Do I Know You?(4)

Eliza opens her recording app and hits record. I try not to move or make unnecessary noise while she starts into her selected excerpt. Her voice changes pitch just slightly, her diction shifting, her delivery coming more firmly. I recognize one of the many voices she has in her repertoire. It’s always a little uncanny to hear. Not because it’s vastly different from her normal voice—Eliza wouldn’t force her vocal cords into unnatural shapes for so long it would risk destroying them. No, it’s precisely the similarity I find unsettling. It’s her, yet subtly transformed. Like there’s this other person hiding within my wife.

While she reads, I let my mind return to my own work. I have one of the most important cases of my career waiting for me when we return home. I’ve spent the past five months doing depositions and marshaling other discovery to consolidate our position. What’s left is prep for several of our key witnesses, the tech executives we’re defending from claims they violated the terms of the sale that would save their company from bankruptcy. I’m on the trial counsel team, which means it’s on me to craft the information we have into the story they can tell on the stand.

In truth, I’m sort of screwed. Getting everything in order will require some very, very long nights when we get back. But I refused to be the husband who couldn’t take a one-week vacation to celebrate his fifth anniversary.

I’m running through the terms of the purchase documents in my head, feeling reassured by my recall of each warranty and covenant, when I catch what exactly Eliza’s reading.

“I undressed my husband deliberately, the patience its own pleasure,” Eliza says in focused, eloquent syllables. “I never needed to wait with him. Which made me want to, until I could no longer.”

I blush.

Eliza continues on crisply. “We were together now, not ourselves except who we were with each other. I was no longer the vacation planner from Ontario, he no longer the consultant from Connecticut. We were bodies in motion.”

It is now nearly impossible not to shift in my seat. Even the dappled ocean out my window starts to seem more insistent than iridescent, the reflected sun like a splinter in one side of my vision. Possibly the scene will end here, I tell myself. Leaving the rest to the imagination, with literary finesse.

It does not. “I felt myself grow wet with expectation,” Eliza pronounces.

I have to clench my jaw while my wife’s voice goes breathy, describing the character’s mounting pleasure while her own chest heaves with—with echoes of sounds I haven’t heard in I don’t want to think about how long. Out of the corner of my eye, I notice the glance she shoots me. She wants something, I realize. I just don’t know what.

Or maybe I do, and I just don’t know how to give it.

“Fingers under his waistband, I took his firm cock in my hand,” Eliza practically whimpers.

Suddenly, in my head I hear one thought like a twig snapping in a silent forest. If she were to narrate our real-life sex scenes, her description would sound nothing like this.

“Could you not?” I cut in, hearing something stung in my voice, then I control my tone. “I mean, could that wait?”

Eliza stops sharp and faces me. “You ruined my take.” There’s no frustration in her simple sentence—only other things I don’t want to dwell on, like betrayal. She’s not wrong to recognize how far my comment was from long nights on her green couch.

“Sorry,” I say honestly. “But maybe you could do that . . . literally any other time? We agreed—no work on this trip.”

“We haven’t reached the hotel yet,” she points out.

I never knew the sun could feel so cold, so unlike light. When we curve from the mountains onto the next flat stretch of seaside highway, it’s like the heat is drained from the car. Because now, from its submergence in Eliza’s statement of fact, I hear exactly what I expected. Disappointment.

Of course she’s disappointed, hisses the insistent voice in my head. I’m disappointed in myself, too. I wish I could be the type of guy to pull this car over to the side of the empty chaparral road, who could inscribe Eliza’s exhaled words onto her stunning body. I don’t know where or how I’ve misplaced the part of myself that once would have. I don’t know if it’s work burnout or existential pressure or what. I just know Eliza wants it back.

God, so do I.

“Graham . . .” Eliza begins, her voice heavy.

I can’t. I can’t hear this right now. I want to pretend for just a little longer that I’m not sinking into a hole I can never climb out of. “Remember our first vacation?” I venture with desperation I know I’m not hiding. “In Ojai? With the horses?”

“Of course I do,” Eliza says, then goes quiet.

I stare straight forward, focusing on the seemingly endless stretch of flat highway in front of me. It’s clear what she’s not saying. She’s not content just to dwell on what was. If I glanced over, I’m certain I couldn’t stand the sight of my shortfall on her perfect face.

When she speaks next, there’s no misreading her resignation. “I do need to send out this sample tonight. Do you really mind?”

I know I can’t say no, not when I’ve just flung what she was really hoping for off the perilous cliffs outside. I palm the steering wheel, my mind reaching for some sort of compromise. “Could you maybe not read . . . that scene?”