by Zoe Kane
When she closed her eyes, she went to some entirely other place in her mind and his touch seemed almost to please her. When she closed her eyes, he could make her wet enough to enter her, and she would go soft and unyielding in his arms, and from time to time he could even make her come. He tried very hard not to think about what it meant that she could only feel pleasure when she was deep inside some interior world that left no room for him. He tried very hard not to think about what it would be like to marry a woman who patiently tolerated, but never sought, his touch. Because hadn’t he gotten what he wanted? Hadn’t he waited for seven damned years to break through the icy façade that kept Annie separate from the rest of the world, and wasn’t he here now, his body pressing hers down into the mattress, thrusting hungrily into her, feeling her soft breath against his skin? Hadn’t he won?
Or was the distance between them as vast as it had always been?
And so the years passed – one became two, then three, then four, and then suddenly one day every question Malcolm Burke had ever asked himself about Annie Walter was answered in one fell swoop, and the missing piece, the key to that locked inner door, fell into place.
He had finally, finally, after four years of engagement, convinced her to set an actual date and tell her family. Burke's relationship with his own mother was strained and distant, but still, Annie had met her half a dozen times. Yet her own family – to whom she was obviously close, and who lived mere minutes away – still knew him only as her research partner and had no idea they were going to be married. She had never been able to give him a satisfactory answer to this question, becoming more irritatingly vague the harder he pressed, but finally she relented and agreed to bring him to her sister’s house for Sunday dinner, and – if all went well – announce the engagement then.
For Annie, this amounted to a sizable concession, and though it was less than Burke had wanted he knew it was the best he was going to get. And so he put on his best suit, zipped Annie into the charcoal dress he had bought her for Christmas, and drove them in amicable silence across the river to the tree-lined street where Annie had grown up. He kissed Grace on both cheeks and handed her an expensive bottle of wine, shook hands with Danny and Michael, and was charming with Aunt Vera. He could see the tension in Annie’s shoulders begin to ease, and felt his own chest unclench slightly. This was going well. This was going to work.
And then he heard something, heard a sound that startled him so badly that he turned away from Michael with a start, leaving the boy to deliver the rest of the question he’d begun asking about the clinical trial to the side of Burke’s head.
Annie was laughing.
She had followed Danny into the kitchen to help him plate the salads while her family vetted the first gentleman caller she had ever brought over for Sunday dinner, and Danny had handed her the salad tongs and made a joke too quiet for any of the rest of them to hear, and Annie had burst out laughing.
Michael and Vera had no reaction to this startling (to Burke) new side of his fiancée, who he had known for eleven years now and never seen laugh like that, and Grace’s only response was a weary, exasperated eyeroll that bespoke how used to this she was.
“We’re starving!” she called over her shoulder. “Quit goofing off and bring out the salads!”
“I’m telling Bel the German shepherd story!” her husband called back, and Grace conceded with a resigned grin at Burke, who could hardly rouse himself to force a smile back.
“Bel?” was all he managed to say, and Grace rolled her eyes again.
“Because it rhymes,” she explained. “Danny and Annie. He said it sounded like a kids’ TV show. He’s always called her Bel.”
Who in the name of God was Bel, and why had he never met her before?
He stood from the sofa and went around to the end table that served as a makeshift bar, ostensibly to freshen his drink but really to buy himself a few moments to stare openly at whatever was happening in the kitchen.
They had an easy rapport, she mincing herbs and sprinkling them over plates of crisp greens as he zested a lemon into a small glass bowl where he was mixing up a vinaigrette, talking in quiet cheerful voices as they worked, relaxed in each other’s presence in a way that Work Annie never, ever was.
And then Danny reached across the butcher-block kitchen island they were both sharing to grab the small knife that sat next to Annie’s pile of herbs, and his hand brushed hers, and they both flinched so hard that for a moment Burke wondered if he’d cut her. And then suddenly Annie was silent and could not look at Danny anymore, and he could not quite look at her either.
The moment eventually passed. Annie was composed and amiable all through dinner, and Danny was gregarious and warm. It was all so infuriatingly normal. Everyone was simply behaving as though they were an ordinary family having an ordinary Sunday dinner, and Burke began to slowly feel as though he were losing his mind. He makes her laugh, he wanted to cry out. Have none of you noticed that he makes her laugh? Am I the only one here who sees what’s going on?
The drive home was awful. Annie could tell that she had somehow done something wrong and he was upset; but – aside from the fact that she had ventured far as to call Burke her “partner” but opted, in the end, not to mention the wedding – she was not entirely sure what her infraction had been.
“You didn’t tell them,” he finally said, after six full minutes of stony silence.
“Next time,” she said reassuringly, but it sounded hollow to both of them.
“Is there actually going to be a next time?” he retorted, his voice almost a growl, and she leaned back against the headrest with a sigh.
“I want to marry you, Malcolm,” she said, as his hands gripped the steering wheel so tightly that she could see the muscles in his forearms tense beneath the cotton of his shirt. “I can’t think why you’re so convinced I don’t.”
Her voice was not angry, only puzzled and weary and sad, and it stoked the flames of his fury even higher. Burke adored Annie in the desperate, obsessive way that only an egomaniac denied a thing he wants for eleven years can, and he had never been anyone’s second choice, for anything. He found himself mentally tallying up all the women he could have slept with over the past decade but didn’t – even when handed the opportunity – out of this clearly-misguided desire to be faithful to a woman whose heart had been lost to him before he had even met her.
Meanwhile Annie, who thought Burke had a long list of good qualities and would be a highly compatible life partner and believed it would alleviate some of her anxiety about the direction her life was headed if she decided to get married, had carefully weighed her options and settled on Burke as an eminently sensible choice. She did not quite understand why this was a crime.
They pulled into the driveway in silence, and Burke switched off the ignition but did not get out of the car.
“Do you love me, Annabel?” he asked suddenly.
“Malcolm, it’s been a long night.”
“Do you love me?”
“What does that –“
“It’s a perfectly simple question,” he snapped at her, his voice sharp and dangerous, and Annie did not recognize him anymore. She was suddenly very, very tired.
“I don’t love anyone, Malcolm,” she said simply, staring straight ahead, not looking at him. “Not like that. Not the way you mean. I’m sorry. I wish I did.”
And for a moment, he believed her. For a moment, he let out a long sigh too, and turned to look at her, to reach out a hand, to say, No, I’m sorry, this is my fault too, for asking you to be something you weren’t, let’s untangle ourselves from each other gracefully and shake hands and say goodbye. He wanted to say these things. Or rather, he wanted to be the kind of man who would say these things.
And then he saw her staring absently out the window, her fingertips lightly brushing the place on her wrist where Danny Walter’s hand had touched hers, and he snapped.
“You bitch,” he said. “You bitch. You’ve been
leading me on for eleven fucking years.”
Annie did not dignify this with a response, except to get out of the car, close the door behind her (calmly, not even a fraction of a slam) and head towards the house. It was clear that he had expected anger, had expected her to yell back, and this cool dismissal just made him even more furious.
“Look at me when I’m talking to you,” he barked at her, and instantly knew it was a mistake.
She froze where she stood for a long moment, then turned back to him, arms folded, face ice cold, and a more level-headed man than Malcolm Burke would have known immediately that it was over. But he had been sitting on his rage all night, and he still had plenty left, so as she stood there on the porch steps with her arms folded over her chest, she watched him flail and grow angrier and angrier.
“I have given you everything,” he hissed, “everything that has ever been in my power to give, I have given to you.”
“Well, that’s . . . dramatic,” Annie murmured dryly. “Not to mention a little grandiose. Are you saying you gave me my career? That you gave me this relationship, when I’m the one that asked you to marry me? Honestly, Malcolm.”
“I tried so hard to make you happy, but you –“
“Oh Lord,” she sighed. “Is this about sex? Is that what this is all about? Look, Malcolm, you knew this about me when you met me. You’ve known this all along. I’m just not a person who . . . who has those kinds of feelings.”
“No,” he said coldly. “You do. You do have them. You just don’t have them for me.”
“What on earth does that mean?”
“You’re doing it again,” he exclaimed. “Jesus. You don’t even know that you do it."
“Do what?” she snapped, then followed the direction of his eyes and realized he was staring at the way her left thumb was stroking absentminded circles over the curve of her right wrist, and that was when she knew.
Annie Walter, expert in the study of the human brain, had not allowed herself to know the thing that she knew – that she had always known – until she saw Burke see it himself, and the full weight of realization hit her with the force of a runaway train.
Four years sharing a bed with her naked body, four years of his mouth and hands on her skin, his cock inside her, and he had never once seen her physically respond the way she had tonight when her brother-in-law’s fingertips brushed against her wrist in the kitchen.
“Danny,” he said, and it was both a statement and a question, and there was no point, now, in denying it, so she didn’t. She said nothing at all. “How long?” he asked after a moment, and she thought about it. She had never been forced to put a name to these feelings, she had told herself this was simply the way families worked, she had told herself he was her friend. But once Burke saw it, of course, she could not unsee it herself. So she tried, out of respect, to take the question seriously.
“I don’t quite know,” she said finally. “I think . . . probably always.”
And he suddenly recognized her tone, this was her work voice, this was the Annie who was in the middle of solving a puzzle, she was analyzing, she was researching, he could feel her press her emotions downwards and go flipping back through the catalog of her relationship with Danny Walter to mine it for clues, and this was wrong, all of this was wrong, because she wasn’t apologizing, she wasn’t repentant, she wasn’t crying, she wasn’t promising that there was nothing between her and Danny or begging him to stay. She was just . . . thinking.
So he drew back his hand and he slapped her.
Hard.
Whatever he had expected to happen after that, obviously, did not. Annie hardly flinched. She looked at him with some unreadable expression in her eyes, a long silent look, and he felt his shame and self-loathing begin to boil over as the cold voice of self-preservation that had spent the past eleven years hissing quietly in his ear crescendoed to a loud shout.
She drove you to this, it whispered. This is her fault. She did this. She did this, not you.
All he wanted was one tiny crack in that wall of ice. Just one. All he wanted was to rouse some kind of emotion. All he wanted was a response. He had spent eleven years killing himself trying to reach her, and all along the woman who was so cold in his bed had really been warm and passionate and alive – with somebody else.
A part of him still loved her – desperately, fanatically, with the devotion of a religious zealot – but mostly, he hated her. And, more than that, himself.
Annie still had not spoken, had not even lifted her hand to her cheek. She had barely responded at all. Finally, after a long moment, she wordlessly slipped the engagement ring off her finger, dropping it onto the porch where it pinged loudly against the wooden stairs.
Then she punched Burke in the face.
She did not stay to watch him cry out in pain, realizing she had broken his nose, and shout obscenities after her. She turned her back on him, got into her car, and drove away.
When he arrived at the hospital on Monday, he was informed that she had quit with no notice. She had arrived three hours before him and by the time he got there, her office was as bare as if she had never existed.
He was startled from his solitary dinner that evening by a knock at the front door, but hope died in his chest as he opened it and saw, not a contrite Annie, but a tight-faced Danny Walter with four of his friends behind him and a U-Haul parked in the street.
“I’m here for her things,” said Danny in a voice that would have frozen lava. “Don’t you say a word to any of us. And don’t you ever, ever come near her again.”
And Malcolm Burke’s last thought, as he made his way to the bar down the street to get out of the men's way, was this: Annie Walter might have been ignorant of her own feelings all these years, but Danny had known the whole time.
And Danny had loved her back.
* * *
That was the story that Marcus had asked for. That was the story he had wanted to hear. But Annie could not say any of this to Marcus. She had never told anyone the real reason the relationship had ended, and she could not bear to say it out loud. Not in this house, of all places, and not to Danny's brother.
Not today.
So instead she took a long drink of her wine and stared down at the table and said, in a flat voice, “It just didn’t work out.”
Chapter Nine: Marcus and Annie
Perhaps realizing that there were no personal questions he could ask her that weren’t laced with emotional landmines, he didn’t push anymore after that.
Instead, they sat at the table for an hour, polishing off a whole bottle of wine and most of the cake, and they talked about absolutely anything in the world that was not Grace and Danny Walter. They talked about books – Marcus had a hidden weakness for English murder mysteries, while Annie admitted to getting caught by a coworker reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows on her lunch break and then lying about it, claiming it was for her nephew (“How old even was he then?” “He was a fetus. But I had to think of something”). They talked about music (Annie surprising Marcus by sharing his affection for The Ramones) and about movies (agreeing on almost nothing). An amicable debate about whether Alfred Hitchcock’s visual artistry peaked with Vertigo (Marcus) or North by Northwest (Annie) was interrupted when the oven timer rang, and as Annie pulled the pan of macaroni and cheese out, she noticed Marcus opening a second bottle of wine, which was the first time she’d consciously noticed that they’d finished the first one. There was a part of her that sensed very strongly that tonight of all nights, she ought to be careful how much she drank. A hangover was the last thing she’d have time to deal with in the morning, waking up in that house with the funeral over and the long desolate stretch of her new sisterless life stretching out ahead of her. Things were progressing nicely with her new future roommate and she didn’t want to ruin it by becoming a sloppy drunk.
Her back to him as she scooped bubbling hot mac and cheese onto a pair of plates, she could hear him refilling both their glasse
s, and his words from before came back to her suddenly. She had buried Grace and Danny today. She had permission to do whatever she wanted. And right now, the idea of not thinking, the idea of plowing through another bottle of Oregon pinot noir and making small talk about classic 90’s sitcoms with Marcus Rey and forgetting as hard as she could about the empty bedroom upstairs she was eventually going to have to move into, seemed the only way she was going to survive the night.
Annie Walter had been the good girl her whole life. She had always followed the rules. She had always done the correct thing.
But for tonight – just for tonight – she was giving herself a pass.
The macaroni was delicious, spiked with English mustard and black pepper and the sharp tang of real cheese – apparently when someone dies it’s not classy to skimp and go for the cheap stuff – and cake or no, they were both starving. Conversation softened down to a minimum as they ate their dinner, and made their way through most of the second bottle of wine. Annie had eaten enough by this point that the wine wasn’t landing on an empty stomach, but she’d still had about three-quarters of a bottle; and while she was a hardy and experienced drinker, she was not a machine, and the warm languid haze of intoxication was beginning to hit her.
Marcus reached over to top off her glass, and she stopped him, taking the bottle out of his hand as if seeing it for the first time.
“Willamette Winery,” she said, running a light fingertip over the label.
“It’s good,” said Marcus carefully, not sure how to respond.
“It’s the best in the region,” she said. “They’ve served it at the White House, even. It’s a famous pinot noir.”
“Should we not have –“
“I bought this,” she said, still staring down at the label. “I didn’t remember, until just now.”
“Annie, are you okay?”
