Before
I lead her to a high-rise apartment building on Kenmore. We take the elevator to the seventh floor. Loud music pours out of another apartment as we make our way down the piss-stained carpeting to a door at the end of the hall. I open the door as she stands by. It’s dark in the apartment. Only the stove light is on. I cross the parquet floors and flip on a lamp beside the sofa. The shadows disappear and are replaced with the contents of my meager living: Sports Illustrated magazines, a collection of shoes barricading the closet door, a half-eaten bagel on a paper plate on the coffee table. I watch silently as she judges me. It’s quiet. A neighbor has made Indian food tonight and the scent of curry chokes her.
“You okay?” she asks because she hates the uncomfortable silence. She’s probably thinking this was all a mistake, that she should leave.
I walk to her and run a hand down the length of her hair, grasping the strands at the base of her skull. I stare at her, placing her upon a pedestal, and see in her eyes how she wishes, if only for a moment, to stay there. It’s a place she hasn’t been for quite some time. She forgot how it felt to have someone stare that way. She kisses me and forgets altogether about leaving.
I press my lips against hers in a way that’s new and familiar all at the same time. My touch is assertive. I’ve done this a thousand times. It puts her at ease. If I were awkward, refusing to make the first move, she’d have time to reconsider. But as it is, it happens too fast.
And then, as quickly as it began, it’s over. I change my mind, pull away, and she asks, “What?” short of breath. “What’s wrong?” she begs, trying to pull me back to her. Her hands drop to my waistband, her drunken fingers clumsily work my belt.
“It’s a bad idea,” I say as I turn away from her.
“Why?” her voice begs. She grasps at my shirt in desperation. I move away, out of reach. And then, it sinks in slowly—the rejection. She’s embarrassed. She presses her hands to her face like she’s hot, clammy.
She drops onto the arm of a chair and tries to catch her breath. Around her, the room spins. I can see it in her expression: she isn’t used to hearing the word no. She rearranges a crumpled shirt, runs sweaty hands through her hair, ashamed.
I don’t know how long we stay like that.
“It’s just a bad idea,” I say then, suddenly inspired to pick up my shoes. I throw them in the closet, one pair at a time. They smack the back wall. They fall into a messy pile behind the closet door. And then I close the door, leaving the mess where I can’t see it.
And then the resentment creeps in and she asks, “Why did you bring me here? Why did you bring me here, if only to humiliate me?”
I picture us at the bar. I imagine my own greedy eyes when I leaned in and suggested, “Let’s get out of here.” I told her my apartment was just down the street. We all but ran the entire way.
I stare at her. “It’s not a good idea,” I say again. She stands and reaches for her purse. Someone passes in the hallway, their laughter like a thousand knives. She tries walking, loses her balance.
“Where are you going?” I ask, my body blocking the front door. She can’t leave now.
“Home,” she says.
“You’re wasted.”
“So?” she challenges. She reaches for the chair to steady herself.
“You can’t go,” I insist. Not when I’m this close, I think, but what I say is “Not like this.”
She smiles and says that’s sweet. She thinks I’m worried about her. Little does she know.
I couldn’t care less.
Gabe
After
Grace and Mia Dennett are sitting at my desk when I arrive, their backs turned in my direction. Grace couldn’t look more uncomfortable. She plucks a pen from my desk and removes the chewed-up cap with a sleeve of her shirt. I smooth a paisley tie against my shirt, and as I make my way to them, I hear Grace muttering the words “slovenly appearance” and “unbecoming” and “Spartan skin.” I assume she’s talking about me, and then I hear her say that Mia’s corkscrew locks haven’t seen a hair dryer in weeks; there are neglected bags beneath her eyes. Her clothes are rumpled and look like they should be cloaking the body of someone in junior high, a prepubescent boy no less. She doesn’t smile. “Ironic, isn’t it,” Grace says, “how I wish you’d snap at me—call me a bitch, a narcissist, any of those unpleasant nicknames you had for me in the days before Colin Thatcher.”
But instead Mia just stares.
“Good morning,” I say, and Grace interrupts me curtly with “Think we can get started? I have things to do today.”
“Of course,” I say, and then empty sugar packets into my coffee as slowly as I possibly can. “I was hoping to talk to Mia, see if I can get some information from her.”