The sheets of her motel bed are scrunched up; rumpled. The light from outside the window creates sharp hollows, swells and dips; creates sheer cliff faces out of cotton. Ellie lifts a hand and flattens them, straightening the fabric as best she can.
Next to her, Alec is not asleep, just pretending. His eyes are closed as he lies on his back. He breathes in through his nose, as if he was dozing in truth, and exhales a gentle sigh from his mouth. He's good, she thinks. A stickler for details. She likes that he doesn't turn into her and wrap an arm around her waist. Doesn't bury his nose in her neck and tell her to try to get some rest.
He's good at boundaries – he makes them all the time.
-.-.-
Sometimes Ellie lies.
The easiest ones are those in the crisps aisle in Tesco's, or picking Fred up from daycare. Overseas on business, he's terribly senior in the company; he helps Tom with his maths homework over Skype. We just sort of drifted apart; it's just a shame how it happens like that these days. Can you believe I caught him cheating? In my own bed? It's just to placate them, she tells herself, and that's another lie.
The hardest ones aren't the ones she tells to her sons (we'll be fine. Everything will be fine). The hardest lies are the ones where she's not sure if they're truth or not: she didn't know; he was so normal; he loved the boys like a father, nothing more; this is just burning off stress, that's all it means.
Sometimes Ellie can feel the puckered edge of truth and fiction and is too afraid to pick at it.
-.-.-
Alec has a scar on his upper chest, horizontal and neat. A year ago, and she might have made a joke about him needing a machine to tell him how a heart works; now, knowing what she does, it would be far too cruel and she feels like she needs every chance to be a good person she can get.
Instead, she runs her fingers over the pale-pink flesh, the interruption to skin and hair. It's smooth, unnaturally so, and her fingertips slide across it. So much worry and concern, she thinks, over something so small. Something that is hidden under his clothes and will fade in time. The scar is fresh and new, and perfect, just a bit, in its innocence.
-.-.-
There's no single emotion for what she's going through.
There's horror and fury and futility; there's guilt and grief and sorrow. It's like there's a die in the pit of her stomach and every morning it rolls and rolls and rolls, then lands, deciding how she'll feel that day.
Time doesn't necessarily make it better, either. The feelings don't seem to fade, they just get shaded with tones of each other. Like her emotions are dabs of paint on a palette, to be mixed together with a clumsy brush. Ellie kisses her sons' foreheads and wishes them goodnight with horror/guilt churning in her breast. She spends fourteen minutes sitting in her car, wallowing in sorrow/fury. Kissing Alec is grief and futility and he knows it, he tastes of it, too.
-.-.-
She draws a line down his chest, her nail scraping against his skin, lightly. Alec snuffles and she's not sure if it is an act, or just an involuntary noise. His eyes are open halfway, heavy with the sleep he's yet to have, and she leans up to kiss the corner of his mouth. His hand gently comes to rest on her shoulder, his thumb rubbing circles – encouragement, or a soothing motion; he'll let her decide.
Ellie chooses encouragement, and her hand drifts lower, underneath the sea of sheets. He's half hard, and she wonders what he was thinking about with his eyes closed. She hopes it was of her, but she has no way of knowing. He sighs when her hand wraps around him, and rolls on to his side so he can kiss her, can stroke and tease. Alec doesn't know her body well enough to do this without a line appearing between his brows, without his eyes searching hers for reactions. It's sweet, in a way, particularly the ghost of a smile that appears when he gets it right. More than that, it's different, and she craves the unfamiliarity of it all.
There are muttered words, muttered questions and agreements and directions, and then his hips are pressing into hers, and she is holding on to his shoulder, to his lower back, as he thrusts into her. They are both so quiet, so careful; this arrangement is fragile, and she fears that one loud noise might shatter everything. Ellie muffles her moans in his chest, letting her clutching hands, her thighs tightening around him, guide his movements.
He always errs on the safe side, making sure she comes before him: his fingers slip to where they meet and, though clumsy, push her over. It's brief and bright, a flash of pleasure, and then Alec is coming, too, his fist clenching in the bed sheet near her head. He swears, he says fuck between gritted teeth, and she holds him close for being different in that, too.
-.-.-
Ellie doesn't like dealing with people any more. She can, still does, has to – because she can't lock herself up in a room. It's almost penance, in a way, the grating sensation as she smiles and waves and makes small talk. How she gets to know the locals all over again and hears their stories, the fictions they create that cover up God only knows what.
When she steps through the door of Alec's motel room, that Ellie dissolves. He strips her of it; unbuttoning her shirt and helping her peel it off. Unzips her trousers and lets her use his arm to steady herself as she takes off her shoes. She calls him "Hardy", and he doesn't ask her how she is, doesn't even know how to do idle conversation.
He's abrasive, and she's so raw. Somehow, illogically, that makes them fit perfectly.