The Wait

There is a geography to a marriage in trouble. At its worst, the distance between us in our own bed felt like something you could measure in miles. 

There had been a time when we slept naked, wound into each other, as much skin touching skin as two bodies could manage. 

Now I would lie awake listening to her breathe on the other side of it. We had both earned it, years of drift and accumulated resentment. 

Then, after seventeen years sober, I picked up a drink. I still don't entirely know why. The drink led somewhere darker, the way it does for me, and by the time I found the bottom it had taken nine months and nearly everything with it.

The job went first. Friends disappeared. Then my dignity. Then, for a time, any reason to stay alive. There were nights I lay on the bathroom floor not knowing if I would see morning, my cheek against the cold tile, my whole body a single point of shame. 

Margot watched all of it, the wreckage, the shame, the long way back, and stayed longer than anyone had a right to ask.

When I finally got sober again, we both knew I needed to go. I packed my car and drove three thousand miles. We called it a break. Margot stayed behind.

Nine months later Covid hit. She called that same day. I had a yard, space to breathe, a pool I never used. She booked a flight. For months we moved through the same rooms like strangers who knew too much about each other.

Long walks in the orchard, her voice rising into the trees as she told me what I had put her through, sometimes so loud the birds lifted out of the branches. 

Walk after walk I made space for her anger, and slowly, without either of us planning it, the telling began to clear something between us. 

There were days when the sun came through the trees and caught the side of her face, and I would think about how I had known that face since we were barely adults. 

Once she lifted her arm to gesture at something and the light made her shirt almost transparent. I looked away.

Every morning before she woke, I logged onto a meeting, strangers on a screen from all over the country, all of us trying to stay inside our own lives without escaping them.

Stretches where we found each other again: A hike, her hand in mine, the feeling that we might actually make it. There were a few nights we found our way back into bed together, urgent and careful at the same time, like people who knew what they stood to lose. 

I touched her with the fear that she might pull away mid-reach, that each time could be the last time she let me. 

Afterward she would lie very still beside me, not quite gone but not fully there either. Then she would get scared and pull back, tell me it couldn't work, and the distance would return as suddenly as it had lifted. I had begun to feel like a man auditioning for his own marriage, never sure if he'd gotten the part.

Hope, I was beginning to understand, was its own addiction. And her ambivalence was not indecision. It was fear. 

Every time I moved toward her she stepped back, and every time she stepped back I waited, and the waiting had become its own kind of diminishment. I was rebuilding myself, day by day, and she was not yet sure she could trust what I was becoming. 

One morning I woke up and the hope was simply gone. I printed the divorce papers, set them on the table in front of her, walked to the bedroom, and stood alone by the window.

The hurt in my chest had shifted into something I didn't recognize. Not worse. Just different. Like a weight finally set down. 

I had loved this woman since we were young. The decision had come with such force that my vision had gone soft at the edges. My hands were still. Somewhere in the house I could hear her moving. I was looking at the mountains but I couldn't quite see them. Three years of talking had taken us as far as it could.

That is when she came in.

Her hands came to my shoulders from behind. 

I didn't turn around. 

There was something different in her touch, a searching quality, like she was looking for something in my skin. I could feel that she was naked without looking. 

Her arms wrapped around me and pulled, not carefully, not the way she had been touching me these past years, but hungrily, her fingers grabbing at my flesh like she was trying to take hold of something she had almost let go.

She spun me around. Took my face in her hands and pulled my mouth to hers. Her fingers pressed into my cheeks, and I felt her tongue press against the back of my teeth.

Before I had time to understand what was happening, her hand was on my cock, direct and certain, something she had rarely done, and never so quickly. She began pulling at my clothes, grabbing and tugging, her movements large and forceful, like fine motor skill had given way to something more animal. 

A button caught. She pulled anyway. I stopped her.

I had forgotten what it felt like to be wanted without reservation. Something moved through me that had no name. Three years of her pulling me in and pushing me away, all of it arriving at once in my hands and chest and jaw. I grabbed her wrists and pulled them to the sides. 

She fought me. I held on. 

For three years I had loosened my grip every time she pulled away. Not this time. I pressed my knee into the top of her thighs. Then I pushed her hard onto the bed.

She fell back and I came down on top of her, my full weight on hers, her body naked beneath my clothes. 

I pinned her wrists to the bed. She was still fighting, her whole body resistant. I pressed myself against her and held there, not moving, just increasing the pressure, feeling her underneath me, feeling the years between us, waiting. 

Every time I had waited by the window. Every time I had stood in the orchard and held her anger. Every unanswered reach across the bed. I held it all there between us and did not move.

She stopped fighting. Not all at once. Gradually, the way a held breath releases. We stayed there for a moment, her body still beneath mine.

Then she screamed and came free. She swung at me, open-handed, hard across my face. The sound of it filled the room. 

I pulled back, startled. She looked at me with something I had never seen in her before, desperate and grief-stricken and furious all at once. I didn't move. For a moment, neither of us did. Then she pressed against me hard, turning onto her stomach, her hips rising.

“Hit me.” The words landed like a command. “Hit.”

I brought my hand down across her skin. 

“Harder.” 

I did it again. No words now, just sound, raw and enormous, filling the room. My fingers stinging across her ass, pink and alive with violence. This beautiful ass. This.

Something in me let go. I stopped thinking. I grabbed and slapped and bit, my hands moving without asking permission, her body giving itself over completely. I grabbed her hips and pulled her up onto her knees. Then I was clawing at the inside of her thighs. I wanted to tear her open.

I put my mouth against her back and cried into her skin. The bathroom floor. The divorce papers. The morning I finally stopped hoping.

I pulled back and tore off my clothes, as clumsy and urgent as she had been.

Then I took her from behind with a force I had never allowed myself, fucking her with the full length of me, filling her completely.

She grabbed for my hips, pulling me into her harder. I came down on top of her with my full weight, again and again, my hips crashing hard against her ass, my hands digging into her skin, gripping her ass like I could tear something loose. There was nowhere left to go and I kept going.

I pulled back until I was almost out of her, gripped the base of my cock, and drove forward again, my fist crashing against her with each push, slick with her, more than I could hold.

I pulled my hand back and dragged it across my face, then put my fingers in my mouth and tasted her.

She reached back and up, grasping for my hair, her hands finding whatever they could. I didn't stop.

Underneath the shouting I could hear her crying now too, small broken sounds that only made her reach back harder.

Then she screamed, "I fucking hate you." And then, almost without pause: "I love you. I love you. I fucking love you."

She said it like someone falling.

I don't know if either of us came. I'm not sure it mattered.

When it was over she curled into herself and I wrapped my body around hers. She reached for my hand. For the first time in years I was not apologizing. I held her and it felt like something returning.