Page 5 of The Marriage Blunder

His hair had lost a fight with itself somewhere between airport and club, and the resulting mess looked both deliberate and completely accidental. He wore his usual black-rimmed glasses, set too low on his nose, as if he’d only just remembered they belonged there.

He scanned the room as though he was actively searching for the fire code occupancy sign, located it, and then measured the exit distance in careful, visible head ticks.

It should have been funny.

It was funny.

I watched the performance. He waved, once, to his sister. Carolyn responded with her signature two-hand flutter, a signal both affectionate and proprietary.

He did not approach immediately, instead navigating the social perimeter of the VIP area as if the couches might contain landmines. When he finally arrived, he sat at the precise point where the position of the booth guaranteed minimal contact to every other person present.

I liked him immediately.

I didn’t care for that.

He nodded when our eyes met, quick and sharp, then looked away so fast I wondered if the whole thing had been a hallucination.

I remembered the last time I had shook his hand. It was at the engagement dinner. He’d offered it tentatively, as though expecting a trick. I’d taken it, firmly—not a power move, just muscle memory from two decades of business—and for one split second, he’d looked at me with a kind of startled directness that didn’t match the rest of him.

I had thought about that look for three days afterward. I had thought about it at intervals I was not proud of.

I did not offer my hand now.

He ordered a wine, one glass. He sipped it when it arrived, slow, while everyone else around him commenced the ancient rite of group shots. He declined every one with a polite shake of the head, like the only adult at the children’s table.

I admired the discipline. I admired the complete lack of pretense. I found myself annoyed by the admiration and took another sip of my scotch to cancel it out.

Carolyn, radiant in the way a very well-lit lobby is radiant, caught my eye from across the booth. She beamed at me, as if this was a moment to be remembered, as if this was a party that would matter in the catalog of her life.

She held up a glass for a toast. I raised mine. So did the table.

“To Carolyn,” said one of the bridesmaids, a small woman in a red dress who looked like she might snap in two if she bent the wrong direction. “To the bride who got away with murder!”

There was laughter. The implication, I presumed, was that marrying me was an act of violence, or perhaps self-defense. Either way, the toast felt accurate.

“To Carolyn,” I echoed, voice easily heard above the table.

The music, if possible, got louder.

I turned my attention back to Jude. He was engaged in a conversation with the bartender, who seemed unprepared for a customer who asked for a list of wines by the glass. The bartender read them off anyway, and Jude nodded gravely, as though weighing the pros and cons of a lifetime commitment to pinot noir.

He wore his discomfort like a signature accessory. The tension in his jaw, the way he rolled his sleeves exactly halfway up the forearm and then adjusted the cuff every two minutes. He checked his phone twice in the space of a minute, then immediately put it away, as though embarrassed by the effort to look busy.

I realized, suddenly, that he was exactly my type.

I had not known I had a type until now. I’d always assumed attraction was a matter of chemistry, but watching him—the careful way he moved, the wit visible even in the way he held his glass—I recognized the pattern.

Every man or woman I’d ever wanted in a real way had looked at the world as a problem to be solved. They’d all hidden something underneath a shell of professionalism, a suit of careful preparation. They’d all been, in some fundamental sense, alone in a room full of people.

I had to look away.

Instead, I watched the club. The bachelorette party in the next booth was up to four pairs of candy underwear each. The DJ, high on the sound of his own mixes, had shifted from deep house to what I could only describe as experimental panic attack. People loved it. They screamed for it, pressed up to the glass like moths to a false sun.

Carolyn was in the center of her own crowd, bridesmaids on either side, her laugh orchestrating their movements. She checked her reflection in a phone camera, found it perfect, and then used the screen as a mirror to fix one eyelash. Not a moment of hesitation. Not a second of uncertainty.

She glanced at me again. This time, there was an edge to it, a check-in, a “don’t embarrass me.”

I raised my glass again and gave her the smallest possible nod, the one that said: I am present, I am performing, and I know the choreography.