Unpermitted Jasmine

The first time, I didn't ask. Not with words. I just reached over and took the glass from her hand and set it on the windowsill, and she said, "What are you doing," not even a question, more like a statement of fact, and I said nothing, just put my mouth on hers.

She tasted like gin and the cherry lip balm she'd been using since high school, the same brand, the same flavor, and I knew this because I'd been kissing her for six years and some things don't change even when everything else does. Her hands came up to my chest, not pushing, not pulling. Just there. Fingers splayed against my shirt like she was checking my heartbeat.

"Daniel." My name in her mouth was a warning and a question and something else underneath, something she wouldn't name.

I didn't stop.

The apartment was hot. August in Brooklyn, the kind of heat that gets into the walls and stays there, that makes the air thick enough to chew. The fan in the corner clicked with every rotation, a small mechanical heartbeat, and the street noise came through the open window in waves. Car horns. Someone's radio. A dog barking at nothing.

She pulled back first. Her lips were redder than before, swollen, and she wiped them with the back of her hand like she could erase what just happened. "You're drunk."

"So are you."

"That's not the point."

"What's the point, then?"

She didn't answer. She walked to the kitchen, and I watched her go, the way her hips moved in those thin cotton shorts, the way her hair swung against her back. Jasmine. My wife's best friend. My wife, who was three thousand miles away in Seattle visiting her mother, who trusted me, who trusted her, who had no idea that the last four months had been building toward something neither of us would admit.

I picked up the glass from the windowsill and finished what was left. Gin and tonic, mostly gin. The ice had melted and watered it down but I didn't care. I needed something to do with my hands.

"You should go to bed," she said from the kitchen. I heard the refrigerator open, close. "I'll call a car."

"Don't."

"Daniel."

"Don't call a car."

She came back with a bottle of water, unscrewed the cap, drank half of it standing in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room. The light from the street came through the window and caught the side of her face, the curve of her jaw, the small scar above her eyebrow from when she fell off her bike at twelve. I knew that story. I knew all her stories.

"You're married," she said.

"I know."

"To my best friend."

"I know."

"So what are we doing?"

The question hung there. The fan clicked. The dog outside had stopped barking and started whining instead, a high thin sound that cut through everything.

I thought about lying. I thought about saying nothing happened, we're just drunk, let's forget it. I thought about all the easy exits, the ones that would let us go back to the way things were, back to the careful distance, the jokes that didn't mean anything, the hugs that lasted a second too long but not long enough to matter.

Instead I said, "I don't know."

She laughed. Not a real laugh. A short, sharp sound with no humor in it. "That's not good enough."

"It's what I've got."

She shook her head and walked past me to the couch, sat down, pulled her knees up to her chest. The water bottle dangled from her fingers. She looked small like that, smaller than she was, and I remembered the first time I met her, at a party in Bushwick, how she'd commandeered the playlist and refused to let anyone change it, how she'd danced with Sarah all night, the two of them spinning each other around until they collapsed on the floor laughing. I'd thought then that she was the kind of person who took up space without apologizing for it.

She wasn't taking up space now. She was curled into the corner of my couch, in my apartment, wearing shorts and a t-shirt that I was pretty sure belonged to Sarah, and she was looking at me like I was a problem she couldn't solve.

"Sit down," she said.

I sat.

Not next to her. On the other end of the couch, close enough to feel the heat coming off her skin, far enough that I wasn't touching her. The distance felt like a lie.

"How long?" she asked.

"How long what?"

"How long have you been thinking about this?"

I could have lied again. Should have. But the gin was in me and the heat was in me and she was right there, close enough that I could smell her shampoo, coconut and something floral, and I was tired of pretending.

"Since the wedding."

She went still. Completely still, like she'd stopped breathing. "That was two years ago."

"I know."

"Daniel."

"I know, Jasmine."

She set the water bottle on the floor and turned to face me, her whole body, knees dropping, feet coming down, and her face was doing something complicated. Anger, maybe. Confusion. Something that looked almost like relief.

"You never said anything."

"What was I supposed to say? Hey, I know you're Sarah's best friend and I just married her, but I can't stop thinking about you?"

"Yes." Her voice cracked on the word. "Something like that."

We stared at each other. The fan clicked. Somewhere in the building, someone flushed a toilet, and the pipes groaned like they always did, and I thought about how strange it was that life kept happening around you even when your whole world was rearranging itself.

"I didn't want to hurt her," I said.

"I know."

"I love her."

"I know that too."

"But."

"But."

She didn't finish the sentence. Neither did I. We just sat there in the heat, in the dark, in the mess we'd made, and I realized that the wanting wasn't the problem. The wanting had always been there. The problem was that now we both knew it, and there was no going back to not knowing.

She reached for my hand. Her fingers were cool from the water bottle, and they laced through mine like they belonged there, like they'd been waiting.

"One time," she said. "Just once, and then we forget it happened."

It wasn't a question, but I answered anyway.