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“Come on, then,” he says, breaking away, and gesturing for me to follow him toward a door facing the entryway So, I do.
In his bedroom, he kisses me this time, laying me down on the bed and pulling my pants down around my hips and then onto the floor. He stops and stares at me for what feels like a few seconds too long, and just as I’m starting to wonder if he has changed his mind, I see that he licks his lips and then his tongue is between my legs, moving back and forth on my clit, and I certainly wasn’t expecting this. It feels good, almost too good—and I find myself trying to do math in my head and figure out how long it’s been, because I can tell that it’s been way too long since I’ve done this. Then, the pressure builds and gets to be too much, and I can’t distract myself with impossible math anymore. My breath becomes short and heavy, my legs start to shake, and my release comes early, and I know it will again when he moves on top of me and then inside me.
I bring my legs up and around his waist as he moves like that, slowly at first, and then harder and faster, and eventually, he collapses on top of me with one long, loud moan. I mean to leave, I think about it even, but I must have been too tired or too comfortable, for whatever reason, or maybe a mix of both. I fall asleep shortly after.
three
Iwakeupona cloud. At least, I think it’s a cloud. Did I die last night? I’m naked and wrapped in the softest fabric I’ve ever felt in my life, and it’s all coming back to me now—much clearer than I’d anticipated. I sit up and wait for a headache that doesn't come. I must have walked off the booze last night. I scan the room and realize I hadn’t really seen much of where I had ended up, which isn’t that surprising—it had been dark, and I think I remember turning down a tour. Now I see I’m in a large, mostly white, immaculate room and I feel like if I break anything, I could end up with a five-figure bill. Fuck the comfortable sheets, I’m uncomfortable. I don’t see Jake. I get out of bed and start to throw on my clothes when he enters the room.Naked.
“Morning,” he says, and kisses me like this is totally normal and we’ve been doing it for years. “There’s coffee.”
Okay, there’s something I can get behind, unabashed nudity aside. I finish putting on my clothes and walk out into the main living space only to find it’s bigger than any house I’ve ever lived in. I step out onto white marble floors which lead to windows that cover the entire back wall and find myself looking out at the Puget Sound wondering what the hell kind of twilight zone I’ve just stepped into. What was I doing here? Surely buildings like this have security guards and those people are paid to stop people like me from entering in the middle of the night. I turn with the intention of locating the door and find, right in the middle of the giant kitchen island with probably 10 barstools, two tiny cups, each with a bit of coffee dripping down the side onto the otherwise pristine countertop. They looked to be out of their element, too—like a crime scene. Who cleans this place? I doubt it’s Jake.
He says something about how needs to be somewhere in a couple of hours, that he’s going to take a shower, and would I like to join him. I tell him sure, knowing that I don’t mean it. He smiles and heads back toward the bathroom. I seize the opportunity and bolt out the door, down the expansive hallway to the elevator, and push the 1* with a vengeance.
Once outside, I see a bus that says Pioneer Square heading toward the stop a block up and make a run for it. Good thing I’m not one for fancy shoes, or I would have had a problem. Since I’m not, I don’t; I make it to the bus and sink into a seat somewhere toward the back and curl into the window, making myself as invisible as possible. I’m in the home stretch.
‘What a fucking night,’ I think, and then I kind of smile. It was pretty amazing, kind of perfect even, but it’s just one of those things. It’s better left like this: something I can reflect fondly on when I think of my youth, which for the most part has been a fucking shit show. I’ll think of my one perfect night with that rich boy, and how glad I am that I didn’t stay and ruin it, because people like me don’t belong in the same room with people like him. Because we, or because I, don’t like it. I can’t breathe in those rooms. I don’t like the feeling—like I’m a spectacle. It’s like everyone else can see that my pieces don’t quite fit and a few of them are missing, and that those missing pieces are all the important ones: a happy childhood, a father, knowing what it feels like to be wanted. They’re birthday cakes and matching pajama photos around the holidays, boxes of your old artwork and baby clothes. They’re someone hanging your report cards on the refrigerator.
I walk a few more blocks, trying to soothe yet another self-inflicted wound with all the reasons why bailing was the right thing to do, pushing down that other voice inside my head asking if it was, instead, just the easy thing. I descend the half-staircase and head towards the end of the hall to my little slice of solitude and straight to the shower—alone. I step inside and let the hot water with its abysmal pressure wash over me until it turns cold, wiping my slate clean for another completely ordinary day.
Afterward, I throw on jeans and a flannel and, sinking down into my usual spot on the sofa, take out my phone. Shit. I forgot I had turned it off last night. I guess I really did have a good time. 16 text messages, 3 voicemails. Most are from Evie, a couple from Olivia, and one from Alex. I start to reply when the phone starts buzzing again. I wonder if she will be mad. It’s nice to have someone who cares, though. After spending 18 years not having anything like that, I went to college expecting solitude and found Evie. She taught me what it was like not to be lonely.
“What the hell happened to you last night?” she asks when I answer. I’m not sure if she is yelling or not. I try to answer, but she continues, “I mean, I didn’t expect you to follow us, but I expected to hear from you. I have been freaking out all morning. And don’t say you were home, I went there as soon as I woke up.”
“Yeah, sorry. My phone was…dead,” I tell her.
“Okay, if you want to go with that—fine. That doesn’t answer my question, though. Where the fuck were you?”
“Umm. I was with that guy from the bar—Jake. You know, the one that Olivia and Kate were talking about.”
She audibly gasps and says, “I knew it! I knew you were into him.”
“I’m not into him. Or at least I wasn’t into him when you said that I was. I didn’t care about him at all. I still don’t, I guess.” I tell her, wincing a bit when I hear the last part. It doesn’t quite come out right. I've never liked lying, and I'm not very good at it. It makes my chest feel tight. It feels tight right now.
“So then, he’s awful, like they said, and you didn’t hook up.”
“Oh…no. We did hook up. And he isn’t awful, either. I mean, if I am being honest, he’s kind of awesome. It was fun. Or it was alright, I guess. But you know, it was just a thing, nothing serious. According to Olivia, he isn’t capable anyway, so it’s fine.”
“So then how did you leave it?”
“Um, probably poorly.”
“Oh, Jesus. What did you do?”
“He…asked me to take a shower with him and I ran out the door when he wasn’t looking.”
“Okay…” she says. “That’s bad. That’s worse than I’d expected honestly. Snuck out while he was sleeping—that I’d expect.”
“Yeah, well, that would have been my preference.”
“You did it to his face,” she adds.
“Yep,” is all I say in response.
“I mean, can you even be sure that he didn’t see your shameful retreat?”
“Nope.”
