Lauren Blakely - After This Night

This foolish way.

He should have taken the chance, and told her when it happened with Charlie’s change-up, rather than waiting. Waiting never did anyone any good. When you waited, the world passed you by. Life passed you by. And the love of your life flew in the dark of night over the country, stretching the distance between you to so much more than three thousand miles.

He left the kitchen and opened the door to his balcony, walked to the railing, and stared at the city as he finished his glass, the liquor burning his throat as he wanted it to.

They should have spent those precious last few hours tangled up together. Or having lunch together. Or shopping together. He wasn’t even fond of shopping, but he’d have happily taken her anywhere, letting her pick out the towels she wanted, the new bench for the balcony. Hell, she could redecorate the whole house from stem to stern, any way she wanted. They’ve have shopped, and then wandered through the neighborhood, his arm around her, discovering the places in the Village that would become theirs: a cafe here, a store there. He’d have gotten her worked up at lunch, touching her legs under the table, slipping his fingers under her skirt, driving her so wild he’d have had to pull her into the restroom at a cafe and fuck her against the wall, her legs wrapped around him, certain that she’d be returning to live with him.

Instead, he was left with this loneliness that could have been avoided with a few simple words spoken hours before.

Avoided with the truth.

He held up his glass, cocked his arm, and considered chucking it five stories down to the street below. Cabs and cars streaked by on a Sunday night, and soft jazz music floated up from a few floors below him. Some kind of melancholy John Coltrane song that might as well have been ordered up for him by the gods of regret.

Maybe that’s what whiskey was good for. Maybe whiskey was best for regret, because that was all Clay could taste tonight.

He lowered his arm, the glass still in his hand. He wasn’t going to make a mess for someone else. He’d somehow have to find a way to clean up the mess he’d made of this love.

He left the balcony, closing the door behind him as if he could seal shut the memories of all they’d done there. But he couldn’t. She was everywhere in his home. She was naked on his couch. She was undressing on his stairs. She was laughing joyfully over a gift in his kitchen. She was dancing in his bedroom. She was sleeping peacefully on his bed. She was giving him her most vulnerable yes in the bathroom, telling him she’d leave her life in San Francisco for him.

Like a ghost shadowing him, she was everywhere and nowhere.

He returned to the kitchen, dropping the glass into the sink. Turning around, he reached for the whiskey bottle, and tucked it back into the cabinet. But the bottle rattled. He steadied it quickly, then peered in the cupboard to see what had knocked it off-kilter.

An envelope.

He took the envelope, fat and stuffed. His name was on the front, and his stomach dropped when he read the words: “This belongs to you. Thank you for the loan. I always pay back my debts.”

But there was no xoxo. No secret message to decode that would reassure him she’d be coming back. There was only money, all ten thousand dollars that she’d won, and he’d lost.

The next day he wasn’t any wiser as to whether she’d be returning. He hadn’t heard from her: no emails, no calls, only a text to say she’d landed safely. He took some small solace in the safety update, but it truly wasn’t enough for him. He wanted all of her. He needed all of her. And he had virtually none.

He’d zombied his way through the day, grateful that the Pinkertons had signed on the dotted line after the emergency soothe session the day before. Warding off that near-fiasco had given him the mental space to manage the bare minimum he needed to get through the contracts and phone calls on his agenda.

He emailed her the ticket back to New York. He’d booked it for two weeks from now, hoping that was fair—a week apart, a week to plan. She replied with a thank you.

He checked countless times for messages from her. Each time he’d come up empty.

He scrolled through his emails on the subway home just to make sure he hadn’t missed one from her.

After a workout at his boxing gym that left his shoulders sore and his body tired, he still was no closer to knowing whether she was going to need those fluffy towels or not.

The time without her was like a black hole, a vacuum that gnawed away at him. He’d subtract a few years from his life simply for a note that gave him some sense of which way she was leaning. Something, anything to hold onto, to give him purchase. How had it only been twenty-four hours when it felt like a fucking year?

But that was what love does. It changes your perception of everything, of your own capacity for pain, for hope, and most of all—your perception of time. Because now, time was measured by her, by her presence, by her absence, and his relentless desire for her yes.

He checked his phone once more on the way home from the gym, like an addict. He was going to wear a hole through the screen with his thumbprint from all the times he’d swiped it. He needed company; he needed someone. He showered and headed uptown, reasoning that if he wasn’t going to find an answer from her, he could at least ask questions of someone else.

When he arrived at the building off Park Avenue with the green awning, the doorman buzzed her apartment. “You have a visitor. Clay Nichols is here to see you,” the man said, then paused. “Very well.”

He hung up.

“She said to come on up,” the doorman said, gesturing to the elevator.

Clay hadn’t been here in a long time. He hadn’t needed to. Now, he did.

When Michele opened the door, she was wearing a tank top and slim jeans, her hair pulled into a high ponytail, showing off her neck.

A neck that he’d once kissed.

He didn’t mince words, or bother with preambles.

“Are you in love with me?” he asked as he walked inside.

“I have been for years,” she said, as the door closed behind them.

“I’ve been thinking of new names for cocktails. Well, Craig and I have,” Kim offered during a lull in the crowds on Monday night.

“Yeah? Do tell.”

“We came up with a whole list of great names while you were out of town.”

“Your hubs is usurping my spot as a partner-in-crime?” Julia asked, resting a hip along the bar as she wiped down glasses.

“Ha. Hardly. But he does like to name drinks. Here’s what we’ve got. A shot called the Long, Hard Night. A stiff drink called the One Night Stand. And a variation on the lemon drop martini that we called Lemon Drop Your Panties,” Kim said, and the edges of Julia’s lips lifted in a smile.

“Great names,” she said, then looked away from Kim because all of them—every single one—reminded her of Clay. He’d been her One Night Stand, her Long, Hard Night, and she’d dropped her panties countless times for him. Every time, he’d risen—no pun intended—to the challenge, stripping her down to the bare essentials of pleasure and desire, and somehow all that desire had morphed into so much more. Into a mad and passionate love. The kind of love that thundered down the road with wild hoofbeats after midnight. Desperate, reckless, and headfirst.

That was the problem. She needed to pull back and analyze. To think. To consider. “Hey, can I ask you a question?”

“Fire away.”

“Has Craig ever lied to you about something because he thought it was for the best?”

Kim shot her a quizzical look. “Well, how would I know?”

“I mean something he eventually ‘fessed up to,” she added.

“Ah, gotcha,” Kim said, scrunching up her forehead as she considered the question. Then she thrust her finger in the air. “Yes! He used to tell me he loved my pot roast when we were first dating, and it turned out he really thought it was dry and stringy.”

Julia laughed. “Tell the truth, Kim. Is your pot roast dry and stringy?”

Kim threw back her head and chuckled. “Evidently, I make the worst pot roast in the entire universe. It’s that bad. But you know what?”

“What?”

“Now if he ever bugs me by leaving his dirty socks on the floor, or failing to put the toilet seat down, I just threaten him with my pot roast. Keeps that man in line,” she said, straightening her spine like a drill sergeant issuing orders.

A pair of young men in suits sidled up to the bar and Kim turned her attention to them. Julia’s mind stayed put on Kim’s story and how it had a happy ending. Wasn’t that what everyone wanted? A happy ending? But was a pot-roast fib the same as an omission of the truth?

She didn’t know, and wasn’t sure how to arrive at an answer. Her brain had grown cloudier in the last twenty-four hours, fuzzier with the distance. Had she overreacted? Been too quick to anger? She was a hot-tempered woman. She knew that about herself. But she valued independence more than anything. Even more than love. If she were to give up her independence, her job, her bar, her home, her sister, even her hairdresser, she had to know with the same clarity she had about how to make a kick-ass cocktail that uprooting her whole damn life—like she were picking up a carpet and shaking everything off it, come what may—was as right as right could be.

Come what may.

That was the real risk, wasn’t it? Charging headfirst into the great unknown. Throwing away the self-protective armor she’d built since Dillon’s betrayal, and shedding all her fiery independence for a chance that could flame out and fade away. Living in close quarters could turn the two of them—two strong-willed, stubborn, controlling people—into a collision course for disaster.