Page 12 of The Marriage Blunder

He smiled. It was the kind of smile that, under different circumstances, might have been the start of something. Here, it was just a data point in a rapidly expanding set of problems.

I said, “We’ll have to annul it.”

He nodded. “Of course.” There was a pause. “Unless…”

I looked up.

He shrugged, just a little. “Unless we don’t.”

I stared at him.

“I’m not saying it’s a good idea.”

“Then why say it?” I asked.

He didn’t answer.

I thought about the night before. I thought about the way he had kissed me, the way I had let myself be kissed, the way I had asked him—not with words, never with words—to stay, and he had.

I thought about Carolyn, and what it would mean once she found out, and how it would look. I thought about my mother, and the home nurse, and the soup on the stove.

I thought about the math, and realized that, for the first time, I couldn’t solve it. “You know this isn’t going to work.”

“I know.”

“But you want it to.”

“Yes,” he answered frankly.

I sighed before admitting, “So do I.”

It wasn’t loud, it wasn’t even a full sentence, but it was true. And in the silence that followed, it was as if the world stopped long enough for both of us to know it, really know it, before everything crashed back into place.

I finished the water and then sat the glass on the nightstand.

“We should get dressed.”

I nodded. “We should.”

Neither of us moved.

The sun climbed higher over the Strip. The city outside the windows was waking up, the same as always, full of people making decisions they’d spend the rest of their lives trying to explain.

I looked at the certificate. I looked at the ring, at my hand, at his. I wondered, for a long moment, if the rest of my life was something I could get used to. I didn’t have the answer, but I wanted to find out.

So I stayed.

Chapter Four

~ Kenneth ~

When I first woke, I lay in bed, perfectly motionless, cataloguing the previous night with the kind of forensic precision that only comes from total absence of sleep.

Jude’s laugh when he was trying not to be heard. The exact moment he stopped pretending he wasn’t watching me back. The elevator, the scotch, the microsecond his hand hesitated at the door to my room before making the decision to come in.

His glasses bent just enough to make them a problem, and the way he set them down so carefully, like an object of religious significance, before turning to me.

The rest: vivid, indelible, mapped on my body in a set of sensations I could, with focus, call up at will. The taste of salt on his collarbone. The way he gripped the back of my neck, not for leverage, but as if verifying I was there and real. The small, sharp noises he made at the point of surrender. The slow, surprised laughter after, like he was sharing a joke with the ceiling. I had not wanted anything so precisely, so greedily, in years.