Page 9 of The Marriage Blunder

We sat with that. The honesty hung in the air, a third party at the table, demanding acknowledgment.

He reached for his glass, found it empty, and set it down with exaggerated care. “I’m not good at these things,” he repeated, softer.

I covered his hand with mine. Not a grab, just contact. His skin was warm. He looked at our hands, then back at me. The noise in the club faded to a background hum, the lights to a pattern of slow motion.

I became acutely aware of the inch of space between our faces, the way his hair had fallen forward, the fact that his breathing had sped up. I felt my own pulse climbing to match.

He said, “Are you—”

I didn’t let him finish. I leaned in. I don’t remember the next part. Not the details. Not the order of operations. I remember the taste of wine and the shock of his mouth against mine, the way he gasped into the contact, the way his hand tightened on my wrist.

I remember thinking, this was the first true thing I’d done in months.

The rest was noise and color, a sequence of images: Jude’s glasses askew, his laugh muffled against my shirt, the heat of his hand on my neck, the way he whispered something—my name, I think—right before everything spun out into a blur.

I don’t know how long we stayed in that booth. I don’t know who noticed, or if they even did. I didn’t care. It ended the way all good things do, with a blackout and the promise of consequences.

I woke up the next morning not knowing what city I was in, not knowing what time it was, not knowing, at first, whose hand was tangled in mine.

I didn’t let go.

Chapter Three

~ Jude ~

The bed was larger than my last apartment and softer than the sum total of every bed I’d slept on since college. I woke up cocooned in what I could only describe as an unreasonable quantity of bedding—heavy cream linens, thread count verging on the criminal.

For the first three seconds, I had no idea where I was, except that it wasn’t my hotel room, wasn’t any room I’d ever paid for, and wasn’t a scenario for which I had packed a contingency plan.

The next three seconds were dedicated to the headache. I am not a man prone to melodrama, but the headache demanded a level of respect that bordered on ceremonial. It didn’t throb. It didn’t pulse. It radiated, cool and steady, as if my brain had simply decided it was time to retire and was making the announcement as public as possible.

I lay perfectly still, staring at the ceiling, and performed the necessary internal audit.

First: The club, the booth, the ice bucket, the orange juice, the bridesmaids’ contest, and Carolyn’s laughter spiking through the music at unpredictable intervals.

Second: Kenneth James. More specifically, Kenneth’s knee pressing against mine under the table, and the part where neither of us moved it away. The scotch-flavored kiss, the impossibility of the moment, which was then, suddenly and inarguably, just the moment.

Third: The elevator, the room number, the corridor that doubled back on itself three times and deposited us in a suite that looked like a Bond villain’s reward for good behavior. The shutting of the door and the way my hands, usually so good at staying where they were told, ended up on him like they had a mind and a graduate degree of their own.

Fourth: The rest.

My body already knew what my brain hadn’t caught up to, which was that the night had not ended at the edge of the booth, not even close, and that what followed was both more spectacular and more catastrophic than anything I had ever let myself imagine.

The inventory populated in real time: the weight of him, the scratch of beard on my jaw, the way his hands—always so controlled, so sure—lost that certainty in contact with skin. The aches in places on my body where there shouldn’t be aches.

Very bad, I decided.

I turned my head, slowly, because the headache didn’t approve of sudden movements.

Kenneth was asleep beside me… a very naked Kenneth as far as I could see. He was on his back, one arm thrown up over the pillow, the other draped across the bare sheet.

His hair—the salt-and-pepper that had dominated my thoughts for most of a year—was rumpled in a way that suggested even it had given up for the night.

He breathed slow and even. Chest rising and falling with the kind of tranquility that made me want to both study it and set it on fire.

I watched him for four seconds, maybe five, the amount of time it takes to count out a short lifetime of regret and want and the knowledge that if I didn’t look away right now, I never would.

I looked away.