Chapter 74: Papers

Edward finished inside Ana with a low sound against her shoulder.

Ana stayed in his lap, breathing hard, his release warm inside her. On the other side of the room Elena’s own climax was still fading. Her hand slipped out from under her skirt. Her legs were unsteady. The television had gone to a brighter stretch of the same lecture-hall recording — someone laughing off-camera, Elena’s voice breaking on a moan — and then Edward reached for the remote and muted it without looking at the screen.

For a few seconds the living room was only breath and the faint hum of the television.

Elena pushed off the wall.

She walked toward them instead of away. Ana watched her come with a wary, satisfied look, still sitting on Edward, still half-dressed. Edward looked up at his wife as if he was waiting for the scene to finally produce the reaction it had been built for.

It produced the wrong one.

“It’s okay,” Elena said.

Her voice was rough. She stopped a few feet from the couch.

“It’s okay that you’re doing this with her. I don’t mind. Not now.” She swallowed. “You can be with different women. I won’t make a problem out of it. We can just… keep living. I don’t need you to stop.”

Edward stared at her.

Then he started laughing.

It was not a kind sound. It was short and incredulous and it went on long enough that Ana joined it, a surprised little laugh against his shoulder, as if Elena had just offered them the one thing neither of them wanted.

Elena’s face tightened.

“What’s funny?”

Edward lifted Ana off his lap with more care than the laugh deserved, pulled his pants back up, and sat forward with his elbows on his knees. The sadness Ana had seen when she first showed him the video was back, stripped of any performance.

“You’re out of your mind,” he said.

Elena opened her mouth.

“I can’t live with you anymore,” Edward continued. “I don’t love you anymore. And it isn’t because I found out you were cheating. I stopped a long time before that. Before Ana. Before the bar. Before I started coming home and sleeping on the couch because the bed felt like a room I didn’t belong in.”

The words landed in Elena’s chest one after another.

Not the rumor.

Not the video.

Not even Ana, still sitting there with Edward’s cum inside her.

The love had already been gone.

“I’ll have the papers sent,” Edward said. “You can sign them when they get here.”

Something in Elena that had survived the classroom, the corridor, Elias’s desk, and her own hand in the doorway finally broke the other way.

“You don’t get to do that,” she said, and her voice came up sharp and ugly. “You don’t get to sit there and talk like this is clean. You never paid attention to me. You were always at the hospital. Always tired. Always somewhere else. I married you and then I became a piece of furniture in this house. You think I turned into this by myself? You left me in here until I went looking. That’s why I became like this. Because of you.”

Edward did not deny it.

He sat there and took the cursing that followed — names, the years of empty evenings, the nights she had waited and the mornings he had already been gone. Ana stayed quiet on the other end of the couch and did not try to look innocent. There was no innocence left in the room to perform.

Elena ran out of volume before she ran out of sentences.

The anger burned itself down into something thinner. She stood in the middle of her own living room with her skirt still wrinkled from her hand and the muted video still frozen on her face and understood, slowly, that fighting to keep a marriage Edward had already left was just another way of lying.

He did not want an arrangement.

He did not want an open house where she could keep the campus and he could keep Ana.

He wanted out.

Elena sat down on the arm of the opposite chair because her legs were done. The house felt larger than it had when she walked in. The guest room down the hall was no longer a secret. The trophy her team had not collected felt like it belonged to a different woman.

“Fine,” she said at last.

Edward looked at her.

“It’s better,” Elena said. The words cost her and she said them anyway. “If you don’t love me, and I don’t even know what I want from you anymore except to not be alone in the wrong way, then it’s better we separate. Send the papers.”

Ana’s expression flickered — triumph first, then something more complicated, as if getting what she had wanted in the open made it less simple than it had been behind a guest-room door.

Edward nodded once.

“I will.”

No one moved to touch anyone else. The living room stayed ugly and honest in the way rooms stayed after a fight that had already been lost months earlier. Elena looked at Ana and did not ask her to leave. There was no version of asking that would put the house back together.

She stood up after a while, picked her bag off the floor, and went upstairs.

Behind her the television was still on mute.

Edward sat on the couch with Ana and did not follow.

The marriage, for all practical purposes, had already ended on the walk from the doorway to the chair. The papers would only make it true on paper.

End of Chapter 74

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