Chapter Two #2
It’s a known phenomenon that time bends in clubs.
The hours double back on themselves, and if you’re lucky, you only lose track of a handful.
If you’re not, you find yourself resurfacing from a vodka-scented time loop with a stranger’s shirt in your hand and a receipt for two thousand dollars you can’t explain.
My party wasn’t like that, not exactly. Carolyn kept things controlled. There was an itinerary. There were even small envelopes with handwritten names and assignments inside.
The DJ got paid extra to play “our” song at midnight, though Carolyn and I did not, to my recollection, have a song. She had selected one for us anyway. I didn’t recognize the song at all.
Jude sat at the end of the booth, glass in one hand, his phone in the other. He would check it every ten minutes as if looking for a plausible reason to look away from the table.
Each time, he’d push his glasses up his nose with two fingers, look at the screen, then set it down and roll his shoulder like he was warming up to leave. He never left. Not once.
I watched him. I watched the way his ears flushed when the bridesmaid in red laughed too loud at one of his comments. I watched the way he would start to smile and then catch himself, like joy was a thing that needed to be rationed for emergencies.
At one point, he listened to one of Carolyn’s friends talk about her disaster of a marriage for twenty uninterrupted minutes, face completely engaged, responding only with small sounds of acknowledgment or the occasional nod.
When she finished, he said something—four words—that made her laugh so hard she doubled over onto his arm. He looked mortified by the physical contact, but also, I thought, deeply satisfied by the effectiveness of the joke.
I’ve spent two decades reading people. I’ve sat through boardroom bloodbaths and figured out who was going to jump ship weeks before they sent their resignation emails. I knew the difference between real warmth and its manufactured equivalent.
Jude Allen Thomas was real. In a room designed to liquefy every sharp edge a person could have, he’d kept his. He’d just learned to hide them under a button-down and an ability to vanish into a conversation.
I was both envious and fascinated by it.
Carolyn reeled him in for a toast. Her friends gathered around, arms linked, all performing at maximum output.
She handed him a shot glass and insisted.
He raised it like it was a dare, then drank it, eyes closed, and I watched him make the decision to stay put instead of running for the water glass.
I liked him more for that.
After the third toast, he had acquired a faint flush across the cheeks. He set his wine down, looked at it, then looked at me. I raised my glass, and for a moment—just a flicker—he held my gaze.
It was nothing, but it was something.
The music intensified. The group moved from the booth to the dance floor. Carolyn didn’t invite me; I was meant to watch, not participate.
Jude hesitated at the edge, then got pulled in by a pair of insistent hands. He didn’t dance so much as allow himself to be danced at, like a mannequin being demoed for a prospective buyer.
The spectacle was brief, but I couldn’t look away.
He returned to the booth after the dance, breathing slightly faster, hair even more disheveled. I could smell the sweat and alcohol from three seats over.
He shed his jacket, draping it over the booth back, and then rolled his sleeves up, not all the way, but enough that I could see the paleness of his forearms.
He noticed me noticing, and for the first time, he didn’t look away. His mouth twitched at the edge. He reached for his wine again, but the glass was empty. He set it back down, softer than necessary, and then laughed at himself.
I tried to imagine what it would be like to be sitting next to him. I imagined the accidental brush of a knee under the table, the warmth of a body at rest after holding itself tense for hours.
I imagined, more than once, what he’d look like in the hotel room upstairs, glasses on the nightstand, shirt open, voice low and embarrassed, but not unhappy.
Somewhere in there, Carolyn performed a set piece of the evening—a cake, delivered by a server in a black tank top and tight pants, bearing a cartoonish representation of her and her future spouse.
The sugar created future spouse had my jawline, and nothing else in common.
Carolyn laughed with the rest, took a hundred photos, then did a tequila shot with the server.
Jude took a picture, too. Not of the cake, but of the whole group. He checked the preview, made a small satisfied noise, then leaned over to show it to the bridesmaid in red, who beamed and hugged him, smearing frosting onto his sleeve.
The music shifted, louder and faster, the DJ determined to finish the crowd off before last call. I checked my own drink. It was empty. I poured another, with the practiced wrist of a man who has outlasted more parties than he cared to count.
I didn’t see Carolyn leave the dance floor, but she appeared at my side, breathless and glowing, eyes bright with what I recognized as pure social adrenaline.
“Are you having fun?” she asked, the words already performing themselves.
An execution would be more fun, but I didn’t say that. Instead, I said, “The most.”
She kissed me on the cheek, careful not to smudge her lipstick. “I’m glad you’re here,” she said, and I believed she meant it. Then she was gone again, swept up in her own orbit again.
I looked for Jude. He was still at the booth, now leaning back with his head against the leather, eyes closed for just a second too long. When he opened them, he saw me watching. He smiled. It was the first time I’d seen him do it without irony.
I smiled back.
The night stretched on. The ice bucket refilled itself, or someone did it. I wasn’t sure and I didn’t care. The champagne made the rounds, three bottles downed and counting. The noise in the club, once impressive, was now numbing.
The world had reduced to a few square feet, the only things worth tracking being the curve of the booth, the coolness of my glass, and the man at the end of it who kept pushing his glasses up with two fingers, who kept being the best part of the evening by simply refusing to try.
At some point, Carolyn passed Jude on her way to the restroom, leaned over, and whispered something into his ear.
He looked mortified, and then amused, and then nothing at all.
I watched the color climb his neck and settle in his cheeks.
He looked up at me, then away, and then back, this time longer.
I raised my glass again. It felt, at this point, like the only gesture left.
He met it, nodded, and did not look away.
The party roared around us, all color and noise and bodies. Carolyn’s laughter cut through, clear as a bell. For the first time, I realized I could not remember what her laugh sounded like when it was just the two of us.
Maybe there had never been such a time.
But I could imagine, with complete clarity, what Jude’s would sound like up close.
I watched him until the night was done.
He let me.
And at the very end, with the club winding down and the party’s energy spent, I found myself thinking that I didn’t want this.
Not the party. Not the woman. Not the life I’d built by following the best available script.
What I wanted was sitting at the end of the booth, pushing up his glasses, eyes soft and tired and perfect.
That thought, once made, did not go away.
I finished my scotch.
It happened by inches. One moment, Jude was stationed at the far end of the booth, separated by a parade of empty glasses and the bodies of half a dozen party-goers who had not so much found their seats as staked them out for the night.
The next, there was a vacancy to my left—Carolyn had migrated to the dance floor again, her friends orbiting in a loose, unpredictable pattern—and Jude had drifted into the space as if pulled by a tide neither of us had invented.
He slid in with an apologetic glance, as though proximity itself required a waiver. I said nothing, only raised an eyebrow in invitation, which he accepted.