Page 131 of Wreckage and Rain

"Faster," I say. "Faster, Colt, I'm close."

He goes faster. The bed makes a soft sound. The window is open. The camellias come in. Outside, the city carries on into the dark, and inside this room my husband is fucking me back into a marriage we're building from scratch.

I come the second time with my arms around his neck, my face against his shoulder, and his name in my mouth. He follows me. He buries his face in the crook of my neck and says my name. Summer. Summer. Twice, out loud, in a room where there's no one to hide it from. I hold him through it. The tremble of his shoulders. The shudder. He says it one more time after, soft, into my skin, Summer, and I press my mouth to his hair.

***

We're lying on our backs with the sheet halfway up. The window is open. The yellow lamp is on the nightstand. He has his arm across his eyes. His chest is rising and falling. Sweat at his hairline. I'm looking up at the ceiling.

The old marriage died in a gas station parking lot.

This is a different marriage.

This one started forty minutes ago in a yellow-painted room on Queen Street with a man who knelt on the floor and named two freckles next to my belly button.

"Summer."

"Yeah."

"I want to know what you're thinking."

"I'm thinking about that night."

He moves the arm off his eyes. Turns his head on the pillow to look at me. He waits.

"I was in the parking lot. I had just seen the photos. I was about to drive into Charleston and pack a suitcase. I sat in the cab of the car and I made a decision. The decision was that the marriage we had was finished. There wasn't going to be a fix. There wasn't going to be a conversation. I made that decisionat a gas station parking lot and I've never unmade it. The old marriage died there."

"Yeah."

"It needed to die, Colt."

"It did. I've known that longer than I'd say out loud."

"It wasn't going to survive what we did to it. Either of us. Even without your father, even without Cheyenne, even without the drugging. The marriage we had ran on me being smaller than I am and you not noticing I'd gone quiet. I was disappearing in it before anyone helped me along. So were you. It was killing both of us. The Bennets sped it up. The drugging sealed it. But it was already dying."

"Yeah. It was."

"Tonight isn't bringing it back. Tonight isn't us going back. I want to be clear about that with you. I'm not going back. I won't go back."

He's quiet. Looking at me. He nods once.

"I'm not asking you to go back. I'm asking to start a new one."

"Yeah."

"From scratch."

"From scratch."

"With me as a different man, and you as a different woman, and the two of us building something new on top of the foundation the old one left."

"Yeah."

"That's what tonight is."

"That's what tonight is."

I turn toward him. Pull the sheet up over my shoulder. Put my hand flat on his chest. The heartbeat. Already slowing. The body coming back down.