He Only Wanted Her When She Left

He Only Wanted Her When She Left

The first time Adrian wanted Lena badly enough to frighten himself, another man had his hand at the small of her back.

It was not an intimate touch by any reasonable standard. The man's palm rested there while he leaned closer to hear her over the music, then remained after the sentence had ended. Lena did not move away. She turned her face toward him, smiling at something Adrian could not hear, and the man's thumb made one small movement against the fabric of her dress.

Three months earlier, Adrian had ended their relationship because he felt nothing.

That was the word he had used. Nothing. Not anger, not unhappiness, not even the exhausted dislike that had kept their final months loud. Adrian and Lena had fought often enough to recognize the stages: the sharp beginning, the two old complaints each of them could produce without preparation, separate rooms, then the slow cooling during which Lena became soft to him again. He would notice her bare legs beneath a short dress or the line of her cleavage when she leaned over the kitchen counter, desire would return before either apology did, and they would use sex to tame each other into being a couple again.

After the last fight, Adrian refused that route. He sat across from Lena at their kitchen table and told her that whatever had once existed between them had gone quiet. She listened without interrupting, one hand wrapped around a mug she never lifted.

"Do you want me to argue with that?" she asked.

He said no. He wanted to be honest.

Honesty is a flattering name people sometimes give to a decision after they have arranged it entirely around themselves. Adrian had been honest about his indifference, but he had not been curious about what his indifference had done to Lena. During their final year together he stopped watching her enter a room. He kissed her automatically. When she undressed beside the bed, he continued looking at his phone as though her body were part of the familiar furniture.

Lena did not become less beautiful. She became available in a way that allowed him to stop noticing.

Now, at a party held in the upstairs room of a restaurant neither of them could afford regularly, she was unavailable to him and vividly present to everybody else.

She wore a dark red dress he had never seen. It followed her waist closely and left her back mostly bare, with two narrow straps crossing between her shoulder blades. Adrian found himself staring at the place where the other man's hand ended and her skin began. Lena laughed again, leaning closer, and the dress shifted across her hips.

The wanting arrived so quickly that Adrian mistook it for anger.

He asked a friend who the man was.

"Theo, I think."

"Is she with him?"

The friend looked at Adrian, then toward Lena. "You broke up with her."

This was not an answer, although it was the answer Adrian deserved.

Lena saw him watching a few minutes later. Her expression changed only slightly. She did not look guilty or startled. She looked interested.

Then she placed one hand on Theo's chest while saying something into his ear.

Adrian remembered that hand on his own body with humiliating accuracy. He remembered the weight of her palm when she climbed over him in bed, the way her fingers tightened against his shoulder when pleasure caught her by surprise, and the small scar near her thumb that he used to kiss without thinking. The memories did not return as nostalgia. They returned as evidence that another man might soon know the same things.

For the rest of the party Adrian remained aware of Lena without appearing to follow her. He knew when she went to the bar, when Theo touched her elbow to guide her through the crowd, and when the two of them disappeared onto the balcony. He spoke to people and retained almost nothing they said.

Lena came to him just before midnight.

"You look uncomfortable."

"I'm fine."

"You never used to watch me like that."

There are accusations designed to wound and others designed to invite. Adrian could not tell which this was, partly because Lena seemed to enjoy that he could not tell.

"I was wondering who your friend is."

"No, you weren't."

She stood close enough for him to smell her perfume, something darker than the one she had worn when they were together. Theo remained across the room, speaking to somebody near the bar. Lena glanced in his direction, then returned her attention to Adrian.

"Do you want to know if I'm sleeping with him?"

Adrian should have said it was none of his business. He knew this so clearly that the knowledge felt like another person standing beside him, offering excellent advice to somebody who had no intention of taking it.

"Are you?"

Lena smiled.

"You really do look uncomfortable."

She left without answering.

The next morning Adrian woke before seven and checked her social media. Lena had posted a photograph from the party. She stood alone in it, one leg visible through the opening of the dress, her face turned slightly away from the camera. The picture revealed nothing about Theo except the edge of a man's sleeve at the side of the frame.

Adrian enlarged it anyway.

He told himself he was searching for information. What he found instead was the body he had trained himself not to see. Lena's bare back. The curve of her thigh when she shifted her weight. The red dress tightening where Theo's hand had rested.

He sent her a message, deleted it, then wrote another.

You looked good last night.

Lena replied almost immediately.

I know.

The answer aroused him more than gratitude would have.

During their relationship Lena had sometimes asked what he thought of a dress, a haircut or the photograph she planned to post. Adrian answered with the careless reassurance of a man who believed the important fact was that she belonged to him. She no longer asked. She had begun enjoying herself without waiting for his attention, and his attention had become uselessly abundant.

He wrote again that evening.

Are you seeing Theo?

Three dots appeared, disappeared and returned.

You can ask me what you actually want to know.

Adrian put the phone down. He walked into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator and stood in front of it without seeing anything he wanted.

When he returned, another message was waiting.

You want to know whether he took the dress off.

Adrian sat on the edge of his bed.

Did he?

Lena did not answer until the following afternoon.

Not that night.

Those three words supplied no comfort. They created a future.

Their messages became intimate through restriction. Adrian could tell Lena what he remembered and what he wanted. He could ask what she wore and where she had been. Lena might answer directly, answer several hours later, or give him one detail precise enough to occupy the rest of his evening.

She did not permit questions about whether she would come back.

The first time Adrian asked, Lena called him.

"You wanted to leave," she said.

"I know."

"And now you want to know whether I might still be yours."

He disliked the sentence because it was exact.

"I'm not asking you to stop seeing anyone."

"Not yet."

Lena was quiet for a moment. Adrian could hear traffic beyond her and the soft click of her heels against pavement.

"Here is the rule," she said. "You can tell me what you want. You can ask what I did. You do not get to ask me to choose you."

"And if I do?"

"I stop answering."

Adrian agreed.

The rule should have protected him from hope. Instead, it gave his obsession a private room in which to grow.

Lena sent photographs occasionally. None were nude, which made Adrian spend more time with them than nudity might have required. A bare shoulder above white sheets. Her legs crossed beneath a restaurant table, with a man's shoe visible opposite hers. A mirror photograph taken before another night out, showing the line of a black dress and the open door of the bedroom they once shared.

He noticed everything she allowed into the frame and everything she excluded.

One Friday night she sent him a photograph of her mouth, lipstick slightly smudged at one corner.

Did he do that? Adrian wrote.

Maybe.

Did you kiss him?

Lena made him wait eleven minutes.

Yes.

Adrian could picture the kiss too easily. Theo's hand returning to her back. Lena opening her mouth for him with the same slow confidence she used to have with Adrian before familiarity made both of them impatient. The image made him jealous, hard and ashamed of how little difference there seemed to be between those feelings inside his body.

Tell me you wanted him, he wrote.

Lena replied with a voice message that lasted thirty-eight seconds.

"I wanted him. I liked the way he looked at me because he had no idea what I looked like under the dress yet. He kept finding reasons to touch my back, then my waist, and I knew exactly what he was doing. I wanted him to keep doing it. And yes, I knew you would picture all of that when I told you. I knew you would want me more because another man could have me now. Maybe I wanted you to finally understand how it felt to stand in front of you and not be seen."

Her voice was low and conversational, not perfectly controlled. She hesitated before maybe, then continued as if she had decided the softer word was not going to protect him. Adrian played the message again.

That was the first moment Adrian understood that he was not the only person using the arrangement. Lena did not simply tolerate his jealousy. She liked what it returned to her. Every neglected part of her had become powerful now that Adrian had to imagine somebody else appreciating it.

She began asking him questions too.

What had he thought when he saw Theo touch her? Which photograph had he opened most often? What did he remember about the way she used to move above him? Did he regret leaving her, or did he only regret that another man could have her?

Adrian tried to separate those questions and could not.

He remembered their final months and understood, with no pleasure at all, that Lena had spent them offering herself to a man who treated access as atmosphere. She had come to bed in a thin shirt and pressed against his back. She had placed his hand on her thigh while they watched television. Once she had stood naked in the bathroom doorway and asked if he was coming to bed, and Adrian had said he would be there in a minute.

He had taken twenty.

Now he could spend an hour imagining Theo seeing her for the first time.

They met for a drink six weeks after the party. Lena chose a narrow bar where the tables were close enough that Adrian's knees touched hers whenever either of them shifted. She wore a plain black top, jeans and the red lipstick from the photograph.

The evening felt less like a reconciliation than a first date held by two people who already knew how the other looked while sleeping. Lena talked about work, a friend's disastrous holiday and a neighbor who played the same four songs every Sunday morning. Adrian listened with an attention that would once have made her suspicious.

When he finally asked whether she was still seeing Theo, Lena took a slow drink.

"You are allowed to ask what I did."

"But not what you are going to do."

"You're learning."

Adrian placed his hand on her knee beneath the table. He expected her to remove it. Lena looked down instead, then back at him.

"Is this what you wanted?"

"No."

"What did you want?"

He moved his hand higher, stopping where her thighs pressed together.

"I wanted you to remember that I know you."

Lena's expression softened, but her legs did not open.

"You knew the woman who waited for you to look up from your phone."

The sentence stayed between them while Adrian's hand remained still. He felt the warmth of her through the denim and the strength in her legs as she held them together.

"Who knows you now?" he asked.

Lena leaned toward him until her mouth was close to his ear.

"Not you."

She stood, kissed his cheek and left him with the bill.

For two days she did not answer him. Adrian discovered that the loss of their messages felt worse than the original breakup. He had left Lena because he could not feel the relationship. She had now created an arrangement in which he felt her absence every hour.

On the third night she wrote:

Come over tomorrow. Nine. Do not ask what it means.

Adrian arrived at eight fifty-three and waited in the car until nine.

Lena opened the door wearing the same thin shirt she had worn during their last months together. Adrian recognized it before he fully saw her body beneath it. The familiarity was deliberate.

"You remember this?"

"Yes."

"You did not seem to like it then."

He stepped inside. Lena closed the door but did not move away from it.

"I liked it."

"You barely noticed it."

"I notice now."

"That is the problem."

She kissed him before he could answer.

The kiss carried none of the caution of former lovers testing whether the old fit remained. Lena pressed him back against the wall, one hand behind his neck, her mouth opening against his with the appetite they had always found once a fight had cooled. Adrian held her waist and felt the thin fabric gather beneath his fingers.

He had imagined taking control the moment she allowed him through the door. He had imagined proving that his desire was more than jealousy. Lena did not give him the chance.

She drew his hand beneath the shirt and placed it against her bare skin.

"This is what you stopped touching," she said.

Adrian's palm moved over her waist and up her back. He was not relearning the shape. He knew it too well. What had changed was the shock of being allowed to touch it after weeks in which Lena had dressed, slept and been desired beyond his reach. Lena watched his face while he touched her. That was part of what she wanted. Not only the contact, but the evidence of what it did to him now.