His Ex Returns but Cannot Leave

The rain ticked against the glass in the same hard rhythm as the pulse in my throat, a mean little strike that would not let up. I stood in the dark of the kitchen and let it count for me. Tick. Tick. Tick. She was in the next room again, the zipper of her bag loud as a confession, moving through the house like the leaving had been weather and not a cut I had never closed.

Vivienne. I said it in my head the way I used to say it into her skin, and the want came up hard and unkilled. I had kept it in the empty half of the bed, in the coat hook that still held nothing, in the particular quiet these rooms made when she was not in them. Now she was. Damp from the walk up the drive, boots abandoned by the door in the spot that had always been hers. Rain caught in her hair. Unpacking in the bedroom we had shared like she had only stepped out for air and found her way back by the shape of my hands.

I pushed off the counter and took the hall slow, every board under me familiar, and stopped at the bedroom door. I did not cross it. Not yet. She set folded things on the dresser with the scratch along the edge, the one from the night I had her bent over it, and she did not look at the scratch. Her coat was still on, heavy with the storm, open down the front. Jeans. A thin shirt underneath, the fabric pulled tight when she reached, and the sight of that strip over her ribs did something ugly to my breathing. I took inventory the way I always had. The back of her neck, bare where her hair had fallen forward, the exact width of my palm. The dip of her waist I could close both hands around. The window behind her, painted shut years ago. The only door, with me in it. She knew I was there. Her hands slowed on the bag.

You can stop standing there like a verdict, she said. The crack was already in her voice. I came back. That should be enough for the first hour.

It was not. I stepped in until the room shrank and the rain got louder on the window she could not open. You left in the middle of a sentence. You do not get to unpack like the sentence finished itself.

She turned. Close enough that I could see the wet on her lashes, there before she had said a word, her jaw working against it, her blinks coming too fast. Not crying. Holding. I tracked the flex of her fingers at her sides like they remembered my wrists and hated that they remembered. My own shirt stuck to me where the heat had gathered, buttons a hard line down my chest, and I kept my hands where they were, because if they moved they were going to her throat, her hair, the small of her back, and I was not going to stop there.

I left because you were everywhere, she said. Every room. Every door. You never once let me get to the end of a hall alone.

You needed me to pretend I did not know you were mine. I did not raise my voice. The want sat in it anyway, low and unburied. Three years. You think I put that down? You think I learned how to sleep without listening for your key?

Her mouth tightened. She took a half step back and the dresser caught her hip, wood instead of me, and the flinch of it made my hands curl. I did not touch her. Rain on her coat. Under it, skin and the soap she still used, warmer than it had any right to be. My body answered like she had put her mouth on me.

I am here, she said, quieter. I drove through that storm. Do not make me say the rest tonight.

I looked at her mouth, at the chapped place on her lower lip where she had been biting it on the road, and then at the gap between her and the door that she thought was hers. I moved when she moved. She circled for it and I was already in the narrow hall at the turn, shoulder to the plaster, no room for her to get past me. I braced a palm flat against the wall and left it there.

She stopped a foot from me. Close enough that I could feel the heat coming off her jeans through the damp, smell the wet wool and the skin under it, see the throb under the hinge of her jaw. Her breath hitched when mine did. Her hand lifted an inch toward the buttons of my shirt and stalled. I watched the stall the way a man watches a lock he already owns. My own hand hovered at her wrist and did not close. The inch of air between my fingers and her skin was hotter than any grip. It lit every place I had kept empty.

Say you are staying.

Do not do that. Her voice broke on it. She looked at my mouth and then away, and the look was a confession she would not spend out loud. Do not stand in my way and ask me nice. You know I cannot leave you and you know I cannot stay and you are going to use both. That is what you do, Cyrus.

My name in her mouth went through me like a grip on the throat. I leaned in until there was nothing between us but air and the decision not to spend it. She swallowed. I watched her throat and wanted my mark there, something that would outlast the drive back, something she could not fold into a bag and carry out into the rain.

Then stop performing the leaving, I said. You walked through my door soaked. You are unpacking in our room. Do not dress it up as a visit you can end.

Something in her face gave. Not surrender. The break that comes when the body gets tired of the mind’s rules. She shoved toward the front of the house, the dark end of the hall and the door beyond it, and the space did not give her room. Her shoulder struck my chest. Brief. Electric. Gone when she jerked past me, weight already committing to the exit, to the story where she could still call this a mistake.

I caught her wrist.

Her pulse slammed under my thumb, fast as the rain, fast as mine. I hauled on it. She came around off balance, a half turn on her own heel, the heavy coat dragging with the pull, wet wool sliding down her arms and bunching at her elbows, until she was facing me again with the wall at her back and nothing of the exit in her eyeline but me. A tremor jumped in the tendon under my thumb. She looked down at my hand on her, then up, and her lips parted on nothing at all. Her weight shifted sideways. Her foot came off the floor.

I shoved her back into the plaster before she could finish the step that would have taken her out of the hall. The wall took her weight with a dull scrape, and I took the rest, my chest crushing hers, one knee driven between her thighs so she had nowhere to put her balance but me. Her coat was already half off. I ripped the rest of it down her arms and let it drop in a wet heap at her feet, crowding in so close she could not have slipped free of me even if she tried.

She did not try. Her fingers knotted in my shirt and tore at the buttons until her palms hit skin, and then she held on with the same crushing force I was using on her. Nails. Knuckles. The heel of her hand pressed hard over my ribs as if she meant to count them and keep them. I got her jeans open with one hand and forced them down, underwear with them, the denim catching wet and stubborn at her thighs until I bent and shoved it past her knees. She kicked. One foot tore free. The other stayed trapped in a twist of soaked denim at her ankle, and I let it stay there. I shoved my own jeans low enough. There was no room to undress properly. The hallway was too narrow for anything but this: her back to the wall, my hands locking under her thighs and hauling her up, her spine dragging the rough paint as her legs cinched around my hips like she was trying to fuse the bone, the trapped leg of her jeans swinging heavy against my thigh. Three years of not touching her and now I could not find a single inch of air between us. My cock dragged through the wet heat between her thighs.

She was soaked. I felt it on the first grind, slick coating me, and the sound she made went straight into my mouth when I kissed her. Not gentle. Teeth. The taste of rain still on her lip and the salt of whatever she had been holding in since she walked through the door. I lined myself up and pushed in on one long, brutal stroke, and the plaster rasped under her shoulder blades as her body took me. Tight. Hot. Clenching so hard I had to brace a forearm beside her head and drive through it or I would have lost the rhythm before it started.

Her breath broke against my throat. I did not give her space to catch it. I pulled almost out and slammed back in, hips pinning hers to the wall, and the impact knocked a raw sound out of both of us. Every thrust scraped her up the plaster an inch and dragged her back down onto me. I felt the grit of the wall through her shirt against my knuckles where I had her braced, felt the tremor in her thighs where they locked around me, felt her cunt flutter and grip like she was trying to keep me buried. I wanted that. I wanted the bruise of it. I wanted her to feel me in the morning and know she had not been allowed to leave again.

She clawed at my back. I hauled her higher, one arm banded under her ass, the other fisted in her hair so her face stayed against mine. No looking away. No distance. Her mouth opened on a broken plea that was my name and nothing else, and I answered by fucking her harder, the wet slap of it loud in the narrow space, my cock driving deep enough that her whole body jolted with each stroke. Sweat slicked where our stomachs met. Her heels dug into the small of my back, one bare, one dragging denim. I could feel the strain in my own arms, the burn in my thighs from holding her up, and I did not care. Letting go was not an option. If I loosened my grip she might remember how to walk out, and I was not giving her that.

She was shaking already. I felt it start in her belly and travel down to where I was splitting her open, a tightening that made every thrust drag harder. I ground in and stayed there, rolling my hips so the base of me rubbed her clit with every short, vicious push, and she came apart on me with a sound that was half sob before the sobs even started. Her cunt clamped down, pulsing, soaking me, and I kept moving through it because stopping would have meant air between us and I could not stand air. Her fingers scrabbled at my shoulders, then locked again, crushing, desperate, holding me like the wall was not enough to keep her upright.

The second wave hit her harder than the first. I felt it in the way her breath shattered, in the way her whole frame went rigid and then collapsed into mine, and then the sobs broke out of her, ugly, uncontrollable, ripped up from somewhere past speech. Not grief. I knew the difference. This was her body overloaded, nerves firing past what she could hold, tears hot on my collarbone while she clung and shook and came again around my cock in helpless pulses. I stayed crushed to her. I did not slow until my own control snapped.

I drove in to the hilt and held, grinding her into the plaster, and came with a groan I buried in her hair. Thick pulses, deep, my hips jerking against hers while I emptied into her and refused to pull back even an inch. My arms locked tighter. Her legs stayed wrapped. We shook together against the wall, her sobs hitching into my neck, my breath ragged, both of us gripping hard enough to bruise because neither of us knew how to stop holding on.

I did not set her down. My cock was still inside her, softening slow, and I kept her pinned there with my weight while the tremors worked through her. One hand stayed fisted in her hair. The other spread across her lower back and pressed, keeping her flush to me, keeping everything I had just given her from spilling out onto the floor. Her tears wet my skin. I turned my face into her temple and breathed her in, rain and sweat and the sharp salt of her, and I did not loosen my grip when her sobs thinned to shaky breaths.

Her fingers uncurled from my shirt only to knot there again, weaker, still refusing the space. I felt the scrape on her back where the plaster had taken skin through the thin fabric, and I shifted just enough to take more of her weight without letting her feet find the floor. She made a small, wrecked sound and hid her face against my throat. I held her there in the narrow dark of the hall, chest to chest, still joined, still crushing, her coat in a wet heap under us and her jeans still hanging from one ankle, and I did not say her name. I did not have to. She was not going anywhere I could not follow with my hands still on her.