The Sin Between Us

Chapter 9: Same Time Next Week

I looked up from my plate.

"Which one."

"What you were thinking about. When you told me your head had been loud."

I set my own fork down too, mirroring him without meaning to, and immediately noticed that I'd done it, which somehow made it worse.

He was watching me steadily, that particular way he had of looking at something he wasn't going to let go of, patient and completely unhurried, like the entire night belonged to him and he was in no rush to spend it, like the restaurant could close around us and he'd still be sitting there waiting for my answer.

"Jude."

"Hyacinth."

I almost smiled despite myself, despite the fact that my pulse had picked up somewhere behind my ribs.

"You're really not going to drop this."

"No."

I looked down at the table, at the wine I hadn't touched in a few minutes, at the candle burning low between us, then back up at him.

"You already know what I was thinking about."

He didn't confirm or deny it. He just held my gaze and let the silence do the asking for him, the way he always did, like he'd learned a long time ago that most people would fill a silence eventually if you just let it sit there long enough.

"Don't make me say it out loud," I said.

"I'm not making you do anything."

"You're just sitting there. Waiting."

"Yes."

I let out a breath and reached for my water glass, mostly to give my hands something to do besides sit there uselessly in my lap.

He watched me do that too, unbothered, like he had all the patience in the world and had already decided to spend every bit of it on me tonight, in this back corner, with nobody else who mattered watching.

"You," I said finally, quietly, once the glass was back down on the table.

"I was thinking about you. You already knew that."

He went still for a second. Not surprised nothing about his face suggested surprise, not even a flicker of it.

It was something else, something closer to a man who'd been carrying a weight for a long stretch of time and had just been handed permission to set it down, even briefly, even just for the length of a dinner, in the back corner of a restaurant nobody we knew would ever walk into.

"Yeah," he said, low.

"I knew."

We got through the rest of the meal somehow, though I couldn't have told you what either of us ordered for dessert, or whether we ordered dessert at all, or what the last twenty minutes of conversation had even been about.

He paid before the check made it fully to the table, waving off my attempt to even see the total, the same way he waved off most things I tried to contribute my share of the bill, my protests, the last of my carefully maintained distance.

We stepped out into air that had gone cool while we were inside, the street quieter than it had been an hour before, most of the shopfronts dark now except for a bar further down glowing amber through its windows.

We walked the block back toward where he'd parked, in no particular hurry, close enough that our shoulders brushed twice along the way and neither of us bothered to correct the distance, and neither of us mentioned that we weren't correcting it either.

He stopped walking outside my building.

I turned to face him, and he was looking at me the exact same way he had that night in my aunt's living room direct, nothing held back except different now, more settled somehow, like a decision had finally been made somewhere behind his eyes and there was no use pretending otherwise anymore, not to me, not to himself.

He reached up slowly and brushed my hair back off my face.

That was all.

His thumb grazed the edge of my jaw on its way down before he let his hand drop back to his side, and I stood there feeling the whole night compress itself into that single point of contact.

"Goodnight, Hyacinth," he said.

Then he stepped back, got in the car, and drove off, taillights disappearing around the corner while I stood there on the sidewalk a beat longer than made any sense, watching an empty street like it still had something to show me.

I went upstairs, sat on the edge of my bed, and pressed my fingers against the exact spot on my jaw his thumb had touched, like I could hold the feeling there if I pressed hard enough, like it might leave a mark if I concentrated.

My phone buzzed once, face-down on the comforter.

A text from Jude

Same time next week.

Not a question. With him…it never was….