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“Oh…Max.” She sighed heavily. “You have the most beautiful shoulders I’ve ever seen.”
My gaze locked on hers in the mirror. I’m certain I smiled.
“What will you say if she does?”
“That I nicked myself while shaving.”
Her questions hardly mattered. We were speaking lazily, as one does after making love, bodies spent, minds slightly drunk. This is not to say I would consider what we’d just done making love. With Laurel, what happened between those walls was carnal, primal. Sex without restriction. Nothing more. Nothing less.
I lived a different life in that room. In all of them, actually. Living was easy. It was no secret that Room 553 was my favorite. I always requested it, saying it was on account of the balcony. Laurel, on occasion, liked to tease me about this. She said a room was a room was a room.
Not to me it wasn’t.
Perhaps because it was the first, perhaps because it started with an argument. The kind without words. The kind Laurel and I had a knack for.
It was an afterthought that wasn’t. That room had a certain flavor, as did what took place within it. She was different there. Freer, if it was possible—truthfully, Laurel was free just about anywhere.
Meeting in hotel rooms had been her idea. It was nothing personal, she said. This way there would be no memories. No expectations that might have us daydreaming about places or things that might have been. She would never have to remember me in her home, she said, or her in mine, or anywhere where things seemed to really matter. The only space she cared to occupy was my mind, she said. For her, that was enough.
“Do you love me, Max?”
Sometimes, though, she liked to test me.
“Sure.”
“You don’t know?”
My eyes grazed over her body. Was it love? I don’t know. I only know I felt at ease. There was a certain kind of satisfaction in seeing your sweat mixed with that of your lover’s, something about not knowing whose was whose, what was what, where you began and she ended. If only for the moment.
Thoughts like those had been going on in my mind.
“Could you see yourself with me?”
I barely registered her words. So, I really can’t recall what I said. It didn’t help that she was already in the process of luring me back into the bed, both with her eyes and her naked body, her spread legs, her siren’s song.
How could I have known that I would relive this scene— conjure this exact moment—hundreds, maybe even thousands of times afterward, and each time from a different angle, from another point of view. For weeks I would struggle to recall the details, and not always of my own free will. More often, others would demand it of me.
Chapter Two
Laurel Dunaway
Journal Entry
I used to think people who kept journals were pretentious. That was before. I suppose you could say things have evolved. Or rather, I have evolved. Memory is a tricky thing. It’s all about perception, and you have to be careful. Perception can be wrong.
It’s scary how life has a way of showing you that everything you believed to be true might actually, in essence, be false. The second your life exceeds your wildest dreams, the knife appears at your back.
First, he told me a lie. And then, more lies. A shit-ton of lies. But that wasn’t the problem. Lies are normal, when you’re a womanizer. The problem was that it was the wrong kind of lie. That’s why I have to keep track of them. Hence this journal.
Usually, a person’s lies conceal something, and/or protect the person.
Sometimes, a person’s lies do both. But not these lies. They didn’t do either one. They did the opposite. They exposed him.
He might have thought they’d protect him. They didn’t. The lies made things more dangerous. Not just dangerous for him—dangerous for me, too. Which made me wonder if it was an accidental lie. Maybe it was a spur-of-the-moment kind of lie. Maybe it was a lie based on opportunity. A lie of omission. Maybe he lied out of guilt. Or shame. Or insecurity. It’s hard to say.
Then, after he lied once, he had to lie again. And the second and third and fourth and the tenth lies were told for the usual reasons. To conceal the first lie. To keep his balls in the air. Maybe that’s what it was. Maybe that’s why he lied.
