Page 24 of The Marriage Blunder

And we would choose it again.

Chapter Six

~ Kenneth ~

There is nothing in the world so satisfying as the early morning in a city that never sleeps, except perhaps the silence that follows a disaster of your own making.

The light in my apartment—the one on the forty-second floor, the one that cost more per square foot than a hospital operating suite—came in slanted, cold and blue, bouncing off the bare expanse of polished concrete and the glass that made up an entire wall.

Even with the blackout shades at half-mast, it found its way in, because that’s what light does, and because Manhattan doesn’t take no for an answer.

I stood at the windows, looking out over a city grid just beginning to wake up. My coffee was cold. I held it anyway.

On the kitchen island behind me, three reminders: Call Miles (attorney), Call Board (quarterly report embargo), Call Monica (publicist). Next to the reminders, my phone, dark and silent, as if the weight of what it carried had put it in a medically induced coma.

I didn’t touch the phone. I didn’t move. I was aware, on some level, that I hadn’t changed out of the shirt I wore on the jet, but since it was a Loro Piana button-down and I hadn’t sweated through it, I let myself have the win.

Instead, I performed the only ritual that made sense. I replayed, in real time, every detail of the last twelve hours. The jet bridge. The heat of the tarmac, radiating up through the soles of my shoes. Jude Thomas walking one pace ahead of me, glasses slightly fogged, hair doing that thing where it decided for itself what the day would bring.

He had a duffel bag slung cross-body, which did nothing to obscure the line of his back. I’d always thought of him as soft—a word that in other men I would have used as an insult—but on him, it was less a quality than a consequence.

He was engineered for comfort. Not the lounge variety, but the kind that, in a quiet room, drew every available heat source and left you wanting to see what was underneath. I had seen what was underneath.

I was not prepared for the impact.

He had a walk that was precise and, I suspect, trained. He didn’t take up more space than he was allowed, but he also didn’t vanish into the air. There was a point, midway down the jet bridge, when he paused—just a half-second glitch in the algorithm—and I knew, without seeing his face, that it was for me.

It was always for me.

At the bottom of the ramp, the driver met us with a sign that said “J. Thomas.” He took it as a good joke and laughed, short and real, then covered it with a cough when he realized I was looking.

The car that picked us up was my own; I recognized the leather, the faint smell of citrus from the last detailing. Jude ran his hand over the upholstery like it was an object worthy of reverence, then stopped, blushed, and spent the next twenty minutes looking out the window at nothing.

The rest of the evening was logistics. I got him settled in his apartment. He made a comment about the number of thread counts required to cross a class threshold.

I made a joke about Egyptian cotton.

He looked at me with that flat, deadpan face—the one that must have gotten him through Carolyn’s dinner parties—and said, “I’m more of a flannel person.”

I could have undressed him right then and there, with or without the flannel, but I didn’t. Instead, I said I had a meeting in the morning, which was a lie.

I did have meetings, but none that mattered as much as the urge to walk him up to his place, close the door behind us, and figure out what it was about him that made me want to gamble everything on one very dangerous hand.

I went home, poured myself a glass of whatever bottle had survived the cleaning crew, and stood exactly where I was standing now, looking out over the city, wondering what the hell was wrong with me.

The answer, as always, was “nothing you’re not already aware of.”

The facts were these:

I had been half in love with Jude Thomas for eleven months, three weeks, and five days. I had, until yesterday, considered this a manageable risk.

He was Carolyn’s brother. Carolyn, who had been my fiancée for almost a year, and who had, even in the act of being left, managed to make it feel like an audition for something bigger. Carolyn, who would treat our implosion as a pivot point, not a tragedy.

He was not my usual type. He was not anyone’s type, if you polled the relevant parties. He was, to be honest, what my mother would call “an acquired taste,” and my mother had acquired almost every taste worth the effort, so her bar was high.

He made me laugh, which was not a thing I did often or well, and he made me nervous, which was a thing I did not do at all.

He was, at this moment, somewhere in Manhattan, probably standing at a window just like this one, looking down at the world as if it was a numbers problem he could solve if given enough time.