He was cold and tense the night before.
Everything about her sudden trip is askew, he said. As askew as I’ve been for the past five months. He knows he’s misplaced a piece of me, but no matter how hard he looks, he can’t find it. I’m shut down. I haven’t even called my parents since I returned, even though I used to phone them religiously, every two days at the very least. Marcus could call my mother, of course, have a chat with her, ask her what it is that happened to change me like this. But he’s much too proud to resort to that. He’ll never admit to anyone there’s something wrong between us.
I’m sure it’s crossed his mind that I’m sleeping with someone else, although he has never come out and asked me outright. I certainly have been careful to obliterate any trace of deceit—not a phone call or a gift or a slip of the tongue or even resistance in bed.
But I can’t help myself. Everything he does is reproachable to me. Things that I found endearing before upset me now. He doesn’t dress properly. He looks sloppy in flip-flops and shorts. That hat he wears in the garden—what guy wears a hat to go gardening? Most important of all, he doesn’t appreciate who I am or what I do or where I come from.
“You wouldn’t understand,” I dismissed him disparagingly, when he asked why I needed to physically go and revise the book.
“What is it that you need to do that you can’t achieve by FedExing the proofs back to them?” he insisted.
“It’s all about personal relationships, Marcus,” I said curtly, appalled that he still didn’t get this, even though I knew it was just a fake reason I was giving to go back. “It’s not like here, where you can simply pick up the phone and send things back and forth. It’s about knowing who you deal with and talking to them and asking how their families are. If you ever took the trouble to go there, you would get it,” I added, convincing myself of the importance of my mission in the process.
Marcus always stays quiet when I say things like that, I think, because he knows that at some level, my anger is justified.
But tonight, I feel the sadness of his reproach, and a surge of tenderness for him suddenly overpowers me.
“Helena,” he whispered, as if sensing my sudden change of heart. “Just go do what you need to do. I’ll pick you up on Saturday,” he says, not waiting for my acknowledgment. He knows me so well, he can always tell if I’m awake. “I’ll pick you up, and we’ll go out and celebrate your book. Okay?”
I don’t say anything for a few seconds. I think of so many nights on this bed, of lying here with Gabriella between us, both of us embracing over her tiny figure. My throat tightens up, and if I speak, I know I’ll burst into tears. But I gulp it down, and in the darkness, I let my hand search for his under the covers. “That sounds like a plan,” I countered quietly and turned around and put my other hand against his cheek and kissed him very, very lightly on the lips, then turned back again, and after a few minutes, I fell asleep.