HUNTER LET THE DOOR SWING SHUT BEHIND HIM WITHOUT checking to see if anyone noticed he’d been dragged into the restroom by the woman he’d met sitting at the bar two hours ago. He stopped to latch the door, fumbling briefly with his left hand. She tugged on his right, pulling him toward the wall opposite the door. Her hands slipped off his, and she stumbled backward with a giggle. Amy. That was her name. He told himself to remember it.
He brushed her curls out of her face before kissing her. Amy worked with kids. Not a teacher, an occupational therapist. She’d had to explain to him what her job entailed. She thought he was lying to her about being a reporter. “War correspondent sounds like a fake job,” she had said.
“I’m not lying to you,” he said into her mouth. He couldn’t be sure if he was pressing her into the wall or she was trying to pull him through it.
“Huh?” Her lips slid to the ridge of his jaw, hung there like a drop of water, before running down the slope of his neck.
“About being a reporter.” He needed her to understand. There was no one else to talk to about it.
She guided his hand to her breast and raised her mouth back to his. She reached down and grabbed his cock. He’d been about to say something (I go where I’m told, to do work I don’t believe in anymore. But I’m on a leave of absence. Whatever that means.) but she (Amy. Not a teacher.) moaned into his mouth.
He shoved her shirt up so that the rough lace of her bra was directly underhand. She unbuttoned her jeans.
“I never do this,” she said. “You can’t tell my friends.”
He tried to remember if she’d been at the bar alone or broken off from a group to talk to him. He’d been drinking alone, the Knicks game his only company before she’d bumped shoulders with him at the bar.
“You can tell whoever you want,” he said before dipping his head to her chest. “I have no friends.”
“How do you have no friends?” she asked absently as she worked on his belt with one hand.
He raised his head. It was like swimming underwater in fast-forward; the temporal and spatial disconnect nearly sent him reeling backward. Only the tether created by her hand reaching down his pants kept him on his feet.
“I have colleagues. Acquaintances. Sources. Bosses. But there’s no one close.”
Amy pressed a finger against his lips, then ran her hands to his hips and pushed his pants down far enough for gravity to complete the job.
She brought her mouth to his ear, draping his face with her curls. Her lower lip caressed the lobe, warm breath spilling across it, and she said, “For the next few minutes, let me get close.”
#
Brennan and Sean lay in his bed, facing each other, nude and slightly sweaty. The room was dark, illuminated only by ambient light sneaking through the curtained window. Sean idly caressed her shoulder, her hip, her arm, in a lazy, looping tour of her body.
“Stay,” he said. “My wife and kids are at our place in Vermont until next weekend. We have the whole place to ourselves.”
“I can’t.”
“You don’t have anyone to go home to.”
“No.”
“Then stay.”
Brennan turned onto one elbow. The movement disrupted Sean’s wandering hand. She looked down at him, and the familiar wave of regret came over her. After they had sex, everything about him became too much. His smile was grotesque in its exaggerated warmth. His hair, askew, revealed a slightly thinning hairline. She noticed the sharp scent of his perspiration and the faint odor of onions from dinner on his breath.
“I have a meeting at nine tomorrow.” She wasn’t meeting Hunter until eleven. But the lie was easier than telling him that she didn’t want to wake up with him. “I can’t stay here, then run home to shower and change.”
He rolled onto his back and pouted. It wasn’t a good look for him. Not for the first time, she imagined the petulant monster he must have been growing up as an only child in Westchester. Still, she fell for it, feeling like she was throwing a dollar on the worst bet at the craps table. Small stupidities in the face of bad odds. She put her hand on his shoulder, then ran it down the length of his torso.
“Just because I can’t stay, doesn’t mean I have to leave right away.”
He shook his head. “If you have to go, then go.”
“Come on, Sean. You don’t have to be like that about it.”
“Like what?”
“Like a spoiled kid.”
“If I wanted someone to call me spoiled, I’d be in Vermont with my wife.”
“If I wanted a clingy little boy, I’d let Paul come home.”
Sean pushed himself up into a sitting position. He held his anger in his jaw and lips, like the entire bottom half of his face was compressing. The glossy, processed magazine-spread version of Sean was gone. It was the driver’s license version now, all unflattering angles and bad lighting. This part of him was hers, something secret that only his wife knew—maybe. From the way Sean talked about it, she had stopped seeing him years earlier as anything other than a to-do list. So now it was Brennan’s alone, the first real emotion Sean had experienced all day.
“Look, I’m sorry. I’m going through some things with my mom. And my brother.” Brennan paused before she went on, noting that her husband no longer made the list of things that merited mention as something that was on her mind. “It’s been a long couple of days.”
“You have a brother?”
“I told you that.”
“You’ve never mentioned him. Seriously.”
“He’s never around.”
“What’s going on?”
“My mother is dying. It’s close now.”
“Why didn’t you say something? How long has she been sick?”
She rolled onto her back so she could stare at the ceiling instead of looking him in the face. “She’s been sick as long as I’ve known you. It’s not your problem.”
He placed his hand on her shoulder.
“Bren,” he said, “whatever we’re doing, whatever this is, I care about you. You can talk to me.”
“I don’t know what there is to say. She’s dying. My brother came back to town to be here for it.”
“You guys aren’t close?”
“It’s complicated.”
“That’s my specialty.”
She rolled her eyes and swung her legs over the edge of the bed, letting them pull her up to a sitting position.
“Honestly, you don’t have to pretend to be interested. And I don’t want to dwell on it.”
“Okay, whatever. I’m not going to tell you your business. But I’m here.”
She collected her clothing, one article at a time, and dressed. He watched her, covered partially by a gathered sheet. A thin black sweater was the last thing she slipped on, standing by the foot of the bed. She pulled her hair free of the neck of the sweater. They waited, separated by the length of the bed, for the other to speak first.
Brennan wondered if Sean’s wife dressed like this, up early to take the kids to school, while he sat in his bed, typing away on his phone answering work emails. Did his wife pause, at the foot of the bed, to share some secret before leaving him there, before he put his work mask on? Was it something true—her fear that her daughter wasn’t going to be as smart as they were, the crush she was developing on one of the dads from school, her anxiety that their whole life together was a massive mistake? Or was their only intimacy the clipping of fingernails, scummy hair in the drain, the smell of each other’s shit? Regardless, all of that started with talking and listening.
“I gotta go, Sean.”
“Like I said, I’m here if you want to talk. You look like you want to talk.”
“I don’t. I want to go home.”
He nodded and reached for his phone. Brennan let herself out.
#
Brennan let herself into her apartment. The ambient streetlight from the windows, electronic clocks on the cable boxes and appliances, and pinpoint power indicators on various devices scattered about the apartment ensured it never got truly dark. And the muted hum of the city and whisper of the refrigerator—broken occasionally by a car horn or the ice maker dumping cubes into the freezer tub—constituted the best silence she could achieve without noise-canceling headphones.
Paul used to be there when she got home, set up at his desk working, on the couch playing video games, or asleep in their bed, blankets thrown askew as if he weren’t the stillest sleeper Brennan had ever known. The conversations, assuming he was awake, were always the same.
“What’s up?” he would ask.
“Nothing,” she would say, whether she was dragging herself in from an eighteen-hour day of trial preparation or from getting trashed at whatever bar she found herself in or if she had just fucked Sean or any of the other guys from the affairs she had before him. They might go days without more conversation. She didn’t mind.
She pulled her boots off without turning the lights on. She knew where everything was, even in the dark. It had been her apartment before Paul moved in. It remained her apartment after they separated. Even when they had lived together, she always felt that he was a guest who had overstayed his welcome, an intruder, a mouse scurrying underfoot.
She threw her coat over the easy chair in the living room as she walked past to the bathroom. It finally felt clean again, clear of Paul’s beard clippings, pomades, toothbrush, and floss.
“Do you miss everything in here on purpose?” she had asked one morning after Paul got out of the shower.
“What?”
She answered by pointing to the Q-tip lying on the floor next to the garbage can.
“Oh my God.” He gave an overly dramatic eye roll that she used to think was cute, but that now reeked of femininity.
“Yesterday, it was your floss.”
“Seriously? This is what we’re doing?”
“There’s piss on the floor next to the toilet where you fucking dripped. Can’t you wipe it up?” She pointed to the marks on the floor, spatters barely visible on the gray tile.
“You’re kidding, right? How do you know it was me?”
“I don’t stand when I pee.” Leaving the bathroom, she added, “Clean it.”
Another year passed before he left. Even gone for six months now, he hung around like a stale cigarette odor. It wasn’t only the random shit of his that turned up—like a pair of his socks buried in a drawer. His absence was a phantom limb. She felt it in the way she crept through her apartment in the dark, like he was sleeping. She forced herself to leave the bathroom door open as she brushed her teeth, the buzz of her electric toothbrush a mosquito in her ear.
Finished with her bedtime routine, she climbed into bed and checked her phone. It was early enough that, if she fell asleep, she might actually get a fair amount of rest. She shut her eyes, spreading her arms and legs out in the bed, stretching across the expanse unimpeded by Paul or Sean or anybody else. The night Paul left, she relished occupying his side of the bed. Every night since, she stretched out across it, a flat plane of space-time without gravity, the sheets cool without the warmth of his body.
Her phone was still in her hand. She wanted it to vibrate with a message. She didn’t care whether it was a text from Sean or a work email or an Amber Alert. But it was still, and she didn’t sleep, but lay there in the solitude of her bed, an astronomer studying the constellations of her worries.
#
Hunter waited until his thighs hit the edge of his mattress before collapsing onto it, inching forward across the covers until his face found his pillow. He pushed himself onto his back and reconsidered putting the girl into a cab at the bar. Annie, the schoolteacher. He was confident of those details. After she’d dropped his pants, she asked him if he had a condom. He didn’t, so he got her off with his fingers as she whispered instructions into his ear between kisses with her hand wrapped around his cock. Between concentrating on her and how drunk he was, he knew he wouldn’t come from a hand job—although there was a moment during her orgasm when Annie’s head was thrown back into a nest of her curls, teeth clamped on the base of her thumb, eyes squeezed shut, when he could have invested himself in starting that climb. Instead, he let her return from whatever oblivion she’d visited and, when he was sure she’d be able to stand, let her go so he could pull up his pants.
Remembering Annie’s orgasm excited him. His erection pushed against his jeans—he’d failed to undress before diving into his bed. He kicked his pants off and took his cock in his hand.
“Let me finish you,” Annie had offered while he threaded his belt through the buckle.
“It’s okay. In my condition, it might take a while.”
“So let me come home with you. We can take a while.”
He checked himself in the mirror. “I have a meeting in the morning.”
“Working on a story?” she asked, adjusting her bra and shirt.
“Editors killed it.”
The thought of his editors, the assignments, and the headlines and word counts that dulled the truth of what he saw obliterated whatever desire remained—to do his job or find the orgasm that eluded him earlier.
Hunter abandoned his effort, barely pulling his underwear up before he passed out.