Wrong Door, Right Man

The snow had been falling since noon, and by the time Laurel pushed through the revolving door and stepped out of the office building, there was a thin layer of white on her shoulders. Valentine's Day. She'd taken a half-day for this. She'd been planning it for weeks, actually — the half-day, the two-hour subway ride, the showing up unannounced at Derek's apartment with a key he'd given her eight months ago. She wanted it to be a surprise. That was the whole point. You didn't call ahead and announce a surprise. She was wearing the lingerie under her sweater. Black, lace-edged, the kind of thing she'd stood in the store and deliberated over for twenty minutes before pulling out her card. Two hundred and thirty dollars. She'd told herself it was worth it. She hummed something under her breath on the subway platform. She couldn't have told you what song it was. * * * Derek's building was a walk-up, three flights, the kind of stairs that creaked on the second step of every landing. Laurel knew which ones to avoid. She'd been here enough times. She took the stairs quietly anyway — part of the surprise — and stood in front of his door at three in the afternoon with her key already out. She slid it into the lock. Turned it. Nothing. She tried again, jiggling it the way you do when a lock is being stubborn, working the key back and forth until she had to accept what she already knew: the lock had been changed. She stood there with the useless key in her hand and looked at the door for a moment. She'd been here last spring. The lock had been fine then. She was reaching for her phone to text him when the door opened from the inside. "Oh—" She looked up, already smiling, already starting to say you're home, and stopped. The man in the doorway was not Derek. He was tall — taller than Derek by a few inches — and he was leaning in the doorframe with his weight on one shoulder, a pair of wireless earbuds hanging around his neck, looking at her the way you look at something mildly interesting that you weren't expecting. Dark eyes. The kind of unhurried stillness that read either as confidence or as someone who simply didn't care what you thought of them. He glanced at the key still in her hand. "Wrong apartment?" Laurel took a half-step back and looked past him into the room. The cream-colored sectional was right there, exactly where it had always been. She'd picked that couch out herself — a housewarming gift when Derek moved in. "Is this Derek Townsend's place?" she asked. The man's eyebrow moved, just slightly. "Yeah. Who are you?" "I'm his girlfriend." He repeated it back to her — girlfriend — in a tone she couldn't quite read. Then he stepped aside and held the door open. "Come in." He had the manner of someone who lived there. Laurel stepped inside feeling like the visitor. "Is Derek here?" she asked. "Couldn't tell you." He lifted one shoulder. "Then who are—" "Crashing here for a couple days." He leaned back against the wall. "Friend of his. You can pretend I'm not here." Laurel looked at him for a moment, then gave up trying to make conversation and went to find Derek's bedroom. She pushed the door open. The smell hit her first. Then her eyes adjusted, and she saw the rest of it — the unmade bed, the sheets twisted and half off the mattress, and scattered across the floor, catching the gray afternoon light from the window: condom wrappers. More than a few. She stood in the doorway and her eyelid twitched once, involuntarily. She turned back to look at the man in the hallway. "Is this your room?" He'd pulled one earbud free. He looked past her into the room with an expression of mild distaste. "I don't make that kind of mess." "So there's someone else staying here?" "Nope." He spread his hands. "Just me." The hallway seemed to tilt slightly. Laurel looked back at the room — at the wrappers, the smell, the evidence of something she'd been trying very hard, in the last thirty seconds, not to name — and felt the floor go out from under her in a way that had nothing to do with the stairs. She pulled out her phone and called Derek. Straight to voicemail. She stood there holding the phone. The man — Derek's friend — watched her from the hallway with an expression that was almost careful. "You can sit down if you want," he said. "Wait for him to show up." "I'll take the couch," Laurel said. He looked at the couch. Then he pointed at it. "They used that too." He made a slow circuit of the living room with his finger, indicating the couch, the armchair, the rug. "Pretty much everything out here." * * * He let her have his room. It was, as it turned out, the room she'd slept in herself — the one time she'd stayed over, a year ago, when she and Derek had ended up in separate beds because she'd gotten shy at the last minute and he'd said it's fine, I understand, and she'd believed him. She'd believed that, too. She sat in the chair by the window with her coat still on and her fists clenched in her lap and thought about the way Derek used to reach over and mess up her hair when she said something that made him laugh. She thought about where those hands had been instead. The door opened. The man — Travis, she'd learned his name was Travis — came back in carrying a plastic bag and a can of beer, which he held out to her with two fingers. "Bought these last night. Haven't opened them yet." She looked at the beer. She didn't drink. Not really — not past one glass at work dinners, never enough to lose track of herself, because she'd learned early that she was a disaster when she drank and she didn't like not being in control of her own behavior. But she took the can. Travis sat down on the floor with his back against the bed, pulled a cigarette from somewhere, and lit it. He had a quality she couldn't quite place — something loose and unbothered on the surface, but the way he held himself, the straightness of his spine, the precision of small movements. Like someone performing casual who hadn't quite gotten it all the way down. She opened the beer and drank it in one long pull. Then she opened another one. When Travis came back from the kitchen with something to eat, he stopped in the doorway. There were three empty cans on the floor. Laurel was sitting among them with her back against the chair and her knees pulled up, crying — the quiet, ugly kind, the kind where you're not performing it for anyone, where your whole face is doing something you can't control. Travis looked at the single remaining can in his hand. "Why'd you drink them so fast?" Laurel hiccupped. "You gave them to me." "I was going to drink some too." He sat down on the floor near her, looked at what was left of his beer, and took a long sip. "I blinked and you'd done three." He watched her for a moment. "Is it really that bad?" "Yes." The word came out louder than she intended. The alcohol had gotten into her volume control. "It's — I'm — I was going to—" She grabbed her neckline, the way you do when you're frustrated and drunk and your hands don't know what else to do, and pulled. Her sweater slid off one shoulder, and the black lace underneath appeared — the two-hundred-and-thirty-dollar black lace, which she had put on this morning in her apartment while she was still someone whose boyfriend was faithful, which felt like a different century now. "I wore this," she said. "I wore this here, I took a half-day, I rode the subway for two hours, I was going to—" Her voice broke on the next part. "And now it's just wasted. All of it. Two hundred dollars, just—" Travis looked at her. Then he looked at what the pulled neckline was revealing — the lace, the pale skin, the very deliberate design of something that had been meant for someone else tonight. He reached over and tugged her sweater back up onto her shoulder, matter-of-fact, like straightening a picture frame. "Okay. Two hundred dollars. I heard you. Put it away." Laurel looked at him with red-rimmed eyes. "If I put it away you can't see it." Travis went very still. "I didn't say I wanted to see it." Something moved behind her eyes — something the alcohol had unmoored and was now floating freely, bumping into things. She got to her feet, which was a more complicated operation than it should have been, and before Travis could process what was happening she had both hands on his chest and had pushed him back onto the bed and was leaning over him, her palms flat on the mattress on either side of his shoulders. "Do you really not want to?" she asked. Her voice had gone somewhere different — lower, less careful. She pulled the sweater over her head. It took two tries. Underneath it she was exactly what she'd been planning to be for Derek tonight: the black lace, the pale skin, the careful deliberateness of something chosen. "It's two hundred dollars," she said, like this was an argument. "It'd be a waste not to." She was still crying a little, at the edges. Her face was flushed and her eyelids were heavy and her mascara had tracked down one cheek, and she was looking at him with an expression that was half dare and half something that had nothing to do with him at all — grief wearing desire like a coat. Travis had been about to push her hands away. He didn't. He became aware, with some clinical part of his brain, that his body had made a decision his mind hadn't caught up to yet.