Finally the jet bridge was retracted and Stewart instructed them to make sure that the cabin was prepared for takeoff. He said it was time to strap in. They began their taxi, and then they were rolling down the runway and she felt the shimmy that suggested they were seconds from wheels up, and then they were. They were climbing, airborne, and they were leaving Dubai. They were, once more, leaving behind the indoor ski resort, the massive, man-made marinas in the shape of palm trees you could see from space, and the skyline with its towering, futuristic needles. The vending machines that sold gold. They were soaring over the endless rows of oil wells and oil rigs—from the sky, they looked like industrious black ants chained in place to the ground—and then the desert, endless, flat, and unfurling in waves and ripples and hillocks to the western horizon.
And with that came the tears. They were as unexpected as they were unstoppable, and she allowed them to slide down her face and muck up her mascara. She cried silently, aware that none of the passengers could see her here in her jump seat. Megan might look over and wonder at what a hot mess she had become, but Megan had flown with her enough to know that she would rally. She cried, she guessed, in some small way because she was so deeply relieved: she was leaving the Arabian Peninsula, where it was hard enough to be a woman and probably a disaster if you were a woman that men believed had nearly decapitated some poor money manager in an inexplicable fit of arak-fueled postcoital madness. But she was crying mostly, she realized, out of grief and sorrow and loss. Now that the self-preservation that had gotten her this far had begun to dissolve, she thought about the man she had left behind, and for the first time—the shock evaporating like the morning haze she’d recall as the sun would rise over the Cumberland Mountains—she began to feel the despair that walks hand in hand with bereavement.
She made a litany in her mind of the little she knew of Alex Sokolov’s personal life: He was an only child. His parents in Charlottesville were starting to toy with the idea of retirement, though it was still a good ways off. (God, that only reminded her of how young he was: his parents had yet to retire.) He said he had been with the fund nearly four years—and that’s what he called it whenever it came up, “the fund”—and before that he’d worked for Goldman Sachs. But he had worked in money management since getting some sort of master’s in math—quantitative something and finance something—in Durham. (In the same way that he only offered the name of his employer when she asked, he only said Duke when she pressed for more details.) He preferred Tolstoy and Turgenev to Dostoevsky, but encouraged her to reread all three writers “as an adult, instead of as a student pulling an all-nighter.”
He had not simply gotten them a table for two at the French bistro a couple of blocks from his hotel, he had paid off the ma?tre d’ to seat them in a corner and not seat anyone else at the table beside them. At first she’d viewed the move as pretentious male swagger, but as they were approaching their table he had whispered into her ear that he viewed romance as a totally private matter, and he wanted to romance her that night. Later he would pick up a tab that dwarfed what she usually spent over three nights in Paris and Dubai; it was more than she spent most months on groceries. He had ordered the blanquette de veau and she had ordered the coq au vin, joking that after all the arak they had consumed, it only made sense for her to eat chicken in wine (though of course, he reminded her, the alcohol would have cooked away). They had enjoyed their meal, savoring the seclusion, and taken their time. They finished a bottle of wine and then ordered still more arak. And yet despite how far down the alcohol rabbit hole they fell there, they never lost sight of the fact they were in Dubai. They both had been here before and knew that the penalties for public drunkenness were not pretty. The two of them were far from raucous. They flirted in their own little alcove, but didn’t touch. He kept his voice low as he told her the things he wanted to do to her in his hotel room once he joined her there. He slid his room key across the tablecloth, and she shivered ever so slightly when their fingertips touched.
When the police would follow his credit card to the restaurant, people would recall he had been with a woman who was likely from America because the two of them had spoken English like Americans. Someone might recall that she was older than he was. But had they stood out? A bit, yes, because they had indeed ordered arak and wine and then more arak. But she was confident that at least half, perhaps even two-thirds, of the diners in the restaurant were Westerners. They hadn’t made a scene.
He liked soccer, she remembered, and had played it at college. He liked squash even more, and played it still.
The notion that he, too, was a boozer—at least for one night—caused her to feel a deep, wistful ache in her heart. Everyone who drank the way she did had a reason, she supposed, and she had never pressed him for his. Did he have one? Now she’d never know. Certainly he had never wondered about her own private pain.
He smoked. She hadn’t kissed a man in a while who did, and with Alex it hadn’t been like kissing an ashtray. It had felt decadent in all the right ways. He said he only smoked when he traveled overseas.
In his hotel room, they had started on the bed as soon as he’d returned, atop the crimson bedspread, but then he had brought her to the shower. She’d been surprised, unsure whether she should be more stunned by his astonishing willpower that moment or insulted in some way that she didn’t quite want to parse, but she had gone along and she was glad. They had made love there, her knees on that marble bench, his hands and fingers around her, between her legs, and then he had washed her hair.
And that recollection made her choke on a small, audible sob right there in her jump seat.
“God, you’re crying,” Megan whispered, her tone walking the tightrope between solicitous and annoyed. “Can I do something?”
“No.”
“Then what’s wrong?”
Cassie sniffed and wiped her face with her fingers. “I don’t know,” she lied. “I swear I don’t. But I’m fine. Or I’ll be fine.”
Afterward, Miranda had arrived. Then Miranda had left and Cassie had planned to leave, too. But Alex had led her instead back to that astonishing bedroom, where they had made love again. They polished off the little bottle of arak they found in the minibar. (At least she believed at the time they had finished it; when she had wiped the blue glass down with the washcloth in the morning, she had heard some liquid sloshing around the bottom.) Then they went back to the vodka. For some reason, he’d had trouble unscrewing the cap and accidentally broken the bottle on the side of the nightstand. (Or had he smashed it on purpose in frustration?) Instead of cleaning it up, they’d just laughed. She thought she had gotten dressed to leave. But it was less than a blur, it was a void. She’d been naked when she awoke. What the hell happened to climbing back into her skirt and blouse and returning to her hotel?
God, it was just like so many of the other times she had woken up naked and hungover in bed with a guy, with only the slightest idea how she had gotten there—except this time the guy was dead.
She took stock once more, trying to make sense of what she had done. What she might have done. Had he attacked her and she had defended herself? Possibly, but not likely. They’d had sex twice that she could recall. Still, no means no. Passed out isn’t consent. What if behind the blackout is this: He is trying to have sex with her and she is resisting? They’re drunk, they’re both drunk. He is upon her, he won’t stop, and she is pounding him on his head, his face, his back. She is trying to scratch him, and he is just growing angrier and more violent. She sees nearby the remnants of that bottle of Stoli. Perhaps some of the broken pieces are even on the nightstand. She reaches for one—that jagged shoulder, maybe, gripping the neck like a knife—and she lashes out at him. She slashes him across his throat. She can see in her mind the backhand motion, the resultant gash.
And then she falls back to sleep.