THE NIGHT
475 Words
What Summer would remember was not the room or the city lights or the white flowers she had smelled in the lobby downstairs.
What she would remember was the quality of his attention.
She had been looked at her entire life. She had never been seen like this. Not at the face she presented, not at the name or the background or the forty-thousand-dollar dress hanging
unworn in a wardrobe across the city. He was attentive to her specific, careful, the way you are careful with something you understand has weight.
He was not soft. She hadn't expected it to be soft. But he asked before he assumed and noticed before he spoke and somewhere past midnight she understood that she had been living inside approximations of this for years without knowing what the real thing felt like.
In the blue quiet of the room she lay still and listened to the city below.
What are you thinking? she asked.
A pause. That I haven't been this honest in a long time.
With a stranger.
Sometimes it's easier.
Yes, she said. I know.
She thought about the engagement meeting tomorrow. About her father's plans and the Ethan family and the neat suffocating logic of it all. She thought about Lucas and found with genuine
surprise that the wound was smaller than expected. She had been grieving the idea of him for longer than she had known. Today had just been the day she was allowed to stop.
The arrangement you're running from, she said. Do you think you'll get out of it?
A longer pause. No. Probably not.
Same, she said.
Neither of them made this heavier than it was. They lay in the dark and acknowledged the shared condition of being in lives designed by other people, and outside the window the city ran
on indifferently, and the hours worked toward morning.
She eventually fell asleep.
He was still awake.
He lay in the dark and looked at the ceiling and thought about a woman who had been entirely honest with him because she had nothing to calculate. No performance. No positioning. Just
herself, plainly, in a hotel room above a city that didn't know either of them were there.
He could count on one hand the number of times someone had been real with him.
He thought: I am going to have to walk into a room with her tomorrow and pretend this didn't happen.
He thought: I don't know if I'm capable of that.
He thought: I should have told her.
He closed his eyes. The city ran on. He did not sleep for a long time.
- Writer
