After Cancer I Turn into A Badass novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Red Dress

Veda buys a red dress, drinks at a bar and knocks on her cold husband's door. He opens it.

I did not ask Glenn about the money that night.

I thought about it in the car, and in the shower, and in front of the mirror with my hair wet.

Whatever Mom thought he was paying for, I had a better question.

What had I paid for?

Three years of a spare bedroom and a husband who said good night like a hotel clerk.

I had eaten every dinner across from him at opposite ends of a long table.

On Saturday afternoon I drove to a boutique in the Oakwood Village that I had walked past for six years.

The saleswoman asked what I was looking for.

"Something a woman would wear if she had six months," I said.

She didn't blink. She brought me a red dress.

It was silk, with a neckline that went down to nowhere and a hem that stopped well above my knee.

I stood in front of the three-way mirror and did not recognize the woman in it.

She had my gray eyes. She was standing up straight.

"I'll wear it out," I said.

Glenn got home at seven.

I heard his truck, then the front door, then the careful sound of his toolbag in the hall.

I came down the stairs.

He looked up, and for a moment he held the strap of the bag in midair.

"Veda."

"Hi."

"You're wearing red."

"I'm told it suits me."

He didn't answer that. His eyes moved over me once, slow and plain, and then he looked at the wall.

"I'm going to wash up," he said. "I'll start dinner."

"I'm not hungry for dinner."

"You should eat."

"Glenn."

He stopped with one foot on the stair.

"What is it?"

I walked past him up to the second floor, down the hall, to the far door that had never once been opened for me.

I knocked.

He had followed me up. I could feel him standing behind me, close, not touching.

"Veda," he said. "That's my room."

"I know whose room it is."

"You're unwell. You should rest."

I turned around.

He was nearly a foot taller than me.

His shirtsleeves were rolled to the elbow, and the scar across his right hand was white against his skin.

"I'm dying," I said. "I'm not broken. I've been your wife for three years and you have never once put your hands on me."

"I thought you didn't want me to."

"Why would you think that?"

He took a breath, held it, and let it go.

"Because I thought that was how you liked it."

"I'm telling you how I like it now."

He did not move. A muscle jumped in his jaw.

"Say it plainly," he said, very low.

I put my palm flat on his chest. His heart was pounding under my hand.

"I want you to take me into that room, and I want you to stop being polite."

The door was open before I finished the sentence.

He had me against the wall inside before the light came on.

His mouth came down on mine, hard and hungry.

It felt like something he had held in his chest for years had finally gone through.

I made a noise I had never made. It didn't sound like me.

His hands were on my waist, then my hips, then bunching the red silk up my thighs.

"Is this what you wanted?" he said against my mouth.

"More."

"Tell me."

"All of it. Everything. Glenn."

He lifted me so my legs went around him and carried me to the bed.

He set me down like something that might break, and then he proved I wouldn't.

He pulled the dress over my head and dropped it on the floor.

The lamp came on. He looked.

I had never been looked at that way in my life.

"Beautiful," he said, and his voice shook. "God, Veda."

I reached for his belt and he caught my wrist and pinned it above my head with one hand.

"Slowly," he said. "I've waited three years."

His mouth moved down my throat and over my collarbone to my breast.

He took my nipple between his teeth until my back arched off the mattress.

"Glenn, please."

"Not yet."

He kept going down, kissing my stomach and the inside of my thigh.

He hooked my panties with one finger and drew them off my legs.

When his tongue found my clit I cried out loud enough to embarrass myself.

He didn't stop.

He held my hips down and licked me slow, then fast, with a patience that was almost cruel.

I was shaking and begging and tangled in his hair.

"Come for me," he said.

I did, hard, and my whole body clenched around nothing, and he kept his mouth on me through every second of it.

Then he stood and stripped.

He was lean and scarred and very hard.

I stared at his cock.

"You keep looking at me like that," he said, "and I won't last."

"I want you inside me."

He settled between my legs.

I felt the head of him against me, thick and hot and slick from my own body.

He pushed in slowly, an inch at a time, and I gasped at the stretch of it.

"Look at me," he said.

I did.

He filled me completely and held there, jaw tight, shaking with the effort of being still.

Then he moved.

Long, deep strokes at first, his hand under my knee, opening me wider.

Then faster, harder, the headboard knocking the wall, my nails dragging down his back.

"Fuck," I said, and I had never said it before in my life. "Fuck, Glenn, don't stop."

"I'm not going to stop."

He rolled us so I was on top.

His hands guided my hips, and I rode him until the room went white at the edges.

He came with my name in his throat, buried deep, his fingers bruising my thighs.

I came right after, with his cock still pulsing inside me, crying out into his shoulder.

Afterward we lay tangled in the sheets, breathing.

He pushed the hair off my forehead and held it there.

"I'm sorry," he said, hoarse.

"For what?"

"That it took a diagnosis to get you to my door."

I fell asleep with my cheek on his chest.

When I woke, the lamp was off and the window was gray.

He was already dressed, sitting on the edge of the bed with his phone in his hand.

"I called Dayton Heights Medical," he said. "The head of oncology owes me a favor. You have an appointment Wednesday at eight."

"I told you I'd handle it."

"I know."

"Glenn."

"I'm not asking you to do it," he said, steady and quiet. "I'm telling you I'll be sitting next to you when you do."

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