Chapter Four #2
“Get out!” she shrieked, dragging a sheet over herself with the grace of a dying sea creature. The motion revealed more of her companions than she intended; neither stirred.
I made a mental note of the evidence. Naked skin, red marks, more used condoms.
Carolyn wept instantly, tears breaking like a fever. Mascara drew twin paths down her face, streaking her cheekbones in a way that would have played as melodramatic if it weren’t so obviously, ferociously real.
Her eyes widened as they landed on the matching rings on our fingers, the crying stopping instantly. “What is that?”
I lifted my hand, glancing at the ring on my finger before looking back at her. “What does it look like?”
I thought it was fairly obvious.
“How could you?” she asked. “How could you do this to me? My own brother—my own fiancé—”
I said nothing.
Jude stood half a step behind me, very still.
She pressed forward, clutching the sheet to her chest, and the volume doubled. “You are both disgusting. This is a betrayal. Do you even know what you’ve done?”
Jude pointed to the two people in bed with her, “You’re not in a position to lecture about betrayal.”
Carolyn turned on him, voice sharpened to a surgical point. “Stay out of this, Jude. I am talking to Kenneth.”
He blinked once, and shut his mouth. The effect was both immediate and strategic.
She sobbed again, hands fisted at her eyes, smearing what remained of her makeup into a mask of pure melodrama. “I gave up everything for you. For this. You don’t even know what you’re throwing away.”
I let her go. The key to any negotiation is to let your opponent run out of ammunition before you reload. Carolyn was a professional in this regard, but even pros have to breathe.
She inhaled, shuddered, and then dropped her hands. She looked at me with a kind of cold clarity that I recognized from the worst fights we’d ever had. “You’re going to regret this, Kenneth James. You’re going to come crawling back, and I won’t be here.”
I said, “I believe you.”
She blinked, caught off guard by the lack of argument.
“You can keep the ring.”
Her face went through a series of micro-expressions, each more operatic than the last. Finally, she settled on contempt. “You think that’s going to make it okay?”
“It’s not an apology. It’s compensation.”
The volume came back even louder this time. “Fuck you. Fuck both of you. You want to be together? Fine. You deserve each other. I hope you’re happy.”
Jude said, “I think we will be.”
Carolyn glared at him with a hatred so precise I felt it pass through me on the way. “You’re nothing, Jude,” she snarled. “You’ve always been nothing.”
He shrugged, the barest flicker. “Takes one to know one.”
Carolyn shrieked and threw a pillow at his head. It missed, hitting the door frame with a soft, final sound.
The bridesmaid woke then, saw the three of us, and made a noise that was not quite language, her face draining of color.
“Get out,” Carolyn shouted. “Get out now.”
I looked at Jude. He looked at me. We left.
In the hallway, Jude exhaled, slow and steady. “She means it.”
“I know.”
“She’s going to make things difficult.” He spoke with the tone of experience.
I simply smirked. “So are we.”
He laughed. The sound was smaller than last night, but real. “You want coffee?”
I groaned. “God, yes.”
We walked back to our suite, hand in hand. The war was not over, but the first shot had been fired, and I was already drafting my response.
* * * *
We checked out of the hotel with minimal ceremony. I paid the bill; Jude handled the incidentals and the necessary apologies to the front desk about the noise. I heard him say “bachelorette party adjacent,” and the woman behind the counter laughed so hard she knocked over her pen cup.
We made it to the airport with nothing to do but wait.
Every commercial flight out of Las Vegas was sold out for the next twenty-four hours.
I admired the efficiency of it: wedding parties, conventioneers, tech bros, and girls gone wild, all funneling themselves through airport security in a festival of regret and low-grade hangovers.
Jude tried every major carrier first then the discount airlines. Then a series of phone calls that, from the content and tone, told me he was not unfamiliar with situations like this.
Finally, he called a number I didn’t recognize and spoke, in a voice I’d never heard before, to someone named Syros.
The conversation was brief and to the point.
Jude said he had a “situation” and needed to get out of Las Vegas by the end of the day.
Syros told him to “meet at the executive terminal, no questions asked.”
Jude smiled when he hung up, a real smile, the kind that precedes relief. “We have a plane.”
“A plane?”
Just like that?
He nodded. “Technically, it’s my boss’s plane, but I’m the one who tracks all his company credit cards, so it evens out.”
I liked him even more for that.
We made our way to the main terminal and sat in a row of empty seats near the executive terminal at Gate C12. The lights above us buzzed with the kind of relentless intensity you can only get from government contracts and the lowest bidder.
It was early. The terminal was populated only by a few families with small children and one man in a hoodie who had somehow fallen asleep standing up, propped against a vending machine.
“We have time to kill,” I said, stating the obvious.
“I’m not good at killing time.”
“What are you good at?” I asked.
He considered. “Dissecting things, filing them, and turning them into a series of manageable units.”
“You do that with everything?”
He shrugged. “It’s not just about control. It’s about making things make sense.”
“Even this?”
He looked at me, and the glasses amplified the effect of his eyes. “Especially this.”
We sat. For a while, we did not talk. Then, gradually, the conversation opened up. Not the way it had in the club, lubricated by alcohol and the pressure of proximity, but with a kind of incremental honesty that felt heavier and more dangerous.
He asked, “How did you end up with my sister?”
I told him, “At a charity gala, a series of high-stakes business dinners, a few dates, and then a proposal on a rooftop overlooking the city.
“Did you ever love her?”
I thought about lying, but the truth was easier. “I think I liked the idea of her,” I said. “She was what I thought I should want.”
He nodded, like this was a familiar story. “That’s not an answer.”
“No.”
He was silent, but not judgmental. He picked at a hangnail on his thumb, then caught himself and stopped. “What about me?”
I smiled. “We’re in an airport, not a confessional.”
“That’s a dodge,” he said.
“It’s a shield,” I countered.
He smiled, but there was no humor in it.
“I liked you before I admitted it,” I told him. “I like you more now.”
His face flushed and he glanced away for a moment. “You’re not the person I thought you were,” he said after looking back at me.
“Good.”
He asked, “Why?”
“Because I thought I was the person you thought I was, too.”
We let that sit.
He leaned back, stretching his legs in front of him, and the edge of his shoe brushed mine. He didn’t move it away.
We watched the travelers drift by, a slow parade of human error and logistics. The families. The red-eyed solo flyers. The honeymoon couple already fighting over a magazine subscription scam. Jude watched them like he was collecting evidence for a case.
“Do you regret it?”
I asked, “Which part?”
“Any of it.”
I looked at him. I took in the way he sat, arms crossed but not defensive, eyes direct and unguarded. “Not even for a second.”
“Even this part?”
“Especially this part.”
He was quiet for a while. Then, as if he’d been waiting for exactly this opening, he said, “I think I want to keep the ring.”
I grinned. “I was hoping you would.”
He rolled it around his fingers as if he wasn’t used to it. I watched the gesture. I watched him, let the silence between us sit.
The hours passed. We did not leave the terminal. I bought him a coffee; he bought me a bagel. We sat, and talked, and did not talk, and the silence between us was no longer dangerous.
At 11:50, a gate agent appeared at C12 and called our names. The rest of the terminal was empty. We stood, collected our bags. As we walked toward the jetway, I reached out and put my hand at the small of his back.
Jude went still for a second, but he didn’t move away. “Is this a thing?”
“It’s whatever you want it to be.”
He looked at me with a curious yet satisfied look, and I knew I would follow that look anywhere.
He said, “Let’s go.”
So we did.