Wasted – Chapter 3 – Good Girl

He came to bed almost an hour after me.

I heard him in the bathroom first – the tap running, then off, then the particular quiet of him standing there a moment too long, the way he does when he’s deciding something. 

I lay very still and pretended to already be asleep, which is a thing I’d gotten unfairly good at.

The mattress dipped when he got in. He didn’t reach for me.

I told myself I didn’t care.

I lay on my side, facing away from him, listening to his breathing change – slower, deeper, the small catch it does right before it evens out completely.

 It took him maybe four minutes to fall asleep.

 I know because I counted them, which is not a thing a person does when she doesn’t care.

His arm found me anyway, at some point, unconscious, heavy across my waist, the way it always does. I lay there under the weight of it, wide awake, furious in a way I couldn’t have explained to anyone, least of all myself.

He noticed I was trying.

That’s what I’d told myself in the car. That’s what had made the whole thing feel almost bearable – almost, God help me, tender. 

And then he’d carried a mug to the sink and told me to get some sleep like the last twenty minutes hadn’t happened at all.

I understood, slowly, with a kind of disgust at myself I didn’t have a name for, that I’d been waiting all night for something he’d never actually promised me.

Worse, I’d been angry with him for not giving it to me.

I didn’t sleep much. When I did, it was thin and useless, the kind of sleep that leaves you more tired than none at all.

Dane woke at six, same as always, like the night owed him nothing and had delivered exactly what he expected. 

I heard the shower running while I lay there with my eyes open, staring at the ceiling, feeling like something unfinished. He came out already half-dressed, humming something under his breath, and dropped a kiss on my forehead on his way past the bed like the night before had left nothing unfinished for him.

“Coffee’s on,” he said. “I’ve got a seven-thirty.”

“Okay.”

He paused at the door. Looked back at me for one second longer than the moment required.

“You okay?”

“Fine.”

He looked at me another second.

Then he left.

I lay in bed another twenty minutes after the front door closed, turning it over. 

I wasn’t fine. 

I didn’t know what I was, exactly, except that I was carrying something heavy and unfinished into a Wednesday that had no idea what to do with it.

By ten I’d texted him something I told myself was innocent.

Thinking about last night. 

Three words, no punctuation, nothing that could be pinned down as anything in particular.

He didn’t respond for two hours.

In a meeting, he wrote eventually. Is everything okay?

Everything is okay. Like I’d sent an alert instead of – I didn’t even know what I’d sent. 

I put the phone face-down on the counter and went to make lunch I didn’t want.

I called him around three. He picked up on the fourth ring, voice clipped, background noise behind him – an office, someone laughing too loud near a copier.

“Hey. Can’t really talk right now.”

“I know. I just -” I didn’t have an end to that sentence. “Never mind. It’s not important.”

“Claire.”

“It’s fine. Go.”

He went.

I stood in the kitchen holding the phone after he’d hung up, feeling something ugly and unfamiliar settle into my chest.

Not hurt, exactly. Something closer to insult. Like I’d handed him an opening and he hadn’t even noticed it was there.

He got home at six-forty. I’d had all day to build something out of nothing, and by the time his key turned in the lock I was ready for him without knowing what I was ready for.

“Hey,” he said, dropping his bag by the door. “Long day.”

“Must be nice.”

He stopped. Looked at me properly for the first time since he’d walked in.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“You’ve been picking at me all day.”

“I haven’t.”

He looked at me for a moment, that particular stillness he does that makes a room feel smaller.

“You have.”

“Maybe you’re just easy to annoy.”

That almost-smile again. The one from the counter, the one from the highway, the one I’d apparently spent all day trying to get back and hadn’t admitted it to myself until right now, watching it arrive.

“Careful,” he said.

It landed wrong.

 Or right – I still don’t know which word actually applies.

It went through me like something physical, low and immediate, and I hated how much I liked it, hated that I’d apparently spent an entire Wednesday constructing small, deniable provocations just to hear that one word in that particular voice.

I didn’t stop.

There were at least three moments over dinner where I could have let it go – could have said something soft, defused it, gone back to being the version of myself that didn’t need anything from him beyond what he was already giving.

I didn’t take any of them.

I made a comment about his mom’s photographs again, sharper than the joke deserved. I let silence sit too long after he asked me something, just to watch him wait for it. I cleared the plates too hard, let one clatter more than it needed to in the sink.

He watched all of it. Didn’t say anything. Just watched, arms crossed, leaning against the counter in the same spot he’d stood in the night before, like he was giving me every chance in the world to stop on my own.

I didn’t want the chance.

By the time I turned around, dish towel still in my hand, he was closer than I’d realized. Close enough that I had to tip my head back slightly to hold his eyes.

“Claire.”

I knew that voice.

I should have stopped.

Instead I looked straight at him.

“What?”

For a second, neither of us moved. The kitchen light hummed. Somewhere outside a car went past, headlights sliding briefly across the wall and gone.

Then Dane smiled.

Not the smile from the highway.

This one was worse.

“There you are.”

And God help me – that was exactly what I’d been waiting for.