His House

Rhett walked in at seven-fifteen and looked at Evan the way men look at things they did not give permission to exist.

"Well." He set his keys on the counter and took his time with it — taking in the set table, the food, the very specific fact of another person occupying his kitchen with a ease that suggested he belonged there. "The genius IT boy. Your mother has told me a lot about you."

I felt the room shift. I kept my voice pleasant. "Is that so? Funny — seems like my best friend has been telling you quite a bit more than she's been telling me."

Rhett's eyes moved to me. A look I knew well. The one that meant: we will discuss your tone later.

"So, Rhett." Evan leaned back slightly in his chair and looked at my husband with an expression I could only describe as unbothered. "Nicole mentioned you two have been separated for about two years now. That right?"

The kitchen went very quiet.

Rhett turned his head slowly toward Evan. "Did she."

"Just something she said." Evan held his gaze. Comfortable. Like a man who had nothing to lose in this conversation and knew it. "Wanted to make sure I understood the situation before moving in."

"And what else," Rhett said softly, "did she say."

"I'm going to get more wine from the back." I stood up before Rhett could finish the thought that was forming on his face. "The good bottle is in the second rack."

"I'll help." Evan was already on his feet.

Rhett watched us both walk out of the kitchen with the expression of a man filing something away.

The back hallway was narrow and cool and about as far from Rhett's earshot as I could get on short notice. I found the wine without looking for it. Evan stood at the other end of the hall with his arms crossed, watching the doorway we had just come through.

"I don't like him being here," he said. Low and direct.

I turned around. "He's my husband, Evan. We live in the same apartment."

"I know what he is."

"Then you know this is not your concern."

He looked at me. That look — the one he had been giving me since the first night, steady and complete and entirely too perceptive for someone who had been in my home less than a week. "You went very still when he walked in," he said.

"I always go still when there's potential for conflict. I'm a lawyer."

"That's not what it looked like."

I held the wine bottle against my chest and looked at him and said, very evenly: "Your clothes and your things are in the bag in the hall corner from this morning. If tonight is too much, if any of this is too much, you can take them and go. I mean that with no unkindness."

He was quiet for a moment.

"I'm not going anywhere," he said.

We went back to the kitchen. Rhett was pouring himself a glass of water and smiling at nothing in particular, which was always the version of him I trusted least.

Dinner lasted forty-five minutes and felt considerably longer.

Rhett performed well. He always did — charming in a way that required you to be watching very carefully to see what was underneath it. He asked Evan questions that sounded like interest and were actually inventory. He touched my hand twice at the table, possessively, making a point that had nothing to do with affection and everything to do with the fact that Evan was sitting across from him.

Evan ate and said little and watched everything.

When dinner was done, Rhett told Evan it had been good to meet him and meant none of it, and Evan said likewise and meant equally little, and then Rhett looked at me and said, "I need a word," and I knew from the specific weight of those three words that the evening was not finished.

He followed me into the bedroom and closed the door.

I had my back to him, setting the wine glass down on the dresser, when his hand came to my shoulder and turned me — not gently — and the next thing I knew the back of my knees hit the bed and I was sitting on it and Rhett was standing over me with the kind of stillness that was its own form of pressure.

"The cameras," he said. "The ones in this room. Why are the feeds blank?"

"I turned them off."

"Turn them back on."

"No."

Something moved through his expression. Something I had learned to track very carefully over six years because the window between that expression and what came after it was short. "It's been a while, hasn't it." His voice dropped. "Is that why you turned them off? For your little friend out there?"

"Get away from me, Rhett."

"My house." He stepped closer. "My cameras. My wife."

"Let go —"

"What exactly did I do so wrong?" His hand closed around my wrist and the question came out soft, which was somehow worse than loud. "Tell me. What did I do that was so terrible that you are letting some nineteen-year-old boy sleep twenty feet from our bedroom?"

I looked up at him. I felt my wrist in his hand and the edge of the mattress at the back of my thighs and I thought with perfect clarity: I am not afraid of you. I have not been afraid of you for two years. I am only afraid of what I might do if you give me one more reason.

"You know exactly what you did," I said. "And if you raise that hand at me again the way you did in March, I promise you — it will be the last thing you do in this apartment."

His face changed.

He raised his hand.

The bedroom door came open.

Evan crossed the room in four steps and hit Rhett hard enough that he went sideways off his feet, and the sound of it was sharp and final in the quiet of the room, and then there was nothing but the three of us — Rhett on the floor with his hand at his jaw, Evan standing over him breathing steadily, and me on the edge of the bed watching in panic.