The Third Between Us

Dina told me about Carla on our third date, back when she was twenty-one and I was twenty-two, and I have thought about that story more times than I will ever admit out loud. We were sitting on the hood of my car outside a taco place that closed at midnight, and she said it easy, like she was telling me about a movie she'd seen. She and Carla had been at a party during grad school orientation, both of them twenty-one and half drunk on cheap punch, and they ended up in a bathroom hallway talking too close, and then they were kissing, and then Carla's hand was on the hem of her shirt, and then Dina had said wait, stop, I can't, because she'd met me two weeks earlier and already knew it was going somewhere. Carla had said okay, no problem, and that was it. They stayed friends. Nothing ever happened again.

I married her a year later and I have carried that near-miss around like a lucky coin ever since. I know how that sounds. I never once got jealous about it, not really, because the whole point of the story was that she picked me. She stood in a hallway with a pretty girl who wanted her and she said no and came home to me. For two years of marriage that story has been the thing I reach for when I need proof. She could have had that and she chose this, chose me, chose our apartment above the laundromat with the washer that sounds like a jet taking off. Jay, our drummer, says I talk about it like someone who found money on the sidewalk, and maybe I do, but it's my money, is how I feel about it.

So when Dina called me at work in September and said, hey, Carla is coming to town for the weekend, she's staying at the Keystone Motel, I said great, that'll be fun, and I meant it, mostly. We're twenty-five and twenty-four now, married two years, living in Ashford where I play guitar in a band that gets two sets on a Friday at a dive called The Rusty Nail. Dina works at the university library. Our life is small and good and I didn't have a single suspicious thought when I said great, that'll be fun. I want to note that. Whatever happened later, it did not start with me being weird about my wife's friend coming to visit.

Carla showed up at the Nail during our first set. I saw her before they got to the table because she's hard to miss, tall, dark hair cut short, boots you can hear coming across a concrete floor. She hugged Dina at the door and I watched that hug from the stage and something about it was different from a normal hug, longer, and when they pulled apart Dina was laughing at something and Carla had her hand still on Dina's arm. I kept playing. I'm not going to say I missed a chord, because I didn't, but I was aware of their table the way you're aware of a lit candle in a dark room, always in the corner of your eye.

I'd seen them together twice before, once at our wedding and once when Carla passed through for a conference, so I knew they got along. What I wasn't ready for was how much easier it all looked now. Between songs I watched Dina lean into Carla's ear to talk over the music, both of them twenty-something and sharp and quick with each other, and the more I watched the more I understood that the two of them had a private frequency, some old shorthand from that one party, and I was never going to be on it. I don't know how else to describe it. They were just fast with each other. One of them would say half a sentence and the other one would finish it and they'd both crack up and I'd be sitting there on my stool like a guy watching a tennis match in a language he doesn't speak.

Jay noticed it too, between our sets, while we were loading bottles back into the cooler. He nodded toward their table and said, "Those two go way back, huh."

"Grad school," I said. "They met at grad school orientation."

"Huh," he said, and he didn't say anything else, but Jay has known me since we were twenty-two and he can say huh in a way that lands like a whole paragraph.

I remember standing there with a bottle of water and thinking about that hallway, that party, the hem of a shirt. I thought about it the way you'd think about a scar you forget you have until somebody asks about it. It didn't bother me, exactly. It just sat there.

We finished around midnight and hauled our gear out to the van, and by the time we got it all loaded Dina and Carla were waiting by the curb, and Dina said, "Colt, Carla doesn't have a car, so she's just going to ride back with us, and we thought you'd come up for a drink."

I said sure. Of course I said sure.

Here is the part where I have to be careful, because everything after this happened fast and I've gone over it so many times that some of it has probably smoothed itself out in my head. But the broad shape is this. We got back to the apartment around one, Dina opened a bottle of wine, and the three of us ended up on the couch, me in the corner chair because there wasn't really room for three on the thing, and the talking went the way talking goes after a bar, louder and looser and funnier than it had any right to be. Carla was telling stories about Dina in grad school, how she used to argue with a professor until he gave her points just to make her stop, and Dina was telling one about Carla and a karaoke machine, and I was laughing along and nursing one glass of wine and at some point, I honestly could not tell you when, I stopped being part of the conversation and started being furniture.

It wasn't hostile. That's what I kept circling back to all night, and what I'd tell you now if you asked. Nobody was cutting me out on purpose. It was more like they were two magnets and I was a piece of wood. They sat close on the couch with their knees turned toward each other, and Carla touched Dina's shoulder when she laughed, and Dina touched Carla's knee when she said something she liked, and I sat in my corner chair with my wine and felt two things at once that don't fit together, which is hot under the collar and cold in the chest at the same time. I didn't know a person could feel both. I thought you picked one.

At some point Carla said, "God, Dina, do you remember the Halverson party," and stopped herself, and glanced at me, and there was this little beat where the whole room went quiet in a way that I could feel in my teeth, and Dina said, "I remember the Halverson party," and looked at me when she said it, held my eyes, and I knew exactly which party she meant, and I nodded like it was trivial, and the conversation rolled on.

But it didn't roll on the same after that. They got a little closer. Or I noticed they'd been close the whole time, which might be the truer version. Carla's arm was along the back of the couch behind Dina's shoulders. Dina had her feet tucked up under her. The lamp was on its dimmest setting because I'd turned it down when we got in, a habit, and the two of them were mostly in shadow and I could see them better than they could probably see me, and that's when it really hit me, sitting there with my glass, that I was watching this. That some part of me had been watching it since the Nail, cataloguing it, holding onto it, the same way I'd held onto the story of the hallway for three years.

Carla laughed at something and put her hand over Dina's on the arm of the couch and left it there, and Dina didn't move it, and I sat in my chair and my face went hot and my mouth went dry and the coin in my pocket, the lucky one, the story I'd been carrying around like proof of something, suddenly didn't feel like proof of anything at all. It felt like a door I'd kept locked because I liked knowing what was behind it.

Dina looked over at me then. Not a long look, just a glance, like she was checking whether I was asleep or just quiet, and I guess she figured out which one, because she leaned over and said something into Carla's ear and Carla laughed and then they both got up, and Dina came around the couch and stood next to my chair. She put her hand on my arm and said, "Hey, can you come in the kitchen for a second," all casual, like she was asking me to help with dishes.

I followed her in and she shut the door partway, which she never does, and she stood there with her back against the counter and her wine glass held in both hands, and she said, "So. You know what I'm going to say."

"Probably," I said.

"I want tonight," she said. "Both of you. I mean, I want you and I want her, and I want everybody in the same room, and I don't want to chicken out like we did at the Halverson party, either of us, all of us." She took a breath and her voice went a little steadier, the way it does when she's rehearsed