I lifted my martini, pausing right before I took a sip. “Drink up,” I said, with a wink and a smirk. Then I emptied my glass.
* * *
When we pulled into Phil’s driveway, I was impressed to say the least. His last place had been nice, something I could have seen myself in, but this, this, even by New York standards, was Impressive with a big capital I.
It was a condo, but in what looked like a very exclusive building that surely cost a fortune. I didn’t dare ask though I was dying to. A doorman handed me out of the car as we pulled up to the front portico and then greeted Phil as he took the keys. I didn’t see any parking garage but had no doubt the car would be whisked away until Phil needed it again.
Once inside Phil’s third floor (the entire floor) condo, I only had a second to register the décor; beautiful, luxurious and warm, no small feat considering the high vaulted ceilings and the marble floor. My mother would nod her endorsement of the place.
But I didn’t have much time to explore with my eyes because I wasn’t in the door five seconds before Phil was on me, his lips on my neck, his hands all over the rest of me. In the massive foyer, he then liberated my breasts, practically making a meal of them.
I’d forgotten what sex with Phil was like. By day, he was one-hundred percent business, icy cool, smart as a whip. By night, he was one-hundred percent no-holds-barred sex-starved maniac. I’m sure it was some sort of type A personality thing, but whatever—it was exciting. It had been a while since I’d had anything like that; having dealt recently with Max’s flaccid half-baked attempts to pleasure me that left me more angry than satisfied.
In my heated frenzy, I managed to speak, although it sounded like a croaky grunt to my own ears. “Let’s…go…bedroom…”
He lifted his face from my chest and looked into my eyes for half a second. Then he kissed me, hard, before leading me to his huge master suite.
To say that Phil rocked my world that night would be understating. He rocked my world three times. By the time we fell into a sweaty heap of flesh and various bodily fluids, it was almost four a.m. and although I prided myself on my cardiovascular fitness, I was beyond spent.
Phil propped himself up on an elbow and pushed a few sweaty locks of hair off my face. “You still got it, Shosh.”
I smiled, closing my eyes. I wasn’t ready to talk yet.
He traced his finger along my chest, around each breast. I hoped he wasn’t resting up to go again; I was never one to refuse great sex, but I’d had more than my…er…fill.
“So why’d you call me?” he asked, nuzzling his face into my breasts. I wondered if he hadn’t gotten enough breastfeeding when he was a baby.
Forcing the gears in my brain to start turning, I had to make a conscious effort to speak (yes, it had been that good). “I’d heard you were back in town. I wanted to see you. We had some awesome times, didn’t we?” I opened my eyes and lifted my head slightly. All I could see was the thinning hair on the top of his head.
“Yeah, we did.”
Closing my eyes to take the focus off his scalp, I thought about him and how good we were together. Forget just the wedding, maybe Phil was it. We had good chemistry; he was back in town, we certainly burned up the sheets. “Maybe now that you’re back, we should give it another go,” I suggested.
He continued running his fingers along my chest and across my belly, making me quiver. Maybe I could go again…
“Nah, I don’t think so,” he said after a long pause, still petting me so it took a second for me to catch up and realize what he’d said.
As soon as I did, my heart sank. “Why not?”
His fingers traveled down my belly. His voice was almost a whisper when he finally spoke. “Because, Shoshanna, you’re a vacuous whore.”
In that instant, my heart stopped beating. It took me a moment to figure out if I had heard him correctly. I wasn’t entirely sure what ‘vacuous’ meant, but I was very familiar with the definition of ‘whore.’
“What?” I asked, sitting up.
He looked up at me, still smiling like a smug fucking bastard. “You’re empty. You’re a gold-digger. I’ve got too much at stake to be mixed up with a girl like you.” He lifted his head, his eyes scanning the room. “Look at this place, I’m not willing to lose half of what I worked my ass off for to a spoiled princess.”
Spoiled princess—this again? I bolted out of bed, eager to get away from him. “Are you fucking kidding me?” I stood staring at him, my hands on my hips, not caring that I was naked.
He smirked. His cavalier attitude was infuriating. “No, I’m not kidding.”
“You buy me drinks, fuck me senseless and then insult me by telling me I’m a whore and a gold-digger?” My heart pounded in my chest so hard, it hurt. I tasted blood in my mouth; I had bit the inside of my cheek. Never before had I seen red like this.
He rolled over and got off the bed, reaching down for the boxer shorts that had been discarded so hastily before. “Shoshanna, you called me, remember? I didn’t ask for anything. This is exactly what I’m talking about. You call me up out of the blue wanting something and whatever it is, you’re willing to fuck me for it.” He smiled sweetly. I wanted to break every perfect tooth in his mouth.
It didn’t matter that he was right. I hated him for it. “So if you knew I wanted something, why’d you fuck me?”
His grin got wider. “That’s an easy one. You’re a good fuck. That’s it. That’s all you’re good at, Shoshanna.” He wagged his finger at me. I wanted to rip it off, it and his dick.
“Fucking asshole.” I was close to tears but wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.
Pulling open a dresser drawer, he grabbed a t-shirt and then turned toward me as he pulled it on. “I’d do you that way too, if you’d let me.” His right eyebrow raised. “Whaddaya say?”
I grabbed my clothes and shoes from where they lay in a heap on the floor and headed to the bathroom. Before I went in, I stopped and turned to look at him. “Don’t you even want to know what I wanted from you? It wasn’t money, you know.” I tried but knew deep down there was no salvaging my dignity.
“I’ll be completely honest with you, Shoshanna, which is more than you’ve ever given me. I don’t give a rat’s ass. If it was anything more than a few orgasms and a memory, it’s not happening anyway.”
I whipped my shoe at his head. Sadly, it missed by a long shot. He laughed at me, continued laughing even as I began to cry and sought out the sanctity of his massive ensuite bathroom.
He knocked a few seconds later and I wiped my eyes a little before I opened the door to what I was sure was going to be an apology.
I was wrong. He was standing there holding out some bills. “For cab fare,” he said.
I hesitated, not wanting his money, but it was a long ride home. And he was loaded. I snatched the money and slammed the door in his face while he laughed.
Standing at the marble sink, I looked up into the mirror at my own face, the makeup smudged and half worn off after the sex and the tears. I looked like a whore.
And for the first time in my life, I felt like a whore.
* * *
I cleaned myself up and got down to the main floor, asking the doorman to get me a cab, somehow holding it together until it arrived only moments later.
I cried all the way home, the entire half-hour drive.
The first thing I did when I got into my apartment was rip off all my clothes and stand under the hot spray of my shower for almost a half hour. I wondered if I could drown, standing in the shower, swallowing water every time I hiccupped from the racking sobs.
Phil Silver needs to die, I thought, wishing for half a second that I had the kind of brain that was good for dreaming up clever methods of exacting revenge. But it wasn’t in me, I had always been the one to just walk away, taking the easy way and just fading out of someone’s life as I pleased. Or so I’d thought.
Finally turning the water off, I stepped out of the shower and looked a
t myself in the steamy bathroom mirror. I didn’t have a face; I was just a vague shape, a blur in the middle of the condensation. Grabbing my bath towel, I wiped the mirror and stared into my reflection.
What had happened?
I knew the answer. I had been used and taken advantage of. But what hurt worse, was that I knew deep down what Phil had said was absolutely true.
In the early light of that morning, my emotions raw, my body and mind naked and alone, I realized he had been right. I was a gold-digger.
It wasn’t just a subtle game to play with men to get a trinket here or a special trip there. It had become my life. It had become how people saw me, how I was defined. Shoshanna Rosenblatt: slutty gold digger extraordinaire. Spoiled princess. Vacuous whore.
Still looking at my own face, I blinked, looking for the real Shoshanna Rosenblatt, the one only I knew. I found her staring back at me, tears rolling down her cheeks, scared and alone.
The alarm went off in my bedroom. I turned and glanced at the clock radio. Five-thirty, time to get up.
“Get your shit together, Shoshanna,” I told the girl in the mirror before I went to turn off my alarm.
Chapter 10
When I got to work, although I looked better than I had when I left Phil’s place, (thank you, cold compresses and a lot of concealer), I felt worse. I had skipped the gym and gone straight to work, stopping at Starbucks first for a pick-me-up of the liquid kind.
I tried to push the events of the evening before to the back of my mind, not emotionally prepared to deal with the reality of it yet. I needed to talk to Bev first.
When she came in, all perky and wide-eyed from all the sleep she probably got over her dateless weekend, she stopped at my desk to chat.
“How was your weekend?” she asked, innocently enough.
“Shitty beyond comprehension,” I said, taking a sip of my double espresso latte, so I wouldn’t have to look at her.
“Want to talk about it?” If Bev lacked in the party department, preferring to hang at home and do her nails than go out dancing and flirting, she did make up for it in the supportive friend department. Yes, I did want to talk to her about it, but not here, not at the front desk where someone could interrupt at any time.
“Can we go out for lunch today?”
Bev nodded. “Sure, I think I’ve got a break between appointments around noon.”
I nodded back. “Okay, I’ll let Rita know.”
* * *
We went to a little dim sum place for lunch. It was quick and cheap and the food was good. I felt a bit guilty about getting a couple of deep fried dishes (shrimp rolls and deep fried squid) considering I had forgone the gym but figured the humiliation I had suffered over the weekend, thanks to both Max and Phil, warranted it.
Bev stuck mostly to the steamed dishes, (siu mai, har gau, sticky rice) and like me, used chopsticks like a pro. It’s weird about Jews; we seem to be really into Asian cuisine. Walk into any decent Asian restaurant on a Saturday night and you will find tables of Jews pigging out on various authentic dishes, almost always containing strictly forbidden, non-kosher seafood. I can’t explain the phenomenon, but thanks to it, and stereotypical Jewish parents, I’d learned to use chopsticks very early on.
As a cart left our table, Bev took the opportunity to begin the conversation that I’d been rehearsing in my head all morning.
“So, tell me why you had such a heinous weekend.”
I cleared my throat and took a sip of jasmine tea. “Well, for starters, me and Max are over.”
Bev’s chopsticks halted midway to her mouth, a round shrimp-filled dumpling between them. “I thought you and Max were over like last week.”
I shrugged. “Yeah, but then you reminded me I have Dad’s wedding coming up. I can’t go to his wedding without a date.”
The dumpling resumed its arc into Bev’s mouth. She chewed a couple of times. “So you’re going to stay with him until the wedding?”
“Well, that was the plan,” I admitted, more than a little embarrassed that it had backfired in such a spectacular way.
“So what happened?”
“Turns out he couldn’t go anyway, has to go to buy diamonds somewhere. Like he has to go that exact week,” I huffed, still incredulous at Max’s audacity.
“Hmm,” Bev said, surveying the bamboo steamer boxes on the table.
“That’s not all, either.” I swallowed. I wasn’t happy about telling this part of the story to Bev, but I needed to get it out. “I ran into Phil.”
“Which one was Phil?” Bev asked, her nose scrunching up. She always seemed to have trouble keeping my guys straight.
“The computer geek.”
Bev nodded. The conversation got put on pause as another cart, pushed by a tiny Asian girl stopped at our table. “Chicken feet, beef ball, beef tripe…” she offered.
We both shook our heads vehemently, passing on all dishes offered. A bit too ethnic for me even though my parents regularly ate chicken feet. They were a throwback to Jewish cooking when their mothers would chuck the chicken feet into the soup for flavor and would later scoop them out and give them to the kids as a snack. Yuck. Some Jewish traditions needed to end with my parents.
Bev continued, “Okay, so if I remember correctly, he moved his company or something. Where did you run into him?”
“Well, I heard he was back in town so I called him and we went out.” I couldn’t lie to Bev.
“Oh.”
“Anyway, we went back to his place and did it and then he says he doesn’t want to hook up with me again.”
“What did he say exactly?” Bev poured us each some more tea from the steaming china teapot.
I felt a paraphrase was in order. “He said I was vacuous and a gold-digger. What does vacuous mean?” I very deliberately skipped the whore part: I already knew what that meant.
Bev blinked a couple of times. She looked like she’d just smelled something bad. “It means empty.”
I looked down at the long, deep-fried tentacle poking out of my bowl. “Oh.”
Bev jumped to my defense, God bless her. “You’re not empty, Shosh. He’s a putz. Don’t let it bother you, what he said.”
“Maybe I am empty. Maybe I am a gold-digger,” I took a sip of tea, trying to dislodge the lump that had appeared in my throat.
Staring at me, Bev seemed to chew on her words along with the dumpling in her mouth. “I don’t think you’re empty. Gold-digger…that’s a harder call.” She cocked her head when I frowned at her. “I’m sorry, Shosh, but you’re pretty materialistic.”
It was true. It wasn’t anything I didn’t know. But hearing it straight from my best friend’s mouth hurt. Hurt more than hearing Phil say it. I nodded and pushed my dish away from me. I’d lost my appetite.
“I’m really sorry,” Bev said.
“What am I gonna do?” I asked. I really was stumped. What was I supposed to do now?
“I don’t know,” Bev said, but I could see it in her eyes—she was looking at me like I needed a makeover. A personality one.
I was terrified that she was right, but I couldn’t deal with that right now. I had to find a date for the wedding. Until then, I was not prepared to spend any time or effort on anything else.
“Keep your eye out for someone I can take to this wedding,” I said, waving the dim sum tally sheet at the waitress so she could ring us up. We had to get back to work.
Bev sighed and nodded, reaching for the last shrimp dumpling.
Chapter 11
“Hi there, I’m here for my facial.”
I looked up and almost didn’t recognize Mr. Blue Collar—the air conditioning repair guy—standing in front of me. The last time I’d seen him, he was wearing his uniform a la grease monkey and now here he was, all cleaned up in a white button-down shirt, without his name embroidered above the chest pocket. I couldn’t see what was below, as he was leaning against the reception counter, but I assumed it wasn’t worn navy work pants.
�
�Sure, I’ll let Bev know you’re here. Please take a seat.” He didn’t move, but just stood there, smiling at me. It was unnerving, but now that he was a client, I couldn’t exactly be bitchy. Pretending he wasn’t there, I picked up the phone and dialed the extension for the back room. “Your seven o’clock is here,” I said when Bev picked up; most of the other girls had finished for the day and had already gone home.
“Is it that hot air conditioning guy?” she asked.
“Yes, that’s correct, he is here for a facial,” I answered, looking up at his grinning face, hoping he couldn’t hear Bev through the phone.
“Sweet, I’ll be right up.”
Almost before I replaced the phone on the cradle, Bev had skipped to the front desk to pick up her client. She stuck out her hand toward him. “Hi, I’m Beverly and I’ll be doing you.” Her face suddenly went a very hot-looking shade of red. “Oh my God, I mean I’m doing your facial.”
“I’m Nate,” the guy said, as he handled her faux pas gracefully, shaking her hand and clearing his throat, but making no mention of it. He followed her into the back and out of sight.
My shift was over at eight when the spa closed, but by five after, Bev and Nate still hadn’t come out of the back room. I locked the front doors and peeked around the corner of the desk but all I saw was the closed door on Bev’s treatment room. I was beginning to wonder if he’d had his way with her on the narrow (and not great for sex, believe me) treatment table when he came out of the room, Bev right behind him.
Not that Nate’s skin had been troubled by any means, but when he emerged from the treatment room, he had a subtle pink glow to his cheeks, evidence of Bev’s top notch expertise.
“Thanks a lot, Nate, I hope you enjoyed it,” Bev said. Hope he enjoyed what? The sex or just the facial? I wondered. Nah, who was I kidding? Bev would never jump a guy in the spa. Something like that was much more my style.
“No, thank you, it was really nice,” Nate said. He made his way up to the desk and pulled his folded-up gift certificate out of his pocket and handed it to me. With a quick glance toward the back, to where Bev had disappeared back into the treatment room to clean up, he leaned over my counter so his face was only inches from mine. His pores looked great, thanks to Bev and really good genes. I thought he was going to kiss me but instead he whispered. “I’m new at this, am I supposed to leave a tip?”
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