Daniel had a condom in his wallet. “I’m impressed,” Lauren said, watching him as he went to retrieve it, enjoying the shadowy sight of his almost naked body (he still had his shirt on), which was strong and in shape but in an athletic, healthy way, not with the overdone musculature of the narcissistic.
He looked over his shoulder at her. “It’s a Boy Scout thing. Always be prepared.”
“You’ll have to restock.”
“No rush,” he said. “This one’s been there for ten years.”
“Don’t tell me it’s been that long for you.”
“Since I’ve had a one-night stand, yeah.”
For a moment, the words nagged at her. Was that what this was?
He dropped the wallet back on top of his pants and turned around with the condom package pinched between his thumb and index finger. For a moment, he hesitated, his face almost invisible in the dim light, the outline of his shoulders tensely hunched forward.
“Put it on,” Lauren said, too aroused and drunk to think about things any more deeply. She held out her arms, arching her back a little, and he looked at the picture she made for a few seconds, then with a catch of his breath did as she ordered and came back to the sofa, where he covered her body with his in one swift motion.
He groaned loudly at one point and Lauren said, “Shh. Don’t wake her up!” and he whispered, “This is just like high school, isn’t it?”
“The good part,” she said, sliding the palms of her hands down his back and gently digging her nails into his ass. “The part where sex is new and exciting.”
He was too distracted to respond to that and pretty soon she was too, arching her back, rising up into his thrusts, and working hard to keep her own cries of pleasure reasonably quiet.
They both gave one last sigh as he shuddered into her, and then there was a moment where they didn’t make a noise at all or move, and then he raised himself on his arms and smiled down into her face.
“That was nice,” he said and pulled out of her.
“Yeah,” she said.
“Where’s the bathroom?”
“Oh shit,” she said. “It’s through Ava’s room. I’m sorry.”
“Think I’ll wake her up if I run through?”
“I don’t know. Probably not.”
Daniel rolled off of her and onto his feet. He was still wearing one sock, his shirt—partially unbuttoned—and the condom. Not an easy look to pull off, but Lauren felt she could happily have stared at his half-naked body forever. “I think I have to risk it,” he said. “What’s the worst thing that could happen?”
“She wakes up and sees you and screams and a neighbor calls the police and you get arrested for indecent exposure?”
“Okay,” he said, instinctively covering himself with his hands at just the thought. “What’s the second worst thing?”
“Here,” Lauren said, sitting up. “Let me go first and make sure she’s asleep.” She still wore the tank top, but her bra had been unhooked at some point and pushed up out of the way so her breasts were no longer actually contained within the cups. She wiggled it back into place under the tank and reached behind to hook it up again.
“It would be a nice world if men and women never wore pants,” Daniel said, studying her as frankly and admiringly as she had him.
“It would cut down on wars,” Lauren said, shifting her legs and bending them slightly to give him the most flattering view of them. “Don’t you think?”
“People would have to carry their own towels, though. Like in gyms. To put under them whenever they sat down.”
“Definitely. Personal towel usage would be key.” Her bra settled in place, she looked around. “Hmm. Where did my underpants go?”
He picked up her jeans and handed them to her. “They’re still in here.”
“You’re an animal,” she said and plucked them out, then pulled them on, twisting her body on the sofa as she maneuvered them up. She stood up. “Okay. Follow me.”
She led the way to Ava’s bedroom door. Daniel followed her, his pants clutched against his torso, covering his genitals. “You have a cute butt,” he said.
She waggled it a bit for his benefit. “Thank you.” She carefully turned the doorknob and pushed the door open a few inches. She peered into the room, which had just enough light coming in from the street to pick out the shapes of the furniture and reveal the doorway to the bathroom. She listened for a brief moment. Deep, regular breaths from Ava. Lauren gestured silently to Daniel to head toward the bathroom. He nodded and ran across the room, briefly mooning her before he was inside and the door was shut.
Lauren swiped a pair of sweatpants out of a drawer, very carefully sliding it open and closed so it wouldn’t make noise. She carried the pants back to the living room, where she pulled them on and turned on the lamp.
Daniel returned a few minutes later, fully dressed except for his shoes, which still lay on the living room floor. He was also still missing the one sock. He closed Ava’s door softly behind him. “That’s the girliest bathroom I’ve ever seen,” he said. “How many different kinds of hair products and lipstick can two women own?”
“Never enough,” Lauren said. She didn’t bother to point out that almost all of the beauty products were hers. Ava basically owned a bar of soap, some shampoo and conditioner, and a bottle of sunscreen.
Daniel picked his jacket up off the floor and extracted his cell phone from the pocket. He flipped it open and peered at the screen. “Good,” he said. “No messages.”
“You’d have heard it ring, wouldn’t you?”
“Not necessarily,” he said, slipping it back in the pocket. “I was pretty distracted.”
“I’m pretty distracting,” she said with an exaggerated leer.
“Yes, you are.” He dropped the jacket on the back of the sofa and looked at her. “Aw, you put on pants. I liked you without them.”
“You put yours on.”
“Still.” He spotted his missing sock a foot or so away and picked it up before sitting down on the sofa. He pulled it on, then patted the space next to him. “Come sit.”
“What now?”
“I’m sleepy.” He closed his eyes. “Can we just sit here quietly for a few minutes?”
“Sure,” she said, and they did. She rested her head on his shoulder and he put his hand on her knee and they stayed like that for a while. It was nice, Lauren thought. Almost as nice as the sex had been. She peered up at Daniel’s profile. With his hair a little messed up and his eyes closed, he looked much more vulnerable and open than usual. She liked this softer version of Daniel. She liked him a lot.
They must have both dozed off because it was a couple of hours later when she became aware of feeling cramped and uncomfortable and wanting to stretch out. She squirmed out from under his arm and draped herself the long way across the sofa, putting her feet on his lap. She felt him shift under her, and when she opened her eyes, he was awake and watching her, his gaze unreadable in the dim light of the one lamp left on.
“You okay?” she said. “Want to lie down?”
“No.” He passed his hand over his forehead. “I need a drink of water.”
“In the kitchen.” She curled up her legs so he was no longer pinned in place. “Glasses are in the cabinet.”
He stood up and she lay there quietly while he was gone, listening contentedly to the sounds of his rustling around the kitchen.
When he came back over to her, she moved her legs to make room for him again, but he didn’t sit. She opened her eyes. He was standing there, looking down at her.
“Everything okay?” she said.
“Not really.”
She propped herself up on her elbows. “What’s wrong?” She thought suddenly that maybe the condom had broken and felt a shudder of panic. Calm down, she thought. That’s why the morning-after pill was invented.
“The thing is,” Daniel said, “I shouldn’t have done this.”
“What?” she said, confused. “Y
ou mean the sex?”
“I didn’t mean to. I had too much to drink. I wasn’t thinking.”
Suddenly wide awake, Lauren slowly sat up and planted her feet on the floor. “Wow. Nothing a woman likes to hear after sex more than a guy’s regrets.”
“I’m sorry.”
Her voice grew sharper. “You seemed to be enjoying yourself. What’s the problem exactly?”
He rocked back a bit on his heels. “The problem exactly,” he repeated absently. “The problem exactly.” Then, with a sudden clarity, like he had just woken up: “The problem exactly is named Elizabeth and she’s in New York right now in my apartment.”
“Elizabeth.” Lauren took a pillow and held it across her chest with the sense she’d be needing a shield. “Give me a clue. Wife, daughter, dog, housekeeper?”
“We’re not married yet,” he said, and his flat tone took away any hope she might have had that he was joking. “But we live together. We’ve been living together for two years now.”
“I see,” Lauren said, and did. A lot of things made sense that hadn’t before. “And yet somehow she never came up in conversation?”
“I’m sorry,” Daniel said. “I should have—”
“All those discussions about your life back in New York,” Lauren said. “Like what you did at night after work and what you ate for dinner—but you never mentioned a live-in companion?”
He stared at the floor. “I don’t know why I didn’t tell you about her.”
“Maybe because you wanted to screw me?”
“I didn’t want to,” he said. “I mean, that wasn’t what I—” He stopped again.
“You looked like you wanted to,” she said. She felt queasy, like she could throw up at any moment. “Maybe it was the way you had an orgasm inside of me. Did I misread that?”
“Shh,” he said.
“Don’t shush me.”
“I’m sorry. I’m trying to explain.”
“You’re doing a great job,” Lauren said. “You asshole.”
“Yeah, okay.” He almost seemed relieved to have her swear at him. “We were only ever going to be friends,” he said. “You and me. That was the idea. Cancer buddies. Both at the hospital because of our moms. It was nice having someone to hang out with there.”
“I know,” she said. “I thought so too. And if you had just told me you had a girlfriend—”
“I don’t know why I didn’t.”
“You keep saying that. Isn’t the answer obvious?” She gestured down at the sofa where just a couple of hours earlier they had been pawing at each other.
He said, almost sadly, “You think I meant to do this all along.”
That was too obvious to even respond to. “No wonder you called me a one-night stand.”
“I don’t think I actually said that.”
She put her head in her hands. “God, I’m an idiot!”
“I’m sorry, Lauren,” he said. “I know you think I’m an ass-hole. I think I’m an asshole. People aren’t supposed to act like this. And I don’t normally. I’ve never cheated on a girlfriend before, ever.” He opened and closed his hands around nothing. “But my life’s been so fucked up since my mother got sick. I don’t know where I’m living, I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing. Neither life seems real, not the one back in New York or the one here. I spend my days in a black hole, watching my mother get sicker in front of my eyes without being able to do anything about it, and sometimes I think I’m going crazy.”
Lauren didn’t say anything. Did he expect a free pass to be a total creep just because his mother had cancer?
“But I shouldn’t have,” he said after a moment of silence.
Her agreement came out as an angry exhale. She raised her head to glare at him. “You going to tell her? E-liz-a-beth?” She enunciated the name with exaggerated deference.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve got to decide what the fairest thing is for her.”
“Yeah,” Lauren said. “You wouldn’t want to do anything to hurt her.”
“I swear I never meant to hurt you—”
“Oh, I believe you,” Lauren said. “I’m sure you would have loved to have screwed me and not hurt me at all. That would have made everything easier for you.”
He was silent again for a moment. Then he said, “I should go back home. My brother’s not used to taking care of my mother.”
“Go ahead,” she said. “Nothing keeping you here.”
He turned away, then stopped and turned back. “I don’t know if I should even say this,” he said. “Whatever I say feels like a betrayal to someone. But I didn’t do this because I was looking to get myself off. I’ve kind of been falling in love with you in spite of myself. Wanting to spend time with you even though I knew it was risky and I shouldn’t. And if this were really my life—if I didn’t have a real life back in New York—I’d happily stay in love with you.”
“That doesn’t mean anything,” she said.
He stood there silently.
“You were leaving,” Lauren said after waiting a moment. “Don’t forget your shoes.”
He nodded, crammed his feet quickly into his shoes, picked up his jacket, and left the apartment with a last quiet “Good-bye.”
Lauren let out a strangled and muffled scream of anger, but it didn’t make her feel better. She slid down on the sofa until she was curled in a knot and played feverishly with the string that tied the waist of her sweatpants, pulling the ragged ends through her fingers over and over again, blinking her eyes against the hot, painful pressure she felt right behind them that wasn’t tears but something angrier and more self-loathing than tears. After a few minutes of that, she stretched out into a lying position on the sofa and tried to will herself asleep but couldn’t. She sat up again and suddenly the living room felt empty and lonely and sad and she didn’t want to be in there anymore. She didn’t want to be the kind of adult woman who lived in someone else’s living room because she couldn’t pay her own rent and who slept with other women’s boyfriends. But that’s exactly what she was.
She padded to the door of the bedroom on bare feet and went inside.
Ava was sleeping in the middle of the double bed, her dark hair tousled and sticking in patches to her cheeks and closed eyes.
“Ava?” Lauren whispered.
Ava stirred and made a little questioning noise and then was still again.
“Ava?” she said, a little more loudly. “Can I sleep in here with you?”
“Wha’?” Her voice was heavy with sleep. “Why? Wha’s wrong?”
“I spilled something on the sofa,” Lauren said. “Please?”
“God, you’re a spaz,” Ava said in that same thick, slurred voice. She slid over to make room and turned on her side so her back was to the empty side of the bed. “Go to sleep—don’ bother me.”
“Okay,” Lauren said and slid in under the covers next to her sister. She lay on her back, staring up into the darkness. Then she whispered, “Can I say just one thing?”
Ava’s voice was muffled by the pillow. “No.”
“Even if it’s that I’m sorry?”
Ava heaved a dramatic sigh and turned back toward her, her eyes still closed. “What are you sorry for?”
“Always telling you what to do when it comes to guys. Acting like I know so much when I don’t know any more than you do. Less, probably.”
“Did something go wrong tonight?”
Lauren wanted to tell her but hesitated, trying to figure out how much to say and what not to say, scared to let Ava know she had been stupid enough to sleep with a guy who was already taken—the signs had been there if she had bothered to look for them—but also desperate for solace. After a few minutes of struggling to find the right words, she became aware of the regular sound of Ava’s deep, measured breaths and realized her sister had already fallen back to sleep.
But Lauren didn’t go to sleep for a long time after that. She lay there wishing she had never bought the shirt
she had stained that night or the shoes that would probably just lie there on the bedroom floor for days that would turn into weeks, waiting to trip her up just when she was beginning to forget about them.
Chapter 14
On Sunday morning, they drove to the house, and Ava went upstairs to find their parents while Lauren carried into the kitchen the fruit and juice they’d brought.
As Ava came up the stairs onto the landing, she heard her parents talking. She was struck by the unusually querulous tone of her mother’s voice and by the equally unfamiliar soothing and patient sound of her father’s. It all felt wrong and a little fascinating, and Ava paused outside the partially open bedroom door to hear more before going in.
“—sounds disgusting,” her mother was saying.
“You need to eat something.” Jimmy’s voice.
“I’ll throw it up.”
“You might not. You’re past the worst of it for this week. You haven’t thrown up on a Sunday yet.”
“Force me to eat an egg and today will be my first time.”
“At least drink something. I don’t want you to get de-hydrated.”
“Why not? What’s the worst that happens? You take me to the hospital and they put me on an IV? I spend half my time on an IV now—what difference will a few more hours and a few more holes make?”
“I could make you some hot tea. Or mix some juice with bubbly water. How does that sound to you? A cranberry juice spritzer?”
Her mother: “Will you just drop it? I don’t want anything.”
Ava drew closer to the door, waiting for the explosion from her father, who always exploded the second someone crossed or offended him in any way, which was why the girls in the family had learned to tiptoe carefully around him except on the rare occasions when they were fully armored and geared up for battle.
But all Jimmy said was “Just think about it. You need energy. We’ve got company coming.”
“I don’t know why I said yes to that. I wish I hadn’t.”
Ava peered around the door and saw them at that moment, her mother’s face twisted and petulant as she plucked at the bedsheet pulled up around her waist, her father’s craggy features drawn with concern. He reached his hand out as if to pat her on the shoulder, but Nancy swatted it away with a noise of irritation. He folded his arms resignedly across his chest and said, “You’ll get a burst of energy. You’ll see. The girls always cheer you up.”
The Smart One and the Pretty One Page 20