As Jennifer finally allowed her toe to touch Bruce’s leg, he looked down at it for a moment, then put his warm hand on her foot. She thought he was going to push it away, to maintain the bubble of polite social decorum, but he rested his hand there, giving her foot a light squeeze.
“I assume it’s gotten easier to have time for yourself as they’ve aged?” She tried to remember how old but came up with only the vaguest idea of high school. He’d told her, she was sure of that. There’s not going to be a quiz, Jen, just pay attention from now on!
“Oh, of course, they have lives of their own, girlfriends. Now we get to decide if we’re going to be parents that police their sex lives. Limiting alone time. I didn’t have a girlfriend when I was a freshman, certainly. So I’m not sure what they get up to. Kids today are light-years ahead of where we were. Fuck!” Bruce rubbed his hand down his face and shook his head with a chuckle. “I can’t believe I just said ‘kids today.’ I’m that guy.”
“You’re not that guy.” After watching the confidence with which he’d played the evening, Jennifer found the view behind the curtain quite intriguing.
“So yes, their aging helps, but one must be more calculating with the lies.” He smiled.
“The lies?” The idea struck Jennifer as somewhat absurd. As the adult, the person in charge, why would you have to— Wait, had her mother lied to her? When she told her the dangers of— Jennifer’s eyes widened.
“Oh, Jennifer, tell me you’re not still laboring under the delusion that your parents not only knew what they were doing with you, but somehow never had to fib about it either.”
“I guess I didn’t really think about it.”
“The lie planning is of utmost importance. So is being able to roll with a challenge to your story.” He laughed and leaned back on the couch. “Just the other day, in fact, Adam, the older one, told me he knows we’ve been lying to him his entire ‘adult’ life. But now he sees through it, he knows what Paige and I are up to.”
Jennifer leaned in, intrigued. “And what is that?”
He turned to her, as though himself caught in a lie and smiled. She returned it.
A tinkle of glasses, a louder thump. Jennifer looked to the sidebar and saw Paige and Ryan together, looking at the bottles. She jumped, withdrawing her toes to the circle of acceptability and pulled her knees in tight. Ryan had a smile on his face as he looked at her. Genuine, warm. Nothing weird. No question of what she was doing with this guy. Just a smile of love.
Look at this girl, thought Ryan. Sometimes it was hard to imagine there could be conflict between them. Sometimes he could forget the therapy and the need for mantras and just look at her the way he’d looked at her that first week, month, when things were new and different, when he couldn’t even believe he got to kiss this girl goodnight. The whiff of jealousy came, that she seemed so comfortable there on the couch with Bruce, that handsome, charismatic, real and true man. He’d probably never have issues getting it up, he’d probably never turn down sex in favor of finishing level 8-3, ‘cuz it’s so damned hard to get there, and this time I made it with a fire flower for chrissakes!
But a whiff was all it was, and it dissipated into the ether again, and he saw his beautiful wife and this man that he himself would like to get to know, because Bruce had… a quality. He didn’t know what that quality actually was, and if said quality could be taught, but the man had something undefinable there. Ryan pursed his lips into a kiss for Jennifer. Her face turned from what might have been minor concern to blowing a kiss back, followed by a smile.
“What do you think of this?” asked Paige, holding up a Hogue Late Harvest Riesling. “It’s about that time of the evening, isn’t it?”
He looked at the bottle, then back at her. He was clearly expected to say something in confirmation or refutation, but he only knew that whatever was in that bottle, if she’d chosen it, would probably be better than the wines he simply knew as “red” or “white” back home. Oh, and “pink.” Sometimes pink. “Yeah, looks perfect,” he offered.
Bottle in hand, Paige lifted two empty glasses from the sidebar and walked to the couch. “Can I offer you two some Riesling?”
“About that time, I think,” said Bruce. In a fluid motion he knocked back the last of his Barbaresco, deposited the empty glass on the side table, and took hold of the glass from his wife as it was filled. Paige tilted the tall brown bottle to Jennifer.
Jennifer looked from the bottle in Paige’s hand, to her half full glass of Barbaresco, and back to the bottle. She blinked a few times and shook her head.
“She can have a taste of mine,” Bruce told Paige.
She leaned down and kissed her husband. “I’ve saved Ryan from juvenile boy talk in the basement so he can have an adult conversation.”
“Enjoy, Ryan,” Bruce told him. “My wife is quite the cunning linguist.”
Ryan wondered how drunk Jennifer was. He made eye contact with her as best as he could hold her attention. Still lucid. His eyes asked everything okay?
She nodded back, then smiled wider.
Paige returned to Ryan’s side and tilted her head toward the hall, her curls bounced with the gesture.
When she left the room, he followed.
8
Ryan had never been down this hallway at the Watkins’ house. He glanced back over his shoulder, wondering if perhaps he’d simply had too much to drink. Jennifer had had… well, was too much the right phrase? That implied poor decision making, and she never indulged herself more than she could handle. So not too much, but more than he’d seen in a while. She’d looked happy, though. It had also been a while since she’d seemed so content, happy… comfortable. Another turn down the hall, a low rumble approaching.
“Where are we going?” he asked. Paige just offered him a smile in return.
Today was the day they started their lives, right? New friends weren’t a bad way to do that. Ryan couldn’t remember his last new friend. Lots of acquaintances here or there, but new? Friend? Perhaps not.
Paige opened the door in front of her, far simpler than doors they’d passed in the hall before this turn, absent the trim and corners and panels of doors elsewhere in the house. The rumble, a cycling sound, louder. She pushed him in and flipped on the light.
Ryan stood in a laundry room as large as his office at home. Gleaming front-load washer and dryer stood beside each other on the opposite wall, the rest was all with white cabinetry topped with equally white counter top. In the center, a laundry basket sat atop an island, also white.
“An odd time for Barbara to be doing laundry,” Ryan observed.
“John French upended a chafing dish in the kitchen about an hour ago; Barb is on her party game to have the tablecloth in the wash already!” Paige stepped past a couple folding chairs tucked between a break in the cabinets and flung herself up onto the washer.
“Really?” asked Ryan.
“A quiet place to talk.” She patted the top of the dryer next to her.
“Quiet-ish.”
Paige put on a thoughtful expression. “I think it’ll do, unless you’re itching to rejoin the boys downstairs, that is.”
“Hell, no,” he said through a grin, and hopped onto the dryer next to her, slightly shaky. She grabbed his arm and made a showy save of his balance. He smiled widely at her as he righted himself.