Dripping Sin

Divorce Him

The room was everything his rooms always were.

Wide and quiet and expensive, the kind of space that made the rest of the world feel very far away. He ordered water and had it at the bedside before I had finished taking my shoes off and I drank half of it in one go and sat on the edge of the bed and waited for the room to stop tilting.

He sat in the chair across from me, jacket off, watching me the way he watched everything.

"Better?" he asked.

"Getting there."

He nodded. Gave me five minutes of silence and the room settling around me before he crossed over and sat beside me on the edge of the bed and tilted my chin up with one finger and looked at my face.

Whatever he saw there made him start slowly.

He kissed me softly at first, just his mouth against mine, one hand moving into my hair, and I kissed him back because my body knew exactly what to do with him even when my mind was somewhere else entirely.

And that was the problem.

My mind was somewhere else entirely.

He laid me back gently and his mouth moved to my jaw and I stared at the ceiling and thought about Eli. About whether he had eaten his dinner. About whether the night nurse was the one he liked or the one that made him nervous. About whether he had woken up reaching for me and found no one there.

Luca's hand moved to my waist.

I thought about Daniel's phone. The way he had tilted the screen away from me twice last week when I walked into the room. The way he had been in the shower when his phone buzzed four times in a row on the nightstand and I had looked at the screen without meaning to and seen a name I didn't recognize saved with no last name.

Just a name.

Just a woman's name.

Luca kissed my throat and I closed my eyes and tried to come back to the room and couldn't quite get there.

He felt it.

I don't know how but he felt it the way he always seemed to feel things about me before I announced them. He stilled. Lifted his head. Looked at me in the low light of the room.

"Where are you?" he said quietly.

"I'm here."

"You're not." He studied my face. "You haven't been here since we got in the car."

I looked at the ceiling. "I'm a little drunk and tired. That's all."

"That's not all."

I pressed my lips together and said nothing and he sat up slowly, giving me space, and the shift in his energy was immediate. The warmth that had been in his hands a moment ago pulled back and something cooler moved in behind it.

"Talk," he said.

"Luca."

"Mia." His voice was flat. "Talk."

I sat up and pulled my knees to my chest and looked at the window.

"I'm thinking about my son," I said. "I haven't seen him since this morning and he doesn't always sleep well when I'm not there and I keep thinking about whether he's okay."

Silence.

"And I'm thinking about my husband," I said quietly. "About a name I saw on his phone last week. A woman's name. Saved without a last name the way you save people you don't want to explain." I felt the words settle in the room as I said them. "I don't know what it means yet. Maybe nothing. But I can't stop thinking about it."

The silence that followed was a different kind from his usual silences. This one had edges.

I turned to look at him.

His jaw was set. His eyes were steady on me but there was something burning underneath the steadiness now, controlled and deliberate the way a fire is controlled when someone is actively managing it.

"You're lying in a hotel room with me," he said, "thinking about your husband."

"I told you I was married."

"You are in my bed, Mia."

"I know where I am."

"Do you." He stood up from the bed and the room felt different immediately, charged in a different way than before. He moved to the window and stood with his back to me and his hands in his pockets and the line of his shoulders was tight. "Every time I get you close enough to matter you pull half of yourself back. You give me your body and you keep everything else somewhere I can't reach."

"That's not fair," I said.

"None of this is fair." He turned around. His eyes found mine across the room and the look in them made me sit up straighter. "I don't share, Mia. I told you that from the beginning. I don't share and I don't do halfway and I will not keep being the thing you run to when your real life gets too heavy and then put down when it's convenient."

My chest tightened. "That is not what I'm doing."

"Then what are you doing."

"I don't know," I said honestly, and my voice came out smaller than I intended.

He crossed the room in three steps and crouched in front of me so we were eye level and looked at me with an intensity that made it very hard to breathe normally.

"Divorce him," he said.

The words landed like something dropped from a height.

"What?"

"You heard me." His voice was quiet and absolute. "Divorce Daniel. He is not present, he is not faithful, and you know it. You've known it longer than you saw that name on his phone." He held my gaze without blinking. "Divorce him Mia."

"You can't just ask me to do that."

"I'm not asking."

I stared at him. "I have a son in a hospital. I have a life that doesn't begin and end in hotel rooms with you. I can't just—"

"I will take care of Eli."

"He is not yours to take care of."

"He could be." His eyes didn't move from mine. "Everything you need, everything that boy needs, I can provide it without blinking. Treatment, specialists, the best care available anywhere in the world. All of it." He paused. "But I will not continue to come second to a man who doesn't even see you."

I felt the tears before I expected them and blinked them back hard.

"That's not a proposal," I said. "That's an ultimatum."

"Yes," he said simply. He didn't dress it as anything else. "It is."

I stood up because I needed distance between his eyes and my face.

I walked to the window and looked out at the city below and thought about Daniel's fine and Daniel's back turned in the bed and a woman's name on a phone screen and Eli's arms reaching for me from a hospital bed.

I thought about Luca crouching in front of me with that look on his face, the one that said he had made a decision and was simply waiting for the world to catch up.

"I need to go home," I said.

He was quiet for a long moment.

"I'll have the car brought around," he said.

No argument. No further push. Just that, cold and immediate, the warmth completely withdrawn now, and somehow the absence of it was worse than the anger had been.

I picked up my shoes.

And somewhere between the window and the door I understood that Luca Carver had just drawn a line.

And I was running out of time to decide which side of it I was standing on.