The Sin Between Us

Chapter 12: More Than Is Reasonable

Thursday dinners had quietly become the best part of my entire week.

I wasn't proud of that fact, not even a little. I understood exactly what it meant …that I'd rearranged the whole architecture of my internal life around one man I saw once every seven days at a restaurant table, a man who pressed his mouth to my knuckles and drove off into the dark and then texted me the next morning like none of it had happened.

I understood the shape of it completely, and I kept doing it anyway, because the only alternative on offer was stopping, and I'd already told him, flat out, that stopping wasn't something I wanted.

So. Thursdays.

By the fifth one, we'd landed at a small Italian place two neighborhoods over from mine, checkered tablecloths, low lighting, a bread basket that appeared at the table before anyone had thought to ask for it.

We'd been settled in for an hour and a half by that point, full and warm, me maybe one glass of wine past what I'd call sensible, deep into a story about something my father had said at Sunday dinner that had been sitting wrong with me all week.

Jude was listening with that whole, complete attention of his, the kind that made you feel like the only other person in the building, and at some point mid-sentence I noticed I'd drifted forward across the table toward him without meaning to.

I sat back immediately.

He noticed. Of course he noticed, he noticed absolutely everything.

"What," he said.

"Nothing. I was learning."

The corner of his mouth moved, not quite committing to a full smile.

"I noticed that too."

"Don't."

"Don't what?."

"Don't look at me like that."

"Like what, Hyacinth."

I reached for my wine glass instead of answering, my face went warm, and blamed the wine, and we both knew perfectly well I was blaming the wine for something the wine had nothing to do with.

He eased back in his chair and studied me in that easy, unhurried way that always made me feel like the single most visible person in any room I walked into.

"You were telling me about your father," he said, steering us gently back.

"I was."

"Finish it."

So I finished it, and he listened the whole way through, asking the right small questions at the right small pauses, and we kept talking for another hour after that, easy and unguarded in a way I still hadn't gotten used to with him.

When the check finally came he paid it before I'd even reached for my bag, same as always, and we stepped out into a night that had gone properly cold while we were inside.

The air hit my face and I thought, with some distant, half-drunk part of my brain: this is exactly the part where I ought to be more careful than I currently am.

He walked me home the long way again. We'd both stopped bothering to pretend that route was accidental.

Two blocks from my building, he broke a stretch of comfortable silence.

"Your friend June..the one you've mentioned before. Does she know about the dinners?"

"No."

"Your cousin Brianna?"

"No."

He went quiet for half a block, hands in his coat pockets, eyes on the sidewalk ahead of us.

"How long do you think we can keep doing this before somebody notices."

"I don't know."

"Does that bother you? The not-knowing part."

I actually thought about it honestly before I answered, turning the question over instead of deflecting it the way I usually would have.

"The hiding bothers me," I said finally.

"Not the rest of it. Never the rest of it."

He nodded slowly, taking that in, and we kept walking in step, our shoulders brushing every few paces the way they always did now, unremarked upon.

"It bothers me too," he said eventually.

"The hiding. I want you to know that much, at least. I don't like what it asks of you, having to fold yourself up small every time we're anywhere near the family."

I glanced over at him. "Then why are we still doing it?"

He met my eyes without flinching. "Because the alternative is stopping, and neither of us actually wants that."

"No," I said quietly.

"We don't."

We covered the last block without another word between us, the kind of silence that didn't need filling.

Outside my building he stopped walking and turned to face me directly, the streetlight overhead throwing enough light that I could see him clearly yhe line of his jaw, the particular way he was looking at me, a stillness in him that read less like calm and more like something being held very carefully in place, on purpose, by force of will.

"I think about you," he said.

"More than I should. Considerably more than is reasonable for a man in my position. I wanted you to know that I'm aware of that. Fully aware. I haven't been fooling myself about any of it."

My chest went tight, all at once, like something had reached in and closed a fist around it.

"Jude…"

"I'm not asking you to do anything with that," he said, cutting in gently, like he already knew where my sentence had been headed and wanted to spare me the trouble of finishing it.

"I just…" He exhaled, long and slow, the first time all night he'd looked less than completely composed.

"I wanted to say it out loud. Just once. To your face, not through a screen."

I looked at him for a long moment, the cold forgotten, the whole street forgotten, everything narrowed down to the space between us and whatever I was about to say next.