The Sin Between Us

Chapter 11: A Brand On The Skin

I should have said something sensible in response.

Something that acknowledged the plain facts of what we were…his brother's daughter, his own family, the niece who had absolutely no business sitting in a wine bar with him on a random Thursday night, discussing why he'd flown through a city just to send her a photo of it.

Sensible was right there, available to me, a whole speech I could have given, one I'd even half-composed in my head over the last three weeks for exactly this moment, for whenever it finally arrived.

The speech had something in it about family, about what my mother would think, about the specific kind of damage that couldn't be undone once it was done, about how there was no version of this that didn't eventually cost someone something. It was a good speech.

Airtight, even, if I'd ever actually said it. I'd never once managed to get a single word of it out loud.

Instead I said… "Neither am I."

He looked at me, and something shifted in his face not surprise exactly, and not quite relief either. More like a man who'd been bracing for a door to swing shut and was still adjusting to the fact that it hadn't.

We stayed another hour after that, easing back into safer territory… his work, my work, a story about our grandmother's garden that had nothing to do with anything and made us both laugh harder than it probably deserved though nothing about the air between us felt safe anymore, not really, not underneath.

He walked me home the long way afterward, adding a good ten extra minutes to a walk that didn't need them, past the closed-up shops and the one bakery still lit for its overnight prep, and neither of us said a word about the detour, both of us apparently in silent agreement that the extra time was worth more than the honesty of naming it.

"You're doing the math," he said at one point, out of nowhere, when we'd gone most of a block in silence.

"What math."

"The one where you're trying to figure out how bad this actually is. I can see it happening. You get a specific look."

"I don't have a look."

"You have several. That one's my favorite, though.

" A small, private smile, gone almost as quickly as it came. "For what it's worth, I do the math too. Every single Thursday, usually right around the second glass of wine."

"And?"

"And I keep coming back the next Thursday anyway."

At my door, I turned around.

He was close. He'd been a little closer than strictly necessary for weeks now, and I'd stopped bothering to pretend I hadn't noticed the pattern of it, the way he found reasons to stand nearer than the situation required.

"I want to ask you something," he said.

"Okay."

"And I need you to answer me honestly. Not carefully. Honestly."

"I always answer you honestly."

He held my gaze in the dim porch light, steady, unblinking.

"Do you want me to stop any part of this? The dinners. The texts. Any of it. Say the word right now and I will, Hyacinth. I mean that completely."

"Why are you asking me this now? Tonight, specifically."

"Because tonight you didn't argue with me back there. You said the opposite of what you should have said, and I need to know that wasn't just wine talking. I need to know it in the morning, when neither of us has a candle and a bottle of Malbec doing the deciding for us."

"It wasn't the wine."

"Then answer the question, Hyacinth. All the way. Not the version you'd give my mother if she asked."

I looked at him standing there in the dark outside my own front door…this man who'd been careful and controlled and honest in a way that made everything else in my life feel loud and unfinished by comparison.

I looked at him and weighed the right answer against the true one, turned them both over like he'd turned that wine glass earlier, checking whether they matched.

They didn't match. Not even close.

"Don't stop," I said.

He held my gaze a moment longer, like he was making sure he'd heard it correctly, like the words needed a second to fully land before he let himself believe them.

Then, without another word, he lifted my hand ..slow, deliberate, no rush in it at all and pressed his lips to my knuckles.

He let my hand go, stepped back, and walked off into the dark without looking back once, hands returning to his pockets like nothing at all had just happened, like he hadn't just handed me something I'd be turning over in my head for days, maybe longer than days.

I stood at my own door long after his footsteps had faded down the street, my hand still faintly warm where his mouth had been, feeling it settle into me the way a brand settles into skin quiet, permanent, impossible to undo.

I let myself inside eventually, climbed the stairs without really registering the climb, and sat down on my bed still holding my own hand like it belonged to someone else entirely, like it had been out on that porch and come back changed.

I thought about calling June.

I thought about it for a long time. Actually, my phone , on the other hand, her name pulled up on the screen. I didn't call her.

Some things, I was beginning to understand, you had to sit with alone first, before you handed them to anyone else to help you carry.

I lay awake a long time that night, staring at the ceiling, replaying the exact tone of his voice when he'd said

“I mean that completely”, trying to decide whether a man who chose his words as carefully as Jude did could have possibly meant anything else by them.

By the time I finally slept, I'd stopped trying to talk myself out of any of it, stopped rehearsing the sensible speech I'd never once managed to say out loud.

That felt like its own kind of answer, one I hadn't given him out loud but had given myself anyway, alone, in the dark, with nobody there to witness it but me.