I thought about Sophie’s opinion of Finn and managed a nod.
Finn stepped over the threshold and paused, looking down before looking up at me. I hadn’t seen him for months, since before Sophie had moved to LA, since before we’d bought our home.
“Is this house a shoes off house also?” he asked.
“Yes,” Sophie answered before I could. She’d come closer, her chest pressed against my back, her cheek against the outside of my bicep. She still had her wine in hand and her stare was focused on Finn while her body tuned into me.
I imagined she could feel the tension in my spine, the tremble in my thighs. I was grateful she couldn’t get a clear line of sight on my face because I didn’t want to know what she’d see.
Finn saw it, though, because an almost forgotten sort of concern flashed across his features, but there was no way I could handle being looked at like that in the moment so I turned away.
“We have some wine,” I said to no one in particular.
“Hey.” Sophie stayed as I walked away from her. I heard the rustle of clothes and the happy noise she made when she wrapped Finn into a hug. I didn’t need to see it to know, to be jealous of it.
“I’m not sure this is a good idea tonight.”
“It’s a perfect idea,” she corrected, ever the planner. “If we’re all at our worst, it can only get better.”
“I’m not at my worst,” I called out, happy to be sitting back down at the dining room table. The chair had four legs to my two which gave me a much better chance at not keeling over on thespot. But Finn sat down at the table and picked up his wine glass, and my body certainly still tried to collapse just the same.
“Neither am I,” he said softly. “Not anymore.”
Sophie hovered beside me, and I knew the decision she was trying to make before the words came out of her mouth.
“I just remembered I have a work email I need to send.” It might have been the truth or it might have been a lie. It certainly wasn’t something that couldn’t wait. She grabbed her phone off the table and took a step back. “I’ll give you two a second to catch up?”
“You don’t have to go,” Finn said.
I scratched the side of my nose and leveled a look at him across the table. His lips were damp with wine, and I wondered if he still drank Manhattans. If I kissed him, would there be scotch on his breath? If he kissed Sophie, would I be able to taste it on her at the end of the night?
“There’s obviously…some history here?”
Sophie posed it like a question, which had Finn and me both making unimpressed noises somewhere in the back of our throats. At the joint noise, our eyes caught, and the smallest thread of tension unwound itself from the middle of my back. Finn’s shoulders sagged and he chased his relief with a swallow of wine.
“Not so much history,” Finn finally said. “More like wasted potential.”
I worked my jaw back and forth, suddenly unable to look at him.
“How do you figure?” I asked.
“I was…not myself before,” he said. “I squandered more than one opportunity because of it.”
“And now?”
“Not perfect, but better.”
Sophie shifted her weight, uncertainly still rolling off of her. Reaching behind her, I nudged the back of her chair away from the table.
“Work can wait,” I told her.
She sat and set her phone on the table, face down. I slid it away from her, toward the wine bottle again, then I rested my hand on the top of her thigh. My palm was sweaty, my fingers shaking. I could feel them tremble against the warm length of her leg.
“I don’t want to squander the night dredging up the past,” I said to him, to her. “It will have to be discussed, though, at some point. If we?—”
“I know,” Finn interrupted, nodding his agreement.
“But not this second.”