Page 36 of Gym With Benefits

"She still has the skin of a corporate reptile," he offered, trying to keep the mood light. "Look at the pores. Or lack thereof. It’s all blurring tools and prayer."

"Use the other account," I muttered, my fingers tightening around the base of my glass. "The one from the fake yacht rental company."

David perked up, his eyes widening. "Oh, the Monaco one? What are we saying?"

"Ask her if she’s cleared her account balance for the July charter. Mention something about a non-refundable deposit for the jet skis."

He cackled and rubbed his hands together. "Brilliant. Elegant. Hints of financial ruin with a side of identity theft. I love it." He typed it out, his tongue sticking out slightly between his teeth.

On the television, one of the housewives threw a glass of champagne across a marble island. The sound of shattered crystal cut through the low thrum of our refrigerator. We watched the replay in silence, the dramatic tension of twomulti-millionaires fighting over a seating chart providing a nice, comforting white noise for our own personal pathology.

"Your turn," he said, sliding the laptop over until the edge of the aluminum frame bumped against my wine glass. "Use Fit Mom. Amberlouse just posted a story from her kitchen. She’s making a smoothie that looks like pond scum. Hit her where it hurts. Comment on the tile selection."

I stared at the screen. The story was a ten-second loop of Amberleigh tossing spinach into a blender, her huge diamond engagement ring catching the light with every movement. The kitchen was all white marble and polished copper. Staged for a magazine and never actually used to cook anything.

My fingers hovered over the keyboard. The lettersA-S-Swere right there, begging for it. Or I could write something witty. Something dry and dismissive that would make her look twice at her own reflection before she went to sleep in her three-thousand-square-foot townhouse in Arlington.

But the keys felt cold.

The image of the tailgate stayed behind my retinas like a burn from a flashbulb. It wasn't the infidelity that stayed with you—not really. The body handles the shock of that eventually. It was the logistics of it. The realization that while I was studying for an exam on the third floor of the Lauinger Library, she was borrowing my key to 'grab a sweater' and using the bed I had picked out at IKEA to undo three years of shared history. It was the memory of walking into our dorm room and seeing her hairbrush on his desk, a tiny, mundane detail that had settled into my brain like a splinter that refused to work its way out.

"Come on," David urged, nudging my foot with his slippers. "Tell her the subway tile is outdated. Tell her it looks like a public transit station in Bucharest."

"I— I don't think I can," I said, my voice coming out flatter than I intended.

He stopped chewing and looked at me, his eyes softening under the ridiculous silk hood of his robe. "Jess."

"I'm fine," I said automatically, the lie tasting exactly like the wine. "It's just... it's a lot of energy for someone who doesn't even care that I exist."

"That’s the point," David said quietly. "It’s her whole superpower. She’s a void where self-awareness goes to die. Why do you think she invited you to her wedding?"

I closed the laptop with a soft, final click, cutting off the blue light that had been painting our faces. The television was still going, the housewives now crying in a limousine, their mascara running in neat, expensive tracks down their cheeks.

"I'm going to bed," I said, standing up and leaving the wine glass on the table.

"But we still have half a bottle of the battery acid," David said, his tone dropping the theatricality.

"Keep it,” I said through a yawn, stretching my arms to the side. "Use it to clean the grout. It’s probably better at that anyway."

But the night wasn’t over by a long shot. David caught the hem of my sleep shirt, and yanked down until my momentum reversed.

"Sit," he ordered, already reaching for the bottle. "We are not concluding a perfectly good evening on a note of emotional bankruptcy caused by a woman who thinks a capsule wardrobe is a personality trait."

The Sauvignon Blanc glugged into my glass, rising well past the halfway mark. He filled his own to the brim, then movedthe laptop aside with a definitive shove, burying the ghost of Amberleigh’s Tulum paradise beneath a layer of brushed aluminum.

"The trolling is officially decommissioned for the night," he announced, crossing his arms over his silk robe. "You've done too much emotional heavy lifting over the last month to let that succubus drag you down. Tell me about the dead people. Give me something wholesome from the basement."

I slouched into the corner of the sofa, letting my head rest against the fabric. He had a point, annoying as it was. The museum had actually provided a bizarre sort of sanctuary over the last forty-eight hours.

"Constance," I murmured, watching the Orange County housewives carry out their silent, muted warfare on the screen behind him. "The 1920s suffragette from the box near the old boiler room. I found the uncataloged correspondence from her companion down in the lower vaults."

David’s ears pricked up. He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees, his wine glass held between his palms like a chalice. "Oh, do tell. Was the companion a worthy gentleman with a high-society mustache?"

"The companion was a woman.”

His jaw dropped, eyes gleaming with the scandal of it. It encouraged me to keep going.

“No name. We know her as ‘R’, who wrote from a boarding house in Baltimore," I said, a small smile finally cutting through the sour aftertaste of the wine. "They spent years exchanging updates on the local temperance union meetings, but if you read between the lines, they were basically running a full-blown romantic operation under the noses of the entire D.C. elite.”