Total pages in book: 80
Estimated words: 75547 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 378(@200wpm)___ 302(@250wpm)___ 252(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 75547 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 378(@200wpm)___ 302(@250wpm)___ 252(@300wpm)
I repeat the numbers in my head. They fit into my finger like a habit. I wonder if he changed it? Never have I touched his phone. This all feels so wrong but my every instinct pushes me to keep going.
My thumb trembles. I steady it. The phone wakes again. I key in the digits.
It opens. The rush in my veins is victory and nausea together.
I don’t go to Messages first, even though that’s the banner that flashed. My hand moves toward the Photos app like gravity is stronger there. The screen brightens. I scroll. The first row is a sea of sunset shots, Rucker’s neon sign, an artfully plated plate of grilled mahi he sent to a client who told him to go live a little. I scroll further.
There she is.
Not her face at first. A mirror selfie taken in a hotel bathroom—the kind with the stone counter and the folded white towels and a complimentary little orchid that’s trying too hard. Her body is the focus. Black lace. The kind of lingerie that’s more design than fabric. It hugs skin like it has a plan.
I don’t need to see her face to know she’s confident. The angles tell me—deliberate, practiced. A second later, there’s the face—another photo, mouth open on a laugh like the person behind the camera said something funny and she’s used to men saying things that make her smile like that.
My breath punches in as if I’ve run a flight of stairs. The next photo is his hand on her thigh. I recognize the watch. The one I bought him for his birthday. It looks expensive against her skin. It is.
The scroll turns jagged. My thumb won’t listen. It keeps going, a compulsion I can’t tame. There’s a picture of the sound side of Indian Beach, a boat wake fanning white with a marker in the water I recognize from this area. There’s a picture of a menu at a steakhouse we’ve never been to together. There’s a picture of a hotel key card on a bedside table with a room number I memorize even though it will mean nothing by morning. There’s a picture of him, lying back on a bed I don’t recognize, shirt open, smile easy in a way I haven’t earned in weeks, maybe months. He took it himself. The angle makes his jaw look stronger. I hate that it makes him look happy.
I exit Photos like it’s burning me and click open Messages. The bubbles fall into place and stack themselves into a narrative I’ll never stop hearing once I’ve read it. The contact at the top is just B with a little black heart. The thread goes back farther than I want to scroll. I pick up in the last three days, like I can contain it to a window small enough to survive.
Q: When are you coming back?
Brian: Soon. Play nice.
Q: You like me better when I don’t.
Brian: True.
Q: (photo of the front of her very sheer panties and what looks like jewels on the skin of her vagina)
Brian: Christ.
Q: You promised me Tuesday. Don’t make me wait until Friday like last time.
Brian: I said I’d try. She’s around and I have obligations to her.
Q: She always is.
Brian: You jealous?
Q: I don’t share well.
Brian: I know. ;)
The winky face blew me away because he’s never sent me any kind of flirty text. The next thing is a video I don’t play, because I’m not made of stone and I’m also not made of anything that can survive that. The one after is a text:
Q: You left your toothbrush beside mine. I’ll keep it in that spot on the vanity for you, lover.
Beside mine. She will keep it on the vanity. Not a hotel, then. Not a random. Not a one-off. Something with roots belonging to her. Something that has a place to hold his spare things. The realization is physical. It grabs at my sanity and has me struggling to breathe.
I swipe up to older messages because I want to inflict damage, apparently. I can’t stop. Two weeks ago, a private joke about a waiter. Three weeks ago, a photo of a bracelet—a thin gold thing with a tiny charm—and Brian’s comment: Looks good on you. A month ago, “Happy for you” when she got some job thing I didn’t know he cared about. If I scroll back far enough, will it hit where he and I overlap? I don’t try. My stomach has limits.
The water in the shower shuts off.
The silence slams like a door. The fan whirs on, then off. The subtle shift of the air in the house as the bathroom door opens just a crack and steam slips under. My heart fumbles and drops, then scrambles after the beat like it got startled except it’s shattered so all the pieces are everywhere inside me and I can’t get them back together.