Sleeping on his lap

"Why do you let him do this to you?" he asked, examining the deep purple bruise on her face.
"I don't let him. He just does it," she replies.
She comes practially once a week to him, her former lover, now divorced, and puts her head in his lap. Mostly they are just quiet, and he runs his fingers through his hair. He will not touch her in any other way since her marriage, choosing a sun-kissed swimming coach whose skin seemed perpetually tanned, with golden hair, who smelled of chlorine and coconut oil.
"This has to stop," he said.
"One day it will," she said, trying to convince herself. But he knew it wouldn't. She would still come here, escaping from the violence that had become her world.
One day her husband came over, finding her head on his lap.
"That's my wife, what are you doing, you asshole?" her husband shouted. His hands were balled into fists.
"She's sleeping. You can hit me," he said.
And he did. When she woke, she found her former lover bleeding all over, with his teeth on the floor. She got up, and walked back to her home, and never returned.