Chapter Three
~ Jude ~
The bed was larger than my last apartment and softer than the sum total of every bed I’d slept on since college. I woke up cocooned in what I could only describe as an unreasonable quantity of bedding—heavy cream linens, thread count verging on the criminal.
For the first three seconds, I had no idea where I was, except that it wasn’t my hotel room, wasn’t any room I’d ever paid for, and wasn’t a scenario for which I had packed a contingency plan.
The next three seconds were dedicated to the headache.
I am not a man prone to melodrama, but the headache demanded a level of respect that bordered on ceremonial.
It didn’t throb. It didn’t pulse. It radiated, cool and steady, as if my brain had simply decided it was time to retire and was making the announcement as public as possible.
I lay perfectly still, staring at the ceiling, and performed the necessary internal audit.
First: The club, the booth, the ice bucket, the orange juice, the bridesmaids’ contest, and Carolyn’s laughter spiking through the music at unpredictable intervals.
Second: Kenneth James. More specifically, Kenneth’s knee pressing against mine under the table, and the part where neither of us moved it away. The scotch-flavored kiss, the impossibility of the moment, which was then, suddenly and inarguably, just the moment.
Third: The elevator, the room number, the corridor that doubled back on itself three times and deposited us in a suite that looked like a Bond villain’s reward for good behavior.
The shutting of the door and the way my hands, usually so good at staying where they were told, ended up on him like they had a mind and a graduate degree of their own.
Fourth: The rest.
My body already knew what my brain hadn’t caught up to, which was that the night had not ended at the edge of the booth, not even close, and that what followed was both more spectacular and more catastrophic than anything I had ever let myself imagine.
The inventory populated in real time: the weight of him, the scratch of beard on my jaw, the way his hands—always so controlled, so sure—lost that certainty in contact with skin. The aches in places on my body where there shouldn’t be aches.
Very bad, I decided.
I turned my head, slowly, because the headache didn’t approve of sudden movements.
Kenneth was asleep beside me… a very naked Kenneth as far as I could see. He was on his back, one arm thrown up over the pillow, the other draped across the bare sheet.
His hair—the salt-and-pepper that had dominated my thoughts for most of a year—was rumpled in a way that suggested even it had given up for the night.
He breathed slow and even. Chest rising and falling with the kind of tranquility that made me want to both study it and set it on fire.
I watched him for four seconds, maybe five, the amount of time it takes to count out a short lifetime of regret and want and the knowledge that if I didn’t look away right now, I never would.
I looked away.
I looked back again.
His hand, the one not lost to the pillow, lay flat and open on the sheet between us.
The hand that had shaken mine at the engagement dinner eleven months ago and left me with three days of tactile memory, three days of not being able to forget the pressure, the warmth, the shock of how much I liked it.
I had liked it more than I had ever admitted to anyone, least of all myself.
I closed my eyes.
When I opened them again, the hand was still there.
The wedding band on it was new.
It was not there last night, unless it had been, and I was now the kind of man who missed a detail like that in the middle of everything else.
I held up my own hand. I looked at it. The ring on my hand matched. Plain band, matte finish, the kind of thing that was supposed to be subtle, but in context was the loudest object in the room.
I checked the ceiling for cameras. Not because I expected them, but because it seemed, on balance, more plausible than the alternative.
I sat up.
The room was larger than I remembered. It had a strip view seen through floor-to-ceiling windows. There was a table near the window. On the table, a piece of cream paper, folded in half.
I got out of bed, careful not to disturb the sheets or the man asleep under them. I crossed to the window, ignoring the part of me that wanted to look back, to check and see if Kenneth had moved, or if any of this was a dream that could be excused on technicality.
The document was heavier than expected. I picked it up. “Marriage Certificate,” it said at the top, in a font chosen by someone who had not met me. My name. His name. Date. Location. Names of two witnesses. Name of the officiant. Both signatures in black ink that had not yet faded.
I looked at my own signature.
It was mine.
The rest of the page did what legal documents do: described the union, the location, the conditions under which it could be dissolved. I read it twice, because that is what you do when confronted with a disaster, you double-check the data.
It checked out.
I walked back over to sit on the edge of the bed. My mind ran the numbers, not just the numbers, but the consequences, and for a brief, perfect moment, I was capable only of admiration for the sheer, elegance of the catastrophe I had engineered.
There was a protocol for this. It started with shame, migrated quickly to panic, then settled into the low, thrumming dread of knowing that Carolyn was somewhere in a hotel, maybe this hotel, possibly this very floor, and that if she found out before I found her and explained, I would never hear the end of it, not in any meaningful time frame.
I wanted to run.
I wanted to climb back into bed and try, for as long as possible, to make the rest of the world stop existing.
I did neither.
I sat. I folded my hands, careful to tuck the ring out of sight, as if that would do any good, and did what I had always done when faced with a problem I could not solve.
I did the math.
The math was not on my side.
First: If this was legal—and it looked legal, it had the paperweight and the ink to prove it—then any attempt to reverse it would involve not just humiliation, but public humiliation. There would be witnesses. There would be records.
Second: The timing. Carolyn’s wedding was not just an event, it was the event, the social lynchpin of her year, and I had managed, with surgical precision, to detonate it in a most spectacular manner.
Third: My mother would find out. She would find out before the end of the day, because nothing that happened in this family stayed private for longer than it took to boil a pot of soup, and the home nurse was an absolute sieve for this sort of thing.
The only upside was that my mother would probably be delighted. She had not once expressed a favorable opinion of Kenneth as a fiancé for her daughter, and I suspected she would find my coup, if it could be called that, darkly satisfying.
Fourth: There was a part of me that was not, if I was honest, entirely opposed to the arrangement. I didn’t know what to do with that part, so I ignored it. I’m sure I’d have to deal with it at some point, but not right now.
I had bigger things to deal with. Big, beautiful, six foot two inch things.
I put my head in my hands and exhaled for a long time. My heart was racing in a way that had nothing to do with the hangover and everything to do with the fact that, somewhere in all of this, I had gotten exactly what I wanted and now had to pretend I didn’t.
Kenneth stirred behind me.
I waited, because it seemed right to let him be the first to speak. If I spoke, I would say the wrong thing, and if I said the wrong thing, I would never be able to take it back.
That was the law of words, and I respected it.
He didn’t speak. Not right away. Instead, he sat up, sheet around his waist, and blinked at the room like he, too, was performing an audit.
His eyes landed on my back, then followed the line of sight to the certificate.
He picked it up. He read it. He read it the way he probably read contracts, slow and steady, as though every clause contained a hidden liability.
Then he put it down.
He looked at me, at my hand, at the ring.
Then at his own.
Then at me again.
I tried to push my glasses up my nose. I wasn’t wearing them. I had no idea where they were. This was, objectively, a minor crisis stacked on top of a major one, and I decided to treat it as a sign from the universe that I was not required to see anything more clearly than I already did.
I said, “So…”
He said nothing.
“It looks real,” I said.
“It is real.”
I nodded, because of course it was, because I had never once in my life done anything halfway.
He said, “How are you feeling?”
I considered the question. I considered telling the truth, which was that I felt as if every bone in my body had been replaced with glass, and that if I moved too quickly I would shatter. I considered a joke, because that was the default, but the joke didn’t come.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I haven’t decided yet.”
He made a sound, not quite a laugh, not quite anything else, and then flipped the sheets back and stood up. My tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth as I watched him walk naked across the room.
This was why I was in trouble.
He moved with a kind of deliberation I could not emulate. He went to the minibar, poured a glass of water, drank it, poured another, and brought it to me before climbing back into bed and pulling the sheet over his lower half.
I was honestly disappointed by that. I glanced away and took a small sip of the water, trying not to spill it.
“Do you remember last night?” he asked.
I remembered. I remembered more than I wanted to, and less than I probably should.
“Some of it,” I said, trying to avoid looking at the incredibly sexy naked man standing in front of me.
He watched me. The silence was comfortable for him. He was a man who had spent years in rooms where the first person to talk lost, and he was perfectly willing to outlast me.
I drank more of the water. “Carolyn’s going to kill me.”
He said, “She’s going to kill both of us, but she’ll start with you.”
“That’s fair.”
He smiled. It was the kind of smile that, under different circumstances, might have been the start of something. Here, it was just a data point in a rapidly expanding set of problems.
I said, “We’ll have to annul it.”
He nodded. “Of course.” There was a pause. “Unless…”
I looked up.
He shrugged, just a little. “Unless we don’t.”
I stared at him.
“I’m not saying it’s a good idea.”
“Then why say it?” I asked.
He didn’t answer.
I thought about the night before. I thought about the way he had kissed me, the way I had let myself be kissed, the way I had asked him—not with words, never with words—to stay, and he had.
I thought about Carolyn, and what it would mean once she found out, and how it would look. I thought about my mother, and the home nurse, and the soup on the stove.
I thought about the math, and realized that, for the first time, I couldn’t solve it. “You know this isn’t going to work.”
“I know.”
“But you want it to.”
“Yes,” he answered frankly.
I sighed before admitting, “So do I.”
It wasn’t loud, it wasn’t even a full sentence, but it was true. And in the silence that followed, it was as if the world stopped long enough for both of us to know it, really know it, before everything crashed back into place.
I finished the water and then sat the glass on the nightstand.
“We should get dressed.”
I nodded. “We should.”
Neither of us moved.
The sun climbed higher over the Strip. The city outside the windows was waking up, the same as always, full of people making decisions they’d spend the rest of their lives trying to explain.
I looked at the certificate. I looked at the ring, at my hand, at his. I wondered, for a long moment, if the rest of my life was something I could get used to. I didn’t have the answer, but I wanted to find out.
So I stayed.