The Travelers by Chris Pavone

purple, the tiles in the bathroom too blue. His face in the mirror is splotchy and stubbly, his eyes shot with red lines. He has been drinking now for—what?—seven hours. It’s surprising how much of his job is about staying up very late, drinking alcohol, with strangers. Maybe that’s all jobs.
    He splashes his cheeks with cool water, trickling into his eyes, onto his lips. It feels good. He dries his face, pushes back his hair, adjusts his tie. He stares at himself in the mirror, searching his eyes for his resolve, alone at a party, far from home, without his wife.
    His wife. If only she were here, taking his hand under the table, as she does, just their secret for a few seconds, I’m here, I’ll be here later, I’ll be here tomorrow, that’s what a wife is. But she’s not here, not now.
    Will never knew what exactly ruined his parents’ marriage, but they ended up loathing each other, hostilities were open, they referred to each other in the third person—“Please tell your father to come inside”—in the other’s presence, occasionally screaming. Then when Will was eleven, Dad died. Rumors eventually reached Will—Mom driven to alcoholism, Dad to serial philandering. But these were the symptoms, not the illness.
    He’d been too young to have ever had any conversation with his father about this. And when he was mature enough, he could never bring himself to ask his mom. So Will’s imagination festered, conjuring dozens of scenarios, of reasons why a couple could be driven to hate each other so much. He told himself cautionary tales. Promised himself that whatever it was, he wouldn’t do it. That he himself would grow old with his own wife, would die at her side, and along the way he’d avoid all the pitfalls, overcome all the obstacles. And that if he somehow failed, he’d admit it, and he’d end it. He’d rather be divorced, rather live with a failed marriage in the past tense than with a shitty marriage in the present.
    And yet here he is.
    Will takes a deep breath. He opens the door, and there Elle is, just like he knew she’d be, waiting for him, leaning against the wall, face turned down but big blue eyes turned up, appraising him from the cool remove of her enviable genetics.
    This is the situation that he has both desired and dreaded. What’s he going to do?
    One of Will’s main fortifications against adultery has been that men always have to make the first physical move. Women may drop innuendo all night, but none has been willing to initiate the physical encounter.
    Until now. Elle takes the step that separates them, and raises her hand, and places her thumb on his cheek, fingers on his neck, and as she begins to pull his face to hers, there’s a brief period when Will can still halt it, he can avert his face or pull back, keep his mouth closed or put his hand up, but he doesn’t do any of these things, he allows it to happen, at first halfway reluctant but then unrestrained, and for a minute or two—how can you measure?—they stand in the short hall next to the washroom in an ancient château in southwest France, very late at night and very far from home, melting into each other.
    Then voices—it sounds like Bertrand, with that sommelier—and Elle pulls back, stares at him hard for a second, wordlessly extending a promise. She blinks, and he reads in that blink her reiteration: yes, I’m yours, take me.
    —
    At the end, only a handful of people remain; that’s what makes it the end. They stagger along the pebbled path toward the taxis, drivers leaning on hoods, eyeing passengers with the superiority of sober people accommodating inebriated ones.
    “You’re staying at the
auberge,
aren’t you?” Elle asks, slowing her pace, creating distance between the two of them and the others, public privacy.
    “I am.”
    “What’s your room number?” she asks. Quietly, without looking at him. Their heels are crunching on the stones. The plastered Scot stumbles, rights himself, none