“Rarely,” Jackie says, her fingers still tracing patterns over Claire’s. “I find it too easy to get addicted to things.”
The swirls that Jackie is making on Claire’s palm seem to match the nonsensical patterns in the ceiling. With her eyes so relaxed, Claire keeps finding images in the plaster. A cresting ocean wave. A dinosaur, with a spiky back and an open mouth. An airplane with a crooked wing. They look like brushstrokes in thick white oil paint.
Claire keeps stroking Jackie’s hair with her free hand. It keeps her grounded—she’s a kite, riding the smoke higher and higherto join that airplane, and Jackie is the only thing keeping her from getting lost in the big blue sky. Claire lets the strands of Jackie’s hair slide through her fingers, and then she scratches her nails over Jackie’s scalp.
Jackie moves suddenly. Her back arches a little, and she makes a noise that Claire has never heard before. It’s high, and throaty, and it gets cut off by Jackie clearing her throat before Claire can examine it further.
Jackie’s chest is flushed under her robe. She drops Claire’s hand.
It sticks in Claire’s mind, that little one-second soundbite. She wants to recreate it. Make it longer and louder. Claire is full to the brim with something she doesn’t understand, suddenly, and the cloudiness of her mind isn’t helping at all.
The movement has made Jackie’s negligée shift up her thighs. The hair above her knees is unshaven and dark, like her arms; Claire wonders, as the skirt glides over her skin, what it might feel like to be that scrap of silk. Light and flowing, pressed so intimately to Jackie for as long as she chooses to wear it.
A silk negligée doesn’t have to go home to its husband after every visit.
That thought is finally enough to part the clouds in Claire’s mind. When she glances up at the clock on Jackie’s mantel, it reads3:47.
The anxiety that’s been so blissfully absent for the afternoon comes back in a great wave. It floods her, crashing against every surface, and Claire springs to her feet, dislodging Jackie from her lap.
“Shoot—it’s almost four! Oh, I should have been home hours ago. I have to make dinner.”
Jackie frowns up at her from the couch cushion. Her hair is ruffled, and she looks like she doesn’t quite understand what’s happened.
“I’m sorry, Jackie, but Pete will be so upset if he gets home with no supper,” Claire says, hopping on one foot towards the door as she tries to get her shoes back on—she doesn’t remember taking them off. Her fingers aren’t quite working properly.
“Okay,” Jackie says quietly.
Claire trips over the two steps leading up and out of the conversation pit. She catches herself, her face flooding with heat, and darts to the door.
She can’t look back at Jackie. If she looks back, if she sees the expression that accompanies thatokay, she might not have the willpower to leave, and she can still remember how Pete reacted the last time she didn’t have dinner on the table when he got home. There had been an Arctic chill in the house until he felt she understood not to do it again.
Cooking is twice the chore it usually is. She finds herself forgetting parts of the recipe that she knows by heart. Twice she burns the onions she’s sautéing because she’s staring out the window at Jackie’s front door, remembering the softness of her hair, and she has to start over.
Dinner still isn’t finished when Pete’s car pulls in.
“Smells like lasagna,” Pete calls from the foyer, as if they don’t have lasagna every second week without fail.
Claire doesn’t answer. She’s hurriedly washing the dishes, trying to get the kitchen as clean as she can while the lasagna bakes, and her attention has caught on a stubborn piece of food on the edge of her cutting board.
“How long until dinner?” Pete says, poking his head into the kitchen.
“Forty-five minutes.”
“Forty-five—” Pete throws his briefcase onto the kitchen table as he passes, and the loud noise makes Claire flinch. “Since when can you not make a lasagna by 5:30?”
“Would you prefer undercooked pasta?”
Pete stops in his tracks. The lasagna bubbles in the oven, marinara sauce sizzling over the edges of Claire’s spare casserole dish.
Claire has never snapped back. When she makes a mistake she apologizes, often incessantly, sometimes to the point of annoying her husband further. Something is different today. Today there’s a resentment in the pit of her belly that something—the drugs, probably, or fact that she had to abandon a perfectly lovely day with Jackie to come back home—is making manifest.
Today, she hears Jackie’s voice in her head.
You should be kinder to yourself.
Pete slams the kitchen door behind himself. “What’s gotten into you? I work to put food on the table, and you can’t do your job and cook it?”
You’re very different, Claire.
