My brother’s arm is draped around his girlfriend’s waist as they walk into the house, and I stand to greet them with a nod and a two-finger wave. The two of them kick off their shoes and carefully place them into the small cubbies next to the door, where my worn-out Chucks look entirely out of place next to the other pairs.
“How was she?” Nia asks as Brody heads for the kitchen. “Did she have a ton of sugar?”
“We didn’t get too crazy,” I lie, the corner of my mouth ticking up.
With a knowing smile, she drops a hand onto my shoulder and leans in to press a grateful kiss to my cheek.
“Thank you,” she tells me. “We really needed that, and I think Katie did, too.”
As she treks up the stairs to check on her daughter, I stuff my hands into my pockets and make my way into the kitchen, where my brother is waiting for me.
It’s funny, in a not-actually-funny-because-it's-awful kind of way; the one thing I always held pride in over my siblings – theonething I gave myself credit for that I might have done better than they did – was my marriage.
Brody has gone through two divorces, and even Edie’s marriage wasn’t always cupcakes and lemon bars, even if she’d like everyone else to think that it was.
They didn’t get it right, but I did, I always told myself.
Now, my sister’s staying loyal to a dead guy and, judging by the fat rocks I caught a glimpse of on the screen of his phone the other night, my brother’s getting ready to lock his girlfriend down.
And my perfect marriage that was alwaysso much better than theirshas dissolved into an unrecognizable pile of sludge.
A cardboard box is pressed against my chest, pulling me from my train of thought.
“What’d you bring me?”
“It’s venison, it’s delicious, and you’re welcome,” Brody tells me.
“Your palate is so fucking pretentious,” I chuckle.
Moving to the kitchen island, I drop the container on top of it and take a seat on one of the bar stools while Brody slides a fork and a steak knife across the counter top.
Thoughtful quiet hangs in the air as he braces his forearms against the counter, analyzing me.
“Have you given any thought to what you’d like to do?” He finally asks.
The handle of the fork rests between my index and middle fingers, waggling back and forth while I weigh the limited options running through my mind, like I have been since the moment I climbed into his rental car.
“I think I need to go home,” I tell him. “I’ve loved that girl since high school. I don’t think I can just…”
“You need to go home,” he echoes with an understanding nod. “I’ll get a flight booked for you.”
Leaning against the back of the stool, I press the heels of my palms to my eyes with a groan.
“Fuck, I don’t want to.”
“You want to go home,” he argues. Reaching into a cabinet for a glass to fill at the sink, he adds, “You don’t want to confront the fact that your wife had an affair.”
Affair.
He’s right, isn’t he?
If it had been just sex, I’d still fucking hate it, but she would have told me about it. It would have been a fluke and somehow, we would have figured out a way to work through it and it wouldn’t happen again.
Jules doesn’t ‘just’ have sex.
The first time that we slept together, I thought it was‘just sex’to her, but it turned out that it wasn’t like that for either of us. She snuck me into her bedroom that night not because we were a pair of miserable teenagers who wanted to rebel against our families – which we were - but because we had a real, solid connection.
It was awful and embarrassing, and if I had the opportunity to go back and take my time to make it better for both of us, I would; but in spite of all of that, it mattered.
