Page 6 of The Marriage Blunder

She looked away, satisfied.

It was strange to be with someone and feel that every moment was being watched, not by them, but by some other, larger eye, the eye of expectation, the eye of what happens next.

Jude had shifted position. He sat now with one arm stretched along the top of the booth, fingers drumming lightly on the leather. The motion was unconscious, a little Morse code of anxiety. I watched the rhythm, tried to decode it, and found myself smiling.

He caught me looking, just for a moment, and looked away again.

I wondered if he remembered the handshake. I wondered if he’d ever noticed the way I couldn’t quite keep my eyes on Carolyn, or the way I kept checking the door when I was supposed to be watching the party.

I wondered, not for the first time, what the hell I was doing here.

I finished my scotch and poured another, because that is what you do in a club, because that is what you do when your life has been reduced to a set of obligations you can neither articulate nor decline.

I watched Jude drink his single glass of wine, alone in a booth full of people, and for the first time in years, I felt something like anticipation.

It was a mistake, and I knew it.

But I leaned into the feeling anyway.

It’s a known phenomenon that time bends in clubs. The hours double back on themselves, and if you’re lucky, you only lose track of a handful. If you’re not, you find yourself resurfacing from a vodka-scented time loop with a stranger’s shirt in your hand and a receipt for two thousand dollars you can’t explain.

My party wasn’t like that, not exactly. Carolyn kept things controlled. There was an itinerary. There were even small envelopes with handwritten names and assignments inside.

The DJ got paid extra to play “our” song at midnight, though Carolyn and I did not, to my recollection, have a song. She had selected one for us anyway. I didn’t recognize the song at all.

Jude sat at the end of the booth, glass in one hand, his phone in the other. He would check it every ten minutes as if looking for a plausible reason to look away from the table.

Each time, he’d push his glasses up his nose with two fingers, look at the screen, then set it down and roll his shoulder like he was warming up to leave. He never left. Not once.

I watched him. I watched the way his ears flushed when the bridesmaid in red laughed too loud at one of his comments. I watched the way he would start to smile and then catch himself, like joy was a thing that needed to be rationed for emergencies.

At one point, he listened to one of Carolyn’s friends talk about her disaster of a marriage for twenty uninterrupted minutes, face completely engaged, responding only with small sounds of acknowledgment or the occasional nod.

When she finished, he said something—four words—that made her laugh so hard she doubled over onto his arm. He looked mortified by the physical contact, but also, I thought, deeply satisfied by the effectiveness of the joke.

I’ve spent two decades reading people. I’ve sat through boardroom bloodbaths and figured out who was going to jump ship weeks before they sent their resignation emails. I knew the difference between real warmth and its manufactured equivalent.

Jude Allen Thomas was real. In a room designed to liquefy every sharp edge a person could have, he’d kept his. He’d just learned to hide them under a button-down and an ability to vanish into a conversation.

I was both envious and fascinated by it.

Carolyn reeled him in for a toast. Her friends gathered around, arms linked, all performing at maximum output. She handed him a shot glass and insisted. He raised it like it was a dare, then drank it, eyes closed, and I watched him make the decision to stay put instead of running for the water glass.

I liked him more for that.

After the third toast, he had acquired a faint flush across the cheeks. He set his wine down, looked at it, then looked at me. I raised my glass, and for a moment—just a flicker—he held my gaze.

It was nothing, but it was something.

The music intensified. The group moved from the booth to the dance floor. Carolyn didn’t invite me; I was meant to watch, not participate.

Jude hesitated at the edge, then got pulled in by a pair of insistent hands. He didn’t dance so much as allow himself to be danced at, like a mannequin being demoed for a prospective buyer.

The spectacle was brief, but I couldn’t look away.

He returned to the booth after the dance, breathing slightly faster, hair even more disheveled. I could smell the sweat and alcohol from three seats over.

He shed his jacket, draping it over the booth back, and then rolled his sleeves up, not all the way, but enough that I could see the paleness of his forearms.