So now I’m caught in the middle of the corridor with one man in front of me and one behind, wanting to laugh and wanting to cry and managing to do neither, and so I do the very worst possible thing, which is nothing at all, while both of them start toward me at once.
“Why are you crying?” Trey says.
I hadn’t known that I was.
Troy gets to me first, one hand already coming out toward my arm. “Cam, what?—”
Trey is between us before Troy’s fingers can reach me, smooth and fast and absolute, a wall arriving out of nowhere. “Don’t touch my wife.”
Troy goes very still. When he speaks again all the easy warmth has drained out of his voice. “I’ve known her a great deal longer than you have, Flint.”
“And yet she married me.” Trey doesn’t raise his voice. He never has to raise his voice, and that is exactly the thing about him that frightens people. “Not you.”
Troy looks past my husband’s shoulder to me, and whatever he finds in my face sets his jaw like concrete. “What’s wrong, Cam? Did this jerk do something to you?”
Trey is watching me too now, and there’s a question in his eyes I don’t understand at all, something dark and cutting and somehow turned accusingly on me, of all people. “Did Barrymore do something?”
“I would never hurt her.” Troy bites each word off like he’s spitting out a threat.
“And you imagine that I would?” Trey says it very softly, almost pleasantly, and the air in the narrow corridor between the two of them goes thin and electric and dangerous.
I can’t believe this is happening. They are actually squaring up to come to blows over the top of my head, my husband and the nearest thing to a brother I have ever had, and I am the thing they’re planted on either side of like two dogs over a bone. I have to stop it. I have to make my voice work in my throat.
“I’m o-okay,” I tell Troy, and the stammer gives me away before the words are even all the way out. “I was just thinking about something. That’s all it is.”
“Don’t lie to me,” Troy says, and he says it gently, which is so much worse than if he’d shouted it.
“Don’t tell my wife what to do.” Trey’s hand closes around mine, warm and sure and absolutely certain of its welcome, the same hand I’ve held across a hundred breakfast tables, and I hate, I hate, that even now my own traitor fingers want to curl themselves into his. “We’re leaving.”
He draws me with him toward the elevator, and I twist to look back over my shoulder, trying to send Troy some signal that I’m all right, that this isn’t what it looks like, even though I no longer have the first idea what anything is.
“Are you serious?” Trey grits out, pitched low enough that only I can catch it.
I don’t get the chance to answer. The elevator doors are already sliding shut on Troy’s worried face, and then it’s only the two of us and the soft mechanical hum of the car starting down, and before I’ve found a single word to say my husband has turned me and put me back against the brushed-steel wall, both his arms braced on either side of my head, caging me in without quite touching me.
“You’re mine,” he says. “Remember?”
It isn’t a question, and it’s nothing at all like the soft ritual of our mornings. There’s something underneath it I’ve never once heard in his voice before, something that sounds, impossibly, almost like pain wearing the costume of a command.
Before I can answer him, he’s kissing me.
And I kiss him back. That’s the unbearable part, the part I’ll be ashamed of and helpless against in the very same breath for a long, long time afterward. My heart is lying in pieces on the floor of a corridor one story up and my mouth still answers his without bothering to ask my permission, because my body learned the whole language of him months before my mind learned the truth this morning and it doesn’t yet know it’s supposed to stop. I rise into him. My hands find the front of his jacket and fist there the way they always do. And for one ruinous, shameful moment I let myself simply have it, the heat and the certainty and the beautiful lie of it, because it feels exactly the way it has always felt, and nothing, nothing in the way he’s kissing me tells me it was ever only ever a line on a contract.
I can never say no to him. I understand that now with a clarity that frightens me worse than the silence in the apartment ever did. I am his. I will always be his. Not because of any contract my dying father signed in a room that smelled of medicine, not because of any words he makes me whisper to him each morning, but because somewhere in these six impossible months I fell in love with my husband, completely and without a single condition, and I went right on loving him up to and straight through the moment I heard him call me a means to a hockey team.
From the very beginning I’ve been in love with him. While he?—
I married her to own the Waymakers. That is the beginning and the end of the arrangement.
The words come back the way a wound reopens, sudden and cruel, bleeding straight up through the kiss, and I push him off me with a small broken cry I don’t even recognize as having come from my own throat.
He stares at me, his jaw set hard, his breath coming as ragged as mine.
And he’s looking at me as thoughI’mthe one who’s done something unforgivable. As though I’m the one who stood hidden behind a door this morning and quietly reduced a whole marriage to a line item in a ledger. Why is he looking at me like that, when he’s the one who?—
“We need to talk,” he says.
The doors slide open before I can get a word out. And instead of taking my hand the way he has every single time we’ve ever walked anywhere together in six months, the way I’d long since stopped even noticing because I’d let myself believe it would simply always be there, he steps out of the elevator without me and leaves me to follow on my own.
