She had a way of setting a drink down that was almost a dare.
Not aggressive. Just deliberate. Like every move she made was considered, like she had decided long ago that she was not going to do anything by accident. I noticed it the first night we came in, back in February, and I kept noticing it every time after that, which was most Friday nights, which tells you something about what I was doing even before I knew I was doing anything.
Her name was Cara. She knew ours by the third visit. She knew his drink before he ordered it by the fifth. She knew mine too but she always asked anyway, and she would tilt her head when I answered, like my answer interested her, like she was filing it somewhere.
My husband liked her. I liked her. We talked about her on the drives home. Cara was funny tonight. Cara remembered that thing about your sister. The way you talk about people who have become part of the texture of your week without you deciding it. She was twenty-six, maybe. Dark hair. The kind of pretty that doesn’t need to announce itself.
It was my idea to invite her home. The wine made it an easy thing to say.
I tried to make it not my idea, later, in the version I told myself at two in the morning. But it was mine. We’d had three drinks each and it was a slow Friday and she was leaning on the bar talking to us and at some point the conversation shifted the way conversations shift when everyone in them has had that many and nobody is pretending anymore, and I looked at her and I said you should come over.
She looked at me for a second. Then she looked at him.
Then she smiled and said I could close early if you want.
In the cab I was already building it. The three of us, the bedroom, what it would look like. I had never done anything like this and neither had he and that was part of it, the newness, the specific electricity of a thing you’ve never done. I held his hand in the cab and he squeezed back and we were co-conspirators, the two of us, with Cara in the seat across from us looking out the window like she was just going somewhere she’d been before.
I should have caught that. The looking-out-the-window thing. She wasn’t nervous. I read it as confidence and moved on.
At the apartment she looked around once and then she looked at me.
“Let me get us drinks,” I said. “There’s wine open, or I can do something stronger if you want.”
“Whiskey. Neat.” She set her jacket on the chair. “Go make them.”
She said it lightly. Like she’d been telling me what to do for years, when she’d never told me a thing before tonight. Not rude. Just certain. Like the task had been decided.
I went to the kitchen.
