Nothing else would come out.
He shrugged. I hadn’t fallen in love with him because of his way with words. Back then it hadn’t mattered if he spoke more with his hands than his mouth. Back then we’d both been young and dumb.
“You look good, Paige. This place,” he gestured, “it’s nice.”
“Thanks.”
His hair used to be bleached almost white by the sun, and he wore it so short I could see his scalp. When I ran my fingers through it, my nails scraped skin. Now it fell forward over his ears and forehead and was the color of wheat in a field, waiting to be cut. His eyes, moving over my face, made me think he was waiting to be cut, too.
I almost couldn’t do it. I mean, the night before I’d let him put his tongue down my throat and his hands all over me. When the warmth of him wafted over me, I wanted to close my eyes at how familiar it was. How easy it would have been to take him by the hand and lead him to my bedroom.
I kept my eyes open, a lesson I’d been taught a long time ago but had taken me a long time to learn. “I don’t miss you, Austin. Last night was a mistake.”
“C’mon, Paige. Don’t say that. We were always good together.”
“We haven’t been together for a long time,” I said, not quite as evenly as I wanted.
“It’s not just the sex.” Austin leaned forward, too, his hands on the knees of his dirty denim jeans. A white spot had worn through just below his kneecap, not quite a hole, but on its way to becoming one. “I didn’t just mean that. I can get laid anytime I want.”
“I’m sure you can.” I got up, my arms folded across my chest.
He got up, too. “I didn’t mean it that way.”
I wasn’t going to bend. Not over the chair, not over the bed, and not over this. “It doesn’t matter how you meant it. I think you should go.”
“Same old Paige,” he said with a shake of his hair. “Still hard as nails, huh? Hard as a rock. Can’t ever give me a break.”
“You don’t need a break from me. Besides, you can just get laid whenever you want. Look, Austin,” I said when it looked as though he meant to speak. “We can’t keep doing this.”
“Why not?”
I studied him deliberately until I couldn’t hold in the sigh any longer and it seeped out of me like air from a nail-punched tire. “You know why not. Because fucking doesn’t solve every problem. And we had a lot of problems.”
He crossed his arms and looked stormy. I didn’t point out the arguments we’d had about money, about religion, about monogamy. I didn’t remind him of the nights he’d gone out for a few beers with friends and had come home smelling of perfume and guilt, or that it didn’t matter whether he had or hadn’t fucked anyone else, it was that he was content to choose a night with his buddies over staying home with me. I didn’t bring up the times I’d said I was studying for school when I was really someplace else, with someone else.
“I just want you to be happy, Austin.” I meant it.
He leaned back and frowned more fiercely. “You want me to be happy so you can feel better about yourself, that’s all. So you don’t feel so bad about what happened.”
The truth of that stung me like a wasp, smooth-stingered and able to jab more than once. “I think you should go.”
Damn him, he didn’t. He moved closer and cupped my elbows in his palms so I had to uncross my arms to push him away or let him snuggle up close. I put my hands on his chest, but didn’t push. His muscles beneath the tight T-shirt were hard and firm. He leaned, and I didn’t pull away. If he’d kissed me, I’d have been lost, but if he’d ever thought he knew me, he proved himself wrong again. He didn’t kiss me. He spoke, instead.
“I’m your husband.”
I pushed my arms straight. His hands slid from my elbows along my arms and fell away at my wrists. I stepped back, my hand against his chest preventing him from following unless he pushed me, too. Austin looked for a second as if he meant to try it, but didn’t.
“I have a folder full of paperwork that says otherwise,” I told him.
“Okay, so not officially. But you can’t tell me—”
“I can tell you anything I want, so long as it’s true,” I shot back.
“Can you tell me it’s true that you don’t miss me, too? Not even a little?”
“I miss fucking you,” I said flatly. “The rest of it? Not so much.”
Austin grinned and spread his fingers. “It’s a start, right? I’ll call you.”
“I won’t answer.”
“I’ll call again.”
I pointed at the door, and he went. I waited until it closed behind him before I gave in to the urge to sigh. What is it about bad boys that make them so, so good?
I’ve known him since kindergarten. Austin. In my elementary-school class photos, more times than not, his freckled face is beaming from the row behind me. In one, we stand beside each other, our grins showing the same missing teeth.
In high school, we had nothing in common. Austin was a jock. I was a gothpunk girl with multiple piercings and a tattoo of a dragonfly on my back. We shared college-level classes and the same lunch period. I knew who he was because of his prowess on the football field. If he knew me it was maybe because I was one of the girls every boy knew, or maybe just because we’d been in the same school since we were five. We didn’t say hi when we passed in the halls, but he was never mean to me the way some of the boys could be. Austin never called me names or made crude invitations.
In the fall of our senior year, Austin went down under a pile of boys pumped up with testosterone and fury. We won the homecoming game, but instead of riding in Chrissy Fisher’s dad’s 1966 Impala convertible, Austin took a redlights-flashing ambulance to the Hershey Medical Center.
He recovered, nothing miraculous about it. His body, bones broken and skin torn, healed. Nobody ever said he’d never play football again. Austin simply never did.
Nor basketball, either, and in the spring, not baseball. By then his chances of going to anything other than community college had vanished along with the scholarship offers, but if he ever cared he wasn’t getting a full ride to Penn State, he never said so to me.
And by then, he would have. By the time our senior year ended, Austin told me everything.
We were an odd couple, but nobody shunned us for it. I didn’t hear whispers in the halls. No jealous cheerleaders tried to pull out my dyed-black hair, and no slick rich jocks tried to convince him he was better off without me. We didn’t go to the prom, but only because we decided to stay home and watch soft porn and fuck, instead.
When I told my mom we were going to get married, she hugged me and wept. Her belly poked between us—she was pregnant with Arthur, then. If she suspected I wanted to marry Austin as much so I could move out of the house as for passion, she didn’t
