1. Meg #2
Luke sets his glass down and puts his hand on the small of my back.
I flinch. He holds both palms up like I’m a skittish animal he’s trying to calm.
“We wanted to tell you sooner. I thought if I told you here, it’d be…
you know…a good reason to let loose. You’ve been saying you wanted to try new things, and Callie said you’d always been curious.
She thought—well. She thought you’d be into it. ”
I look at her. “Did she?”
Callie’s smile sharpens. “I know you’ve always been too good at pretending you don’t want what you want.” She steps closer, slides her hand up Luke’s chest in a way that makes my skin feel like a shirt I want to crawl out of, and kisses him.
Not a peck. Not a test. Deep. Familiar.
Luke pulls back, breathy, and extends a hand toward me, like we’re boarding a boat. “Come here,” he says, gentle and coaxing and maddening. He gestures vaguely at the room with its velvet curtains and printed rules and anonymous joy.
I don’t take his hand. “You’ve been seeing each other.”
“It’s not—” He glances at Callie, then at me, then at the ceiling like there’s an answer carved into the molding. “It’s not serious.”
Callie laughs again, softer. “Don’t be mean,” she tells him, like I’m a child who needs things softened. “We wanted to tell you together. We thought it would help you feel included.”
“ Included ,” I repeat, each syllable a blade. “Okay. Here’s what’s going to happen. I’m going to leave. If either of you come into my shop I will personally glue your hands to your wallets so you have to tip my staff for the pleasure of breathing my air.”
“Meg,” Luke says, flustered. “It’s not a big deal. Everyone’s poly these days.”
“Polyamory is not a party you spring on someone. That’s not ethical. That’s not kind. That’s not us.”
“You’ve been so…closed off. You said you wanted to try?—”
“You should have told me you were sleeping with her. You should have told me before you kissed her in front of me. You should have told me before you put me in a room where the only way to not be a buzzkill is to pretend my boundaries aren’t real. They are. You crossed them. I’m out.”
He rubs a hand over his jaw, frustrated. “You’re making a scene.”
“Deal with it.”
Callie’s smile, to her credit, falters. “Meg?—”
“Don’t,” I snap. “Don’t Meg me like I’m a silly freshman and you’re the senior who knows everything.
” I turn to Luke. “You brought me to a sex party to tell me you’re sleeping with someone else.
You called it a surprise. You let her tell you who I am.
And when I said I didn’t want to do this, you made standing still feel like failure. Get out of my way. I’m leaving.”
Color rises in his face. “You know why Callie and I hit it off? She’s not boring , Meg. She actually wants to have fun.”
“Boring,” I repeat. “Because I didn’t kiss your mistress at a sex party you didn’t ask me if I wanted.”
“Meg, come on. You?—”
“No.” I set my glass on the bar with a square, final sound. “We’re done. You could have ended it like an adult. Instead, you tried to engineer me into someone you know I’m not.”
He moves toward me again, faster this time, voice low. “Stop. Stop. You’re making me look bad.”
“You’re doing that on your own,” I say, the sweetness in my voice the exact sweetness Aunt Bea used when a customer tried to return coffee beans because “they tasted like coffee.” I narrow my gaze. “Get out of my way.”
He doesn’t. He angles himself so I’d have to brush past him to leave, a cornering move that’s more reflex than threat but still makes my body flinch. He’s not dangerous. He’s just stubborn and embarrassed.
Fuck him.
“I’m done. I’m not having this conversation in a room where I can hear other people’s pleasure like it’s the laugh track to my humiliation. Get. Out. Of. My. Way.”
Luke inhales and then, finally, steps aside. It’s not grace. It’s calculation. He’ll tell himself he’s the bigger person. He’ll tell himself I’m dramatic. He’ll tell himself I’ll apologize tomorrow. He’s wrong on at least two counts.
I don’t even look at Callie. She’s not worth it. I buzz past her, through the increasingly naked crowd, to the front of the building. The valet looks up, slicks water off his brow with a practiced hand. “Would you like a car, miss?”
“Please,” I say, and my voice breaks on the p . It makes the valet look at me properly. He doesn’t ask questions. He just lifts a hand, and a black SUV glides up like it was waiting for me.
The driver service is crisp and silent and part of the ticket price, apparently.
The driver opens the door like he’s seen worse nights and not judged them.
I slide in and the leather cools the backs of my legs through silk.
The door thunks shut like finality itself.
The rain gets louder and farther away at once.
“Where to?” the driver asks, eyes kind in the rearview without being intrusive.
I give him an address that I don’t call home, not out loud. “Please.”
I press my palms to my knees to keep them from shaking. The word boring bounces around the car like a moth smacking a lamp.
When we turn into Luke’s building’s private drive, my heart does that identity lurch again— this is not home —but I go upstairs anyway because my clothes are here and my toothbrush is here.
The security guard nods at me like he knows. Maybe he does.
The elevator whispers up and opens into a foyer with art I don’t love and a console table I had to move three inches to keep from bumping my hip every day.
The apartment is quiet. Of course it is.
Luke isn’t back yet. Maybe he’s smoothing things over.
Maybe he’s telling Callie I’m “emotional” and they should be patient with me, like I could be coaxed to come back.
Not happening.
I go to the bedroom I don’t call ours and pack two suitcases.
In the living room, there’s a photo of us on the mantel from a fundraiser—me in green, Luke in navy, my smile wide enough to sell something.
I take it down and set it face down on the coffee table, not because I’m dramatic but because I don’t want it looking at me while I gather the pieces of myself.
I wheel one suitcase, then another, to the door.
At the threshold, I look back once the way people do in books, to see if the house changes shape when you choose yourself.
It doesn’t. It’s still beautiful and cold.
I leave the fob on the console because I don’t want Luke to say I took something that wasn’t mine.
It’s still raining. Baltimore never does half measures when it decides to be wet.
The roads gleam black and dangerous and weirdly friendly, the way city nights can be.
Thankfully, the driver service waited for me, so I give him the address I know by heart.
The wipers keep time while my brain replays Callie’s hand on Luke’s suit jacket, the word our knifing the air, Luke’s mouth shaping boring like he was dying to say it.
I could have been crueler. I could have thrown a drink. I could have truly embarrassed them. Maybe I should have.
By the time we turn onto their block, the worst of the shaking has stopped. The driver parks under the awning. “You want me to wait?” he asks, and I could hug him for the kindness of the question.
“No. Not this time. Thank you.”
I unload the suitcases myself because I need the ache in my arms. I drag them through the hallway to the door of their apartment and set them down with a thud that feels earned.
Then I sit on the floor with my back to their door, the suitcases on either side of me like sleepy dogs, and listen to the rain drum on the awning and the elevator ding somewhere down the hall and my own heartbeat slow to something survivable.