Just One Night, Part 1: The Stranger (4 page)

“You touched me here.”

And now we’re against the wall of the Venetian and again I can feel him, I can wrap myself around his fierce energy.

“Where else?”

My fingers move to the outline of breasts before tracing a line down from my ribs to my stomach. “You touched me here.”

And I can feel him kissing the base of my neck, that little hollow area where the flesh is softest and the most sensitive.

“Where else?”

My fingers keep going lower. He can’t see where they are but he knows; I can see from his eyes that he knows.

And I feel him deep inside me. I burn to be on that fire-colored bed. “You touched me here,” I gasp.

I know I’m affecting him. The power is coming from both of us now. His breathing is a little faster; his eyes convey a little more urgency. His own hands move below the screen and I know what he’s touching, I know its details, know its strength . . . I want to feel it again. I want to taste it the way he tasted me.

“You entered me here.” I breathe, feeling, stroking the dampness between my legs. He moans as I throw back my head, my control quickly leaving me. I can feel his eyes, almost as good as his hands, and oh his hands had been so good. And still, I touch myself, replicating his caresses. I am immersed in his desire, in my own.

“Kasie,” he whispers. My name is the final caress I need. My free hand grabs the armrest of my chair and my hips push forward as I follow this dangerous path to its only possible conclusion. I hear him moan again. I know I’m not alone. I know what I’m doing, to him, to myself.

My body shakes as the orgasm comes with a convulsing and heart-wrenching power. It’s the final chord of an erotic rhapsody that leaves me with the mingled emotions of satisfaction and endless longing.

For a moment I don’t move. My eyes are closed and the only sound is of my breathing and his. Across the city, by my side, he’s everywhere.

And the little voice that had tried to talk to me before, the voice that comes from the part of me I should have listened to, now whispers in resignation,
You’ve broken another glass.

My throat tightens and with a shaking hand I reach for my keyboard . . .

 . . . and disconnect.

CHAPTER 5

I
SIT IN MY
living room waiting. Waiting for Dave. Waiting for the chaos. Something is churning inside of me. A brew of disaster mixed with an impetuous desire. I have to get it out of me. Throw it in the sewer along with all the other toxic waste that dirties our lives. But what I can’t do is add deceit to that bubbling pot of trouble. Dave has to be told . . . something.

I stand and walk to my window and stare up at a brightly backlit sky of gray. Can I blame Dave for my recent mistakes? I’d like to. Wedding jitters run amok, that’s all. My subconscious telling me that his proposed union isn’t as perfect as I once imagined. He had rejected me so easily last night, like he would a homeless person holding out a hand for change. Dismissed me with a smile, a polite expression of sympathy and repulsion.

It was rejection that stirred that brew, insult that spurred my rebellion. So I will talk to Dave. I’ll face the music. And if the music is rough, I’ll find a way to smooth out its edges, I’ll unplug the electric guitars and dismantle the bass until there’s nothing left but a soft, unthreatening tune that I can sway to.

It’s not until the doorbell rings that I have second thoughts.

Dave stands on my doorstep with a dozen white roses. There had been white roses at the luncheon where we first met . . . six years ago. Forever ago . . . but right now the memory’s close enough to touch. When he walked me to my car, we had passed a florist and Dave had insisted that I, too, have white roses; he bought me a dozen to take home. He had asked for my number then and I had been moved to give it to him. Most girls will give up something for a bouquet: a phone number, a smile, even anger. But of course the most frequent price for such a gift is the loss of one’s resolve.

I move aside, let him in, and watch as he disappears into my kitchen then reemerges with the roses arranged neatly in a vase. He finds the perfect place for them on my dining table.

Dave and I still haven’t said so much as hello but the roses are speaking with something more tangible than words.

“I overreacted last night,” he says. He’s starring at the roses, not me, but I don’t mind the evasion. “I didn’t want to move to LA, did you know that? I just did it for work.”

I shrug noncommittally. He’s told me this before but I don’t see how it’s relevant.

“It’s such a gaudy city,” he continues. “A place where the men smile at you with bleached white teeth and the women thrust their fake boobs in your face. Everyone here is aggressive but the women . . . they act like men. Like drag queens with a lust for exhibitionism. They’re not ladies. They’re not you.”

“I’m a lady?”

“But you’re also strong,” Dave adds quickly. He sits in one of my upholstered dining room chairs. “Strong, ambitious, controlled, quiet, beautiful.” He pauses as he works to find a metaphor. “You’re a concealed weapon. A pistol hidden inside an Hermès handbag.”

I like the image.

“The woman with the Hermès knows that she can only reach for that gun when she needs to keep the wolves at bay. Only in cases of extreme danger. Because a gun in the hand is vulgar, common,” he says. “But when it’s kept neatly in a couture bag, it becomes something else.”

As the metaphor is stretched, it loses its appeal. A gun that can’t be handled becomes useless. It’s denied its raison d’être.

But I see his point. Last night I wasn’t the woman he wanted me to be, the woman I had always been with him, the woman he had fallen in love with. Last night the gun had come out of the bag.

“I overreacted last night,” he says again. “But you scared me. Not because what you said was so extreme but because it wasn’t something you would say.”

He rises again, pulls a single rose from the bouquet, and extends it toward me. “Remember when I first bought you white roses? The day we met?”

“I had just finished graduate school,” I say, nodding at the memory. “Ellis took me to her Notre Dame alumni event because the Harvard events weren’t bringing me any interesting job offers. ”

“I remember the way you held yourself,” he says, “your modesty and your strength. . . . As soon as I saw you, I wanted to be near you.”

My eyes focus on the flowers as my mind travels back.

Dave had looked good that day. Boyish, sweet
 . . .
maybe a little awkward in his red-pinstriped shirt and navy tie worn in a city where ties are reserved for car salesmen and bank clerks. But I liked that he didn’t play by the LA-style rules. He stood out. He was a throwback to a time and place where educated men were expected to be gentlemen and elitism wasn’t such a dirty word.

He was shy when we first started talking but he quickly gathered confidence as we delved further into our conversation. He said he would put in a good word for me with the global consulting firm I had once hoped to work for. They had declined to recruit me right out of Harvard but Dave’s godfather was the company’s founder. He could give me the perversely rare and exceedingly cultivated second chance.

And then he started to tell me about himself, how he had been living in LA for two years. He hated the smog, hated the traffic, hated the people and the Hollywood culture. But he liked his law firm and loved the wealth he was able to coax out of the city’s Armani-stitched pockets. It would be irresponsible for him to leave just so he could live in a city more to his taste.

And right then I knew Dave and I were alike. He followed the rules. He was responsible, pragmatic—he wasn’t governed by temptation or rash whims. Dave was steady. And standing there by his side, a Harvard grad with a mountain of student loan debt and not a single job offer from a company I had any desire to work for, well, steady seemed nice
 . . .
even sexy.

And I had wanted to be near him, too.

He pushes the rose farther forward so now the petals are touching the base of my neck. The gesture brings me back to the present.

“Don’t change, Kasie,” he says. “You’re the only thing about this city that makes it bearable. When I’m with you, I feel like I’m not really so far from the town where I grew up. When I’m with you, it feels like home.”

And now he takes another step forward; the rose remains where it is, delicate petals against my skin. “Don’t change. Please don’t change.”

This is the man who I wanted to blame for my own misbehavior. This is the man who I betrayed twice in one week. This is the man who sees me as I want to be seen. In his eyes I’m a lady, a deadly weapon in a designer bag. Dave sees the aspiration of what I want to be while Mr. Dade sees the woman I’ve been running from. Dade sees the version of me that I tried to bury in a garment bag.

I should have seen that, should have understood before I accepted the invitation to digress.

I have never had to search for my role in life. It’s always been assigned to me. By my parents, my teachers, by this man with his white, white roses. My sister chose a different path. No one in my family talks about her anymore. Like the Ancient Egyptians who would erase the image, and names of the gods who had fallen out of favor, my family has simply erased my sister from our lives. I live the life I’m expected to live and I’m loved for it. Why change patterns now?

“I’m going to buy you a ring today,” Dave says.

And I nod and smile.

*     *     *

S
TORE AFTER STORE,
ring after ring, none of them feel right. One’s too heavy, another too murky. Diamond after diamond, each one is sharp enough to cut glass. Each one of them speaks to a convention that dates back to the fifteenth century. A history splattered with blood and greed. There are more innocent traditions. In colonial times, men would give women thimbles as an expression of eternal companionship. I wouldn’t know what to do with a thimble.

But I’m not sure I know what to do with a diamond, either.

“Maybe another stone?” I suggest, eying the bold red of a ruby.

The woman behind the counter smiles the smile that all salespeople smile when they smell money. “It’s untreated.” She pulls the ring out of the glass case and hands it to me. “Just pulled out of the ground, cut and polished.”

Dave wrinkles his nose. He doesn’t like the sound of this but I’m entranced. I hold the gem up to the light.

“All rubies have their little imperfections,” the saleswoman continues. “Incursions of rutile needles. We call them silks. The ruby is a more complex stone than the diamond. Their imperfections distinguish them.”

Silks. I warm to the term. Even the imperfections are made to sound elegant.

“We want a diamond,” Dave says definitively. “It’s more . . . pure.”

I don’t know if that’s true. Decades of oppression of South Africans verses the brutish military dictatorship of the ruby-rich Myanmar. Injustice and pain all for pretty little stones that are supposed to symbolize love. Still, maybe that’s fitting when you consider the actual nature of love.

“Would it be so inappropriate for us to do something different?” I ask Dave.

Dave hesitates. I can see the conflict in his eyes. I know he’s measuring the size of his guilt over last night’s rudeness against his true wishes.

But the guilt wins. “If you really want the ruby, you should have it.” He kisses my cheek and slips his arm around my tensed shoulders. “I want you to be absolutely and truly happy.”

As I slip the ruby onto my finger I wonder if it’s wise to wish for anything as fleeting and insubstantial as absolute happiness.

*     *     *

H
OURS LATER AND
minutes after Dave has gone off to play racquetball with one of his firm’s partners, I sit at home, contemplating . . . well, everything.

I don’t have the ring with me. The price had exceeded the budget Dave had carved out. So we had walked away; he told the saleswoman he wanted to think about it, and she had assured us both that she would talk to her manager to see if she could get us a slightly lower price. Dave told me it was just the first step in a bargaining process, that the markup on gemstones was so high,
not
haggling was an act of audacity. But I would have my ring. He would put it on my finger and it would stay there . . . forever. Just as we had always planned.

I roll the word around in my head:
forever
. I don’t know what that means.

I grab a
Forbes
magazine from the coffee table and start flipping through it, but I can’t focus.

There isn’t a single logical reason why I shouldn’t marry Dave. He’s doing everything he’s supposed to do. Getting me the ring I want in exchange for my agreement to be the person I’ve been for my entire life. All he wants is for me to abandon my recent vagaries of nature. Compromises are the support beams that hold up every relationship.

My compromise is only to give up a part of myself that I’m already uncomfortable with.

So why does that seem so impossible?

Suddenly I’m tired. I close my eyes, lean my head against the back of my cream-leather armchair.

I can see Mr. Dade’s face against the darkness of my closed lids. I can feel him, sense him. I feel a throbbing that’s becoming familiar.

This is not good.

I get up and walk to the kitchen and pour Evian into a crystal water glass. Fantasies are normal. I know that. Is this really so different from fantasizing about an actor, a rock star, a male model staring out of a Diesel jeans ad?

Yes. Because I have never touched the actor, the rock star, the model. I’ve never taken off my robe for those people. I have never asked them to take off my panties. I don’t know what their fingers feel like.

I want to close my eyes but I can’t because
he’s
there. It takes conscious effort to keep him out of my head. Keeping his image away is as challenging as winning at arm wrestling. If I relax, if I let the strength of the memories overpower me, I’m lost.

I sip the water. I know I’m a little lost already because while I can still keep his image away when my eyes are open, I can’t push away the memory of his touch. Even now, as I try, I get wet.

I unbutton the top of my jeans and cautiously slip my hand in.

When I touch myself, I jump, surprised by my own sensitivity. I shouldn’t be doing this, thinking about the wrong man, remembering . . .

My phone chimes and I jump again and quickly look around the room as if there could possibly be someone there to see me. I remove my hand and rinse it under the warm water of my kitchen faucet. Then, with my jeans still unbuttoned and loose around my waist, I leave the room and find my phone next to the roses on the dining table.

And printed across its screen is Mr. Dade’s name. Just a text, a request that my team meet at his office on Tuesday at 9:30 a.m. for a tour of the facilities. There’s nothing there to bait me, worry me, delight me . . . nothing but his name.

And that’s enough to do all that and more.

I press my fingers against the touch screen:
I want to meet earlier.

A moment passes, then two before he answers in the form of a question:
How early can your team be here?