at the bottom, wide and yet masculine. I licked my lips, glanced up into his eyes. They were on my mouth. I leaned forward and bit his bottom lip. He pulled me back into him, and soon we were making out once more.
The phone buzzed again. And again. And again.
I groaned, pulled away and yanked the phone from my purse. Sam, cell. I felt a pang of panic. What if it was an emergency? “Hello?”
“Hey, Red Hot.” Sam said, his nickname for me. The sound of it softened me, made everything disappear—the bar, Theo, the bottles, the people. They all vanished as if pulled into a hole, deep and black.
“Hey,” I said.
“Where are you?”
It all filled back in then—the booth, the crowd. Suddenly the music’s bass seemed to pump louder, harder. “Some place on Damen.”
“Who are you with?”
“Jane. You know, Jane Augustine?”
I looked over to the end of the booth, but Jane was gone. Probably in the bathroom.
From behind, I felt my hair being lifted up, then replaced with a mouth, wet and questioning on my nape. I almost moaned.
“Come over,” Sam said.
“I can’t.”
“Why?”
“It’s late.”
“Exactly, so come over.” A pause. “I miss you.”
Theo was suckling the skin on the back of my neck now. I thought to warn him that I was a redhead, and redheads acquired hickeys very, very easily, but I couldn’t exactly say anything while I was on the phone with Sam, and the fact was I didn’t want Theo to stop. Not even a little bit.
For a moment, I was suspended there, hearing Sam say sweet things—how he missed me, how he loved me. And at the same time, I was feeling those persistent lips on my neck, sucking something of me into the room, some part of me that had been veiled until now—a part that enjoyed a dark lounge in the wee hours of a Saturday morning, a part whose whole body responded to the boy with long hair and tattoos, a part that reveled in the off-kilter and the fresh and the surreal.
“Iz?” Sam said. He’d stopped talking, I realized, and I hadn’t said anything.
“Yeah, sorry, I’m here.”
“Come over.”
I was torn in two then. One part leaned toward my old life, toward Sam, the other pushed back into Theo, thrilled with the new. The truth was, the new was a stronger pull, if only because I’d been living in the past for so long and I was tiring of it. Sam and I spent hours and hours trying to piece together what had happened between us. Once a week, we talked to a therapist about our “communication patterns.” Now I wanted, just for a moment, levity and life, fun and frolic.
“Sam, I told you earlier that we couldn’t get together. I told you I had plans.”
Theo’s arms slid around my waist. He whispered in my free ear, “Get off the phone.”
“Sam, I’ll call you tomorrow.”
“Don’t bother.”
“Excuse me?”
“I’m sorry, but I’m sick of this, Iz.”
“So am I!” Exasperation crept in, messing with my levity.
“I know I caused you a lot of pain. But it’s in the past, and at this point, it’s your hang-up.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’ve been talking, and I’ve been explaining, and I’ve been telling you how much I adore you, but you just won’t let it go.”
“Are you kidding? It’s kind of a big thing to just let go—”
“Have fun, Izzy.” And he hung up.
I stared at the phone in dismay. Sam had never hung up on me. At first, I was scared—scared I’d lose him, scared I’d already lost him, scared that if I didn’t patch things up, and right now, he’d be gone forever. Then anger swept in. How dare he blame this on me?
And then at last, calm entered my mind. It said, Leave it alone. Just for now. You want frolic? Then frolic.
Theo was kissing my ear. I stared at my phone. One finger itched to call Sam back, but that voice spoke again. Leave it alone. For now.
In that instant, I wanted so badly to forget everything, to forget even myself.
I put the phone back in my purse, turned around and placed my arms around Theo.
3
Jane Augustine opened her eyes and let her gaze sweep over the strange bedroom. A small skylight, drawing in the morning sun, illuminated the otherwise dark room. She could make out an antique shelf packed with books in a meticulous way—the taller books at the beginning of each shelf. Next to it was a dresser, which also looked antique. Above that hung an oil painting, which showed a single green apple on a table. The brush stroke was heavy, the painting textured contemporarily. The place looked as if it had some cash behind it.
And then there was the address—Goethe Street, right off State. Impressive, Jane thought. Writers usually made so little money. Not that she cared. It wasn’t as if she was looking for a husband; it was simply that she’d woken up in more than one strange bedroom, and they weren’t all this nice.
She turned her head, trying not to shift the bed, and glanced at the writer in question. Last night, he had seemed worldly, but now, as she listened to his light snore, he looked like a little boy despite his gray hair.
But he was a little boy who knew how to fuck. She could tell that even before she went home with him. She could tell that with any man. She had gotten exactly what she wanted from the writer—Mick was his name. She’d needed her fix last night, and he had been her black tar heroin.
That was how she thought of what she did—like an addiction—but in all honesty, it was inaccurate to say that she was addicted to sex. She’d once visited a sex addict Web site, and what she found there wasn’t her. She didn’t search the net for porn. She hadn’t been arrested for voyeurism, exhibitionism, prostitution, sex with minors or indecent phone calls.
What she was addicted to, though, was the rush of someone new, the smell of a body so unlike her husband’s, the feeling of instant intimacy with a stranger. She was addicted to the way an evening with someone like the writer would walk her right into a world so dissimilar from hers. She had always been able to see, even as a child, that there were so many different lives to be had. Sex with someone other than her husband gave her a key to those other lives, let her crawl right into them and look around with awed eyes.
She and Zac loved each other with a ferocious loyalty and an ever-present tenderness, but she and Zac were different when it came to sex. She liked it more than he did, required it more than he did. And so her dalliances—she
