Page 11 of Baby for My Ex’s Dad

Tonight was the other thing, and the other thing was perfect, and the way to keep it perfect is to be gone before it can turn into a morning.

The wobble passes. Phase two complete.

Phase three is getting dressed, and the dress fights back. I get it up over my hips and shoulders, and then the zipper hums to the middle of my back and stops, because the last four inches of that zipper have required an assistant every time I’ve worn this thing, and my assistant options at present are a wall and a sleeping stranger.

Definitely not waking him.

I perform a full minute of silent contortions against my own spine. The zipper wins. Fine. My coat covers the gap, October covers the coat, and I’ve survived worse wardrobe failures at better-lit events.

I ease the door open. Hallway light falls in a thin bar across the carpet, just touching the foot of the bed. He hasn’t moved. His arm’s still lying across the empty half of the bed, holding the shape of where I was.

Bye, Max. Thanks for everything, and I do mean everything.

The door clicks shut behind me, and the corridor is all hush, carpet and dim sconces and a hundred strangers breathing behind numbered doors. My heels stay in my hand, because heels at four in the morning are optional until I’m outside. I aim for the elevators, half-zipped, hair beyond the help of professionals, moving in the special silent walk of a woman who would like no one to know what she’s been up to.

Just a few doors down, the neighboring suite opens, and a man steps out directly into my path, and I stop so fast my shoulder brushes the wallpaper.

He’s big. Not gym big. Occupational big, like a bricklayer, filling the doorframe in a black sweater and black pants. He’s bald, and his scalp is a mess of old scars, ridged lines crossing each other in a pattern that no accident would draw. More scarring pulls at one cheek, tugging the corner of his mouth toward his ear in a way that suggests a smile even at rest. He has a phone in one hand and a toothpick in the other corner of his mouth, and it appears he’s fully dressed and going somewhere, same as me.

Our eyes meet, and the corridor narrows. I do not want to share an elevator with this man. Or a hallway. Or a city.

Two seconds. That’s all it is. Two seconds of eye contact with a stranger in a hallway, and in those two seconds his gaze does a slow, unhurried inventory of me, and arrives at my face with the toothpick rolling, leisurely, from one corner of his mouth to the other. Then his eyes slide past me, to the door I just came out of, and hold there.

And he breathes in slow, through the nose. His head tips a degree to one side, and the resting smile deepens by a fraction, without any warmth whatsoever. A sound comes out of him. Quiet. Two notes, hummed, almost merry. A little tune for a private occasion.

Every hair on my arms stands up at once. He must smell sex on me.

He steps back and to the side, making room for me to pass, and executes a small, courteous sweep of the phone hand. After you.

The courtesy is the worst part. The courtesy is a costume, fake, and we both know it. But I walk past him because the only other option is to stand still, and I do not want to be near him any longer than I have to be.

Ten steps of hallway. I feel his attention on the bare gap in my zipper the entire way, even though I know he can’t see through my jacket. The doors open. I step in, turn around, and he hasn’t moved.

Not one fraction of an inch.

He stands in the middle of the corridor watching me with the phone now raised loosely at his side, not quite pointed at me, not quite not, and as the doors begin to close, he lifts two fingers off it in a small salute, and the last thing I see through the narrowing gap is the toothpick rolling.

The doors seal. My breath comes out all at once and fogs the brushed steel.

“Okay,” I tell my reflection, which has gone a fun shade of gray. “That was creepy as fuck.”

By the lobby, I’ve constructed a reasonable explanation, because constructing reasonable explanations is my profession. Hotels are full of frightening men this early in the morning. That’s what hotels are for. He’s probably somebody’s driver, somebody’s bodyguard, or somebody’s very committed personal trainer—and he was creepy at me for two seconds.

But I’ll never see him again in my life.

Shake it off, girl.

The valet brings my Honda around to the valet zone, where it sits, looking deeply embarrassed among the luxury cars, and I tip him too much for both of us, then drive home.

My hands stop shaking somewhere on the bridge. I can take a full breath by the time I wedge my key into my apartment’s lock. My place is a third-floor walkup in Queens with radiators that clank in a pattern I’ve decided to hear as affection. I get the door open, flip the light on, and find Potato on the kitchen counter, illegally seated beside the cookie jar, which is on its side and now mostly empty.

Potato is a Scottish Fold I did not select. He picked me two years ago by sitting outside this building every day, looking fat and tragic until I cracked. The Cat Distribution System hard at work.

He’s brown, built along the lines of a fuzzy football with ambitions, and his left ear performs the fold while the right one never got the memo. His tail has a bend at the end from a past he declines to discuss. He observes me observing the crime scene, and his golden-yellow eyes hold no remorse, only the serene confidence of a creature who has never once feared a consequence.

“You have food,” I remind him. “There’s food in your bowl. I can see it from here.”

Potato says nothing, because bowl food is for emergencies and the jar was right there. He drops off the counter with a thud that shakes the floorboards and escorts me to his dish, herding my ankles, yelling the whole way. I feed him because one of us should get what he wants without complications, and he punches into the wet food while I lean against the counter in my coat and let the night finally catch up.