by Lucy Walle
(07/30/08)

I gesture for the bartender. Firmly placed on a sturdy stool, I glance around the bar -- neither busy nor empty. Mahogany walls, Chesterfields, lamps. Warm, stately, and utterly generic. It could be any hotel, any city. Which is precisely why I chose it. To avoid anything too modern or flashy, anything with blond wood and stainless steel fixings, anything resembling a theme park or the set of a bad music video. The surroundings, while important, are to fade into the background.

I order scotch on the rocks and suddenly feel like a cigarette, even though you can no longer smoke in New York bars, and I don't smoke. Usually I drink beer out of a bottle, but this afternoon is different. It's not that I'm nervous; it's anticipation. Also, not that I'd admit it if you asked, a faint trace of dread.

My body is at the bar but my mind is already up in the room I'd booked earlier in the week. I'm an hour ahead of herself -- until I stop and remember to savor the time that will always be the time just before. I feel the prickles in my shoulders and all the way down to my painted toes -- clotted-blood red, peeking out of my 40s-style heels. I've felt this excited expectation before. There was that first time, when the tension was a tightrope, like the one that crazy French guy strung between the twin towers.

It's amazing, I think, as I sip my scotch, that my 3 AM fantasies had come true, that I'd somehow made them happen just by thinking. I'd imagined that out-of-town tryst as I'd lain in bed, quietly willing myself to come. And within a few months you were there beside me. The fantasizing beforehand had made it feel more like a natural progression, as if there had been dates before that night. As if we were able to date.

When I look back at that night, that morning, it's the little things that still stir me. Sharing a drink, swapping the briefest of eye contact each time we passed the glass back and forth, all the while carrying on conversations with whoever was around us. Sitting next to you, watching your hand tap the blackjack table for another card. Walking through the gold-rush casino entrance as you held out your arm for me to lace mine through. And then, once we were in your room, in the dark, there was the weight of what was about to happen hanging over us.

I'd told myself months earlier that I just wanted that moment. If I couldn't have your weight on top of me, I wanted to feel the weight of possibility upon me. This is what I thought of when it happened, in that room with the heavy curtains drawn to shut out the morning desert light. We had gone to your hotel under the pretense of one last drink but bypassed the bar in silence to head straight to the elevators. Then there was talk of a nap followed by breakfast downstairs, but your were already under the covers when I came out of the bathroom into the darkness, not knowing what to take off and what to leave on.

When I slipped under the blanket the only sound was the faint hum of hotel air-conditioning. Time didn't stand still. I could feel the seconds tick past, and knew that if I didn't make up my mind soon, or if you didn't move, that I'd drift off to sleep and that elaborate dance that had led us to this moment would be for nothing -- except perhaps an awkward feeling when we woke up.

When I finally rolled onto my side, I felt like a child reaching into a lucky dip, holding out my fingers to feel for the prize I couldn't see. I was terrified that you'd brush me off and we'd have to have that conversation, but I knew I no longer had a choice. With the heat of your body connected to mine through the palm of my hand on your chest, my thoughts dissolved. I just was. I was my body without thoughts. I was the sum of my own movements.

Minutes later, I realized that you could still call a halt to it all, to where my hand had moved, to what I was doing. It wasn't until more minutes had passed, when I took you out of my mouth and glanced up to see your head thrown back, eyes closed, lips apart in a slight "O" that my awareness disappeared and I slipped back into pure want.

I was only jolted out of my slow, sleepy enjoyment of you when the unexpected happened, when you did something to me that no one ever had, or has since. This I would see as the lynchpin of the entire experience; the thing that obliterated any chance of me ever getting over it. I couldn't -- wouldn't -- forget; I wanted it again. It was so new, and dirty, and hot. There was no time to protest, to process -- all I could do was give in to it, be taken over by it; flipped over, taken. We stayed in that bed for a few hours more, but already I was yearning to have you like that for the first time all over again.

From where I sit at the bar, I can't see how that feeling of connection will ever go away. I can get caught up in thinking about the two of us together, and it's like nothing else matters. Whatever this is between us, it exists on its own, in relation to nothing -- no one -- else.

I try not to let myself think beyond that room, or the other rooms. I don't let myself wonder what it would be like to come home to you, to have you pull me down onto the couch, onto you, when I walk in the door. When I get to thoughts like that, I quickly pull myself back to safety. The way we talk to each other in the real world helps -- we can joke and laugh with everyone around us, and never let on that we've ever been alone together. Sometimes, I can get myself on a track where I don't think about any of it for days but then my mind betrays me and I dream a dream where you're sitting next to me at some party, where you lean over and kiss my bare shoulder.

Whenever I conjure up that first time, trying to make myself feel what I felt with you there, I wonder how anyone could go on living their mundane lives, day after day, after experiencing such pleasure. How could it be that you still had to buy milk from the deli, or stand still on the subway amongst strangers, or answer emails and write memos -- all those things -- when this was possible?

I remember the way you stroked my arm as we lay there, drowsy but not done, ignoring the alarm, ignoring faint cell phone rings from beneath layers of discarded clothes. I thought we'd have to get up. That would be that. But then you asked me to have a shower with you.

The bathroom light was harsh but I liked seeing your face, seeing what this -- what I -- was doing to you. Under the spray, I sent a prayer of thanks to the hotel architects for placing the soap holder right in the middle of the shower wall, where I was resting against it. You stopped to adjust position, propping me up higher and adjusting my legs around your waist. Later I will realize that I have developed a soft spot for motions like this one -- for the actions themselves. Somehow the thought of them makes the memories come rushing to life in a way like nothing else. But back then all I could think of was how it felt as you fucked me against the bathroom wall.

This would become my go-to moment for taking myself over the edge. If I took myself back to that shower and I imagined that motion, the up and in, the idea of pulling you in deeper, higher, up, up, up, until you hit that part of me that made me gasp, if I could really imagine it and clench my muscles, the thought alone could be enough to make me come. There would be more go-to moments. But I didn't know that then.

I decide to stand at the bar, wondering how I look in my plum-colored wrap dress, the most grown-up outfit I own. I want you to walk in and see me like this, one leg bent slightly behind the other, so my silhouette makes a long, lean S-shape. I think about the way the dress makes my ass look and think about myself upstairs in a matter of hours, lying naked face-down across the bed, you leaning over me, resting on that ass. I picture it, I feel it, and my face flushes.

I have thought about what I want to do to you, despite a vague sense of doing so being a jinx. There are scenes I have crafted in my mind. In one, I writhe above you, my back to you as you slump in a chair. I want to dance for you, but for the dance to slip into something else, for you to take control of me, in the chair in the room upstairs. I imagine myself sitting at the end of the bed, pulling you to me roughly by the waistband of your jeans. It's the motions.

I imagine walking across the room to where you're sitting -- on the window ledge, on a chair, anywhere -- and lifting a leg over your lap, straddling you. It's that movement of my leg over yours that does it for me. I imagine you laying back but propped up on your elbows, watching me as I'm about to come, wanting so badly to make me, holding me firmly on the waist...watching. You'd know when it was about to happen, you'd see it on my face -- you'd feel it -- and you'd give me that look, a raised eyebrow, a look that said, "Like this?" And I'd say yes without saying a word and you wouldn't be able to take your eyes off me as I moved on top of you.

I'd seen that look -- "Like this?" -- before, elsewhere in the city, sitting in an empty bathtub. There was one thrust, a jolt that made our eyes lock. The look said, "Are you feeling this? You are, aren't you? My god, what is this?"

It was a moment where nothing else mattered, where the world could come crashing down around us and as long as we stayed just like that and held onto each other we could survive anything. Then the gaze broke and I leaned forward to bury my head in your neck.

Later, when I'd see you in a bar, amongst friends, and we talked, I'd look at you and something would make me think: I know this face; I've seen this face up close. Did you ever think that? What did my face look like from your vantage point in that tub? My hair was wet, the water from the shower was falling on my back, dripping from my silver and black earrings...But how did I look to you there, my mouth open, my eyes full of what I was feeling?

I didn't find out for a long time, not until after that stretch where we thought it was all over. We had to get on with other things, other people, even if we couldn't forget. We did a good enough job, although occasionally when we were out with friends, I'd see the heavy-lidded look you get, the one that says "drunk" and "sex" simultaneously, and I had to look away. Seeing your beard reminded me of how it felt to touch your cheek in the bath and seeing the way your hair curled up slightly at the nape of your neck made me want so badly to touch it, to be back where we were all those months ago.

Even though I still thought about you when I was alone in bed -- I didn't know how not to -- I grew to accept that the memories were all I had, that I'd never touch you again. But I was wrong. There was a night where something -- opportunity, alcohol -- blew our pretense of being over each other apart.

I don't know how you see that cold January night, but this is the way I like to think of it, in a movie-scene kind of way. I like to think that your eyes lit up, like mine did, when you saw me. That you liked standing in that old, tiled bar, joking loudly with the other guys, and that you enjoyed seeing me be just as loud and crack jokes of my own.

I like to think that when I took a swig of beer just as someone said something hilarious -- when I guffawed and beer came spurting out of my mouth, when I turned away so I wouldn't laugh as hard as everyone else was at me -- that you were standing there laughing too but you were thinking, 'Oh my god, she's so fucking cute.' You know you're not meant to think that and it seems nuts that you do, but you do. I'm there wearing a long-sleeved top that a nine-year-old might, with jeans, flat boots and messy hair. With beer spurting out of my nose. And you're thinking, I want her.

Whether I'm right or not doesn't matter.

The night took us where we thought we'd never get to again. When you started stroking my waist as we stood at that crowded bar, my breath caught. I was afraid to move. Even through fabric, I felt the heat of your touch everywhere, and I didn't want you to ever stop. In the cab, I would undo myself even more by turning to kiss you and by lifting my hand to stroke your cheek as we kissed. As soon as I felt your beard under my fingers I was back where I'd been months earlier. It was if all the guilt, the sadness, the struggle to get back to normal, to forget, had never happened.

Later, when I reached up to pull back my hair, to revel in just how good it felt, to look into your eyes, there it was, the moment you said, "You're so fucking sexy." That's all you said -- they may have been the only words spoken when we had sex -- but hearing them thrilled me to the bone. They gave me a glimpse of what it might feel like to be you, to be sitting where you were, to have me on top of you, to see what you were doing to me.

I look up with a start when I see you approaching the bar -- and sit back with a slump when I realize it's not you at all, just someone with your hair, the color and even the way it curls up at your neck sometimes, when you haven't had it cut in awhile. It's not you, so I lean back and stare into my glass, keeping my eyes off the clock above the shelves of liquor. I do that sometimes: think I see you getting off the subway, sometimes beside a girl with long blond hair. I hurry up to get a proper look, just in case it is you, but it never is. Even on the other side of the world, I thought I saw you. It's crazy when I stop and realize where I am, but that first hopeful glance knows no reason.

At the hotel bar, I retreat back into my senses. I think about how you smell, how intoxicating it is, how I inhaled the smell of you that last time, when I had lain down on top of you, my breasts bare, but still in my jeans. We kissed so slowly then, holding back and then giving in -- savoring it, I realize. Feeling the enormity and the futility. I woke up the next day still able to smell you, and, god, how I wanted to hold it inside and never breathe out. Only later did I realize that it was the smell of the two of us combined.

I think about this afternoon, about how it's a goodbye to our weakness for each other. I do but I don't want to walk into that room saying, Never again. Just once, I want to be with you and not have the clock lingering in a corner of my mind. I want no distractions, no other thoughts, just the feeling of the two of us, alone. I need to get it all out, act it all out, so that finally, we can move on. I want to send you off into your future, and me into mine. I want to celebrate, just once, something that was doomed from the start. I want to feel you one last time.

But what I do is this: I take one last gulp of scotch, and slip off the stool at the bar. I walk out to the hotel lobby, my expensive heels making a satisfying click clack as I go. I pass the check-in desk where my name will be deleted from the computer when I call from my cell phone in an hour. It's not that I'm leaving before you arrive. You were never going to. I know that now. So I do the only thing I can. I take off my heels, and push my way out of the heavy, glass doors, out of the pictures in my mind and into the afternoon.

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