The Marriage Blunder (Marriage Mayhem #10)

Chapter One

The Marriage Blunder

AJA FOXX

~ Jude ~

I’d just spent four hours on a plane next to a man who watched a cooking competition at full volume without headphones. He laughed out loud at the judging. Very loud.

He had what I can only describe as an entirely separate ecosystem happening in his lap, comprised of napkins, snack wrappers, and a paperback with a cover so worn I couldn’t read the title, though I spent a frankly embarrassing amount of time trying to decipher it through my peripheral vision.

The moment the wheels of the airplane touched the tarmac, my carry-on was already in my hands.

I don’t check luggage. Checking luggage is for people who enjoy standing around conveyor belts watching other people’s duffels go by while experiencing the slow existential horror of a universe that has forgotten you exist.

I was not that person.

I color-code my grocery lists. I had contingency plans for my contingency plans.

I had been gay since before I had a word for it, which was approximately two decades of my life where I was just walking around with this vague sense of wrongness and a persistent interest in cataloguing the forearms of male movie stars, and I’d be damned if I was going to leave my toothbrush in the custody of an airline.

As soon as I left the airplane, I called my mother. She picked up on the third ring.

“Jude Allen Thomas.”

I smiled at the admonishment I could hear in her voice. “That’s my name, yes.”

“You’re on vacation.”

“I’m at a bachelor party in Las Vegas, Ma. That’s not a vacation, that’s a field assignment.”

She laughed despite herself. I could hear it, the crack in her voice that she’d had since I was nine years old and brought her a dead beetle in a paper cup because I thought it was structurally interesting.

I had, in fact, spent most of the flight working. Spreadsheets don’t judge you. Spreadsheets don’t watch cooking shows without headphones. Spreadsheets don’t have forearms.

“How was the flight?” she asked.

Miserable.

“Fine,” I told her instead of the truth.

“You spent it working, didn’t you.” It wasn’t a question because she knew me too well.

“I spent it productively,” I insisted.

She made the sound. The sound she has been making since I was seventeen and brought a textbook to Thanksgiving dinner. It’s somewhere between a sigh and a laugh, the vocal equivalent of a woman who raised two children alone and still hadn’t figured out where she went wrong with one of them.

“How’s Carmen?” I asked.

Carmen was the home nurse I was quietly paying a substantial portion of my salary to keep on retainer while I was gone.

My mother’s cancer had gone quiet for almost two years.

Then it came back, and now we were all pretending this was a minor setback, and I was paying Carmen an hourly rate that could probably cover the mortgage on a small island nation.

“She’s a gem,” Clara said. “Made a very good soup today.”

She should be making excellent soup, given what I was paying per hour.

I did not say this.

“Good,” I said. “Eat the soup.”

“I ate the soup, Jude. I’m not incompetent.”

“I know you’re not incompetent. I’m making sure you’re not stubborn, which is different.”

“You got that from your father,” she said, which was her favorite deflection and also objectively untrue.

My father had been many things, none of them stubborn. He had been the kind of man who vanished from difficult conversations by developing a sudden interest in the weather report.

I got my stubbornness from Clara herself, who once sat through an entire neighborhood block party with a broken wrist because she didn’t want to “make a fuss.”

“I’ll call tomorrow,” I said. “Don’t drink too much.”

“You’re at a bachelor party in Las Vegas and you’re telling me not to drink too much?”

“I’m going to drink exactly the right amount.”

“That is not reassuring.”

“It’s statistically sound, which is better.”

She was quiet for a beat. I could hear the television in the background, something with a laugh track. Carmen was probably in the kitchen, doing whatever home nurses do when they’re off the clock, which in my imagination involved very efficient dish-washing and possibly some light espionage.

“I love you,” Clara said.

“I love you too, Ma. Eat the soup. I mean it.”

I hung up and tucked my phone into my jacket pocket.

The terminal was exactly what I had mapped in my head: forty-seven gates, three sets of restrooms, two coffee shops—both featuring lines of visibly traumatized people—and an exit that would put me approximately ninety seconds from the taxi stand if I maintained a brisk pace and didn’t get stuck behind a family with strollers.

My plan was to check in, change clothes, and then make one appearance at the party, because my sister Carolyn would notice if I didn’t show and the resulting interrogation would be more exhausting than the party itself.

I’d drink the minimum number of drinks required to register as a good sport, which my research indicated was two, one to hold and one to sip slowly and then I’d locate whatever quiet corner of this city would have me.

The Natural History Museum opened at nine. I had the hours saved in my phone, along with the admission price, the café menu, and the distance from the Bellagio, which was 2.7 miles.

I had already calculated the cab fare. I had calculated the cab fare three different ways, using three different ride-share apps, and then averaged the results because that’s what a reasonable person did.

I pushed through the sliding doors.

The heat hit me like a physical blow. One hundred and three degrees, according to the sign I’d glimpsed on the way out, and approximately seventy percent humidity, which meant the air had the consistency of hot soup.

My glasses fogged immediately.

I stopped dead.

“Absolutely not,” I said, to no one.

A cab driver idling at the curb gave me a look of profound sympathy. He had the eyes of a man who had seen everything and regretted most of it. His dashboard was littered with religious paraphernalia and what appeared to be a very old energy drink can.

I got in the cab. The air conditioning was set to what felt like the interior of a meat locker, and I loved it with the desperate, grateful passion of a man who had just walked across the surface of the sun.

“Where to?” he asked.

“We’re going to the Bellagio,” I said, buckling my seatbelt. “And I would like to go the speed limit, please. All of it. The entire limit. Not one mile per hour over.”

The cab driver looked at me in the rearview mirror. I could see him calculating something, the way people sometimes do when they encounter me, which is usually the moment they decide I am either fascinating or exhausting and they need to pick a lane.

“You got it, boss,” he said, and pulled away from the curb at exactly the speed limit.

I settled back and watched Las Vegas scroll past the window, all neon and motion and scale, and thought about the fact that somewhere in this hotel was Kenneth James, and I was going to have to be normal about that for approximately forty-eight hours, and then normal about it for the rest of my life.

I had a plan. I had the museum’s hours. I had my sensible shoes.

It was going to be fine.

* * * *

The Bellagio lobby hit me like a very expensive brick.

Dale Chihuly glass sculpture ceiling fixture.

I knew this because I had looked it up on the flight, in the thirty-seven minutes when the cooking show man had finally fallen asleep and I could hear myself think.

Two thousand hand-blown glass flowers, suspended from the ceiling in what the hotel’s website called “a celebration of color and form.”

The chandelier alone probably cost more than my entire apartment building. I did the math in my head, roughly, and then stopped because it was making me feel sick to my stomach.

A receptionist smiled at me from behind the front desk. She had the stale warmth of someone who had seen every variety of out-of-place human being and was professionally delighted by all of them.

I could respect that. Customer service was its own kind of performance art, and she was very good at it.

“Checking in,” I said, sliding my ID across the marble.

“Thomas,” she said, tapping at her keyboard. “Jude Thomas. Yes, we have you. Fourteenth floor, strip view.”

“I requested a quiet room,” I said. “Away from the elevators.”

“You did, and you got it. Room 1412. Elevators are at the far end of the corridor.”

Perfect.

I smiled back. I am very good at being the quietest person in a loud room. Twenty-eight years of practice. Twenty-eight years of standing at the edges of parties, of folding myself into corners, of developing the skill set of someone who wants to be present without being noticed.

My sister Carolyn had the opposite talent. She walked into a room and the room rearranged itself around her. I walked into a room and the room mostly continued doing whatever it had been doing before I arrived, which was fine by me.

The fourteenth floor was mercifully silent. My room was exactly what I had paid for: king bed, desk, armchair, window with a view of the Strip that was, objectively speaking, spectacular.

I stood at the window with my jacket still on and looked out at it. Neon in every color. The fountains, visible in the distance, were already beginning their evening show. The sheer vertical scale of it, buildings stacked against the darkening sky like cards in a hand that kept getting better.

I was impressed.

For approximately seven seconds, I allowed myself to be impressed.

Then I recovered.

I unpacked with the methodical efficiency of a man who treats hotel rooms as temporary military installations. Toiletries arranged in the bathroom by height and frequency of use.

Clothes hung in the closet in the precise order I planned to wear them: casual button-down for tonight’s appearance, slightly nicer button-down for tomorrow’s obligatory group brunch, backup casual button-down in case of spillage.

Chargers plugged in and tested. Glasses case placed on the nightstand, open, facing the correct direction for easy access in the dark. Then I sat on the edge of the bed and did the thing I had been actively not doing for months.

I thought about Kenneth James.

Kenneth was somewhere in this hotel right now. Six-foot-two, two hundred and fifteen pounds of what my brain, in its least helpful moments, categorized as “structurally significant.”

Salt-and-pepper hair worn neat. A close-cropped beard that gave him the distinguished edge of a man who had stopped needing to prove anything to anyone approximately a decade ago.

Dark blue eyes that were direct and appraising in a way that made my internal systems do this thing where they all tried to run at once and then stalled out, like a computer trying to open too many spreadsheets.

Carolyn’s fiancé for eleven months.

My brother-in-law in six weeks.

I had spent those eleven months being completely, professionally, exhaustingly normal about this.

About the way he stood in a room. About the unhurried confidence of a man who had navigated boardrooms and black-tie galas for longer than I had been allowed to drink at them.

About the way his attention, when it landed on you, felt like being the only legible thing in the room.

Once, at a dinner three months into their engagement, he had asked me about my work. Not the polite, surface-level question that people usually ask when they’re being nice to the quiet sibling.

He had asked a specific question about data architecture that indicated he had either done his homework or he was the kind of man who retained information about other people’s professional lives without being asked to, and either possibility had left me sitting there with my fork halfway to my mouth, blinking behind my glasses, trying to remember how sentences worked.

I had answered him. I had answered him competently. I had not mentioned the fact that my heart was doing something in my chest that felt medically adjacent to a code blue.

And then I had gone home and been normal about it.

And I was going to spend this weekend being normal about it too, and then go home and be normal about it for the rest of my life, because that is what you do when the person who makes your internal systems stall out is marrying your sister, who has never once in her life been anything less than absolutely certain about what she deserves.

I pushed my glasses up my nose. The room was very quiet.

Outside the window, Las Vegas continued being Las Vegas, which is to say it continued being exactly as loud and bright and excessive as it had promised to be, and I continued being exactly as prepared for it as I had promised myself I would be.

I had a plan. I had the museum’s hours saved in my phone. I had approximately forty-five minutes before I had to go downstairs and perform the role of Jude Thomas, Supportive Brother, Perfectly Fine. A role I had been rehearsing for most of my adult life, with varying degrees of success.

I stood up and straightened my shirt. It was a blue button-down. Not the blue that says “notice me,” but the blue that says “I am a responsible adult who owns more than one shirt.”

I had packed specifically for this. I had packed specifically for a lot of things, because I am nothing if not prepared for situations I would rather not be in.

I sat on the edge of the bed and laced up my shoes, one eyelet at a time, with the focused calm of a man walking into something he has already decided he can handle.

I could handle this. I’d handled worse. I’d handled four hours next to a cooking show enthusiast. I’d handled eleven months of Kenneth James’s occasional, devastating attention.

I’d handled being the quiet one, the careful one, the one who kept the peace and took up as little space as possible, for so long that it had become less a habit and more a personality trait.

I tied the second shoe, stood up, and adjusted my glasses. Forty-five minutes then the performance began.

I was ready.

Or I would be, which was close enough.