The fluorescent lights flickered and whined overhead. I should have felt more nervous than I did; everything in me screamed that my present life was about to end, one way or another. But it already had, and no matter what happened in the next however long, seconds or minutes or hours, knowing would be better than not knowing. That's what I told myself. That's what I clung to.
Waiting rooms are liminal spaces, holding pens for those whose lives are about to change. In the limbo between two quantum states, the one before and the one after, the waiting room is the buffer. Is it allergies or a cold? Is it benign or malignant?
Is it my child or his?
I looked across at Trevor, as distant from me in the waiting room as he could be. Not long before, I would have expected him to be waiting out here by himself, pacing nervously, ready with cigars for me and flowers for Julia.
We'd been friends since high school, inseparable as the three new kids that all came in on the first day of our sophomore year. We went to college together. He was the best man at our wedding. And nine months before, while I was away for a couple of days, he and my wife had hung out together, gotten drunk and high, and fucked.
I didn't suspect at first; we all had our own things going on, and Trevor not coming over to hang out for a couple of weeks wasn't that surprising. He was trying to get established in business, and Julia and I still acted like newlyweds, so he'd given us a little space lately anyways.
I'd like to give her credit for telling me as quickly as she did, but I can't. Julia claimed it had only happened once, and one time at that. No all night fuckfests, just a quick, passion-filled tryst, followed by tears and guilt as they realized what they'd done. She was remorseful, she claimed, but wanted to live with the guilt rather than hurt me.
