Claimed By Rival

Chapter Three

Harriet's POV

"Tell me about it," I whispered.

Adrian stood by the bathroom door with water still dripping off him onto the floor. He kept his eyes on mine while the rain hammered the windows, and then he crossed the room and stopped an arm's length away.

"An affair," he said. He said it like a contract. "You and me. Nothing sweet about it and nothing promised. We give them back exactly what they gave us."

I laughed. It wasn't funny. "You want us to sleep together to punish them?"

"Yes." He did not blink. "They took something that was ours, so we take it back the same way."

Half of me wanted to slap him for even saying it, but the other half kept seeing Claire's head resting on Wilbert's chest. That half was winning.

"I am not like them," I said, and I hated how thin my voice sounded. "I do not hurt people for fun."

"It is not for fun. They laughed while we suffered, and now it is our turn."

I walked to the window to get away from his eyes. The rain was coming down the glass in thick streams. The woman in the glass looked pale and angry. I didn't know her. Five years I had spent believing I was the broken one because I could not give Wilbert a child, and all that time he had been getting whatever he wanted from my own sister.

"They will never feel what I feel," I said. "Even if we do this."

Adrian came and stood behind me. He did not touch me, but I could feel the warmth coming off his skin. "They will feel it when we are gone and they see that we found something in each other. Nothing I say will hurt them like that will."

I shut my eyes and saw it again, Wilbert wiping cream off Claire's thumb with his own mouth while the two of them smiled over some joke I would never be told. I felt sick.

"How would it even work?" I asked.

"We meet whenever we like and we keep going until neither of us has room left to think about them. When they come crawling back they will know exactly who we were with.”

“Until then it is nobody's business."

When I turned around his hair was still wet and a drop slid down onto his bare shoulder, and I made myself look at his face instead. Up close he seemed more dangerous than he had in the dark, the kind of man who could take a person apart without raising his voice.

"And after?" I asked. "When it is finished?"

"We walk away. No feelings and no attachment. That is the deal."

I looked for doubt in his face and found only the same anger I had been carrying around for two days.

"I need time," I said.

He nodded as though he had expected that. "Take the night. The bed is yours and I will sleep on the couch."

He pulled a blanket out of the cupboard and lay down on the narrow couch by the wall with his back to me. After that there was only the sound of the rain.

I sat on the edge of the bed in my towel with my eyes on the floor. Whenever I tried to think about something else, Wilbert and Claire were there again, laughing and touching and keeping their secret while I sat at home waiting for him to come back for dinner. My phone lay face down on the nightstand where I had left it, and I did not want to turn it over.

If I said yes I wouldn't be me anymore. But what had being me ever got me?

The rain thinned to a drizzle sometime after midnight but never quite stopped. I lay down and pulled the covers up, and sleep would not come. Once I heard the couch creak, and when I turned my head Adrian was watching me across the room in the dim light. Neither of us said anything and after a while he looked away. I lay listening to him breathe and wondered if he was awake with the same doubts, because he had sounded so sure of himself earlier but I had seen his jaw tighten every time he said Claire's name.

Grey light was creeping into the room by the time I sat up. My eyes were dry and my chest felt heavy, and somewhere in the night my mind had made itself up without asking me. His words kept coming back to me. No strings and no feelings attached, only revenge. It still frightened me, but it no longer felt like the thing that would finish me off. It felt like the only way to stop the pain from eating me alive.

I went to the window. The rain had stopped at last and the trees outside were black with wet, and at the edge of the clouds there was a thin strip of pale gold. Down on the street a car went past with its tyres hissing on the wet road, and then it was quiet again. I leaned my forehead on the cold glass and let everything come at once, the betrayal and the rage and the odd pull I already felt toward the man on the couch. Then I shoved it all down.

When I turned around the couch was empty. A cupboard opened somewhere close by and a cup clinked against the counter, and soon the smell of coffee reached me, which was so ordinary, so ordinary I almost laughed. He was awake and in the kitchen, moving about like someone who had slept well, or who had not slept at all and had learned to hide it. My heartbeat slowed, and for the first time in days I felt no confusion at all.

I tightened the towel, which had gone cold and damp against my skin, and walked toward the sound, and my bare feet made almost no noise on the floor. Every step felt heavier than the one before, but I kept going. At the doorway I stopped and looked at his back as he stood at the counter. After this there would be no taking it back.

I had made up all kinds of reasons in the dark. The real one was simpler. I wanted him to look at me and not see a woman who got left.

I opened my mouth.