Doubt.
Otherwise known as the remorse portion of the aftermath. And as each Patrón shot hit, she’d grown more and more gripped by it, more and more uncertain. Uncertain about their breakup, but certain she was missing him. Watching him entertain Tara/Jocelyn, giving off that smoothness he so naturally projected, Allison fondly recalled the days when she’d been the recipient of it. It felt like a lifetime ago. How she longed to hear the compliments that had made her blush, to feel his arm around her waist in the manner she’d always claimed was too tight, to summon the jovial grin that lit up his face in a way she’d always thought so goofy. Though she feared she no longer had access to these things, she’d realized she needed to try.
So last but not least (in fact, undeniably most important) came the relapse. Seizing the brief hiatus Tara/Jocelyn had taken from Josh’s side, Allison now excused herself from Brian and bravely moved in.
“Hey,” she said, timidly approaching the couch, then seating herself in the empty spot beside him. She felt her pulse begin to race; she was quite unsure how he’d react.
“Hey,” he answered, with a hint of surprise, seemingly unsure himself. He studied her, fixing his eyes on her disconcerted face. So she left hers on his as well.
It was odd. For Allison had always found him attractive, but it was as if she was suddenly seeing him through different eyes: namely, Tara/Jocelyn’s. And while Allison knew it was horribly immature, through them his own deep brown ones seemed more endearing, his bone structure more defined, the sole dimple he couldn’t frown away more charming. Undeniably, this stranger before her was entirely more attractive, more desirable, and more perfect a catch. Like everything that was no longer within her reach.
“So you know me now,” he said sarcastically.
Immediately Allison apologized, as was always her first instinct in the face of conflict. “I’m sorry. But what could I possibly do? This isn’t easy for me, either.” She glanced worriedly around to ensure they had no audience.
“It sure looks pretty easy,” he said, less concerned with concealing their history than with making his case. (Little did he know what effort “looking easy” had taken.)
“Well, it doesn’t seem like you had such a hard time tonight,” she said, more to vindicate herself than put him on the defensive, and unconsciously turning toward the door Tara/Jocelyn had exited. To this he had no answer. Or perhaps no incentive to argue.
They sat in silence a few interminable minutes (she’d resisted getting up twice) before he spoke again. “So why are you doing this? House,” he made sure to clarify.
She took a deep breath. To be honest, she’d been asking herself that same question all night. Because I’m single now, she wanted to say. Because I need to move on, and this seemed an ideal way. But instead she answered, “Why not?”—something a professor had once said was the quintessential answer to the question why.
Josh was hardly satisfied. So she added, “Jamie and Rachel wanted a third person to do a share with them.” Having then earned the right, she readily returned the question. “Why are you doing this?”
It was an inquiry he should have anticipated, yet he looked wholly unprepared for it. “Well, Rich grew up in Scarsdale with Mark, the guy who’s running the house, and he does it every year,” he stammered. Which made them pretty much even, if not equally clueless. Piercing her with his eyes, Josh took his interrogation a step farther. “Why’d you look so disgusted to see me?”
Allison had no idea she’d looked that way upon seeing him, but she had no desire to relive their first encounter of the evening. “I wasn’t disgusted. I was just...well, surprised. You never told me you liked the Hamptons.”
“You never told me you weren’t happy.” He looked up at her earnestly, finally asking her for the answers she even now couldn’t give. At once the anger fled from his face, the defensive lines in his forehead softened. And for the first time all day, for the first time since their breakup, Josh let his guard down.
“I was happy,” she said, not lying, not wanting anything but to appease him. With every word she spoke, she knew she was regressing. But looking around at the random house filled with random people all on a frivolous and hormone-driven mission, there was no one with whom she’d rather be. No one who even came close.
“You look really beautiful tonight,” he told her, this one comment making all of Jamie’s efforts worthwhile. Unlike her friend, she didn’t need to dress up for a nightclub of posers; she dressed up for the people that mattered. And she was beginning to revisit the possibility that Josh mattered.
“Thanks,” she said, blushing as she often did when put in the spotlight, then looking around at the people lingering awake to pair off. “This is so random,” she whispered, random being the only word she knew to describe it. “I would love to be back in the city, back in my apartment right now.”
“On the couch, eating grilled cheese and catching up on DVR,” he said, describing their weekly routine. “By the way, did you see Lost this week?” Then, as if there hadn’t been a two-week interruption, they reverted to the kind of conversation they always had—the kind of conversation that satisfied her like a favorite meal when she hadn’t eaten in a week. She’d been starved for this kind of trivial comfort.
“You’ll never guess what happened with my kids the other day,” she began, and relayed the story she’d been holding in. The one no one else could appreciate. And it felt reassuring. Comforting. Tempting.
And so, waiting until most of the room had dispersed (her friends weren’t near ready for this), Josh leaned over and kissed her. Allison couldn’t remember the last time they’d both been up at five in the morning. And she couldn’t remember the last time he’d kissed her like that. Like he appreciated every ounce of her.
Quietly slipping into Josh’s room (where there were about three other guys dead passed out), they attacked each other with a hunger neither had felt nor expressed in a long time. A hunger that possibly had never existed in the first place. “I forgot how great it was to be with you,” he said, wrapping tightly around her waist that arm she had craved. And convincing her that nothing that felt this good could be so entirely wrong.
Paralyzed by pleasure, Allison hardly knew what was right anymore. Despite her hasty desire for reconciliation, she still thought in the long run this might not work out. But helping him remove her clothing and yanking off his in return, she didn’t want to think beyond the moment. She didn’t want to think at all.
His hands expertly roamed her body, navigating in the way he knew she’d be receptive to. lt felt good, to not be ignoring him. It’d been a long time, since they’d connected so deeply. Their every breath seemed amplified against the dark eerie room, uniting them against the share house, them against the unfamiliar. Just like it had always been. Just like it always could be.
Did Allison really want that? she wondered. Tomorrow, she imagined, once again she wouldn’t be sure.
But on this roller-coaster ride of a night (a weekend...a year), if only for a moment, it felt nice to get off.
Chapter Seven
Deductive Reasoning: The process of drawing valid conclusions from a given set of premises. (V. Goel and R. J. Dolan, “Explaining Modulation of Reasoning by Belief”)
Waking up in a Hamptons share house is much like solving a mathematical equation. It’s all about deducing the unknown.
Lifting her head from her pillow that morning, Rachel had no idea where she was, or who she was with.
But once she came to, only one of these things was resolved.
“Jame,” she whispered, peering cautiously around the room, able to identify only her one friend sleeping beside her. The blinds were pulled completely shut, barring any trace of sunlight that might offer orientation; it could be 7 AM or 2 PM. Rachel imagined it couldn’t have been too late, since everyone else was still sleeping. Then again, everyone else had gone to sleep after her (who knew how much after), and, well, stranger things had happened in the H
amptons.
She tapped Jamie gently, but not a sound emanated from the one person in the room Rachel did recognize. The unidentified individual enjoying blissful slumber across from her, however, continued to snore at leisure.
“Jame!” she whispered.
At this, Jamie finally rolled over, but showed no other signs of life. “What time is it?” she slurred.
Rachel couldn’t answer that, so she stated her more immediate query. “Who is that?” Rising to her feet, she pointed to the lump of covers she now saw was too large to be a girl. She turned toward Jamie again. “And where is Allison?”
“What? Oh, I don’t know.” Satisfied it was nothing urgent, she rolled right over again.
But Rachel was far from satisfied. “Ew!” she shrieked. “He’s sleeping on her sheets!” she exclaimed to no one at all. Tiptoeing over, she noticed a chunky metal watch (clearly belonging to a guy) abandoned on the nightstand, as well as a silver sequiny shirt atop a pile of clothing on the floor. That’s when she realized there wasn’t just one intruder. There were two.
That’s also when she realized that while she’d been sound asleep, horny, inconsiderate shareholders had been ripping each other’s clothes off mere feet from her. Repulsed (yet slightly grateful they had co-opted Allison’s bed and not her own), Rachel peered over, more determined than ever to catch a glimpse of the culprits.
She made one of them out to be Dave (whom she vaguely recalled trying to climb into bed with her, before she pushed him off...or had she merely been dreaming?). The other was a girl Rachel had never seen before (or that was the conclusion she drew from the mop of blond hair).
Who this girl was and how the two of them wound up in a room alongside her was really quite a mystery. But the bigger one, in Rachel’s eyes, was what had become of Allison.
Did she get up early and slip out to the pool? Rachel wondered. Had she fled back to the city in the middle of the night? Rachel’s mind drifted back to the last image of her friend that she could recall. Wait a minute, Rachel thought, vividly picturing the late-night scene. She couldn’t possibly have hooked up with...Brian?
No way, she decided, bending down to dig through her luggage. She knew full well that Allison wasn’t ready to enter the field again. Why, she’d even said so herself! (Besides, the last thing Rachel wanted to entertain in the wake of her romantic rebuff was the idea of someone else’s success.) And so, pulling out a bathing suit, towel, and toiletries, Rachel deduced that Allison must have gotten a head start at the pool—at which point these people had eagerly commandeered her bed. It made perfect sense, for Rachel had no idea how anyone could sleep long in these conditions.
What a wretched night it had been, what with the door opening and closing every five minutes, the sounds of screaming and banging bursting through it, and—lo and behold—an X-rated display at arm’s length. It was a wonder she’d slept at all!
Growing strangely dizzy, Rachel sank back down on her bed again. She hadn’t noticed it before, but the air in the room was palpably warm and oppressive, and she was suddenly overcome by a fit of nausea—no doubt from everything she’d drunk the night before. (What had she drunk the night before?) For unlike in the city, where drinks are twelve dollars a pop and your wallet naturally inhibits your alcohol intake, Rachel could barely count the number of drinks she’d had from Mark’s bottles. In truth, she stopped trying to count when she realized that number surpassed three. Stumbling toward the door, she could only imagine how her friends would feel—they’d drunk twice the vodka she had, not to mention an indeterminate number of Patrón shots. This, without downing the precautionary bottle of Poland Spring she always gulped down after drinking. Which reminded her, she really had to get to a bathroom.
Cracking open the door and creaking out onto the wooden floor, Rachel couldn’t believe the sight that greeted her. Now she felt nauseous not only from the amount she’d drunk, but also from the vile state of her surroundings.
Sun (O blessed sun!) fought through the glass door leading to the patio, but its cheerfulness cast a depressing gleam on the disastrous condition of the share house, which barely resembled the house they’d arrived at yesterday. Leftover food, wrappers, and garbage polluted every inch of the living room, some organic yellow liquid had dried to the floor with sticky resilience, and there were enough beer bottles hidden in obscure places to make finding them a new game. Balancing awkwardly on the balls of her feet in her flip-flops (to make contact with as little floor area as possible), Rachel patiently negotiated the mess obstructing her path and wandered the upstairs.
Comically, in addition to food and alcohol and garbage, there were also people littered everywhere. Camouflaged by their environment, it took Rachel a few minutes to discover the three figures compressed on one futon, the girl nestled inside a sleeping bag on the floor, and the dozing couple whose interlocking limbs draped over the side of the sofa.
So maybe they’d ignored the noise. Maybe they’d shut their eyes to the garbage. But she found it absurd that they could overlook the worst hurdle of all: the smell. The distinct, pungent odor of fraternity-party-in-the-morning. The entire sticky, stuffy pigsty reeked of stale beer and rotting meat and bodies roasting in the morning sun, sweat and tequila seeping from their pores. Rachel had barely been awake ten minutes, and already she could have vomited three times over. And when she retreated to the bathroom, it looked like someone already had. Without bothering to close the door, she rushed (skeptically) to the downstairs bathroom. Stepping in, her feet encountered a layer of water coating the floor, but she nevertheless barricaded herself inside. The lock didn’t appear to be working—it now seemed too much to ask for there to be anything functional in this house—so she slid on her bathing suit and sarong at record-breaking speed (all the while picturing someone barging in on her). Then, clearing the sink of partially full cups of beer, she quickly washed her face and brushed her teeth. There was no towel with which to dry her hands or face (good thing she’d brought her beach towel), and no toilet paper. Searching the house and deeming it a lost cause, she settled on grabbing the roll of paper towels from the kitchen and leaving them in the downstairs bathroom as a courtesy.
After that, you couldn’t have kept her inside that house another minute, not for anything. And so, returning to her room just long enough to replace her toiletries and grab some things (no one had moved an inch), she closed the door and hurried back out to the pool.
Sliding open the heavy glass door, she allowed the cool morning breeze to hit her, inhaling air as if for the very first time. Though it wasn’t quite summer yet, the sun shone with promise and immediately brightened her mood. Rachel wasn’t even alarmed when Allison wasn’t outside as she’d expected. What was there, however, was a similar array of cups and wrappers and residue, and a number of pieces of deck furniture had found their way into the water. If Rachel hadn’t known better, she might have suspected a small tornado had hit the property while they slept inside.
Outside, too. Rachel froze as she noted a handful of bodies sprawled out on lounge chairs. Still, she was developing a buffer to the house’s absurdities, so she simply dragged a lounge chair to the pool’s edge and angled it toward the sun.
Laying out her pink towel (coordinated to match her brand-new swimsuit, natch), she smothered herself with SPF 45 (no need to risk burning this early in the summer...or wrinkling this early in her lifetime). While Jamie was the darkest of the bunch, believing too tan just as silly a term as too rich, and Allison’s skin assumed a healthy outdoor glow, Rachel preferred to maintain the porcelain quality of her own—to the point that her friends teased her that she’d never really been sunburned just like she’d never really been drunk. (Just like she’d never really been...ravaged.) Though she disagreed on all three counts, Rachel nevertheless couldn’t prove them wrong.
Soaking up the calm, Rachel decided that this was the perfect time of morning. The sun was strong enough to keep her warm, yet mild enough that it didn’t threaten to overh
eat. A quick glance at her cell phone revealed that it wasn’t yet nine thirty, but Rachel had never been a late sleeper. She’d never been much of a sleeper at all. Because of this, she religiously went to the gym every morning at five thirty before arriving at work at nine, so even on the weekends her body was inclined to wake up. Now a blessing, this had posed quite the problem in her childhood days, when she’d always been the first to pop up in her sleeping bag at slumber parties, and would pretend to be sleeping for hours until the other girls awoke. Funny, she felt as ostracized being the early bird now as she had back then.
Still, even in the eerie solitude, she closed her eyes and attempted to enjoy the blissful peace.
She didn’t get very far. Within minutes, she heard the recognizable swishing of the glass door sliding open. Curious to see who’d gotten up as insanely early as she had, she turned and spotted a girl dressed in a trendy outfit that last night was probably hot, but in the morning light looked ridiculous: tight low-slung jeans, pointy pumps, and, wouldn’t you know it, that silver sequiny top (one of those items that looked a lot better on a hanger—or, as opportunity had provided, on their bedroom floor—than on a body). But Rachel regretted these insensitive thoughts when she realized the girl had been crying.
“Are you all right?” Rachel asked, leaning over the lounge chair and calling out to the figure frozen on the patio.
“Yeah,” the girl sniffled, hardly looking all right, and hardly looking in Rachel’s direction. She paced back and forth almost in a trance before approaching Rachel’s chair. Sinking lugubriously into the seat opposite, she eventually decided to elaborate. “My cell phone was stolen last night. I’m so upset.”
“Are you kidding?” Rachel asked, pulling herself upright. Rachel didn’t think she was kidding, but didn’t really know what else to say.
The girl merely shook her head, setting her blond mane flying. Last night’s mascara stained black her entire eye area but couldn’t mask the pretty blue eyes buried beneath, and there was something about her bed-set locks that looked very modelesque—the overall effect of which inspired sympathy. “Can I use your phone for a minute?” she asked after an overdrawn pause, and after eyeing Rachel’s phone beside her.
How the Other Half Hamptons Page 8