"This was the last time," I said as I came back from the bathroom and slipped under the covers again, and tried my best to sound like I meant it. The fact that this was the third 'last time' in the past month probably wasn't helping my case. Neither was letting him tuck me under his arm. "I'm serious, we've got to cut this shit out."

"Okay," he said, a touch deadpan, before his fingers brushed against the inside of my thigh. Despite myself, I shivered like the heroine of some pulp romance, my body betraying my rational brain. "Maybe one more for the road, though?"

You could say we were doing a real bang-up job being separated, all right.

I rolled away, propped myself up on one elbow as I studied the contours of his face, as inscrutable as ever to me lately. Sometimes, on reread, that Tulsa World profile on him convinced me that his interviewer had managed to dig deeper into his psyche than I had in years of sharing his bed. "We really need to talk," I insisted, fumbling around the covers for where he'd dropped my panties and coming up short; I couldn't let him spend the night, Jesus Christ, I had to draw the line somewhere. "That's why I said you should come over here—"

And it wasn't to say anything with his hands.

"I quit my job," he said into my hair, his exhale sending a shock down my spine, despite the words being the opposite of what I wanted to hear. "On the oil rig."

Well, if that wasn't throwing me into a tailspin, and I thought he'd finally started running out of ways to surprise me. "You were makin' good money—"

It wasn't easy to find work when you were a ex-con who'd dropped out of high school to deal, and whose only legitimate experience was the week you'd spent at the Tastee Freez when you were sixteen— as Darry had put it in his delicate way, once you added the face tattoo into the mix, he might as well have been designed in a lab to be completely unemployable. The rig job was dangerous and dirty, sure, carried the ever-present risk of dying in a fiery explosion, but I'd always figured that was more of a perk to him than anything.

"Good money for what?" He was kissing my shoulder now, across the ridge of bone at the top, down to the soft skin of my upper arm. "I ain't hardly see the same damn kids I'm supposed to be doin' all this for, after I ain't hardly seen them in five years— hell, Mike's already in junior high, he's grown up so fast," he added with a dangerous wistfulness. "I only got so much time left with them."

The mention of Mike's name made a headache start to pulse in both of my temples at once— he'd been completely unmanageable ever since Curly got released, and I wasn't looking forward to the fracas awaiting me once his daddy started taking advantage of all that freed-up quality time. "So where are you gonna be workin' now?" I asked, trying to sound as bright and positive as a children's TV presenter. It was certainly more pleasant than his parole officer would be.

"My buddy Pedro— you remember Pedro, he has that kid Mike's age with the pill-popper chick, I'm his godfather?" Unfortunately for Pedro, what was sticking out in my mind about him was his patchy neck tattoo in the shape of a cross, which looked like the product of one of Curly's less steady-handed cousins. I couldn't remember the kid— or his baptism, which I must've been to, if Curly was godfather— at all. "He thinks we could fix up one of those dives we had in the old neighborhood, turn it into a legitimate place."

Trying to get Curly to pin down specifics about anything was like trying to give an eel a root canal. "And where do you plan on findin' all that fixin'-up money?"

"Oh, don't worry about it, we'll work something out."

They said prison changed people, broke them like brittle iron when they couldn't bend, but Curly— whether because Club Fed was a five-star jail for white collar criminals, or because he'd just been through too much already— had returned same as he ever was, albeit a little more short-fused, a little less cocksure. That was the whole trouble. What I'd found charming, exhilarating, at nineteen, just reeked of immaturity and irresponsibility at thirty. More than I'd ever resented Dani being dropped off on my doorstep, or her existence in the first place, I resented that I couldn't so much as trust him to take the kids to the fucking Dairy Queen these days without screwing it up. "Do you plan on sellin' coke out the back alley behind that joint, to keep it solvent?" I asked more sharply than I'd intended, but I didn't really feel like softening my tone, either. God knew he'd earned a little venom from me, after everything. "Is that the subtext I'm missin' here?"

He inhaled jaggedly through his nostrils, his jaw tightening; I was pissing him off, when he'd expected nothing but easy tail tonight. Like I gave two shits. "Let's don't fight."

That was always his style, too, the passive-aggressiveness, trying to sweep everything under the carpet before anyone noticed the mess. The same way he'd swept his little flower child— man, it was just too easy. "I guess I'm wonderin' with what money you plan on feedin' our two kids. Or if that money's headed straight up your nose, if you'll excuse me for bein' blunt."

"I told you, I'm sober." He said it too quickly and forcefully— it reeked of insincerity. He could quit coming around the kids high— I'd insisted— but he'd never convince me he'd gotten clean even without the telltale blown pupils and traces of dust ringing his nostrils. Absence of evidence wasn't evidence of absence. "Stone-cold sober… listen," he said in a voice that sounded like he was dripping warm honey on my stomach, seductive and low, "I promise, you won't have to worry about money no more, your job, none of it. I'm gonna look after this family from now on."

"Curly, I am not quittin' my damn job so you can move in here and take care of me." He could've sold Raid to a roach, and he'd sold me on plenty more than I was willing to admit, but he was never getting his way with that again, even if he came up with a business plan that inspired more confidence than 'trust me'. When I'd first left, it'd taken me less than twenty-four hours to realize I'd have no choice except to go back, unless I wanted to pawn my gaudy-as-shit wedding ring to buy Mike school clothes. "I wanted you to come over so we could talk about custody."

"What about it?"

I wasn't so much in the mood to deal with his feigned ignorance right then. "I'd never try to keep you from them," I said, and I meant every word, had since the beginning of all this; I made Mike visit his daddy's place whether he pulled faces or not. He wasn't old enough to make those decisions yet, he'd thank me once he was older. "But the state's probably gonna say they'll go to you every other weekend, and I think that's for the best, at least for now… until you're more settled." I tried to echo my words from when I'd spoken to Soda earlier. "God knows they need some consistency."

Darry kept pushing me to go for full custody, said it wouldn't even be much of a fight, against a father in Oklahoma and against an ex-con to boot, but even if I had the leg to stand on, I wouldn't have had the stomach. He hadn't been trying to hurt Mike; he just didn't know better, how could he have, growing up with a mother who'd had her kindergartener potty-training him and mixing Angela's bottles. I'd never let anybody hurt my fucking kids.

"You're not really goin' through with it, c'mon." He looked at me expectantly, like he was waiting for me to deliver the punchline. "The divorce. C'mon." When I said nothing, he hiccupped an incredulous laugh. "We're literally in bed together right now—"

"Us screwing doesn't mean we're still married."

If it was a losing battle even to my own ears, it sure was to his. I had no real excuse for my behavior, other than that it'd been, well, a long past few years with nothing but my right hand and distant memories for company— considering all of his extracurricular activities, I probably could've justified playing the field myself while he was inside, but all the spite in the world couldn't change the fact that he was the only man I'd ever liked or felt safe sleeping with. Everything he'd done hadn't broken that fundamental trust. It was too damn bad he'd broken so much else.

"Jasmine," he drawled, fluffing his pillow with hard whacks before he lay back down, "when your mouth says one thing and you do another, you've always made it a little tricky for me to keep up." He had me there, going back to when we were fifteen years old, but I'd bite my own tongue off before I copped to it. "Look, I get Darry's been up your ass, I guess Soda now too, but you know me. I know you." He tried to cup the side of my face with his hand; I jerked away. Then I yanked the blanket back over my tits, just to make sure he was paying attention to the issue at hand here. "If you really wanted to get divorced, you would've done it when I was inside, not five years later. You wouldn't be lettin' me in your bed."

My favorite part of the divorce process had to be both my husband and brothers assuming I had no free will. I was so struck dumb by annoyance, he'd started talking again. "Tell me that you don't love me anymore, and I'll go get the papers from the courthouse myself."

His smug certainty might've been a thin façade over a crumbling building, but it was still intolerable to hear. "I don't know what kind of delusions were keepin' you warm at night in jail, Carl Jung, but me having bigger priorities when you were in there than filin' for divorce don't mean time healed all our wounds." The freshly-slapped look on his face made me think those delusions had been downright precious to him, but I was nowhere near feeling sorry enough for him to take it back. "Marriage, it's only just about love in Disney movies— it's a legal arrangement, too, you realize that? I need to trust you with my best interests to stay married, and I don't trust you with cash, I don't trust you to stay clean, I don't trust you to make a single good decision left to your own devices, I don't even trust you not to screw around with other women—"

Part of me hated hearing myself talk, as I really got going— the way I sounded like a bitch, a nag, a cross between my ever-so-saintly sister-in-law and, even worse, my own mother. I didn't want to think about how Mom might've been less than thrilled to be stuck dealing with the tornado-wreckage Dad had always left in his wake, if I'd have to soften my memories of her like I was airbrushing out the edges— but the older I got, the more I started to understand where she'd been coming from all along.

"Jasmine, I swear on all that's fuckin' holy, there will never be another woman. There was barely even that woman. I can count the amount of times we ever spoke on one hand." He reached over to clutch my fingers, his grip hot and his eyes feverish. I let him, even though it did nothing to change my mind. He'd said as much back in '77, for years in jail; the same way a word started to sound like nonsense if you repeated it enough, so did his endless litany of apologies. "I'd let you chain me up in this damn house, if it'd make you happy. I'd never leave your sight."

How romantic, just like having another toddler to look after. He didn't get that my rage had long since had time to cool, the same way magma hardened into volcanic rock, and that all I had left for him was indifference— except when it came to one question he'd always refused to answer. "Hell, I could handcuff us together, but that's just treatin' the symptom, not the root. Why'd you do it?"

"It's not your fault," he said automatically, like one of Mike's G.I. Joes when you pressed the button. That was another classic. "There ain't no hidden meaning, I just wasn't thinking about nothing, none of the consequences—"

I was tired, and not just the dreamy kind of tired that felt like you'd taken a muscle relaxer, after good sex. The kind that went straight down to the bone. "You ain't so dumb as that."

"And I don't even know why it matters, at this point— you really think I even remember what was goin' through my head, close to a decade ago? I can't remember what I even had for breakfast Tuesday, or whether or not we got health insurance. She's nothing to me." I had to give him some credit for attacking at this angle, it took a ballsiness I could respect. Kicking a mendicant at my feet, no matter how much he might've deserved it, felt too much like bullying when he didn't fight back. "If you want to keep your job, okay, keep it. Whatever you want, it's yours. I'm yours."

"No, but the problem is, you always liked me helpless, Curly— dependent on you." I didn't even know how long I'd been holding the words inside until they came out of my mouth, and maybe that rage wasn't gone so much as waiting to be melted down again. If I didn't go through with this, our marriage would just hang like a noose around both of our necks forever, one that would never break or kill. "And that's what I was for years, under your roof, wasn't I? I could hold court with your outfit in public, sure, but at home, I was always your poor crazy wife, always flying off the handle or having yet another episode you'd have to talk me down from. Half-crocked before noon, most days. And I don't need you like that no more, I don't need you to look after me, and I know that's just boiling your piss."

I'd been calling him a bum and a bad excuse for a provider all night, but it'd taken me this long to really offend him. "Okay, you want me to be honest, darlin', lay all my cards out on the table?" he asked with a quiet menace. "I messed around on you because I was drunk and high, like I was every day of my life back then, and because I was sick to death of your shit, and because we had absolutely no business bein' married or makin' no damn kids at nineteen— is that what you wanted to hear, Jasmine? The truth? I love you more than anything, I'd still take a bullet for you, but you wear me the fuck out. So don't you dare tell me I liked you better crazy. You're a lot smarter than me, and I've never argued that, but you couldn't have read that more wrong if you tried."

He got up and started rummaging around for his own underwear, with more success than I'd found. I made myself look dead-on, like that'd desensitize me from the sight of him, but it didn't work. "The worst thing I've ever done was to you," he said lowly. "I ain't got no defense for it. But you still don't want to be alone half as much as you claim, you never did."

He was pulling on the rest of his clothes now, making to leave, but I wasn't about to let him get the last word in. "You can feel alone even with someone around, Curly, and that's worse." I made sure my voice was harsh enough to lacerate. "You want me to tear those papers up, you're gonna have to do me better than that."

Even tucked under my matching sheet and duvet set, a craving for danger still itched deep beneath my skin, something nobody could ever lobotomize out of me— if I'd been looking for a stable and predictable marriage, I would've said yes when Bryon Douglas tried to put a ring on my finger. Against all of my hard-earned better judgement, I wanted him to prove me wrong.