Chapter Five
~ Jude ~
The interior of a private jet at thirty-seven thousand feet is a study in artificial calm. Leather seats, stitched with the kind of thread that costs more per yard than my first car, faced each other over a table too small for meetings and too large for drinks.
A narrow aisle ran from cockpit to tail of the plane like a border between warring states. The windows were ovals, trimmed in brushed aluminum. The afternoon sun cut through them at an angle that made everything look a little clinical and a little expensive.
We were somewhere over Nevada, according to the monitor embedded in the bulkhead. The jet’s engines produced a hum that was almost meditative, if you could ignore the physics of combustion and the absolute certainty that, if something went wrong, neither of us had a parachute.
I could not ignore this. It was, in fact, the only thing I could think about, except for the fact that Kenneth James, the man I wanted more than I wanted to breathe, was sitting directly across from me.
He had discarded his jacket onto the armrest, which felt both ceremonial and practical.
His shirt collar was open one button. His posture was perfect.
He sat with one ankle crossed over his knee, the casual gesture of a man who knows exactly how much space he is entitled to and occupies every inch of it.
I was attempting to review a spreadsheet on my laptop. The spreadsheet contained information about the portfolio of a client who, by coincidence or by design, had recently acquired two of the largest private art collections on the East Coast.
I had not looked at the spreadsheet in twenty minutes. I had opened and closed it three times, toggling between Excel and my email as though either was going to rescue me from the awkwardness of sitting in a tube of metal with the man I had legally married less than twenty-four hours ago.
Kenneth watched me. Not constantly, but at intervals, each one long enough to be noticed and then denied. His eyes were unreadable from this angle, but I could feel the attention like a draft, a slight but persistent change in cabin pressure.
I looked at the spreadsheet. The spreadsheet looked back at me.
“Are you working?” he asked. His voice cut through the engine noise and landed somewhere just below my left collarbone.
I looked up, my glasses slipping down my nose. “Just checking in,” I lied.
He tilted his head, which I had learned over the last eleven months was his version of a smile. “On what?”
“Portfolio review. I told my boss I’d have an updated report by Monday.”
“You said you worked for an art collective, but you handle financials?”
I felt the faintest burn at the tips of my ears. “I’m the business side. I run the numbers. The rest is above my pay grade.”
He smiled, for real this time. It was slower than it needed to be and therefore more effective. “Which asset class?”
I hesitated. This was not the question I’d expected, and it threw off my rhythm. “Real estate, mostly, some hard assets.”
“Gallery properties?”
I nodded. “Eight in the U.S., one in development in Amsterdam. The client is expanding, which is good for everyone except me, because it means I have to do comparative tax work in Dutch.”
Kenneth’s eyebrows rose just a fraction. “Do you speak Dutch?”
“About as well as you’d expect for someone who learned it from a library book and three months of Duolingo.”
He laughed, and the sound was warmer than the jet interior deserved. “I speak German. They overlap.”
“Less than you’d think,” I said.
“More than you’d admit,” he countered, and for a second, it was just banter, just the old game of who could land a better line.
I leaned back in my seat, closed the laptop, and set it on the table beside me. He watched my hands as I did it, and the observation made me hyper-aware of every subsequent motion: the way I steepled my fingers, the way I tapped my thumb against the palm.
I forced myself to stop, then started again out of sheer necessity.
Kenneth shifted in his seat. It was a minor movement, but it collapsed the space between us by two inches.
He held up a hand—large, square, exactly the kind of hand you’d expect on a man who had built his own fortune before marrying into anyone else’s—and gestured at the laptop. “What are you actually looking for?”
I considered telling the truth, which was that I was using the spreadsheet as a shield against the fact that, right now, the only thing I wanted to do was watch him watch me.
Instead, I said, “I’m looking for patterns.
There’s always a pattern, but sometimes it’s hiding behind something less interesting. ”
He nodded as if this made perfect sense. “You always look for patterns?”
“Always,” I admitted, and hated how revealing it sounded.
He uncrossed his leg, recrossed it the other way. The pant fabric pulled taut over his thigh, and I followed the line of it, then looked away before I got caught.
“Tell me the pattern here,” he said.
I hesitated. “Which here?”
“Us,” he said, without blinking. “This.”
There was no safe answer. The pattern was obvious, but admitting it would have meant admitting to a year of anticipation, a thousand small humiliations, every second spent at the periphery of a family I was not really part of except by accident or, now, by technicality.
I said, “I think you know what it is.”
He didn’t look away. “Say it.”
I considered the consequences, decided they were inevitable, and said, “You wanted me, not Carolyn.”
He breathed in, once, slow. “Yes.”
“And you became engaged to her because you thought it was the closest you could get to what you actually wanted.”
He didn’t move, but his knuckles whitened slightly against the armrest. “Yes.”
“Now we’re on a private jet, and you’re staring at me like I’m the answer to a question you never got to ask.”
His mouth did the thing where it wanted to be a smile and also wanted to be a challenge. “And you’re letting me.”
It was not a question, but I answered it anyway. “Yes.”
He didn’t move closer, but he didn’t have to. The jet felt smaller now, the air thicker, the pressurized hush of the engines the only thing keeping the atmosphere from turning inside out.
I looked at his hands. I watched the way he flexed them, like he was working something out of his system. I wanted to touch them, but I didn’t. Not because I was afraid, but because it would have been too much, too soon, and I needed to believe I had a scrap of control left.
He said, “You push your glasses up when you’re nervous.”
I pushed my glasses up, reflexively, and he watched the gesture like it was a performance piece.
“You also do it when you want something.”
I laughed. “That’s two data points. Hardly statistically significant.”
“I only need two,” he said.
I was aware, suddenly, of how much I was sweating under my shirt. The recycled air of the cabin had gone dry in my throat. I looked at him, really looked, and saw that he was not so much unhurried as deliberately holding back.
I got up and went to the bathroom because I needed something to do, a moment to compose myself without Kenneth’s watchful eyes.
The lavatory on a private jet is not the place you go to have an epiphany. It’s barely the place you go to have a bowel movement.
I shut the door and flipped the lock, even though there was no one else on the plane except Kenneth, the stewardess, and the pilot, who would both presumably rather go down in a burning ball of fire than deal with whatever was happening in the passenger cabin.
I turned on the water. It was cold enough to sting. I ran my hands under it, then cupped some and splashed it over my face, which didn’t so much clear my head as it did reinforce the fact that my head was, at this point, beyond the reach of ordinary interventions.
I looked at myself in the mirror.
Glasses: smudged. Shirt: collar uneven, a single thread poking out from a seam near the shoulder.
My wedding ring—still there, still visible, still catching the light every time I moved my hand.
It felt heavier than before, like it had absorbed the mass of every possible outcome and decided to keep it for itself.
My reflection was not improved by the lighting. Nothing in the jet was. But the truth of it was, I looked exactly like myself. Even here. Even now. Even after what had happened in Las Vegas, and in the club, and in the suite, and in the bed.
I was married to Kenneth James, who was, at this moment, sitting in the main cabin of a private jet, probably considering how best to address the optics of his engagement to my sister being torpedoed by a 3 a.m. detour through the Little Chapel of Perpetual Regret.
I was not fine, but I was functional, which was the next best thing.
I toweled off, fixed the worst of the collar, and wiped my glasses on the hem of my shirt. I checked the ring again.
Still there.
Back in the cabin, Kenneth had not moved. He was reading something on his phone, but I could tell from the angle of his head that he’d heard me approach.
He looked up, eyes taking in the details. “You okay?”
“Never better,” I said, and sat back down.
On the tray table in front of me was a cup of coffee, perfectly black, no sugar, no cream, just the way I took it. The cup was real china, which meant someone had put effort into selecting it, into making the gesture.
He had ordered two, but his own sat untouched. I watched the steam rise off the surface, watched the way it curled up and dissipated in the pressurized air.
He watched me watch it.
“You didn’t have to,” I said, because it was the thing to say.
He shrugged. “I wanted to.”
I sipped the coffee, and he finally picked up his own cup and drank. For a moment, it felt almost normal, like we were two colleagues traveling on business. The fact that I was shirtless under my suit and that my undershirt was still somewhere in a hotel room in Nevada was beside the point.