That night, after Lenore’s door clicks shut down the hall and the light under the guest room door goes dark without Grant saying goodnight, I run a bath hotter than I can really stand and get in anyway.
He’s been sleeping in there 3 nights a week now, blaming his back, blaming a work call that runs late and he doesn’t want to wake me, blaming anything that isn’t the actual reason, which is that neither of us has figured out how to be in the same bed without the silence between us turning into a named thing, an accusation, a divorce waiting for one of us to say it out loud.
I stopped arguing about it in February.
There didn’t seem to be a version of the argument that ended anywhere good.
The water climbs to my collarbone.
The ceiling above me is the one Grant had custom-plastered the year we moved in, some Venetian technique he found in a magazine, smooth as skin and twice the cost of a normal ceiling, and I’ve spent more nights than I’d like to admit staring up at money instead of sleeping.
“Would you be relieved?” His voice again, low against my ear in a car that still smelled like fogged glass when I drove home.
“If he was?” I didn’t answer him then.
I’m not sure I’m answering him now, not really, just running the question on a loop, again and again, checking whether it still hurts.
“It’s not the same hope,” I’d told him, and he hadn’t believed me, and the longer I sit in this water the less I believe myself either.
The honest answer is yes and no, both at once, sitting in my chest like 2 different weather systems that refuse to merge.
Yes, because if Grant breaks it first, I get to be the wounded one instead of the guilty one, I get a story where I’m allowed to leave instead of the one where I’m the woman who ruined a marriage over a man 8 years younger than her.
And no, because some small, stupid, 8-year-married part of me still wants it to not be true, still wants Grant to walk through that guest room door tomorrow morning and be the person I married instead of the person I’ve been quietly grieving for the better part of a year.
I don’t know when grieving him started feeling more familiar than missing him.
I used to be able to mark the difference.
I remember exactly which year it happened, even if I can’t point to the month: the year Milo turned 5 and Grant started taking the 7 a.m.
train instead of the 8.
The year date nights stopped being an event we scheduled and started being a request I made, a plan he agreed to and then quietly let slide, 3 times, 4, until I stopped mentioning it at all.
Asking and being disappointed felt worse than just not asking.
My hand drifts under the water without my permission, same as it has every night this week, and I let it.
But tonight, I don’t stop at just my hand.
I think about the wheel against my back, the absurd honk of the horn, twice, both of us laughing too hard to be quiet about it.
His hands on my hips, steady even when nothing else about the moment was.
Is this okay, he’d asked, actually asking, waiting for the answer instead of assuming it, and the wanting of that question alone is enough to make my breath catch here in the cooling water of a bathroom Grant designed and never uses.
My fingers slide between my legs and find my clit already swollen, already slick and wet, and I circle it slow, lazy, the way Jonah does when he’s not in a hurry, when he’s just enjoying the feel of me against his tongue.
I close my eyes and it’s his mouth I’m thinking about, his tongue dragging flat and wet through me, the way he groans into my pussy like he’s the one being eaten.
My hips roll against my own hand and the water sloshes against the porcelain and I don’t care, I don’t care about the mess, I don’t care about the noise, I’ve spent 8 years being quiet and careful and I’m so fucking tired of quiet and careful.
I want more.
I reach over the side of the tub and pull open the drawer under the sink, the one Grant never looks in because he doesn’t look for anything in this bathroom that isn’t his own reflection.
The vibrator is buried under a rolled-up hand towel, small and black and discreet, a toy you buy online at 2 in the morning and pretend you didn’t when the package arrives.
I’ve had it for 6 months and used it exactly twice, both times with the guilt so thick I couldn’t finish.
Tonight the guilt is still there, a low hum under everything, but the wanting is louder.
I press the button and it buzzes to life in my hand, a soft, insistent hum that seems obscenely loud in the quiet bathroom, and I slide back down into the water and spread my thighs wide, propping one heel on the edge of the tub.
The position is undignified and awkward and I don’t give a single fuck.
I press the vibrator against my clit and the sensation hits me like a fucking train, a sharp electric jolt that makes my back arch and my mouth fall open and a sound tear out of me that I have to muffle with my other hand because my mother is asleep 3 doors down.
“Oh, fuck,” I breathe, barely a whisper, my hips already grinding against the buzzing silicone.
“Oh, fuck, that’s—” I don’t finish the sentence because there’s no word for this, for the way the vibration hits my clit so hard it’s almost pain, almost too much, and I keep it there, I press it harder, my thighs shaking, my pussy clenching around the emptiness, aching and desperate to be filled.
I slide 2 fingers inside myself and it’s not enough, it’s never enough, my own fingers are too short and too thin and I want Jonah’s cock, I want his thick cock stretching me open, I want him to fuck me hard and deep while I hold this vibrator against my clit and come all over him until I can’t remember my own name.
I think about his mouth at my ear, the particular weight of his hands, the deliberate care in how he says my name, slow and careful, the opposite of careless.
I think about the blindfold he hasn’t actually mentioned yet, the scarf still folded in his nightstand drawer, waiting for a conversation neither of us has started.
I think about what he’d say if he saw me right now, spread open in the bath with a vibrator pressed against my clit and my fingers buried in my pussy and my face twisted up with a pleasure so sharp it’s almost agony.
He’d ask me what I wanted.
He’d make me say it.
And then he’d give it to me.
The thought pushes me closer to the edge, my hips bucking against my own hand, the vibrator buzzing relentlessly against my swollen clit, and I’m panting now, my breath coming in ragged, desperate gasps, my free hand clamped over my mouth to keep the sounds in because if I let them out Lenore will hear and Milo will wake up and Grant will open the guest room door and find his wife with her legs spread and a sex toy in her hand and the humiliation of that should stop me but it doesn’t, it just makes it hotter, the risk of getting caught, the nearness of discovery, the thought of someone walking in and seeing exactly what I am when I’m not performing.
My other hand slides lower, past my pussy, my fingers slick with my own wetness, and I hesitate for just a second because this is new, this is a fantasy I’ve only ever touched in my own head, never with my hands, never with anyone.
But I’m alone and I’m curious and there’s no one here to judge me except the woman in the mirror I’ve been lying to for 8 years.
I press one wet fingertip against my ass, just barely, just testing, and the sensation is strange and foreign and unexpectedly electric, a jolt that connects directly to my clit like a circuit completing.
I push a little further, just the tip of my finger, and the fullness of it, the taboo of it, makes my pussy clench and my breath stutter and my hips grind harder against the vibrator.
“Oh my god,” I whisper into my palm, my voice wrecked and trembling.
“Oh my god, oh my god—” I don’t push further.
I’m not ready.
But just the suggestion of it, just the promise of an act I might want later, a door I might ask him to open, is enough to tilt me right up to the edge.
I work my finger in a shallow, tentative rhythm while the vibrator hums against my clit and my other fingers curl inside my pussy and I’m fucking myself in 3 places at once, completely full, completely overwhelmed, my whole body trembling and slick with sweat and bathwater and my own desperate wetness.
I think about Jonah’s voice in the car.
I’ve got you.
Three words.
I think about what it would feel like to have him behind me, his chest against my back, his cock buried deep in my pussy while his fingers worked my ass and the vibrator pressed against my clit and his voice in my ear saying I’ve got you, I’ve got you, let go, I’ve got you.
That’s it.
That’s the thought that breaks me.
I come with a sob I have to choke back with my own hand, my whole body convulsing, my pussy clamping down on my fingers, my ass clenching around the fingertip still pressed inside me, the vibrator still buzzing against my clit through the aftershocks until I can’t take it anymore and I yank it away and just lie there, shaking, destroyed, my chest heaving, water sloshed halfway across the floor, my legs too weak to move.
For a long moment I don’t move, just breathe and stare at the Venetian plaster ceiling and feel the water cooling around me and the vibrator still clutched in my hand and the wetness between my legs that has nothing to do with the bath.
I just made myself come harder than Grant ever has in 8 years of marriage.
Harder than Jonah has, maybe, and Jonah is the best sex I’ve ever had.
But this was different.
This was just me.
This was my own hand and my own toy and my own filthy imagination, and nobody asked me what I wanted because I already knew.
I think about how long it’s been since anyone asked me what I wanted instead of assuming they already knew, and the answer is longer than I’m willing to count out loud.
But tonight I didn’t need anyone to ask.
Tonight I asked myself.
For a few minutes afterward I just lie there, the water cooling faster than I want it to, staring up at the ceiling that cost more than Jonah’s entire apartment probably costs in a year.
I think about how long it’s been since anyone asked me what I wanted instead of assuming they already knew, and the answer is longer than I’m willing to count out loud, even to myself, even here, alone, where nobody’s keeping score.
It isn’t just the sex, even though I keep telling myself it is, keep filing it under that heading because the other heading, the one about feelings, about leaving, about wanting a different life, is so much more dangerous.
It’s the asking.
It’s a man 26 years old pausing mid-thrust to check if I’m still there with him, still wanting it, instead of assuming my body’s presence means my consent to whatever comes next.
Grant used to ask, early on, before Milo, before the trains got earlier and the silences got longer.
I don’t actually remember when he stopped.
I just know that somewhere in 8 years I became a woman whose husband doesn’t ask anymore, and a woman whose lover does, and I’m starting to understand which one of those facts is going to end up costing me more.
I get out before the water turns cold enough to be unpleasant, wrap myself in the robe hanging on the back of the door, and carry my laptop to the edge of the bed instead of putting it away, breaking the routine without deciding to.
I type “gallery curator positions New York” into the search bar before I can talk myself out of it.
I haven’t searched for a job in 2 years.
Not since the wedding, not since the apartment in Chelsea got packed into boxes and the boxes got driven to a storage unit in Connecticut and the unit got quietly forgotten, same as most of the dreams I used to have, somewhere around year 3 of being Mrs.
Cavender.
I curated exactly one show that mattered, a year before I met Grant, a young sculptor named Theo Reyes nobody had heard of yet, all rusted steel and reclaimed wood, and the opening sold out in 2 hours and a critic from the Times used the word “arresting” in a sentence with my name in it.
I still have the clipping somewhere, folded into a book I haven’t opened since the move.
I used to be a person who made things happen instead of a person who waits to find out what happens to her.
I met Grant 4 months after that opening, at a fundraiser I almost didn’t go to, and the first words he ever said to me were that he didn’t understand contemporary art but he understood ambition, and he could see I had it.
I thought it was a compliment for years.
I’m not sure anymore if it was a compliment or a diagnosis, the way a man inspects a house before committing to buy, checking the ambition box, seeing if I’d fit.
The wedding was at the house in Litchfield, white tent, 200 people, my mother crying for reasons I didn’t fully understand until much later.
Grant gave a toast about partnership, about building a life together, and I remember thinking, even then, even happy, that the life he meant was always going to be his life, with room made for me inside it, rather than a future we were actually building side by side.
I didn’t let myself finish that thought for another 6 years.
The results load.
Three open positions, one of them at a gallery 2 blocks from where I used to work, and I sit there with my thumb hovering over the first link, in no hurry to find out what it says.
My pulse is doing a stupid, embarrassing thing for a job listing.
I haven’t felt this nervous reading anything since the test results came back on Milo, and that comparison alone tells me everything I need to know about how long I’ve gone without wanting a single thing just for myself.
I don’t click it.
Not yet.
I just leave the tab open, a small, stupid act of defiance against a life I built so carefully I forgot I was allowed to want a different one.
That’s when Grant’s phone starts buzzing through the wall.
Once.
A pause.
Twice.
Another pause, longer this time, like he’s deciding whether to answer.
Three times, and the last one doesn’t stop, just keeps going until it cuts off and the guest room goes quiet again.
I check the clock.
11:47.
I tell myself I’m not going to get up.
I get up anyway, robe still damp at the hem, and stand in the hallway outside the guest room door, my bare feet cold against the floor, listening to my own husband’s voice through 3 inches of wood like I’m the one with secrets to hide.
“…no, I told you, it’s— it’s fine, she doesn’t suspect…” His voice drops too low to follow after that, and I press closer to the door without deciding to, my heart loud enough that I’m half convinced he can hear it from his side.
A pause.
Then, lower, almost gentle in a way I haven’t heard him be with anyone in months.
“I know, I just— I know.
Soon.” Then, clearer, one word breaking through the rest.
“Camille.” The door handle turns.
I’m down the hall and back in my own room before it opens, heart going harder than it has any right to over 2 syllables, standing dripping in the dark with my laptop still open on the bed, the gallery listing still glowing on the screen, waiting for me to decide which life I’m actually living.