What do you mean it’s stuck?” I said.
Jacob was rubbing the back of his neck. “It’s stuck. I can’t get it open.”
I stared at him. Then I went back to the door and started tugging desperately on the handle. It was like trying to open a bank vault.
“No…” I breathed. “No, no, no, no, no…”
“Are you claustrophobic?” he asked, looking worried. No. I was not. “Yes,” I lied.
“But we eat lunch in a supply closet—” “That door isn’t locked!”
I pulled out my phone and called Alexis, pacing in front of the fireplace while Jacob threw open the windows and the bathroom door to help me with my fictional fear of enclosed spaces.
She answered on the second ring. “Hey—” “Ali? We’re locked in Jacob’s room.”
“What?”
“There was some freaky breeze, the door slammed shut, and now it won’t open.”
I heard the sound of her coming in the front door while she relayed this to Daniel. “We just got home, we’ll be up there in a second.”
Forty-five minutes later, we were still trapped.
Jacob had been trying to troubleshoot from our side, but the issue wasn’t the lock. The door had swollen itself into the doorway. Like a broken finger
swelling around a wedding ring.
“I’m just going to cut it,” Daniel said resignedly through the speaker on my phone.
“No, don’t cut it,” Jacob said quickly.
I gawked at him. “What do you mean don’t cut it?”
He nodded at it. “That’s an antique door. It’s probably original to the house. It’s irreplaceable.”
“We are trapped here!”
He peered at me calmly. “Look, my cabin does stuff like this. The foundation settles and the house shifts. Humidity makes the doors stick. It just rained yesterday, that’s probably what’s going on.”
Jacob raised his voice. “Daniel, do you have a dehumidifier?” “In the basement, yeah.”
“Okay. Set that up in the hallway. Let’s run it overnight. See if we can’t dry out the wood a little. If we can’t get it open in the morning, we can reevaluate.”
“Good idea,” Daniel said from the other side.
I looked at Jacob bleakly. “All night? We have to stay here all night?”
“We were going to bed anyway,” Jacob said. “We have a bathroom, water, we just ate. We don’t need anything—”
“I do! I need…my retainer!” I said desperately. “I can’t live without it!”
He gave me the amused look of a parent entertaining the wild story of a three-year-old.
I couldn’t stay the night in this room with Jacob. I couldn’t share a bed with him. I looked over at it in a half panic. I’d never actually seen a bed that small—wasn’t this a bed-and-breakfast once? Didn’t they specialize in beds meant for couples? Was this a child’s room???
“I could always get a ladder up there,” Daniel called through the speakerphone. “But you’d have to climb out onto the roof—”
“Yes. Absolutely.” I nodded enthusiastically. “Let’s do it.” “You are not climbing out onto a roof,” Jacob said.
“Why?”
“Because you could fall. And look at the windows. They only open four inches wide. You’d have to birth-canal yourself out of it, you’ll get stuck.”
“I agree, Bri,” Alexis said through the phone. “It’s too dangerous. I think the plan is good, just stay where you are.”
I looked at Jacob in despair.
“Excuse me,” I said, and I took my phone to the bathroom and shut the door.
“Alexis, take me off speaker and go to your room,” I whispered.
There was a pause and the sound of a door closing. “Okay, you’re off speaker.”
“I cannot sleep in here tonight.” “Why?”
“Because I will have sex with him.” She snorted.
“It’s not funny,” I hiss-whispered. “Your house has locked me in a thirst trap and I’m so sex starved and into him I’m not going to be able to say no. My legs will probably shoot straight out like one of those fainting goats the second he so much as breathes on me. This is a crisis!”
I could tell she’d moved the phone away from her mouth so I wouldn’t hear her laugh—which I totally did.
“Ali, the man literally propositioned me last night.”
“He asked you on a date,” she said, still snickering. “He didn’t ask you for sex.”
“Yes, he did. We already go on dates. Every day. He wasn’t asking me to get emotionally involved with him, because he’s not emotionally available and he’s seen my dating profile and he knows I’m not either, so what he was actually asking was if I’d be interested in maybe having sex with him.”
“That is a very dizzying argument…”
“So now I’m locked in a room with a man that I’m half in love with and extremely attracted to, who wants to have sex with me, and I’m sorry, but I have about as much willpower as a piece of broccoli.”
She lost it. It took her a solid minute to stop laughing long enough to reply.
“Look, there are extra toothbrushes in the drawer under the sink,” she said, still wheezing. “I can slip your retainer under the door and we’ll take care of Lieutenant Dan. Also, you should know the walls are very thick…”
I groaned, sitting heavily on the closed lid of the toilet. “I cannot believe this is happening…”
“I can.”
“What is that supposed to mean?” I grumbled.
“Let’s just say that sometimes things happen here that I can’t explain.”
I put my forehead into my hand. “God. And why is the bed so fucking small?”
“Daniel’s re-staining the old frame. He put that one in the room until he’s done.”
“It might as well be a hammock.”
She was laughing again. “Bri? I think you’ve just made it to the Only One Bed scene.”
“Ha-ha.”
When I hung up with her and came back out into the room, Jacob was crouched in front of the fireplace, poking it with a metal rod.
“What are you doing?”
“Starting a fire,” he said, standing. “It’ll help dry the room out on our side.”
Of course. We’re sharing a tiny bed, and there’s going to be a romantic fire. Perfect.
He stood there giving me that earnest, hat-in-hand, puppy-dog look again. He knew I didn’t want to be here. I sighed and resolved to try and be less visibly miserable. This wasn’t his fault.
He looked over his shoulder at the bed and came back to me. “So…what side do you want?” he asked.
Sides? We were going to have to sleep stacked on top of each other. I sighed. “What side do you normally sleep on?”
“The right.”
“Okay. I’ll sleep on the left.”
I looked at what I was wearing. I was in a tank top and jeans. My boobs would be everywhere the second I lay down.
“You can borrow a shirt,” he said, reading my mind. “Thanks.”
“It’s just sleeping,” he said. Ha. Right.
I changed into the shirt he gave me. It smelled like him and made the whole situation a million times worse. Alexis slipped my retainer under the door, which I actually didn’t want to wear in bed with Jacob, but I’d made such a big deal about it I had to. It made me lisp.
His shirt was long enough to cover me. Barely. I debated sleeping in my jeans, but that idea actually did make me feel claustrophobic, so I just got under the covers as quickly as I could to keep from accidentally flashing him.
When Jacob got in, his entire left side was pressed into my body. After some awkward, apologetic shifting that seemed to be mutually geared at keeping his penis as far away from me as possible, we agreed to sleep back to back. It would have been easier to let him spoon me, or for him to lie on his back with me sleeping curled up next to him in the crook of his arm, but there was no way I was doing either. It was waaaaay too slippery a slope.
My knees were halfway off the bed. I’m sure his knees were halfway off the bed.
He cleared his throat. “You know, we’d fit better if we—” “No,” I said, cutting him off.
He spoke over his shoulder. “We hug all the time. It’s not sexual.”
I had to hold back a maniacal laugh. “It’s not that. I’m just…really claustrophobic,” I lied. “I can’t have someone hugging me right now or it’ll make it worse.”
He was quiet for a beat. “Okay.” He went back to facing his side of the room. And then over his shoulder again, “Do you want to stay up and talk for a little while? It might be hard for you to sleep if you’re anxious.”
I let out a long breath. Then I rolled onto my back and he rolled onto his. “What do you want to talk about?” I asked.
“You could ask me one of your weird questions.”
“My questions are not weird,” I said, lisping through my stupid retainer.
He propped himself up on his elbow. “‘Would you rather drink toilet water or eat dirty kitty litter?’ That’s not weird?”
“That was an excellent ice breaker, meant to get to the core of who you are as a person.”
“Uh-huh.” His eyes were creased at the corners.
“Well, what about your questions? They suck too.”
“My questions are great. You just don’t take them seriously.”
I gasped. “I have taken every question you’ve asked me seriously.” Major lisp on seriously.
He looked amused. “Really? Your near-death experience was when your thighs were rubbing together at Disney World on your twenty-fifth birthday
—”
“I WAS FIGHTING FOR MY LIFE, JACOB.”
He laughed and his chest rumbled against my arm. It rumbled everywhere. He was so close.
We were alone…
I swear his eyes flickered to my mouth for a second and I had the brief realization that if he kissed me right now, I wouldn’t say no. I couldn’t. It was like I was under some spell. I had just enough strength to hold my ground, but not enough to save me if he advanced. I prayed that Jacob would be Jacob tonight and be respectful. He always was. But what if he wasn’t?
A very specific part of me was hoping he wasn’t. My traitorous vagina was putting on war paint and blowing a Viking horn like it was about to go ransack Jacob’s village.
I cleared my throat. “These get-to-know-you questions are very important for our fake relationship.”
“And what exactly did you learn by asking me what kind of mullet I’d be?”
“I learned your hair grows out curly and you have a great laugh?”
He cracked up again. He was still smiling when he went on. “You should ask me real things. Things with substance.”
“You’re not ready for my substance questions. Believe me. They’re extremely invasive.”
He adjusted himself on his elbow. “Try me.”
I sat up on my elbow and looked at him. “You can’t handle it.” “I can.”
I narrowed my eyes. “No.” I lay back down.
“What? What do you mean, no?”
“No. I don’t have a kiddie pool, Jacob. I go right from Would You Rather to the deep end. It’s Truth or Dare on steroids. We’re not there. We might never be there.”
“Just so I’m understanding what your hesitation is, you think I won’t be willing to answer the heavy questions you might ask me.”
“That’s what I’m saying.” “I will.”
I lolled my head to look at him.
He peered at me steadily. “I mean it. Ask me whatever you want. What do you want to know?”
I sat up against the headboard. “I want to know what’s in your search history.”
“What?” He laughed.
I shrugged. “That’s what I want to know. It’s worth a thousand questions.”
This was when he was going to bail. No way was this man letting me see what weird porn he liked to watch.
“Okay.” He sat up, reached for his phone on the nightstand, and handed it to me.
I stared at it in shock. “Uh…” “My password is 7438.”
I was literally rendered speechless.
“Why would you agree to this? I was just calling your bluff.”
He looked me in the eye. “There’s nothing about me that I’m afraid for you to know.”
I just stared back at him.
My heart felt tight and I couldn’t even explain why—but then I knew why. Because for so many years my own husband made himself a stranger to me. He had a whole double life I knew nothing about. And here was this man who wanted me to see him. All of him. He didn’t want any secrets between us. He just gave me his damn PIN.
I grabbed my phone off the nightstand and handed it to him. “Then you get to see mine too. My password is 9008.”
“Okay. And just so you know, I don’t ever change my password,” he said.
“Okay.”
“That means that you’ll always have access to my phone. And my debit card.”
I gawked at him. “Jacob! You just gave me your debit card PIN? You cannot give that out.”
He gave me an amused look. “Why? I can’t trust you?”
“Of course you can trust me.” I lisped hard on the word trust and he smiled.
“Well, if I can trust you, then what’s the problem?”
I let a breath out through my nose. “Your bank PIN shouldn’t be the same PIN as your phone. It should be two separate PINs.”
“Okay.” He took his phone from me and did a few swipes. He thumbed something in, then he handed it back to me. “There. I changed my password. Now it’s the same one as yours.”
“Jacob!”
“What?” He was laughing. “Now you won’t forget it.”
“Why would I need to know your password?”
“To check a text for me while I’m driving, to open my phone to take a picture, to look at my calendar to see if we’re available on the same day—”
I gave him a look.
“What? We’re spending a lot of time together. There’s going to be a situation when you’ll need to get into my phone. If you don’t want to use it, don’t ever use it, but at least you’ll have it if you need it.”
I peered down at the cell in my hand and I felt my face contort the tiniest bit and I realized a lump was rising in the back of my throat. I stared at the black screen so long he noticed.
“Are you okay?” he asked, dipping his head to look at me. No? Not even a little?
I guess this was going to be the first heavy truth I volunteered as part of this exercise.
“I didn’t know my husband’s PIN,” I admitted quietly. “Because he gaslighted me into thinking I was paranoid and controlling for asking for it.”
I raised my gaze to his and watched understanding move across his face. “You and me?” he said gently. “We’re different. We agree to be harmless
to each other.”
The words broke my heart. Jacob’s promise to be harmless to me felt more earnest than my own wedding vows had at the end.
I believed that he wanted to be harmless to me. But mostly because Jacob was harmless to everyone.
He watched me for a long moment. Probably to make sure I was okay. But it felt like I was trapped in some hypnotic trance and I couldn’t look away. I could see the flecks in his eyes. Feel his breath just tickle my face. He was one small lean from being able to kiss me.
I couldn’t imagine how Amy’d had his love and devotion and didn’t do everything to keep him. Didn’t want it, or see it for the precious thing that it was.
I looked away and broke the spell. “Are you sure you want to do this?” I sniffed. “It’s super invasive.”
“I’m sure. I don’t care.”
I swallowed hard and took a deep breath. Okay. Here we go.
I picked up his phone and went to his search history. Most of the first page was Googling Wakan. I smiled when I saw that he’d Googled every single place I told him to before coming.
Before the Wakan searches he had a long history of searches for…sofas? I looked up at him. “You’re shopping for a sofa?”
“Yeah,” he said, sitting against the headboard. “I actually wanted to show you. See what you thought.”
He peered over at his search history and tapped on one. A navy-blue sofa came up. “That one. What do you think?”
“Why are you getting a sofa?”
“To replace the recliners like you said.”
“You’re replacing your chairs because I came over one time and casually said you should have a sofa?”
“I want to have the kind of living room you like.” My face went soft.
He was making plans for me?
Permanent, furniture-type plans—and we were just friends. Nick wouldn’t even commit to having dinner with my mom when she came to town. Probably because he’d had one foot out the door for the last half of our marriage. I wasn’t on his long-term agenda. And Jacob was over here
like, “I’ve known you for two months, you might come over again, which sofa do you want?” It made me laugh a little.
“I like it,” I said. “But you don’t want to go sit on it first? What if it’s all hard?”
“If I go, will you come?” “You want me to come?” “Yes.”
“Okay.” I nodded. “We’ll go sit on sofas.”
He smiled and I went back to his phone while he looked at mine. He was being awfully quiet.
I couldn’t honestly remember what I’d Googled in the last week. Nothing scandalous. I think there was a long jaunt where I was researching menstrual cups. But I refused to be embarrassed by period products and Jacob couldn’t care less. I don’t know a doctor who would. And even if there was something humiliating in there, I kind of wanted him to see it. I wanted him to see all my ugly parts and my dirty secrets. Like, here’s all my neurotic shit. Here’s me on a two a.m. rabbit hole, Googling psychic mediums after I saw a TikTok that said one solved an unsolved murder in Alabama. And look! Instead of going to bed after, I searched for some little plastic dicks I wanted to put on the light switches in Benny’s room as a prank. What do you think of that? Is it weird enough for you?
It’s like I wanted to see if he still wanted me around after he knew me.
The unscripted me. The real me. The messy me.
Maybe because at some point Nick knew me like this, and he decided he preferred someone else.
I remembered when I’d looked at Nick’s search history, when I’d hacked his laptop and finally saw what he’d been doing after the lid was blown off
of his double life. It was like a timeline of deception, a detailed account of every lie he’d told.
Here he was Googling to figure out which five-star hotel was closest to his office so he could fuck Kelly on thousand-thread-count sheets on his lunch break. Here’s him searching for flower shops to send bouquets that weren’t for me. Oh, and here’s Nick searching for first-class flights to Cancún while I was asleep next to him in bed. He was getting them for a romantic vacation with his girlfriend that he was planning to tell me was a work trip.
When we flew places, he flew us coach.
You know what I didn’t see in Nick’s search results? Not a single search result for pregnancy. Or parenthood. Or cribs or car seats or baby names…
Anyway.
Jacob’s phone was a very different search history experience.
I liked seeing what Jacob did when no one was watching because it was exactly what he said he did. Down to the Google search for the nursery he said he was going to check for rosebushes for his yard and the IMDB for actors on Schitt’s Creek and the Chuck & Don’s website for treats for Lieutenant Dan.
Jacob was who he said he was. All the time. And to me, men were never who they said they were. But this one, by all accounts, sort of was.
And it scared the absolute shit out of me.
I think I would have felt better if his search history was just Andrew Tate quotes and six hours a day of Pornhub because then I wouldn’t feel like I had to keep looking for the catch-22. I wouldn’t have to continue to be braced for the big letdown when Jacob Maddox showed me his true colors. I could just go, “Ah. There it is.” And then my heart would start making the building blocks again for the wall I liked to keep around it.
I think, subconsciously, that was what I was hoping for. I wanted him to disappoint me. I wanted to get past the façade that everyone shows the rest of the world and see who he really was unscripted.
But the plan had backfired. Because I was in love with Jacob unscripted. I loved that every time we’d gone out to eat over the last week, he’d Googled the menu so he’d know what to order when we got there. I loved that he’d Googled El Salvador and then the little town I’d told him my mom was from. I loved that the day we took the twins to the park and Carter said he wanted him to wear raccoon socks, Jacob had gone on a multi-site crusade for them. I loved that he Googled plants. I loved it. It made me want to climb him for having this wholesome hobby that wasn’t boning
someone else. I loved it.
I loved him.
And then I froze where I sat. Oh my God…I loved him.
But how could I not? He was the most lovable man alive. I think you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone in Jacob’s life who didn’t love him.
But I loved, loved him. Not in a friendship way. Not in an admiration way. In an if-you-weren’t-in-love-with-someone-else, I’d-take-a-chance-on- you way. An I’d-give-you-everything way.
But he was in love with someone else. And just yesterday they’d been whisper-fighting in a room full of taxidermy animals, and she’d left her lipstick on his collar and her perfume on his shirt. She’d sent him home shaken and sad because she still had the power over him to do that.
So I should just stop thinking about it. Because me loving him didn’t matter as long as he loved her.
I handed him his phone back. “Here.”
He gave me my phone back too. “I have to know, did you go with the DivaCup?”
“Ha. Do you wish we would have stuck with the mullet questions?”
He shook his head. “No. I like your super invasive, completely inappropriate get-to-know-you activities.”
I laughed a little.
He held my gaze. “Anything you want to know about me, you just ask me.”
Will you go back to Amy when the time comes? Do you have any sort of feelings for me at all?
If you could love me back, would you never hurt me or leave me? If we were pregnant, would you Google it?
I smiled at him for a long moment and his eyes flickered again to my lips.
“Hey,” he said, talking to my mouth. “Yeah?” I said, talking to his.
“Do you want some bourbon?”
I looked up. “You have bourbon?”
“Yeah. I brought it for Daniel and Alexis, but then I saw she was pregnant and I started second-guessing if it was inconsiderate to give it to her, so I kept it. We could open it.”
“You don’t drink, though.”
“I drink. I just don’t drink when my anxiety is high.”
“We’re in a house-hostage situation—it’s not high now?” He shook his head. “No.”
A grin spread across my face. Then we both hopped out of the bed at the same time.
