The seating chart was the thing that finally broke them.
It was a sheet of white poster board on the kitchen table, covered in sticky notes in four colors: pink for her side, blue for his, yellow for work people, green for the people their mothers insisted on. They had been moving the same six squares around for an hour. Claire’s Aunt Patty could not sit near Ben’s Uncle Rick because of something that happened at a Fourth of July in 2009 that nobody would explain. The DJ wanted a final count. The caterer wanted a final count. Claire wanted a beer, and then she wanted a second beer, and now she was halfway through it and laughing in a way that was mostly exhaustion.
“Six weeks,” she said. “Six weeks from Saturday, I’m going to be Mrs. Hollis, and I’m going to have spent the whole engagement at this table.”
“You don’t have to take my name.”
“I want your name. I don’t want Aunt Patty.”
Ben smiled, but it didn’t quite land. He had been quiet all night, quieter than the seating chart deserved. He was turning his bottle in slow circles on the table, leaving wet rings on a list of hotel blocks.
“Hey,” she said. “What?”
“Nothing.”
“Ben. You’ve been looking at me like you swallowed a bee for three days.”
He laughed, and rubbed the back of his neck, and that was when she got a little scared. She’d known him four years. He was a big, easygoing guy who fixed furnaces for a living and cried at dog commercials and had never once, in four years, been afraid to tell her anything.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay. Don’t freak out.”
“I’m already freaking out.”
“It’s not bad. I don’t think it’s bad.” He let out a breath. “You remember the night we had too much wine at my brother’s, and you told me about the guy before me? The mechanic?”
Claire went very still.
She remembered. She remembered exactly how much wine it had been and exactly how much she’d said, which was more than she meant to. DeShawn Reed. Dee. Two years, on and off, in her twenties, before she’d decided she needed somebody who wanted the same boring life she did. They had not broken up because anything was wrong. They had broken up because she was twenty-six and scared of how much she wanted him. She’d told Ben all of it that night, how big Dee was, how he used to hold her down by the hips and take his time, how she’d never come like that before or since. Then she’d woken up mortified and apologized, and Ben had kissed her forehead and said, I asked, babe. It’s fine.
“I remember,” she said carefully.
“I think about it,” Ben said. “A lot. Like, a lot a lot.”
“Ben.”
“Not in a jealous way.” His face was turning red from the collar up. “In the other way. I think about you with him and I get so hard I can’t think. And I keep thinking, six weeks, and then that’s it, you’re my wife, and I’m the last guy. Which I want. God, I want that. But there’s this part of me that wants—” He stopped. He looked at the poster board instead of at her. “That wants you to have one more night first. With him. The night before. And then come home and marry me.”
Claire put her hand over her mouth.
She did not know what her face was doing. She knew what her body was doing, which was a slow, hot, humiliating flood between her legs, so sudden she squeezed her thighs together under the table.
“You’re serious,” she said through her fingers.
“I’m serious. You can say no. You can say I’m a freak and we never talk about it again. But I’ve been carrying it around since the night you told me, and I didn’t want to marry you with a secret.”
She took her hand away. She looked at him, this sweet, red-faced man in his flannel shirt who had just told her the most dangerous thing anyone had ever told her, and the first thing out of her mouth was not no.
It was, “Come here.”
He came around the table and she pulled him down by the shirt and kissed him hard enough to knock his chair over. Sticky notes went everywhere. Aunt Patty ended up on the floor.
“Tell me what you think about,” she said against his mouth.
“Claire.”
“You told me the fantasy. Now tell me the details.”
He groaned. She had his belt open already, her hand inside his jeans. He was harder than she’d felt him in months, leaking against her palm.
“I think about him bending you over,” Ben said, and his voice shook. “I think about you telling me how big he is. I think about you coming home and still being—” He couldn’t finish it.
“Still being full of him?” Claire said, and she felt him jerk in her hand.
She’d never talked like this in her life. It came out of her like it had been waiting.
She stood up and shoved her leggings down and bent herself over the kitchen table, over the seating chart and the hotel list and the wet rings, and looked back at him over her shoulder.
“He used to do it like this,” she said. “Right here. One hand on my back. He’d make me wait.”
Ben pushed into her with a sound like he’d been punched. She was so wet it was almost embarrassing. He fucked her against the table while the beer bottles rattled, and she told him things. How Dee used to stretch her so slow she’d beg. How she could feel him in her stomach. How he’d pull out to the tip just to watch her squirm and then sink back in, all of it, until she couldn’t breathe. Every word made Ben move harder, and every word made her clench around him, and she came first, gasping, her cheek pressed to a pink sticky note that said Cousin Amber +1.
Ben lasted maybe ten more seconds. He came with his forehead against her spine, saying her name like an apology.
They stayed like that a long time.
“So,” he said finally, muffled. “Is that a no?”
Claire laughed so hard she slid half off the table.
“I don’t know what it is,” she said. “Let me think. I have to think.”
But she was already thinking about what she’d say to Dee.
Reed Auto was on the east side of town, past the grain elevator, a three-bay garage with a hand-painted sign and a gravel lot. She drove past it twice on Thursday before she pulled in. It was after six. The bay doors were down, but the office light was on.
She had texted Ben from the parking lot. I’m here. I’m going to ask him. I might just throw up instead.
He wrote back in under a minute. Whatever happens, I love you. Tell me everything.
The office smelled like motor oil and burnt coffee, exactly the way it had five years ago. There was a tire calendar on the wall and an old brown couch she knew far too well. Dee was at the desk with a parts catalog open, and he looked up when the bell over the door rang, and then he didn’t say anything at all for a while.
He’d gotten bigger. That was her first stupid thought. Broader through the shoulders, a little gray coming in at his chin, the same shaved head and the same patient dark eyes. He was wearing a black work T-shirt with grease on the forearms, and he looked at her like she was a car that had come in with a noise he couldn’t place yet.
“Claire Dunn,” he said.
“Hi, Dee.”
His eyes went to her left hand. To the ring.
“Congratulations,” he said, and he meant it, which somehow made it worse.
“Thank you. It’s in six weeks. His name’s Ben. He’s really good.” She was talking too fast. “That’s actually why I’m here. Kind of. Can I sit down?”
He nodded at the couch. She didn’t take it. She stood by the door with her keys in her fist and told him, all of it, in one long run-on sentence that got quieter as it went, until she was nearly whispering: the seating chart, the kitchen table, one more night, the night before.
When she finished, the only sound was the buzz of the fluorescent light in the bay.
“Your fiancé,” Dee said slowly, “wants you to spend the night before your wedding with me.”
“Yes.”
“And you want that.”
She had promised herself she would not lie to him, and she’d promised herself she would not lie to Ben, and that left nowhere to hide.
“Yes,” she said.
Dee closed the parts catalog. He got up and came around the desk. He did it the way he did everything, unhurried, and she backed up without meaning to until her shoulders were against the office door.
He put one hand flat on the door beside her head.
“Here’s my problem,” he said, very low. “You walked out on me five years ago because you said I was too much. You said you couldn’t think straight around me. And now you want one night, six weeks from now, with a clock on it.” He leaned in, not quite touching her. She could smell him, soap and engine oil and something underneath that her body remembered before her brain did. “I don’t do anything for one night, Claire. You know that.”
“So that’s a no,” she whispered.
“That’s a not like that.” His eyes dropped to her mouth. “If I’m doing this, I’m not doing it cold. I’m not letting you show up the night before your wedding scared and shaking and wondering if you remember. You’re going to remember.”
She had both fists in his T-shirt. She didn’t know when that had happened.
“Call him,” Dee said.
“What?”
“Your man. Call him. I want to hear him say it.”
Her hands shook so badly she nearly dropped the phone. Ben picked up on the first ring.
“Hey,” he said, breathless. “Are you okay?”
“I’m okay. I’m here. He’s—” She looked up at Dee. “He wants to hear it from you.”
Dee took the phone out of her hand. He kept his other hand on the door.
“Ben,” he said. “DeShawn. I’m going to ask you one time, man to man, and I want a straight answer. You want this? Not the night before. Tonight. Now.”
Claire couldn’t hear the words, only the shape of Ben’s voice through the speaker, low and rough. Dee listened. Something changed in his face, a slow, dark pleasure.
“All right,” he said. “She’ll call you after.”
He hung up and set the phone on the desk, face up, and looked at her.
“He said yes,” Dee said. “He said, and I’m quoting, don’t go easy on her.“
Claire made a sound she’d never made in front of anyone.
Then he kissed her, and five years went up like paper.
He kissed her the way she remembered and better, slow and deep and completely sure of himself, one hand at her jaw and the other sliding down to grip her hip and pull her off the door and into him. She felt him through his jeans, thick and heavy against her belly, and her knees actually went. He caught her. He laughed into her mouth, low.
“There she is,” he said.
He walked her backward to the old brown couch and sat her down on it and knelt in front of her, and he took her jeans off with a patience that made her want to scream. He kissed the inside of her knee. He kissed higher. When he finally put his mouth on her she grabbed the back of his head with both hands and bucked against his face, and he held her hips down, just like he used to, and made her wait, just like he used to, licking her slow and steady until she was shaking and swearing and begging him by name. She came with her engagement ring tangled in the throw blanket on the back of the couch.
“Dee. Dee, please.”
He stood up and unbuckled his belt.
She’d told Ben the truth at the kitchen table, but the truth had faded in five years, and now it was in front of her again. He was thick and dark and long enough that she just looked at him for a second with her mouth open. She reached out and wrapped her hand around him, and her fingers didn’t meet.
“I forgot,” she whispered.
“I know you did,” he said. “That’s why we’re not waiting six weeks.”
He pulled her to the edge of the couch and pushed into her, slowly, so slowly, an inch and then a breath and then another inch, his eyes on her face the whole time. She was soaked and it was still a stretch that took all the air out of her. She grabbed his forearms. She felt every vein. He stopped halfway and let her feel it, and she was gasping, more, more, all of it, and he gave it to her until he was buried in her and she could feel him so deep it was almost like an ache in her stomach.
“Look at you,” he said, and moved.
He fucked her on that ugly brown couch for a long time. He fucked her slow until she was crying with it, and then he turned her over and pressed one big hand flat between her shoulder blades and fucked her hard, the couch springs shrieking, the tire calendar rattling on its nail, her face buried in a cushion that smelled like the past. She came again with him all the way inside her and it went on and on, and he held her through it and didn’t stop. When he finally came, he pulled her up against his chest with an arm across her collarbone and groaned into her neck, buried as deep as he could go. She felt every pulse of it.
They lay tangled on the couch afterward, sweaty, her jeans somewhere on the floor, his heartbeat slowing against her back.
“Six weeks,” Dee said into her hair.
“Five weeks and six days.”
“You keep count?”
“I’ve been looking at a seating chart for a month. I count everything.”
He laughed and kissed her shoulder. “Then here’s the count. Between now and the night before, you come see me whenever he says you can. And the night before, you’re mine till morning. Then I’ll drive you to your wedding myself.”
She turned to look at him. “You’d do that?”
“I’d do that.” His thumb found her ring and turned it, gently, once. “I liked you a lot, Claire. Glad somebody’s going to marry you right.”
She sat in her car in the gravel lot for ten minutes before she could drive. The sign over the bays glowed red through the rain-speckled windshield. Her hair was a mess. Her thighs were wet. She could still feel him everywhere.
She picked up her phone and typed with her thumbs, biting her lip so hard it hurt.
It was him. It was so much more than I remembered. He didn’t go easy on me. I’m coming home and you’re going to find out exactly how much.
The reply came before she’d even turned the key.
Drive safe. Drive fast. I love you so much.
And then, a second later:
Five weeks and six days.
Claire laughed out loud, alone in her car, with her ring on her finger and another man’s come still warm inside her, and pulled out of the lot toward home.
To be continued in Chapter 2: The Bachelorette.
