by Laura Hankin
She wheeled Hope’s stroller over. The bathroom was lovely, all gray tile, each soap still packaged in its starched paper, the little amber bottles of shampoo gleaming in the soft light. “Ooh, look at this beautiful bathroom!” she said as she pushed the stroller in. “I’ll be right back, sweetie.” She tiptoed out as Hope clapped her hands at the animals.
She shut the door and met Christopher’s eyes again. He was standing now, his jacket in his hand.
“You think I’m crazy,” she said.
“Whitney . . . ,” he said, and he didn’t deny it.
She burst into tears and slid down against the bathroom door to the rug. “I’m sorry,” she said through her sobs. “It’s just a really tough time right now, and all I wanted was to come here and be with you, and the babysitter canceled, and now I’ve made a mess of it all.”
He hesitated, looking over at her. Then he sighed, laid his jacket back on the chair, and sat down next to her, gathering her in his arms, holding her while she cried against him. He smelled like coffee, rich and peppery. She probably smelled like sour sweat from lugging Hope’s stroller around. Through the bathroom door, the faint sounds of barnyard songs tinkled on. Her tears stained the light blue of his shirt to dark navy. His body was rigid against hers. He held her like she was almost a stranger or an old-maid aunt of his who had gotten too drunk and weepy at Thanksgiving, not like she was a lover he’d once said was the sexiest woman alive.
Screw that. She swallowed away the lump in her throat. “I’m sorry,” she said into his chest.
“You don’t have to apologize,” he said, sighing.
“No,” she said, dangling her hand down into his lap and brushing it against him, almost as if it were an accident. “I want to.”
Christopher tightened in a different way, a sort of snapping to attention, and she ran her hand up and down his thigh more insistently. “I’m sorry,” she said, “that I couldn’t wait a whole week more to have you inside of me.”
She glanced up at him through her eyelashes, still wet with tears. The look of apprehension on his face was turning into a look she liked a whole lot more.
“I’m sorry I kept thinking about the way your breath changes when you fill me up,” she said, walking her fingers up to his belt buckle and undoing it. He grasped her shoulder as she slipped her fingers inside his pants, to where he was hardening, and brought him out. “I’m sorry I wanted to taste you,” she breathed, then bent down and ran her tongue over the tip of his penis as lightly as she could. A drop of precum dissolved in her mouth, salty as the ocean. He shivered.
She straightened back up and turned away. “But you’re right,” she said, making as if she were about to stand. “This was too crazy. I’ll go.”
He grabbed her around the waist and threw her roughly down onto the ground, holding her wrists above her head. “You fucking tease,” he growled in her ear, laughing in a sort of disbelief, and then they were kissing, their tongues tasting like her tears, as he ripped open the buttons on her dress and stripped her black lace underwear from her hips.
Some overeager hotel employee had turned on the central AC too early in the year, and a vent blew cold air over Whitney with a low hum. In comparison, Christopher’s mouth was hot against hers, as scalding as the hot coffee he tasted like.
She rubbed herself against him, not letting him inside her just yet. Running her fingers through his curls, she tugged him away from her by his hair, wriggling her hips to a new spot on the rug, just out of reach of where he wanted her. She gripped his face and stared him straight in his hazel eyes, her nose inches away from his bumpy one. “Tell me I was right to come here anyway,” she said.
“You were right,” he said, panting.
She rolled over so she was on top of him, perching just above his penis. Slowly, she lowered herself down, stopping when she’d only taken the first couple of inches of him into her. Her thighs shook. “Tell me how glad you are.”
“I’m so glad,” he said, grasping her ass, and pulled her hard against him. She let out a strangled moan. As they bucked, he dug his fingers into her skin. “God, Whitney, you make me feel so good.”
She smiled against his shoulder as his breathing started to change, and her whole body tingled in anticipation.
And then, from the bathroom, Hope began to cry.
They both looked at the door, their bodies growing rigid. Probably the playlist had stopped. Whitney couldn’t hear the tinkling barnyard song, the helium voices, any longer. She shook her head. “It’s fine,” she said.
“Are you sure?” Christopher asked.
“Yes. Yes,” she said. “Keep going.”
He thrust again and again, but Hope’s cries were echoing off the tiled wall. This bathroom had the acoustics of Carnegie Hall. Christopher’s face set in determination, as if suddenly the act in which they were engaged wasn’t about the pleasure he was feeling but merely about needing to cum. Wanting to get it over with.
He flipped her over and began to drive into her from behind, pulling her hair. The walls of her vagina started stinging, just a little at first and then as if he was opening up a thousand tiny paper cuts to the soundtrack of Hope’s wails. It felt like it did with Grant, she realized with a sudden shock, her eyes beginning to water. She gritted her teeth and willed him to get it over with. She didn’t need her own pleasure today. They could still salvage things, if only he managed to finish. But instead, he pulled out of her abruptly.
“I can’t,” he said, trying to catch his breath. “You need to go get her.” He stood up and walked over to the window.
“I . . . ,” she said, remaining curled on the floor for one moment longer. Then she grabbed her underwear and buttoned up her dress, brushing her sweaty hair out of her face. She rushed into the bathroom, where Hope was pounding on the side of her stroller, the screen dead in front of her. As soon as Hope saw Whitney, she held out her arms, and her wails started tapering into whimpers. “Oh, honey. I’m so sorry,” Whitney said, lifting her child out of her stroller and bouncing the wriggling, beautiful weight of her in her arms. “I’m here. I’m right here,” she murmured. She thought of the dinosaurs at the Museum of Natural History and wondered if Hope would retain something of this too, of this strange man in this strange hotel room, of the unsettling noises coming from the other side of the door while she’d cried and cried. A deep sense of shame spread through Whitney. “You’re okay,” she said as Hope’s whimpers faded too, then turned to call out into the bedroom, in case Christopher was worried. “She’s fine.”
She carried Hope back out into the bedroom to show him, but he was gone, the door swinging closed with a bang that started Hope’s cries right up again. And suddenly Whitney had gone from lover to mother, like a magic spell over which she’d had no control, the reverse of a fairy tale’s happy-ending transformation.
She’d only ever be a mother in his eyes now, and not a very good one at that.
Chapter 29
When she arrived in Whitney’s neighborhood, Claire pulled the hood of her gray sweatshirt over her coppery hair and put on her sunglasses. Then she found a bench on the border of Central Park, right across the street from the familiar limestone building, and sat down to wait, watching the entryway, feeling ridiculous.
Just as she was starting to believe she had made a colossal mistake, the doorman ushered Whitney out of the building, holding the door open for her as she pushed Hope in her stroller and flashed him a grateful smile. The man hailed her a taxi, and once it pulled over to the curb, Whitney, the doorman, and the taxi driver began the laborious process of collapsing the stroller, installing a car seat, and buckling Hope into it, Whitney profusely apologizing as the taxi driver stamped his feet with impatience. You couldn’t take a baby to a massage! She’d known Whitney was lying.
Claire hailed her own cab and slid into the back. “Good afternoon!” the driver said, cheerful, as loud Ch
ristian hymns played on the radio. “Where are you going?”
“Just follow that cab, please,” Claire said, peering out the window
“You got it, lady,” the man said, and glanced at her in the rearview mirror. “I hope you don’t mind me asking, but are you a follower of Jesus Christ?”
“Um,” Claire said. Whitney’s taxi took off, and Claire jabbed her finger toward it. “Oh, go!” Claire’s driver swerved into the middle lane to follow.
“I take that as a no,” her driver said, chuckling. “But it’s never too late to accept Him into your heart.”
The most stressful fifteen-minute cab ride of Claire’s life followed, during which she was torn between worrying that they were going to lose Whitney’s trail and that the driver was going to get them killed by following too recklessly, cutting in front of other cars and leaving a cacophony of honks in their wake. All the while, he kept up a steady sermon, offering to drive her to church any Sunday she needed, while she chewed her fingernails down to ragged shells of their former selves and the meter ticked steadily upward. She was on the cusp of something, she felt, as they screeched down Park Avenue and turned east, as the buildings changed from tall brick apartments to office buildings ornamented with glass and steel and the trees in the center of the road blurred together into smears of green. Should she confront Whitney—follow her into wherever she was going and blow the fucking whistle—or just go over to Amara’s right after this with the story?
Whitney’s taxi pulled over partway down the block on East Forty-seventh Street, and then Whitney began the whole car-seat-stroller process again, in reverse. Claire paid her driver with a quick pang of regret at the chunk that the ride took out of her still-recovering bank account, accepted with a distracted nod of thanks the business card he offered her for his church, and slid out of the cab. She ducked behind a mailbox and watched out of the corner of her eye as Whitney finished buckling Hope into her stroller, straightened her shoulders, and headed into the revolving door of a fancy stone building called . . . the Windom Hotel and Spa.
Fuck. What an idiot she was. Amara was right. She might as well type up some pamphlet about how Obama was a lizard person and start proselytizing on the street corner.
Vagabond kicking her out had turned her into the side character of her own life—the fine, forgettable one taking up space before the star attraction came along. Now, to make up for it, she was trying to insert herself where she didn’t belong. She’d been so desperate to be the hero of someone else’s story that she’d fancied herself a kind of Nancy Drew uncovering a vast conspiracy. Really, though, the only thing she had in common with Nancy Drew was that she was a fucking child. And like Amara had said, she needed to grow up.
It was too late to go back to the clothing store. She could use a drink, a little bit of fuzzy euphoria to block out the image of Amara shaking her head at her. She turned around and faced the intersection, scanning for the nearest bar that would be open at one P.M. on a Wednesday. There, right in between a pharmacy and a SoulCycle, was an Irish pub, beckoning like a siren at sea. Thank goodness for the Irish. She headed straight in, sat on a barstool, and ordered a whiskey soda, pushing her hood back.
The Shame Demons, those terrible, disparaging thoughts about her own self-worth, came to her, and she sat with them for a while as she let the whiskey slide down her throat, acknowledging all the insults they hurled at her. Why did she even care so much about what happened to this playgroup of wealthy, overprivileged women?
Because she was lonely. People were meant to have support groups, but somehow she cycled through communities—through megachurch and Vagabond—and ended up alone. Even Thea, her constant, no-nonsense champion throughout everything, had never called her back after the night Claire ran through Central Park, and when Claire tried calling her again to see if they were still on for dinner plans they’d made weeks before, Thea had answered, distracted, that she had to cancel, which was completely unlike her.
Bizarrely, Claire had felt at playgroup that that time could be different, that she’d finally cycled to the right place. She’d let herself imagine that she and Amara would grow closer as they grew older, and take strolls with their canes through Central Park together, and feed the goddamn ducks. God, maybe that was why people had children. Because they wanted someone who had to sit with them and feed the ducks, no matter how doddering or uninteresting they got. She wanted to take care of her new friends, but she had no idea how to do it, and so they’d all inevitably slip away too.
Well, if she couldn’t have community, at least she could have communion, her own particular type of it, taking another person’s body into hers. She did a quick scan of the bar for someone she could fuck. Unfortunately, the people who came to a divey Irish pub to get drunk on a Wednesday at lunchtime weren’t exactly the cream of the crop. She pictured herself walking over to the group of slurring retirees in the corner booth, crusty old men in sports jerseys, and pointing to one at random to follow her into the bathroom. She didn’t have high standards, but even she could tell that that wouldn’t make her feel any better.
She took a big swig of her drink and contemplated ordering another. At least nobody ever had to know about this stupid, misguided adventure. She’d show up at the photo shoot tomorrow and try to be the person that Amara believed her to be.
The door to the pub swung open, letting in a businessman on his lunch break who sat down heavily a few stools over from her and greeted the bartender. She’d heard that voice before. When she glanced over, their eyes met. Dammit. Christopher. She could see a similar Dammit run through his mind before he quickly rearranged his expression, trading in a stressed-out grimace for his usual charming smile.
“Claire the playgroup girl!” he said. “This is a funny coincidence. What are you doing here?”
“I work nearby,” she said.
“I do too.”
“So, what’ll it be today?” the bartender asked Christopher.
“I’ll see a food menu,” Christopher said. The bartender raised an eyebrow and handed over a dubious-looking piece of paper with a few lines of text printed on it.
“Ah, yes,” Claire said. “I hear they’re renowned for their food here.”
“Uh-huh,” Christopher said. “I come all the way from the office for their”—he squinted at the menu—“hot dogs and tater tots.” He shook his head, half laughing. “You caught me.” He leaned over to grab the bartender’s attention, and Claire waited for him to ask for a beer, but he ordered a club soda instead. Then he turned back to Claire, a rueful look on his face. “Every so often, when I’ve really been having a day, I like to come to a bar and order a club soda as a reminder that I can control myself in at least one aspect of my life, you know?”
“No idea what you’re talking about,” Claire said. “I’m a well-balanced person, and I never have to come to bars to deal with my self-loathing in the early afternoon.”
He smiled and held up his club soda. “To self-loathing, that old friend.”
“To self-loathing,” Claire said, and drained the rest of her drink.
“Give her another on me,” Christopher said to the bartender, and moved over to the stool next to Claire’s as the bartender handed her a new glass, covered with beads of condensation.
“Oh, fine,” Claire said. “Thanks.”
Christopher nodded. They sat in silence for a moment, drinking their respective drinks, as a baseball game played on the TV above the bar. He smelled like coffee and something else, something sharper that Claire couldn’t place. Sneaking a sideways glance, Claire noticed a sheen of sweat on Christopher’s neck. He caught her eye. “You won’t mention this to Gwen, will you?”
“What, that you come to bars to drink club soda?” Claire asked. “Somehow I can’t imagine that she’d be too upset about that.”
He shook his head and said, in a voice so quiet that the sounds of the bar almost
drowned him out, “Yeah.” He took another deep swallow of his drink, staring into his glass like he was trying to find salvation there.
“Obviously, I won’t tell her about today if you don’t want me to,” Claire said, placing a gentle hand on his shoulder, the fabric of his suit jacket soft under her palm.
At the unexpected touch, he startled, and then all of the charming, foxy scaffolding around him fell away, laying bare the defeated man beneath. “I’m a screwup,” he said. “I fail her, and I fail her, and I fail her. She’s the one who keeps everything together. She’s the one who has it all figured out.”
Claire laughed then, an unstoppable, gasping laugh, and he looked up at her in surprise. “Well, I’m glad to see you’re treating my misery with the respect it deserves,” he said, raising an eyebrow, and she could see the defeat on his face turning to confused amusement.
“I’m sorry!” Claire said, putting her hand in front of her mouth. “No, it’s not—”
“Very kind of you. Have you considered becoming a therapist?”
“I just— I have a feeling Gwen has made some mistakes too, that’s all. She might be more forgiving than you think.” She shook her head. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to be an asshole.”
“I forgive you,” he said. “And thank you for keeping my secret.” The way he said it suddenly made her feel dirty, as if what she had thought of as a small omission was actually something much bigger.
