Chapter 22
22
Kayla
“A man and a woman who have been cohabiting decide to get married. The woman asks the man to agree that all of the property she now owns will remain in her name if they get divorced. He agrees, but demands a written document.
“However, they get married without having signed anything. Three months later, the wife leaves the husband for another man. She sends him notice to vacate the apartment based on their prenuptial agreement. He refuses and the wife sues, asking that their oral prenuptial agreement be enforced. Is the court likely to enforce the wife’s claim?” I glance up from my laptop screen. “Do you want me to read the possible answers?”
“I want you to shut that door and come over here,” Gabe says with a smile that makes my entire body tingle. We’re in one of the study rooms at the library. I’ve been meeting him here to help him prepare for the bar, but frankly it’s been pretty hard to concentrate. All I want is for him to sweep everything off the table and have his way with me, and from the way he’s looking at me, he’s probably thinking the same thing. I have purposely sat as far away from him as possible. Tearing my eyes from him, I continue.
“A: Yes, because the consideration for the contract was the marriage and its consummation made the contract enforceable. B –”
“You know I never considered fighting Gretchen for the apartment? I mean, it was my apartment, but I didn’t want to live there anymore after she cheated. I even paid my half of the rent until she moved out. Isn’t that crazy?” He twirls his pencil absently and looks out the window. I can never tell if he wants to talk about Gretchen or not. I wonder if he still loves her. Given that we’re basically just fuckbuddies, it shouldn’t matter to me, but it baffles me that a woman could have this man’s love and throw it away.
She is obviously the reason for the melancholy I noticed when he first walked into the café. Affection begins to well up in my chest like it did that day, only now we’ve had a week of having sex in the Navigator, a week of seeing who can find the cutest dog pictures on the internet (I won with a snapshot of a woman holding a full-grown German Shepherd like a baby). A week of lunches in the back booth at the café, where he sits right next to me with a heavy arm around my shoulder, nuzzling my neck and eating the extra basket of fries I now know I have to order for him. He likes me to lie next to him after sex and rest my head on his chest. He puts on a sock and a shoe and a sock and shoe, rather than first socks, then shoes, which is possibly the craziest thing I have ever seen a human do. When he was five, he found a piece of gray agate on a walk with his grandfather, which he now keeps in his pocket, for luck.
We’re just friends, I tell myself firmly, fighting the urge to go sit in his lap. Old friends who have delightful sex and will stop as soon as one of us gets a job and moves away. Or who knows, maybe we’ll still text, then hook up every once in a while when we’re both back in town. But we certainly aren’t, or ever will be, anything more than friends.
I try to draw the conversation back to the matter at hand. “Did you and Gretchen have an oral prenuptial agreement?” I ask, keeping my voice light.
“No.” He’s still gazing out the window, lost in thought.
“If you did, would she have been in her rights to refuse to vacate?”
Slowly he turns his attention back to me and blinks a little, like he’s surprised, but pleased, to see me there. He looks like a man who’s waking up from a dream. I’m about to repeat the question when he replies.
“Yes. The couple in the question only had an oral agreement. According to most state laws, promises made in consideration of marriage have to be in writing to be enforceable.”
“Very good, Counsel,” I answer. “And no, I don’t think you’re crazy for paying your half of the rent. It was the gentlemanly thing to do, and I wouldn’t expect any less of you.”
“ You wouldn’t have let me,” he says with a grin.
“ I wouldn’t have cheated on you,” I retort, scrolling down my list of sample bar exam questions in search of a stumper. “I’m kind of famous for being honest. It used to drive Alli nuts. In college she paid a design student $200 to Photoshop fake IDs for us, but I would never use mine. I still gave her my half, though.” I look up at him with a smirk and am surprised by the serious expression on his face. He seems to be studying me carefully. He opens his mouth to say something, then apparently thinks better of it.
When he finally speaks again, he simply asks, “So what’s the next question?”
You know I wouldn’t ask if I wasn’t really desperate
I know, but Sunday mornings are my time off, and I have so little time off as it is
I’ll pay you twice what you would have earned at the café. You’ll be doing me an enormous favor
I sigh. Meg and Jason are both up to their eyeballs preparing for Hungry Hearts—she’s finalizing her catering menu, he’s obsessing over his playlist—and are desperate for me to babysit starting at 10:00 A.M. on Sunday. Ordinarily I’d be happy to, but I have a dastardly plan to sneak off to a B he makes fun of my refusal to go barefoot in a hotel room. I discover that he showers at night and prefers the right side of the bed.
Not that we go to sleep right away. Sex in a normal bed is just as dreamy as I thought it would be. We turn the lights down low (“Not off,” Gabe had insisted, “I want to be able to see you”), undress fully, and take our time.
I run my fingers through his thick, dark brown hair, noticing for the first time the hints of red that gleam in the soft lamplight. His skin is a few shades lighter than mine. I admire the contrast and wonder, before pushing the thought away, whether our children would inherit his pale complexion or my tawny one. I stroke the stubble starting to form on his cheeks, which always rubs my chin and breasts and thighs raw whenever we meet late at night. He has just the right amount of chest hair: not a dense forest, but not bare skin, either.
Before I explore any lower, I gently push him onto his back and climb on top of him for the first time.
“Now why haven’t we done this before?” Gabe asks softly, reaching up to massage my breasts as I rub against his cock, teasing him before taking him inside.
“Because,” I say, perilously close to coming already, “we were in your stupid car, and I didn’t want anyone to see.”
“I’ll have you know,” he says, a little breathlessly, “that Car and Driver praised both the length and width of the 2016 Lincoln Navigator. It’s considered a luxurious ride.”
“Are we still talking about the car?” I ask, before beginning to ease him inside me. By now I ought to be used to his length and width, but I’m not, not quite. The challenge of taking him in all the way turns me on, though, and now I go slow not only because I have to, but because I want to. I slide him in a little, then retreat, then a bit deeper, then retreat again, watching the sweat bead on his upper lip and forehead. I love the feeling of being in control and knowing that I have the power to please us both.
He almost ruins the moment, though, by trying to roar like a British lion just as I take him in up to the hilt. I laugh so hard that I collapse on top of him.
“What was that ?”
“I was trying to be debonair. No good?”
“You sounded like a pretentious house cat being run over by a bicycle.”
He laughs his deep, rumbly laugh, but also starts thrusting his hips into mine, and suddenly I’m not laughing anymore. Instead I’m coming, hard, as he strokes my clit and spans both my breasts with one big hand. I clutch his chest and let myself scream, undoubtedly shocking our polite B&B hosts. Gabe flips me onto my back and keeps thrusting, setting fireworks off inside me again and again. After he comes, he looks down into my eyes and gives me his sweetest best-friend smile. I smile back up at him and brush his sweaty hair from his forehead. I feel incredibly lucky to have a friend like him: someone I can talk to, laugh with, and, now, have amazing sex with. I sure hope he’ll text me every once in a while after we both move away.
He rolls off of me and I snuggle into his side, breathing in the smell of soap and pine-forest cologne and sweat. We talk, drowsily, of this and that before falling asleep in each other’s arms.
The next day, we’re crammed into a booth at the café, with me, Molly, Daisy, and Hadyn, Gabe’s youngest nephew, on one side, and Gabe, Maddie, and Tyler on the other.
“So you’re telling me,” Maddie is saying, staring intently into my eyes with a hot chocolate mustache over her upper lip, “that there was totally room for Jack on that raft?”
“Totally,” I nod emphatically.
“So why didn’t Rose just scootch over?!” Molly, Meg and Jason’s oldest, demands.
We’d decided to join forces and take all of our babysitting charges sledding. Kentwood’s steepest hill has a smallish, okayish swimming pool at the top and metal Frisbee golf baskets scattered across the bottom. These jut about three and a half feet out of the ground and sport a shallow receptacle right at child-head height. Avoiding them is part of the fun of sledding in Kentwood—if you’re a kid. If you’re an adult, as Gabe and I quickly discovered, they scream CONCUSSION CONCUSSION CONCUSSION, and at one point we both had to fly down the hill to shove Maddie off her collision course. I’d reached her first and shouted “Watch out for the iceberg!” in as carefree a voice as I could muster. Then they all wanted to play Avoid the Iceberg until Gabe and I couldn’t take it anymore and bundled them off to the café, where we’d had to explain about RMS Titanic, the ship, and then, inevitably, Titanic , the movie.
Tyler and Daisy, Meg and Jason’s youngest, needed all the gory details about the shipwreck, so the two of them are hunched over Gabe’s phone, doomscrolling.
“They had nowhere near enough lifeboats and they didn’t even fill them all the way up!” Tyler exclaims.
“The water was so cold that you would die instantly if you touched it!” Daisy practically shouts.
“So sure, Rose loved Jack, but if she had married him, or her despicable fiancé, she would probably have been a stay-at-home mom for the rest of her life, and she wouldn’t have been able to have cool adventures,” I explain to Molly and Maddie.
“Wait, what?” Molly objects. “She was engaged to two guys at the same time?”
“Wait, what?” Gabe objects. “You think she purposefully let Jack get hypothermia and die so she could, like, fly airplanes and ride horses on the beach?”
“I’m not saying she killed him,” I reply. “I’m just saying there were advantages for her to delay getting married for a decade or two.”
“Ouch!” Hadyn shouts, and for a second Gabe and I both think he’s responding to our debate, before we realize that he’s plunged his chubby fist into his hot chocolate to retrieve a marshmallow. Gabe grabs the cup before it spills onto our entire side of the booth and I dip a napkin in cold water to soothe his skin. I encourage him to fish out the rest of the marshmallows with a spoon—what a concept!—and Gabe orders a round of fries for everyone. As we munch, and the kids debate whether the whole women and children first policy was fair and smear ketchup on their faces and chests and elbows, Gabe shoots me a look that says, We’re good at this . He is, that’s for sure. The kids obviously adore him. And watching him wipe Maddie’s nose while simultaneously explaining to Hadyn that zipping up his coat will make him warmer , not colder , made my heart twist into knots that even Eagle Scout Gabe can’t untie.
Except for the close brush with a brain injury , my eyeballs shoot back.
Let’s pretend that never happened , his eyeballs reply.
I smile at him and he squeezes my knee under the table. But he seems contemplative as we herd the kids out of the café and into our respective cars.
“You okay?” I ask, touching his arm after he’s buckled Hadyn into his car seat. “Sure,” he says, unconvincingly.
“You know I would totally make room on the raft for you,” I tell him with a smile.
“Would you? Even if there were other people around? Even if you had someone else in your life?”
“What are you talking about? Yes ,” I reply, feeling a little worried by his serious tone. “Wilson—” I begin again, but he interrupts me by pulling me to him with one hand and cupping my face with the other.
“I would encourage you to fly,” he says, looking straight into my eyes, “whether we were married or not.”
We’re just friends , I sternly tell my heart, which is racing toward the word married like a 50,000-ton ship toward an iceberg. I know he doesn’t mean it. Surely he would tease me mercilessly if I acted like I took him seriously. I try to think of a joke to pull us back into comfortable fuckbuddy territory, but for some reason the words won’t come.
So instead I just place a palm on his broad chest and try not to think too much about the warm skin beneath his coat. The corners of his mouth turn up in response. But he doesn’t kiss me, because he knows the kids are watching.