The One In My Heart

But I never managed.

Sometimes I came as soon as I got to the part about the two of us returning to your hotel room. Sometimes I didn’t even last that long—we’d have barely sat down to coffee. And sometimes all you had to do was say hello, and I’d come to a fiery end, like the Death Star.

Both of them.

Oh, God, now I’d gone and compared myself to a space explosion, the celluloid depiction of which was riddled with scientific inaccuracies. If his phone was ever hacked—or mine—I’d never be able to show my face in public again.

Yet I kept going. I told him exactly where I stroked, rubbed, and sometimes pinched. I told him how I liked to keep the room absolutely dark, and my eyes tightly shut, so that my fantasy took on the greatest clarity and verisimilitude. I told him how afterward, still trembling from my multiple climaxes, I’d peel off my pajamas, feel the sheets against my skin, and imagine instead that it was his hands and his body upon me—and perhaps start the process all over again.

When my shoulders started locking, because I’d held the phone at a strange position for too long, I finally set down the device from hell and groaned into my pillow, dying from mortification.

And imagined him sleeping soundly while my midnight insanity invaded his phone, packet after packet of relentless crazy.

And relentless yearning.


“BENNETT’S WORKING TONIGHT, RIGHT?” ASKED Zelda the next evening, which happened to be the start of the weekend.

I sprinkled some salt into the eggs I’d just finished beating. “His shift is until midnight.”

Thank goodness, or I’d have to explain why I was staying home. But what was I going to say tomorrow evening, when he had no shift and I was still hanging around my own house?

“I do admire that boy,” said Zelda, checking on the leftover scalloped potatoes she was reheating in the oven. “I’m not sure I’d still work—let alone work so hard—if I had that sort of money sitting in the bank.”

I lit the stove, set a pan over the flames, and dropped a pat of butter inside. “He probably knows he’d be up to no good if he didn’t stay busy.”

“He won’t hear any arguments from me about keeping busy. You, darling, on the other hand, could stand to become a little less busy.”

“Won’t be long now before my tenure review.”

When’s the wedding?

August.

Why August?

‘Cause she’ll have passed tenure review and I’ll have finished with my fellowship. And we can have a nice long honeymoon before her schedule goes crazy again in September.

“Isn’t the butter hot enough?” Zelda reminded me.

I started. “Right. Thanks.”

The mushroom, spinach, and ham I’d cut up for our dinner omelet went into the pan. Zelda sneaked in with her fork and stole a piece of ham. “Since you’re home tonight, how about we stream a movie?”

“Sure.”

Anything to keep me from sending deeply humiliating texts that added up to the length of Broadway from end to end.

Of course I hadn’t had any replies from him. And that was the most humiliating part of all: He conducted himself with dignity, whereas I behaved like an adolescent in the throes of her first breakup, all self-indulgent misery and hormone-driven drama.

I put half an omelet and one scoop of scalloped potato on the plate for each of us and carried the plates to the living room. Zelda had just sat down next to me, remote in hand, when her phone dinged with the sound of an incoming text. I picked up the phone from the coffee table and handed it to her.

Had Bennett read my texts? Or had their scent of lunacy been too strong for him to do more than scroll through, shaking his head at that endless spew of verbiage?

“My God!” cried Zelda.

I almost dropped my plate. “What’s going on?”

“Frances Somerset texted from the hospital. Her husband had a heart attack.”

“What?” I clutched the rim of my plate. “Is he okay?”

“They’re operating right now, a quadruple bypass.”

“Jesus. Does Bennett know?”

“She’s been trying to contact him. His hospital says he’s in surgery and they don’t expect him to come out for at least another two hours.”

I turned off the TV. “Which hospital is his dad at? Does his mom need someone to stay with her?”

Zelda exchanged further texts with Mrs. Somerset. Fifteen minutes later we were in a cab, huddled close together on the backseat.

“It can all go away in a heartbeat,” murmured Zelda, as the cab glided forward.

I stared out the window. Cones of orange light from street lamps punctuated the night; shadows of still-bare branches swayed back and forth on walls and sidewalks.

At the hospital we found Mrs. Somerset in a nondescript waiting room. Dressed in an incongruously glamorous gown of black cashmere, she rocked back and forth in her chair, her hands over the lower half of her face.