Free Bird in Hand by Christina Baker Kline

willed herself to stop.
    The hotel room was small and dark and stylish, a jewel box. Its one window had a postcard view of Broadway, miniature yellow cabs and neon lights and pedestrians. Claire sat on the chocolate brown velvet bedcover and smoothed it with her hand. Cold light on pale skin; no candles, no music. They were awkward with each other, not knowing how to begin. She looked at Charlie and started unbuttoning her blouse, and he came over to the bed and knelt beside her. He slipped his hand between her legs and pushed up her skirt. She leaned back with her eyes open, feeling his slippery fingers inside her, his breath hot on her thigh.
    Afterward, they took the elevator to the ground floor in silence. The hotel was busier than it had been earlier in the evening; the elevator stopped three times before they reached the lobby. Claire looked at Charlie, his cheeks flushed and hair still damp from the shower, and wondered if anyone could guess. Of course, she thought; people do this all the time, don’t they? Step across invisible lines, reach over and touch the forbidden. It was easier than she’d imagined.
    “I didn’t ask for this,” she whispered to Charlie, but of course she did, one way or another. What attracted her to Charlie was indefinable, a feeling in the pit of her stomach. She felt wild with him, spontaneous. But Charlie wasn’t inherently this way; if anything, he was more conventional than she was—leading a comfortable suburban life, shouldering the burdens of domestic responsibility without complaint. It was only the two of them together that felt unpredictable.
    Why did she want this? Why did she need it?
    Only two months ago, she had been pregnant. The miscarriage had been terrible, but when it was over she’d been strangely relieved. Ben was the one who had pushed for the baby—he wanted them to be a family, he’d said. She had gone along with it, but secretly she’d been ambivalent. Afraid of losing her autonomy, her ambition. Afraid of being a bad mother. Afraid of feeling trapped. When he asked, now—which he did every few weeks—and she said she wasn’t ready to try again; she didn’t know if she’d ever be ready, he half-nodded, chin up, like he was taking a blow without flinching. She knew that he would wait a while and try again. He believed his patience would trump her unreasonableness. What he didn’t know—and what she barely understood herself—was that she wanted to hurt him in small ways to toughen herself for hurting him worse.
    Standing outside by the revolving door, Claire wrapped her coat tightly around her, though it wasn’t cold.
    “How do you feel?” Charlie asked.
    “Crazy. Guilty. Do you feel guilty?”
    “This is between us. It has nothing to do with them.”
    But of course it had everything to do with them.
    Claire remembered falling in love with Ben—how unfettered they were, how young. Now she felt old and jaundiced. Cruel. She would have liked to talk to her best friend about it, but her best friend was Alison. She would have liked to talk to her husband, but that, too, was impossible. The only one she could talk to was Charlie, and he was as culpable as she was. They were bound together by deception, like two thieves on the run. Fleetingly she wondered if the passion she felt for him was merely a manifestation of her restlessness, if she had transferred the anxiety she felt about getting settled, stale, becoming her mother, perhaps, into this feeling propelling her into another kind of life, terrifyingly open-ended, the dissolution of everything good and proper and right.

Chapter Four
    “Oh, Lord, Alison . How terrible,” her mother gasped when Alison called to tell her parents about the accident.
    “Yes,” she said grimly.
    “That poor family,” her mother said. “How awful. Just awful.”
    Alison could feel a surge of tears against the dam of her rib cage.
    “Are the police … Are you being charged with anything?” her father