Go fucking figure, huh?
I felt suddenly, inexplicably weary. I put the plate I was holding on top of the already wrapped stack of matching plates and leaned against the counter, studying my husband. My ex-husband, I mentally amended.
The years had been kind to Nathan. He didn’t look much different than the kid I’d met at Berkeley as an undergrad. The dark hair was turning silver, the lines around his eyes and mouth were more defined, like water etches stone after a millennium; there were a few more pounds on his always lean frame, but he was otherwise exactly the same as when I met him thirty-five years previous. Still quick to smile and slow to anger. Still stubborn as a mule and gentle as a kitten. Still kind-hearted and thoughtful. Still sexy as hell in well-worn jeans and an old Yale T-shirt.
There is a moment when every newly divorced person looks at his or her former spouse and doesn’t see their partner, lover, friend of X number of years, but a stranger. I felt like I was having an out-of-body experience looking at Nathan standing in our kitchen. He was everything I had ever wanted. Still was. And yet … and yet, here we were, packing up our fucking stuff and going on our merry separate ways.
‘What do you see?’ he asked, that gentle tone of a teacher trying to coax the student to find the answer on her own.
I shrugged and turned away, fingering the single strand of pearls I wore, one last birthday present before it all went to hell. ‘I see a life together that’s fallen apart. Time to start anew, I guess.’
I sounded more carefree than I felt. Much as I’d wanted this – and I had been the one to file the divorce papers when it dawned on me that Nathan wouldn’t, no matter how much we fought or withdrew from each other – I really didn’t know what I was going to do now. The house had gone on the market once we started the paperwork for the divorce and we had gotten a more than generous offer just days after the realtor listed it. Our ‘separation’ involved Nathan moving into the guest room. It wasn’t that we couldn’t afford for one of us to move out, but it seemed silly when the house was more than big enough. Our paths rarely crossed except in the mornings for a few minutes before we both went to work. It made sense for us to live together as roommates until the house sold and we could each take our half and find something new. It was civilised this way. It was also bitterly depressing to realise that after thirty years together we could live in the same house for months without talking other than to pass on phone messages, without touching because we made such a wide berth around each other, without one of us caving in and climbing into bed with the other, one late night. Depressing as hell.
I slammed the poorly wrapped plate down on top of the stack and heard an audible crack. I gasped. The tears started coming even before I unwrapped the plate and saw it had been cleaved in two. I felt Nathan’s hand on my shoulder, that gentle, familiar squeeze to comfort me. But it didn’t comfort me. It made me angry. For the first time in at least six months he was touching me and it was because he felt sorry for me.
I shrugged him off. ‘Leave me alone!’
‘I was just trying to be kind, Rachel,’ he said. ‘It’s not as if you ever liked that old ugly china.’
I whirled on him then. ‘It was my mother’s!’
‘Well, it’s not as if you liked her much, either,’ he said, evenly. ‘And she was old and ugly, too.’
I knew he was joking. Sort of. Nathan was a lot of things, but he wasn’t cruel. He was trying to make me feel better. Trying to lighten the mood. He never could stand to see me cry. I knew all of that, but my first reaction wasn’t to laugh. Or even to stop crying. I sobbed – and slapped him hard. The diamond in my engagement ring glinted in the overhead light, as hard and cold as I felt.
‘Go to hell, Nathan Davis.’
He recoiled, as much from the shock of it as the pain, I think, and stared at me. The look of utter horror on his face was comical. I’d never so much as raised my voice or slammed a door, much less slapped him before. I was the quiet, angry type, more likely to hide in the bedroom nursing my wounds than to vent my emotions and risk hurting someone else’s feelings. It was, I thought, a good quality. But standing there with my hand stinging and my entire body practically vibrating with anger while the tears dried on my cheeks, I felt pretty good. Furious and violent, clearly, but good. Alive.
As quickly as the feeling came, it faded, shrivelling up inside me like it had been deprived of oxygen. I was ashamed of myself.
‘I’m sorry.’ I watched him rub the red mark on his cheek and felt small. And sad. ‘I don’t know where that came from.’
‘I do.’
He picked up the sugar bowl from the counter, the one that went with my mother’s china, examined it for a minute, then dropped it. I gasped in horror as it hit the tile and fractured into several smaller pieces, scattering shards across the kitchen floor.
I blinked at him, certain it had been an accident, but he proved me wrong by picking up a salad plate and doing the same thing. The sound of breaking porcelain seemed to echo even as he reached for a third piece. I was frozen in place, unable to move to stop him as another salad plate crashed to the floor.
I finally found my voice when he picked up the serving platter. ‘What the hell are you doing?’
‘Breaking your mother’s china,’ he answered, as if that made all the sense in the world.
I looked at the fragments of the seventy-five-year-old dishes littering our pristine kitchen floor – not even our kitchen floor any more, as the house was officially sold – and felt … nothing. I took a deep breath, waiting for the indignant anger to explode out of me again, and simply exhaled. There was no emotion there, no sense of loss. All I saw was a mess to clean up and a few less things to pack.
Nathan seemed almost as shocked when I started laughing as he had when I slapped him. It started small, just a twitch of my lips as I mentally replayed his comment about my mother and her china, and built from there. First a giggle and a shake of my head at my own audacity – laughing at something that wasn’t funny in the least – then an open-mouthed guffaw at the idea that I should feel bad for giggling. I looked at Nathan, at his gaping ‘have you lost your mind?’ expression, and completely lost it. I was doubled over with laughter, clutching at the kitchen counter to keep me upright.
‘You’re right,’ I managed to say between fits of giggles. ‘I hate this china. It’s ugly and tacky and has to be hand washed. Good god, hand washed! Who has time for ugly hand-washed china? I don’t!’
Nathan nodded sagely. ‘I know.’
‘Unbelievably fucking ugly.’ I was like a kid discovering the power of dirty words. ‘Right?’
‘Right.’
It was contagious, Nathan’s baritone chuckles joined my own girlish-sounding squeals and soon we were holding onto each other, laughing like fools. And maybe we were. Fools, that is. The two biggest fools in the world – and we had to hold onto each other because no one else would.
I kissed him then. It was an open-mouthed, awkward, laughing kiss, but it was the first kiss we’d shared in at least a year. His mouth felt both new and familiar. A couple of days’ growth of beard scraped against my cheek as I cupped the back of his head and held him to me, as if he might pull away otherwise. But he didn’t. He didn’t even hesitate before he was kissing me back. He fisted his hands in my hair, kept long even now because that’s the way he liked it and I had never thought to cut it, and held me as tightly as I held on to him.
All traces of laughter gone, I tentatively nipped his bottom lip. I heard – and felt – his moan. It had been so long since we’d even kissed, I didn’t know how to proceed. I couldn’t think straight, didn’t want to think at all. I wanted to feel. His act of destruction had released something inside me, something tight and coiled, and