Page 37 of Mr. and Mrs. Novak

"Because we've heard some things that worry us and we wanted to talk to you."

The atmosphere in the room suddenly turns icy. The silence stretches out, heavy as lead. I can sense Sophia's discomfort from here. She has never been able to lie to her parents, and each passing second seems to heighten the tension.

"Tell me, you two..."

Loïc leaves his sentence hanging, scrutinizing our faces one after the other. His eyes, usually warm, have become two cutting blades that seem to want to slice through our lies.

"You didn't go on your honeymoon. Is there something we should know?"

Sophia freezes in her chair.

"We had an emergency to handle at Gloventis, and Sophia suggested postponing it until later," I lie brazenly.

My voice sounds false to my own ears, but I maintain a façade smile.

"Until when?" asks Renée, her eyes not leaving her daughter's.

Damn! We don't have a date. The silence stretches dangerously. I'm frantically searching for an answer when Sophia intervenes:

"This summer," she says, a bit too quickly. "I still need to negotiate with my colleagues, but it's coming together."

Her voice trembles imperceptibly on the last words. Renée and Loïc don't comment but don't seem to believe us either. I feel their piercing gazes settling on us like merciless spotlights, trying to see through our façade. Sophia gives me a brief glance, a flash of forced complicity, and we realize that this time we're on the same team. Neither of us wants her parents to discover the mess that is our marriage. If that happened, Renée would send us straight to couples therapy and Loïc... Loïc would try to understand why I'm making his daughter unhappy.

If he found out about Natasha, I'm a dead man.

The conversation then drifts to easier subjects, but the shadow of doubt hangs over the table throughout the meal. The dinner soon ends in palpable relief.

Once Sophia's parents have gone to bed, we find ourselves in the forced intimacy of our bedroom. We avoid talking about sensitive subjects, not knowing whether her parents can hear us or not.

It’s been a long time since we’ve found ourselves in the intimacy and tight space of a bedroom, and the irony of it isn’t lost on me. The last time was two days before our wedding, and we did everything but sleep. God, I miss the scent of her and the softness of her skin.

Sophia's discomfort is palpable; every movement she makes seems calculated to maintain a distance between us. Her eyes deliberately avoid mine, and the tension in the room is almost unbearable.

I decide to act as naturally as possible, although my heart threatens to leap out of my chest.

"Do you want to take a shower first, or can I go?" I ask her, my voice hoarser than I would have liked.

"Go ahead, I'll go after," she responds quickly, as if she were eager to get rid of my presence.

The shower was quick; I wash hastily before coming out. Without even taking the time to get dressed, a towel carelessly knotted around my hips, I return to the bedroom, aware of being almost naked. Sure enough, Sophia's gaze lingers, despite herself, on my chest, descends along my stomach, then abruptly rises. The air in the room heats up suddenly, charged with a tension that has nothing to do with the previous discomfort.

She jumps off the bed where she was waiting her turn and dashes into the bathroom, fleeing from me like the plague. The door slams behind her. I snicker inwardly, a mixture of amusement and frustrated desire. The night promises to be interesting, or at least terribly long.

When she returns, dressed in a loose t-shirt and pajama bottoms, an outfit that is meant to be deterring but which, paradoxically, stimulates my imagination, I have only one desire: to discover what she's hiding underneath. Each centimeter of her skin that disappears under the fabric becomes a territory to reconquer.

She gives me a suspicious glance, as if she had seen through my lustful thoughts, before making her way around the bed at a cautious distance, as if I might grab her as she passes. She slides under the comforter with rapid and precise movements.

She immediately turns off the light on her side, lies down at the extreme edge of the mattress, and deliberately turns to the other side, presenting her back to me like a wall.

"Good night," she says in a voice that tries to be neutral but betrays her nervousness.

"Good night, Sophia," I respond softly, letting a promise linger in my voice that I may not keep.

I turn off my light. Sleep is slow to come, even impossible. Feeling her so close to me without being able to touch her is true torture. The darkness amplifies every sound. Her breathing, the rustling of the sheets when she moves slightly, and I could swear I can hear her heartbeat. I have to restrain myself several times from invading her personal space. My desire for her is so violent that it becomes almost painful, and the very idea of being able to sleep is absurd.

I bet that if I moved toward her, I would find her in the same state. The minutes stretch out, endless, and I tell myself that this must be what hell is like: being next to the object of your desire without being able to touch it. Finally, I hear her breath calm down, become deeper, more regular. Then very gently, so as not to wake her, I move closer to her centimeter by centimeter, holding my breath. I put an arm around her waist, expecting at any moment that she'll wake up and push me away. But she only sighs in her sleep and, reassured, I drift off too, lulled by the warmth of her body against mine.

Something warm caresses me as I emerge from my sleep. It's completely dark and it takes me two seconds to remember that I'm in bed with Sophia. I freeze as I fully grasp the situation. One of Sophia's arms is wrapped around my waist, while her hand is on my anatomy. At the thought, the blood rushes out more and my member expands in her hand. I hold my breath when her fingers tighten slightly, moving in a slow, unconscious rhythm. She seems half asleep and doesn't realize what she's doing. Her voice implores my name in a half-sleep: it's indecently erotic.