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He rolls his eyes, blinks, and tents his fingers in front of his pursed lips. “There’s a difference.”
“Oh? What’s that?”
“I had real work—a real project to finish. I couldn’t just leave for your little—”
“Little? My little what? My little biggest event of the tour? My little this-means-everything-to-me night?” And then it hits me: the real reason why he didn’t prioritize it. “You don’t support me. You don’t think my writing’s important.”
“That’s not what I said.”
“But it’s exactly what you meant.” He raises a finger to interject, but I’m not done. I’ve been holding this in for a year; now it’s erupting out of me, and someone’s going to get burned. “What kind of project requires you to fuck some random person, anyway? That sounds like an in-demand position.”
Another one of the things that makes Tristan so good at sales is that he truly believes everyone wants to buy everything that he’s selling. Great for sales, terrible when he’s peddling excuses to his ex.
“She was nothing.”
“Which is the problem, right? That a ‘nothing’ was more important to you in that moment than your supposed something.”
“It was just a fling!” He protests, and a few heads turn our way. He drops his volume and adds, “I screwed up. I don’t even think about her anymore. I don’t even remember her name.”
The word hits me like a punch to the gut. Breathlessly, I repeat, “A fling?”
“Yes. Unremarkable. A mistake.” He huffs, like he’s the one who has the right to be upset. “I’m here now, aren’t I? I came looking for you, in the cold, just hoping to find you. Can’t you see I’ve changed? Can’t you see how badly I want you back, Gwendolyn?”
And there it is, all wrapped up in a neat little package, my name the ribbon knotted on top, holding it all together. After a week of Gwen, a week of I don’t do flings and being enough and someone putting in effort, I know exactly what I need right now. And it sure as hell isn’t this.
“It doesn’t matter, Tristan. I deserve to be with someone who isn’t okay with letting me go in the first place.”
I drop a few more dollars in the tip jar on my way out and hail a cab. “The Audrey Kay hotel, please,” I tell the driver. “As fast as you can.”
Sawyer
“Oh, thank God,” she pants, standing in the now-open bathroom doorway. Steam swirls around her as it makes its escape.
“Gwen?” I contemplate covering myself, but it’s nothing she hasn’t seen before. She’s not looking anywhere but my face now anyway, and I can tell she’s been crying. “Are you okay?”
She doesn’t answer. Her heels clatter to the tile floor, and she shrugs out of her coat.
“Did you run all the way up here?”
“Just from the elevator to the room.” She steps toward me, careful not to slip. “I needed to make sure you were still here.”
“Of course I’m still here. I told you, I’m not going anywhere.” She steps over the ledge of the tile shower. “Your dress—”
She shakes her head. “The dress doesn’t matter.” Another step toward me, and now she’s in the flow of the water with me, fingers feeling their way up my biceps, interlocking behind my neck, drawing my face to hers.
I was afraid I was imagining her. Maybe the water was too hot, messing with my head and making me see things that weren’t there. But my hands can’t grasp mirages; visions don’t taste like hunger and desire and longing.
She clings to me while I shut off the water, and now she’s drenched and still shivering from the lingering bite of the outside air. I wrap her shoulders in a towel, but it’s no match for the waterlogged dress. She lets the white Egyptian cotton fall to the floor by the time I’ve got my own towel tucked around my waist, and she presses her body against mine, closer and closer until my back’s against the wall, then raises her arms above her head. I lift the hem of her dress over her hips, then her chest, my fingers grazing every inch of her soaking wet skin along the way, until the dress has joined the towel and shoes and coat on the floor.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
Running mascara streaks her cheeks. “Yes. Later. Right now— ” she places my hands on the small of her back, “I want you to kiss me like you’ll never let me go.”
That means something to her, and I don’t know what kind of kiss that is. But I know that I don’t want to let her go, that the thought of her leaving kills me, and had she been gone much longer I would’ve been curled up in the corner of the shower crying. So I bring all that into my kiss when my lips part to meet hers, and I trust she can feel it all. Her tension seems to dissipate and her body softens, molding into mine. “I won’t, you know.” I whisper it into her hair. “I won’t let you go unless you ask me to.”
She backs away, her eyes all earnest, still wrapped in my arms, leading me out of the bathroom and toward the bed. “Never.”
My pulse quickens, and I feel it equally in my chest and my erection, this longing for her in every possible way, this euphoria that she’s somehow already mine. She catches my glance to the bed and simpers, dipping her fingers between the towel and my torso. “Do you want this?” she asks.
