“Do you even remember anything?” she says, after a while.
I stop for a second. “No,” I lie, flashes of Jessie’s ass swaying in my hands immediately playing themselves out in my mind. “I don’t remember a thing.”
“Okay,” Jessie says, tightening the sheet around her body as she gets up out of the bed, “then maybe we can just forget this ever happened.”
I look at her as if she’s just solved the secret of life.
“You think we can do that?”
She shrugs, her bare shoulders making me immediately remember how she went down on me, my hands in her hair as she bobbed back and forth, sucking me hard into the back of her throat, her moans reverberating against the head of my cock. Fuck, snap out of it.
“Here’s what we do,” she says, with the determined slyness of someone explaining a robbery, “I get in the shower, you leave. We don’t see each other for a month – no, two months. Then when we do see each other again, and for as long as we live, we never bring this up again. It never happened. No excuses. No apologies. No explanations.”
“What about—”
“And no Kyle. I don’t want him finding out any more than you do. He’d kill me, too. Deal?”
I blink at her with hungover eyes, processing what she’s just offered me. “You really think that plan will work?”
“We need it to work.”
I nod slowly.
“Okay,” I say, starting to scan the room again. “I just need to find my shoe.”
Jessie sighs, tightens the sheet around her again, and moves toward the bathroom.
“Well hurry up, ’cause I’m gonna get in the shower now.”
“What if I don’t find it?”
Jessie shoots me a look of utter disbelief.
“What are you, Cinderella? Fuck the shoe, Nate!”
She goes into the bathroom and I watch her close the door, smiling to myself. For a split-second, I almost wonder if I should leave at all. Then I spot my shoe behind the trash can, and I take it as a sign to get the hell out of there and never look back.
2
Nate
Kyle’s already there when I get to the bar, hunched over a table in a booth, staring at his beer like he wants to fight it, his small, wheeled suitcase beside him. I grab the barman’s attention and order two more beers to be sent to the table, then make my way over.
“Did the Lakers lose?” I say, patting him on the shoulder.
He looks up and smiles weakly as we clasp hands.
“Dude, the Lakers always lose now.”
I settle myself down on the other side of the table. It’s kind of disturbing to see him when he’s down, partly because he looks like Captain America, and partly because, for him, there’s a thin line between the emotions of anger and sadness. In fact, there’s a thin line between anger and pretty much any emotion when it comes to Kyle. He’s got a pair of shoulders that make you wonder if he’s wearing football padding, and the kind of square jaw that would break any fist stupid enough to hit it. Under a certain light, his short blonde hair and crystal-blue eyes give him an all-American good-guy action-hero charm, but anyone who knows him will tell you that’s just for show. If his job as a lawyer didn’t require him to be so clean-cut, he’d grow a beard, cover his body with tattoos, and swap his suit for sweatpants quicker than you could say ‘fight night.’
“So what’s up?” I ask, as Kyle drains the last of his beer, and the barman puts the two more I ordered in front of us.
“Jessie. Again.”
“What happened?”
“A whole load of shouting, arguing, and foot stomping, that’s what happened.”
I shrug, taking a long swig of my beer. “And there was heavy traffic on the 101 this morning – the same old bad news isn’t worth worrying about all the time.”
“No, it wasn’t like that. It was different this time.”
I gaze around at the nearly-empty bar. Kyle chose it. Probably to make sure my attention wasn’t distracted.
“How so?”
Kyle tenses and sighs so heavily he sounds like a boiler breaking down. At this angle he looks like a bull about to charge.
“She’s just…all she does is complain about her life, but when I give her solutions, she never listens! She’s still working on that crappy TV show – sixteen hour days most of the time. They pay her next to nothing and they treat her like she’s still an intern. Get this, I met her for lunch a couple days ago and apart from the fact that she could only sit with me for twenty minutes, she had to go and order about forty lunches for the crew and take them back herself! Can you believe that shit? She’s gonna have a fucking meltdown.”