The Dare We Didn't Finish

The move was supposed to be the exciting part, the fresh start, the chapter where Jon and I turned thirty-something into something better, and instead I spent the whole day carrying boxes up stairs that were steeper than the listing photos made them look, and by evening I was sitting on the floor of a living room that smelled like someone else's candles, surrounded by bubble wrap, wondering when exactly I had stopped feeling like a person other people looked at. I am thirty-five, and Jon is thirty-seven, and we have been married for eight years as of this past June, and none of what happened that night was planned, not by him, not by me, and definitely not by Nick, who is thirty-eight and has been Jon's friend since they were twenty-two and suffering through a grad school study group together.

Nick met me at our wedding, when I was twenty-seven, and he gave a toast that made my mother laugh so hard she had to put her wine down, and that has basically been his role in our lives ever since, the funny one, the easy one, the one who shows up with takeout when you are drowning in cardboard.

So there we were, the three of us, sprawled on the floor of our new rental house at nearly eleven at night, the moving crew gone since six, the whiskey bottle on the coffee table down to its last third, and the boxes stacked along every wall like a cardboard skyline nobody had approved. I had unpacked exactly four boxes that day, which for me was a kind of nervous breakdown, because anyone who knows me knows I label and sort and alphabetize, and the fact that I had left a kitchen's worth of pans in a sealed box marked KITCHEN MISC was eating at me even as I drank. Nick noticed it before Jon did, because Nick notices everything and turns it into material.

"You've unpacked four boxes," he said, tipping his glass at me. "I counted. Four. Out of what, sixty? And you've reorganized the coat closet twice. The coat closet, Bex. Nobody has ever needed that coat closet on day one."

"Some of us like to know where things are," I said, and I pulled the sweater sleeves down over my hands, which is a habit I have when I am feeling seen in a way I do not enjoy. "Not all of us can just float through life leaving a trail of tangled phone chargers."

"See, that," he said, pointing at me with the sort of delight he used to reserve for Jon's worst PowerPoint slides, "that is exactly what I mean. You cannot sit still for one second. You cleaned the inside of the oven before we ordered food. The oven came with the house already clean, and you cleaned it anyway."

Jon laughed at that from where he was slumped against a box marked LIVING ROOM BOOKS 2 OF 3, and the sound of him laughing made me feel warm in a way I had been missing, because honestly the last few months of the move had been all logistics and mortgage emails and the two of us passing each other in the hallway like polite coworkers. It had been a long time since Jon had laughed at something I said instead of something on his phone, and I hate admitting that, because it makes me sound needy, but this is my story and I am trying to be honest about how I went into that night, which was lonely and a little raw and a whiskey past the point of caution.

And here is the thing I have never told anyone except the inside of my own head, which is that ever since we moved into this neighborhood I have felt invisible in a brand new way. Our street is full of young couples, genuinely young, like late twenties, and they jog in matching outfits and carry enormous water bottles and wave cheerfully at me while their stomachs stay flat and their arms stay toned, and every single time one of them waves I feel myself shrink an inch. I know thirty-five is not old, I know that in my brain, but my body has changed twice over since I met Jon, softer in places I used to be firm, and there is a particular kind of ache in standing in a driveway in old sweatpants while a twenty-eight year old with a ponytail jogs past looking like an advertisement.

Jon never says anything, never looks at those women, never gives me a reason, but he does not look at me much either lately, not the way he used to, and I had built a whole quiet wall of evidence out of that absence.

The whiskey was doing its warm work by then, and Nick, who is divorced and has been for three years and handles it with jokes the way some people handle grief with therapy, reached over and refilled my glass without asking, which should have been a sign about how the night was going to go. Jon suggested a game, actually, which surprised me, because he is usually the one who falls asleep during game nights, and he said it in this careful offhand way, like, "We could play truth or dare, we haven't done that since college," and Nick raised his eyebrows at me across the coffee table and I shrugged and said sure, why not, what was the worst that could happen among three adults who had all known each other for years.

I will tell you what the worst that could happen was, but I did not know it yet, so I sat cross-legged on the floor in my oldest leggings and Jon's old college hoodie and I picked truth, because I am a coward and always pick truth.

Nick went first with something harmless, asking about my most embarrassing moment, and I told the story of the wedding cake incident, which they had both heard, and everyone drank, and the game rolled along easy and warm, and then Nick dared Jon to call his old landlord and leave a message, which he did, and we all laughed until my sides hurt, and I thought, this is nice, this is exactly what I needed after four months of boxes and stress, just this, friends and whiskey and the last box of the day still unopened.

Then it was Jon's turn to ask me, and he looked at me for a moment longer than the game required, and he said, "Truth. Do you actually like the new neighborhood, or are you just saying that."

And I do not know what happened in me, whether it was the whiskey or the ache I had been carrying around or just the fact that he was looking at me properly for the first time in weeks, but instead of the safe answer I heard myself say, "Honestly, I feel invisible there. I feel invisible a lot of the time lately. Sometimes I wonder if you even find me attractive anymore, and I know that is a stupid thing to say out loud, but there it is."

The room went very quiet, the kind of quiet where you can hear the ice settling in the glasses, and Nick suddenly became very interested in the label of his bottle, and Jon's face did something complicated, and I immediately wanted to swallow the whole sentence back down. He did not laugh it off. He did not say of course I do, babe, in the easy automatic way that would have let us all move on. He just sat there with his jaw working a little, looking uncomfortable in a way I had not seen in years, and the silence stretched, and Nick glanced between us as a man deciding whether to leave the room, and I took a long sip of whiskey and stared at a box marked BATHROOM and thought, well, so much for the fun part of the evening.

So Jon sat with that confession of mine sitting in the middle of the room between the three of us like a fourth person nobody wanted to introduce themselves to, and then instead of answering it, he turned the whole thing sideways in a way I still cannot fully explain. He took a breath, he drained what was left in his glass, and he said, "Nick, dare. Dare Bex to let you kiss her. Just once, just to prove a point, and then I get to watch her blush about it. And Bex, you can say no, and we move on and I never mention it again."

The room went so quiet I could hear the refrigerator humming in the kitchen we had not unpacked yet, and I felt my face go hot all the way down to my collarbone, and Nick put his bottle down on the coffee table very slowly, like any sudden movement might set the whole evening off. I looked at Jon to see if he was joking, because there was a version of this where he was joking, where he would grin and call it back and we would all laugh, but he was not grinning, he was watching me with this steady careful attention, and I realized with a jolt that he was waiting for my answer, that the dare was nothing until I made it something. And that is the part people do not understand about a dare in a marriage, it is not a command, it is a question wearing a costume, and underneath it Jon was asking me something much bigger than kiss Nick, he was asking whether I still wanted to be seen, and by extension whether I believed him when he said he still saw me.

My heart was loud in my ears. My hands did the thing they do, the sleeve-pulling thing, and I huddled into the cuffs of his old college hoodie and stared at a spot on the carpet between a roll of bubble wrap and an empty takeout container, and I thought about all the reasons to say no, the mess of it, the risk of it, the fact that we were thirty-five and thirty-seven and thirty-eight years old and sitting on the floor of a half-finished house like people at a sleepover, and then I thought about the joggers with their matching outfits, and the driveway, and the four months of feeling like a piece of furniture that had been moved into the wrong room, and I heard myself say, "Okay. Okay, fine, once, and then we never speak of it."