Page 66 of Homewrecker

I turned my head to see that he was awake, watching me.

“What?”

“You’re thinking.”

“I do that sometimes.”

His hand found mine beneath the sheet. Our fingers intertwined. It was exactly what I wanted… A hand reaching for mine in the dark.

Caleb lifted my hand before he kissed my knuckles. And there went another piece of my common sense. I closed my eyes.

I told myself that I was simply loving a man whose marriage had ended before I got there. The paperwork was just behind. That story felt good, so I climbed inside it and made myself comfortable.

By morning, I was barefoot in Caleb’s kitchen making coffee. He came up behind me and kissed my cheek.

I looked around the empty apartment. “We need to do something about this place.”

His brows lifted. “We?”

Instead of correcting myself, I smiled. “We.”

That was how quickly I settled into the lie. I was the one who looked at a legal wife and decided separation made her almost an ex. I was the one who knew there was still paperwork. And I chose the version that hurt least.

Years later, people would ask how I could sleep at night. How I could live with myself. How I could knowingly be with a married man for three years. They imagined guilt must’ve followed me everywhere. Sometimes it did, but they were wrong about the beginning.

In the beginning, I slept beautifully. I thought I was waiting for the paperwork to catch up to a love story that had already begun.

9

Blair

There were very few things in life more humbling than sitting half naked on crinkly paper with your goods hanging out of a gown. Maybe getting arrested for something stupid, but gynecological appointments were definitely top five.

I sat on the edge of the examination table with my phone in one hand and my dignity folding between my clothes on the chair.

My phone buzzed.

Nash: What are you doing?

I looked around, seeing a plastic vagina diagram on the wall.

Blair: At an appointment.

Nash: Everything okay?

I smiled and that had been happening a lot lately. I was always smiling at my phone like someone’s sixteen-year-old daughter.

Blair: Routine check-up. I’m fine.

Nash: Good.

Nash: I was about to ask if you wanted to get dinner tonight.

It had been a week since our first date.

Seven days of texts, phone calls, memes, and random questions. We even had a forty-minute argument about whether Love & Basketball was actually romantic or a horror film that collectively convinced Black people to overlook several red flags. We had talked until almost one in the morning twice. I was having fun, and that was all I was willing to call it.

I wasn’t dating Nash with visions of marriage floating around my head. I didn’t know the man well enough to imagine a future, but I liked him. And apparently my body had received that information before the rest of me was prepared to discuss it. Because I was at the gynecologist getting back on birth control.