When they’d finished, he reached out to flip on the bedside lamp. This time, she didn’t object, only nestled deeper into the crook of his arm. He looked down at the top of her head. The auburn color was nice, but it had always struck him funny, how the rules were so different for women that way; if you were a girl and you didn’t like the hair God gave you, you could pick any color you liked out of a box. But men, never. There was something vaguely suspicious about a guy who dyed his hair, even if it was just to cover the grays. Undignified. He yawned, feeling warm and sleepy, the first hints of a headache starting to creep around the corners of his eyes. The whiskey had been a mistake, but then again, if he hadn’t had the whiskey, he might not be here, in a postcoital moment as wild and unexpected as it was nice. It was nice. The past few months had been professionally productive but personally lonely. He’d been on a handful of first dates that had netted one night of mediocre sex, zero second meetings, and the uncomfortable feeling that this was probably his fault. He yawned again. Maybe he’d sleep here awhile before heading back. Beside him, Adrienne yawned, too.
“That’s your fault,” she said. “It’s contagious. I should go. I can’t sleep here.”
“I mean, you could.”
She smiled. “No. It’s a bad idea.”
“At least don’t move just yet,” he said, and squeezed her closer. “I like having you here. You’re very . . . warm.”
“Five minutes.”
He nodded. “Okay. Five minutes.” For a while, neither one of them spoke. Bird turned to rest his chin on the top of her head.
“So, what are you going to do now?” he said finally.
“Well, for the next five minutes, nothing,” she joked.
“No, I mean—”
“I know what you mean.” She sighed. “And I don’t know. People keep suggesting things. All these options. But I don’t like any of them.”
“Some folks I know thought you might get a book deal,” Bird said, and she laughed.
“One of the many options. They offered. Hard pass.”
“You don’t want to be famous?”
She scowled. “God, no.”
“Come on. Be honest.”
“I am. I guess it probably sounds weird to you. But Adrienne Richards, she’s the one who wanted to be famous. And I’m not her. I left that person behind.”
Bird closed his eyes. His breathing began to slow, and he thought it wouldn’t be so bad to just drift off. Drift off and wake up alone. The five minutes he’d asked for were ticking away, and while neither one of them had said so, there was a cycling-down feeling in the air. The end, not the start, of something. He should stay awake to see it through, but his eyelids were so heavy.
“You want honesty?” Adrienne said. “You want to hear something really fucked up?”
“Mmm,” Bird said.
She said, “I once told my husband I hoped he died.”
Bird’s eyes cracked open, and he rolled to one side to look at her. She was lying on her back, her gaze fixed on the ceiling.
“Jesus, seriously?”
“The thing is, I still don’t know if I really meant it. I don’t think I did. But then everything went to hell. And now he’s gone.”
“You feel like it’s your fault.”
“It’s definitely my fault,” she said, so matter-of-factly that all Bird could do was silently agree. Not that Ethan Richards’s death was all her fault—a thing like that never was. But you could also see how things might have been different, if she’d made different choices. If anyone had. There was blame enough to go around.
“Do you miss him?” Bird said, and now she did look at him.
“That’s a weird fucking question,” she said.
“It is,” he said. “I don’t know why I—”
“No,” she said. “I’m glad you asked, because I want to say this. I want to tell someone that, yeah, I miss my husband. I do. I miss him, and at the same time, I know we couldn’t have gone on together. Something was always going to happen—maybe not this, but something. We were like a homemade bomb. You know? Where you’ve got these two things, they’re nothing on their own, but then you put them together and you get a toxic sludge that kills everything it touches.”
“Uh,” said Bird, and she laughed, shaking her head.
“Yeah. I know. And that was our marriage. But we’d already been put together. That’s the thing. Even if we broke up, we couldn’t . . . un-combine.”