Page 2

I stop. I know precisely how stupid that thought is. I keep having it anyway. That’s always been my particular talent.

Slowly. I’d want it slow.

I’d want someone who isn’t in a hurry to reach the end. Who takes his time. Who kisses me until I forget I’m nervous, until I forget every rotten thing anyone ever said about my body. I want hours, not minutes.

I want foreplay. So much foreplay it stops being a means to an end and just becomes the entire point. His hands. His mouth. Him telling me I’m beautiful and me actually believing it, because he’s looking at me like he means it and not like he’s doing me a favor.

I want to feel like the most wanted woman alive for one single night of my life. Is that really so much to ask?

With every whoosh, some knot in my chest loosens by a thread. It’s so much easier to say into a glowing rectangle at one in the morning than it ever was to say to an actual face across a pillow.

The reply takes longer this time. Three dots appear, vanish, appear again, as if the man on the other end is choosing each word and setting it down with care.

Maksim

Whoever earns that should count himself lucky. And he should take his time—all of it. A woman who knows exactly what she wants deserves a man patient enough to give her every part of it. Slowly. Until she stops wondering whether she’s wanted and simply knows.

I read it once. I read it again. And something snags, low and cold beneath the warm wine haze.

Maksim doesn’t talk like this. Maksim types in lowercase fragments and reaction gifs and a single “k” with a period when he’s sulking. Maksim has never once used the word deserves about me except to rule on what I did or didn’t deserve to complain about.

Of course he sounds different. People change. Maybe guilt has finally, at long last, done something to the man.

Or maybe I’m so lonely that I have started rewriting a man I hate into someone worth texting in the dark.

What am I doing? What in God’s name am I doing?

This is the man who called me fat and frigid in the same breath. Who screwed my BFF Vanessa in my bed.

Forget all of that. I’m drunk. I don’t even know why I’m texting you. Delete it.

I don’t wait for an answer this time either. I turn the phone face-down, and then, not trusting myself even that far, I shove it beneath the couch cushion where I cannot reach it without real commitment.

I press the heels of my hands into my eyes until I see color.

God. What have I done?

1

DELANEY

I balance a tray of forty-dollar cocktails and pretend the couple in the corner booth are strangers.

Let me correct myself right now. The man is my ex. The woman is my former best friend. So really, I’m’m carrying a tray of overpriced gin toward a slow, private betrayal that decided to book a table in my section tonight.

Sablo House doesn’t usually seat people like Maksim. It seats men who earned their money, not men who live on their family’s. But there he is, one arm draped along the velvet, and there she is beside him, a ring the size of a knuckle catching the low gold light. Of all the lounges in this city, they walked into the one where I pour drinks to pay down my dead parents’ hospital bills.

The universe has terrible aim and a meaner sense of humor.

“Oh, my God.” Vanessa’s voice climbs three floors of delight. “Delaney? Sweetie, is that you?”

I set the tray down without spilling a drop. That’s the entire job tonight. Smile like it doesn’t cost blood.

“Good evening,” I say. “Can I start you with anything?”

“You work here.” Maksim looks me up and down, slow, the way you’d read a menu you’ve already decided to send back. “In the little apron and everything.”

Rot in your own cologne, I think, but keep smiling anyway.