The House Between Heartbeats

by Devoted Sub

Contents

1. Chapter 1: The Third Pulse
2. Chapter 2: Too Ordinary For Secrets
3. Chapter 3: Yellow Socks
4. Chapter 4: Settling
5. Chapter 5: The White Door
6. Chapter 6: 3:03
7. Chapter 7: Whatever Was Mine
8. Chapter 8: The House Between Heartbeats
9. About the Author

Chapter 1: The Third Pulse

The first lie Ace ever told me was that he could not hear the heartbeat in the wall.

It started eleven nights after the pregnancy test turned positive. I woke with his hand cupped over the small curve of my stomach and counted three pulses in the dark.

Mine beneath his palm.

His against my back.

The third behind our headboard, beating exactly between them.

I did not move. I did not breathe. I lay inside the cradle of his arm and counted again, the way you count money in the dark, certain it will change denominations if you rush it.

One. Two. Three.

One for the rhythm in my own chest, thick and drowsy. One for the deep knock behind me, where Ace's sternum pressed the flat of my shoulder blade. And one more, softer than either, patient, coming through the wood and the plaster and the paint, tapping the back of my skull through the pillow.

I counted a third time, because two could have been a mistake and three was a pattern. Mine. His. The third. Each one distinct, each one holding its place, none of them hurrying, none of them falling behind.

I held my breath. Behind me, Ace went rigid.

His hand did not leave my stomach. That was the worst of it, how gently his fingers stayed curled, how tender he was in a moment when tenderness had nowhere to go.

"Tell me you hear that."

His voice came out stripped, lower than his sleeping voice, lower than the voice he used with his customers when they tried to talk him down on a price.

He sat up. The sheet slid off his shoulders. He pressed his ear to the wallpaper, his whole body turned toward the wall the way a dog turns toward a sound it has decided to chase. His face emptied for half a second before he smiled.

"Water heater."

The heater was beneath the kitchen. The sound was touching his cheek.

I said nothing. His hand found mine in the dark and held it too hard, the way he held my hand on highways when the trucks ran close. His thumb moved against my knuckles in a rhythm that was not his heartbeat and not mine either, as if his body had picked up the third pulse without asking his permission.

He lay back down. He arranged me against him the way you arrange a pillow when you cannot sleep, and I let him, because I had always let him arrange me, and because something in the wall was listening to how we lay. His chest rose against my shoulder blades. His heart knocked its familiar knock. And behind the headboard, patient as a held breath, the third one kept on, exactly between them.

I counted until the numbers blurred. I told myself I was imagining it. I told myself pregnancy made you hear things — blood volume up, senses strange, the body turning into a place you had not yet learned the rooms of. I told myself all of it, and the pulse did not care. It went on being there, the way a person in the next room goes on being there while you pretend the house is empty.

We had bought the house six months earlier because it looked too ordinary for secrets. Beige siding. A crooked porch. Two bedrooms, one of them already waiting for a life we had not made yet. The inspector had found nothing. The light came in clean through every window.

It had two habits.

Whenever we were downstairs, footsteps crossed the bedroom above. Slow ones, barefoot ones, crossing from the window to the door and stopping there, as if deciding. Sometimes there were two sets. Sometimes the second one hurried, as if catching up.

Whenever we went up, they moved below. The same weight. The same pause. The same patience in the way they stopped.

The hall closet kept a dank, musty smell through bleach, vinegar, and paint. I emptied it twice. I washed the walls. The smell stayed, sweet underneath the rot, like something that had been closed up a long time and was glad to be remembered.

The realtor called both things settling.

I asked him once, early on, what exactly was settling. He laughed and said houses do that. He said the word settling the way doctors say normal. I signed the papers anyway, because Ace had already knelt in the backyard and found a horseshoe rusted to nothing in the grass, and he held it up like a vow, and I could not have told him no in that yard if the foundation had been built of skulls.

On our first night, we ate pizza on the floor of the living room and scratched our initials beneath the porch rail. Mine first. Then his, larger, underlining mine like a name being claimed.

That was the only exorcism the house ever got.

The storm came three weeks after we moved in. Not a bad one by Texas standards — no tornado sirens, no hail — just rain coming sideways and the sky working itself into a purple bruise by nine.

We lost the porch light first. Then the hallway.

Ace lit the candles we had bought and never needed. He set one on the dresser and one on the nightstand, and he watched me flinch at a crack of thunder the way you watch someone you love discover they are afraid of something small.

"Come here."

It was not a request. It was barely even an invitation. His voice went to that low register it reached when he stopped being reasonable with me, and something in my body answered before my mind could raise an objection.

I went.

He lay back against the headboard and pulled me down across his chest, my ear over his heart, his hand spread wide across the back of my head, holding me there. The thunder rolled. His heartbeat did not.

"Count," he said.

I counted. One. Two. Three. The rain struck the windows in handfuls. I kept losing the thread and he would tap my scalp, once, a command, and I would find it again.

"You don't sleep until you reach a hundred," he said. "And if you miscount, we start over."

I reached sixty and lost it to a white fork of lightning. He made me start over. I reached eighty-four and my breathing changed, slowed, and he felt it the way he felt everything, his hand tightening in my hair just enough to keep me from sliding under without permission.

"Ninety-seven. Ninety-eight. Ninety—"

"Keep going."

One hundred. My voice had gone to a whisper. The storm was still there but it had become weather in another county, background to the knock under my ear.

"Again," he said.

"Ace."

"Again. Slower this time."

And I understood then what he was doing. He was not soothing me. He was replacing the sound. The sky could crack itself open all it wanted; there would be one rhythm, his, and I would be made to follow it until following it was the only thing I knew how to do.

I reached a hundred the second time with my body already gone heavy and warm against him. He turned my face up with two fingers under my chin.

"Good girl," he said, and kissed me, and the storm did not matter at all anymore.

He did not let me sleep. Not yet. His mouth found my throat and he took his time there, teeth and tongue, learning the places that made my breath catch. He pushed the blanket off my legs and ran his palm up the inside of my thigh until I was shaking, until I made a sound I did not recognize.

"Look at me," he said.

I did. His eyes were black in the candlelight. Not dark. Black, the way the sky goes before the rain actually starts.

"Tell me what you want."

I could barely speak. "You."

"Then hold still."

He spread me open with his hands and looked at me for a long moment, the way you look at something you have paid for with years. Then he lowered his mouth to me and I stopped being able to think at all.

His tongue was slow and certain. He licked through my folds like he had all night, like the storm had agreed to wait on him. When he found my clit he circled it once, twice, and then sucked it gently into his mouth, and I cried out, and his hand clamped down on my hip.

"Quiet," he said against me. "The house is new. Let it wonder."

I bit my own knuckle. He worked me with his mouth and two fingers, curling them up inside me, finding the place that made my whole body bow. I came with my teeth sunk into my own hand, shaking so hard the mattress moved.

He kissed his way up my body — stomach, ribs, the underside of my breast — and settled his weight over me. I could feel him, hard and heavy, pressing against me, and I was still trembling from what he had done.

He took my wrists and pinned them above my head with one hand. He looked down at me.

"Beg."

"Ace—"

"Beg properly."

"Please," I whispered. "Please, I need you inside me."

He entered me in one deep stroke and I gasped. He filled me completely, stretched me, and I wrapped my legs around his waist to take him deeper. He did not move at first. He just held there, inside me, looking into my face, making me feel every inch of him.

"Mine," he said.

"Yours."

He began to move. Slow, deep thrusts that built with every stroke. The headboard knocked against the wall in a rhythm that answered the thunder outside. He watched my face the entire time, and when I tried to look away he caught my chin and turned me back.

"Eyes on me. I want to see it happen."

I came again with his name tearing out of my throat, my body clenching around him, and he groaned and drove deeper, and I felt him let go, felt him pour into me with a sound that was almost a growl.

We lay tangled in the candlelight, breathing each other in. Then he moved, and I thought he was done, but he turned me onto my stomach and pulled my hips up.

"Not yet," he said.

He knelt behind me and spread me with his thumbs and took me into his mouth again, his tongue deep and hungry, licking into me where he had just been. I moaned into the pillow. He lapped at me until I was dripping down my thighs, and then he entered me again from behind, one hand gripping my hip, the other tangled in my hair, holding my head down.

"Take it," he said. "All of it. That's my girl."

He fucked me hard and deep, the bed slamming, the thunder rolling over us like it was part of it. I reached back for him and he caught my hand and pinned it to the small of my back, and I surrendered to it completely, to being held and taken and used exactly the way he wanted.

When I came this time it ripped through me, and he followed a moment later, burying himself to the hilt and holding there, shuddering.

After, he pulled me back against his chest. My ear found his heart again, still knocking, steady as a metronome.

"Count," he said softly.

One. Two. Three. I counted his heartbeat until I slept, and the storm became nothing but weather somewhere else.

One for him. One for me. Nothing in between.

That was the whole ritual. That was all it had ever been.

I lay in the dark of the bedroom we had lived in for six months ...