The Husband Clause

The First Night

Damon came home at twelve minutes past eleven.

I knew because I had been watching the small gold clock on the mantel for the last hour and a half, sitting on the cream linen couch in the dress I had not changed out of, with a glass of wine I had poured an hour ago and not touched. The wine was warm now. The dress was wrinkled. My feet were bare because the heels had hurt and there was no one to perform for, which turned out to be its own kind of loneliness.

The elevator chimed. The doors opened. He stepped out.

He had taken off his tie at some point. The top two buttons of his shirt were undone, and the line of his throat in the low lamplight was the most distractingly beautiful thing I had seen all day, which was saying something, because it had been a day of beautiful things.

"You are still up," he said.

"You said eleven."

"I said I would see you tonight. I did not say what time. Go to bed."

"I want to talk first."

"About what."

"About tomorrow. The party. The Halsteads. You said your board would be there. You said I had to be ready."

He walked past me into the kitchen. He did not look at me. He poured himself a glass of water from a pitcher on the counter, drank it standing up, set it down. Every movement was efficient and slightly wrong, like a man going through motions he had practiced too many times to feel.

"You will be ready," he said.

"How."

"Because I will tell you what to say."

"I don't know how to be your wife."

"You do not need to know how to be my wife." He turned around. He leaned against the counter. He looked tired in a way I had not seen at the restaurant, in a way I do not think he allowed himself to look in front of most people, and for one terrible second I almost felt sorry for him. "You need to know how to look like my wife. There is a difference."

"And what does your wife look like."

He studied me for a long moment.

"Stand up," he said.

I stood up.

He crossed the room slowly. He stopped a foot away from me. He did not touch me. He looked at me the way you look at a painting you have been told to evaluate, his head slightly tilted, his eyes moving from my hair to my mouth to the line of my collarbone where the dress dipped, and I felt the look the way I would have felt a hand.

"My wife," he said, "does not flinch when I stand close to her."

"I am not flinching."

"You are about to."

He took a step closer. My back was already against nothing, and there was nowhere to go, and I did not flinch, because I had decided in that exact second that I would die before I flinched.

"My wife," he said softly, "looks at me like she has decided to forgive me for something."

"Forgive you for what."

"Anything. Everything. Pick."

"What if I haven't."

"Then you learn to lie with your face."

* * *

He lifted his hand. He did not touch my skin. He took the strap of my dress between his thumb and forefinger and slid it, very slowly, an inch lower on my shoulder. The dress did not move much. The strap was not the point. The point was that he wanted me to feel the weight of his hand without giving me the weight of his hand, and the point was that it worked. My breath went shallow. My pulse hit the inside of my wrist hard enough that I thought he could probably see it.

"My wife," he said, "breathes when I do this."

"I am breathing."

"Not well."

"Don't."

"Don't what, agápi."

It was the first soft thing he had ever called me. It was probably not real. Greek, his lawyer had told me; he calls everyone agápi, do not let it mean anything. But it had not sounded like nothing. It had sounded like a hand on the back of my neck.

"You are doing it on purpose," I said.

"Yes."

"You are not even attracted to me."

Something moved across his face. Very fast. Almost not there. I would have missed it if I had blinked.

"That," he said, "is the second mistake you have made today."

"What was the first."

"Signing your name."

And then he did something I was not ready for. He bent his head, slowly, and he did not kiss me. He pressed his mouth to the corner of my jaw, just below the ear, just above the pulse, and he held it there for a long second of held breath. He did not move. He did not open his lips. He simply rested the warm shape of his mouth against the place where my body had been about to give itself away, and he stayed there, and the dress strap was still hooked on his finger, and the city was burning outside the windows, and I forgot, for the space of three heartbeats, that I had ever been afraid of anything.

Then he straightened.

He let the strap go. It slid back into place.

"That," he said, in a voice that was perfectly level, "is what my wife looks like."

"Damon."

"Go to bed, Selene."

"I want to know what just happened."

"Nothing happened."

"Something happened."

"Something that will happen many more times," he said quietly, "in front of many people, until you stop reacting to it. We have rehearsed for tomorrow. I will rehearse with you again the day after. You will get used to me."

"I don't want to get used to you."

"That," he said, turning away, "is also part of the contract."

He walked out of the room. I heard a door close down the long hallway, very softly, the way a door closes when the person closing it does not want anyone to know they are doing it. And then I heard a second sound, a faint hum, and I realized it was the elevator.

Someone had come up.

Someone had come up at eleven thirty at night, and Damon had walked toward the back of the apartment, and the someone had not made a sound.

I went to the kitchen. I picked up my glass of warm wine. I walked very softly down the hallway in my bare feet, and I told myself that I was only going to my own bedroom, and I was lying.

There was a door at the end of the hallway, half-open, a slice of warm yellow light spilling onto the dark wood floor.

And inside that door, I heard a voice that was not Damon's say, very low, very tired, "Did you do it."

And I heard Damon answer, in a voice I had never heard him use before, soft and bone-deep and almost broken, "I did. I'm sorry. I did."

I did not move.

I did not breathe.

Because the voice that had asked the question, I now understood, belonged to Adrian Cole.