Authors: Charlotte Stein
But I suppose that’s a good thing, in one way. If I drift into an orgasmic coma now, I’ll never have to face him and his obvious regret – the regret I know is coming before he’s even backed away from me.
And then he does, and his absence is cold, very cold.
Though it’s nowhere near as bad as what comes next:
The click of the door, as he leaves without speaking.
He doesn’t call the next day, or the day after that. And by the third I’m starting to get the message. I got an inkling of it back there in the hotel room, when he decided to take a quick stroll after sex and then just not come back.
But now that madness is underlined: something has disturbed him. Something has disturbed him so badly that he can’t even call me and pretend it never happened – which is very bad indeed for someone like him. I’m sure he could explain away a random murder if he really put his mind to it, so the fact that he’s struggling to come up with a credible response to this is …
Unsettling.
It makes me wonder if it’s more than that … though how could I possibly know for sure? He’s never said what his expectations are. They could be as small as an assignation and as large as a relationship, with a thousand different possibilities dancing around in the middle. And I’ve no way of picking out any of those possibilities, because he never really says. He doesn’t talk about himself in any real way.
I don’t even know where he works.
But I do have his number, if I feel like asking. Oh, God, I really
really
feel like asking, despite knowing that’s probably the last thing you should do in a situation such as this. He walked out of the room. He did not come back. Now’s the time for me to maintain my dignity, rather than rushing for the phone to ask him
what the fuck?
Or at least I think that’s what the dating guides say. Don’t they usually have sections on the rules of interacting with a man, and how it’s unladylike to call first? I think they do, though I’m not sure if the same thing applies in these circumstances. Most of the stuff I’ve read dealt almost exclusively with dinner etiquette and who should pay for a cab.
Almost none of them talked about kinky encounters. There’s no subheading for being abandoned in a hotel room; no guidelines that discuss the ins and outs of sexual exploration. The best I can come up with are a few websites and a lot of porn, but even they don’t tell you what to do in times of sudden crisis.
I’m going to have to decide for myself.
I’ve
already
decided for myself. I don’t care if it’s not ladylike – I’ve never been that sort of person anyway. And if I break a few rules of dating by doing this, well, what does that matter? We’re not dating. We’re doing something else instead, and if I have my way we’re going to keep doing it too.
All I have to do is call.
Which sounds really simple until I’m actually doing it – and then I’m just a mess of chattering teeth and rattling heart palpitations and lots of sweat. Oh, Christ, I’m sweating buckets. I want to check under my arms to make sure I don’t have any of those dark circles, and as soon as the phone starts ringing I forget every single thing I was going to say. The words
how dare you
now seem like something from another language, and I come close to hanging up. I have to hang up, so I can check my gibberish-to-English dictionary.
But I’m glad I don’t, in the end. I’m not some little speck any more, too afraid to go through with a phone call. I’m something, now. I’m someone. I made him do things against his will and persuaded him into situations he didn’t want to go near.
I can do this.
‘Kovacs.’
I can’t do this. He answers with his surname, for God’s sake, like some slick character from a movie about making loads of money. He might as well add a little
you’re turn to talk
on the end, but when he doesn’t it isn’t any better. I’m just left with silence instead. A long, aching silence that I’m supposed to fill with words from a language that’s no longer mine.
I want to tell him that he’s an ass, but the sentences in my head don’t make any sense. They keep rearranging themselves, from gobbledegook to barely rational to something else entirely. Something else that I never want to say, under any circumstances.
You really hurt me.
Because he did – I can see that clearly now. The silence stretches out between us like a yawning chasm, filled with things I don’t want to be feeling. He doesn’t care about stuff like feelings. He doesn’t care about anything at all. It’s his defining characteristic: a complete inability to give a fuck.
Though that doesn’t really explain the hint of sadness in his voice, when he suddenly speaks. And it certainly doesn’t explain the words he chooses.
‘I was sure you wouldn’t wish to talk to me,’ he says, so abrupt I do a double take. I jerk on my wheelie work seat – almost sending myself sliding across the aisle between the cubicles – and for some unaccountable reason my ear heats. In fact, the whole side of my face heats, as though the receiver has a small fire inside it.
Either that, or he’s touching me through the phone wires. He’s rubbing one finger against my cheek, and, God help me, I’m responding to it. That flame is already spreading from my face, down over my throat and chest and right on through to some other places that really need it.
I always need it now. I’m always aroused and always ready, primed in a way I’ve never really experienced before. Last night I woke up in the middle of an orgasm, so intense it probably qualified as stifling. I certainly felt stifled in its aftermath, too stunned to let out a sound but trying all the same. Oh, I’d done my best to scream out my pleasure.
But nothing had emerged. It felt like banging against a wall that isn’t there, which feels kind of apt in the light of what he’s just said. There’s culpability in there that I definitely hadn’t anticipated, and emotion that I can’t quite grasp, and all of it adds up to one thing:
Me, unable to think what to say. All the anger and frustration die down, and I’m left with very little. Should I insist on an explanation? I really want to, but I realise now what the issue is: I think I’m afraid of what he might say. I can deal with him being bored, or even regretful about his loss of control.
But what if it’s more than that?
‘Perhaps my assessment was correct,’ he says after a second. And though there’s amusement in his tone there’s something else in there too – a drifting sadness, like someone joking about times long past.
It’s impossible to resist. It forces me to speak.
‘No, I want to talk to you,’ I say, and it’s then that I realise how much I do. I thought I was so cool, keeping myself to myself for these past few days. I didn’t so much as glance at the phone, and I spent every evening reading instead of thinking about him.
Of course my reading most often consisted of staring at the same page for half an hour, but we won’t go into that. We’ll just focus on right now, and all the thousands of things I suddenly need to say.
And all the ways in which I can’t.
‘I just don’t know where to start.’
‘You could try demanding an apology.’
‘I don’t think demanding is my style.’
‘Are you sure? Personally I think you did very well at it, the last time we were together,’ he says, and though I can’t detect any approbation in his words, I’m not sure that lets me off the hook. At the very least I’m suddenly guilty, in my own head, of asking for something that he maybe couldn’t quite give.
‘I didn’t mean to be.’
‘So now you’re apologising to me? I think that might be the wrong way around.’
‘OK then. You say sorry.’
‘Is that another demand?’
There’s laughter in his voice now, which is a comfort in one way. But it’s also kind of a nerve-wracking, heart-thumping thrill ride. I’m starting to think I really shouldn’t have made this call at work, but it’s become a sort of groove now. I’m comfortable speaking to him while surrounded by other people. They’re my safety net, in case I should think of saying things I don’t really want to.
Like ‘fuck’ and ‘me’ and ‘now’.
‘It might well be.’
‘I recommend taking out the “might”.’
‘OK. Then it definitely is. I’m demanding you apologise for abandoning me in a hotel room.’
He makes a noise like this:
sssstthhhhh
. It’s the kind of sound someone makes when they’ve been told the cost of fixing something is far beyond what the item is actually worth.
‘“Abandoning” is such a loaded word.’
‘But true, none the less.’
‘I did return later, if that ameliorates the situation somewhat.’
I love that he uses the word ‘ameliorate’. I love how he says it, too – like it has seven extra syllables and needs to sprawl out all over a chaise longue. It sounds as though it means something else when he says it, like when something is so sweet you can’t stop licking it.
You
ameliorated
that ice-cream
.
‘How much later?’
He hesitates, so tellingly. Even his pauses mean something extra.
‘Maybe an hour … or two.’
‘Two
hours
?’
‘It could have been one.’
‘And what? I was just supposed to wait around wondering, for that one hour?’
‘I thought you might sleep.’
I think he knows he’s being ludicrous now. There’s a note of discomfort at the end of this explanation, as though he doesn’t quite believe it either. He definitely knows me well enough to understand that I can’t just snooze in a hotel I’m half afraid of, in the hope that he might return at some undisclosed point.
I mean, what if he hadn’t? What if I woke up to find the cleaning lady dusting around me, or worse? Maybe that cool, snake-haired receptionist would have found me, and demanded to know what I was doing there, pretending to be a guest.
I see the way she looks at me every time I walk in the door with Janos.
It isn’t a good look.
‘And then what?’
He doesn’t answer right away, which makes me think at first that he doesn’t want to. He doesn’t want to suggest that maybe he would have come back into the room and slept with me. Sleeping with someone implies an intimacy that we just don’t have – and that he surely can’t deal with.
But then I hear it: other voices, barging over his. Big, annoying, arrogant male voices, hacking away at a conversation I can’t quite hear. For one awful moment I strain and strain, trying to determine if this is all some joke he’s having at my expense. Maybe he has me on speaker phone, mewling like a child about my hurt feelings.
Though after a second I start to realise. The men aren’t talking about me. They’re not even talking to Janos, really. I get the word ‘projections’ and the word ‘graphs’, and then I realise with a little jolt: he’s talking to me in the middle of a business meeting.
‘Where are you?’ I ask, before I’ve even had a chance to think things over. The words just blurt out of me, slightly and breathless and a little stunned.
‘In the boardroom.’
He says it like it’s nothing.
I can’t believe he says it like it’s nothing.
‘You’re
in
the
boardroom
. With other people there.’
‘Well, naturally. You can’t have a meeting without other people.’
‘And you’re just talking to me in the middle of it?’
‘Of course.’
I wonder if he knows what those two words sound like. I wonder if he knows what they feel like. They’re so simple, and yet they make me silent and still and so sure of his feelings. I don’t think he’d ever say the words
‘love’ or ‘affection’ or even ‘you’re my friend.’ But he doesn’t really have to, when he can make the most innocuous little phrases sound like the sweetest compliments.
His ‘of course’ is other people’s ‘I love you’.
Oh, God, what if he loves me?
He certainly feels enough for me to answer his phone in the middle of a meeting, to offer apologies and explanations and terms of endearment disguised as simple statements.
‘Don’t … don’t any of them mind you talking to me?’
‘I can talk to whomever I please. I’m the boss. They’re here to impress me, not the other way around.’
‘You must look very unimpressed right now.’
‘Ah, but there’s an upside. They’re working so much harder to get my attention.’ He makes a little tutting sound, familiar enough for me to match an expression to it. Almost an eye roll, I think, followed by a dismissive glance away. ‘One of them just disconnected the PowerPoint projector. I’m afraid he isn’t very bright.’
‘Can they
hear
you saying these things?’
‘I don’t believe so. My boardroom is rather large.’
‘Now I’m picturing a palatial hall with marble pillars, and you at the head of a stone table like some ancient feudal lord.’
‘You aren’t far off.’
‘Are you wearing a crown?’
‘Metaphorically speaking.’
I can’t help asking, at this point. If I let this go on any longer, I really will start to believe in his imaginary fiefdom. Next time we meet I might call him ‘milord’, and that just won’t do. He has enough power without me giving him more.
‘What exactly do you
do
?’
‘You don’t really want me to explain. It’s too dull to bear.’
‘I don’t think that’s a healthy way to feel about your job.’
‘Ah. Because you enjoy yours so very deeply.’
His voice is so thick with sarcasm I couldn’t cut my way out with a chainsaw, but for a second I still want to deny his claim. I even glance around, as though searching for something that isn’t grey and awful and monotonous – but it isn’t a surprise when I draw a blank. Michaela isn’t here today to add a splash of colour to the cubicle next to mine. All I can see are blacks and whites, occasionally broken up by the off-green of the carpet.
The whole place is like a painting entitled
Depression
, and it doesn’t get any better when some movement catches my eye.
Mr Henderson is by the water cooler again.
And he’s looking in my direction.
‘I think I should probably be going.’