“Let’s talk about something else. Health care reform or the impasse in Congress,” I say sharply, because I need to shut this topic down. My sister is the only person who really knows me. Sometimes I hate being known. Sometimes I prefer the appearance I’ve carefully crafted with my work.
My sister is insistent though. She reaches her hand across the table to wrap it around mine. “I know you worry about me, but I worry about you too. Just let me, okay? You’re all I have.”
The waiter appears with a plate of bread.
“Thank you,” I say to him.
“But of course, sir.”
He leaves.
I grab a piece of bread and bite into it. When I finish, I point to the bread. “You should have some,” I say, reminding her to eat. She always forgets to when she’s sad, and the last thing I want is for her to be sad for me. I’m fine, I’ll always be fine. But even though I like to think I’m the one who looks out for her, as I have since that snowy day our parents died in a car crash when I was only seventeen, the truth is we look out for each other. “I promise I won’t do something as abysmally stupid as fall for an actress again.”
“Good,” she says, and takes some bread. “There are plenty of wonderful women in the world who won’t use you to get ahead.”
I want to believe that Jill wouldn’t do that. I want to believe that she’s different from Madeline.
As soon as I realize that, I know too that I don’t really care if Madeline will be in town. What I do care about—maybe too much for my own good—is the sweet, sexy, vulnerable woman who’s already gotten me hooked. But that’s a different problem, a far bigger problem, and that’s precisely why I’m going to have to resist her with everything I have.
Jill
Now that my beer-soaked skirt and tights are in the hamper, I wash my face, brush my teeth, and pick a long t-shirt to sleep in. I slide under the covers and grab my eReader, because I want to return to a Patrick state of mind. Between the messed up morning in the stairwell and the buzzkill of Alexis in the bar, I need to get back into the groove with the main man of my fantasies. The one who makes me feel again.
I click on the title Kat gifted me. She got me into her steamy romance novels, and now I’m a junkie. I started with the lovey-dovey stuff but I’ve moved well past her now, and am all about the out-of-the-gate heat.
Especially on nights when I’m alone. When I can say his name out loud.
I open the novel and skip straight to the good stuff. The hero’s a rock star, and he has a filthy mouth, and I could never imagine liking that in real life. I’m sure Patrick whispers only sweet nothings about love and beauty and how I’m the only one for him, but somehow this dirty-talking rocker who’s telling his woman that he wants to bend her over the bar at the hotel where they’re staying is doing something for me tonight.
“I’m going to take you and it’s going to be hard, and it’s going to be fast. I’m not going to be gentle, and I’m not going to apologize, but you’re going to f**king love it,” he said, his voice rough against her ear.
“Yeah? Why don’t we see if I love it?”
“For doubting me, I’ll make you come harder.”
“Can you though? Can you make me come harder?”
He slid a hand between her legs, spread wide open for him. “You are the perfect kind of wet for the way I’m going to f**k you right now.”
Who talks like this in real life? Does anyone say this stuff? But it works on the heroine because she’s spiraling off into another stratosphere right now, and it starts to work on me, because soon I’m hot and bothered and breathing harder. Little moans are coming out of my lips, and it’s nice to have the place to myself from time to time because I don’t have to stay silent. I know how to bring myself there without noise. I can achieve soundless orgasms without even moving my h*ps either. I know, such a talent. Enter me in the Guinness Book of World Records for most quiet orgasms, which will tell you something about my completely pretend sex life for the last several years. I’m quiet because I have to be, and I’m quiet because I do this a lot. I do this because I haven’t been touched in so long that I’m a pinball machine, full of restless desire.
I focus on my main attraction. I picture Patrick taking his clothes off, Patrick climbing over me, Patrick telling me I’m the one. And now I’m moaning and I’m nearing the edge, but then it’s no longer Patrick on me. Because Patrick would never talk like that, or move like that. He’s disappeared and I’m with someone else, someone nameless. I don’t even know who he is, but he’s doing all sorts of things to me, and saying all kinds of dirty words.
Spread my legs for him.
Touch myself for him.
Show him how I make myself come.
And maybe it’s the rocker hero making me feel this way, but Nameless has a way with his hands and his body and his voice, and I’m almost there, I’m almost over the edge.
But then I stop.
Sit up straight in bed.
Turn on the light.
Look around.
As if I’ve been caught.
But no one’s here, the apartment is quiet, and the only noise is in my head. It sounds like a radio tuned slightly wrong, static mixing with the song I used to know well.
Because something is wrong. Something is wrong with me.
I’ve only ever pictured Patrick. I don’t understand why he’s not coming out to play tonight, and yet I still feel this itch inside my bones to be touched, to be held, to be savored.
I throw off the covers, pace down the hall and check my phone that I left on the coffee table.
But there are no new messages and, honestly, I don’t even know who I’m waiting to hear from.
When I finally fall asleep, everything is still wrong, because I dream of the letters in the locked box by my bed. Letters living, breathing, creepily alive. Letters making demands. Letters being opened on the streets, and I try to grab them, and stuff them back inside, but they’re rippling away in the wind, and I can’t reach them anymore to hide them.
* * *
The next morning, I skip my run. I shower quickly, get dressed and take one of the letters from the wooden box. Then I catch a train to Brooklyn and head for Prospect Park.
I clutch the piece of notebook paper in my right hand, my fingers digging into the faded words, now smudged from all the times I’ve read this one, the first of the handful of letters Aaron sent me after we split. I walk deeper into the park, following the path by memory from having explored every inch of this place while growing up nearby. I spent so many days here with my brothers, riding bikes, climbing trees, playing hide and seek. When I was a teenager, I relearned all the corners of this oasis in Brooklyn that were perfect for stolen kisses, for first tastes of beers, for moonlit make out sessions far away from parental eyes. But I haven’t set foot in Prospect Park since Aaron. Not since the last time I saw him under Terrace Bridge.