Lost in Hotels (7 page)

“It can be a quick dinner … sushi.”

“It won’t be a quick dinner.”

“It really will, I have to pack. We could order room service in my room if you want.” I know it’s the wrong thing to say even as it comes out of my mouth.

“Yes, room service in your room. Now I know how that would end up.”

“It’s not like that. I just want more time with you. You really made my day, and I just want it to last a little longer.”

“David, I’m not one of those women who just has sex in hotels. I like you and I liked our day. Let’s make that the memory we both take with us.”

She grabs my hand with a tenderness I have not felt in years, perhaps ever. Not having her simply makes me want to have her even more. I look deeper into her moss-green eyes that make time tick in half the time and say everything, even when nothing is said.

“So this is where we say good-bye.” Catherine says it in a way that makes it clear to me there will be no dinner. This is indeed good-bye.

“I’ll leave my information for you at the front desk, and I’ll look forward to our paths crossing again,” I say, pulling her cold wet skin close against my own under the towel.

“I would very much like that, David.”

Catherine seems to hesitate, perhaps reconsidering dinner or thinking of a compromise that might give me just a little longer with her. I know my life and my way with women—if it’s not here and now, it will never be again.

“And I really did have a great day, my best day in Rio. You’re a terrific guide and a gentleman. I haven’t known one of those in a long time. Thank you for that.”

CHAPTER 3
PARIS

R
IO ISN’T A trip up Corcovado or a certain churrascaria or a nightclub where every supermodel in the world has danced until six o’clock in the morning. Rio is what happens in the moments of those sticky afternoons along its wavy mosaic sidewalk. As you’re sipping coconut water, an impossibly perfect man in a swimsuit smaller than yours, lingers with his eyes and stands so close you can feel his breath on your moist skin, and the hairs on your neck stiffen as you linger for just a second, and then another more.

My Rio story reads like a love letter to David, even without a mention, comment, or insinuation of his very existence. Since returning, it’s been a swath of endless winter in New York; dirty snow is everywhere, and steam clouds envelope the skyline in a dreary constant of concrete and grayness. To think of all the wasted time I sat poolside in Rio wishing to be back and yet, every day since, has been marked by a countdown of the hours since I left it and dream when I can leave again. It’s only been three weeks, but it has felt like a three-year sentence for a heart that has been sucked from my cavity.

For me, Rio was really about a single twenty-four-hour period. That one day spent with the man who came and left my life as quickly as we wandered through the city and found ourselves in the middle of the Atlantic only moments from my demise as a wife and mother. In that instant, I was bound to no one, and I knew if I controlled myself, there would be nothing lost in allowing me to go to the brink and no farther. However, in that moment and ever since, it is all I can think about.

David has consumed my thoughts from the moment we hastily parted, and him pleading just a few moments more, took every ounce of me to decline. Everything else in my life seems secondary. He invades my deepest fantasies to the point that thoughts of him corrupt my eating, my sleeping, and my thinking. He is the only man I have ever met who made the idea of my risking everything seems as if I was risking nothing. I lost something of my old self in the water that day, alive under his touch, but trying so hard not to allow the situation to go any farther. How I wanted him inside me as we devoured each other in the water, his manhood alongside my skin that makes me crave to this day that he had actually been inside me, just once, for only me to know and savor in my mind for the rest of my days.

Now I know so much more about David Summers. I hadn’t even left Rio before I began researching his background like an interview subject or some sort of stalker, of which I’m sure he has no shortage. He was born in Essex. He gets his strong nose, sculpted profile, and exotic black Anglican looks from a gene pool descendant of Roman soldiers who occupied his ancestral town in the first millennia when it was known as Camulodunum.

His Facebook profile wasn’t private, but there’s very little of him on it except for a cropped photo of his one eye, which is almost neon blue juxtaposed to his fair white skin and pitch-black hair. I saw images of rescue dogs and an organization for which he volunteers. He also has an occasional check-in at the Groucho Club, Morton’s, and Crazy Bear, where posh London guys go to find sex. David Summers has no siblings, just a lone cousin listed on his Facebook profile. Unlike him, I’m too private to admit anything in the social media forum.

Each page of information read like a deeper betrayal of Matt, and yet I delved deeper without hesitation. Before Rio, David was in Shanghai, Tokyo, Sydney, and Paris all within a span of what appears only three months, and likely a woman like me in every one of them. A Twitter profile revealed one status update from six months prior complaining about a barking dog in Moscow, and a lone Twitpic of ballerinas on their way to the Bolshoi Theatre with the caption, Black Swan or White, can I take both?

LinkedIn was perhaps my kindest source with more than thirty-one hundred connections, none of which we share. The site offered a fully updated index of his last five positions in various banking houses, as well as a description of his present job description: I run the team at Alistair of London, which focuses on building relationships with businesses in emerging and developing markets. The site also lists double degrees, one in marketing at the University of Gloucester and a later one from Cambridge.

I returned from the trip in a desperate state. I worried that despite having stopped myself from actually sleeping with David, I had crossed the line. I thought Matt would be able to sense my hesitation with him and us, but as I returned to our dark house that night from Rio, I found nothing but uninterrupted normalcy. All was quiet and excruciatingly the same, despite the glaring change I could feel inside of me. Matt slept peacefully with one leg out of the covers as he always did, and Billy slept well through the morning and awoke at 5:00 a.m. as if I had never left.

The days after that were anything but normal for me, distant and sometimes downright confrontational with Matt to the point of instigating trouble. I avoided kisses, embraces cut short, and bedtimes coordinated. I dreaded the moment when Matt would ultimately initiate sex. How can Matt possibly compete with the likes of David, a man who grabs life by the hand in a way that I haven’t felt in years? I’m not sure whether it’s something he did to me or simply I have regained my independence, but I am different since Rio.

Then there was the situation I was most dreading. Upon arriving home on the fourteenth evening, I opened the door to a dark house and the worst of my fears. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, Matt appeared from behind the door dressed in a crisp white shirt and khaki pants, freshly shaved, and hair slicked to the side the way he knows I like.

“Welcome home, honey. I’ve missed you.” He grabbed me fully around my lower waist and kissed for more than just a couple’s kiss.

As I looked around the house, I saw the living room lit in a candle path that led to the dining room table. Two chairs sat side by side, and plates were set on the table. My knees seemed to stop the flow of blood to my feet.

“Matt, this is beautiful,” I said, despite collapsing inside.

He took my hand, pulled me through the room, and seated me at the table in front of a white plate with a hefty portion of pasta. Two glasses of red wine were at each serving, his only half full.

“I put Billy to bed early, and now it’s just you and me.” He lifted his chair and placed it awkwardly close to my own. He then lifted the wine glass to my mouth. There was no escape.

There were glimpses of the man I used to know, even if just fleeting. When we met, he was a freelance production assistant with burly biceps that were always showing themselves under his plaid lumberjack shirts on photo shoots. I thought I only wanted to sleep with him, but he made me laugh and feel comfortable in my own skin. He saved me, like the last exit before I became one of those obsessed women who work their entire lives only to discover at thirty-five she passed up love and family.

He makes the best pasta I’ve ever tasted, adapted with wheat noodles and pine nuts and sweet raisins to make up for the fact we both gave up meat a long time ago, or at least he thinks I did.

“It’s delicious,” I say, hesitating to eat the entire portion after having lost a fair amount of weight doing my version of the Paleo diet since Brazil.

“You’ve barely touched it.” He takes my fork and drops it on the plate.

He caresses my hand with his soft, thick fingers roughened by years of work, but now has just the lingering scent of baby oil. I know where this is going and it feels so wrong. My heart holds onto the memory of David, the memory of his touch and his kiss that will seem so much farther away once I am with Matt again. There is no resisting without making an even larger issue. I resign myself to get through this, and I hope to come out feeling the way I once did in this relationship.

He stands up at the table, and I can see his erection compressing his khakis, already a bit tight from weeks of no morning runs or jaunts to the gym. We haven’t had sex in weeks, and I know this must happen regardless of how I feel. He takes my hand, places it on his dick, and pushes away the plates of food and drinks as if they’re token collateral for what is to come. As long as I don’t let him inside me, I know everything will be okay.

He stands in front of me and drops his pants around his knees. I imagine David in front of me, his translucent skin soft with a salty sea kiss and those muscular legs wrapped around me. I imagine what he would taste like, how he would control this situation and fill me.

“I’ve missed you, baby,” Matt whispers, as his dick stands almost throbbing in front of me with a dew of pre-cum already emanating from the tip.

I imagine David as I grab him from the shaft and edge closer without actually taking him inside my mouth. Matt drops to his knees. Our lips meet in a deep kiss, not the married kind or the lover kind, but the awkward first-time kind, where our tongues intertwine, and my fully conscious mind can taste the treachery of my adulterous desire.

One of my hands grabs his back, already damp, as the other pulls on the hairs of his upper chest. I imagine my gentler lover, smelling the way he does, as he drops to his knees and devours me in full daylight as my mind casts judgment on this dimly lit apartment and this rushed sex that could be anywhere with anybody.

Matt tends to be quick to ejaculate, but I notice he lasts longer than usual before trying to enter me. He inevitably does, thrusting himself inside me along the brim of our bentwood dining chairs where I sit arched with his fully erect dick that goes in painfully deep the first time. He grabs the back of the chair in a somewhat awkward position, my hand falls into the plate of uneaten pasta, and he rattles me back and forth and back again.

I pull his hair and hold him back like the extended legs of an unwilling rider. The intensity edges on pain as he thankfully nears climax. I feel as though I’ve left my body and hover above the room in judgment as I moan louder and louder hopeful this will end. Then with a forceful push away, he erupts just outside of me and along the brim of the chair. His brow now fully sweaty, he leans in to kiss me with all his masculine, labored breath. I soften with a sense of relief that this much-needed moment has happened. Afterward, Matt retreats to our bed, and I into our bathroom where I cocoon myself in the noise of running water to finish myself off with recollections of David’s touch and as many memories as I could recall of his voice, his smell, and his stare that will soon slip away from me.

The following day in the office, I felt as though my train had been realigned on the rails, even if not in fluid motion again. Perhaps I had quelled this Greek tragedy in the making. There are always distractions in a marriage, but ultimately you return to your husband and realize the reason you committed to a life with him in the first place. This, I hoped, would be my moment where David faded from my mind and Matt returned to my heart.

The office proved to be as trying as my marriage upon returning from Rio. I returned to the office to discover the actress we booked for the June cover wasn’t available to shoot in New York, which meant I’d have to source existing images or go with an entirely different person, which was nearly impossible, given the magazine was scheduled to print in less than a week.

These are some problems with a B-list magazine. Neither celebrities nor their publicists ever take their scheduled photo shoots or interview times seriously. When I started at
Rouge
, we were one of the few magazines still to have covers with the occasional non-celebrity model in various sexy-with-a-wink poses and gloomy articles on “Life after Divorce” and “Sex in Your Widow Years.” I was one of the drivers of change at the magazine, insisting we stick to a twenty-eight through forty-five demographic and a celeb-only cover, even if it meant not always shooting ourselves.

As the magazine started to improve in sales, I stayed loyal to my editor instead of following everyone else to better titles like
InStyle
,
ELLE
, and
Marie Claire
. Now here I am, almost seven years later at
Rogue
, in the same position with a better title, more money, and a nicer office doing the same daily penance in an economy where it isn’t nearly as easy to jump ship.

After a few pushy e-mails and publicist calls, the magazine’s unenthused cover star alas surfaced as I tried to figure out the various details of a rushed interview that she would inevitably cancel or want to do over the phone on the day before we’re supposed to go to press. The compulsion to spy on my would-be lover was fully suppressed until an hour after lunch. When the morning’s work seemed able to be put off until the following day, I found myself hovering over his latest Twitter update, “Wheels-up to CDG, some work, and hopefully a little play.”

With little more than his fifty-character status update, I allowed the axis of my reason, my life, and my relationship to tilt on its side once more. I will do the interview in Paris. Typical to my character, the dominoes were set in motion at warp speed from idea to end plan. I aggressively suggested to the publicist that the interview take place in Paris as soon as possible. Surprisingly, it was an easy sell to her as well as to my nervous editor, frantic to wrap up this issue. Matt, still comforted by our night together, appeared caught off guard by the last-minute trip, and to a playful Billy, I promised a very hip French toy on my return home.

That’s how I end up here, in my flying 777 sanctuary, even if in economy class. I awaken on the plane somewhere above the Atlantic bound for Paris and knowing full well my mistake in motion. I awake in an Ambien haze to that scurry just before landing when half-eaten trays of breakfast are collected and coffee cups clink as flight attendants pace the aisle looking for those still reclined in their business-class chairs. I wasn’t really expecting to sleep on the flight, taut with anxiety about my decision to do this and leave my husband and son yet again.