Chapter 5: What we can’t take back

SCARLET ♠️

I have kissed my husband four thousand times.

I know this because I am the kind of woman who remembers things like that,  the first time, nervous and laughing outside a restaurant on our second date. The wedding, which was perfect in the way that photographed moments are perfect, every feeling slightly performed for the camera. The anniversary kisses, the goodbye kisses, the automatic press of lips to cheek that marriage reduces passion to eventually, quietly, without either person noticing the exact moment it changed.

Four thousand times. And not one of them felt like that.

I was still sitting in Ray’s consultation chair, both hands pressed flat against my thighs, trying to locate my composure. Ray was back behind his desk,  I didn’t see him move there, I just looked up and he was behind it, the desk between us like a decision we had both made simultaneously without discussing it. He was looking at the window. I was looking at the floor. The room was completely silent except for the low hum of the air conditioning and the sound of two people trying very hard to breathe normally.

He didn’t apologize.

I noticed that first. The space where “I’m sorry should have gone” and didn’t. He sat there in his white coat with his hands on the desk and said nothing, and I understood that the absence of the apology was its own kind of statement. An apology would have made it a mistake. He wasn’t calling it a mistake.

Neither was I.

“Ray.” My voice came out steadier than I had any right to expect.

“Scarlet.” Same tone. Both of us being very careful.

“That can’t happen again.” I said it to the floor first and then made myself look up because I was not a woman who said important things to floors. His eyes met mine and there it was again,  that specific, devastating attention that had always made me feel like the most seen person in any room. I had forgotten what it cost to be looked at like that. Eight years of marriage had made me forget entirely.

“I know,” he said.

“We’re both married.”

“I know.”

“This was,” I stopped. Started again. “This was a results appointment. That’s all it was.”

He said nothing. He looked at me with those steady dark eyes and said absolutely nothing and the silence was worse than any argument because it meant he was not going to agree with me and we both knew it.

I picked up my bag. Stood. Smoothed my blouse the way I smoothed everything,  automatic, habitual, the gesture of a woman who had been straightening surfaces for eight years. “Thank you for the results,” I said. Formally. Ridiculously. Like he had given me a routine prescription.

“Scarlet.”

I was already at the door.

“Take care of yourself,” he said. Quietly. Just that.

I walked out.

I made it to the lift. I made it through the lobby, past the reception desk where the nurse who had promised me discretion looked up and smiled and I smiled back. I made it through the clinic’s glass doors and across the car park and into my car and I closed the door and put both hands on the steering wheel.

Then I sat there for a very long time.

The thing about being kissed by someone who used to know you completely is that it doesn’t just happen to your mouth. It happens to every version of yourself you’ve been since them. 

I was twenty-two the last time Ray kissed me. Twenty-two and certain about very little except that he was the safest place I had ever existed. Then life happened, separate paths, separate choices, the reasonable practical decision to build lives that didn’t include each other.

I had been so sensible about it at the time. I remembered being proud of myself for being sensible.

Sitting in a clinic car park at thirty-two with his mouth still a physical memory I could not shake, I had some questions about the value of sensibility.

My phone rang.

Clara’s name on the screen. I looked at it. Cleared my throat. Answered.

“Tell me everything,” she said immediately. “Results? Doctor? Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.” The word came out smooth and automatic. “Results were good,  all clear, completely healthy. No issues on my end.” My voice did not waver on my end which I felt was a significant personal achievement.

“Oh, Scar.” Clara’s exhale was relief and something softer. “That’s… that’s everything. That’s what we needed to hear.”

“Yes,” I said. “It is.”

“And the doctor? Normal? Professional?”

I looked through the windscreen at the clinic building. At the window on the second floor that I was fairly certain was Ray’s office. “Very professional,” I said.

I drove home and said nothing else about it.

Noah was already asleep when I got back. I stood in the doorway of our bedroom and looked at the familiar landscape of him, the arranged side of the bed, the even breathing, the complete absence of awareness that anything had shifted in the universe today. I watched him sleep and thought about what he had said two nights ago. What is the point if nothing comes of it. I thought about the document I had not yet opened, still in a drawer in his office, still waiting. I thought about a man in a white coat who had not apologized for kissing me.

I got into bed beside my husband. Lay on my back. Stared at the ceiling.

Then, slowly, I raised my hand and touched my own mouth.

My phone buzzed on the nightstand.

I picked it up carefully, shielding the screen so the light wouldn’t reach Noah. Unknown number,  but the moment I read the message I knew exactly whose hands had typed it.

“I know I shouldn’t. I’ve been sitting here trying to talk myself out of this for two hours. I can’t. I need to see you, Scarlet. Not as your doctor. Just… I need to see you.”

I read it three times. My heart was doing something it had no business doing at midnight beside my sleeping husband.

I should delete it. Put the phone face down. Go to sleep. Let the morning create some distance and some sense between me and today and the specific insanity of what had happened in that consultation room.

I put the phone face down.

Lay in the dark.

Picked it back up.

I did not reply that night. But I did not delete the message either. And at 3AM when I was still awake and Noah was still sleeping his perfect unbothered sleep, I read it a fourth time. Then a fifth. The problem with Ray Lionel had always been the same,  he never asked for the things he wanted tentatively. He asked for them like they were already true. Like he was simply stating a fact the universe had not yet caught up to. “I need to see you. Not as your doctor. Just… I need to see you.” That message kept ringing in my head. I put the phone under my pillow and lay in the dark and thought about the drawer in Noah’s office and the envelope I had not opened and the woman I was becoming in the space between one decision and the next.