CELESTE

I woke up slowly.

For a moment I did not know where I was.

Then I remembered.

The resort. Dominic. The bathroom. The bed after the bathroom.

I turned my head on the pillow.

He was still asleep beside me. On his back. One arm thrown across his stomach. The sheet had slipped to his hip.

I looked at him.

I had not looked at him properly before. I had been too busy being undone by him. Now, I let myself.

The shoulders. The chest. The flat plane of his stomach and the cut lines below it. I knew what that body felt like now. I knew what it could do. Looking at it asleep felt like looking at a weapon someone had laid down on the bed next to me.

His phone buzzed on the nightstand and he came awake the way men like him came awake. All at once. No yawn. No stretch. Eyes open, hand already reaching.

He took the call quietly. Said three words. Hung up.

He looked at me.

“You hungry?”

“No.”

“I have a meeting. Can I drop you home?”

“Yes.”

That was the whole conversation.

He dressed without performance. I watched him do it. He caught me watching once and the corner of his mouth moved. He did not say anything. I liked that he did not say anything.

—

The drive back was quiet.

I watched the city go by through the window and did not think about anything. Or I thought about everything and could not name any of it.

He pulled up outside the gates. Did not get out. Did not lean over. Just looked at me.

“I will call you.”

“Okay.”

I got out.

The gate closed behind me and I walked through my own compound and it looked smaller than I remembered it.

—

I made it to the bedroom before my legs gave out.

I threw myself face down on the bed and the exhaustion hit me like a second body landing on top of mine. Every muscle. The backs of my thighs. My jaw. Places I did not know could be sore.

My phone rang.

I rolled onto my side and looked at the screen.

Julian.

I watched it ring.

I watched the name pulse on the screen and I did not move my hand toward it. Not once.

The call ended.

I unlocked the phone and saw the missed calls stacked up like accusations. Six. Eight. I stopped counting.

Twenty four hours ago, I would have called him back before the phone stopped ringing. I would have apologized for missing him. I would have made my voice soft to take the edge off whatever mood he was in.

I set the phone face down on the sheet.

Nothing.

No guilt. No pull. No instinct to fix.

Just a body that had been pleasured for hours by a man who was not my husband, and a phone full of missed calls from a husband who was somewhere with my best friend.

I closed my eyes.

—

The first time I saw Dominic was at a club.

I had been out with Sera and Pat. The three of us. Single, all of us, though Sera was only ever single between men. She collected them. Cycled through them. Always had one more in the wings.

I had seen him from across the room.

That was all it took.

The shoulders. The way he held a drink. The way he was not looking at anyone but somehow held the room. My type, top to bottom, drawn from whatever sketch lived in the back of my head.

He looked up. He looked at me.

My stomach dropped.

“I caught one,” I said to the girls. I was grinning. I felt sixteen. “Look.”

Pat looked. Pat whistled.

Sera looked.

Sera said, “I call dibs. Sit this one out, Celeste. He is my spec and I saw him first.”

I turned to her.

I do not remember what my face did. I remember that I did not have time to make it do anything before she was already off her chair, already walking, already arranging her hair on the way over.

I watched her stand in front of him.

I watched him smile.

“You know how Sera is,” Pat said next to me. Sympathetic. Tired. The voice of the older friend who had watched Sera flirt many times with men.

I got up.

I walked out of the club.

I told myself I was not the kind of woman who fought another woman over a man. I told myself there would be others.

I had not known then that the man I let walk away that night was going to walk back into my life through my husband’s bed.

—

Eventually they dated. Eventually I got over it. Eventually we were all friends again and I told myself the story that I had never really wanted him.

A few months later I met Julian.

Julian was besotted.

That was the word everyone used for him. Besotted. Smitten. Wrapped around her finger. Look at the way he looks at her. Look at the gifts. Look at the cars. Look at the way he watches the door when she is out, waiting for her to come back.

I was not head over heels. I knew that, even then. But I loved him. I cared for him. I thought he was my whole world because he kept telling me I was his, and I had no reason to question it.

He bought everything I wore.

Every shoe. Every bag. Every dress that hung in the closet I never paid for. He chose them. He had taste, and he had opinions, and his opinions were that I should cover up more. That I should stop showing skin. That I dressed too sexily for a married woman.

I changed.

I told myself it was love. I told myself a married woman who loves her husband adjusts. I told myself the compound full of cars I never asked for and the closet full of clothes he picked and the standing complaint that I worked too hard at the lab were all evidence of a man who treasured me.

He gifted me daily. He told me he could give me anything. He told me I did not need to work. He told me the lab made me tired and a tired wife was no good to anyone, and he said it gently, the way a man says a thing he has decided you are going to agree with eventually.

I went to the lab once a week. Then twice a month. Then when I could.

Pat understood. Sera understood. Sera, by then, was already pulling away.

—

We had met first year. Microbiology. The three of us in the same lab section, paired by alphabetical chance.

We had stayed together for so many years.

Helix Research was ours. A small independent lab. We studied the diseases medicine had been ignoring for as long as medicine had been a profession. Endometriosis. Unexplained infertility. The conditions that affected one in ten women and got told for decades that the pain was in their heads, that the empty cradle was something to pray about, that women complaining about their own bodies was an old story and a tired one.

We were not famous. We were not rich. We were close to something. We could feel it on the good days, the way you feel weather changing. A biomarker for early-stage endometriosis that could shave seven years off a diagnosis. The kind of finding that did not save a life in one stroke, but gave a hundred thousand women back a decade.

Sera left three months ago.

According to what she told us, her husband thought she would do better work alone. Her own space. Her own name on the door. Ford Biosciences. Five times our square footage. Equipment we could not afford to look at.

Pat and I were not jealous. We were sad. We told her we were happy for her.

I do not think we lied.

But I think now, lying in this bed with my husband’s missed calls stacking up and another man’s marks on my body, that Sera has been leaving for longer than three months. That she has been leaving since the club.

That some women take. And some women do not realize they have been taken from.

—

I opened my eyes.

The ceiling was the same ceiling. The bed was the same bed. The man whose name was on the deed of this house was the same man.

I was not.

I had spent more than two years calling control by the name of love. I had let a man dress me, undress my freedom, fold my career into smaller and smaller squares, and I had thanked him for it. I had told other women I was lucky. Sera, smiling across a brunch table, telling me how lucky I was to have a perfect husband like Julian.

Sera had known.

The bitter laugh that came out of me was small and quiet and did not feel like mine.

I closed my eyes again and Dominic was there.

His hand at the back of my neck. His mouth at my ear. The weight of him. The way he had looked at me afterward like I was something he had not finished examining.

A ridiculous thought arrived without my permission.

If Sera had not stood up that night. If she had stayed on her seat and let me catch the eye I had already caught. Would I be in a different bed right now? Would I be a different woman? Would the past two years have been mine instead of his?

I pushed the thought away.

It did not matter.

I was done loving men. Done trusting them. Done folding myself into the shape of whatever they preferred. Dominic was not love. Dominic was pleasure and revenge and the look on Julian’s face at the end of it, and after that, goodbye.

I would take what I needed from him.

And when the time came, when Julian found out, I would make him feel as small as he had spent years making me feel grateful.

I almost laughed.

I was too tired to laugh.

I let my eyes close and the room go dim and the last thing I thought before I slept was the curve of Dominic’s mouth, and the way he had said, “I will call you.”

—

I woke to evening light.

The window was orange. My stomach was loud. I had slept almost the entire day and the body that had been used so thoroughly had finally gotten the rest it had been owed.

I got up. I stretched. I felt good in a way I had forgotten the shape of.

I made dinner and ate it standing at the counter and was surprised by my own appetite. Real hunger. The kind that comes after a body has actually been used.

I checked the phone after.

More missed calls. Three messages.

I rolled my eyes and called him back.

“Where have you been?” he asked. The wounded husband voice. Practiced. “I have been worried sick. I called all afternoon.”

“Mrs. Celeste”

“Yes.”

“Sign here, please.”

I signed.

I looked past him. The driveway. The gate. The street.

Nothing.

No second car. No silhouette in dark glasses. No Dominic.

I almost laughed at myself.

I took the box back inside and set it on the kitchen island and stared at the label.

‘For my game partner.’

I went very still.

For a half second I had thought it was Julian. I had thought he had sent something again. He sent things, especially when he was away. Apology gifts. Guilt gifts. Whatever they had been all along.

This was not that.

I opened the box.

There was an envelope on top of folded tissue paper. I lifted the envelope and the tissue parted and underneath it was a dress.

Red.

The kind of red that did not exist in my closet anymore.

I lifted it out.

It was heavy in the way only good fabric is heavy. The slit ran up to mid-thigh. The neckline did not pretend to be anything other than what it was. I knew what this dress cost without looking at a tag. Julian had been buying me dresses my whole marriage and I had learned the weight of money in a seam.

I stood there holding it.

A small question surfaced.

Where did an ordinary office worker get the money for a dress like this?

I let the question pass.

I did not want it. I wanted the dress.

I walked it to the bedroom mirror and held it up against my body. Long red column. Slit up the leg. My collarbones bare. My shoulders bare. A version of me I had not seen in the mirror in a while stood next to a version of me who had been married to Julian for two years, and the two of them did not look like the same woman.

The phone rang in my hand.

“You did not have to,” I said when I picked up.

“I did. I invited you.”

“I love it.”

“Good.”

“But… how did you know my measurements.”

He laughed. Low and unhurried. The laugh of a man who knew exactly what he was about to say.

“My hands have been on every part of your body. Why would I not know your measurements?”

I felt the heat rise up my neck.

“You know,” I said. “When I heard the door just now, I thought you were the surprise.”

“Did you?”

“I thought you had come for me. I had already decided I was going to let you have me on the floor of the foyer before I even opened the door.”

The line was quiet for a beat.

“Celeste.”

“What?”

“You are making it very hard to sit at this table.”

I bit my lip.

“Good.”

“At the party tonight,” he said. “I will find a corner. I will find a closet. I will find a wall. And I will slam into you hard enough that you will feel it for days.”

“I will be counting the hours.”

“Wear the dress.”

He hung up.

I stood in front of the mirror holding the phone and the dress and a heart that was beating loud enough to embarrass me.

I put it on.

Of course I put it on. I had not even taken the tags off and I was already stepping into it, watching myself in the glass.

The slit ran high. The neckline ran low. My shoulders were bare and my collarbones were bare and the long line of my leg was visible all the way up to a place that used to be private property.

I turned. I looked over my shoulder. I looked back.

I smiled.

A small mean private smile.

If Julian saw me in this, he would lose his mind.

I pushed the thought far away from me and focused my mind on the party and what Dominic would do to me there.

I just did not know yet that Julian was also going to be at the party tonight.