Chapter 13: The Shared Bed
The silence after the front door clicked shut was different. It wasn’t the charged quiet of anticipation. It was hollow. An echo chamber for everything they’d just done.
Catriona stood in the hallway, her robe pulled tight. She could still taste them both on her tongue, a phantom flavor that made her stomach clench. From the bedroom, she heard the heavy shuffle of Aidan moving, the groan of the bed frame as he stood.
She didn’t turn when he appeared in the doorway. He’d pulled on his jeans, but they were still unbuckled, hanging low on his hips. His chest was a map of faint scratches.
“She got off okay?” he asked. His voice was gravel.
“Yeah. Her car started. She’s gone.” Catriona’s own voice sounded distant, like it was coming from another room.
He walked up behind her, not touching her. She could feel the heat radiating off his skin. The scent of sex and sweat and Jenny’s lavender soap clung to him. To both of them. It was in the air, in the fibers of the rug.
“Cat,” he said, just her name. It was a question, a plea, a statement of overwhelming fact.
She finally turned. His face was drawn, the green of his eyes murky with exhaustion and something like shock. The astronomer who had just charted a new, forbidden constellation.
“That was…” She searched for a word. ‘Incredible’ was too shallow. ‘Monstrous’ wasn’t right. “A lot.”
He gave a single, sharp nod. “Yeah.”
“Are you…” She reached out, her fingers hovering over the red marks on his pectoral. “Are you okay?”
He caught her hand, pressed her palm flat against his heart. It beat a steady, strong rhythm under her skin. “I don’t know. Are you?”
She looked down at their joined hands. “I watched you fuck my best friend until she cried. Then I cleaned your come out of her.” She let the clinical words hang in the air, testing their weight. “I should feel wrecked. I feel… clear.”
He exhaled, a long, shaky breath, and pulled her into him. His arms wrapped around her, his face buried in her hair. He held her so tightly she almost couldn’t breathe, and she realized he was trembling. Not much. A fine, almost imperceptible vibration deep in his muscles.
“I’ve never…,” he murmured into her curls. “I lost myself in there, Cat. Completely. It wasn’t me.”
She leaned back, cupped his stubbled jaw. “It was. It’s a part of you. I asked to see it.” She kissed him, slow and deep, reclaiming his mouth. She tasted salt, the residual warmth of wine. Hers. “It was the hottest thing I’ve ever seen.”
A groan vibrated in his chest. His hands slid down to her backside, gripping her through the thin robe, pulling her against the hard line of his body again. He was already half-aroused. The animal in him wasn’t sated; it was awakened.
“Again?” he rasped, disbelieving.
“You’re asking?” she said, a sly smile touching her lips. She took his hand and led him, not back to the ruined master bed, but across the hall to the smaller, cooler guest room. The sheets here were clean, starch-stiff.
They didn’t make it under the covers. He pushed the robe from her shoulders and backed her against the wall beside the dresser, his mouth desperate on hers, his hands everywhere. This was different. There was no choreography, no audience. This was a reclamation. A grounding.
He entered her in one swift, sure motion, pinning her to the wall. She cried out, the sensation a bright, sharp shock after the spent sensitivity of before. He moved with a frantic, driving pace, his eyes locked on hers. He was trying to find his way back to her, to them, through sheer physical force.
“You’re mine,” he gritted out, each word a thrust. “You. Are. Mine.”
“I know,” she gasped, her legs locked around his hips, her fingers digging into his shoulders. “Aidan, I know.”
His climax took him quickly, a short, fierce storm that seemed to wrack him with a kind of agony. He slumped against her, his weight pressing her into the wall, his breath hot on her neck.
They slid down the wall together, a heap of limbs on the hardwood floor. Cool air whispered over their sweat-slicked skin.
“I’m not sorry,” Catriona said after a while, her head on his shoulder.
“I am,” he said quietly. She stiffened. He felt it and tightened his arm around her. “Not for doing it. For how much I wanted it. For how fucking good it felt to…” He trailed off, unable to finish.
“To give her what her husband can’t?” Catriona finished for him, her voice gentle.
He was silent for a long minute. “Yeah.”
“That was the point, love.”
“It feels dirty.”
“It is dirty,” she said, shrugging against him. “And beautiful. And sad. All of it.”
Across town, Jenny stood under a scalding shower. The water pounded her skin, turning it pink. She’d scrubbed herself twice with a loofah, but she could still feel the ghost of him inside her. A deep, pleasant ache between her legs, a tenderness in muscles she hadn’t used in years.
She pictured Catriona’s face, watching. The fierce love in her eyes, the arousal. She pictured Aidan above her, his expression stark and uncontrolled in the moment of release.
She stepped out, wrapping herself in a towel. In the foggy mirror, her reflection was blurry. She placed a hand low on her belly.
Mark was asleep when she slipped into bed. He smelled of his own soap, a crisp, alpine scent. He murmured and rolled toward her, throwing an arm over her waist, snuggling into her back.
Jenny lay perfectly still, staring at the digital clock on the nightstand. 2:47 AM. She was in her own bed, with her own husband. And she felt more alone than she ever had in the empty silence of a doctor’s office. The hope she carried now was a secret, illicit thing. It didn’t belong to them. It belonged to the three of them.
A single, hot tear escaped the corner of her eye and slid into her hairline. She didn’t wipe it away.
A week passed. The normal rhythms of life reasserted themselves with almost violent banality. Aidan went back to his telescope arrays and data logs. Catriona tackled a new mural commission for a boutique downtown. They talked about groceries, about the dripping faucet in the guest bath, about maybe getting a dog.
They did not talk about that night.
It sat between them at dinner, a silent, third guest. It lingered in the bedroom, where they made love with a renewed, almost desperate frequency, as if trying to overwrite the memory. They couldn’t.
Catriona found herself staring at her phone, waiting for a text from Jenny. It came, daily, but they were normal texts. Saw the cutest puppy today! followed by a photo. This recipe was a disaster, lol. Movie night Friday?
The subtext screamed. Neither woman acknowledged it.
Then, on a Tuesday afternoon, Catriona’s phone buzzed with a call. Jenny’s name flashed on the screen. Catriona’s heart jumped into her throat. She was in her studio, speckled with blue paint.
She answered. “Hey.”
“Hey.” Jenny’s voice was thin, tight.
“What’s wrong?”
A long pause. Catriona could hear Jenny breathing, could almost hear her thinking.
“My period is five days late.”
The words hung in the air, charged and fragile. Catriona’s knees felt weak. She sank onto her paint-stool.
“Okay,” Catriona said, her professional, nurturing tone snapping into place automatically. “That could be stress. God knows, enough has happened to—”
“I took a test,” Jenny interrupted, her voice dropping to a whisper. “Two of them. This morning.”
Catriona stopped breathing. The world narrowed to the phone pressed against her ear and the smears of blue on her hands. “And?”
Another pause. Then, a sound that was half-laugh, half-sob. “The second line was so faint. You could barely see it. But it was there, Cat. I think… I think it was there.”
Catriona closed her eyes. A storm of emotions broke inside her—a wild, soaring joy for her friend, a sharp, vicarious triumph, and beneath it, a cold, dark current of something else she couldn’t name. It was the feeling of having opened a door that could never fully be shut again.
“Jenny,” she breathed. “Oh, my god.”
“I’m scared to believe it,” Jenny whispered. “I can’t tell Mark. Not until I’m sure. I can’t get his hopes up. Not again.”
“What do you need?” Catriona asked, her voice steady even as her hand trembled.
“Can you… can you come with me? To get a blood test? Tomorrow? I can’t go alone.”
“Of course I can. Of course.” Catriona nodded, though Jenny couldn’t see her. “I’ll be there.”
She hung up and sat in the quiet studio, surrounded by vivid, unreal colors. The plan had worked. The terrifying, beautiful, dirty plan might have actually worked.
She had to tell Aidan. He was a father now. Maybe.
The thought was so enormous, so cataclysmic, it made the room tilt. She put a paint-stained hand on her own flat stomach, and for the first time, she wondered what they had truly set in motion.