Chapter 1: First night
I pulled up to the curb outside Tom’s apartment building and killed the engine. The silence that flooded the car was thick and uncomfortable. I glanced over at Dani in the passenger seat. She was staring straight ahead at the building’s faded brick facade, her fingers nervously pleating the fabric of her sweater.
“You don’t have to do this,” I said, for what felt like the hundredth time. “We can call it off. Right now. Just say the word.”
She took a deep, shaky breath and turned to me. Her hazel eyes were wide, but her jaw was set. “No. I want to. They’re our best friends. It’s just… biology. It’s help.” She said it like a mantra she was still trying to believe. “Kylie needs this. Tom needs this.”
“I know.” I reached over and squeezed her hand. It was cold. “It’s just for a few hours. I’ll be with Kylie. We’ll see that dumb superhero movie she wanted to watch.”
A weak smile touched her lips. “Don’t pretend you won’t enjoy the explosion scenes.” She leaned over, kissed my cheek, and grabbed the small overnight bag at her feet. It felt obscene, that bag. It contained a toothbrush, a change of clothes, nothing special. But everything about it was wrong.
We walked up to the door together. Tom opened it before we could knock. He looked like he hadn’t slept in a week. His broad shoulders filled the doorway, but he seemed diminished, folded in on himself. The scent of fresh sawdust and pine oil wafted out from the living room behind him, where half-built furniture stood like skeletal reminders of his normal life.
“Hey,” he said, his voice rough. He couldn’t quite meet my eyes. “Mark. Thanks for… you know.”
“It’s fine, Tom.”
Dani stepped forward and hugged him quickly. It was stiff, awkward. “Hi, Tom.”
Kylie appeared from behind him, a whirlwind of nervous energy in a dark green dress. She threw her arms around Dani. “You’re a saint. An absolute saint. I love you so much.” She released Dani and flashed me a brilliant, brittle smile. “Ready to get out of here, Mark? Give the scientists their lab time?”
Her joke landed with a thud. Tom flinched. Dani looked at the floor.
“Yeah,” I said, too forcefully. “Let’s go. You two… have what you need.”
Tom finally looked at me, his eyes full of a silent, profound apology. “We’ll take care of each other, Mark. I promise.”
It was the worst thing he could have said. I just nodded, turned, and followed Kylie’s clicking heels back down the path to my car.
The inside of the movie theater was a cavern of sensory overload that I completely failed to process. Explosions bloomed across the massive screen in vibrant oranges and yellows. A soundtrack of shattering glass and pounding drums vibrated through the stadium seating. I registered none of it.
My brain was back in Tom’s apartment, constructing images from the silence we’d left behind.
I saw them standing in the living room after the door closed, the hum of the single floor lamp the only sound. Tom would run a hand through his hair, that calloused carpenter’s hand. “You want a drink or something?” he’d ask, his voice low.
Dani would shake her head, her short dark hair brushing her jaw. “Probably shouldn’t. For… optimum conditions.” A clinical phrase, so unlike her.
Then what? An awkward shuffle to the bedroom? A discussion of logistics? My mind supplied the details, torturously vivid. The soft groan of the bedframe under Tom’s weight. The whisper of fabric as Dani’s sweater came off. The way his stubbled jaw would feel against her skin—not like mine at all.
“You’re not watching at all, are you?”
Kylie’s voice, laced with amused irony, cut through my thoughts. She nudged me with her elbow. On screen, a car sailed through the air in slow motion.
“Sorry. Distracted.”
She leaned closer, her perfume a light, floral cloud. “Thinking about the secret project back at home base?” Her tone was light, joking, but there was an edge to it. A brittleness.
“Something like that.”
She took a sip of her soda, her eyes on the screen but not seeing it either. “You know, for fairness… and for science… we could always conduct a parallel experiment.” She glanced at me, her expression mischievous but her eyes searching. “Wife-swap for the night. Keep things balanced in the universe.”
I barked out a laugh, too loud for the quiet theater. A few people shushed me. “God, Kylie. Don’t even joke.”
“Who’s joking?” she said, but she was smiling again, the moment passing into the realm of dark humor we were all learning to speak. We both laughed again, a release of tension that was almost genuine. Almost.
But the seed was planted. It took root in the dark, fed by the images flickering behind my eyes. As the hero on screen wrestled a villain, I wasn’t thinking of Dani anymore. I was thinking of Kylie’s slim wrist next to my armrest. The way her jet-black hair fell over her shoulder. The bubbly laugh that hid a current of something sharper, something restless. What would it be like to quiet that restlessness? The thought was a guilty, electric shock.
I dropped Kylie off at the entrance of her apartment after the movie, the goodnight hug lingering a second too long for just friends, before getting back in the car to wait for Dani to come down, the empty passenger seat feeling like a physical accusation.
Dani came down a moment later, her bag clutched to her chest. She slid into the car, bringing with her a wave of unfamiliar air—a mix of Tom’s pine soap and something else, something warm and spent.
“Hey,” she said softly.
“Hey.” I pulled away from the curb. “How… was it?”
A long pause. The streetlights strobed across her face, illuminating her then casting her back into shadow. “It was… fine. Weird. Sad, kind of.” She let out a breath that was almost a laugh. “He cried afterward. Not during. After. Just… held me and cried into my shoulder. He kept saying ‘thank you’ and ‘I’m sorry’ over and over.”
My hands tightened on the wheel. “Fair enough, I suppose.”
Dani continued after a moments pause. “It wasn’t… passionate. Not at first. It was like a task. A thing we had to check off.” Her voice changed then, grew quieter, more confidential. “But then… I don’t know. He changed. He was just so… there. So attentive. I guess being friends with him for so long helped.”
She fell silent, staring out the window. I dared a glance at her. The nervous determination from earlier was gone. In its place was a soft, languid stillness. Her skin glowed. Her lips were slightly parted. There was a quiet, deep satisfaction in her posture that I recognized intimately—it was the look she carried for hours after we had a particularly connected night, after she’d come apart multiple times, thoroughly and completely. A post-coital radiance that was impossible to fake.
A fierce, unexpected heat shot through me, settling low in my gut. It wasn’t jealousy. It wasn’t anger. It was a stark, blinding arousal. The vivid, confessional image of my wife and her best friend, the raw honesty in her tired voice, the tangible proof of her pleasure written all over her… it twisted something deep inside me.
I didn’t say a word. I just drove, the hum of the engine filling the car, my mind now completely consumed by two conflicting images: Dani, trembling in Tom’s arms in his quiet, wood-scented bedroom, and Kylie’s mischievous eyes glinting in the dark theater, asking who’s joking?