Chapter 3: Wait, He's Married?

I stop breathing.

The phone keeps lighting up. Vanessa. Wife. Vanessa. Wife. Like it wants to make absolutely sure I read it correctly the first time.

I did.

Garry reaches for it fast, kills the call, flips it face-down, turns back to me like nothing happened. Like nothing at all just happened. His hand finds my waist and I feel how warm it is and I feel exactly nothing good about that warmth right now.

"Hey." His thumb strokes my hip. "You okay?"

I sit up.

"Who's Vanessa?" 

Flat. Quiet. The kind of question that already knows its answer and is just waiting for him to catch up.

Something moves across his face. Not guilt exactly. More like... calculation. A man deciding in real time how much truth fits inside this particular moment. That split-second tells me everything I need to know before he even opens his mouth.

"Dara..."

"Don't." I'm already reaching for my dress on the floor, shaking it out, pulling it over my head. My hands are completely steady and I'm genuinely proud of that because inside I feel like someone just poured ice water directly into my chest. "Just don't do the thing where you explain it to me like I'm going to understand."

""It's complicated," he says.

I laugh. It comes out sharp. "Of course it is."

"We're separated."

"Mm-hm."

"she just hasn't..."

"Dara, I'm serious. We've been done for eight months. She's in Lisbon, we're just waiting for her to come back so we can sign..."

"She's still saved as wife in your phone, Garry." I find my jacket. My bag. I'm doing inventory with my eyes because I need something to look at that isn't his face right now. "That's not a separated contact name, that's a married man contact name."

He sits up, dragging a hand down his face. And he looks tired now, the easy confidence from an hour ago folded into something rawer and more human underneath, and I hate that it makes him look better, not worse. I genuinely hate that.

"I should have said something before," he says quietly. "I know that."

"Yeah." I pull my jacket on. "When exactly were you going to fit that in? Before or after..." I gesture vaguely at the destroyed bed, the pillows on the floor, the general evidence of the last hour. "...all of this."

"Before. I know." A pause that carries actual weight. "I'm sorry."

I stop moving.

Because it lands different than I expect. He sounds like he means it. Not the reflex sorry, not the sorry that's really just please don't make this into a whole thing. The kind that sits heavy in a man's chest before it comes out. The kind that costs something real.

I hate that I can tell the difference.

"I'm not the kind of woman who does this," I say, and even I can hear how thin that sounds right now, standing in a hotel room I technically broke into forty minutes ago with my dress on inside out.

"I know that about you." No argument. No defence. Just quiet.

"I was leaving. I had my hand on the door."

"You did."

I look at him. He looks back. He hasn't moved from the bed, sheets pooled around his waist, forearms resting on his knees, watching me with those dark patient eyes, and my stomach does the thing it has absolutely no business doing right now. The pull. The warmth. The complete moral bankruptcy of a body that stopped caring about context somewhere between the first orgasm and the second.

"Is she going to call back?" I ask.

"Probably."

"Are you answering?"

He holds my gaze steady. "No."

I should leave. I built the whole sentence in my head. I should leave, this was a mistake,  hope your separation works out however it's supposed to work out, good luck with the paperwork, take care of yourself. Clean. Final. Smart.

"What does separated actually mean?" I hear myself say instead. "Like legally. Papers and lawyers and all of it?" 

The corner of his mouth moves. He's reading me and he knows exactly what I'm doing and he lets me do it anyway. "Like we haven't shared a bed in eight months and she's in Lisbon with someone else and we're both just waiting on one appointment to make it official."

"So she's also..." 

"Also," he confirms.

I stand in the middle of this hotel room in my crumpled dress and I think about his hands. How certain they were. How nothing he did tonight felt accidental or careless or like I was just convenient. I think about I've got you, how easily it came out, how much I felt it when he said it with his hands pressed flat against my thighs like he meant it past the moment.

Ugh. I hate this. I genuinely, deeply hate this.

"This is a terrible idea," I say.

"Probably." And he has the absolute nerve to sound almost fond when he says it.

"I don't know you."

"You know my name. My back. My..."

"Garry."

He stops. Almost smiling again, that edge-of-it version that does catastrophic things to my common sense.

My bag slides off my shoulder.

Intentional this time.

I cross the room and he reaches for me before I even arrive, hands finding my hips, pulling me down onto the bed, and I land against his chest and his arms wrap around me and we stay like that for a moment. Not kissing. Not moving. Just breathing in the same warm space, his chin resting on top of my head.

"One more time," I say into his collarbone. "And then I go find my actual room."

His chest moves under my cheek. A laugh, low and almost silent.

"One more time," he agrees.

His phone lights up again on the nightstand.

We both ignore it.