Chapter 2: The First Call
The kitchen went utterly silent after the call ended. The hum of the refrigerator climbed up the register, suddenly loud and obtrusive. JoAnn set her phone down on the butcher block with a definitive tap. The sound was a period at the end of a sentence they couldn’t take back.
She looked at Joe. Her pupils were wide, swallowing the green of her irises. “That was Merriam.”
“I gathered.” His voice was rough. He braced his hands on the cool granite, head down, studying the whorls and patterns. “She sounds…”
“Composed.”
“Yeah.”
“Calm. Like a librarian planning a heist.”
That drew a snort from him, a tension release valve letting off a tiny, sharp burst of air. He looked up. JoAnn’s cheeks were flushed, her breath not quite steady. She was terrified. She was electrified. She was mor
completely out of her skin. He saw the same war inside her that was raging in him. It was the most honest either of them had looked in weeks.
"Saturday," she said, the word hovering in the air between them. "Eight o'clock. The Absinthe House."
"Because of course they'd pick a place called that," Joe murmured, finally pushing off the counter. The space felt different now, charged with a new, unfamiliar energy.
He walked to her, each step measured on the hardwood floor. Her eyes tracked him, wide and waiting. He stopped close enough to feel the heat coming off her body, to see the faint pulse in her throat. He cupped her face, his carpenter's thumbs brushing her cheekbones. "You're shaking."
"Adrenaline," she breathed, leaning into his touch. "Like before a big opening. Or jumping off the high dive."
"I never jumped off the high dive," he said, a faint smile touching his lips. "Too many variables. Uncertain water depth."
She let out a ragged laugh, her hands coming up to grip his wrists. "And this? How's the water look here, Joe?"
He didn't answer immediately. He just looked at her—this woman who dreamed in color and wanted to paint their marriage with a stranger's brush. The fear was a cold stone in his gut. The desire, however, was a live wire, sparked by her absolute certainty.
"Murky as hell," he finally said. "But you're already in the air, aren't you?"
She nodded, a single, forceful dip of her chin. Her fiery hair whispered against his fingers. "And I need you jumping with me. Not just standing on the board because I asked you to."
He kissed her then. It wasn't gentle. It was a claim, an affirmation, a physical echo of the promise they’d just made. Her mouth opened under his, and the taste was all JoAnn—wine, ambition, a trace of peppermint lip balm. When he pulled back, they were both breathless.
"The rules stand," he said, his forehead resting against hers. "My red. Your red. Our room."
"Our room," she repeated, sealing the pact.
She slid off the counter, her body aligning with his. The silk of her robe whispered against his flannel shirt. Her hands crept beneath the fabric, finding the warm, solid plane of his back. "I want you," she said, her voice low and direct. "Right now. Before any of this. I need to remember us first."
He understood. This was consecration. A recommitment before the unknown. He didn't carry her; that wasn't their style. Instead, he took her hand and led her from the kitchen, leaving the amber lights burning, the phone dark on the counter.
The hallway was shadowed, strips of moonlight from the bedroom door laying silver on the floor. The house was theirs, a familiar sanctuary that now felt like the holding area before a journey.
In the bedroom, the cool, cotton scent of their laundered sheets filled the air. She turned to him, her back to the moonlit window, her face in darkness. "I need to see you," she said, and her voice had lost its teacher-lyricism, stripped down to something raw.
He reached for the hem of his shirt and pulled it over his head. The moonlight caught the dense musculature of his shoulders, the old wrestling scars, the soft dark hair on his chest. He stood before her, allowing her look. He saw her eyes trace him, not with a critic's eye, but with a devotee's.
"Your turn," he said.
Her fingers went to the silk tie at her waist. The knot gave way with a soft hiss. The robe fell open, then slid from her shoulders to pool at her feet. She was pale and curved in the monochrome light, a sculpture of shadows and milky skin. The freckles across her chest and shoulders were like distant, constellations he knew by heart.
NIGHT BEGINS.
He touched her then, his calloused hands a familiar contrast against her skin, mapping the territory that was entirely and only his. The weekend vanished in a blur of whispered rules and nerve-racked silence, until suddenly it was Saturday night, and they were sitting at a secluded table at The Absinthe House, when the door opened and Merriam arrived.
Merriam’s entrance was not a grand thing, but a slow, confident unspooling of presence, her blonde hair catching the low, green-tinged light of the absinthe fountain behind the bar. She slid into the booth across from them, her partner Leo following, and when her cool fingers brushed Joe’s wrist in a brief, deliberate greeting, a current of understanding passed between them all.