Inside Suzi Chapter 5
by Inside Suzi
Chapter 5Building PressureThe laundry was warm from the dryer and I was folding it on the bed when Marcus appeared in the doorway.This was a Saturday morning habit of mine — the sorting and folding, the small domestic ritual of returning things to order. I did it slowly, which was how I did most things, and I usually had music on, something low and unhurried that matched the quality of a morning without agenda. Today I had forgotten the music and the silence was its own kind of company. The anklet caught the light each time I moved, a small gold flash at the periphery of my vision, and I had been aware of it with the particular background awareness it always produced now — not thought about, just felt, like a second pulse.Marcus leaned in the doorway with his coffee and looked at me in the way he sometimes did on mornings like this, when neither of us had anywhere to be and the house was ours and time moved differently."You know what I've been thinking about?"I looked up with the particular expression I had developed for this kind of question — one eyebrow slightly raised, the suggestion of innocence that neither of us believed. "The weather?"He smiled. Not the polite smile, the real one — the one that lived just underneath the patient exterior and came out when he wasn't bothering to manage it. "Tom," he said. "And the look on his face when you didn't cover yourself."I set down the shirt I was folding. "You're still thinking about that.""Every day."He crossed the room and stood behind me, his mouth finding the back of my neck, his hands settling on my hips over the thin cotton of my sleep shorts. I felt the warmth of him, the particular solid weight of his presence, and leaned back slightly into it."And I think," he murmured against my skin, "that he is too."I said nothing. I let the words sit in the room between us and felt what they did to me — the specific pull of them, low and warm and immediate. Outside, a car moved slowly down the street. A bird made a sound in the hedge. The morning continued its ordinary business and I stood in the middle of it with my husband's hands on my hips and the knowledge that somewhere across the neighborhood a man was probably still thinking about my body, and I found that I was not only comfortable with that thought but warmed by it in a way that had stopped surprising me."Have you talked to him?" I asked."A few times. Just messages. He's careful. Respectful." A pause. "He asked about you."I turned in his hands and looked at him. "What did you tell him?"Marcus met my eyes with that expression — steady, open, already several steps ahead. "I told him you were doing well. That you'd ask about him." He paused. "I didn't tell him about the anklet.""Why not?"His smile returned, smaller and more private. "Because some things should be discovered rather than explained."I looked at him for a moment and then turned back to the laundry, which was a way of letting myself think without having to manage my expression at the same time. The anklet caught the light again. I picked up another shirt and folded it."I've been thinking," Marcus said, settling onto the edge of the bed, watching me work, "that a group chat might be easier. The three of us."I didn't answer immediately. I finished folding the shirt and set it on the pile and picked up another one. "Easier for what?""For the conversation to find its own level," he said. "Without me translating."I thought about that. About what it would mean to have Tom's name on my phone, in a thread, visible. His words arriving directly rather than filtered through Marcus. The idea was more charged than I'd expected it to be — not frightening, but significant in the way that small structural changes sometimes are, the way a door left open changes the quality of a room."All right," I said.Marcus looked at me for a moment, as if checking whether I meant it. I kept folding. He picked up his coffee."I'll set it up today," he said.—The notification arrived while I was in the kitchen making lunch.A new group. Marcus had named it simply with our street address, which was such a Marcus move — practical, neutral, leaving the naming of what this actually was to the participants rather than the architecture. I stood at the counter with my phone and looked at Tom's name beside Marcus's and felt the particular quality of a threshold being crossed without fanfare.Marcus's first message was already there.Marcus: Easier this way. Suzi, you remember Tom.Then Tom, almost immediately:Tom: Hey Suzi. Hard to forget, honestly.I read it twice. The specific weight of those three words landing with a directness that the weeks of distance had not diminished. He wasn't pretending the doorway hadn't happened. He wasn't performing embarrassment he didn't feel. He was simply stating a fact, quietly and without apology, and leaving the rest to me.I set the phone down. Picked it up again.Suzi: Hi Tom. I remember you too.Simple. True. Not nothing.The three dots appeared almost immediately.Tom: Good. I was hoping.I put the phone face-down on the counter and stood there for a moment with both hands pressed to the granite, breathing. Then I turned it back over.Suzi: How are you, Tom.He replied that he was well. That the weather had been good. That he'd been by the neighborhood a few times and noticed the garden looking well-tended. That last detail was specific enough to tell me he had been paying attention to the house, to the garden, to the possibility of me in the garden, and I received that information with the same quiet warmth I was learning to receive all of it.They exchanged a few more messages that afternoon, the three of us finding the particular rhythm of a conversation among people who share a secret and are learning how much of it to acknowledge. Tom was warm and direct without being forward. Marcus was easy and unhurried. I said less than either of them, but what I said I meant, and I felt Tom reading that in my brevity the way people who pay attention read things in what isn't said.By evening the chat had settled into something that felt, improbably, almost natural.Almost.Then Tom sent:Tom: I'll be honest with you both. I think about that morning more than I should. I don't have much more than a memory at this point. Not a complaint. Just the truth.I was in the living room when it arrived, Marcus on the deck with his blueprints, neither of us aware of what the other was reading. I read the message alone, in the particular privacy of a phone screen in a quiet room, and felt it land with the specific weight of something true being said plainly.Not a complaint. Just the truth.I thought about it for a long moment. Then I typed:Suzi: We'll have to do something about that memory of yours. But not tonight.Tom's reply came back as a single word.Tom: Waiting.I sat with that word for a long time.Waiting. Not eager, not demanding, not angling for anything. Just the simple statement of a man who has decided something and is in no hurry because the decision