Late Enough to Be Believable

"There's no traffic jam quite as effective as the one you create yourself when you're terrified of where the road ends."

The clock on the wall read 3:47. My shift ended at five. Just over an hour of pretending everything was normal, of answering phones and dealing with whatever fresh complaints the afternoon delivered, of existing in a body that still held the physical memory of what I'd done.

I could feel it. That was the thing nobody tells you about infidelity—the way your body holds onto it, keeps the evidence even when you desperately want to forget. The ache in my arse. The phantom sensation of Ben's hands on my hips. The raw feeling in my throat from sounds I hadn't meant to make. Every time I shifted in my chair, my body reminded me. Every time I swallowed, I tasted him.

I wanted to shower. I wanted to scrub my skin until it was raw, wash away every trace of what had happened, emerge clean and unchanged like none of it had been real. But I couldn't leave the desk again. Couldn't draw attention. Couldn't do anything except sit here and smile and pretend I was still the person I'd been this morning.

The afternoon crawled past.

I answered calls. Directed visitors. Nodded at the appropriate moments when colleagues passed through, exchanging the meaningless pleasantries that lubricate workplace interactions. How's your day going? Busy afternoon? See you tomorrow. The words came out automatically, drawn from some reservoir of social muscle memory that operated independently of the chaos in my head.

Ben passed through once, around four-thirty. Our eyes met for a fraction of a second—long enough to acknowledge, short enough to deny. He didn't stop. Didn't speak. Just walked past like I was furniture, like the last hour hadn't happened, like we were exactly what we appeared to be: colleagues, nothing more.

I should have been grateful for the discretion. Instead, I felt something twist in my chest—not quite hurt, not quite relief, something in between that I didn't have a name for.

At five o'clock, I clocked out.

The car park was half-empty, the winter evening already closing in. Tasmania's winter sunsets came early and without ceremony—one moment grey daylight, the next grey dusk, the transition so gradual you barely noticed until the darkness was already there. I sat in my car for a long moment, hands on the steering wheel, engine off, staring at nothing.

I couldn't go home.

The realisation landed with the weight of certainty. I'd told Luke I'd be late—Mr. Gangley had another fall, don't wait up—and now I was trapped by my own lie. If I walked through the door at 5:30, the fiction would collapse. Luke would know something was wrong. Luke would ask questions. And I couldn't—I couldn't—look him in the eye right now. Not with Ben still on my skin. Not with the taste of betrayal still fresh in my mouth.

I started the engine.

The streets of Lindisfarne unspooled before me, familiar and meaningless. I drove without destination at first, letting the car carry me through the quiet eastern shore suburbs while my mind churned through the wreckage of the afternoon. Past the shops, past the primary school with its empty playground, past the neat weatherboard houses with their winter gardens gone dormant. The Derwent stretched out to my right, flat and grey, the city lights of Hobart beginning to flicker on across the water.

I couldn't face the bridge yet. Couldn't face the route home.

Instead, I turned toward Rosny, then Bellerive, the car tracing the curve of the eastern shore like it had its own agenda. The waterfront car park near the yacht club was nearly empty—too cold, too grey, too miserable for anyone without a reason to be there. I pulled in, killed the engine, and sat watching the water do nothing.

Why?

That was the question, wasn't it? Not what I'd done—that was straightforward, physical, undeniable—but why. Why had I let it happen? Why hadn't I stopped Ben when I had the chance? Why had I said yes when everything in my history with Luke should have made me say no?

Because you wanted it, a voice whispered. Because Luke hasn't touched you in weeks. Because he looks at you like you're furniture. Because you've spent the last month sleeping next to a stranger and pretending that's enough.

The justifications tasted sour, but they weren't wrong.

Things had been disintegrating for a while now—months, maybe longer. The distance had crept in so gradually that I hadn't noticed until suddenly Luke was a closed door at the end of the hallway, a shape in the bed beside me that might as well have been a pillow for all the warmth it provided. He'd retreated into himself, into that fucking study, into whatever mystery had consumed him, and I'd been left on the outside, knocking on doors that never opened.

And today, Ben had opened a door. A different door. A wrong door. And I'd walked through it because at least it was something. At least it was someone looking at me, wanting me, making me feel like I still existed in some way that mattered.

Was that an excuse? Was that a reason?

Or was that just the story I was telling myself to avoid the simpler truth—that I was weak, and selfish, and had done something unforgivable because I could?

The grey of the water blurred. I blinked, and my cheeks were wet.

Christ. Crying. Like that would help. Like tears could undo anything, could wash away the choices I'd made, could rebuild the foundation I'd just taken a sledgehammer to.

I wiped my face with the back of my hand. Pathetic. Sitting in a car park in Bellerive, crying over my own mistakes like some tragic figure in a shit movie. Luke was at home—probably worried by now, probably wondering why I wasn't answering my phone, probably—

My phone.

I pulled it from my pocket, and the screen lit up with notifications. Two text messages from Luke.

Everything okay? Call me when you can. x

Getting worried. You usually text. Love you.

Love you. There it was again. Those two words, so casual, so automatic, delivered like spare change dropped in a tip jar. Did he mean it? Did it matter if he meant it, when I'd just proven how little I deserved it?

I typed a reply with numb fingers.

Sorry, crazy afternoon. Everything's fine. On my way home soon. x

The 'x' felt like a lie. Everything about this felt like a lie—the message, the excuse, the promise to come home to a house where I'd have to pretend nothing had changed. I hit send anyway, then dropped the phone on the passenger seat like it had burned me.

The evening deepened. Lights flickered on across the water—the city on the western shore, distant and indifferent. Hobart glittered like a stranger's jewellery, pretty from a distance, nothing to do with me. I watched the reflections wobble on the dark water while my mind kept circling back to the bathroom, to Ben, to the moment I'd said yes and crossed a line I couldn't uncross.

What happened now?

I didn't know. Couldn't think that far ahead. The future had contracted to a single, unbearable point: going home. Facing Luke. Climbing into bed beside the man I'd betrayed and pretending to sleep while my guilt ate me alive from the inside out.

Maybe I should tell him.

The thought surfaced, and I recoiled from it immediately. Tell him what? Hey Luke, I know we've been drifting apart, but I thought you should know I let my colleague fuck me in the staff bathroom while you were on the phone telling me you loved me. That would go over well. That would fix everything.

Or maybe it would. Maybe the truth would be a grenade that blew our life apart, and from the rubble we could build something honest. Something real. Something that wasn't this slow suffocation of silences and closed doors.

Or maybe it would just be the end. Period. Full stop. Luke walking out, taking whatever pieces of our shared life he wanted, leaving me alone in a house that would suddenly feel far too large.

I wasn't ready for that. I wasn't sure I'd ever be ready for that.

So I'd do what people did. I'd go home. I'd pretend. I'd bury this afternoon so deep that maybe, eventually, it would feel like it had happened to someone else.

I started the car.

The drive took longer than it should have. I found reasons to delay—a detour through Howrah, a stop at the bottle shop in Mornington for a six-pack I didn't need, ten minutes sitting in the Eastlands car park staring at shoppers who had no idea their lives were simple. By the time I finally crossed the Tasman Bridge, the city lights stretching across the water below, the clock on the dashboard read nearly nine.

The bridge had always felt like a threshold to me—crossing from one side of the Derwent to the other, from the quiet eastern shore to the sprawl of Hobart's northern suburbs. Tonight it felt more literal than usual. I was crossing from one version of myself to another. From the Jamie who'd done something unforgivable to the Jamie who had to pretend he hadn't.

The northern suburbs slid past in a blur of streetlights and familiar landmarks. New Town to Moonah to Glenorchy, then the turnoff toward Berriedale. Each street bringing me closer to the house, to Luke, to the reckoning I couldn't avoid forever.

I stopped at the bottle shop in Claremont, even though I'd already bought beer. Killed another fifteen minutes browsing wines I had no intention of buying, nodding at the bloke behind the counter like I was a normal person doing normal things. By the time I got back in the car, my hands were shaking.

Get it together. You can do this. You've been pretending for months—what's one more night?

The drive from Claremont to Berriedale took less than fifteen minutes. Not long enough. Never long enough.

When I finally pulled into our driveway, the clock read 10:47. Late enough to be believable. Late enough that Luke might already be asleep.

Please be asleep. Please don't be waiting up. Please don't ask me questions I can't answer.

The house was dark except for the porch light, left on the way it always was when one of us was coming home late. A small gesture. A thoughtful gesture. The kind of thing Luke still did, even now, even with all the distance between us. The kind of thing that made my chest ache with something that might have been love or might have been guilt or might have been both, so tangled together I couldn't tell where one ended and the other began.

I sat in the car for another minute, gathering myself. Arranging my face into something neutral. Rehearsing the lies I'd tell if Luke was awake—long shift, difficult patient, you know how it is—and hoping I wouldn't need them.

The front door was unlocked. I slipped inside, moving quietly, the habits of a thousand late nights guiding my feet around the soft darkness of the house I'd shared with Luke for nearly a decade.

The bedroom door was ajar.

I paused outside it, listening. The soft, rhythmic sound of breathing filtered through the gap—deep and steady, the unmistakable cadence of sleep. Relief washed through me, so intense it was almost physical. He was asleep. I wouldn't have to face him. Not tonight. I could postpone the reckoning for another few hours, let the darkness cover my sins until morning.

I didn't go in.

The thought of sliding into bed beside Luke, of letting my body rest next to his like nothing had changed, made my skin crawl. I could still feel Ben on me. Could still smell him, faintly, beneath the deodorant I'd reapplied in the car. If I got into that bed, I'd contaminate it. I'd bring the afternoon into the space we'd shared, and somehow that felt like an even worse betrayal than what I'd already done.

The spare bedroom, then.

I moved past the master bedroom doorway, footsteps silent on the carpet, and that's when Duke appeared.

Our eldest Shih Tzu—white and brown—emerged from the bedroom with the unhurried dignity of a creature who'd seen everything and judged most of it. His eyes found mine in the darkness, and for a moment we just looked at each other. Dog and human. The loyal and the faithless.

Did he know? Could dogs sense these things—the guilt, the wrongness, the way their human had fractured something important? His gaze seemed to hold something, some canine wisdom I was probably projecting, and I felt my throat tighten.

"Hey, mate," I whispered.

Duke's tail gave a slow wag. No judgment. No questions. Just acknowledgment that I was home, that I was his person, that whatever had happened in the hours I'd been away didn't change that fundamental fact.

He followed me to the spare room, his claws clicking softly on the carpet. I undressed in the darkness—mechanically, each motion an effort—and left my clothes in a pile I'd deal with tomorrow. The shower could wait until morning. Right now, I just needed to stop. To lie down. To let unconsciousness take me somewhere I didn't have to think.

The bed was cold. It always was, in winter, when it hadn't been slept in. I crawled under the covers and lay there, staring at the ceiling I could barely see, while Duke performed his ritual circling at the foot of the bed before settling into a warm knot against my legs.

His weight was a comfort. Small, simple, uncomplicated. The kind of love that didn't ask questions, didn't demand explanations, didn't need you to be anything other than what you were. Dogs were easy that way. Dogs forgave you for being human.

I wished I could forgive myself that easily.

The events of the day played behind my eyes in fragmented loops. Mr. Gangley's outrage. Ben's theatrical slap. The moment in the bathroom when everything had shifted. Luke's voice on the phone—love you—while another man's mouth—

I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to force the memories away.

It didn't work. It wasn't going to work. This was my punishment, I supposed—to lie here in the dark, replaying my own betrayal on an endless loop, unable to escape the truth of what I'd done. Tomorrow I'd have to get up. Go back to work. Perhaps see Ben if he was rostered on the same late shift as me, and pretend we were nothing more than colleagues. Come home to Luke and pretend we were still the people we'd been yesterday.

I was so tired of pretending.

But that was all I had left. The pretence, the performance, the careful maintenance of a life that was crumbling from the inside out. I'd been doing it for months with Luke—smiling through dinners where we barely spoke, reaching for him in bed and meeting only distance, telling myself that every relationship went through rough patches and this was just ours.

Now I'd added another layer of pretence. Another secret. Another thing to bury and deny and never, ever speak of.

You could tell him, that voice whispered again. You could wake him up right now, confess everything, let the chips fall where they may.

I could. I wouldn't. Not tonight. Probably not ever.

Because I was a coward. Because I wasn't ready to lose him. Because despite everything—the distance, the silence, the closed doors—I still loved Luke Smith. Loved him in that deep, foundational way that doesn't disappear just because things get hard. Loved him enough to know that what I'd done today would destroy him, and I couldn't bear to be the one to deliver that blow.

So I'd carry it. This secret, this guilt, this weight. I'd add it to all the other things I carried and keep walking, one foot in front of the other, until... what? Until it crushed me? Until the truth came out anyway? Until one of us finally admitted that whatever we'd had was gone?

I didn't know. Couldn't see that far ahead. The future was a fog, and I was lost in it.

Duke shifted against my legs, letting out a small sigh of contentment. At least one of us was at peace.

I closed my eyes.

It was the closest thing to escape I had left.