The Other Man · Part 3: After Hours

Previously: Ashlyn tested you with a green dress and a stranger at the bar, you won her back, and you spent your anniversary night in a hotel room. Then she showed you an unsent message to a divorce lawyer and asked what you'll do about it.

*Now you know how close it was,* she said. *What are you going to do about it?* You look at the phone face-down on the carpet, and you get up, and you walk out.

You don't shout. You want to — there's a version of this where you throw the empty draft in her face and feel righteous for a night — but you did the math in the elevator of your chest already: she wrote it, and she didn't send it, and instead she bought a green dress and gambled everything on you following her.

So you walk out of the room, robe and all, and press the button for the roof.

The lift doors start to close and her hand stops them. She stands there in her robe, barefoot, holding her clutch like armor.

"Running's my move," she says. "You don't get to use it."

"I'm not running. I'm going up. Pool deck. You're going to talk to me and I'm going to listen, and we're not doing it in a room where either of us can slam a door."

She steps in beside you. She presses nothing. Eleven floors of silence, going up.

The pool deck is closed, chained gate left loose by a careless hand, the water lit from below, blue and empty and throwing moving light on the ceiling. The city all around, above the walls, everywhere. It's warm for tonight. You sit on the edge of the pool and put your feet in, robe and all.

She sits beside you. A careful foot of water and one unsent message between you.

"Say the whole thing," she says. "Not the polite version. You read it. Tell me what you felt."

"Like the floor went." You look at the water, not her. "Like I deserved it. And then like — like I'd found a note that the house was on fire, written a month ago, and I've been asleep in it the whole time." You turn.

"I'm not angry at you, Ashlyn. I'm angry at the two years I checked my phone while you walked past me in a towel. I did this. You just wrote it down first."

Her mouth works. "You don't get to take all of it. I stopped saying things too. I decided you didn't care and I made it easy for you to prove it."

"I'm choosing you," you say. "Out loud, like you said. I'm choosing you, and I'm done being late — to dinner, to Thursdays, to everything. I forgot to look. That's over."

She doesn't answer with words. She stands up, drops the robe on the tile, and under it she's wearing the black slip she had on under everything, thin straps, and it goes transparent where the underwater lights hit it. She steps down into the pool in it, water to her waist, and it's the most deliberate thing you've ever watched her do.

"Well," she says. "Come here, then."

"I didn't bring — we're in a hotel pool, there's a —"

"There's nobody here but you and the worst decision I almost made, and I'd like to drown it. Get in the pool."

You wade in. She takes your belt in both hands and pulls you with her, walking backward toward the deep end, the water climbing your robe, and her eyes haven't left yours.

In the chest-deep water she wraps her legs around you and her slip floats up around her waist and she takes your face in both hands, and this kiss is nothing like the elevator — it's hungry and messy and hers, and she's making a sound into your mouth like she's finally allowed.

"You didn't bring anything," she says against your lips, "so you're going to have to be careful — no. Wait." She pulls back an inch, eyes bright, hair wet. "No. I'm on the pill, you know that, and I have waited six years to feel you without — just you. Don't you dare be careful."

"Ashlyn—"

"Six years," she says. "I've earned this. Have you?"

You hold her under the water and slide into her, nothing between you for the first time in six years, and her head goes back and the sound she makes comes off the tile walls and the whole empty pool deck hears it.

"Oh my god — okay — okay, that's —" she laughs, wrecked already, "that's different, that's — don't move, just — let me —" and she rolls her hips and finds it herself, using your shoulders, the water slapping against the pool edge in rhythm. "This is what I wanted. You, and this, and nobody being careful with anybody."

You move and she gets loud — properly loud, no thin walls, no habits, her voice saying exactly what she wants in plain words, and it's filthier and freer than the window an hour ago, and she doesn't care who hears because nobody can, and neither do you.

"Harder. I'm not made of — yes. Like that. Say you missed this. Say it."

"I missed this. I missed you. Every night, I missed you and I was right there."

"Then don't be right there anymore. Be here."

She comes apart in the water, loud, shaking, gripping your neck, and you follow her over, and the underwater lights blur and the city keeps its own counsel above the walls.

You carry her out of the pool to the cabana bed at the far end — one sentence, her laughing against your neck, dripping. The canvas is cool, the towels smell like chlorine and her, and the guard's flashlight passes across the far wall once, pauses, and moves on, and you both lie perfectly still with your hearts hammering, her hand over her own mouth, and when the light is gone she loses it, shaking with silent laughter.

"He saw nothing," she whispers. "Ten years of being a respectable married woman, ruined by a rooftop."

"Best thing I've ever been part of ruining."

"Show me." And she doesn't mean the joke anymore.

She pushes you flat on the cabana bed and climbs over you, wet slip plastered to her, city lights on her shoulders, and she takes her time, and this time she talks the whole way through — what she likes, what she wants next, things she says she's never once said out loud in six years of marriage, and you realize the volume and the words are the point: she is telling you everything now so there's nothing left to find in a laundry basket.

"Next time I wear the green dress, you're the one booking the room." Her hips don't stop. "And I want a night where you tell me no. Where you say not yet and make me wait for it. I've been waiting for years and it was never once on purpose."

"Next Thursday," you say. "I'll book it."

"Every Thursday," she says, and comes again, quieter this time, deeper, her forehead against yours, and after a long while she reaches down and finishes you with her hand, watching your face while she does it, like she's memorizing it.

A week later. Home. It's a Saturday and the washing machine is going and you're pretending to read the news on the sofa, and she comes out of the laundry holding a hotel key card in a paper sleeve, one eyebrow up.

The sleeve has handwriting on it. Yours.

"Thursday," she reads. "9. Wear the green dress. Wear it under something, and don't tell me what." She looks at the card, then at you — the polo, the greying temples, the man who forgot last time and will not forget again — and she turns the card over in her fingers, twice, exactly the way you turned your wedding ring in that bar.

"Room's booked," you say. "In my name. I told them to have champagne ready, and also that thing you hate, because I know you hate it and I'm buying it anyway."

She sets the key card on the counter where it will sit all week, where she'll see it every morning, and she doesn't answer with words. She just walks over, takes the news out of your hands, and puts your phone face-down on the table, and looks at you until you look back.

The green dress hangs on the bedroom door where she left it, waiting for Thursday, and the key card sits on the counter catching the morning light every day. Six years married, and you've finally learned her trick: it was never about the room. It was about the card on the counter — something waiting, on purpose, where the other one would find it.

There's a whole week until Thursday. She's in the laundry room right now, and you can hear her humming.

Go find out what she's wearing under it.