Chapter 15
Chapter Fifteen
What nobody tells you about pretending to be married is how much of marriage turns out to be physical in ways that have nothing to do with sex and everything to do with proximity.
Staff expect to see a couple touch in passing.
Family expects shared looks across a crowded room, the kind that say something private without saying anything at all.
Society expects kisses that linger half a second past what strangers exchange, hands that find each other's at dinner tables without either person seeming to look for them first.
Donovan and I built that vocabulary slowly, the way you build any language, through repetition until it stops requiring thought.
His hand at the small of my back walking into a room.
My fingers finding his lapel to straighten something that didn't actually need straightening.
A kiss at his cheek that occasionally, when the room was watching closely enough, found the corner of his mouth instead, and lingered there one full second longer than performance strictly required.
I told myself every single time that the lingering was strategy.
Strangers can spot a performed marriage by its precision, by the way every gesture looks rehearsed rather than habitual, so a little excess, a little blur at the edges, made the whole thing more believable.
That was the story I told myself, and for a while it even held up.
I remember one dinner in particular, a fundraiser for the wildlife rescue the Winthrop Foundation had helped finance, where the performance and the reality blurred so completely I lost track of which version of the evening I was actually living.
Donovan had been seated across the table for the first course, separated by protocol and a seating chart neither of us controlled, and I caught him watching me from that distance more than once, his expression unreadable to anyone who didn't already know how to read it.
When the seating shifted for dessert and he finally ended up beside me again, he leaned in close enough that his mouth nearly brushed my ear and said, low enough for only me to hear, that he'd spent the entire first course wishing the seating chart had been less democratic.
I laughed, genuinely, the kind of laugh that startles its way out of you before you've decided whether to allow it, and the table around us, watching, read it exactly as the easy intimacy of two people who couldn't quite stay apart even for the length of a meal.
I wasn't entirely sure, sitting there with his hand finding mine under the tablecloth, whether I'd been performing that laugh or simply having it.
What started to worry me was how Donovan remembered things.
Small things. The way I took my tea, which I'd mentioned exactly once, in passing, weeks earlier.
The fact that I hated being approached from my left side at parties, a detail I'd never explained and he'd simply noticed, then quietly accommodated, always steering us so I stood with my good side to the crowd.
Charles, in five years, had never once noticed which side I preferred.
Donovan noticed in five weeks, without being told twice, and noticed in a way that didn't look like effort.
He noticed other things too, smaller things I hadn't realized anyone was tracking.
That I went quiet in rooms with too much overhead lighting, something about the fluorescence that made my skin feel like it was being inventoried rather than seen.
That I always ate the vegetables on my plate before anything else, a habit left over from a childhood where my father rationed dessert based on whether you'd cleared your plate properly first. That I hummed, very quietly, almost without realizing it, when I was working through a design problem in my head, and that he'd started recognizing the specific tune well enough to know, just from hearing it down the hall, exactly which kind of mood I was in.
I started keeping a private, useless inventory of these moments, the same way I'd once kept an inventory of every small betrayal Charles had handed me without my noticing. The categories were different. The compulsion to keep score wasn't.