Page 40 of The Marriage Blunder

Chapter Nine

~ Jude ~

Thursday, six fifty-four p.m., me on Kenneth’s doormat with a bottle of wine and a sense of déjà vu so crisp you could have wrapped sushi in it.

It had taken me the better part of twenty minutes at the shop on 54th to pick the bottle, which was both a new record and a personal low.

I checked the label three times, like the difference between 2017 and 2018 was going to matter to anyone but my own spiraling nerves. It was not a date. I had told myself this. The wine was for the meal. The wine was a logistical necessity, a polite contribution, not a declaration.

The elevator was silent, save for the pulse of my own blood in my ears. I watched the numbers climb, each floor a marker on the slow arc of my self-control collapsing.

I arrived at the penthouse with exactly a minute to spare, sweating through my shirt and regretting the third round of cologne, which now layered on my skin like a desperate defense mechanism.

Adams opened the door before I could knock. He was, as always, dressed in a way that rendered comment obsolete: navy suit, understated tie, a pocket square so perfectly folded it was probably engineered by MIT.

He took the wine and my coat in the same practiced motion, hung the coat, then assessed the bottle. “A good vintage, sir,” he said, which was one of those statements that could mean anything, including nothing. He did not smile, but there was a glint in his eye that suggested this evening had already begun without my participation.

Inside, the fireplace was lit, low but unmistakable; the balcony doors were cracked just enough to let the city in; and a bottle—different, better—had already been pulled from the cellar and was breathing next to two glasses on the kitchen counter.

I clocked all three in under ten seconds and understood, with the clarity of a man who has been fooled by his own denials too many times, that it was in fact a date.

Kenneth was at the stove, tan slacks, white shirt, sleeves rolled to the mid-forearm. He was stirring something that smelled like garlic and stock and the kind of comfort food that made my own kitchen seem fraudulent by comparison.

There was a smear of flour on his left wrist and a look of total focus on his face, which he broke only when he glanced over to confirm that I had, in fact, entered the room and not just become another one of the penthouse’s many ghostly projections.

He said, “You’re early,” and the words landed like a handshake: cool, precise, and not entirely without threat.

“I was aiming for punctual,” I replied, setting the wine bottle on the counter as if it were an offering to a particularly judgmental deity.

He looked at it, looked at me, and then at Adams, who already had a corkscrew in hand. “Good choice,” Kenneth said. “You didn’t need to.”

“I know,” I said. “That’s why I did.”

He nodded, like he appreciated the logic even if he didn’t agree with it. “Dinner in ten?”

“Sounds good.”

I hovered at the edge of the kitchen, uncertain if I was meant to participate or be a spectator. Kenneth solved this by handing me a second wooden spoon and pointing at a saucepan. “Keep stirring or it clumps.”

The sauce was pale and rich, flecked with something green that I hoped was parsley and not an exotic herb I’d later have to Google. “You cook,” I observed.

He shrugged. “I delegate, but sometimes I need to do it myself.”

I caught Adams’s eye. He had retreated to the periphery, but not so far that he couldn’t intervene if a crisis developed. I asked, “How do you know when it’s ready?”

“You taste it. There’s no substitute.”

I did as told, dipping the tip of the spoon into the sauce and then into my mouth. It was warm, salty, perfect. I wanted to say something about it, but anything I could have said would have sounded like a come-on.

I said, “It’s good,” and left it there.

He watched me for a moment, then checked the oven, then set the timer for seven minutes. “You want a drink?” he asked, gesturing to the waiting glasses.

“Please.”

He poured, handed mine over, and our fingers brushed. The contact lasted less than a second, but it ran a feedback loop through my entire nervous system. I took the wine, sipped, and pretended not to notice that my hand was shaking.

We stood side by side, not talking, watching the sauce reduce. The city was a thin blue haze through the window. The only sound was the low crackle from the fireplace and the timer counting down the seconds to something neither of us was willing to name.