Trapped In The Wrong Arms

Selene POV

The smile lasted until the car door closed.

That was usually how long it took. And then it was just me and Marcus and the partition between us and the driver and the city sliding past the window in amber and grey.

Fourteen seconds from the entrance of the venue to the car. I had counted once, early in the marriage. Counting things was how I'd stayed sane. The steps from the bedroom to the kitchen. The seconds between when Marcus started speaking and when he expected a response. The number of times per evening I was required to smile and mean it convincingly.

Tonight the number had been high.

Marcus was on his phone. He was always on his phone after events, debriefing he called it, which meant calling the people who mattered to him and saying the things he'd been saving up all evening. I had learned to be grateful for the phone. It meant the debrief that involved me could wait until we were home, and I could have the car window and the city and my own silence.

London moved past the glass. Wet pavements. A group of people outside a pub laughing at something. Black cabs queuing at a junction. And then, cutting between lanes with easy recklessness was a motorcycle courier, red tail light blinking in the rain, a Mercer Logistics jacket catching the amber glow of the streetlights before he was gone.

I watched the space where he had been long after he disappeared.

Don't, I told myself. Not tonight.

But I was already there and I knew it, and the city kept moving and Marcus kept talking and I pressed my fingers against the cold glass and said nothing at all.

We arrived home at half past eleven. The house was what it always was; beautiful, immaculate, temperature-controlled to Marcus's precise preference. Mrs Marshall had left a lamp on in the hallway. Everything in its place. Everything exactly as Marcus required.

"You did well tonight," Marcus said, setting his keys on the console table.

I turned. "Thank you."

"The speech was good. Could have been shorter." He loosened his tie without looking at me. "And you spent too long with the Alderton woman. She's not worth the investment."

"She chairs three charitable foundations....."

"That don't align with our interests." He interrupted with a measured look, the kind that reminded me who was keeping score. "We've talked about this, Selene."

'We've talked about this, Selene.' I filed it away beside all the other things we had talked about. Five years of these conversations and I still caught myself thinking I could navigate them differently. I never could.

"You're right," I said. "I'll remember."

He looked at me then, like he was taking inventory, and whatever he found must have satisfied the count because he nodded once, said he had calls to finish, and went to his study.

I went upstairs.

The bedroom was mine for approximately forty minutes every night before Marcus came to bed, and I had learned to treat those forty minutes the way other people treated holidays. Something to move through slowly.

I sat at the dressing table and took the diamonds off one piece at a time and set them in their velvet case and looked at the woman in the mirror doing it. Dark hair still pinned. Mascara still perfect. A face that had smiled on command all evening and showed absolutely nothing it wasn't supposed to show.

She looked fine.

I pressed my fingers against my sternum, just for a moment. Just to feel something real beneath the performance. My own heartbeat. Proof of something.

Then I undressed, showered until the water ran cold, and got into bed.

The ceiling. The dark. The soft mechanical hum of the temperature control.

The motorcycle courier. That was all it had taken, a stranger in a familiar jacket cutting through rain-soaked London, and now I was five years away from this bedroom and there was nothing I could do about it except close my eyes and let it come.

It had been a Tuesday. His flat in Hackney, third floor, windows that let in too much noise and not enough light. We'd argued about something small, something I couldn't even remember now because it hadn't mattered then and it certainly didn't matter now. And then he'd looked at me across the kitchen with that look, the one that wasn't quite patience and wasn't quite anger. He knew I was only arguing because I had missed him.

"Come here," he said. Not a request.

He put his hand in my hair and pulled my head back and looked at me like I was the only thing in the room worth looking at. He walked me back against the counter slowly, deliberately, the kind of slow that had nothing to do with gentleness and everything to do with control. His hands on my waist. His mouth at my throat doing something that made every coherent thought I had dissolve completely.

"I've got you," he said. Low. Certain.

That was always the ruinous thing. Not the want I could have survived the want but the certainty. The way he held me like he had already accounted for every part of me and decided he wanted all of it.

Three weeks later I stood in my childhood bedroom and called him and told him I didn't love him anymore.

It was the largest lie I had ever told.

I opened my eyes.

The bedroom ceiling. The temperature-controlled dark. Marcus's study light visible under the door, which meant I still had time.

I moved my hand lower and closed my eyes and gave myself the only thing in this marriage that still belonged entirely to me.

The memory of a man who used to mean every word.

Afterward I lay completely still and listened to the house breathe around me.

Outside, distant and low, a motorcycle engine turned over in the night and faded as it moved away through the wet London streets. I listened until I couldn't hear it anymore.

I need to get out of here.

Not a new thought. Not even close to a new thought. But something about tonight made it sit differently in my chest, heavier and more certain, less like a wish I kept returning to and more like a decision I was finally tired of postponing.

I reached under my pillow. Found the notebook. Found the pen by touch in the dark.

Three words. I wrote them without hesitating.

I need out.

I tucked it away, turned onto my side, and arranged my face into something peaceful. By the time Marcus's footsteps sounded on the stairs I was perfectly still.