There is something intoxicating that swirls in and around the idea of adultery, Kate has always thought. Even the word is seductive; it coils beneath the tongue, when she whispers it in the dark of her bedroom, half-bitter, like musky perfume, like the heavy open dampness of a summer night after a long day spent bent over a desk.
She wants to taste it for herself.
She never tells anyone this, about her fascination, her fixation, whatever technical term it requires, because what would they think of her then?
Thou shalt not commit adultery. She remembers sitting in Sunday School, about six years old, bored to death, hair braided too tight and her tights unbearably itchy. The class is supposed to be going over the Ten Commandments: the church's air conditioner is broken and she scribbles in the margins of her paper, tuning the droning of her instructor out, but then her head pops up at this strange word, interested. It sounds pretty and interesting and like the things adults whisper about when she's playing in the other room, but the teacher won't tell her what it means.
In the car afterwards she asks her mother. Diane's left hand twitches on the steering wheel and she reaches with the other into the backseat to pat her daughter on the head, almost but not quite mussing the part. "It's breaking a promise, Katherine."
Kate is too young to understand much, but she knows that "Katherine" is bad, and the dark furrow between her mother's eyes is worse, and so she swings her legs back and forth for something to do and is quiet for the rest of the drive home.
Two weeks later her mother introduces her (it isn't a real introduction but Katie doesn't know that) to a man called Wayne. He smells funny, like the stuff the grown-ups drink at Communion, and when he looks at her mom hard, and then grins, Diane lets go of Katie's hand, and she feels something shift.
Tom is married, to a cute perky brunette. Noreen. That wasn't a surprise, not really, not when she thinks about it (the impact did hurt, though). He'd always been that kind of guy, the picket fence and til-death-do-us-part and making a woman honest and all that.
She shouldn't have expected him to wait for her.
If you kiss a married man, are you the sinner or is he? Who will pay on Judgment Day? She pulls away, the taste of his midnight study-break coffee (he still does that, just like in high school, and that makes her unimaginably sad) mingling with the sharpness of her floral perfume on her tongue, before she can figure it out.
When Tom dies (when she kills him), Kate sees one bright spot: now his wife will never find out, and she'll only have to wear the blackened badge of the murderer, not the scarlet letter of the adulteress. No harm, no foul, she thinks, and the absurdity of that phrase in this situation is what makes her finally break down and cry.
If she hadn't kissed him, would he still have died for her?
Or would he have known better?
She would.
Kevin would never hurt her; she knows this. That's partly why she chose him; and she thinks it's partly why he chose her.
Monica. Her name that is not her name sounds sexy and innocent and confident and all the things she's not coming from his mouth, and when she meets his mute invitation of a crooked eyebrow with an open-lipped smile she is kissing the husband of a woman who doesn't exist.
She's unfaithful in many ways and to many things, but most of all to herself.
It's not as exciting as she thought it would be.
Kate is used to wanting. She just isn't used to having what she wants within her grasp.
It's wrong, the back-and-forth, she knows it is, and it's not the power but the powerlessness, somehow, of being between two men, that draws her in. It's not her fault that she's caught in the middle.
That's what she tells herself.
Most days she just ignores the platitudes, the thou shalt nots humming in her head, ghosts of Sunday Sermons past, because Jack is waiting and Sawyer is watching, and there's no time like the present, and if that isn't moral, it feels right.
She wakes up wrapped in an over-sized shirt, lying sprawled over her lover's chest, the easy rhythm of his breathing feathery in her ear, but the face she sees behind her eyes before she opens them belongs to another man.
One year later the pattern reverses itself, and she's lying in the arms of the other but with the first one's laugh ringing in the space behind her ears, and good morning, no, don't get up, I'll make the coffee, tears stinging her eyes as she smiles--
She thinks that she finally knows what it feels like.
(She knew all along.)