Live (The Burnside Series): The Burnside Series by Mary Ann Rivers

book and her sweater settled back over her middle and she hiked up her jeans.
    That night, he had a dream he was on his knees before her. She was naked. There had been almost no light, but her skin glowed, stealing the bit of light available.
    In the dream, he had both hands full with the flesh of her bottom, and his tongue was playing over the top of her thigh.
    In his dream, it’s all he wanted—to taste the lean belly of her thigh muscle, to rest his forehead against the bone of her hip, to press his fingers into the soft skin of her bottom. It wasn’t tender, in his dream. His touch was a kind of animal comfort where he was permitted to take his own needs from her body.
    When he woke up, every bone in his body had felt aligned, and heated. His erection, when he palmed it, didn’t ache urgently. Stroking it had filled him with more of the leftover warmth from the dream, had sent him back to an untroubled sleep.
    On the enclosed observation deck, he slumped onto a bench and watched the light play on the lake. On his own, he would never have left Jessica. It had made so much sense, when they had finally made plans, for him to emigrate.
    He had desirable and transferable skills. In Beijing, where his internship was ending, even in London, it would take him as many years as it would anywhere else to do the work he wanted to do. There was the promise of interest in green large-scale commercial projects, his specialization, in the States.
    Jessica was an attorney. Her license was married to the state of Ohio.
    So he married her. It made so much sense, a bit of tidiness to cap off the fantastic messiness of their Welsh affair, of her windblown and unexpectedly romantic vacation.
    The night she came home and poured them wine and told him that he resentedher, and she couldn’t live with his resentment anymore, he started to say no, of course he didn’t, his failure to find work in his new country was his own, his temper and his moods were his own, or were his shame that he hadn’t provided for her, for them—and then he was choked by his own tears.
    He cried like a child, noisy and stormy and wet, and she held him against her.
    The grief was impossible.
    To understand that he spent his days poisoning himself against the woman he was supposed to love, to understand that he had broken their home, that she lived her life with the knowledge that the man she was meant to depend on for support and common marital worship and long Sundays in bed had turned into a snarling source of daily pain was gutting.
    He snapped at her for nothing, he canceled plans for little reason, he took long showers where he blindly pulled himself into release, then turned away from her in the dark.
    He did. All of it.
    He watched the water. He didn’t spectacularly fuck up. He didn’t sleep with another woman, couldn’t imagine that sort of infidelity. He was grumpy, but their day-to-day life was civil. Among their friends, he always felt compelled to talk her up, boast of her accomplishments at work and the funny things she said.
    His failing was of the sort of a very ordinary and common fuckup. The sort that is a collection of the small ends of miserable days that hook themselves roughly together until there is a whole stretch of time that is quietly miserable.
    Fucked.
    He remembered how small the bones of Des’s wrist and shoulder had felt in his hands when he held them during their erotic grappling at the park. How her gray eyes caught the light as easily as her hair—both shifting in color and luminescence.
    He watched a little eight-footer negotiate the swift cross breeze on the lake. From up here, like watching a tiny pillow feather blow across a quilt.
    He missed the sea.
    He missed people who’d known him before he’d made such a mess of things, who only knew him as full of certainty.
    He realized even if home was nothing more than carving in his dad’s shop and working his mum’s garden, his life here had been so reduced that such a