Page 65 of Best Offer Wins
“That’s true.”
Which, I now realize, is exactly what makes him a safe alibi. I’m hardly ever around him, so he’ll likely never have a chance to blow Ian’s cover. I pick through my memory for any other times recently that Ian claimed to be hanging out with Brant. He said he was with him the night I made his mom’s chicken, when he didn’t come home till three in the morning. Something clicks inside, like I’m finally shifting gears. And there it is, thick and scalding, the fury surging past the shock, beginning to burn away the heartache.
Ian keeps talking while he chews. “You know, he’s the same old Brant.” His fork screeches through a puddle of syrup. I see pancake mush on his tongue. “He has a new girlfriend, but she sounds way too good for him, so who knows how long she’ll stick around.”
“Oh yeah? What’s her name?”
“Alex.”
He says it too quickly. It was right there, already formed on his lips. So, that’s her then. That’s who’s on the other end of that fucking phone.
Just then, my own phone vibrates, rattling the knife on the edge of my plate.
It’s a text from Dottie. I’d forgotten I was still waiting to hear from her—that she’d left the cabin last night without committing to an answer. That until approximately forty-five minutes ago, getting hold of her paper was my biggest concern.
You’re nowhere on the Georgetown website, it reads.I’m not giving you shit, whoever you are.
“Anything interesting?” Ian asks.
I choke down my rage, along with another gluey bite.
“Just spam.”
23
Ian fucks his side piece in a shabby brick apartment building surrounded by much grander-looking row houses—the kind that sell for millions to senators and lobbyists—on a narrow, leafy street on Capitol Hill.
I know that now because I am parked across from it, a coiled snake waiting and watching for two disgusting rats.
The affair started seven weeks ago. Or at least that’s when Ian started using a burner phone like he’s on the fuckingWire. He sent the first text from it on February 22:Can’t stop thinking about earlier. When can I see you again?
Her response:Another lunch? When’s your next day in the office?
It goes on like this, week to week, them arranging dates in the middle of workdays. They met at the W the first few times, near Ian’s office. But then he started to get nervous:
Worried we’ll run into someone from work. What about your place?
So she texted her address.
After their first rendezvous here, in apartment 201, she sent him a photo of herself in a full-length mirror, naked and pubeless, tousled dark-brown hair, making the pouty duck face of a billionKardashian selfies. She looked like a teenager—tiny enough that I could crush her like an engorged mosquito.
Along with the photo, she’d included a note:Cum back soon. XO.
The next poet fucking laureate.
After reading that Sunday afternoon—while Ian was allegedly out for a run, giving me my first moment alone with the phone since discovering it—I wasn’t sure I’d be able to sleep next to him. At least not without waking up in the middle of the night to hold a pillow over his face. But then I realized what had happened: the rage had fully taken over, shutting out the despair. Basking in the anger, I was perfectly comfortable sitting there on our bedroom floor, on the sisal rug that we picked out together a lifetime ago at West Elm, excavating his betrayal.
So, that’s just what I’m doing now: leaning hard into the rage, at least until I figure out how I want to play this.
Now it’s a little past twelve thirty on Tuesday, a time when they almost always meet. (Not to mention TWO FUCKING DAYS till the dream house is supposed to hit the market.) As a tan Lexus comes to a stop in front of the apartment building, I sink down lower in the driver’s side of the Prius. I’m parallel parked between two cars; Ian will never notice me over here, a rare benefit of driving something so unremarkable. The curbside rear door of the Lexus swings open. Out steps my husband, in the same blue button-up and khakis that he wore to the office this morning, a sight thoroughly familiar and alien all at once. He ascends the front steps to a buzzer by the entrance. Punches something in, says something into the intercom. A second later, he lets himself into the building. Alex must be waiting upstairs.
My mind wanders to the vile things they’re probably doing up there. They were here together the day we saw the dream house for the first time, too. That morning, right before Ian told me he had to be at the office for “a lunch meeting,” she’d sent him a shot of her ass. That was it. Just the ass. Ian, thank God, hasn’t texted herany visuals in return. At least that’s one way his aversion to risk has worked in my favor.
It’s after one o’clock now. Only when I begin to lose feeling in my hands do I realize I’m squeezing the steering wheel so hard my knuckles are white. I breathe in deep and remind myself about their more recent text messages—the way a disconnect seems to be emerging between them.
Why don’t we go out for lunch today?Alex texted Ian last Wednesday, the day before I had sex with him on our sofa.We can still come back to my place after.
You know we can’t do that, he wrote back.I hate it when you make me into the bad guy.
