To Save Our Marriage, My Husband Tied Me to the Headboard

The mattress dipped with his weight, a constant, gentle slope pulling her toward the centre. She resisted it, keeping her muscles tight to hold her position at the very edge. He slept on his right side, facing the wall. Even in sleep, his body seemed to occupy a carefully delineated territory, leaving a strip of cold sheet between them that felt intentional, a line drawn down the middle of the small bed.

It had been a month. Thirty-one nights of this. Thirty-one nights of lying awake in the dark of his bedroom, listening to him breathe. The sound was so familiar it was physically painful, a rhythm she had once been able to map her own sleep to. Now it just served as a reminder of his proximity, and of the distance.

She watched the faint light from the street filter through the thin curtains, tracing the pronounced curve of his spine. She knew the shape of him. She knew the way the muscles in his shoulders shifted when he was dreaming, the exact spot below his shoulder blade that was sensitive to her touch. Her fingers twitched at her side with the memory of it. She could reach out. It would be so easy to close the gap, to press her front to his back and slide an arm around his waist, to feel the warmth of his skin through the thin cotton of his t-shirt.

But she didn't move. The air in the room was too heavy, thick with everything they hadn't said since she’d carried her bags back up the three flights of stairs to his flat. It was easier to pretend to be asleep. Easier than initiating a touch that might be ignored, or worse, politely tolerated. They had sex, sometimes. Quiet, perfunctory acts in the dark that felt more like a contractual obligation than intimacy, a way of proving to themselves that this reunion was working. Afterwards, he would roll away, back to his side of the unspoken border, and the silence would rush back in to fill the space.

She could feel a dull ache spreading through her chest, a familiar longing for a version of him, of them, that she wasn't sure existed anymore. The Ethan who would pull her against him without thinking, whose hand would find hers in his sleep. She wondered if he ever lay awake like this, staring at her back, feeling the same chasm. Or if he slept soundly, content in the quiet arrangement they had made. She shifted her weight, the bed frame letting out a low creak, and his breathing hitched for a moment before settling back into its steady rhythm. He didn't move. She closed her eyes, but the image of his back remained, imprinted on the darkness.

A few evenings later, they were back in the same bed, propped against their respective pillows. The only light came from their phones, casting two separate, sterile blue rectangles onto their faces. The room was silent except for the faint, repetitive sound of Lena’s thumb swiping upwards on her screen, a mindless scroll through other people’s curated lives. On his side of the bed, Ethan was still.

She assumed he was reading something, an article or a long email from work. The silence wasn’t comfortable; it was the tense, deliberate quiet of two people in a confined space who had run out of safe things to say. It was a silence that made her ears ring.

“Lena?”

His voice, when it came, was so unexpected that she flinched. She didn’t look away from her phone. “Yeah?”

He cleared his throat. “I was reading something today.”

She waited, her thumb hovering over an image of a friend’s holiday in Greece. She could feel his hesitation like a physical presence in the air between them.

“It was this article,” he said, and his voice was aimed at the ceiling. “About couples. About… rebuilding intimacy.”

A cold, tight feeling seized her stomach. She kept her eyes fixed on the bright screen, but she wasn't seeing it anymore. The words hung in the space above the bed, stark and exposing.

“It talked about how, after a separation or a period of difficulty, the old patterns of physical interaction can feel… loaded,” he continued, his tone becoming unnaturally formal, as if he were reciting from a textbook. “So it proposed using structured scenarios. Exploring fantasies. As a way of communicating desire in a different context. A less pressurised one.”

He stopped talking. The silence that followed was different. It was active, demanding. He had taken the polite, unspoken agreement to ignore the deadness between them and ripped it open. He was talking about their sex. He was talking about the quiet, careful way they touched each other, the way they never looked at each other for too long afterwards. He was calling it what it was: a failure.

A hot, familiar wave of defensiveness washed over her. But beneath it, something else flickered. A sharp, surprising current of interest. It was the sheer audacity of it, of him naming the problem so clinically. Structured scenarios. He made it sound like a business proposal. Yet, it was the first time in a month that he had acknowledged the polite, hollow performance their physical relationship had become. He wasn't pretending anymore. In his own awkward, academic way, he was admitting that he wanted more. That he missed what they’d had.

Her first instinct was to say something cruel. Something like, So we’re scheduling it now? Is there a shared calendar for that? The words formed in her head, perfectly shaped and sharpened, ready to be deployed. It would be so easy to remind him that their entire relationship had fractured under the weight of his assumptions, his quiet expectations of what she should want, what she should be. This felt like more of the same, just packaged differently. A clinical, pre-approved framework for intimacy so he wouldn’t have to risk the messiness of asking her, directly, what she felt.

She lowered her phone, plunging her side of the bed into shadow. The screen on his phone was still lit, illuminating the tense line of his jaw. He was still staring at the ceiling, as if the answer he was waiting for might be written there. He wasn't looking at her. He was giving her an out, an opportunity to pretend she hadn't really heard, or to dismiss it with a noncommittal noise. She could just turn over and the conversation would be finished, another failed attempt swallowed by the quiet.

But she didn't turn away. She watched him. She saw the way his thumb was rubbing a frantic, repetitive circle on the edge of his phone case. He had braced himself for her rejection. It was there in the rigid set of his shoulders, the careful stillness of his body. He wasn't being arrogant or demanding. He was terrified. And beneath the terror, she could see the fragile, desperate hope that she might not say no. It was the most vulnerable he had looked in a month. More vulnerable than when he was inside her, his face buried in the dark.

The silence stretched. She could feel the steady, dull thud of her own heart against her ribs. To say no would be safe. It would maintain the sad, stable equilibrium they had established. They could continue like this for months, two polite ghosts sharing a bed, until the arrangement dissolved under its own weightlessness. To say yes felt like stepping off a ledge. It was an admission that this wasn't enough for her, either. It was handing him a piece of her, a piece he had broken before, and trusting him not to drop it.

She watched his throat move as he swallowed. He was still waiting.

The word came out before she had fully decided to let it. It felt foreign on her tongue.

“Alright.”

It was quiet, barely more than a breath, but it landed in the space between them with the force of a physical object. Ethan’s hand on his phone went still. He turned his head on the pillow, his eyes finally meeting hers in the dim light. He didn’t look relieved, not exactly. He looked startled, as if he couldn’t quite believe she’d said it. A long, slow breath escaped his lips, a sound of release that he seemed unable to hold in. He didn't say anything else. He just looked at her, and the distance between their pillows suddenly felt charged, a current running through the cold strip of sheet that separated them. Lena held his gaze, her own heart beating a frantic, unsteady rhythm, the single word she had spoken hanging in the air, fragile and immense.