Chapter Ten
THE ENVELOPEsat in the middle of the coffee table. It looked innocuous, brown and wrinkled at the edges, but they both knew it wasn’t. Neither of them wanted to look at it. Joe, at least, was tired of plain brown envelopes that threatened to ruin his life. He thought briefly about the coolness in Cal’s eyes when he handed the envelope over—“it’s all there”—but he couldn’tdwell on that with something like panic.
“Kris,” he said. “What the hell did you think you were doing?”
She looked at her nails and picked at the cuticle on her index finger. When she was younger, she bit them down to the quick—Joe had seen the pictures—but she’d broken herself of the habit. Ladies, she told him once in her sour impersonation of her dad’s pompousness, don’t have ugly hands.Now she picked at them instead.
“I don’t like him,” she said.
“You don’t have to.” Joe walked over to the whiskey and tapped his finger against the bottle. Too early to drink or did the fact heneededa drink make it a bad idea whatever time it was. “You should go home.”
“You’re my home.”
Hell.
Joe twisted the top off the whiskey and poured a finger’s worth into a tumbler. There was no ice,but neat would do what he needed it to.
“Stop it, Kris,” he said. “This isn’t going to work. What did you think was going to happen? That you’d pay off my driver and I’d have to ask you to chauffeur me around? Then we’d be stuck in traffic so long I’d fall back in love with you? There are Ubers in London, you know, and taxis.”
She muttered something that he didn’t catch. Joe took a swig of whiskeyand then turned to look at her.
They’d known each other their whole lives, in the way that rich kids from the same city did. His best friend had dated her younger sister. They’d both driven down to a mutual friend’s Halloween party in Balboa Park every year, and they both had issues with their families. Not friends, but they’d known each other in passing.
Joe asked her out the first time becausea friend had walked in on him and a man whose name Joe had never learned, half-naked in the back seat of a Hummer. He’d thought he could make himself what everyone wanted, and she was the first step.
It wasn’t fair to either of them.
“I don’t want to get married, Kris,” he said.
“We don’t have to,” she said as she got to her feet. “If you’ve got cold feet, if that’s what this is about, we canput the wedding off for now. Go back to how we were.”
“I don’t want to.”
She flung her hands up in frustration. “Why not?” she demanded. “We’re good together, Joe. We have fun, the papers all want our pictures, our parents are happy. I know we weren’t… you know… passionate, but we were happy. So why not?”
It had been good, and Joe had thought it would be good enough. But it hadn’t been or,at least, wasn’t anymore, not when he knew what it was like tonot carebecause a man was so beautiful you had to touch him, or to sit in easy, hazy warm silence and daydream about sand on tattooed skin.
Cal’s beauty. Cal’s skin.
“I wasn’t happy,” he said.
Kristen shook her head in denial. “You were,” she insisted. “I was there. I could have told if you weren’t. I loved you… love you. I don’tcare that you… had a few slips. Once we’re married, it’ll be different.”
“It won’t,” Joe said.
“Fine,” Kristen said defiantly. She shrugged and smiled glossily when he raised his eyebrows at her. “It’s the modern way of doing things, isn’t it? Monogamy is old hat.”
Joe hesitated. He’d thought it was kinder to blur the edges of their breakup for Kristen, or maybe he hadn’t been confident enoughthat he was done hiding. Maybe he’d wanted to leave himself the chance to walk that decision back.
“I like men,” he said. It felt odd. True, but still odd. He wasn’t sure if the tight, breathless feeling in his chest was anticipation or dread. “That’s not something an open marriage is going to change.”
She turned her mouth down in an expressive, impatient shrug. “So you’re bi,” she said. Hervoice had gone brittle, as though her refusal to acknowledge it had started to crack. “I don’t care, Joe.”
He looked down into his whiskey. The swirl of amber blurred the world. “I’m not bisexual, I’m gay,” he said. “I loved you, Kris, but I wasn’t in love wit—”
Her hand cracked across his face and knocked the rest of the words back down his throat. The slap caught Joe off guard, and he bitthe side of his tongue. The taste of metal and salt mixed with the tang of whiskey. He swallowed and turned his head back to Kris, and she looked as surprised as he felt, her eyes huge and hands trembling. He waited for the apology he would have to reject.
“I hope he leaves you,” Kristen spat out instead. She took a step back, legs wobbly under her, and snatched her bag up from the chair. Sheroughly stuffed the envelope in, on top of the clutter of old lipsticks and Post-it note reminders she had in there. “I hope everyone fucking leaves you. Maybe that’s why your mother left you. She could see what a waste of skin you’d grow into. Go to Hell, Joe.”
