Chapter Four
~ Kenneth ~
When I first woke, I lay in bed, perfectly motionless, cataloguing the previous night with the kind of forensic precision that only comes from total absence of sleep.
Jude’s laugh when he was trying not to be heard. The exact moment he stopped pretending he wasn’t watching me back. The elevator, the scotch, the microsecond his hand hesitated at the door to my room before making the decision to come in.
His glasses bent just enough to make them a problem, and the way he set them down so carefully, like an object of religious significance, before turning to me.
The rest: vivid, indelible, mapped on my body in a set of sensations I could, with focus, call up at will.
The taste of salt on his collarbone. The way he gripped the back of my neck, not for leverage, but as if verifying I was there and real.
The small, sharp noises he made at the point of surrender.
The slow, surprised laughter after, like he was sharing a joke with the ceiling.
I had not wanted anything so precisely, so greedily, in years.
I wanted it again. Sober. In a bed that belonged to me, with his glasses on my nightstand and enough time to be exhaustive.
Now, Jude was sitting on bed, the sheet drawn over his lap in a posture that suggested both modesty and mild surprise at his own state of undress.
The marriage certificate was open on his knees, both hands braced on either side of it, as if prepared to close the page and let the situation collapse into a harmless singularity.
He read the document twice, lips pressed thin. Then he set it on the bed with deliberate care. He reached up to push his glasses up the bridge of his nose, realized they were not on his face, and located them by touch—right where he had left them, lenses down.
He put them on. He did not look at me.
I waited.
I know the value of silence. I know when a person needs to fill it, and when the silence is the only safe place left. Jude sat in his, and then cleared his throat.
“Well…” The word floated there, wanting a verb.
I sat up, letting the sheet fall to my waist. I am not ashamed of my body. At my age, shame is a sunk cost, and if you do not cash out early, you will be eaten alive by the compounding interest.
I said, “Well.”
He looked over at me then, just once, a brief head-tilt that read as both challenge and request for context. “We should talk about it.”
“Do you want coffee?” I asked.
He did. I picked up the phone on the nightstand and ordered room service. While we waited, we inventoried the evidence.
Item one: two matching rings, plain and dull.
Item two: two men, neither clothed, both very awake.
Item three: a hotel suite with the scent of last night’s sex and, beneath it, something newer, sharper, like panic.
He said, “We’ll need to fix this before Carolyn finds out.”
I nodded. “She’s not in the room. Not that it would matter.”
He looked at me like he was about to say something devastating, then reconsidered. Instead, he asked, “You want out?”
I looked at him. I really looked. Jude Thomas was not the kind of man you wake up next to and feel buyer’s remorse. He was, even at this moment, so controlled, so aware of every possible outcome, that I suspected he had mapped the entire conversation before he allowed himself to begin it.
I admired that.
I said, “No.”
He blinked, but did not look away.
I asked, “Do you?”
He didn’t answer, which was as close as he got to admitting a thing without having to defend it.
There was a knock at the door. Jude retreated into the bathroom, taking the marriage certificate with him, and I fielded the coffee tray in a hotel robe, exchanging the barest of words with the server. I tipped generously.
I always tip generously.
When Jude returned in a robe, hair combed and glasses at proper alignment, he poured himself a cup of coffee with the care of a man handling volatile chemicals. He sat at the little table by the window, sunlight catching the edge of his jaw.
He said, “My mother is going to be delighted. Carolyn will try to kill us both. Possibly at the same time.”
I smiled at that. “I’ve had worse threats.”
He sipped. “It’ll be quick. She won’t linger.”
I sat across from him, arranging the robe to cover just enough to be polite. He noticed, of course, and pointedly did not comment.
He said, “She’s going to say I seduced you.”
Oh, he did.
“Did you?”
He smiled. It was the first real smile of the morning, and I felt it somewhere behind my sternum. “I’m going to need more coffee for that conversation.”
We drank in silence. I was content to let the silence hold, but Jude shifted in his seat, restless.
“You want to talk about what happens next?” he asked.
I looked out the window. The Strip was already awake, or maybe it had never gone to sleep. I said, “I’m going to end it with Carolyn.”
He nodded.
“You should decide what you want, but I’m not going to undo this unless you make me.”
He considered that. He considered it for a long time and then finally said, “Okay.”
It was the right answer.
I stood and went to shower. I left the door half-open, which was less an invitation than a test. Jude did not follow. He was not the kind of man who tested doors.
When I returned, towel slung at the waist, he was on the phone, voice pitched low. I recognized the grim humor, the smile that was for the person on the other end of the line and knew he was talking to his mother.
I dried off, dressed, and checked my own phone. Two missed calls from my mother, one from my father. The time difference had not made them more patient.
I called my mother first.
She answered on the first ring. “Kenneth,” she said. Not a question.
I said, “I’m in Las Vegas.”
“I know. I read the flight itinerary you sent.” She did not ask why. She knew. She asked, “Is it over with Carolyn?”
I said, “Yes.”
She said, “Is it because of that boy?”
I considered correcting her—Jude was not a boy, not even close—but I let it go, a little confused as to how she even knew there was a “boy”. I answered her honestly. “Yes.”
A pause, a slight exhale, not disappointment, but something like the memory of it. “Are you going to marry him?”
“It’s already done.”
She made a sound that, under different circumstances, could have been a laugh. “Your father will want to review the legal implications.”
I said, “I expected as much.”
“And, Kenneth?”
“Yes?”
“I like him better already.”
She hung up. My father called before I could set the phone down. He said, “Son.” Never “Ken,” or “Kenneth” like my mother, just always “Son.”
“Dad.”
“You understand the possible repercussions?” he asked.
“Yes. She signed a prenup so there should be no financial losses.”
“You’ll want to have the engagement ring appraised after she returns it. Carolyn has expensive tastes. She might try to keep it.”
“I’m not asking for it back.”
A pause and then he asked, “You think that’s wise?”
“It’s the least I can do.”
Another pause.
“I’ll see you when you’re back in town.”
He hung up.
I put the phone down and went back to the table.
Jude had finished his call. He was sitting, one knee tucked up to his chest, the marriage certificate folded back on itself. He looked at me, at my hands, then up at my face. “My mom says congratulations.”
I smiled. “You told her?”
He shrugged. “I tell her everything.”
“What else did she say?”
He looked out the window. “She said Carolyn was never right for you. She said you needed someone who doesn’t treat you like a prop in their audition reel.”
I laughed at that, and he did too.
He said, “She also said I shouldn’t fuck this up.”
I moved closer to him, to the window, to the morning. I touched his hand, palm to palm. He did not flinch. “Let’s get dressed.”
He nodded.
After Jude got dressed, we did not linger. As we left the suite, I looked back at the bed, at the ghost of ourselves there. Jude caught the look, then caught my eye, and for the first time in a long time, I knew exactly what came next.
I took his arm, and we walked down the hallway, side by side.
We had an appointment to keep.
We walked in silence, shoes echoing off the carpet like a clock winding down. The door to Carolyn’s suite was just two numbers from ours, a design choice I chose to interpret as a warning rather than a coincidence.
I knocked, once. Waited. No answer.
I used my key.
Carolyn had always insisted on adjoining suites. She liked the symbolism, the implication of unity. She also liked the convenience of being able to materialize in my room without warning, which she did twice during our engagement to stage-manage my wardrobe and my opinions.
The door swung in, and the tableau inside was so perfect in its messiness that I had to stand and admire it for a moment.
Carolyn was in bed with two people.
One was her bridesmaid, a petite woman with hair so violently blonde it looked like a chemical accident.
The other was the bachelor-party novelty, the man with the glittering sash and a body that suggested he had not just been hired for the night, but had been cast in the role a season early and was determined to make the most of it.
All three were very, very asleep. All three were, by every metric I could apply, extremely naked. The numerous empty champagne bottles and used condoms around the room set the scene clearly.
There was a moment of total silence.
Then Jude, with a calmness that bordered on the supernatural, took out his phone and snapped several, high-res photos of the scene from different angles.
I turned, met his eye, and he handed me the phone. No words were exchanged. We were already running the same playbook.
Carolyn woke first. She did not wake up like a normal human. She came to consciousness the way an alarm goes off, all at once and loud enough to be heard in multiple rooms.
She saw me. She saw Jude. She saw the phone in my hand. The scream that followed was not a sound I had been prepared for, not even in my worst-case scenario drills.