Semua Bab I Slept With My Best Friend's Son: Bab 31 - Bab 40

I looked at him across the table. "It's never going to happen," I said. "Nicole —" "I heard what you said. And I'm telling you clearly — it is never going to happen. Not the way you mean." "Why not." "Because I am thirty-eight years old." I kept my voice straight. "Because you are nineteen. Because whatever has happened in this house over the last three weeks does not change the fact that there is almost twenty years between us and I am a married woman and you are my best friend's son and those things are real regardless of —" I stopped. "Regardless of anything else." "I don't care about the age." "I know you don't. That doesn't make it disappear." "Then tell me you don't feel anything." He looked at me steadily. "Tell me that and I'll drop it." I said nothing. He nodded. Like that was the answer. Like my silence had just confirmed everything he needed confirmed. "I'm going to protect you," he said. "Whether you want me to or not. Whether Rhett is your husband or not. Whethe

I was still talking when my phone rang. I looked at the screen. Ashley. I looked at Evan. He looked at the phone. Something in his expression said he already knew who it was from the way my face changed. I picked up. "Nicole." Ashley's voice was tight and controlled in the way it got when she was pretending to be calm about something she was not calm about. "I need you to send Evan home. Whatever is happening in that house right now it has gone far enough and I need my son out of that situation before —" "He moved out," I said. Silence. "What?" "He found alternative accommodation near campus. He's no longer at the house." I kept my voice even and my eyes off Evan. "He's fine. He's sorted." A longer silence this time. "He didn't tell me that." Ashley's voice shifted. The control cracking slightly at the edges. "Why wouldn't he tell me that? He just — why wouldn't he say something?" "I don't know, Ashley. You'd have to ask him." "Can you put him on —" "Call your son," I sai

"Go ahead," I said. Rhett looked at me. "Investigate." I kept my voice easy. Completely easy. The voice I used in courtrooms when I already knew how something was going to end and was simply waiting for the other side to catch up. "Look at whatever you want to look at. You're going to find nothing because there's nothing there." He studied my face. That was the tell — when Rhett went quiet and studied my face it meant I had not given him what he expected and he was recalibrating. He had wanted an argument. Defensiveness. The particular crack in someone's composure that told him he had found the right pressure point. He got nothing. I poured myself a glass of water and went to bed. --- The days that followed were quiet on the surface. Rhett moved back in without announcing that he was doing so — his things simply stopped being packed and he was at the dinner table and that was that. We existed in the apartment the way two people exist when they have said everything that needed

The apartment on Bleecker was quiet in a way his room at Nicole's never had been. Not bad quiet. Just — different. The quiet of a space that had not yet decided what it was. No sound from the next room. No footsteps on the floor above. No particular smell to the kitchen except the cleaning product it had been wiped down with before he moved in. He had been there four days and he still woke up in the mornings and had to locate himself. He sat at the desk by the window with his laptop open and the reading for Thursday's seminar beside it and the city doing what the city did outside the glass — indifferent, continuous, entirely unbothered by the fact that he had read the same paragraph eleven times and retained nothing. Her voice. That was the thing that kept coming back first. Not her face — the voice. The specific way she said his name when she was done being patient with him. The way it dropped slightly at the end. The way she said it differently in the corridor than she said it a

He made the decision during his last lecture. Not dramatically. It arrived the way practical decisions arrive — quietly, without announcement, slotting into place between one thought and the next. He was going. Today. Whether she answered his calls or not, whether it was welcome or not, whether it complicated the space she had asked for or not. He had heard his mother's silence on that phone line and he had spent the night sitting with what it meant and by morning he was done sitting. He packed up his bag when the lecture ended and walked out into the corridor. --- "Evan." Serena fell into step beside him. Bag on one shoulder, coffee in the other hand, the particular energy of someone who had been waiting for a natural opening and had just found one. "How was Mahoney's lecture?" she said. "Long." He kept moving. "The middle section could have been an email." She laughed. "He really does love his own voice." She matched his pace without effort — she was a natural walker, the ki