For a moment I considered creeping across the room to get my camera. I could take a picture and bring it home to show Laney, the way men do when they return from a fishing trip. Here’s my first one-night stand, I would say proudly, ain’t he a beaut?
With that thought, images of the actual event began to sting me: Sam pulling me to stand as he kissed me. Me raking my hands through the surprising softness of his silvery-blond hair. The amazing way his skin smelled like sun, making me want to bury myself in the smooth curve of his neck. Him trying to take his time, wanting to kiss and kiss and kiss, while I began pulling at his sweater, needing to get right to it. Him finally understanding, crushing my chest with rougher kisses, lifting me up, my legs around his waist. The both of us crashing back onto the bed, our clothes seeming to disappear, and finally the comforting weight of him on top of me, inside me.
We’d had sex once more before we’d both fallen asleep. In fact, it had still been early evening. I glanced at the bedside clock now. Only six-thirty in the morning. I didn’t need to meet Cole in the lobby for an hour and a half. I watched Sam sleeping, his hair even more tousled than usual, lips slightly parted, head lolling to one side. Strangely, he seemed even more attractive to me. Why was that? Was I the typical female who fell for everyone she slept with? Come to think of it, I had fallen for everyone I’d slept with—Ted, my high school boyfriend; Remy, the gay guy; Steve, my college boyfriend; Eric, the guy before Ben; and Ben. Those were different, I reminded myself. I’d been dating those men before I’d had sex with them. Pleased with this distinction, I closed my eyes again.
The two-freckled man was leaning over me. He was saying something kind and reassuring, but there was a hesitancy to his words, something he was concerned about. Why couldn’t I hear them? What was it? He sat back and I focused on those two freckles under his left eye. He tried to smile, tried to make me laugh, but my face felt stiff. His image kept fading in and out in an odd way.
He was surrounded by white—the white of his clothing, the white of his skin, brilliant white walls. He seemed to go fuzzy for a moment, so that all I could make out was the vivid blue of his eyes, the dark of his hair, and then his face would zoom into focus again and I could see the finer details—those two freckles, the thick eyebrows, the way he smiled reassuringly.
Whatever he was saying, I suddenly didn’t want to hear it any longer. It was too hard, too depressing. I wanted him to stop talking. Why didn’t he stop already? But his lips kept moving and moving. I felt helpless, as if I was sinking away from him, into some dark space. He was still there, though, hovering above me, still saying the words over and over, just in some different form, trying to explain something.
I felt someone rubbing my shoulder from behind. What the hell? Was he here? But then it came to me—Sam. I had only dreamed of the two-freckled man.
I feigned sleep, making my breathing slow and heavy, but Sam kept up the gentle caress of his fingers on my bare shoulder. It was a kind, lulling touch, but why, exactly, was he doing it? Wasn’t he supposed to be gone now? Shouldn’t I never set eyes on him again? Wasn’t that how one-night stands worked?
I tried to think back to the random guys Laney had slept with over the years. There were a few she’d gone to breakfast with, but for the most part she was out the door early, or they took off themselves, never to be seen again, leaving Laney lots of room for embellishment when she gave me the play-by-play later that day.
I lay there, feeling the soft stroke of Sam’s touch, and at the same time trying to calculate what I might look like at the moment. I’d never dried my hair yesterday, just put a hat on my wet head, so it was probably misshapen and frayed. Meanwhile, the minimal mascara and lip gloss I’d applied yesterday morning could never have survived. Basically, I figured I looked like a particularly nasty “before” picture from a magazine makeover spread. Maybe if Sam left soon, before I was “awake,” I could avoid the embarrassment. Then it struck me—I’d have to see him. All day today and all day tomorrow. If Laney and I were still on speaking terms right now, she’d flunk me for my first fling effort. I could just hear her sighing, saying, Kell, you don’t have a one-nighter with someone you work with!
The room was getting hotter as the sun shone through the louvered doors with growing force. The ceiling fan overhead spun lazily. I wondered how in the hell to get Sam out of my room without having to face him just yet. Meanwhile, his fingers kept up their gentle manipulations, now moving from my shoulder to my arm. I opened my eyes and stretched my eyeballs to their greatest capacity in an effort to see the clock on the nightstand: 7:40 a.m. Shit, shit, shit. Twenty minutes until I had to meet Cole. Sam, of course, wouldn’t have to be ready until nine-thirty with the rest of the crew, so no wonder he wasn’t up and rushing around as I should have been.
I let another five minutes crawl by before I decided there was no way around it. He’d have to see me now. We’d have to speak.
I pulled the sheet up to my cheekbones before I rolled over, hoping for a casual, veil-made-accidentally-of-bedding look that would hide most of my face.
“Hi.” My words were muffled by the cotton.
“Hey.”
I hated him for a second, because, if possible, he looked better than the night before. His green eyes were sharp and clear, his white teeth revealed by his pleased grin.
“I have to get going. I need to meet Cole in fifteen minutes.”
He made a murmur of disappointment. “I’d try to talk you out of it, but after the lecture I gave you guys last night about losing money, I’d be a hypocrite.”
He smiled at me, and I tried to smile back, though of course, he couldn’t see it from beneath my sheet. We lay there silently for a second. What was I supposed to say? Should I acknowledge the fact that this man had contorted me into a human pretzel only hours ago? Or did one simply act as if nothing had happened? I tried to dredge up some of Laney’s stories, but I couldn’t remember anything about this part. Why hadn’t she told me it would be so awkward?
“I really didn’t expect that to happen last night,” Sam said. Well, that was one way of broaching the subject. He laughed. “I mean, I came down to the bar to bitch at you guys and…” He laughed again.
“Yeah, well, I hadn’t exactly planned it, either.” It came out snippy, and I tried to add a little giggle at the end, but it sounded like I was choking on my bedsheet. “I really have to go.”
“Sure.” But he wasn’t moving. Why wasn’t he moving?
Oh Christ, I couldn’t get out of bed and walk around naked in front of him. It struck me somewhere in the outer reaches of my mind that I’d done a lot more with him last night than simply trot naked through a hotel room, but I couldn’t shake my overwhelming sense of shyness. Leave, leave, leave. I lifted his wrist and looked at his watch. Seven forty-five. Shit.
“You probably want me to go,” he said. Finally!
He rolled off the bed and stepped into his clothes, dragging his hands through his hair a few times. Then he kneeled on the bed, leaning over me, reminding me of the two-freckled guy. For a moment, the images of those two faces—Sam’s and then the man from my dream—disoriented me, both of them in front of my eyes, one shifting into the other and back.
“You okay?” Sam said. “I could call Cole and tell him you’re running late, say you’re not feeling well.” His forehead was wrinkled with concern.
Despite myself, I was touched. “No, no. I’m great. Thanks for last night.”
Were you supposed to thank your partner for random sex? Was that somehow implying that I thought him a whore? Or was I the whore? This was all so confusing.
Sam leaned closer and kissed my cheek. “You are a wonderful, wonderful woman.”
I opened my eyes, and we looked at each other. Why did he have to be so damned cute, so fucking sweet? Why did he have to live in New York and be way too old for me and have kids already and be in the middle of a divorce?
God, maybe I was the kind of woman who fell for everyone s
he slept with.
The next few days were a tangled blur of poignant victories and wistful goodbyes. Over it all hung intermittent layers of confusion and loneliness and, when I let myself see it, a healthy dose of fear.
The victories came into my life via Cole, whom I now viewed as one of the kindest people on the planet, albeit under a tough, spiky exterior. He’d been reprimanded by Sam for letting me take those shots, yet whenever Sam turned his back, usually to make a phone call, Cole handed me the camera and told me to give it a go. To the rest of the crew he would say, “Anyone who tells Sam she’s taking these shots will be personally executed by me.” They all smirked and kept their mouths closed. They all loved him by now, just as I did. It seemed Cole was back in his element again, back to his place on top of the mountain.
I loved the heavy, sharp-edged feel of the camera in my hand. I loved calling out instructions to the models, the stylist. I loved turning my head, squinting at the sun and asking Cole what he thought about doing it this way or that. We’d begun to get a sense of teamwork, sometimes silently knowing what the other wanted. It was the type of teamwork that many financial analysts had with their colleagues who followed the same stocks—though of course I’d never shared that with Attila—and so the whole exercise was poignant for me, knowing I’d have to quit. I really had to.
During the lunch break, I’d stolen away from the group, and taken a seat at a picnic table outside a local bar. I’d decided to figure out my finances, instead of skating by, assuming that the chunk of change in my bank account would last forever. Using the back of a postcard, I scribbled down my monthly expenses, the wages that Cole was paying me, the ridiculous amount I’d spent on clothes at Saks, and finally the cash I had left from the severance package and the sale of my house. I did the math over and over, trying to shave off a few pennies here and there, but the conclusion was inevitable. I could last another few months, but after that time, I wouldn’t be able to afford rent or utilities. I certainly wouldn’t be able to buy any more clothes.
And I had to look at the bigger picture, too. In six short months, I’d be thirty-one, only four years away from my self-imposed married/kids/country house deadline. But at the rate I was going, I was well on my way to a basement apartment and a houseful of cats. So I knew I’d have to say goodbye to my job with Cole and get back on the clear path I’d set for myself. There was simply no other way.
I ordered a beer then and, trying not to cry, toasted the quickly approaching end of my “hobby” of a job.
Meanwhile, I also had to say goodbye to Sam sooner than I thought. I’d assumed he was on location the entire time, but as it turned out he had only one more day with us. That morning after he left my room, I dived in the shower, slapped on as much makeup as possible, threw on a sundress that was, in actuality, way too dressy for work, and ran out to meet Cole.
When Sam arrived an hour later with the rest of the crew, he gave me a secret smile, a quick squeeze of my hand, but nothing else that might embarrass us, something I profoundly appreciated. What would the rest of the crew think if they knew he’d been throwing me around like a sack of potatoes only hours before? Sam looked even more gorgeous in shorts and a baseball cap than he had naked in my bed that morning. Was it me, or did the guy just get better looking?
We were shooting at the Baths on Virgin Gorda that day. At one point, I was making my way over the huge boulders that littered the beach, searching out a site for later in the afternoon. I concentrated on keeping my dress down and my ass covered, on making my sandaled feet grip the slick stone. I climbed over one monstrous rock, slipped down the other side and picked my way through the wet sand, looking for that perfect spot. I had just found someplace interesting and was lifting the light meter to check the reading when someone or something grabbed my arm. I gasped as I was pulled backward into a dark space, one of the caves that lined the beach.
“What?” I said stupidly. I’d had enough flashbacks of the two-freckled guy and the old Kelly to wonder whether it was happening again. I struggled to stay conscious, blinking furiously. And there was Sam, grinning like a little boy.
“I needed to see you,” he said.
“Jesus, you scared the shit out of me.” My heart drummed against my ribs.
“I’m sorry. I just wanted to get you alone for a second.” He grasped my wrist and made small, reassuring circles on my skin with his thumb.
The cave was dank and thick with humidity. Water slapped against the walls somewhere deep inside as Sam’s fingers encircled my wrist caressingly. My heart rate slowed, I looked into his eyes and decided then and there to sleep with him again that night. I could hear Laney’s voice yelling in my head, No, no, no, you idiot! A one-nighter means one night. Don’t you get it? You don’t go back for more! You’ll only get hurt! But since Laney had decided to stay away from me for a while, I ignored her. I whispered in Sam’s ear that I’d meet him after dinner.
The heated looks Sam and I exchanged throughout the rest of the day puffed me up and left me feeling like I was, quite possibly, the sexiest woman on the planet. That night at dinner, I wore a slitted skirt and high-heeled sandals that I’d bought on my shopping spree with Laney. Sam and I sent each other more of those looks, and I could have sworn that the temperature soared after the sun went down.
The whole crew was there, since it was Sam’s last night, and we were on post-dinner port and coffee when I started to count the minutes until Sam and I could escape, back to my hotel room, or maybe his. But then Mella, in her sunny way, turned the conversation to Sam, and everything changed.
It started out easy enough. “Why are you running back to chilly Manhattan when you could stay here with us?” she asked. Everyone else joined in, cajoling him to postpone his flight. He and Cole had made up, and Cole called down the table, “Yeah, c’mon, mate. Stick around awhile.”
“I wish I could,” Sam said, and under the table he gave my leg a light kick. “But I have to get back.”
“Back to that boring magazine,” Mella said. “Call them and tell them that we’re a problem shoot. Tell them you’ve got to stick around.”
“Well, you’re all a bunch of deviants so that wouldn’t be a lie,” Sam said, and everyone laughed. We were all giddy on the wine and the Caribbean breeze.
“Seriously,” Sam said, “my son has a soccer game tomorrow night, so I’ve definitely got to leave.”
Someone called to the waiter for more port, and the conversation split up into little, individual ones again. Chad, who was on my right, wearing all white (including a little white beret) began bitching about his errant boyfriend. I nodded and managed to make appropriately outraged responses, but my mind was still on what Sam had said—my son…my son has a soccer game. I’d managed to forget that he had the divorce back home and two kids. I had conveniently pushed away the fact that he was singularly wrong for me, for what I wanted to do with my life, and although I shouldn’t care less—we were on a Caribbean island, for Christ’s sake! It was just sex!—already I couldn’t think of it like that. I liked him. Or at least, I thought I could like him if we spent more time together, and so being with him again that night would have been dangerous. I’d had too much heartache this year as it was. I’d lost too many people.
And so, when he knocked on my door an hour later, I stepped outside, kissed him on the cheek and said goodbye.
24
UChic had booked Cole and me first-class tickets home from Puerto Rico to Chicago. Normally that would have made me very happy, but as I sank into the wide leather seat, it seemed like a metaphor for my life—too big and slightly awkward feeling, with enough room to squeeze in someone else. And yet no one fit the bill.
The saccharine voice of the flight attendant came over the intercom announcing our flight time, and I dutifully fastened my seat belt.
“Christ, I hate flying,” Cole said, arranging and rearranging himself next to me—organizing magazines in the seat pocket, fumbling with his seat belt, then unclasping it a
gain to reach down and get something else from his bag.
I picked up the in-flight magazine, trying to figure out what movie we’d get, what kind of music I could listen to on the headphones, anything to keep myself from thinking about landing at O’Hare and taking a cab back to that lonely apartment. I tried to get myself psyched up, telling myself that I was about to turn over another new leaf. I was about to recreate myself again, this time back into someone with definable goals and a plan for getting herself there.
“So, what happened with you and Sam, eh?” Cole said.
I sat motionless for a few seconds, trying to figure out if he really knew something or whether he was just fishing. “What do you mean?”
“What do you think I mean? I’m not a blithering idiot. I know you two were snogging.”
I wasn’t sure if “snogging” was a British term for kissing or having sex, or whether it was a Coley Beckett word that he’d made up to signify God-knows-what, so I didn’t answer him right away.
“Oh, c’mon,” Cole said. “I know you fancy him.”
“Did he say something to you?”
“God, no. The man’s a bloody vault when it comes to that stuff, but I could see something was happening.”
I sighed. “Well, you won’t see anything more. It was just one of those island romances, you know?”
The plane was accelerating down the runway now, hurtling faster and faster. Cole leaned his head back and closed his eyes, and yet his hands tugged at the collar of the lime-green bowling shirt he wore. “I hate flying,” he said again. “Especially the takeoff. It’s bloody unnatural. Talk to me, Kelly Kelly.”
“How about a question?”
“Fine.” His eyes were still squeezed shut. The front wheels lifted off the ground, soon followed by that weird moment of suspension when the bulk of the plane became airborne.
A Clean Slate Page 24