Page 13

Katrina

In the movies, people wake up in the bed of someone they barely know after a one-night stand and express shock: What have I done?

Katrina does not do this. First of all, she doesn’t wake up .

She’s been awake all night, contemplating the strangeness of being in bed with this man.

She is also not appalled. What she feels is bemused pride.

A smile comes to his face before he even opens his eyes. It’s as if he has become conscious of her presence before visually confirming it, and this consciousness brings him joy. It feels good to be the source of someone’s joy.

“Good morning, beautiful,” he says as he opens his eyes.

She watches him watching her come into focus. His smile gets wider. He evidently has no regrets about their night together. Either he has one-night stands all the time, or he doesn’t think this is a one-night stand.

“Good morning, handsome,” she says.

He really is so handsome. She wonders if here, in this bed, with the morning light streaming in across her face (likely highlighting the wrinkles that seem to multiply by the day), he will realize that she is not on par with him, attractiveness-wise.

He reaches over, puts his hand on her bare stomach, seemingly oblivious to its folds and flaws. Are they going to have sex again ? She wasn’t anticipating that, was thinking they would say their awkward goodbyes and go back to their regular lives.

“How did you sleep?” he asks.

He’s sweet. In another life, she would have heart eyes while imagining their future together. But she has this life, and her future is spoken for. The heart-eyes days are behind her.

“I slept fine,” she tells him. May as well keep the lies going.

“That’s good,” he says, sliding closer to her in bed. He kisses her forehead, then her nose, then her lips. She wants to giggle at the preposterousness of this. She wishes there was someone filming the whole thing so she could have evidence of it happening.

He rolls on top of her, takes her hands in his, and holds them up above her head. As sweet as he is, he also knows how to take charge. It surprised her last night, the way he handled her. She wonders how many women he’s slept with. Judging by his skill, she guesses dozens.

“You are so hot,” he says, kissing her neck, a spot that triggers full-body goose bumps.

His lips travel down her body until they are at her inner thighs, and then his tongue is inside her and she writhes around.

When she moans, she wonders for a split second who is making those sounds.

She is both embarrassed and impressed upon realizing it’s her.

She didn’t know she had it in her. With her husband, any moaning is manufactured, produced in attempts to hurry things along.

She didn’t know that moans could occur naturally, involuntarily.

Their sex is slow, with less urgency than the night before. He is both gentle and direct. After this, she doesn’t know how she can go back to the old kind of sex, the rushed and forced and unfeeling kind. It’s possible he has ruined her. Or resurrected her. Is there a difference?

He doesn’t leap out of bed after they are done. He lies next to her, catching his breath, his skin hot and sticky against hers. He strokes her face with one of his fingers.

“You want to go to breakfast?” he asks.

Breakfast? What thirty-year-old man wants to take his one-night stand to breakfast?

He must see the surprise on her face because he says, “What? You just wanted to thank me for my services and run?”

Kind of, she thinks.

“No, no,” she assures him, unsure what to say.

“Then join me for breakfast,” he says. “After all, we burned a lot of calories.”

She hesitates. Sitting with him at a dark bar and then going back to his apartment is one thing. Going out with him in broad daylight is another. There is little chance someone she knows would see her, but what if ?

“There’s this cute little French bistro nearby,” he says.

What thirty-year-old man uses the word cute ?

“Okay,” she says, figuring What the hell? She is starving, after all.

He gets out of bed, and she watches him walk to the bathroom, admiring his body, his musculature. Adonis, indeed. She hears the shower go on, and he comes back to stand naked in the bathroom doorway.

“Join me?” he says.

In the shower? she thinks. The desire to giggle returns.

She hasn’t showered with a man for any reason other than efficiency since her early twenties.

Even then, she remembers thinking it was impractical.

There is nothing romantic about togetherness in the shower.

If anything, it causes resentment because someone always has to shiver away from the hot-water stream.

“Come on,” he says.

Again she thinks What the hell? The last twelve hours have been about completely abandoning everything she thought she knew of herself.

Thankfully, Elijah has one of those showerheads that’s on the ceiling, so they don’t have to jockey for position in the stream of water.

Instead, it feels like they are caught in a tropical rainstorm together, which is sort of lovely.

He soaps up her body, rubs his hands all over her.

She does the same to him. If she thinks about this moment too hard, she will burst out laughing at the absurdity of it.

Last week, if someone had told her that she would be standing in a shower with a gorgeous man she’d met at a bar, she would have gone into hysterics.

When they get out, he wraps her in a plush towel, and she can’t help but wonder if he would always be like this.

If they were actually in a relationship—which they will never be—would he be this attentive?

Unlikely. It’s easy to be the ideal guy when the woman you’ve just slept with is about to drive home to a faraway city.

She dresses in her clothes from the night before, both aghast at and delighted with herself, a forty-year-old woman doing the walk of shame.

She wraps her wet hair into a bun and asks Elijah if she can borrow a hat—something she can hide under to help ease her anxieties about someone she knows seeing her.

He gives her an A’s baseball cap and tells her she looks adorable in it. Who is this guy?

The bistro is a short walk from his apartment. She feels paranoid, exposed in the sunlight. She’s thankful when they get a table on the back patio.

“I want everything,” she tells him as they peruse the menu.

“Everything?” he asks.

She nods. This is who Katrina is—a hungry, greedy woman driven by her base instincts.

“Let’s get everything, then,” he says, not missing a beat.

They settle on three things—pancakes, eggs benedict, and a scramble. They will share, which seems too intimate for people who will soon part ways and never see each other again, but she really does want to try each of the dishes. And what Katrina wants, Katrina gets.

After the waitress comes and goes, Elijah sits back in his chair.

“So,” he says, a mischievous grin on his face, “I’ve been thinking.”

“Oh god, that doesn’t sound good.”

He laughs.

“You should stay a few days with me,” he says.

She’s both flattered and panicked.

“I can’t,” she says. “I’ve got so much going on, and—”

“Okay, just one more day, then. Play hooky.”

“So you do have a mischievous side,” she says.

“Of course.”

“I was beginning to think you were some kind of saint.”

He furrows his brows. “Why’s that?”

“You’re just so . . . nice .”

He unfurrows his brows, laughs. “You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

“It’s very strange,” she says.

“You don’t have a lot of nice men in your life?”

She considers this. “I find most men to be very egocentric.”

He nods. “They are. We’re socialized that way, told to be tough, hide emotion, win no matter what.”

“I thought you were a lawyer. You sound like a shrink.”

He laughs again. “A wannabe lawyer. Not a shrink. But I was raised by a sociology professor.”

“Your dad is a sociology professor?”

“Ah, see, you just revealed hidden bias, assuming professor equals male,” he says. “What if I had said sociology teacher ? Would you assume female?”

She rolls her eyes, hiding her shame behind annoyance with his pedantry. “So your mother is a sociology professor?”

He taps his nose with his index finger.

“Well, please thank her for raising you to be a nice gentleman.”

“I will,” he says. “She’ll appreciate that.”

“I can see it now: ‘Hey, Mom, this woman I had a one-night stand with said you’re a good parent.’”

“I was kind of hoping this wasn’t just a one-night stand.”

She sighs, her fear realized. Leave it to her to find the one hopeless-romantic man in existence at a phase of her life when she wants nothing to do with hopeless romance.

He leans forward, elbows on the table, and looks into her eyes. She wants desperately to look away but wills herself to hold his gaze.

“I mean, if that’s what you want, that’s okay,” he says, “but that’s not really my style.”

“Oh,” she says, dumbly. Then: “What’s your style?”

“I’ve honestly never had a one-night stand,” he says.

She is shocked.

“You haven’t?”

He shakes his head. “Like I said, not my style.”

“But I told you I was from out of town,” she says, aware she sounds like she is pleading a case.

“I know. I guess I’m not scared off by a little distance between us.”

Christ, what have I gotten myself into?

“You don’t even know me,” she says. Because, really, he doesn’t.

“I get a good vibe. It can’t just be me who felt a connection, right?”

He looks so earnest. It’s the eyes—those eyes! She has never met someone so sincere, so forthright, so honest. Yes, she barely knows him, but she can say that with confidence.

“It’s not just you,” she says.

It’s true. She does feel a connection. But she is older than him, arguably wiser. For all they know, this “connection” is just lust. They are awash in dopamine, stupid from it.

“Okay then,” he says.

The waitress brings their food, places the three plates on the table in front of them.

“This looks delicious,” Katrina says.

They take their first forkfuls, the sharing of entrées not nearly as awkward as she thought it would be. She feels comfortable with him in a way that’s hard to explain, almost as if she’s known him before, like they are old childhood friends who have reunited.

“I love a woman who can eat,” he says.

“So do I.”

They don’t talk much while they eat. When they’ve made a significant dent, he puts down his fork and wipes his mouth with his napkin, then says, “I just realized your car is still parked at the bar.”

“Shit,” she says, imagining the ticket stuck under a windshield wiper. There are all sorts of parking rules in this city.

“I’ll walk there with you. If there’s a ticket, I insist on paying it.”

She sits back in her chair, hands on her full belly.

“Seriously, you are too nice,” she says. “But you don’t need to pay my ticket.”

“I want to,” he says. “I’ll consider it the price to pay for the pleasure of your company.”

“Okay, that just makes me sound like a hooker.”

He laughs again, this one big and hearty.

“You crack me up, Kat,” he says.

Kat.

He pays their bill, and they walk past his apartment to the bar. Her car is the lone one in the lot, and amazingly, there is no ticket affixed to the window.

“It’s a miracle,” she says.

“I wouldn’t say that.” He points to the sign explaining the parking rules. “You abided by the rules, that’s all.”

“My abiding by the rules is a miracle.”

She fumbles around in her purse for her keys. She would be lying if she said she didn’t feel sad saying goodbye to him. She has felt better, more alive, in the past twelve hours than she has in the past few years.

“I’m really sad to see you go,” he says.

“I am too.” A truth amid so many lies.

“I still think you should play hooky from your regular life.”

She smiles. “I can’t.”

“Well, if you change your mind, here’s my number,” he says, handing her a blue Post-it.

She recalls a stack of blue Post-its on his kitchen counter at his apartment and says, “Did you really write your number on this and have it in your pocket to give to me?”

He nods. “I did.”

“You’re an old soul.”

“So I’ve been told,” he says.

“Well, thanks,” she says, holding the Post-it.

Maybe she’ll enter the number in her phone, under the name E.

It could be fun just to have it there, to confirm his existence and reinvigorate herself with the memory of their dalliance.

It would be like a little bump of cocaine to her system, not that she’s ever done a little bump of cocaine.

She’s always been a good girl. Until now, at least.

“It would make me feel better if we saw each other again,” he says. “I really don’t know if I can live with myself for having a one-night stand.”

“We had sex this morning, so technically it was more than one night.”

“You’re killing me.”

“I’m sorry.” Another truth.

He goes to her, pulls her body close to his, and she feels that jolt of desire again. He wraps his arms around her so tightly, and she feels suddenly like crying—not a few tears, but surging sobs of both sadness and gratitude. He has given her life. He will never know this, not fully, but he has.

They pull apart, and he takes her face in both his hands and kisses her.

“Goodbye, Ms. Katrina,” he says, his farewell words, the false name, reminding her that he doesn’t really know her at all.

“Goodbye, Elijah.”

She gets in her car, despite everything in her body telling her not to. As silly as it is, she misses him before she even puts the key in the ignition.