Two Can Play (Celeste and Dominic) novel Chapter 22

Chapter 022

JULIAN

“Celeste!”

She was now singing.

I paced the bedroom with the black dress in my hand and called her name until my throat was raw and she just kept singing behind that bathroom door like I was background noise. Like I was furniture. Like I was nothing.

“Celeste!”

The shower cut off.

I stopped pacing. I stood in the center of the room and I waited. I told myself to stay calm and I was not calm. I was the opposite of calm. I was a man holding a dress that smelled like another man and waiting for his wife to come out of the bathroom she had disappeared into the moment she walked through the door.

The door opened.

She came out in a towel, her hair damp, her skin warm from the water, looking like a woman who had just had the most relaxing evening of her life. She looked at me the way you look at someone who has interrupted something pleasant.

“Why are you screaming my name like I’m deaf?”

I held up the dress.

“How could you do this to me?” My voice came out lower than I intended. The rage had gone somewhere underneath the words. “I have been nothing but good to you. Nothing but faithful. And you…”

“What are you talking about?” She furrowed her brows.

I threw the dress at her.

It hit her chest and fell between us on the floor.

“The cream on that dress,” I snapped. “Are you going to stand there and tell me you know nothing about it? Where have you been? Why have you been ignoring every call I made? Were you out there with a man this whole time?”

She looked down at the dress on the floor.

She looked back up at me.

And she smiled.

Not a nervous smile. Not the smile of a woman caught and scrambling. A slow, unbothered smile that did something cold to my chest.

Then she looked me directly in the eye.

“Julian,” she said, her voice completely steady. “Are you cheating on me?”

I felt the ground shift. “What?”

“Look at yourself right now. Look at how you are behaving toward me. The accusations you are throwing at me the moment I walk through my own front door.” She tilted her head slightly. “Do you know what the statistics say about partners who cheat? They are always the first ones to accuse their innocent partners. Always.”

“That is not what this is…”

“I have been through so much.” She did not raise her voice. She did not need to. “I am starving. I cannot

remember the last time I ate a proper meal. You could not find it in yourself to ask how I was doing. Not one question. You saw something on a dress and the very first place your mind went was that I was being unfaithful.” She paused. “That tells me a great deal about the man standing in front of me. More than you probably intended.”

I opened my mouth.

Nothing came.

I was the one holding the evidence. I was the one who had spent the entire day sick with worry. I was the one who had sat in this house and starved himself and turned away three women because he could not stop thinking about his wife. And somehow I was standing here with nothing to say while she looked at me like I was the one who had done something wrong.

She turned away from me and walked to the wardrobe and began pulling out her pajamas.

Calmly.

Like the conversation was finished.

Like I was finished.

“Celeste.” My voice came out rough. “I am not done talking to you.”

She stepped into her pajama bottoms and pulled the top over her head and ran her fingers through her

wet hair. Then she turned and looked at me with those flat, unbothered eyes.

“By the way,” she said, “if you must know, the ice cream I had earlier is what stained the dress.”

I stared at her. “Ice cream?”

They both looked at me.

You slapped my wife?” I turned to Seraphine. My voice came out harder than I intended. “You put your hands on her?”

When I had seen Celeste slapping Seraphine earlier, I had not stopped to think about who started it. The anger about the dress had been too loud. But now I was looking at the faint redness along Celeste’s jaw and understanding the sequence of events and feeling a different kind of rage start to climb.

“It is true,” Celeste said quietly. “Seraphine slapped me first. But I am sure she did not mean it. She was probably upset about something.”

I looked at Seraphine.

She looked back at me.

Before she could speak I raised my hand and slapped her.

The force knocked her sideways and she hit the floor with a yelp, her hand flying to her face.

“Julian!” Celeste shoved me, both palms flat against my chest, pushing me back a step. “How can you raise your hand to my best friend? Forgetting everything else, Sera is a woman. And her husband is my benefactor. How could you?”

“She hit you first,” I shot back.

“That is not the point.” She turned away from me and knelt beside Seraphine, helping her up from the floor, her hands gentle. “I am so sorry,” she said, guiding her back to the sofa. “Are you okay?”

There was blood at the corner of Seraphine’s mouth. Celeste reached for a tissue and dabbed at it carefully.

“I want to thank you,” Celeste said, her voice full and warm. “I know you must have spoken to your husband. Put in a good word for me.” She shook her head like she was still absorbing something wonderful. “You are a true friend, Seraphine. All this time you never once mentioned that your husband was the richest man in the country. You just quietly went ahead and convinced him to invest five billion dollars into my small lab.” She squeezed Seraphine’s hand. “What would I do without you?”

I watched this.

I watched every word of it.

And I knew. I knew Seraphine had not convinced her husband of anything. Seraphine had not known who her husband was any more than the rest of us had. The idea of Seraphine quietly pulling strings for Celeste out of friendship and generosity was so far from the Seraphine I knew that it might as well have been a fairy tale.

But Celeste was saying it with such warmth and such sincerity that for one half second I almost wondered if I was wrong.

I watched Seraphine’s face go through several things in quick succession. The surprise. The calculation. Something hardening behind her eyes.

She pushed Celeste’s hands away.

“Since you already know that I was the one who convinced my husband to invest in your lab,” she said, her voice flat and cold, “return my five billion right now.”