Chapter Seven
~ Jude ~
Three days after Las Vegas, I was standing in front of my open closet, holding a bowtie like it was a bomb and I had been tasked with deciding which wire to cut.
The night before, Kenneth sent a link to the tie. No subject, no context. Sixty seconds later: “Wear it.”
I had stared at that text for eleven minutes.
It was not the only one. Kenneth’s messages arrived at a measured, unpredictable tempo, like he was testing the interval between lightning and thunder.
Sometimes it was a dry link to a Wall Street Journal article—“Thought you’d find the implications amusing”—sometimes a question about real estate investment trusts or gallery acquisitions, sometimes a photo of the view from his penthouse, city lights fracturing the window and no caption.
That one I looked at for an embarrassing amount of time. I saved it to my camera roll, then deleted it, then restored it, then decided to pretend it had never happened.
I knew what he was doing. The deliberate contact, the specific frequency, the not-quite-implied demands.
If I’d had even a single functioning boundary, I would have blocked him.
Instead, I found myself standing in my closet, holding the tie and weighing the merits of defiance versus capitulation like they were variables in a system I could game if I tried hard enough.
My closet was arranged by color, then by function, then by cut. I owned a total of four suits, three pairs of dress shoes, and enough button-downs that I could go a month without doing laundry if I didn’t spill anything.
I also owned, until now, exactly one bowtie. It was plaid, purchased as a joke for a New Year’s party in college, and it still had a faint whiff of champagne on it from the night my old roommate had dared me to see how many olives I could fit in my mouth at once.
I had never worn a silk bowtie. I had never worn anything that had to be dry-cleaned unless someone else paid for it. I had never, to my knowledge, received a clothing directive from a man whose forearms had occupied the better part of my thoughts for eleven consecutive months.
I looped the tie around my neck. I had to look up how to do the knot, which was its own humiliation; the YouTube video featured a twelve-year-old with better fine motor skills than I had ever possessed, and I spent a full five minutes in front of the mirror practicing before it looked even remotely acceptable.
When it did, I stepped back and regarded the result.
Glasses: on, but threatening to slide. Hair, as always, resisting any attempt at control, but I had flattened it with water so that at least I looked like a person who understood how grooming was supposed to work.
My shirt was white, buttoned all the way up, a move that said “I want to be taken seriously” but also, “I am afraid of what my own collarbones might imply.”
The bowtie, front and center, was perfectly aligned as if daring anyone to mention it so I could have an excuse to take it off.
I closed the closet, hiding the world’s most neurotic color gradient from view, and checked my watch.
I still had nineteen minutes.
On the desk, my phone vibrated with a new notification. I ignored it, then immediately caved and checked anyway. It was not Kenneth. It was a calendar alert: “Car service, 6:45 sharp. Do not be late.”
I had objected to the car. “It’s unnecessary,” I’d texted back, “and also the subway is faster at this hour.”
He replied, “The subway is never faster.”
It should have been infuriating, the way he presumed control over every interaction. The way he set the terms, the tempo, the level of engagement.
Instead, I found it oddly… steadying. Like he had established the ground rules for a game I wasn’t sure I wanted to play, but couldn’t stop thinking about anyway.
I checked my reflection one more time. The mirror was mounted on the inside of the closet door, a design decision I’d made years ago in order to reduce the overall number of surfaces in my life.
My face stared back at me: light brown eyes behind black frames, skin currently at its ghostly winter peak, the bowtie sitting on my neck like a dare.
I looked like someone who had made a decision and was now pretending it wasn’t a decision at all.
The phone vibrated again. This time it was Kenneth: “Car’s early. You can come up when you arrive.”
I picked up my jacket, shrugged it on, and left the apartment, double-checking the lock twice before telling myself to stop being insane.
The elevator smelled faintly of industrial lemon and regret. I rode it down to the lobby, where the doorman—who had, on previous occasions, referred to me as “professor”—raised an eyebrow at my neckwear but said nothing.
Outside, the car waited exactly where Kenneth said it would. Black Mercedes, windows tinted darker than was probably legal, the kind of ride that announced itself as “not here for you, but you can pretend if you want.” The driver stood by the door, hands folded, expressionless.
“Mr. Thomas?” he said.
“Yes,” I said, and slid into the back seat. The door closed with a sound that was engineered to evoke safety, luxury, and the impossibility of escape.
As we pulled away from the curb, I watched my building recede in the window.
I made a mental note of the route: down Riverside, cross at Seventy-Second, west toward Central Park.
The car was silent except for the hum of the city outside and the occasional mechanical click of the driver’s hands on the wheel.
At the first red light, I caught my own reflection in the window. The bowtie looked even more pronounced in the city’s sodium glare.
I wondered what Kenneth would say about it—if he’d say anything at all, or just file it away as a data point, a variable to be adjusted for in whatever model he was running in his head.
I realized, with something between resignation and anticipation, that I didn’t care either way. I was going. The decision had been made hours ago, or maybe days, or maybe last week, when Kenneth kissed me in a club full of witnesses and didn’t look away.
The car turned onto a wide avenue, picking up speed, and I sat back, letting the seat absorb the tension I wasn’t about to let show anywhere else.
It was going to be a disaster.
I could hardly wait.
The car rolled up a driveway of a tall residential building built of white brick.
The building itself was the kind of imposing that required a different version of yourself to enter.
The columns spanning the main doors were real, not decorative.
The entryway was sized for people who wanted to be reminded of their own importance every time they came home.
I stood outside for a full thirty seconds, cataloguing the number of ways this could go wrong.
The best-case scenario was that I walked in, made it through dinner, and escaped without revealing the several things about myself that I preferred to keep at the subatomic level.
The worst-case scenario was that I said something inappropriate and got banished from polite society, which I had already done once this week and wasn’t eager to repeat.
I headed inside and then made my way to the elevators. The ride up was simple and nerve-racking all at the same time. By the time I reached Kenneth’s floor, my palms were sweating. I quickly rubbed them on my slacks and then stepped out of the elevator.
The front door opened before I could knock. “Mr. Thomas,” said the man in the doorway, a butler so crisply turned out that I suspected he had a backup shirt starched and waiting at all times. “Welcome.”
His name was Adams. I knew this because Kenneth had, with minimal preamble, sent me a summary of the household staff and the major dietary restrictions of everyone who might conceivably attend dinner.
“Adams keeps the house. He is discreet, but not infallible. Assume everything you say will be relayed, if not by intent then by osmosis.”
Adams looked at my bowtie for half a second, then at my shoes, then at my face, as if checking to see whether the whole was greater than the sum of its parts. He decided it was, or at least that I would do, and ushered me inside.
The scent was wood polish and something warm from the kitchen—baking bread, maybe, or a sauce with enough garlic to kill off the rest of my dating prospects for the season.
I barely had time to register the shine of the floors or the fact that there was an original Anurak sculpture on a pedestal by the stairs—white marble, cold and angular, worth more than my apartment and probably the one next to it—before a voice called out from the hall.
“Jude!”
I turned and nearly collided with Kyue Kincaid, who looked exactly the same as the last time I’d seen him, which was a month ago in a hotel conference room in Tokyo: long dark hair, laid back posture, and the kind of expression that read as “I am listening to you, but also to the eight conversations happening in adjacent time zones.”
He stopped, took in the bowtie, and grinned in a way that would have been undetectable to anyone but me.
“Hey,” I said, which was not what I meant to say, but it was the only word that made it out intact.
“You could have told me,” he said, voice pitched low for my benefit, the rhythm already locked in from years of collaboration. “About Kenneth.”
I shook my head, smiling despite myself. “You know confidentiality.”
“You married him,” he said, as if this was a point in his favor.
“Confidentiality,” I repeated, helpless, because I had promised, and because I was technically still on retainer to keep his affairs separated from the rest of the universe. “On the flip side, he doesn’t know about you either.”
Kyue laughed as he stepped forward and enveloped me in a hug that lasted two, maybe three seconds, but contained about a decade’s worth of unspoken sentiment. He let go first, then stepped back, eyes flicking over my shoulder to the entryway.