8. Chapter Eight
~Jennifer~
It broke my heart to sit there and watch Gabe come to terms with the end of his marriage.
The fact that he’d decided to end it wasn’t in doubt for me even though he hadn’t said anything out loud. I’d sat on the other end of the video chat with enough women to know the signs: the disbelief, the pain, and the acceptance, all of which flashed across his open, expressive face in exactly that order.
He didn’t deserve this. He would also be better off without her, I didn’t doubt that, but it didn’t make the pain any easier for him to take at the moment the foundation cracked and left a gaping hole beneath him where there had previously been solid ground.
“I don’t want to see her,” he finally said, his voice barely louder than a whisper. “Not tonight.”
“Then you don’t have to.” Just like with the women I helped, I would back up whichever choice he decided to make. The ‘right’ decision varied from person to person, and only he knew what felt right to him. “You can stay here or you can go back to your room, or anything else you want to do. I meant it when I said not to worry about me.”
His nod suggested he believed me, but he opted to stay anyway. “I don’t think I want to be alone either.”
“That’s fine. Supper will be here soon and some food might do you good. How about a drink?”
“Yes, please. ”
Even heartbroken, he couldn’t help being polite. With a heavy heart of my own, I grabbed one of the wine bottles I’d picked up that day and used the hotel’s corkscrew to open it up. Two glasses poured, I returned to the sofa and handed one to him. He downed half the glass in one gulp.
“Do you want to talk about it?” I asked. Again, everyone dealt with things differently. Some people wanted to hash things out and figure out what went wrong while others didn’t want to think about it at all until the situation had a chance to fully sink in.
“No,” he answered quickly before scrunching up his nose. “Yes? Maybe. I don’t know. You’re already way more involved than you want to be, I’m sure.”
“Stop. Worrying. About. Me.” I said each word as a complete sentence, poking my finger into his shoulder with the final one. “What do you want to talk about?”
He tried to smile at my gentle teasing, but it looked closer to a grimace as he stared down at his wine glass. His five o’clock shadow ran along his jaw, looking stronger in profile, and for a brief second, my fingers itched to trace the line of it. “Would you mind if I ask you for a woman’s perspective?”
“On what?”
His grimace grew stronger as he glanced over at me. “On why she would cheat. I mean, I don’t expect you to know the specifics about why she’s unhappy in our marriage, but if she’s so unhappy that she wants to be with someone else, why wouldn’t she just tell me so?”
My heart beat faster as I tried to keep my expression neutral. I’d wondered the same thing, and I’d got my answer through my sister and his. Could I help him come to the same conclusion I’d already reached?
“Well, why do you think she married you in the first place?” I started.
His eyes drifted away from me again as he searched his memory for the answer. “She said she loved how supportive and caring I am.” He gave a shrug, as if it embarrassed him to say it out loud, even though it didn’t surprise me at all. “And the sex was really good. Sorry if that’s too much information. ”
“It’s fine, don’t apologize.” I had a feeling he would be good in bed, based on that supportive and caring nature of his. I could imagine he wouldn’t consider his job done until his partner had been fully satisfied.
Trying to ignore the heat that spread through my body at that thought, I shifted my position, angling myself towards him more as I took a drink of my wine and did my best to keep us on track.
“Have any of those things changed to make her unsatisfied, do you think?”
Bless him, he honestly considered it even though I could have told him he hadn’t done anything wrong. Thankfully, he came to the same conclusion on his own. “I really don’t think so. I have to travel sometimes, but I always invite her to come with me and call her when I’m away to make sure things are okay. I didn’t notice anything changing until she started to pull away.”
A knock at the door interrupted us, and I brought the room service cart inside, bringing our meals over to the sofa so we could continue our conversation while we ate. Gabe thanked me as I handed him the seafood linguine I’d ordered for him.
“This looks fantastic. Celine probably would have ordered me whatever she wanted.”
He glanced over at my salad with thinly-veiled disgust, and I laughed. “Too much wine and cheese today, I need to be a little bit good. But I saved room for dessert, don’t worry.”
Those words sounded dirtier than I meant them. I literally had ordered dessert for us, but my tone somehow shifted, and Gabe’s gaze dropped to my lips, just for a fraction of a second, before he turned back to his plate and shoved a forkful of pasta into his mouth.
I cleared my throat as I speared some leaves on my plate. “Celine doesn’t know what you like?”
Gabe nearly choked as he swallowed, and I tried not to groan. Why did everything sound like an innuendo all of a sudden?
“You said she would have ordered you the same meal that she had,” I reminded him before I could make things worse .
“Right. I said that.” He shook his head as if trying to shake out the dirtier thoughts that had started to fill the air between us. “She doesn’t really pay attention to things like that, I guess.”
“Things like what you like to eat? When you’ve been together for four years?”
He started to shrug again before a look of confusion crossed his face. “I don’t remember telling you how long we were together.”
Fuck. He hadn’t, and Celine hadn’t either. That bit of information came from Eda’s snooping.
Maybe the time had come to tell him about Celine hiring me, at least. I’d wanted to wait until he put the whole picture together, but he just gave me the perfect opportunity.
I opened my mouth to respond, but before I could get any words out, Gabe shook his head. “You’re distracting, I guess. I forget too many things when I’m around you.”
His eyes met mine for a brief moment before he dropped them again, but the heat in that eye contact nearly took my breath away. It all but confirmed for me that the connection I felt between us wasn’t one-sided. He felt something too, even if he shouldn’t.
“I don’t know why she doesn’t notice those kinds of things,” he continued, completely unaware of my swirling doubts and emotions. “Monica says she’s just selfish, there’s nothing more to it than that.”
“Monica?” I knew he meant his sister, but he definitely hadn’t mentioned her to me before, so I played dumb that time.
“My sister. She never really liked Celine.” He let out a huffed, rueful ghost of a laugh. “Maybe I should have listened to her more than I did.”
He took another drink of his wine while I tried to find an avenue that would lead us to talking about his inheritance. If I could get him down that road, then there’d be nothing left to stop me from telling him the full truth about my part in all of it.
Focusing on his family might get us there, so I gave that a try. “Are you close with your sister?”
“Yeah, pretty close. She’s great.” For the first time since he came into the room, he almost smiled.
“It’s just the two of you?”
“Yeah. Not only in our immediate family, but the extended family too. Both my parents were only children.”
No cousins meant his grandparents’ inheritance went straight to him and Monica. We were getting closer. “You must have been spoiled by your grandparents,” I teased lightly.
That same attempt at a smile appeared again. “We were. Still are, really. My mom’s parents, the ones from Greece, moved here to retire.”
They were still alive, then. “What about your dad’s parents?”
Any hint of a smile vanished. “They passed away a couple of years ago, but they’re still doing their best to spoil us.”
We were so close to where we needed to get, I could almost reach out and touch it.
I kept my tone as innocent as possible while I took another bite of my salad. “What does that mean? Did they leave you a lot of money?”
“Kind of. They thought that young, single people wasted money on stupid things, so they put a clause in their will that we wouldn’t get it right away.”
I mustered up a laugh even though my heart had begun to pound. Come on, Gabe. Make the connection.
“They sound pretty smart,” I said out loud.
“They were,” he agreed. “We don’t get anything until we turn thirty or we’re married for…”
He trailed off, his fork frozen halfway to his mouth, and I held my breath as I waited for him to finish that sentence.
~Gabriel~
There were days in the San Francisco bay when the fog got so thick, the city seemed to be floating in a cloud. The Golden Gate bridge disappeared and people on one side of the street could barely see people on the other. Sidewalks you’d walked down your whole life could seem unfamiliar, the path ahead unclear and mysterious.
Then, out of the blue, the sun came out, the fog lifted and everything seemed brighter and clearer than it ever had before.
That almost described how I felt at that moment.
The fog that had been obscuring my understanding of why Celine would cheat on me but stay married to me suddenly cleared, and I could see the whole picture as sharply as looking across the bay on a sunny, cloudless day.
How could I have been so completely blind when the answer had been right there all along?
“Gabe?” Jen’s voice seemed to come from far away even though she still sat right beside me. Blinking slowly, I tried to pull myself back to the present, back to the hotel room where we were still finishing our meal. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah, I’m… I…”
Words failed me as I put my plate down and reached for my wine glass, draining the rest of it in one gulp. I wanted to laugh and cry at the same time, giddy with understanding and crushed by the realization of exactly how little the woman I once loved actually thought of me.
“What is it?” Jen asked, putting a comforting hand on my knee, as if she knew I needed something to ground me in the moment before my thoughts flew away again, pulling me along with them.
My words came out flat and cold, but at least they came. “My grandparent’s estate. I get my share of it either when I turn thirty or when I’ve been married for three years.”
She leaned a little closer. “And you’ve been married for two?”
“That’s right. If we get divorced before that, Celine’s entitled to her fair share of our assets, but not any of the inheritance. That must be why she’s staying with me even though she clearly doesn’t want to. For the money.”
The thought struck me as so ridiculous, so base and uncaring, that I had to laugh. It didn’t sound much like a laugh, though. The noise that came out of me was harsh and pained, and Jen’s hand squeezed my knee in sympathy.
“Money can make people do crazy things. It’s not the same thing, obviously, but before Matt died, he changed his life insurance to make me the beneficiary. He didn’t tell me he’d done it. It came as a complete surprise when his father settled his estate, and it turned out to be quite a lot since he’d been young and healthy and no one expected him to die.”
We’d been talking so much about me that it took me a second to refocus. Despite the whirling, careening thoughts in my head, I did my best to give her my full attention, the way she always did for me. “That was thoughtful of him.”
“It was.” Despite her words, her lips twisted into a grimace. “Unfortunately, his father didn’t agree. He was furious that I would get it when we weren’t even married yet.”
It must have just been my distracted state, but that didn’t make any sense to me. “That’s hardly your fault. Not your fault that you weren’t married and not your fault that he made you the beneficiary.”
“You sound like my sister.” Her quick smile let me know she meant that as a compliment. “It sucked, though. Rather than supporting each other through our grief, I got cut off by his family. Even when I offered to share the payout with them, the damage had been done. None of his family speak to me anymore. Either they’re still upset at how things played out or, in the case of his sisters, I think they’re just embarrassed. I lost not only my fiancé but my almost in-laws as well. Money brings out the worst in people sometimes.”
I couldn’t argue with that when I felt the brunt of it myself, but through my own self-pity, empathy for her surfaced. “I’m sorry you had to go through that. ”
Jen leaned into me a little more, nudging me with her elbow. “I’m supposed to be comforting you, not the other way around. I just wanted to show that sometimes money changes people. They do things you never thought they’d do, especially if it’s a lot of money.”
“We’re talking about a lot,” I admitted. “That’s exactly why my grandparents put the restrictions on it that they did. I guess they knew that it would attract the wrong type of people. In fact…”
I trailed off again as another thought occurred to me, one that turned my stomach even more than the first.
“Gabe?” Jen’s face had gotten closer to mine, and when I looked over at her, her hazel eyes seemed kinder and warmer and more appealing than ever before.
“Sorry, I don’t mean to keep zoning out on you. Something else just occurred to me.”
“What is it?”
Swallowing down my nausea, I tried to explain. “Before we got married, Celine and I almost broke up. She started to pull away, a lot like she’s doing now, and I thought maybe the relationship had run its course. It felt like the end. But things turned around: she became more attentive, more present, and then she told me I should propose, as I already told you. When she turns on her full charm, she’s awfully hard to resist.”
I always figured that explained why Monica didn’t like Celine much, because Celine had never tried to make my sister like her. When she tried, really tried, she could win over just about anyone, and I fell for it, again and again.
“And?” Jen prompted, still waiting for the punchline.
“It all happened around the time my grandparents died. I didn’t tell Celine about the inheritance or the conditions but the lawyers sent some of the paperwork to my house and she opened it before I got home. She claimed she’d done it in error, that she’d been expecting something else, and that as soon as she realized what it actually pertained to, she put it back without reading it. But shortly after that, her charm offensive began, which ended in our marriage.”
Jen put it all together much quicker than I had. “So, she found out how much money you were getting and decided to stay with you.”
The seasick feeling in my stomach got worse. “I think she must have. Fuck. You must think I’m such an idiot.”
I dropped my head into my hands, and Jen’s hand moved from my knee to my back, rubbing in warm, soothing circles. “I don’t think that at all. You trusted her and she took advantage of that. It doesn’t make you stupid. It doesn’t make you anything, but it makes her an ass.”
The blunt assessment made me smile beneath my hands, in spite of everything. “I guess I should be thankful that she cheated, in the long run. Or grateful that I found out about it, at least. After three years, she could have gone on a huge spending spree and I would have been none the wiser. I guess I have you to thank for that.”
Raising my head, I turned to look at Jen, finding her only inches away from me. We both froze there, her eyes as wide as mine were at the unexpected proximity, our lips only a breath apart. It would be so, so easy to lean forward, just a tiny bit, and show her exactly how much I appreciated the way she’d opened my eyes.
Not only did she help me uncover Celine’s lie and confront my feelings about our relationship, but she reminded me what spending time with someone could feel like when that person was actually a good match for me and not just pretending to be.
She gave me just a hint of what a relationship with someone like her would be like, and I wanted that more than I’d ever wanted anything before. In just a couple of weeks, I felt more comfortable with her than I did with Celine, but with all the excitement of a new attraction too. The best of both worlds, and I wanted more.
I wanted more with her .
“Gabe.” She whispered my name, her gaze dropping to my lips for just a second before returning to my eyes. “I have to tell you something. ”
Normally, I would have let her speak, but the wine and the emotional turmoil and all the built-up feelings overwhelmed me, so instead, I did what I knew I shouldn’t. What I’d been trying not to do ever since we found ourselves at the same hotel.
I leaned forward, closing the tiny gap between us, and I kissed her.
~Jennifer~
My sister and I had developed a shorthand code for when she asked how my dates went since Matt. There hadn’t been that many, but I forced myself to try dating every now and then, and when I spoke to Eda afterwards, she always asked me two questions: ‘did you kiss?’ and ‘was Matt there?’
No matter how the evening had gone to that point, when my date kissed me, my mind immediately went to my former fiancé and how the kiss compared to the way it used to feel when Matt kissed me.
Up to that point, I had to answer ‘yes’ to the second question every time she asked me. Matt had always been there in the back of my mind as soon as another man’s lips touched mine.
When Gabe kissed me, it didn’t happen, and I didn’t even realize it until later.
When it happened, I didn’t think about Matt at all.
The kiss took me completely by surprise. Maybe that partly explained why Matt was nowhere to be found. Since I hadn’t expected it, I didn’t try to clear my mind, which usually only made me think of the very thing I tried to avoid remembering. I had been entirely focused on comforting Gabe, my heart breaking for him more with every new realization he made, until he suddenly lifted his head and we found ourselves face-to-face, hardly a breath’s distance between us.
Something in the air shifted. His pupils dilated and my body tensed, and when I glanced down at his lips, I wondered what they would feel like against mine.
But I didn’t think of Matt.
Instead, I thought about how I still needed to tell him about Celine hiring me, how we should get everything out in the open before anything happened between us, because it suddenly felt very possible that it might happen.
More than that, I wanted it to.
But before I could tell him, he kissed me, and everything else faded away.
Soft lips with a hint of wine lingering in their taste. A gentle hand that reached up to my cheek, featherlight but somehow still warm. The deep, earthy scent of his cologne and the caress of his breath against my skin. Those sensations consumed me, leaving no room for thought at all. For a wonderful, blissful handful of moments, I could simply feel , and it felt better than anything had for a long, long time.
Until reality came crashing back in, and I remembered that the man kissing me still didn’t know how I’d ended up in his life in the first place.
It must have hit Gabe at almost the exact same second it hit me because we both pulled away from each other, both of us gasping for air, his lips parted and red and his blue eyes wide and panicked.
“Fuck. I’m so sorry, Jen. I shouldn’t have… I didn’t mean to… fuck.”
He sprang to his feet, burying his head in his hands again while I called out after him. “I know you didn’t plan that. It’s okay.”
“No, it’s not.” Lowering his hands, his tormented eyes met mine. “I’m married. No matter how I feel or what might happen next, at this moment, I still have a wife, and this makes me no better than she is.”
I couldn’t let him believe that, especially since he still didn’t know the full story. Beating himself up any more than he already had would be unfair. “There are things you still don’t know about her. What I wanted to tell you is…”
Again, he cut me off, this time not with a kiss, but a forceful shake of his head. “I should go. I think I need to be alone after all.”
“Wait, Gabe, please. This is important.”
I got to my feet too, reaching for him, but he pulled back as if my touch might scald him. “Please, Jen. I’m not angry with you, not at all. I just need to get out of here. I’m sorry.”
With that, he headed for the door, and I exhaled in frustration as it clicked shut behind him. Clearly, he was in no state to hear what I had to tell him. It would upset him too, rightfully, and it would be better if he were in a good frame of mind to begin with.
To distract myself from my own spiraling thoughts, I cleaned up the remains of our meal, poured myself a glass of wine and tried to watch TV. It didn’t work. My mind kept wandering and so did my eyes, drifting over to the door as I hoped for a knock from Gabe.
Should I go to his room? What if he refused to open the door? Should I text him what I had to say? That last idea felt completely wrong since a text could never cover all the context I needed to provide.
At a loss, I called Eda for advice.
“Hey! How’s Napa?”
Her voice came through the speaker so loudly, I had to hold the phone away from my ear. That, combined with the way she popped the ‘p’ in Napa told me all I needed to know: my little sister was drunk.
“Where are you ?” I asked, trying to keep the amusement out of my voice. Though we often enjoyed a glass of wine together, it had been a long time since I’d seen her overindulge.
“At a birthday party,” she giggled. “Don’t ask me whose birthday it is because I don’t know.”
Clearly, my timing sucked that night in more ways than one. No useful advice would be coming from my sister in her current state. “Alright, you have fun. I’ll catch up with you later. ”
“Wait!” Her cry reached me just before I could end the call, and I could hear the background noise getting quieter as she moved to a different location. “Why did you call?”
“It’s not important. We can catch up later.”
“Jennifer.” She said my name so much like my mother did when I got in trouble that I had to laugh. “Whenever you say it’s not important, it’s important. I’m tipsy but I can still talk. What’s going on?”
I still had my doubts about the validity of her advice that evening, but with no other real alternatives, I gave in. “It’s about Gabe,” I admitted, lowering my voice as if someone might overhear me. “He’s here. At the same hotel as me.”
“What?!” Eda’s shriek didn’t match my volume in any way. “Did he go there to see you? Did you invite him?”
“No, and no. It’s just a mix-up, but we’ve been spending some time together, and he kissed me, but he still doesn’t know who I am and I…”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, back up. He kissed you?”
Hopefully, she’d moved to a completely different room or everyone at the party must have heard that. “Will you lower your voice, please?”
“I will not calm down,” she said, even though I’d said nothing about being calm. “Was it good? Did you like it?”
She paused, but not long enough for me to answer before adding her usual question.
“Was Matt there?”
It didn’t hit me until that moment that he hadn’t been, not at all, and my chest both ached and felt lighter at the same time with the realization. Even in the aftermath, my thoughts had been so focused on Gabe, Matt hadn’t even crossed my mind. “No. He wasn’t.”
Eda let out a loud breath directly into the phone. “Wow.”
“Yeah.”
The best thing about my relationship with my sister was that no further words were needed. We both knew the significance of my answer.
“Where is he now, then?” she asked after a moment’s silence .
It was my turn to sigh. “He felt guilty about kissing me when he’s still married, and he left. I don’t know if I should go after him or give him some space. Should I text him something? Wait until the morning? I don’t know what to do.”
Even through the phone, even through her drunkenness, I could practically see the smile on my sister’s face. “Do you have any idea how long it’s been since I’ve heard you like this? You’re the queen of flirting! People literally pay you to do it, and you’re stressing like a teenage girl over whether you should send a text.”
“Because it’s not real when I do it for other people,” I pointed out.
Like it or not, what I felt for Gabe had begun to feel very real.
“Okay, here’s what you’re going to do,” Eda told me, taking charge once her initial shock wore off. “Send him a text. Tell him you still want to talk to him, you’re available, but leave it up to him. If he doesn’t come back tonight, show up at his door with coffee in the morning. He’ll have calmed down by then and you can tell him everything.”
Even drunk, she made sense, and since I had no better plan, I accepted hers. “Alright, I will. Have fun at your party. I love you.”
“Love you too,” she replied with a loud, wet air kiss. “Can’t wait to meet this guy!”
“That’s a very long way away,” I tried to protest, but she hung up before I could be sure she heard me.
It took me almost twenty minutes to compose a text I felt satisfied with, open and friendly without being flirty, and after I sent it, I stayed up for another two hours, waiting for a reply or a knock at my door, but neither came. Eventually, I had to accept we wouldn’t be talking that evening, and I’d have to move to Eda’s plan B.
After getting ready in the morning, I made two cups of coffee in my room and with my heart pounding at both the memory of Gabe’s kiss and the confession I needed to make, I made my way down the hall to Gabe’s room.
However, when I got there, the door sat open, and inside, a housekeeper stripped the sheets off the bed. She caught sight of me as I stood in the doorway, confused and lost, and gave me a smile. “Can I help you, ma’am?”
“The man staying here…” I started, trailing off there because I didn’t know exactly what to ask.
I didn’t need to say more than that, anyway. She filled in the blanks for me. “He checked out first thing this morning.”