Chapter 11: The Silent Pact
Three days passed. They were the longest days of Catriona’s life.
Monday was emails and spreadsheets, the sterile glow of her office monitor a poor substitute for the golden kitchen light. Her fingers typed quarterly reports, but her mind replayed the image of Aidan’s back, muscles shifting under sweat-slick skin as he moved over Jenny. She felt no jealousy, only a low, persistent hum of arousal, a secret she carried through meetings about marketing budgets. She texted the group chat, just a sunflower emoji. Aidan replied with a telescope. Jenny sent back a single heart.
Tuesday, Aidan spent eleven hours at the observatory, calibrating instruments meant to detect the faintest whispers from dead stars. He’d stare into the profound blackness on his screens and see the curve of Jenny’s hip, the desperate clutch of her fingers on the table’s edge. The memory was a physical punch to his gut, a primal feedback loop that had nothing to do with astronomy. His research assistant, Leo, asked him twice about a data anomaly. Aidan blinked, his mind pulling back from the scent of lavender and sex. “Run it again,” he muttered, rubbing his eyes.
Jenny’s Tuesday was grocery shopping, laundry, a phone call with her mother. Normalcy like a too-tight jacket. She kissed Mark goodbye that morning, tasted his mint toothpaste, and her brain treacherously supplied the memory of a different taste, saltier, more intimate. She flinched. Mark noticed. “You okay?” he asked, his hand warm on her shoulder. “Just a headache,” she lied, the words ash in her mouth. She spent the afternoon obsessively researching early pregnancy symptoms, knowing it was futile, unable to stop.
By Wednesday afternoon, the tension was a live wire strung between their three separate lives.
Catriona left work early, claiming a migraine. She drove nowhere, windows down, until she found herself parked outside Jenny’s house. It was empty. Mark’s car was gone. Jenny’s too. She just sat, engine off, watching the lace curtains move in the breeze from the open kitchen window. The scene of the crime. It looked so innocent.
Her phone vibrated. A text from Jenny. Just left the clinic. Bloodwork. Feeling like a pincushion. And empty.
Catriona’s thumbs flew. Where are you now?
Driving. Just driving.
Come to our place. Aidan’s at the university until seven. We can talk. Or not talk.
The pause was long. Then: Okay.
Catriona made tea she knew neither of them would drink. She heard Jenny’s car, the hesitant steps on the porch. When she opened the door, Jenny looked shattered. The gentle femininity was still there, but it was bruised, shadows under her hazel eyes.
“Hey,” Catriona said, pulling her inside.
They ended up on the big sofa, curled at opposite ends, facing each other. The silence was comfortable, worn-in.
“Mark wants to try another round of IUI next month,” Jenny said finally, picking at a thread on a cushion. “He’s so… hopeful. He got a brochure from a new clinic. He left it on my pillow.”
“Oh, Jen.”
“I can’t do it,” Jenny whispered, the words cracking. “I can’t go back to those rooms, to those cold stirrups and the sympathetic nurses and the two-week wait that feels like a death sentence. I can’t look at his hopeful face when another hundred thousand yen vanishes for nothing.” She looked up, tears spilling over. “But what we’re doing… it’s a different kind of lie. A bigger one. Isn’t it?”
Catriona moved, closing the distance. She wrapped her arms around Jenny, felt the fine tremors running through her frame. “It’s not a lie to him. It’s a secret for us. A private thing. To give you what you both want.”
“It feels monstrous.”
“Does it?” Catriona pulled back, her hands on Jenny’s shoulders. “When he was inside you, when I was watching… did it feel monstrous?”
Jenny’s breath hitched. Color flooded her cheeks. She looked away, then back, her gaze defiant through the tears. “No. It felt like the only real thing that’s happened to me in years.”
“Then there’s your answer.”
The front door opened. Keys jangled. Boots on the hardwood.
Aidan stopped in the doorway to the living room, his silhouette blocking the hall light. He’d come home early. He took in the scene: the tear-streaked faces, the intimate curl of their bodies on the couch. His green eyes met Catriona’s, a question in them.
“She had bloodwork today,” Catriona said, her voice quiet.
Aidan didn’t ask for results. He just nodded, understanding the emotional calculus. He shrugged off his jacket, toed off his boots, and came to them. He didn’t sit. He knelt on the rug in front of the sofa, putting himself at their eye level. His presence was a solid, calming force.
“Talk to me,” he said to Jenny, his voice a low rumble.
“I’m scared,” she said simply. “I’m scared this will break everything. Mark. My marriage. You two. I’m scared it won’t work, and then we’ve done this… this incredible, terrifying thing for nothing. I’m scared it will work, and I’ll have to carry this secret for the rest of my life.”
Aidan listened, his gaze steady. He reached out, his calloused thumb wiping a tear from her cheek. The touch was shockingly tender. “Fair fears. All of them.”
“What do we do?” Jenny asked, leaning into his hand.
Aidan looked at Catriona, then back at Jenny. “We move forward. Carefully. But we move. The waiting, the worrying in separate rooms… that’s the torture. We’re in this together. So we act together.” He paused. “When’s your window?”
The clinical term in their warm, messy living room was a jolt. Jenny swallowed. “The app says Friday through Monday. Peak is probably Saturday.”
“Okay.” Aidan sat back on his heels. “Then Friday night, you come here. Or we come to you. We have dinner. Like friends do. And we see what happens.No pressure. No schedule. Just… us.”
“And if I chicken out?” Jenny asked.
“Then we watch a movie and you go home to Mark,” Catriona said, interlacing her fingers with Jenny’s. “No guilt. No drama.”
Jenny stared at their joined hands, then at Aidan’s rugged, earnest face. The alternative was the brochure on the pillow, the clinical chill, the slow erosion of hope. Here was heat, and life, and a terrifying kind of honesty.
“Okay,” she breathed. “Friday.”
Aidan stood, the movement fluid. He leaned down and kissed the top of Catriona’s head, a familiar, loving gesture. Then, with a hesitation so slight only Catriona would notice, he bent and pressed his lips to Jenny’s forehead. It was a promise. A benediction.
“Stay for dinner,” Catriona said, her voice thick. “Let’s just… be normal for a bit.”
They ordered pizza. They ate on the floor around the coffee table, laughing about a stupid video Catriona found. Aidan’s socked foot rested against Catriona’s thigh. Jenny’s shoulder brushed his arm when she reached for a napkin. The space between them crackled, not with tension, but with a charged, fragile potential.
When Jenny left, the night air cool on her skin, she didn’t feel empty. She felt full. Of dread, of possibility, of the memory of Aidan’s kiss on her forehead and Catriona’s hand in hers.
Back inside, Aidan was loading plates into the dishwasher. Catriona came up behind him, wrapped her arms around his waist, pressed her face into the solid plane of his back.
“You’re okay with this?” he asked, his voice muffled by the rinse cycle.
“I’m more than okay,” she said, and meant it. “Seeing you with her… it does something to me. It doesn’t take from us. It adds.” She turned him around, looked up into his puzzled, beautiful face. “I want to watch again. I want to be part of it. Not just in the room. Part of it.”
His green eyes darkened.He understood. He cradled her face, his thumbs on her cheekbones. “You’re sure?”
In answer, she went up on her toes and kissed him, pouring all her tangled-up desire and love and wild curiosity into it. When they broke apart, they were both breathing hard.
“Friday,” he said, the word a vow.
“Friday,” she echoed.
Upstairs in their bed, later, their own lovemaking was different. Slower, more intense, more visual. Catriona’s eyes were open, watching his face, imagining it hovering over Jenny’s. The thought sent a sharp, electric thrill through her. After, as she drifted off with his arm heavy across her, her last thought was a question, not of morality, but of mechanics.
What would it feel like, her skin against Jenny’s, with him between them?
The question followed her into sleep, a secret, shimmering thread pulling them all toward Friday.