I nodded.
He shook his head. “There are no others.”
“What does ‘right now’ mean to you exactly? Today? This evening? This week? What does that mean?”
He took a moment too long to formulate his answer.
“You know what? Never mind. I don’t want to do this to you. I don’t even know that I want to know.”
“Okay,” he said, slow, careful.
“You’re trying not to hurt me.”
He nodded, biting his lip.
“Fuck.”
“I’m trying not to mislead you,” he said, soft, his hand moving in my hair. “I just want to make certain we’re on the same page.”
“Hayes, I haven’t done this in a while. I don’t even know what the page looks like.”
He chuckled at that, kissing the top of my head. “It looks like this, Solène. We get together when we can, and we really, really, really enjoy each other’s company. And I wouldn’t say we were just fucking.”
I took a moment to process that. “Are you doing that with anyone else?”
“That? Right now? No.”
“Right now this week?”
“Right now this month. Does that work for you?”
I nodded. “If it changes, will you let me know? I’m not going to lose my mind, I just want to know.”
“If it changes, I will let you know.”
He kissed my head again, and I could feel him breathing me in. So much lay in what we were not saying.
“What’d you do while I was gone?” he asked. His hand had found its way back to my knees, rings cool against my skin.
“Went through all your stuff. I sold your underwear for ten thousand dollars on eBay.”
“Only ten?”
“Turns out fourteen-year-old girls don’t have that much money.”
“They do in Dubai.” He smiled, his fingers traveling farther up my skirt, prying open my thighs. “Are you splitting the proceeds with me?”
“I wasn’t planning on it.”
He laughed then. “Somehow that doesn’t seem fair.”
“Life isn’t fair.”
“It’s not.” He’d arrived at my underwear, the tips of his fingers tracing over damp cotton. “You know how I know that? Because tonight I get to have you … and no one else does.”
“You’d better earn it. Hayes Campbell.”
“I always do.”
*
It might have been the ghosts of the Chateau Marmont, and the feeling that wild things had happened there. It might have been the fact that we’d been separated for two weeks. It might have been my sudden determination not to be replaced. But that night, although Hayes might have had another word for it, we fucked like rock stars.
He was thorough and intense and insatiable. And the third time he handed me a new condom package to open, while he simultaneously disposed of another, I paused.
“Do you never need recovery time? Ever?”
He smiled, shaking his beautiful head. “I’m twenty.”
I tried to remember what sex with Daniel was like in the beginning, and sex with my two boyfriends in college, and sex with the boy from Saint-Rapha?l, all who were in the realm of twenty, and while I could remember the appetite, I did not recall this level of stamina. But maybe that was just me getting older.
“You tired?” he asked, taking the condom from me and slowly rolling it on. Just watching him do that was a turn-on. Hayes, with his dick in his hands.
“Yes. But don’t let that stop you.”
He laughed. “Do you want to stop? We can stop, Solène.” Even as he was saying it, he was lifting me by the hips, hoisting me above him, determined. Round four.
He took his time guiding it in. Eyes peeled to mine, teeth sinking into his bottom lip, hips rising. “Just say the word and we can stop.”
“Really?” I smiled.
“Really.” His hands moved up over my hips and around to my ass. “Although, I’m no expert, but … it feels to me like you don’t want to stop.”
“Is that what your dick is telling you?”
“Fu-uck.” He started to laugh. “I think I might love you.”
“Don’t say that.”
“I’m just putting it out there as a possibility.”
I stopped moving then, folding into him, close. “Not even as a joke.”
“Okay,” he said, serious.
“You’re trying not to mislead me, remember?
“I like you.” I kissed him, deep. “A lot. But as long as you’re fucking other people, you’re not allowed to make jokes about being in love with me.”
“I’m sorry.” His hands had moved to my hair, holding it out of my face.
Neither of us spoke for a moment. And then: “Are you angry with me?”
I shook my head, rising up off his chest, moving on top of him again, not wanting to lose this precious thickness. His gift that kept giving. “Does it feel like I’m angry?”
He smiled, even as his breath was quickening, his hands cupping my breasts. “I’m not sure. I can’t read you.”
I didn’t respond, but the thought went through my head that maybe it was better that way.
When it was over and I lay on top of him, feeling the layer of sweat between us and drinking in his four-times-over postcoital scent, he held me, tighter than he ever had, and said nothing.
*
In the morning Hayes blew off an appointment with his trainer and chose to come with me to the gallery instead. “I want to see what you do when I’m not with you,” he’d said at some point during our debauched night. He’d uttered it at a moment in which its meaning could have been taken in a variety of ways. But when we awoke, he made himself clear. “So it’s Take Your Lover to Work Day, right?”
I had an unexpected surge of nerves driving down La Cienega with him in the front seat of the Range Rover. The idea that I had his life in my hands, this irreplaceable commodity, and that should anything happen to him on my watch I would be forever culpable. It was like driving with Isabelle as a newborn all over again: the pressure, the fear.
It is likely I had never seen Lulit’s eyes as wide as when I walked into the gallery with Swagger Spice. I had not warned her or the others. It was the day before our July opening, and I knew they’d be swamped with detailing the show. I did not want to give her something else to think about until he was already there.
Her jaw dropped and she moved to fix her hair, which was in a perfectly messy topknot. She was in jeans and no makeup and she was still flawless. Her enviable brown skin that would not age.
“You’ve brought … company.”
“I have.” I smiled, wide. A whole conversation transpired between us then without a word spoken. “Hayes, this is my partner, Lulit Raphel. Lulit, Hayes.”
“So this is the famous Lulit. It’s a pleasure. I’ve heard plenty about you.” Hayes’s voice sounded particularly deep in the cavernous space. Gravelly. As if he’d been up eating pussy until four in the morning. Which, indeed, he had.
“Lovely to meet you, Hayes.”
“God, this space is brilliant.” He began walking around, admiring the layout, the art. The juxtaposition of Cho’s atmospheric images and James’s emotional landscapes. Both abstract, more metaphoric than literal. Smoke and mirrors.
“You want a guided tour, or you want to wander on your own?”
“I want to wander first.”