Chapter 5: The Lie
The key turned in the lock just after seven.
Gage jerked upright from where he’d been slumped on the couch, a cold dread solidifying in his gut. He’d spent the last hour in a paralyzed fugue, staring at the silent television, seeing only the shuddering metal of the washing machine lid.
The door swung open and Alexis stumbled in, drenched. Her retail polo was plastered to her skin, her khakis dark with rainwater. A stream of water dripped from the tip of her nose. She shook her head like a dog, droplets flying.
“You would not believe the traffic,” she groaned, kicking the door shut with her heel. “Whole damn highway was a parking lot. I’m soaked to the bone.”
She looked past him, smiling wearily. “Hey, you. Quiet day?”
Her voice was normal. Everything was normal. The dissonance was so violent it made his temples throb. “Yeah,” he managed, his own voice sounding thick and foreign. “Quiet.”
She toed off her squelching shoes, peeled her socks away. “Is Tori gone? Her text said she got her laundry done and bounced.”
Bounced. The word landed with a sick irony. “Left about an hour ago,” he said, staring at his hands. He’d scrubbed them raw in the kitchen sink, but he could still smell her. He was sure of it.
“Good. I love her, but I am wiped.” Alexis began unbuttoning her polo right there in the living room, shivering. “God, I’m freezing. You should have seen Mrs. Henderson today, returning a ceramic gnome because it ‘didn’t match her aura.’ I wanted to tell her her aura was ‘bitch.’”
She laughed, a light, tired sound. It used to make him smile. Now it felt like a needle under his skin. She shrugged out of the wet shirt, standing in her plain white bra. Her breasts were full, softer than Tori’s, the skin pale. She worked the button on her pants, shimmying out of them, leaving them in a damp heap on the floor. In her underwear, she looked younger than twenty, vulnerable, completely unaware of the fault line that had opened up beneath her feet.
She padded over to him, her skin cool and damp from the rain. She climbed onto the couch, straddling his lap, her arms looping around his neck. Her wet hair brushed his cheek. She smelled of rain, of cheap store perfume, and underneath it, the warm, familiar scent of her skin.
“Missed you,” she murmured, nuzzling into his neck. “Day sucked.”
His body reacted on pure, traitorous instinct. His hands came up to her hips, but they felt like they belonged to someone else. Her mouth found his, and he let her kiss him. Her lips were cool. He could taste the rain.
His mind fractured. Here was Alexis, sweet, trusting Alexis, kissing him with simple affection. And imprinted on the back of his eyelids was Tori’s face, head thrown back against the shuddering dryer, her cry raw in the fluorescent glare. The taste of Tori’s skin, that faint, shocking sweetness, bloomed in his memory, overwhelming the present.
Alexis felt his tension. She pulled back an inch, her brow furrowed. “You okay? You’re all… stiff.”
“Long day,” he lied, the words ash in his mouth. “Just zoned out.”
She accepted this, because she always accepted what he gave her. She believed him. She trusted him. The weight of that trust was a physical crushing force on his chest. She shifted against him, a deliberate, familiar motion, and he was hard beneath his jeans. A purely biological betrayal.
A smile touched her lips. “Not that stiff,” she whispered, her voice dropping into that soft, intimate register he knew so well. She ground down against him, and a soft sigh escaped her. “Come on. Let’s go to bed. I need to not think for a while.”
She took his hand, pulling him up from the couch. He followed, a man marching to his own gallows. The walk to the bedroom was a blur. The room was as they’d left it this morning, the sheets tangled from their rushed wake-up. Tori’s perfume was gone, either imagined or obliterated by the scent of rain and Alexis.
Alexis pushed him down onto the edge of the bed and undressed him with a quiet efficiency. Her fingers were cold. When she finally took him in her hand, he flinched. Her touch felt wrong. Everything felt wrong.
“Jesus, you’re wound tight,” she said softly, leaning in to kiss his shoulder. She guided him into her, sinking down onto his lap where he sat on the bed.
It was easy. Too easy. A smooth, practiced slide into a familiar, yielding warmth. There was no resistance, no gripping tension, just a comfortable, enveloping heat. A sob clawed its way up his throat, and he choked it back, turning it into a gasp.
He wrapped his arms around her, burying his face in the damp crook of her neck to hide his expression. She moved above him, slow and steady, her breaths coming in soft puffs against his ear. She was lost in the simple, physical comfort of it, her fingers trailing through his hair.
He kept his eyes wide open, fixed on the wall behind her. The memory of Tori was a physical ache, a branding iron on his conscience. The frantic, clutching heat of the laundry room against this quiet, rhythmic ride. The illicit, stolen ferocity against this gentle, granted intimacy. Alexis’s body, open and accepting, felt terrifying in its vast, unguarded familiarity. A profound, ugly thought wormed its way through the haze of his guilt: he could disappear inside this and she would never know he was gone.
She moaned, a sweet, low sound, and picked up her pace. Her nails dug into his shoulders. “Gage,” she breathed. It was his name, but on her lips, it felt like an accusation.
He shut his eyes tight. Behind the darkness, Tori’s blue eyes stared back, defiant and unblinking. This was mine. I took it.
A wave of nausea rolled through him, hot and sour. He thrust upward, mechanically, a piston in a machine whose purpose he’d forgotten. His hands gripped Alexis’s hips, but he was holding onto her to anchor himself from being swept away, not to pull her closer.
She came with a shuddering sigh, her body clenching around him in a slow, gentle pulse so different from Tori’s seismic fracture. She slumped against him, her full weight settling into his lap, her cheek resting on his head. “Mmm. There you are,” she mumbled, content. “I needed that.”
He was still painfully, shamefully hard. The finish line was right there, but it felt like a violation. To find his release here, now, with her, while his every nerve was still screaming for the woman who had walked out into the rain. He couldn’t do it.
He gently lifted her off of him, laying her back on the rumpled sheets. She looked up at him, sated and smiling, her eyes soft. “You didn’t…” she started, a hint of concern.
“It’s okay,” he whispered, his voice rough. “Just tired. C’mere.”
He stretched out beside her, pulling her into the curve of his body, the classic spoons position they’d slept in for two years. She wiggled back against him, letting out a happy hum as his arm curled over her waist. Her skin was warming up, losing the chill of the rain.
Within minutes, her breathing evened out into the deep, steady rhythm of sleep. She trusted him so completely she could drift off naked in his arms, after he’d just pulled away from her.
He lay rigid, staring at the slice of city light cutting through the blinds, painting jagged lines across the ceiling. The same ceiling he’d stared at while she moved above him. His phone, charging on the nightstand, lit up with a notification. The screen glowed blue in the dark.
Carefully, so carefully, he extricated his arm from under her. She mumbled something unintelligible but didn’t wake. He reached over, his fingers closing around the cool device.
He tapped the screen. It was a text. Not from a saved number.
Unknown: The rain stopped. My place still smells like laundry soap. It’s weird.
A pause. Three dots appeared, lingered, then vanished. Then they appeared again.
Unknown: You taste like guilt. I can still feel it.
He stopped breathing. The blue light of the screen illuminated his hand, trembling. He didn’t have her number saved. She’d never given it to him. But he knew. He knew.
Down the hall, in the dark living room, the heap of Alexis’s wet clothes began to seep rainwater into the floorboards, a slow, steady drip onto the wood.