Chapter Two
~ Kenneth ~
Forty-two was the age at which you stopped pretending to enjoy clubs and just dealt with it when forced to be present. There is no dignity in a velvet rope, no revelation left in the electric glare of a bar where the music alone could raise your blood pressure.
But when your fiancée requests bottle service and “the full experience” for her bachelorette party, you oblige.
You pay the premium for a curved booth of white leather, you buy the liquor in quantities that would kill a small horse, and you post up in the VIP like a dignitary whose kingdom is full of other dignitaries with better hairlines and more expensive shoes.
I had a neat view of the club from where I sat.
Strobing lights, DJ perched in his glass box like a power-mad hamster, floor thrumming with the efforts of the young and the very young to outlast each other.
The table in front of me was crowded with sweating bottles: champagne, vodka, one very optimistic bottle of orange juice.
To my left, an ice bucket slowly leaked condensation onto my sleeve. On my right, an entire wedding party—not ours—had decided to turn their pre-party into a test of which member could eat the most novelty candy underwear off of a hired model. They were up to three pairs each.
I could only admire the stamina.
Carolyn was in white, of course. Not an accident. She wore it with the precision of a woman who has spent her whole life refining herself down to the most effective version of a human being.
The dress was simple, not ostentatious—she abhorred the idea of being mistaken for someone desperate for attention—but it had structure, it had purpose. Her hair fell in what I assumed were expensive curls down one shoulder, a deliberate asymmetry I’d been told was “in.”
Her laughter, audible even at this volume, was the laughter of someone who could convincingly audition for the concept of fun itself.
I watched her work the room. This was not a party so much as an audition, and she aced it, just like she always did.
I had met her at a charity gala a little under a year ago, something for underprivileged children in a city whose real estate had never once failed to profit me. She’d been charming, devastating, and I’d been distracted by a sudden emergency in the Asian markets and missed most of her anecdotes.
We had three dates, and then we had a ring. Somewhere in between, I assumed there had been a reason we’d become engaged, a logic that would make sense to me if I sat down with it and ran the numbers.
I had yet to find the logic.
What I had found, consistently, was that every conversation was a negotiation, every kindness the beginning of a transaction. Carolyn had never asked me a question she didn’t already know the answer to. She had also never asked me one she actually cared about.
I was really starting to wonder how in the hell we’d gotten engaged. Even more, I was starting to wonder if I’d lost my brains somewhere along the way. Why was I staying engaged to a woman who clearly saw me as an accessory, bright and shiny when she needed me, but put on a shelf when she didn’t?
I had to be insane.
I was nursing a glass of Oban, triple rocks, when the air in the room changed. I didn’t see him walk in. I felt it the way you feel the arrival of an unexpected check at a business lunch.
Jude Allen Thomas, in person, was not the fantasy.
He was smaller than I remembered. Softer, around the middle—the word doughy is not kind, but it was not inaccurate—and dressed in a button-down so correct for the occasion that it managed, somehow, to be more out of place than the novelty candy eating contest.
His hair had lost a fight with itself somewhere between airport and club, and the resulting mess looked both deliberate and completely accidental. He wore his usual black-rimmed glasses, set too low on his nose, as if he’d only just remembered they belonged there.
He scanned the room as though he was actively searching for the fire code occupancy sign, located it, and then measured the exit distance in careful, visible head ticks.
It should have been funny.
It was funny.
I watched the performance. He waved, once, to his sister. Carolyn responded with her signature two-hand flutter, a signal both affectionate and proprietary.
He did not approach immediately, instead navigating the social perimeter of the VIP area as if the couches might contain landmines. When he finally arrived, he sat at the precise point where the position of the booth guaranteed minimal contact to every other person present.
I liked him immediately.
I didn’t care for that.
He nodded when our eyes met, quick and sharp, then looked away so fast I wondered if the whole thing had been a hallucination.
I remembered the last time I had shook his hand.
It was at the engagement dinner. He’d offered it tentatively, as though expecting a trick.
I’d taken it, firmly—not a power move, just muscle memory from two decades of business—and for one split second, he’d looked at me with a kind of startled directness that didn’t match the rest of him.
I had thought about that look for three days afterward. I had thought about it at intervals I was not proud of.
I did not offer my hand now.
He ordered a wine, one glass. He sipped it when it arrived, slow, while everyone else around him commenced the ancient rite of group shots. He declined every one with a polite shake of the head, like the only adult at the children’s table.
I admired the discipline. I admired the complete lack of pretense. I found myself annoyed by the admiration and took another sip of my scotch to cancel it out.
Carolyn, radiant in the way a very well-lit lobby is radiant, caught my eye from across the booth. She beamed at me, as if this was a moment to be remembered, as if this was a party that would matter in the catalog of her life.
She held up a glass for a toast. I raised mine. So did the table.
“To Carolyn,” said one of the bridesmaids, a small woman in a red dress who looked like she might snap in two if she bent the wrong direction. “To the bride who got away with murder!”
There was laughter. The implication, I presumed, was that marrying me was an act of violence, or perhaps self-defense. Either way, the toast felt accurate.
“To Carolyn,” I echoed, voice easily heard above the table.
The music, if possible, got louder.
I turned my attention back to Jude. He was engaged in a conversation with the bartender, who seemed unprepared for a customer who asked for a list of wines by the glass.
The bartender read them off anyway, and Jude nodded gravely, as though weighing the pros and cons of a lifetime commitment to pinot noir.
He wore his discomfort like a signature accessory.
The tension in his jaw, the way he rolled his sleeves exactly halfway up the forearm and then adjusted the cuff every two minutes.
He checked his phone twice in the space of a minute, then immediately put it away, as though embarrassed by the effort to look busy.
I realized, suddenly, that he was exactly my type.
I had not known I had a type until now. I’d always assumed attraction was a matter of chemistry, but watching him—the careful way he moved, the wit visible even in the way he held his glass—I recognized the pattern.
Every man or woman I’d ever wanted in a real way had looked at the world as a problem to be solved. They’d all hidden something underneath a shell of professionalism, a suit of careful preparation. They’d all been, in some fundamental sense, alone in a room full of people.
I had to look away.
Instead, I watched the club. The bachelorette party in the next booth was up to four pairs of candy underwear each.
The DJ, high on the sound of his own mixes, had shifted from deep house to what I could only describe as experimental panic attack.
People loved it. They screamed for it, pressed up to the glass like moths to a false sun.
Carolyn was in the center of her own crowd, bridesmaids on either side, her laugh orchestrating their movements. She checked her reflection in a phone camera, found it perfect, and then used the screen as a mirror to fix one eyelash. Not a moment of hesitation. Not a second of uncertainty.
She glanced at me again. This time, there was an edge to it, a check-in, a “don’t embarrass me.”
I raised my glass again and gave her the smallest possible nod, the one that said: I am present, I am performing, and I know the choreography.
She looked away, satisfied.
It was strange to be with someone and feel that every moment was being watched, not by them, but by some other, larger eye, the eye of expectation, the eye of what happens next.
Jude had shifted position. He sat now with one arm stretched along the top of the booth, fingers drumming lightly on the leather. The motion was unconscious, a little Morse code of anxiety. I watched the rhythm, tried to decode it, and found myself smiling.
He caught me looking, just for a moment, and looked away again.
I wondered if he remembered the handshake. I wondered if he’d ever noticed the way I couldn’t quite keep my eyes on Carolyn, or the way I kept checking the door when I was supposed to be watching the party.
I wondered, not for the first time, what the hell I was doing here.
I finished my scotch and poured another, because that is what you do in a club, because that is what you do when your life has been reduced to a set of obligations you can neither articulate nor decline.
I watched Jude drink his single glass of wine, alone in a booth full of people, and for the first time in years, I felt something like anticipation.
It was a mistake, and I knew it.
But I leaned into the feeling anyway.