All Our Wrong Todays(61)

This feels good. Feels right. Didn’t even know he’d been holding me back all these years. The doubts. The questions. The hand on my shoulder. The voice in my ear saying, no, don’t, it’s wrong, just because you want it that doesn’t mean you deserve it. That boring whisper is gone and I deserve it all. Wanting it is the same as deserving it.

It’s hilarious I thought I loved Penny just because he loved Penny. I’m young. I look great. I’m going to be rich, and even if I’m not, Greta will give me whatever I ask for, she’s so screwed up about her money. I’m sort of famous. Famous enough. I never need another good idea in my life. Like Penny could satisfy me when there are interns with perfect asses and the kind of faces that make them drop their jeans for a famous enough man who tells them they could be something one day. Who the hell wears jeans that tight to work? Someone whose main ambition in life is to give herself to me.

Everything is so clear now that he’s gone.

I don’t know why I’m bothering to write this down. Guess he got me in the habit. And anyway Tom’s story needs an ending.

The End.





95


I wake up and I’m missing a day.

Yesterday was Saturday so today is Sunday except it’s Monday. I should be waking up next to Penny at her apartment, but I’m in my condo bedroom lying next to a stranger. No, not a stranger, a young woman who interns at the architecture office. Beth. Her name is Beth. She’s nervous, embarrassed, her eyes searching my face for evidence that this wasn’t a career-damaging mistake, but there’s anger percolating there too, held in check, like she hasn’t decided if it should be directed at me or herself. She nuzzles her naked body next to mine and I recoil instinctively and I see a wall of self-recrimination slam down over her eyes because of course she sees the panic in mine.

I tell her I need some coffee and I’ll make her some too. She tries to kiss me but I act like I don’t notice as I skitter out of the bedroom.

I have no idea what happened. My mind is blank.

Something buzzy in my brain stem sends me to check the laptop and there’s an entry that I didn’t write. As I read it, my body shivers hot and cold like a bad flu.

It’s him, John—he somehow took control and did this to me.

She calls out asking about the coffee and I slap down the laptop screen. I make coffee and she pads into the kitchen wearing nothing but yesterday’s underwear, too casual, showing herself to me in the morning light. She has a small bruise on each hip. They look fresh.

I feel queasy. The neural scanners aren’t supposed to let you wake up into a nightmare. Because that’s how this feels, as cliché as I know that sounds, like a nightmare, lucid and crystalline but gummy around the edges.

She asks if I want to go get breakfast and I say I can’t, I have to go to the office, and there’s this excruciating moment where she makes a joke about workplace sexual harassment and it’s supposed to show how grown-up she is about this stuff but it only makes her seem so young, too young, except there’s also this steely wire of threat inside the joke, giving it its essential structure, and she sees me get it and she flushes pink, because she’s tasting a bit of power and she’s not sure what to do with it.

She stands there, stirring milk into her coffee, undressed, a display and a challenge. She wants something more from me, I don’t know what, I don’t even know if we slept together—I have no memory of yesterday, nothing. But there’s a jagged tension simmering in her face, like she’s waiting for me to confirm that I’ve already taken everything I wanted from her and now she’s just one awkward conversation away from me never thinking about her again.

I read what he wrote so fast, I didn’t get the full picture of what happened with Penny. But it sounds bad. Awful. The kind of awful that maybe can’t be fixed.

She asks if she should just go and I say that’s probably a good idea. I escape to the bathroom to wash my face and I still have no idea what exactly happened but there’s a used condom, thank god a condom, in the bathroom trash. I can’t make eye contact when she comes out of the bedroom wearing yesterday’s clothes, pulling on her shoes, swaying as she balances on one foot, then the other, and in sixty seconds she’ll be gone and I can move on to the next phase of this calamity.

But this is not her fault. This is my fault—his fault—and even if the last thing in the world I want right now is to prolong this mess, her name is Beth and she matters.

“Wait,” I say. “Beth . . . I’m sorry, I’m not good at this stuff. I don’t want you to feel like what happened last night didn’t . . . mean anything. It’s a lot easier for me to pretend it didn’t happen and treat you like a stranger at the office. But, I mean, if nothing else we should be able to be honest with each other. Don’t you think?”

Beth blinks at me, like she’s waiting for something snide or dismissive and when it doesn’t come she’s sweetly confused and not so sweetly sad. She crosses her arms, tight, guarded.

“You want us to be honest,” Beth says.

“Yeah,” I say. “Because, uh, I don’t totally remember what happened . . . exactly.”

“You don’t remember,” she says. “Uh-huh.”

“Did we . . . drink a lot?”

“I guess so. Yes. I sure did.”