Page 29 of The Marriage Blunder

I wanted to wake up with him in this bed, with his glasses on my nightstand, with his books stacked on the window ledge and his sense of humor ricocheting off the concrete at sunrise.

I wanted the rest of it, too—the fights, the slow negotiation of boundaries, the first time we made each other angry enough to raise our voices.

I wanted it all.

I reached across the mattress, to the space where he should have been, and let my hand rest on the smooth, cold expanse of nothing.

I thought about texting him again, just to close the gap, but didn’t. I let the ache sharpen. I was a patient man. I’d waited a year for this. I could wait a little longer, but not much.

In the dark, I smiled at the ceiling, at the city, at the memory of him. I let myself feel it—want, not as a weakness but as the engine of everything worth having. When the morning came, I would call him.

And when he came to me, I would keep him.

Every risk, every cost.

I would keep him.

Chapter Seven

~ Jude ~

Three days after Las Vegas, I was standing in front of my open closet, holding a bowtie like it was a bomb and I had been tasked with deciding which wire to cut.

The bowtie was navy, which was fine, but the pattern was small interlocking cubes that looked like someone had tried to diagram a tesseract and then lost interest halfway through. The tag on the back was still attached: “100% silk, made in Italy, dry clean only,” which read like a warning for the kind of life I had never intended to lead.

The night before, Kenneth sent a link to the tie. No subject, no context. Sixty seconds later: “Wear it.”

I had stared at that text for eleven minutes.

It was not the only one. Kenneth’s messages arrived at a measured, unpredictable tempo, like he was testing the interval between lightning and thunder. Sometimes it was a dry link to a Wall Street Journal article—“Thought you’d find the implications amusing”—sometimes a question about real estate investment trusts or gallery acquisitions, sometimes a photo of the view from his penthouse, city lights fracturing the window and no caption.

That one I looked at for an embarrassing amount of time. I saved it to my camera roll, then deleted it, then restored it, then decided to pretend it had never happened.

I knew what he was doing. The deliberate contact, the specific frequency, the not-quite-implied demands. If I’d had even a single functioning boundary, I would have blocked him. Instead, I found myself standing in my closet, holding the tie and weighing the merits of defiance versus capitulation like they were variables in a system I could game if I tried hard enough.

My closet was arranged by color, then by function, then by cut. I owned a total of four suits, three pairs of dress shoes, and enough button-downs that I could go a month without doing laundry if I didn’t spill anything.

I also owned, until now, exactly one bowtie. It was plaid, purchased as a joke for a New Year’s party in college, and it still had a faint whiff of champagne on it from the night my old roommate had dared me to see how many olives I could fit in my mouth at once.

I had never worn a silk bowtie. I had never worn anything that had to be dry-cleaned unless someone else paid for it. I had never, to my knowledge, received a clothing directive from a man whose forearms had occupied the better part of my thoughts for eleven consecutive months.

I looped the tie around my neck. I had to look up how to do the knot, which was its own humiliation; the YouTube video featured a twelve-year-old with better fine motor skills than I had ever possessed, and I spent a full five minutes in front of the mirror practicing before it looked even remotely acceptable.

When it did, I stepped back and regarded the result.

Glasses: on, but threatening to slide. Hair, as always, resisting any attempt at control, but I had flattened it with water so that at least I looked like a person who understood how grooming was supposed to work. My shirt was white, buttoned all the way up, a move that said “I want to be taken seriously” but also, “I am afraid of what my own collarbones might imply.”

The bowtie, front and center, was perfectly aligned as if daring anyone to mention it so I could have an excuse to take it off.

I closed the closet, hiding the world’s most neurotic color gradient from view, and checked my watch.

I still had nineteen minutes.

On the desk, my phone vibrated with a new notification. I ignored it, then immediately caved and checked anyway. It was not Kenneth. It was a calendar alert: “Car service, 6:45 sharp. Do not be late.”

I had objected to the car. “It’s unnecessary,” I’d texted back, “and also the subway is faster at this hour.”

He replied, “The subway is never faster.”