Page 110 of What You left in Me

“So that’s where you ran,” I say to the room, and I can’t help the smile. “You think distance will save you.Cute.”

I put the phone face down and open the laptop purely to keep from driving there and putting her over my shoulder in a place that sells croissants. I answer emails I don’t remember reading. I sign off on a restructuring memo that will make three vice presidents cry and one of them retire. I schedule a call for next week I probably won’t take. Every thirty minutes, I flip the phone over and watch the dot move two storefronts down, then back, then nowhere. The constellation of a restless mind. I imagine her sipping coffee and stepping into a bookstore,reading mindlessly as her mind wanders towards me. I know she waits for nights as desperately as I do.

Don’t flatter yourself, you smug fucker, I tell myself, and then immediately ignore my own advice.

At noon, Eleanor texts a photo of Dad in the garden, in a wool cardigan he didn’t choose, looking small and brave.He walked to the oak. 8 minutes. Your father is stubborn.She wants credit for the eight minutes. She always wants credit for the weather.

I type and delete three replies before I sendGood.It costs me nothing to be on my best behavior for the kill. It might buy me one more day where he smiles at me like he still sees his son and not a man who came home to burn the house.

Contracts. Vendor temper tantrums. A board member who thinks I need to “soften my edges” for the press. I picture softening his edges with a belt sander. I send a smiley face instead, because sometimes cruelty wears a grin.

Every half hour: the dot. I don’t need it to know where she is. I know by the tug under my ribs, that low, unignorable voltage I pretend is biology so I don’t have to call it what it is: obsession. I check anyway because I’m an obsessed bastard.

“You’re mine,” I say to the dot. “Fucking deal with it.”

By four, emails bore me enough to become dangerous. I stand, pace a line crease into the rug, sit, stand again. I consider sending Eric the go order on one of the nets I’ve set for Eleanor, then put the phone down because it will feel better if I spring every trap in person. It will feel like justice, and I’ll take feeling over law every time.

I open a spreadsheet that’s just a screen full of green numbers and stare at it like a man re-watching the same murder frame by frame. Waren’s name is nowhere on it and still I seehis greasy grin bleeding through the cells. My mother’s toe tag flashes in the column headers. I press my palms to my eyes until I see lightning. When I stop, my hands are steady. The rage is there. It’s always there. It just knows how to wait its turn.

Five. The dot is on the move. Main road. Left turn. The little blinking proof of her choosing home over whatever the fuck her pride told her to do. I breathe out, slow and pleased, like a man watching a plane he bet on come in over the runway.

“Good girl,” I say to the empty office, and hate the softness in my voice even as I keep using it. She’d blush and argue if she heard it but I know she’d melt anyway.

Eleanor sends another photo, this time of a table setting she’s curated for dinner. Tall candles, aggressive flowers, a place card withArianescrolled like a threat.Seven sharp,she texts.Family night. No excuses.I consider replying with a photo of the match I’m going to use to set her life on fire. I sendI’ll be thereinstead.

By six, I pack the laptop I won’t open again today. I check the tracker one last time before I leave the office and there she is, the dot, back on the grounds. The gates. The drive. The white rectangle of this house is a mouth that keeps swallowing things I love. I put the phone in my pocket and feel ten pounds lighter because she’s inside my perimeter again.

In the hall, the housemaid moves like a well-trained ghost. Most of the house help has learned not to meet my eyes when I’m in this mood. The few who haven’t learned will learn today. I pass the study and the door is ajar, the room empty, the light low and warm. I file it away without thinking. A hunter’s map of his own house.

I don’t go straight to her room because I want to savor the moment. I want to take her in a threshold, breathless, with theday still on her tongue. I want her to try and fail to say no. I want the lie of it, the ritual. I want to hear the first sound she makes when I put my hands on her after an entire day of pretending distance is a cure.

I take the back stairs and turn the corner and there she is: halfway down the corridor, keys in hand, hair pulled back from her face like she thought that would make her harder to read. She stops when she sees me, and the look that runs through her, guilt, relief, heat, anger, feeds every starving part of me at once.

“Hi,” she says, and it’s stupid and perfect.

“Hi,” I say, and my voice comes out lower than I intend. The day drops away like a curtain.

We stand there for a breath that’s too long to be innocent. Then, I close the distance and take her wrist because that’s what I do when I need the world to get small. Her pulse slams against my fingers like a trapped bird. She doesn’t pull away. Her mouth parts like she forgot what it was for.

“Study,” I tell her, because it’s the nearest room with a door and a desk that’s already survived a few bad ideas. Her eyes flare, scandal and want, and for a second she looks past me, down the hall, toward the wing where Eleanor keeps her floral daggers and Richard naps in a cardigan.

“Finn…” she starts, and I’m not interested in the version of my name that ends in sense. I tug, not gentle, and she comes. Always.

We move, boots on runner, her breath catching when I press the flat of my hand to the small of her back. The study door swings shut behind us with a soft, complicit snick. I don’t need to lock it because nobody comes to this side of the house anyway.

“I’m still mad at you,” she says, breathless, already lying, but leaning.

“Get madder if you want. But come closer,” I say, and she does, and the world narrows to the distance between her mouth and mine, and the day burns off us like fog.

I turn her around and shove her down, splayed out for me against the top of the desk.

Like this, my hand glides down between Ariane’s thighs, and fuck, she’s already drenched, her heat soaking my fingers. I smirk into the warm, sweet crook of her neck, the taste of her skin salty where sweat is already misting. “You fucking hate me, but your pussy’s screaming a different story.”

“Shut the hell up,” she snaps, voice ragged, breathless, like she’s fighting for air.

I press harder, fingers teasing, slipping inside her tight heat. She moans, and it’s a sound that rips through me, raw and pissed-off. She’s furious, at herself, at me, but her nails dig into my shoulders, yanking me closer, like she can’t get enough. I claim her mouth again, rougher, deeper, my other hand gripping the back of her neck, locking her to me.

I’m fucking merciless as I take off my pants and tear through her panties while trying to take them off. The soft sounds she’s making is driving me even more insane.