“Neither will you,” he says.
I bite my bottom lip briefly, wetting it with my tongue. I clear my throat and sip my wine.
It’s one of those moments that doesn’t need to be acknowledged head-on for us both to know what’s happening.
After a long silence, I say, “You know what always seems to happen in movies?”
“What’s that?”
“Strangers meet and get a hotel room to go fuck. I’ve never done that. Do you think it really happens?”
Holy shit, I’m feeling bold apparently.
He furrows his brow, and says, “I don’t think it does. Or at least, not to me.”
My chest feels light, my legs weak.
“That’s a shame,” I say. “It would be nice if life were more like the movies.”
He holds up his hand to the bartender, and then gestures at both of our plates, handing over a card.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
“Buying you dinner first.”
My heart trills at his words. “Before…”
“That’s up to you.”
After he pays, I take the last few sips of my wine and lead the way out of the restaurant.
This is crazy. Are we really about to do this?
It’s always been very, very against my personal code to sleep with a married man. Lots of girls in the world don’t care. They go on their sexual journeys, feeling like they’re entitled to whatever they want.
I think, besides the obvious, that it’s morally fucked, I personally object to it after seeing my mom do it. I mean, not literally seeing her do it, but knowing that she did. It felt like it got her nowhere good.
But this man is getting divorced. He sounds like the wronged party. And it’s a one-night stand. I’ll never see him again.
He doesn’t even know I’m a ballerina. I don’t know what he does. I don’t know who his wife is. We don’t know each other’s last names. We can’t hurt each other. This can just be a dream we both have, one time, one night, together.
We walk until we find a hotel, neither of us saying a word, but the energy between us buzzing hot.
When we go in, he tells me to go to the bar and order us some drinks, handing me some cash. He then goes up to the lobby desk.
It’s a fucking nice hotel. The kind of thing that looked like a Disney princess castle to me as a kid. It’s warmly lit with crystal chandeliers, the décor would make Marie Antoinette feel at home, and the cocktails at the bar all cost twenty-five dollars or more.
I get us both dry gin martinis with a twist. Even if he’s not a martini person, I figure he probably won’t mind. At its best, a martini is a delicate exploration. At its laziest, it’s a huge shot.
He finds me at the bar, putting a hand on my lower back and asking, “Ready?”
I nod and we go to the elevator with our cocktails, his hand still on the small of my back gently leading me, both of us clearly nervous but eager.
We go to the top floor of the hotel and he takes us to the end of a long, ornately carpeted hallway, to room 2000.
He opens the door and my jaw falls open.
It’s an extremely glamorous, opulent room.