One Last Thing Before I Go

furiously in his chest. Denise rolls in waves beneath him like a storm, lifting him off the bed with her hips, grunting to the beat like a tennis player, and he feels himself building, worries that he will finish too soon. He doesn’t want it to end, is terrified of the expression she will wear when they’re done. Is this a fundamental change, or is this good-bye? He was both amazed and relieved at how they arrived here in his bed without any discussion, but now he finds himself wishing he knew what the hell she was thinking, or even what the hell he was thinking, for that matter.
    Denise comes, crying out with the pleasure of it, pulling him deeper inside of her like she’s trying to squeeze the last bit of something out of him. His own orgasm comes on the heels of hers, not nearly as impressive or animated, but it rocks him nonetheless. When he’s done, he rolls off of her, closing his eyes as the room flashes like lightning. He feels her hand land on his chest, her finger tracing circles there. She says something, but he can’t hear her over the ringing in his ears.
    He stares up at the paint swirls on his ceiling and thinks about God, wonders what He might make of all of this. A wave of clarity washes over him, and he has a thought, an epiphany really. Suddenly he sees an answer, not a solution, but a truth floating above him, and he knows he needs to share it with Denise. But even as he starts to speak, the ringing in his ears becomes louder, and the thought dissolves before he can articulate it. He closes his eyes, trying to recapture it, but the darkness is soft and soothing and doesn’t lend itself to introspection. He hears a sound, as if from far away, a low rumbling that he only identifies as his own snoring in the instant before sleep consumes him.

CHAPTER 35
    D enise lies on her back, listening to Silver snore. She feels guilty, primarily about not feeling guilty, and wonders if that’s the same thing. She isn’t quite sure when it was she knew that this was going to happen—maybe when he walked into the dress store, maybe when he showed up to dinner at his parents’ looking freshly scrubbed and strangely childlike; she suspects it might even have been as early as when he burst into her bedroom that crazy day last week, eyes blazing, looking to somehow reclaim her and Casey. She realizes now that there has been a part of her for all of these years that never stopped waiting for him to do just that.
    But whenever it was, she knows this crime was premeditated. Not by Silver, he never planned anything in advance. If he thought about his actions at all, it was always after he had committed them. That was emblematic of their differences in general. Denise considered and planned, while Silver looked back after the fact and wondered what had possessed him.
    And yet here she is, lying beside the man who has failed her in every possible way, who has used up the best years of her life, feeling tenderness and . . . loss? It makes no sense, but if there is one kernel of wisdom she does possess on matters of love it is that sense rarely enters into it. Silver was the first man she ever loved, and even now, after all the anger and hatred, she still feels things shifting inside of her when he walks into a room. And that’s not healthy, or fair, or right, but there it is.
    She rolls onto her side to watch him sleep. His face loses something in slumber, and he looks unfamiliar to her, like a word repeated endlessly until its syllables disintegrate into meaningless sounds. What have I done? she thinks, then chides herself for being dramatic. She moves closer to him and presses her index finger into his shoulder, watching his skin dimple around her finger. She looks around this small, depressing bedroom, with its cracking paint and generic, shit-brown carpeting; the plywood dresser with mismatched handles on its drawers; the random, scattered laundry piles; the lone cell-phone charger plugged into a wall outlet; and the smell of masculine desperation lingering like a base coat beneath the fresh smell of their recent sex. She experiences a shameful pang of vindication, as if these shabby surroundings are incontrovertible proof that the failure in their marriage had been his. But she also feels sorry for him, for the drab and empty life he’s been living all these years, and sorry for herself for being here.
    What are you doing here?
she asks herself.
Do you love him at all?
She does, she supposes, but it’s a