The Sin Between Us

Chapter 8: The Table In The Back

I did end up with plans for Thursday evening, technically.

Not real ones. I'd told June I might be around, which wasn't a plan so much as a maybe, the kind of soft commitment neither of us ever held the other to.

I never bothered canceling it because there was nothing on the books to cancel in the first place. I just didn't fill the evening with anything else. Didn't schedule a gym session, didn't agree to drinks with anyone from work, didn't do the thing I usually did on a free Thursday, which was catch up on laundry and pretend that counted as a plan.

I left the evening open the way you leave a window cracked on a mild afternoon, no real expectation that anything would come through it, just the option of sitting there in case something did.

He texted at four.

*”Dinner. Know a place near you. I'll swing by at seven.”

No question mark anywhere in it. I clocked that immediately, the way I seemed to clock everything about him lately, filing it away for later scrutiny.

Not

“are you free”

not

“would you want to”

not even

“does seven work for you”.

Just the plan, already assembled, handed to me finished, like all I had to do was show up and occupy the seat he'd already picked out for me.

That was Jude's whole method, really. He didn't ask permission. He announced outcomes and let the rest of us catch up to them, and somehow it never came across as arrogance, just certainty, which was almost worse because certainty was so much harder to argue with.

I should have pushed back. I know that now, and honestly I knew it then too, sitting on my bed staring at the message like it might rearrange itself into a question if I looked at it long enough.

Instead I typed

Okay.

I spent longer than I'd admit to anyone deciding what to wear for a dinner that wasn't supposed to mean anything.

Tried on three things, hated all three, settled on the first one again out of sheer exhaustion with myself. Told my reflection, out loud, that this was just dinner, the way people say things out loud specifically because they don't believe them.

He pulled up at two minutes to seven. I know the exact timing because I'd parked myself by the window under the pretense of reading a book I hadn't turned a page of in twenty minutes, watching the street the entire time, and I made myself wait a full two minutes after his car appeared before I went down, because I was twenty-two and still had a scrap of dignity left to protect.

Not a lot of it. But some.

He was already leaning against the car when I stepped outside, jacket dark, hands tucked in his pockets, attention on his phone. He glanced up at the sound of the door and something crossed his face quick, gone almost before it landed, the kind of expression a person gives without realizing they've given it, before they've had time to arrange their features into something more careful.

"You cut your hair," he said.

"Two weeks ago."

"Suits you."

He rounded the car and opened my door before I got there myself, then circled back to his own side, and we pulled off into the evening with nothing but some low, wordless music filling the space between us.

I sat with my hands folded in my lap, working very hard at remembering how an ordinary person behaved in a car with another ordinary person, which apparently was not a skill you kept once you needed it most.

The restaurant turned out to be small, tucked into a side street I'd walked past a hundred times without ever noticing it, the kind of place that didn't need flash because the food carried it dim lighting, tables set close together, a chalkboard menu propped near the kitchen door, the smell of garlic and something roasting drifting out every time someone opened it.

He'd clearly been a regular. The hostess greeted him with the particular warmth reserved for people who tipped well and came back often, glanced at me for half a second with open curiosity, and led us straight to a table tucked into the back corner.

Private. Out of the way. I noticed that too, the way I seemed to be noticing everything about this night, cataloguing it for later the way you catalog evidence.

We talked, easily, the way we always had never the stiff, performative kind of conversation people have when they're nervous and trying to seem interesting to each other.

He told me about the London project, about a meeting in week three so catastrophically bad he'd apparently been saving the story for the right audience, and it was funny, genuinely funny, the kind of story that made me laugh loud enough that the couple at the next table glanced over.

I told him about a client win at work that my manager had actually praised out loud, in front of everyone, which almost never happened, and he asked three follow-up questions about it, real ones, not the polite kind people ask when they're waiting for their turn to talk again.

He listened the way he always did, like whatever I was saying already mattered before I'd gotten to the end of the sentence.

Somewhere in the middle of the meal, I noticed the nerves had quietly left the building without me clocking the exact moment they went.

That was the most dangerous thing about him, honestly. He made all of it look effortless. Sitting across from him at that corner table, under that low light, with the food good and the wine better and the conversation drifting wherever it wanted to go, I could almost convince myself this was ordinary.

Almost forgot that we were tucked away in the back of a restaurant, alone, that nobody in the family had the faintest idea we were here, that if my mother walked past the window right now she'd see something she had no framework for understanding.

Almost forgot that the entire reason we were sitting in this particular corner, at this particular table he'd clearly requested in advance, was something neither of us had actually said out loud yet.

Almost.

"You haven't answered my question," he said, setting his fork down with a small, deliberate click against the plate.