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I’d kissed her and she’d kissed me and now it was gone. The moment.
Yet again she’d avoided a confrontation. We’d fought in the department store and it had been fun as hell, but it wasn’t the kind of fight we needed to have. That I knew we needed to have. It was just another fantasy. Like Rachel burning toast. Like me getting caught by my wife with another woman. The fantasy of a fucked-up marriage. The fantasy of us being messy and angry and fucked up, but together.
“I can’t believe you asked the security guard for two more minutes,” Rachel whispered next to me.
I gave her the same smile she’d given me. Small. Easy. Noncommittal. I think she saw it. I think she knew. Knew what she had done. Knew what I was letting her do.
Because I didn’t want this to end either. Us having fun. Us fooling around. Us being us.
“That was for you,” I leaned over to whisper. “You know I could have come just at the sight of you.”
Rachel elbowed me again. After a second she whispered back, “Then you should have asked for five.”
I put my arm around her and after a moment’s hesitation she put her head against my shoulder.
A little while later we paid the fine. Hefty, but reasonable, I suppose. We made our apologies. We listened to the security guard’s warning as he tacked up our photographs to the wall of shoplifters and flashers and child snatchers.
I should have wondered why Rachel would have risked such a potentially damaging public relations fiasco when the reason she was here in the first place, asking for a divorce after all this time, was to scrub off the last remaining stain on her record.
But I ignored that along with everything else.
Because Rachel was worth it.
Or at least whatever role she claimed she was playing was worth it. It was a painful truth, I supposed: that a glimpse of Rachel, a shadow, a part, a piece of Rachel was better than nothing.
But I ignored that, too.
At least, for as long as I could…
