He’d brought her to his favorite bar, hidden away in a Hispanic neighborhood in a corner of Santa Ana. She’d never danced to traditional Mexican music or witnessed the enthusiasm, no, the joy that it seemed to bring to the people listening to it. Her only exposure to anything like this was an awkward moment with a mariachi band at a bad chain restaurant, their horns blaring as her father tried to swallow the last of his enchilada combo plate that her mother had chastised him for ordering because it was too expensive. Dylan’s parents had spent a huge chunk of her childhood discussing the cost of things. What a rip-off! It’s two dollars less at Walmart! Did you use the coupon I gave you? It always left her feeling embarrassed and a little bit exhausted.
But this wasn’t a chain restaurant in Phoenix with stale tortilla chips submerged in bland salsa. This was a hole-in-the-wall in a neighborhood even her roommates, who didn’t have super high standards when it came to places to drink, wouldn’t be caught dead in. But they’re missing out, she thought as James spun her around. She was dizzy, but she didn’t care. She couldn’t understand a word the band was singing, but it was now her favorite song. She had never met the Hispanic couple dancing beside them, but she wanted to be their new best friends. Maybe they’d teach Dylan culture, something she often feared she lacked after growing up in a house that was literally whitewashed—her mother’s decorating style bringing new meaning to the word neutral.
Dylan had always felt bland—her blonde locks blending into her alabaster skin. A mean girl in middle school had once said Dylan was so plain she faded into the walls. But not when she was with James. He made her feel colorful. And sometimes she could almost pretend that this was their life. That he didn’t belong to someone else. That she hadn’t become the type of person who danced with another woman’s husband in a dark bar so far off the beaten path that no one would ever find her.
Several songs later, James said he wanted a margarita. Dylan wished she liked alcohol, but she couldn’t stand the taste, having gotten drunk once and only once in high school, her hangover so terrible the next day she vowed to never drink again. And she hadn’t. But she knew the buzz would help blunt the guilt she felt. Because she did feel terrible shame about the affair—she wasn’t a monster! Her conscience kept her up more nights than she’d ever admit. Her tossing and turning would often wake her fiancé, Nick, who would reach his large hand to her bare thigh to calm her, falling back asleep with his grip around her leg tight. Then she’d will her thoughts about James to be quiet, lying so still that it was almost like she wasn’t there.
She glanced at her phone as the bartender handed a margarita rimmed with salt to James and they said something to each other in Spanish. Dylan thought she caught the words delicious and beautiful, but she couldn’t be sure. She was a long way from the high school Spanish she’d waded through.
Nick was on a seventy-two-hour shift, so she was surprised to see one missed call and a text from him. He worked in a busy fire station in Long Beach and would often take several calls a night, usually coming home exhausted. Sometimes he’d tell her stories that made her heart hurt—a child who had been burned, a mother who had suffered a major heart attack and left her family behind, the homeless man who hadn’t bothered to get off the train tracks. He described the situations with such detachment, it was like he was reading the newspaper.
Yet he had no trouble connecting with his buddies at work, who adored him, insisting he use his athletic prowess to be pitcher on their many slow-pitch softball teams, and use the culinary skills he’d gleaned from his mother to win the chili cook-off for their firehouse each year. Nick was a guy who could be counted on. But Dylan wondered where he stored the anger and sadness—the helplessness he witnessed each day. Because she knew there was only so much one person could handle, and a small part of her often worried he might be close to bursting. But maybe he was like an earthquake—there would be no way of knowing it was coming until it was already there.
James planted a wet kiss on Dylan’s thin lips and smiled. “You really held your own out there, for a white girl.”
Perhaps sensing it bothered her, James liked to tease Dylan about her lack of culture. He was Costa Rican and had rich olive skin and green eyes that looked like a beautiful piece of sea glass. Even though he’d grown up in Irvine, California, and had visited Central America only once, when he was twelve years old, he wore his heritage like a medal of honor and talked about it and his mother constantly. She couldn’t connect with how James felt about his heritage, feeling no real roots of her own. But now she could see his intense pride in the way he danced, in his body language as he talked to the bartender, in the smile that hadn’t left his lips since they’d arrived.
She smiled. “I’m good like that.” She leaned in and kissed him, relieved she didn’t have to look over her shoulder here. The couple they had been dancing with earlier had assumed they were just like them—out on a date night. “Let’s get out of here—we’re getting a hotel tonight, right?”
James’s eyes flickered, and Dylan’s heart sank. She knew that look. “I thought we were spending the night together.” She tried to keep the pout out of her voice. He hadn’t spent the night with her the last time either. And it wasn’t like she saw him very often. It was only one, maybe two times a month. They had it down. James would tell his wife he was going to be traveling one night longer than he actually was. Then she’d pick him up at the airport and they’d stay at a hotel James would book—always making sure it coincided with one of Nick’s seventy-two-hour shifts at the station. The next morning, James would go home as if he’d just arrived back in town. Dylan marked her mental calendar each time they planned an overnight date and then counted down like a child to Christmas. And now he was going home again. To his real life. The one where she didn’t belong.
“Babe, I can’t. I’m sorry.”
Dylan stood up. She didn’t know many things for sure, but she knew when a man was becoming bored. So she played the only card she had, the ace she held close. “Good night, James,” she said with a tight smile, and started to fight her way through the crowd to the door.
“Dylan! Wait!” She ignored his calls and continued swiftly toward the exit. She’d made it outside and was searching her phone for the Uber app when he grabbed her arm. “Stop being childish. You can’t just walk out like that.”
“Watch me,” she shot back. In general she was a calm person, but James always made her feel out of control.
“What do you want from me? I’m sorry, but I have to go home. I wish things were different, but they’re not. I thought we were on the same page about all this.”
All this?
“Maybe I don’t like that page anymore.” Dylan sighed. She hated feeling like an afterthought. They had to mean something. Because if they didn’t—then what did that say about her? She wanted, no, she needed him to care enough that the risks they were both taking seemed worth it. All this was the fabric of their lives, and if it was stripped away, they might both end up with nothing.
“I’m not sure how much longer I can do this.” She bit her lip. Losing James would crush her. She wasn’t ready to let him go. And she was taking a gamble by threatening it. But she knew there was one thing James could not handle: losing on someone else’s terms.
His eyes darkened. “Come on. Don’t say that.” He looked at his phone and shook his head. “I really can’t stay, boo.”
A smile crept to Dylan’s lips. “It’s shameful that a thirty-five-year-old man would use that word.”
“Okay, then I’ll use my special name for you,” he said, pushing the hair away from her eyes. “I promise you, belleza, I would stay if I could. What if I took you away somewhere? Just the two of us? We’d have to wait a few months, but I could swing maybe four or five days.” James kissed the top of her head softly. And she felt all the anger disappear from her body. She loved when he called her beautiful in Spanish, the one time she truly felt like she was the only woman in his life. And now he was offering to give himself to her for multiple days.