Hati Beku Berselimut Sepi

I married him because he had the coldest eyes I had ever seen.

That sounds insane. I know. But when you grow up surrounded by heat, by the wet, grasping humidity of Jakarta that sticks to your skin like a second layer, when every man who looks at you does so with some kind of hunger or expectation or pity, a pair of cold eyes feels like a glass of water in a desert.

His name was Aris. Aris Pramono. Thirty-four years old. Wealthy in that quiet, old-money way that doesn't need to announce itself. His family owned shipping lines and rubber plantations and god knows what else. My father had lost everything in a bad deal, something involving palm oil futures and a partner who fled to Singapore. The details didn't matter. What mattered was that Aris needed a wife and my father needed a miracle.

I was the miracle.

The wedding was small. A civil ceremony in a room that smelled of air conditioning and old carpet. His mother sat in the front row with her hands folded, her face a mask of polite disapproval. My mother cried, but I never knew if it was from joy or shame. My father shook Aris's hand with both of his, a gesture so desperate it made my stomach turn.

Aris didn't flinch. He just looked at me with those eyes, pale gray like the underside of a monsoon cloud, and said, "Shall we?"

That was six months ago.

We live in a house in Menteng, a colonial relic with high ceilings and windows that don't quite close. The garden is overgrown with bougainvillea, purple and red and orange, the kind of riotous color that feels almost violent against the whitewashed walls. I spend my days walking through rooms that don't belong to me, touching furniture I didn't choose, sleeping in a bed that smells like someone else's detergent.

Aris sleeps in the room next to mine. Separate bedrooms. That was my condition.

He agreed without argument. Without even a flicker of disappointment. That should have reassured me. It didn't.

The first month, we barely spoke. We passed each other in the hallway like ghosts who had learned to share the same haunting ground. He left for work at seven, came home at nine, ate dinner alone in his study. I ate in the dining room, the long mahogany table set for one, the maid hovering at my elbow like a nurse attending an invalid.

I started to hate him. Not for what he did, but for what he didn't do. He never raised his voice. He never forgot to have the car ready when I needed to go somewhere. He never touched me.

That last part was the problem.

I didn't want him to touch me. I told myself that a hundred times. I didn't want his hands on my skin, his breath on my neck, his weight pressing me into a mattress that wasn't mine. But the wanting and the not wanting got tangled up in my chest like a knot I couldn't undo. I would lie awake at night, staring at the ceiling fan as it sliced the darkness into rotating shadows, and I would imagine what it would feel like if he came through the door.

Not because I wanted him. Because I wanted to know what it felt like to be wanted by someone who could have anyone.

That's the thing about cold people. They make you wonder what it would take to warm them.

Tonight, I am sitting on the back terrace, watching the rain fall into the empty swimming pool. The water is green with algae, thick as soup. A frog croaks somewhere in the depths. Aris said he would have it cleaned, but he never did. Another promise that slipped through his fingers like everything else.

I hear his footsteps before I see him. He walks with a particular weight, deliberate and unhurried. The kind of walk that says he has never had to rush for anyone.

"You're wet," he says.

I look down at my arms. The rain has blown in through the open terrace doors, speckling my skin with cold droplets. My batik shirt is damp at the shoulders.

"So are you," I say.

He's standing in the doorway, his white shirt clinging to his chest. He must have just come home. His hair is slicked back, darker than usual. He looks like a man who has been caught in a storm and decided he didn't mind.

"I have news," he says.

I wait.

"My mother wants to visit. Next week."

The words land between us like stones dropped into still water. His mother. The woman who spent the entire wedding reception talking about how her son deserved someone better, someone from a good family, someone who wasn't damaged goods.

"Why?" I ask.

"She wants to see how we're living. She thinks we're not... happy."

A laugh escapes me, sharp and bitter. "And what will you tell her?"

He steps onto the terrace. The rain is falling harder now, drumming against the concrete, filling the silence between us. He stops a few feet away, close enough that I can smell him. Cigarettes and rain and something else, something clean and metallic, like the air before a storm.

"I'll tell her we're fine."

"Fine."

"Yes."

"That's a lie."

He looks at me then, really looks at me, and for a moment his eyes aren't cold at all. They're tired. Heavy with something I can't name.

"I know," he says.

The rain falls. The frog croaks. I feel something shift in my chest, something I don't have a name for. Not love. Not even like. But a crack in the wall I've built between us, hairline thin, barely visible.

"What do you want from me, Aris?"

He doesn't answer. He just stands there, letting the rain soak through his shirt, letting it plaster his hair to his forehead. He looks younger like this. Less like the man who bought me and more like a boy who doesn't know what to do with his hands.

"I don't know," he says finally. "I thought I did. But I don't."

He turns and walks back inside, leaving me alone with the rain and the dark and the strange, unwelcome warmth spreading through my ribs.

I sit there until I'm shivering. Until my teeth chatter and my fingers go numb. And then I go inside, lock my bedroom door, and press my palm flat against the wood, wondering if he's doing the same on the other side.

He isn't. I can hear him in his study, the clink of a glass, the murmur of a phone call. His voice is low and even, the same voice he uses for everything. Business. Dinner. Me.

I press harder against the door, as if I could push through it, as if I could reach him with sheer pressure alone.

But I can't. And I don't know if I want to.

I just know that I'm tired of being cold alone.