The Sin Between Us

Chapter 10: The Unnamed Thing

Same time next week turned into a pattern before either of us admitted it out loud.

Nothing about it was ever discussed or agreed to in so many words. It simply started happening, the way certain things settle into place between two people who are paying close attention to each other quietly, without fanfare, without either party raising a hand to flag it.

Thursday, seven o'clock. His car parked outside my building like it had always belonged there.

Dinner in some back corner, or a different spot entirely, or once just a walk that stretched into two hours and somehow ended with us sitting on a bench by the water, neither of us in any hurry to head home.

We never once put a name to what it was.

I think that omission was deliberate on both sides. Naming a thing makes it real in a way that demands a response from us, from the family, from whatever remained of the reasonable, sensible part of my own brain.

So we left it unnamed and kept showing up on Thursdays, talking about anything and everything except the one subject sitting in the middle of every dinner like an empty chair nobody would look directly at.

Three Thursdays deep into it.

We'd landed at a wine bar this particular week, exposed brick, candles guttering on every table, the kind of place that made even ordinary conversation sound weightier than it was.

He was midway through a story about a colleague who'd taken credit for work that wasn't theirs, and I was listening, or meant to be listening, except at some point I'd drifted entirely into watching his hands instead of his face the way they moved when he explained something, unhurried, precise.

He'd always had good hands. I'd simply never let myself study them this openly before.

I looked up and realized he'd stopped talking.

He was watching me watch him.

"Sorry," I said.

"Don't be."

I reached for my wine glass, aware that my face had gone warm.

We sat in a small pocket of quiet for a moment, the bar humming on around us, other conversations, low music, the occasional clink of glass against glass.

In the middle of all that noise, the two of us had carved out our own private silence, and neither of us seemed in a rush to break it.

"Can I ask you something," I said.

"Ask me anything."

"Why'd you send me that first photo? Edinburgh."

He turned his wine glass slowly against the tablecloth, not answering right away.

That was the thing about Jude he never rushed an answer. He turned it over first, considered it, which had always struck me as steadying about him and was currently striking me as almost unbearable.

"You'd mentioned it once," he said finally.

"I know I mentioned it. Once. Fourteen months ago. And you remembered it well enough to route yourself through Edinburgh on your way home from London, and the very first thing you did once you landed was take a photo and send it straight to me.

" I kept my voice level, deliberately so. "That's not just remembering something a person said in passing."

He looked at me directly.

"No," he agreed. "It's not."

"So why."

He eased back slightly in his chair, studying me in that unhurried, deliberate way he had, like he was actively deciding how much of the truth to hand over.

"Because I wanted you to see it," he said.

"Because every time I come across something worth seeing, you're the first person who comes to mind. Every time."

The bar kept on humming. Somewhere behind me a woman laughed loudly at something. The candle between us guttered once and steadied.

I didn't have anywhere to put that sentence. I just let it sit there in front of me.

"Jude."

"I know."

"You know exactly what I'm about to say."

"Probably."

"This is…" I stopped. I tried again. "We're.."

"I know what we are," he said, steady, not defensive, just stating it plainly, like a fact he'd long since made peace with.

"I know precisely what we are and precisely what this looks like from the outside, and I've known it for a lot longer than you're giving me credit for. I haven't been sitting across from you unaware, Hyacinth."

"Then what exactly are we doing?"

He looked at me for a long stretch, the candlelight moving across his face, and there was something tired in his expression that had nothing to do with sleep, the kind of exhaustion that comes from carrying a weight for far too long without setting it down anywhere.

"I don't know," he said.

"But I'm not ready to stop."