Still Number One

Leaving me was never a permanent solution.

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You answered.

I knew you would.

Don’t speak. I don’t want to hear your voice. I’ve heard enough of your words to last several lifetimes, and not one of them was worth the breath you spent on them.

Just open the door.

Thank you.

So, where were you tonight?

Out?

No shit. With who?

You know what, never mind. I know exactly where you were tonight. I have my sources. Some girl from Tinder, wasn’t it? Fresh face. Clean history. No scar tissue. I’m sure she laughed at all the right moments, touched your arm across the table, and tilted her head like women do when they’re auditioning.

Did it feel good? That new attention?

Yeah, I’m sure it did.

Enjoy how it felt, because you won’t be seeing her again.

Not after tonight.

Stop looking at me like I’m something to manage. I’m not a crisis. I’m a reckoning. And the difference between me and every woman you’ll swipe right on for the rest of your miserable attempt at moving on is that I know you. Every ugly, small, secret thing. I know what shames you, what breaks you open, and exactly how to use both.

She knows nothing.

I know everything.

Which is why I’m standing in your doorway and she’s home alone, convincing herself the date went well.

It didn’t.

Now. Are you going to keep blocking the entrance, or are you going to step aside and let me remind you what you were stupid enough to leave?

Yeah. That’s what I thought.

No. No. Don’t touch the lights. I want the dark. I want you to have to rely on memory and touch and the smell of me — which I know you still recognize because I saw your jaw tighten the second I stepped inside.

No. No. Don’t touch the lights. I want the dark. I want you navigating by memory and desperation and the smell of me — and don’t pretend you don’t recognize it. I watched your whole body respond the second I stepped inside. Your jaw. Your hands. That sharp inhale you tried to hide.

Your body never learned to lie to me.

Sit on the edge of the bed. Hands in your lap. Stay there.

You remember this coat. You should. You paid for it. Back when you still thought grand gestures meant something, back when you were still performing the role of husband with any conviction.

I’m taking it off now.

Slowly.

There.

Nothing underneath but the body you walked away from. Look at it. Really look. Memorize what abandonment costs, because I want this image burned behind your eyes every time you sit across from some new woman trying to build something with the wreckage you are.

Does she look like this?

Your silence is answer enough.

And you’re already hard.

Already. Before I’ve laid a single finger on you. Before anything. Your body has completely overruled every legal document you signed, every decision you congratulated yourself for making.

Pathetic.

And perfect.

Come to me — no, stay sitting. Let me do this. Let me come to you.

Feel my hands on your chest. Steady. I’m not shaking. I burned through every fear I ever had about you a long time ago. What I have left isn’t longing. Isn’t grief. It’s something colder and more focused than either of those, and tonight it all narrows down to this.

Lie back.

Feel my thighs settle over yours. Feel the heat of me hovering just above you. I’m going to reach down, take hold of you — god, you’re thick — and guide you exactly where I want you.

Don’t rush. Don’t grab my hips. You signed away that right along with the house and the joint accounts.

Tonight I’m in charge.

Feel that?

Feel me spreading open around you?

Yeah.

That’s it. That’s still yours. That still recognizes you in the way nothing else about my life does anymore. My body hasn’t gotten the memo. My cunt doesn’t care what the papers say.

I’m sinking down now.

Oh.

Oh god.

You fill me so completely it punches the air right out of me. Every inch. I forgot — I made myself forget — how perfectly you wreck me. How my walls grip and flutter and pull you deeper like they’re trying to keep you.

Like they know something I’ve been trying to argue them out of for months.

Don’t you dare close your eyes.

Look. At. Me.

This face. These eyes. This body swallowing you whole while some girl who doesn’t know your middle name sits at home, wondering what she did wrong.

Are you looking?

Good.

I’m moving now. And you’re not going to stop me. You’re not going to flip me over or grab control because you have none. Not here. Not with me on top of you with my slick heat destroying your resistance, squeezing you tight, dragging every coherent thought right out of your skull.

Feel how wet I am.

That’s not performance. That’s months of rage and grief and want that I’ve been carrying around like a second skeleton, and it’s all flooding out of me and onto you.

Feel how deep you are.

Feel it.

I know every sound your body makes. Every tell. The way your breathing collapses when you’re losing. The way your hands stop being careful. I know exactly where you are right now — teetering, unraveling, about to go somewhere you can’t come back from — and I want you to know that I know. I want you to understand that you are completely, embarrassingly transparent to me.

You always were.

Are you close?

Yeah?

I can feel it. That pulse. That swelling. Your cock thickening inside me like your body is trying to make a decision your brain stopped being capable of ten minutes ago.

Don’t hold back.

Give me everything you have.

Every.

Single.

Drop.

Think of it as the one thing your lawyers couldn’t divide. The one asset still entirely mine.

Let go.

There.

Yes. God. Yes. Shoot it into me. Just like that. Give it all to me.

Stay still. Don’t move. I want to feel every pulse of it. Every wave. I want it held right there because I am keeping it. Every microscopic piece of what you just gave me.

I’m keeping all of it.

When I lift off of you, I want you to watch what you’ve done. I want you to see your own cum sliding out of me, down my inner thighs, slicking across your skin, your sheets, the expensive mattress you kept in the settlement.

Look at it.

That’s yours. That mess. That consequence.

What’s that?

What do you mean, now what?

Now, I’m getting dressed. Don’t speak. Just wait until I have my coat back on, until I’m standing at the door, until I look exactly as composed as I did when I arrived.

There.

So, here’s where we are.

One of two things happens next.

You call me tomorrow and tell me you made a mistake. That you want me back. That whatever fragile, cowardly reason you had for leaving wasn’t worth what you’ve lost. You say the words, you mean them, and we never have to discuss tonight again. I’ll be your wife. You’ll have your life back. Messy and complicated and real in the way nothing you’ll find on Tinder will ever be.

Or.

You don’t call.

And in a few weeks, when a little pink line appears on a stick, I’ll photograph and text it to you without a single word, and you can spend the next eighteen years writing checks that remind you of exactly this moment.

Of me in this room.

Of this body, filled with your weakness.

The choice is yours.

You have until morning.