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It should’ve been a forgettable kiss.
She’s got her cell between her ear and her shoulder, her purse dangling from her arm, and her arms are full with a stack of tupperware filled with cupcakes, brownies, and cookies for the fall bake sale.
“I’m afraid I don’t understand the problem, Asmita,” she says, careful to smooth the irritation out of her voice. “If someone doesn’t want to eat gluten, they don’t have to buy one of my desserts?”
She barely pays attention to whatever Asmita’s says on the other side of the line, carefully balancing the tupperware in one hand as she uses the other to try and dig in her purse for the car keys. She was running late—Rio had pulled her into the shower with him while the first batch of cookies were baking and she’d dug her nails into his shoulder blades and told him to hurry up, which had the exact opposite result of what she’d wanted (but oh god, how he’d gotten her to change her mind, how he’d gotten her to not care at all). She’d had to start all over once she finally made her way back into the kitchen to find the cookies blackened and the oven smoking, and now she was going to be the last to arrive at the school, the last to set up, and she’s sure that Lauren will take the opportunity to rejigger the layout so that she’s got one of the tiny tables in the annex hallway just so she can help Asmita prove some point about how the gluten-free items really do sell better, and if Beth really wanted to help fundraise for the new track then she would—
She looks up and nearly bumps right into Rio, who reaches out to steady the tupperware so that nothing tumbles from her hands. He’s got his bomber jacket on and she can see his black duffle bag on the entryway bench.
“Uh huh,” she says to Asmita, just to make it sound like she’s listening, but she mouths to Rio, “You off?”
“Be home late,” he whispers. “Don’t wait up, yeah?”
Beth scowls because he knows she can’t go to sleep when he’s meeting with people she’s never heard of doing deals she knows nothing about, but he doesn’t notice—he’s already leaning over the containers to press a quick kiss to her lips, missing so that he mostly gets the corner of her mouth.
“Be careful,” she warns lowly. Rio hates when she says that, she knows, but if he wasn’t going to tell her anything, she was going to fret. That’s just how it was.
“These got gluten in ‘em?” Rio asks.
Brows furrowed, Beth looks at him like, What? but before she can, Rio shrugs. “We all like to live a little dangerously, ma.”
He flashes a smile, pinches her ass, and then turns on his heel and disappears out the door.
Beth glowers after him.
The feeling doesn’t last.
Glasses perched at the end of her nose, Beth frowns, rereading a paragraph for the third time at the bottom of the page. Sighing, she gives up, tossing the book to Rio’s side of the bed. It’s still empty.
She reaches for her cell phone for the hundredth time that night (and the third in the last five minutes) and checks the time: 4:36 am.
Stifling a yawn, she opens up her text thread with Rio, even though she knows there isn’t a reply yet—she’d taken her phone off silent, just in case she fell asleep, but she’s wide awake, something twisting inside of her.
Rio still hasn’t read her texts.
When he’d said late, she hadn’t thought he’d meant this late. He and Mick were only in Lansing, after all—or wait. Was it Grand Rapids? One was this week, one was next, but it escapes her memory now. Throwing the blanket off her legs, Beth slides her feet into her slippers and pads downstairs.
The house is cold and, all alone in it, it feels too empty. Too quiet. The only sound is the scratch of her soles against the hardwood. Beth pulls her robe tighter around her body.
Their office is dark, shrouded in shadows, and Beth can only make out the edges of the furniture as she pats around, finding the lamp on her desk and then inching her hand upward until she twists the knob. She blinks, adjusting to the light, and she realizes how much her eyes sting.
Coming around the other side of the desk, she pulls open a drawer and pulls out her planner, flipping open to October.
Underneath Bake Sale @ WES she’s got two stickers: a rose and a waterfall. Next week, it’s a rose next to a music note underneath the words Pumpkin Carving with the Hills. And okay, she remembers now—this week was Grand Rapids. Lansing was closer, so Rio’d arranged it so that he could still do all the family activities and sneak out once the kids were in bed and sneak back in before they’d woken up.
Still, Beth thinks, a nagging worry tugging at her, it was unusual that he hadn’t responded to any of her texts.
Typically, Rio drove there and Mick drove home, and that meant Rio would text back and forth with her on the way back—she’d expected that he would celebrate the victory over Asmita and Lauren with her (in the form of teasing, of course), ask what she’d done for dinner (checking that she hadn’t eaten some sad microwave meal, hoping that she’d at least ordered in takeout from the Chinese restaurant he hates—“too greasy”—or the La Hacienda Real—“that ain’t Mexican food”—to feed herself) and update her (in the vaguest terms) as to how the deal went. She’d finally be able to fall asleep knowing that she’d wake up to Rio’s hand on her back, his lips brushing against her cheek. Then she’d hear the rustle of him undressing, feel the bed dip with his weight, and smell the warm, earthy scent of his cologne as he wrapped himself around her.
But now she doesn’t know if that might happen in thirty minutes or three hours.
She should try and sleep, she thinks, flipping the planner closed and sliding it back in the drawer.
In the kitchen she thinks: she should take some NyQuil, play some ambient noise video on her phone, and lie down.
But she doesn’t.
Instead, on autopilot, she pulls out flour, milk, eggs, sugar—and all the rest of the ingredients for a fresh batch of chocolate chip cookies.
They’ll still be warm by the time he gets home, she tells herself, pulling out the mixing bowl and dumping in the dry ingredients, scooping and shaking the flour just so for the most precise measurement.
She rolls her shoulders, feeling the crick in her neck as she beats in the eggs and vanilla and tries to convince herself that maybe he’d driven home this time. Maybe Mick was tired, or maybe Rio was annoyed, wanted to be the one behind the wheel, because the deal had gone sour—
No. She slices the thought off before it sprouts.
The deal went fine.
Rio was fine.
He’ll be home soon.
The stress baking will make him roll his eyes, but when he bites into the cookie, he’ll shut up. She can imagine it perfectly: he’ll press a finger smeared with melted chocolate against her lips, ask her to lick it off for him, his eyes heated. Beth will bat his hand away, tell him it’s five am, and he’ll laugh and tease her that she can’t be that tired if she was up baking at all hours of the night.
She rolls the sticky dough between her fingers, making perfectly rounded balls that she plops on the baking tray. It’s only when she’s sliding the tray into the oven that she realizes she’s been grinding her teeth so hard that she’s given herself a headache.
Everything aches, she realizes, popping two ibuprofen and dropping onto the stool at the island, just outside of the ring of light cast from the bulb above the stove.
She checks her phone again.
No new texts.
No missed calls.
Rubbing her shoulder, She pulls up her favorite contacts, hovers over his name, hesitating. If he hadn’t even read any of her texts, it wasn’t like he was going to answer—
But her finger moves of its own accord, and the phone is ringing dully in her ear.
It just keeps ringing through and eventually, the oven dings and she has to put the phone away.
She feels a flash of desperate irritation. Tomorrow, she decides, he’s going to have to give her a massage to make up for all of this.
It’s the finger jabbing into her cheek that does it. She squirms away from it, brow furrowed, annoyance simmering as she blinks open her eyes to see Annie standing over her, grinning, backlit by the too-bright sun.
“Morning, sunshine.”
Beth slowly sits up and grimaces, every muscle in her body screaming in protest. She rubs her eyes and yawns.
“Well, that happens when you sleep on a couch. Why are you sleeping on the couch?” Annie asks curiously. “Did you and Lover Boy get into a spat?”
Still half-asleep, everything had felt foggy until exactly this instant. The question jolts her into remembering and, ignoring the question, Beth scrambles to reach out for her phone on the coffee table, punching the buttons so that her home screen lights up to reveal—
Nothing.
Her breath hitches in her throat and her stomach sinks.
“Beth?”
Looking up at her sister, Beth feels like she’s still in a dream—everything hazy and nonsensical. The rules of the universe don’t apply here: Rio doesn’t come home when he says he will.
She presses call.
Pick up, she wills, tasting bile at the back of her throat. Pick up, pick up, pick up—
But the phone doesn’t even ring.
It just goes straight to the voicemail.
“Beth? What’s going on? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
Beth clears her throat. “Um,” she croaks, voice cracking and thin. “I don’t—I don’t know where Rio is.”
They were supposed to make a batch of fresh cash today, her and Annie and Ruby. Instead, they crawl into bed on either side of her as she alternates between being indignant (“I swear to god if he says anything about us not making the money today, I will—”) and worried to the point of nausea (“Do you think—?” she asks, but she can never finish the question).
Sitting up against the headboard, Ruby has Beth lay her head in her lap. She runs her fingers through Beth’s hair as Real Housewives plays on the TV Annie had drug in and set up on top of the dresser. “To distract you,” she’d said, a little sadly, but Beth wasn’t distracted.
All she could think about was Rio. Who he met. What the deal was. What had happened to him. What in the world could keep him from calling her.
They’re all unanswered questions. She’d already torn apart the study, hacked into his laptop (she’d watched him hunt and peck to type his password in too many times—e3m5Kd6j11$, which took her a while to figure out was each of their kids' names followed by their birth month in chronological order) but she couldn’t find anything. Not a name, not what the meet was about, not a hint towards who else might know anything. The only thing in Rio’s history the Detroit Piston’s Twitter page, a Google search for the water cycle (from when he’d helped Jane with a school project), and a dozen links to different necklaces on the Tiffany and Co. website (was he looking for her Christmas gift already?).
But nothing that could help her. Nothing that could dull the knife in her gut.
Eventually, delirious and soothed by the calming touch of Ruby’s fingers running through her hair, Beth falls asleep.
She doesn’t dream.
She wakes up to Annie and Ruby whispering. Besides trying to blink away the dryness in her eyes, Beth doesn’t move.
“Do you think he’s, like, hurt?” Annie asks in a small voice. “Or—?”
“He better not be, so help me God,” Ruby answers, and she jostles Beth a bit. Making the sign of the cross, Beth assumes. “She’d be catatonic.”
“But if he wasn’t… you know… wouldn’t he… call?”
The silence stretches. Beth stares hard at Ruby’s toes peeking out from underneath Rio’s favorite sage green throw blanket (it had been strange, when they’d moved in together a few months ago, to realize that Rio was normal enough to have things like a favorite throw blanket). She suddenly wishes she could burrow underneath it, hide from Annie and Ruby, be alone.
“I remember when Stan got in that car accident, back before Sara was born,” Ruby says instead of answering.
“I forgot about that,” Annie admits quietly. “He was okay, though.”
“Yeah, but before I knew that? I was a mess. I remember Beth had to drive me to the hospital because I couldn’t stop crying. I was just blubbering about how I hadn’t kissed him goodbye that morning.”
“Oh, god.”
“Yeah,” Ruby agrees, and Beth feels Ruby squeeze her arm gently. “At least I was listed as his emergency contact though, you know? At least I got a call within an hour of it happening.”
Beth’s heart lurches into her throat.
“She’s not going to get that,” Annie says somberly.
“She can’t even call the police.”
“Fuck.”
And maybe that’s what Beth should be worried about, too. But she just stares at a loose thread in the blanket, everything else hazy and out-of-focus, thinking about that kiss. It was hurried. Thoughtless. Careless—like there’d be a thousand more of them. Like this one didn’t matter.
Like it might not be their last.
She doesn’t fall back asleep.
Annie and Ruby spend the next three days with her, calling out sick to work. They feed her, force her to bathe, and pick out fresh pajamas for her. Annie does all the laundry in the house (folding it all wrong) and Ruby goes over Beth’s calendar and cancels her eyebrow wax and the oil change for the van.
“Do you want us to call Dean?” Ruby asks the night before the kids are set to come back home. “Ask him to keep them for a little longer?”
“No.”
“We could take them off your hands? Sleepover at Auntie’s house?” Annie says, nudging Beth and trying to sound excited. “How about that?”
“No.”
“Beth,” Ruby says seriously. “I don’t think they should see you like this.”
She could use a reason to get out of bed. Plus, they’d keep her so busy she could stop thinking. Shut off her brain. Exist on autopilot.
“They won’t.”
“B, you can barely take care of yourself right now…”
Beth ignores that. “This reminds me,” she says, crawling out of the bed and grabbing her phone off the bedside table. She doesn’t even allow the hope to bubble in her chest anymore, knows that when she looks at the screen it will be blank. “I should call Rhea.”
“We can do that—“
She shakes her head. “No. It should be me.”
Ducking into Marcus’s bedroom for privacy, Beth sucks in a breath and forces herself to dial.
The phone rings. Beth stares at Gus, Marcus’s favorite stuffed gorilla. It sits on his bedside table right next to a framed photo from the final soccer game of the season, Marcus pristine and beaming, standing next to a cross-eyed Jane with her tongue out and dirt smudging her face. The phone rings again. Beth tears her eyes away, refocuses her gaze on her own feet.
Rhea picks up before the third ring.
How reliable, Beth thinks bitterly.
“Beth?” Rhea asks with confusion. It wasn’t usual for Beth to be calling. They’d formed a tentative truce, but Beth wasn’t sure the warmth would ever return to their relationship. She wasn’t sure she deserved it, either. Sometimes it still shocked her that her and Rio had ever managed to turn things around. Other times it shocked her that it had ever gotten as bad as it had between them. It seems so long ago, her feelings so different now, so sharp, so certain.
It didn’t make the conversation easier.
“Yeah, it’s me.”
There’s a pause. Beth rocks on the balls of her feet.
“Why are you calling?” It’s not rude, exactly, but a little impatient.
“Christopher is...” Her own voice is unfamiliar. Small. Fragile.
How could she find the words?
Missing?
Gone?
(She won’t say the other word. She refuses to even think it.)
“Mmm,” Rhea says, like she’s already caught on. “Well, I guess he’s overdue.”
Beth feels a flash of irritation at Rhea’s flippancy. She remembered—of course she remembered—how unphased Rhea had been by Rio’s disappearance two years ago, but god, how wrong she’d almost been. How close he’d been to—
(She won’t think it.)
But that was different. He’d never done this to Beth.
“I’ll keep Marcus, then?” Rhea asks, moving the conversation along. “Until he’s back.”
Beth sinks onto Marcus’s bed, fists his Spiderman bedspread in her fingers, then smooths her hand over it, fixing it.
“Oh. Okay, yeah, that—makes sense.”
Did it? She's not sure.
She hadn’t necessarily thought that far ahead.
The sharp pain in her chest tells her that she hadn’t expected she’d lose both of them in one fell swoop, though.
“What are you going to tell him?”
Rhea sighs and Beth hears the clank of ceramic, the spray of a faucet. She’s doing the dishes, Beth realizes. Continuing on with her to-do list as if the world hasn’t stopped.
“I’ll think of something. I always do.”
Fidgeting with the tie on her robe, Beth nods, forgetting that Rhea can’t see her.
“How about you?”
“What?”
“What are you going to tell your kids?”
“Oh.” The question startles her. “I hadn’t—I don't know yet.”
“You’ll get used to this,” Rhea reassures. She must flick off the tap because the sound of flowing water dies abruptly.
Beth swallows, her mouth suddenly dry. She doesn’t want to get used to this.
“Or,” Rhea continues, “if you’re like me, you won’t.”
Beth snaps her head up.
No, she protests immediately. They’ve made it through worse. They can make it through this, as long as—
They can make it through this, she thinks firmly.
“Well, give Marcus my love?” Beth asks, ready for the conversation to be over.
“Sure thing.” Rhea hesitates, then seems to ask despite herself, “You okay?”
“I’m okay.”
It’s the worst lie she’s ever told.
Beth manages the kids by herself for 72 hours. Tells them that Rio’s visiting a sick friend in Ohio—something that seems open-ended enough but also flexible enough that it wouldn’t be odd if he walked through the door tomorrow (and god, she hopes he walks through the door tomorrow. Her nerves are basically being held up to flames at this point, completely fried). Still, she cooks. She cleans. She chauffeurs the kids to school and practices and friends’ houses and the park. She helps with homework and baths, and she resolves a fight between Kenny and Danny over the XBOX. There’s a lead ball in her gut that grows every minute, though, and by the time the day is over, she collapses in her bed after draining three bourbons and passes out.
In her dream, they kiss—properly. He’s on top of her in their bed, his tongue in her mouth, but she can’t taste him. Can’t even remember what he tastes like, and when she realizes that she can’t feel him, that he weighs as much as a ghost, she jerks awake, her face wet.
The breaking point comes with the kids—and of course it does, Ruby was right—but it has nothing to do with Rio, at least not directly.
It’s Jane.
She asks questions about Marcus incessantly. Where was he? And why wasn’t he over just because Rio wasn’t home? Rio went on trips all the time and Marcus still came over. Could he come to the park with them? Could she call him?
Beth almost says yes, but at the last minute, she remembers—she and Rhea didn’t agree on the same story.
Next time, Beth thinks, and then her jaw clenches. She’s barely surviving this time. Could she do it again? Could she weather a "next time"?
Coming up with an excuse for why Jane can’t call Marcus is harder, and the whole thing devolves into a tantrum. Beth texts Annie SOS and Annie doesn’t even ask a follow-up question. She’s in Beth’s foyer fifteen minutes later promising the kids endless sugar and a movie night full of scary movies that Beth normally wouldn’t allow them to watch, and everyone scrambles out of the house into the van at the snap of Annie’s fingers.
“I got this, okay?” Annie promises, squeezing Beth’s hand. “Just worry about yourself.”
If only, Beth thinks.
He’s kissing her neck, moving up to her jaw, then pressing his mouth to hers, only the trail he leaves behind is cold.
She reaches for him, tries to pull him closer, wants to feel him touching every inch of her, but it’s like there’s a barrier between them. She can’t touch his skin, and she’s desperate for it, her hands scrambling over him, needing to feel the smooth planes of his stomach, the jagged scars on his chest, the rough scruff of his beard.
“Please,” she begs him.
She can feel him murmuring something into her ear, but she can’t hear it. She knows what his voice should sound like, knows it in her bones, knows it as well as she knows the shape of Kenny’s birthmark or the grip of Emma’s hand when she’s scared, remembers it as strongly as the smell of Danny when he was a baby or the first piercing scream of Jane’s after she made no noise at all after she was born. It’s imprinted in her, she couldn’t forget it if she tried, but she can’t conjure it—and she needs it. She needs to hear him, needs to know what he’s trying to tell her.
“Please.”
He kisses her and this time, he tastes like pennies. She should be concerned, but relief washes over her.
Then: she smells him.
Warm and earthy and familiar.
And then:
“Elizabeth, stop cryin’.”
Her eyes fly open and he’s there, in front of her, lying next to her in their bed. A shriek gets caught in her throat, and she doesn’t know if it’s terror or disbelief of pure, distilled relief, but she’s flinging her hand to the lamp and flipping the switch—and then she sees him. Properly.
Greenish bruises along his chin, a blackened scab on his cheek, his forehead. His eyes dark and puffy, some of his knuckles wrapped in tape. He looks—thinner.
He looks alive.
He looks beautiful.
Beth bursts into tears.
“What’d I tell you?” he asks gruffly, reaching out to wipe them from her eyes.
“What happened to you?” she asks, hand flying up to cover his on her cheek.
“It’s a long story.”
“Why didn’t you call?”
“I wanted to.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Couldn’t,” he says simply. He rubs his thumb over her lip, drops his eyes to the same spot.
“But—”
“Elizabeth,” he says softly. “I know you got a million questions. But I really want—" He huffs out a breath. "I really need to kiss you right now.”
“I’m furious at you,” she says weakly. “You know that, right?”
“I know. And believe me, darlin', I’d love nothin’ more than to fight about it with you in the mornin’. But all I been thinkin’ about for a week is when I’d get to kiss you again, and—”
She yanks him by the neck of his t-shirt, cutting him off with a kiss, pouring every single thing she’s felt into it, giving him every broken piece of her. Her worry, her terror, her anger, her regret—and underneath it all, something else soft and warm at the same time that it’s wild and sharp, gripping them together like a vice.
Beneath the blood from his resplit lip, he tastes like mint.
She can’t believe she’d ever forgotten.
“This will never happen again,” she tells him when she pulls away, voice firm and resolute.
“I can’t—”
“Never. Again.” Rio searches her eyes, rocking his jaw. “I need details. I need to know—“ She squeezes her eyes shut. “I need to know where to start looking.”
She opens her eyes to see Rio’s face shift, but she can tell he’s still not convinced.
“Imagine if it were me.”
At first he doesn't react, his face a mask. Then he blinks, nodding slowly, his bottom lip jutting out.
“Okay.”
“Really?” Beth asks, surprised he’d conceded so easily.
“If,” he says, and Beth wants to roll her eyes. Of course it’s a negotiation. “We save the rest of the fight for the mornin’.”
Beth grins. That’s not so bad.
“And what do we do now?”
“Now,” he says, voice low and husky in the way that makes her feel drunk on him, “you tell me about showin’ those PTA bitches who’s boss while I go down on you.”
He tugs at the drawstrings of her pajama bottoms, a gleam in his eyes.
“You’re very romantic when you miss me.”
“I think so.”
Beth laughs, but it’s cut off by another kiss, this one a little more frenzied, a little more urgent, and okay, Beth thinks. Their goodbye kisses will need some work—but their hellos were nothing short of perfect.