Tempted

by Megan Hart

  “Never mind,” Mary muttered.

  The talk steered back to the party details, though by this time I was as sick of the party plans as I was of the drama between Patricia and Mary. Claire kept the conversation moving with a fewer than usual number of wisecracks, which was as disturbing in its own way as the animosity between my other sisters.

  We were at a table full of secrets. I knew mine. I could guess at Patricia’s—trouble with Sean. Of Mary and Claire I had no idea, but it was easy enough to guess their minds were as far from planning the party as mine was.

  “How are we going to divvy up?” said Mary at last when the bills for dinner came. “I think we should all put our shares into a fund and draw from that. Patricia penny-pincher can take care of the details.”

  “I’m not a penny-pincher!” Patricia’s voice was louder than I expected, and I flinched. So did Claire. Mary only looked smug.

  “Why don’t we divide up the different things we need to buy and just turn in the receipts at the end,” I suggested. “Divvy it up then.”

  “Because Claire will never remember to keep receipts,” Claire said. “Don’t bother saying it, Pats. We know.”

  Patricia tossed her napkin onto her plate. Her voice quivered. “Why don’t you all just back off? Why are you all riding me?”

  “We’re not riding you.” I’m sure Claire meant to sound soothing, but it was so out of character I wasn’t surprised Patricia didn’t hear it that way.

  “You are! And I’m sick of it!” Patricia stood, body straining like she meant to flee until her gaze caught the flutter of the bill on her plate.

  I watched her physically restrain herself from shoving away from the table. She read the bill and pulled out her wallet, counted out the money carefully. Even exact change. She added the minimum, exact tip and settled the small piles of bills and coins on the table. We all watched her in silence as she went through this ritual. Patricia had always been precise, but she’d never been cheap.

  “What?” she cried, chin lifting. “That’s right, isn’t it?”

  “Sure,” I told her. “If it’s not, I’ll cover it, don’t worry.”

  “I don’t need you to cover it, Anne.” Patricia hiked her purse over her shoulder. “I’ll pay my own!”

  “Okay, sure. Don’t worry about it.” I exchanged looks with Claire again. Mary, face clouded, stared at her own bill like she meant to burn a hole in it with her eyes.

  “I have to get back. I had to get a sitter, and she’s expensive.” Patricia edged past my chair.

  “Where’s Sean?” asked Mary without looking up. “Working again?”

  “Yes.” Patricia looked like she meant to say more, but didn’t. “Anne, I’ll call you.”

  Her keys jangled as she pulled them from her purse and strode away. Like good sisters, we waited until she was out of earshot before we fell to talking about her.

  “Since when does Sean work on Saturdays?” I asked.

  “Since he’s at Thistledown watching the horses.” Mary sounded less smug now.

  Claire looked surprised. “No! Sean? You think so?”

  “Yeah. I do.” Mary looked at each of us. “I think he’s lost a lot of money lately. She told me they’re not going on vacation this summer. She said it was because of Mom and Dad’s party, but you know she’s lying. Sean never gives up his trip to Myrtle Beach.”

  “Unless they can’t afford it,” I said. It made sense. “God. That sucks.”

  “But…he’s such a nice guy!” Claire sounded more than surprised. She sounded forlorn.

  It took me a second to remember that she’d only been fourteen when Patricia had started dating Sean. To Claire he was the big brother the rest of us had never had, no matter how many times she might have called him asshole.

  “Just because he’s nice doesn’t mean he doesn’t have a problem, Claire.”

  We were all silent for a moment after that. I don’t know what they were thinking, but I was thinking of our father. Everyone who ever met him thought he was a nice guy. Life of the party. And he was. They didn’t know the man who sat in the dark with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and a pack of cigarettes, the one who sat and wept and talked about the taste of a pistol.

  “If we just have music on the stereo, that will save money,” Claire said quietly. “We can hook up my iPod or something.”

  “Yeah.” Mary nodded. “That would be better.”

  We said our goodbyes, and I took my notes and headed home. The radio might have distracted me, but I drove in silence. Thinking.

  The past doesn’t change no matter how much time you spend thinking about it. Good and bad all add up to the whole. Take away one piece, no matter how small, and the whole changes. Whether it’s optimism, pessimism or fatalism, I don’t spend my time wishing for the past to be different so the present would be different, too. I control my future with what I choose now. I’m the only one who does.

  My sisters and I had grown up in the same house, had the same parents, gone to the same schools, yet we were all different. Our tastes in clothes, music, political leanings, faith, all scattered in scale. We were as alike as four strangers, yet we all had one thing in common.

  Our desire for perfection.

  Patricia was the perfect mother, the kind who bakes cookies and hand-sews Halloween costumes. She was the mom who drove the carpool and waited at the door for the school bus with snacks that weren’t too full of sugar or caffeine. Her children were clean and well-pressed and if, upon occasion, they were also little terrors, it wasn’t because she didn’t discipline them with a firm but gentle hand.

  Mary, until recently, had been the perfect virgin. Saving herself for marriage or Jesus, one or the other and now neither. She volunteered in soup kitchens and gave blood. She went to church every Sunday and almost never swore.

  Claire had rejected perfection and become the perfect rebel. She’d have been a parody of clothes and hair and attitude if she hadn’t also believed it of herself, the wild child. The one who didn’t care about what other people thought.

  I played at being perfect, too. The perfect daughter, the one who took care of everything. Who had everything. The house, the car. The husband. Everything bright and shiny.

  And yet, like my sisters, I, too, failed at being perfect. I didn’t have children to resent, or an image of myself to uphold, and I didn’t secretly care desperately about being liked. No. I had a perfect life. Car, house, husband, shiny.

  But how could it all be perfect when I wanted it to change?

  Chapter 09

  It took me a long time to drive home. I had a lot to think about. When I finally got there, the tang of cigar smoke made me sneeze. I heard laughter rumbling from the den and sought the source. I watched them from the doorway for a while without their noticing.

  They were playing cards. James, in sleep pants and a T-shirt, gripped a cigar between his teeth while he dealt a fresh hand onto the coffee table between them. Alex, in those damnably sexy jeans and an open Oxford shirt, lolled on the couch with a glass in one hand and picked up his cards with the other. His cigar squatted in a makeshift ceramic key-holder ashtray. The open windows and ceiling fan had kept the smoke from gathering too thickly, but it was still pungent enough to tickle my throat. A green bottle of what looked like wine was on the table, too, along with a silver spoon and a box of sugar cubes.

  “One-eyed Jacks wild.” Speaking around the cigar, James tapped the deck to even out the cards and set it down. He fanned out the cards in his hand.

  “Aren’t they always?” Alex gulped the remnants of the liquid in his glass. It didn’t look like wine. “Ever since the first time I taught you how to play poker, man, you make one-eyed Jacks wild.”

  The tickle in my throat forced its way out as a cough. They both looked at me. Slow smiles spread across their faces. Side by side, there were differences in them. Not identical, as I’d thought.

  “Welcome home.” James took his cigar out. “C’mere.”

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nbsp; I did, picking my way around sofa cushions that had been tossed to the floor and a newspaper that had been strewn about. I bent to kiss him. I tasted smoke and licorice.

  “What are you drinking?” This close, I could smell it on him, too. Anise. His eyes were bright and a little red.

  James laughed and cut his gaze from mine. “Umm…absinthe.”

  I looked at the bottle, which had a picture of a fairy in a green dress on the front. “Like in Moulin Rouge? You’re drinking absinthe?”

  I picked up the bottle while James and Alex laughed like boys caught with their hands in the cookie jar who know they’re charming enough not to get in trouble. I looked at the spoon and the sugar and the lighter next to them.

  I looked at Alex. “Isn’t this illegal?”

  “Illegal to sell,” he said. “Not to drink.”

  “But…doesn’t it have wormwood in it? I mean…isn’t absinthe poison?” I handed Alex the bottle when he reached for it.

  He poured a small amount of bright green liquid into the glass, then balanced a pair of sugar cubes on the spoon. Dipping a finger in the absinthe, he dripped the liquid on the sugar and lit a flame beneath it. It flamed blue. The sugar started to melt. He grabbed up a pitcher I hadn’t seen from the floor and poured water over the sugar, dissolving it. The green liquid in the glass turned a milky white. He swirled it and held it up to me.

  “Try it.”

  “She doesn’t drink,” James said, though I already had the glass in my hand.

  “I know she doesn’t.” Alex leaned back against the couch.

  They both watched me. James looked curious, like he was waiting, but Alex’s expression was inscrutable. I swirled the liquid in the glass.

  “What does it do? Make you high?”

  “The Bohemians drank absinthe.” Alex re-lit the end of his cigar.

  “The last time I checked, we were not Bohemians.” But I didn’t put down the glass. It smelled good.

  “Vive la décadence!” Alex said, and he and James laughed.

  I looked at my husband, who was definitely not acting like himself. His gaze flittered over Alex’s face like a butterfly sipping at a flower, never lingering. He looked at me, next, and reached out a hand to pull me onto the couch next to him.

  Absinthe sloshed on my hand and I licked it. I’d expected the bite of alcohol but tasted only fine black licorice. James slipped an arm around my waist and nuzzled at my shoulder.

  “You don’t have to drink it if you don’t want to, baby.”

  “I know.” I didn’t put it down.

  Alex fixed himself another with a glass from the wet bar in the corner. He added more absinthe this time. The sugar flamed higher. Like children watching fireworks, we oohed and ahhed.

  “Are you in, or are you out?” Alex said when he returned to the sofa across from us. “One-eyed Jacks are wild.”

  “I’m in,” I said.

  I thought the absinthe would burn but drinking it was smooth and warm. Sort of like eating candy. Sweet. I wanted to drink all of it, which was why I put it aside after two sips.

  Alex noticed but made no comment. We played cards, betting pennies we shook out of the wine jug that had been James’s since college. We all cheated.

  “I’m out,” said Alex after a while and tossed down his hand. “I got nothing.”

  We’d all moved onto the floor, the low table between us. James had an arm around me, fingers doing a familiar dance along my bare arm. He put his cigar in the ashtray.

  “And you’re broke, man.”

  “I am broke,” said Alex. “Flat-out broke. Busted. Damaged beyond repair.”

  “I’m out, too,” James said. “What you got, baby?”

  I showed them my hand. Winning was easy against men fuzzed by alcohol. “I’ve got a pair of kings.”

  Alex buffed his nails on his bare chest. “You certainly do.”

  I looked at the cards in my hand, the queen of hearts nestled between the king of clubs and the king of spades. No wonder she was smiling.

  “Pay up, boys,” I said to both of them.

  “We’re both broke.” James nuzzled against my ear again. “I’ll have to pay you in sexual favors.”

  I turned to look at him. He smiled, his cheeks flushed and his eyes so bright a blue beneath the darkness of his brows. “That’s fine for you, but what about Alex?”

  We both looked at Alex, whose attention had been captured by picking up the scattered cards. He looked up at the sound of his name, and it was the first time I hadn’t seen him look completely in control of his expression.

  For most of the night we’d been two and one, but now, as we had in Wonderland, we became three again. Three points of a triangle. A trinity.

  “I guess that’s up to you,” James said finally, voice a husky whisper.

  I had the chance for things to stay the same. To choose perfection over change. I could’ve said no, and we all would have laughed and gone to sleep in separate beds. I could’ve saved us all a lot of grief.

  But I wanted him, and unlike the absinthe, I didn’t put him aside.

  Alex had been our pivot point, but all at once I found myself the focus of two very sharp gazes, one bright blue. The other deep and smoky gray.

  “Anne…” James said.

  I thought he meant to call it off. End the game. I thought he meant to save me from myself, but in the end all he said was, “Do you want him to kiss you?”

  I wanted it so bad I shook with it, but I needed to be sure it was all right. I turned and put my mouth very close to James’s, so close our lips brushed with each word. “Do you want him to?”

  James’s tongue flicked out to wet his lips and caught mine, too. Our mouths parted. We breathed, in and out, but we didn’t kiss.

  “Yeah,” came his answer, finally. “I want to watch him kiss you.”

  I put aside any notions I had about what both of them really wanted. I wanted both of them. I could have what I wanted. Did it really matter how we got there, or why, when we’d all have what we wanted in the end?

  “You’re drunk,” I whispered against James’s mouth.

  “You’re not,” he whispered back.

  I fell, spiraling, into his eyes and his smile brought me back. “You want this?”

  His hand stroked my hair and tugged it free of its clip. “If you want it, baby.”

  He looked over my shoulder at his friend. “If there’s anyone else I trust you with, it’s Alex.”

  I turned to look at Alex. This time, I needed no red pill to tumble me to Wonderland. I only had to lean across the table. One hand supporting myself, the other linked with James’s, that’s what I did.

  James had asked me if I wanted Alex to kiss me, but that first time, I kissed him. I owned that moment. It was mine.

  I tried keeping my eyes open but at the last moment courage failed me and I couldn’t look. His mouth was warm, lips fuller than James’s. He didn’t move toward me, but his mouth obliged me by opening right away.

  I couldn’t hold that position for very long before it cramped my wrist. That was okay. It was long enough for a first kiss, that tentative exploration I’d expected nervousness to make less exciting. I pulled away and opened my eyes.

  Alex had closed his eyes, too, and this made me feel unexpectedly tender toward him. He looked softer like that, a prince awaiting true love’s kiss to waken him from slumber. But only for a second, because then his eyes opened. His gaze flared.

  He took the second kiss with a hand to the back of my head, holding me in place. Alex kissed me breathless, almost bruising my mouth but pulling back at the last moment.

  The table was still between us, digging into my stomach. My hand still linked with James’s. The kiss went on and on and ended before I’d had enough.

  This time when I opened my eyes, he was already looking at me. “Now,” he said. “Let me watch you kiss him.”

  I looked at James. I leaned in close. “Is this okay with you?”

 
He put his arms around me. “Do you want to do this?”

  “Do you want me to do this?”

  The hands that threaded through my hair and slid over my shoulders and down my arms to capture my hands were shaking. He pressed our palms together, our fingers linked. James took a slow, shuddering breath. His gaze went over my shoulder. I don’t know what he saw when he looked there, but it was enough for him to smile when he returned his eyes to me.

  “Yes. I do.”

  I’d never been unfaithful to my husband. I had no reason to suspect he’d been unfaithful to me. Yet now we were inviting another person into our bed. I’d have been insane not to feel some trepidation.

  Lust won out over good sense, as it had done in the past, when my body ignored the wise counsel of my mind and heart. I’d grown older, but not, apparently, smarter.

  I stood between and above them, a queen with two kings. They looked poised on the edge of leaping, their bodies arrested in waiting for my command. They didn’t look alike and yet at that moment were indistinguishable.

  “Come on.” My voice dipped low and husky, but they both heard me. I crooked a finger and turned, not looking to see if they followed.

  I went up the two steps from the sunken den to the kitchen, down the hall toward our bedroom and through the door. My buttons slid from their holes. My zipper un-latched beneath my fingers as I walked. By the time I got to the bed I’d tossed my shirt aside and stepped out of my jeans. In bra and panties I stopped at the foot of our bed and turned.

  Waiting.

  I heard them in the hall, the soft whisper of bare feet along wooden floors. The rasp of zippers and shush of cloth sliding on skin. I waited to see who would come through the door first. Would James be a good host and allow his guest to enter before him?

  They showed up in the doorway together, shoulder to shoulder, both bare-chested. Alex’s jeans had slid even lower over his hips, the zip undone and allowing a hint of dark hair to show through. The front of James’s sleep pants was already tented, and I smiled.

  Like teammates who’ve played together so long they can anticipate each other’s moves, James and Alex both shifted, each making a half turn toward the other so they could both slip through the doorway at the same time. Their bodies aligned and parted as soon as they were through. Though it had taken less than the time it took my eyelashes to flutter, the sight of them face-to-face like that burned in my brain.