She misreads the gesture because she wiggles in my lap, her body rolling against mine.
My cock doesn’t even stir—whiskey, maybe, or the sudden tightness in my throat. “Hey,” I say again, “I’m married.”
The woman laughs. “I don’t see your wife here.”
I don’t know if she’s still my wife. Sometime during the evening I’ve lost a button on my shirt collar and who knows what else. But my wedding band—the black silicone one—is still on my finger. That has to mean something. That has to mean something, otherwise…my throat does that thing again, like I’m trying to breathe but can’t quite take in a lungful of air.
The bartender delivers me a drink I don’t remember ordering. I reach over the woman on my lap to pick it up. The glass is strange in my hand—the heft of it somehow unsatisfying. I could drink this. I could drink another. If I asked, they’d bring me the entire bottle and look away as I poured it out into my belly. My throat isn’t just tight now—my whole body feels like it's collapsing in on itself somehow, a weight threatening to crush me from within.
Once, when we were kids, Blake and I were wrestling too hard and he flipped me on my back, knocking the wind out ofme. All I could do was lie there in the dirt, while Blake freaked out that he’d killed me and Brad told me to quit being a pussy by pretending to be in pain.
It took five minutes for me to get my breathing back, longer than that to begin feeling okay. Blake sat with me the whole time, joking and talking about nothing, throwing me worried looks when he thought I wouldn’t notice.
And he still left and Savannah left. Everyone who you love will eventually leave.Asher didn’t leave but he’s not here, either.It’ll hurt less if you leave him first.Still, it hurting less doesn’t mean not hurting at all, a sensation crawling below my sternum that no amount of whiskey can seem to dislodge.
I put down the glass, undrunk. I need to be…somewhere else. Right now.
The woman on my lap is looking at me funny, like I’ve said something rude, and maybe I have. I scoop her up, shift her until she’s standing on the points of her heels. “You’re leaving?” she pouts.
“Yeah.”
“Are you coming back?” She flutters her eyelashes at me.I’m not worth the effort. But I’m trying to be, and maybe that’s what matters.
“No,” I say and find that I really mean it. “No, I don’t think I will be.”
Lights.Headlights for the Uber I call, traffic lights that smear by on the way home, my phone screen as my fingers fumble over my texts. The porch light flicks on as I make my wayup the front path.Is Savannah home?Is she here?But no, it’s on a motion detector.
The walls are shadowed inside, everything dark and matte. We should put up some pictures. I pull out my phone, spend a while looking at the picture I took of the three of us: Savannah’s hand curled in mine as she laughs. Asher isn’t laughing, but there’s something playing at the edge of his mouth that carries the same amusement. I’m smiling too—not at whatever we were saying but just at the idea of both of them. That things could be like this. That we could be like this, together.
I’m not sobering up yet, but I’m reaching that stage of being drunk that everything is a strange, stumbling whir. I walk up the front hall, past where Sav left a pair of shoes in a loose tangle. I pick one up by its thin, breakable strap before setting it next to its pair. I drag myself over to the couch where I’d watched TV with Sav, body thrumming with so much energy—with how much I wanted to reach out and touch her and couldn’t—that I had to go for a late-night run to get rid of it.
I lie back. The world starts to spin, so I put a foot on the floor. It sort of helps. I pull my phone from my pocket, ask the voice assistant to make a phone call. It rings once, twice. It’s possible he won’t pick up.
Finally, the phone clicks and there’s a noise like it’s being moved around. “It’s three o’clock in the morning, Bray. Are you alright?”
I’m fine.What I’d normally snap at Blake—no matter how many times he asked. “No,” I say. The word comes out wet. “No, I’m not.”
“Where are you?”
“At home. She’s gone.” I rub my eyes; my hand comes back wet. “They’re both gone.”
Blake pauses like he might have misheard me. “Both?”
I shouldn’t even say that much but fuck it. “Sav left me. Asher…”Wasn’t mine to begin with.
“Sav left you for Asher?”
“No.” I shake my head. The world starts tumbling again like it’s spinning the wrong way on its axes. “He’s…we were…all of us were together. I thought we were, anyway.”
I wipe my face again. I shouldn’t be telling Blake any of this. He’s in Boston. He chose to leave. He’s busy hanging out with his girlfriend and their bear of a roommate. Fred? Fabian? Felix. That’s it.
Another long pause, this time with murmuring in the background like Blake has his hand over the phone speaker and is talking to someone who he doesn’t want me to hear. Even so, his hand can’t quite muffle the rumble of the other person’s voice. “You were dating both of them?” he asks.
Dating.The word feels entirely incomplete. “Sav is my wife. Was my wife. Asher is…”A pain in my ass.Mostly because I told him to keep his distance and I hate that he listened to me for once. “We both love her.” I lower my voice, like I don’t want the street outside to hear. “We were trying to make it work between the three of us. You wouldn’t get it.”
Another pause, this one much longer and more pronounced. “I think I would more than you know,” he says eventually.
“What does that mean?” I spit.
