Chapter 2

But sitting there, with the wine I couldn’t afford and a man I’d never met looking at me like I was a person and not a problem, I knew exactly what I wanted.

I didn’t want to be Maya tonight.

The heartbroken one. The one who got walked all over. The one who waited in line for Thai food for a man who was already in bed with someone else.

For one night, I wanted to be no one at all.

“You’re right,” I said, and I picked up my glass. “I did decide something.”

He waited.

I looked at him, this stranger, this stupid beautiful stranger who had no idea what kind of night I’d had, and for the first time in hours something in my chest loosened.

“I’m not telling you my name,” I said.

He didn’t laugh. That was the first thing that got me. Anyone else would have laughed, or pushed, or asked why it was a game.

He just nodded, slow, like I’d said something reasonable.

“Okay,” he said.

“Okay?”

“You don’t want to be a name tonight.” He turned his glass a quarter turn on the bar, watching it instead of me. “I get it more than you’d think.”

I studied the side of his face. Sharp jaw, dark hair, a suit that probably cost more than my rent and didn’t try to tell you so. He had the kind of stillness that made the room feel loud around him.

“You’re not gonna ask,” I said.

“Ask what?”

“What happened? Why am I sitting here drinking a four-figure bottle by myself.”

“Wasn’t going to, no.”

I took a sip. The wine was good. I hated that it was good, that something tonight could just be good with no catch.

“Most people ask,” I said.

“Most people want the story so they can decide how to feel about you.” He finally looked at me. “I don’t need a story.”

Something in my chest pulled tight and then let go.

“What do I call you, then,” I said. “If we’re not doing names.”

He thought about it. Actually thought, like it mattered.

“Whatever you want.”

“That’s a cop-out.”

“It’s an offer.” The corner of his mouth moved. Not quite a smile. “You’re the one making rules tonight. I’m just following them.”

I didn’t have an answer for that. I drank instead.

The bartender drifted past and Lucas, the stranger, the man, lifted two fingers again without asking me. A second round arrived like it had been waiting.

“I had a whole speech,” I said. I don’t know why I said that. The wine, maybe. The dark. The fact that he wasn’t writing anything down in his head about me. “On the way over. I had this whole thing I was gonna say to him.”

“You didn’t say it.”

“No.”

“Why not.”

I turned the glass. “Because saying it would’ve meant he got to hear it. And he didn’t earn that.”

He went quiet. Not the awkward kind. The kind where someone’s actually turning your words over.

“That’s the smartest thing I’ve heard all week,” he said.

“You should get out more.”

“I really should.” He almost smiled again. “Most of my week is people telling me what they think I want to hear.”

“And what do you want to hear?”

“Right now?” He looked at me, properly, and the noise of the bar seemed to drop away under it. “Nothing. That’s the part I can’t get anywhere else.”

I should have felt cornered. A strange man, a dim bar, that kind of attention. Instead I felt the opposite of cornered. Like a door had opened somewhere and the cold air felt good.

“You always pick up wrecked women at bars,” I said.

“You don’t look wrecked.”

“You should see the inside.”

“Maybe I’m not looking at the inside.” He held my eyes a beat too long. “Maybe I’m just looking at the woman who told a guy he didn’t earn her speech.”

My pulse did something stupid.

I looked down at my hands. Steady. When had they gone steady. An hour ago they’d been shaking against a takeout bag and now they weren’t, and I didn’t want to think about what that meant, that a stranger could do in twenty minutes what I couldn’t do for myself.

“This is the part where you tell me you’ve got a nicer bottle somewhere quieter,” I said.

He huffed a breath that was almost a laugh. “I was going to let you get there on your own.”

“So there is a bottle.”

“There’s a bottle.” He set his glass down. “There’s no catch on it, though. You can drink it and leave. You can not drink it and leave. You decide things, remember. I’m just the guy holding the door.”

I looked at him for a long moment.

Some sober part of me, the Maya part, the one I was trying to leave at the bottom of the glass, said this was insane. That I knew nothing about him. That tomorrow I’d hate myself.

But tomorrow already had so much waiting in it. The candle. The toothbrush. The phone full of Sophia’s missed calls and the explaining I’d have to do.

Tonight didn’t have to belong to tomorrow.

“No names,” I said again. Quieter. Almost a question.

“No names,” he agreed.

I stood up. My legs held. “Then you’d better not lose your nerve about that bottle.”

He left cash on the bar, more than enough, no card, no receipt, nothing with a name on it, and I noticed and decided not to notice, and we walked out into the cold together.

I’m not going to tell all of it.

Some of it is mine.

But I’ll tell you he didn’t rush. That surprised me, somewhere I didn’t expect to be surprised anymore. He asked me, more than once, in different ways, if this was what I wanted, and he listened to the answer like it could change everything.

I’ll tell you that for a few hours I wasn’t the woman in the doorway.

I wasn’t the one who got cheated on. I wasn’t the one who waited in line for Thai food. I wasn’t anybody’s girlfriend or anybody’s fool.

I was just a body that wanted and got to want without it being about him, the other him, the one I was trying to burn out of my skin.

At some point, late, with the city humming gray through the window, he said something into the dark.

“You went quiet.”

“I’m allowed.”

“You are.” A pause. His hand was warm at the small of my back and I let it stay. “You just had a lot to say earlier. I missed it.”

“You don’t even know my name.”

“Don’t need it.” I felt him breathe. “Whoever you are, you had a worse night than you’re letting on. And you didn’t fall apart. That’s, “ He stopped. “That’s rare.”

I didn’t answer. If I answered, my voice would have done something I couldn’t take back.

I lay there and listened to him drift off, this stranger, this kind, infuriating stranger who’d given me the one thing the man I loved couldn’t, an entire night where I didn’t have to perform being okay.

And then I made the mistake of thinking about tomorrow.

It came in all at once. The apartment. The smell of his cologne still on my pillow. Sophia’s voice when I finally picked up. The version of me that was waiting back in my real life, and how she’d look at this, at me, at what I’d done to feel like a person again.

The warmth went out of the room.

I lay still until his breathing went deep and even.

Then I got up.

I found my dress on the floor in the dark and didn’t turn on a light. My heels by the door. My phone, dead now, useless. I moved the way you move when you’ve decided something and you don’t want your own body to talk you out of it.

At the door I stopped.

He was a shape in the bed, one arm thrown across the space where I’d been, and for one second something in me wanted to stay just to see his face in the morning. To know if it would be kind. To know if any of it had been real or if real was just a thing I’d needed it to be.

That second was exactly why I had to go.

Because that was Maya thinking. The one who stayed. The one who waited. The one who handed her whole self to a man and got a stranger’s heels by the couch for it.

I wasn’t going to be her tonight, and if I stayed till morning, I’d be her by breakfast.

So I left no number. No name. No note.

I let the door click shut behind me as soft as I could, and I rode the elevator down with my shoes in my hand, and I stepped out into the early blue cold of a city that didn’t know or care what I’d just done.

A mistake. That’s what I told myself, walking to the corner, hailing the first cab with its light on.

A one-time, never-again, burn-it-and-move-on mistake.

I almost believed it.

I had no idea I’d just spent the night with the one man in this city I should have run from.