Page 30 of Lucky Night

He prefers her completely naked, that’s all.

Mrs. Gryzb! he yells. Your presence is required in the bedchamber!

This time she really did have to pee. Sweet relief! She flushes just as he hollers from the other room. Some variation of get your butt in here, no doubt.

But she’s taking a minute. Doing a little check-in. A self-check, like you’re supposed to do after hiking. Except instead of deer ticks, she’s checking for latent terror.

She doesn’t find much. Disquiet, sure. Why haven’t they madeanother announcement? It seems like a bad sign. But this worry is fighting for brain space with a fresh source of agita: her cringing embarrassment at the turn their conversation just took, entirely at her instigation.

Has this changed you?Where did that come from? From what he said earlier, obviously, she was belatedly pushing back, waddling after him on webbed feet, but why did she make it about them? What kind of response was she expecting?

He hadn’t even known it had been six years!

So, yeah. With that recent horror uppermost, her fears about the fire aren’t getting much oxygen.

Ha ha. Aren’t you clever?

Pull it together.

The toilet seat is warm. It wasn’t warm the last time she was in here. Is it one of those fancy…why yes. Look at that control panel. He must have switched it on. He’d have been all over the option for ass-toasting, ready as he is to deploy every available amenity. Including her.

She moves to the sink.Has this changed you?He handled the question well. Answered without lobbing it back at her, or demanding to know why she was asking. He’s so patient tonight. Since that first moment of tenderness—where are you, Jenny, where’d you go?—he’s been so gentle. Who knew?

She plucks a hand towel from the stack under the sink. Everybody, maybe. Maybe everybody knows him. Patient, kind—that could be who he really is. And lustful, caustic Nick, handsy and horny, mocking and profane—that could be the version he shows only to her. Shady, street corner Nick. Because with her he doesn’t have to be good.

You know what, though? No. She’s seen him out in the world. They keep a careful distance, of course, but she can observe. Enough to know that his personality, his essential Nickness, is the same out there as it is in here. In their little sex pod. Their fuck bubble.

Six Years in a Fuck Bubble: The Parrish and Holloway Story.

She wanders back to the toilet, wipes a few drops off the seat.Has this changed me fundamentally? I would say no.All righty, then. That’s fine!

No it isn’t. If she’s being completely honest, it isn’t. She would like to think she has some importance to him, aside from being a semiregular receptacle for his copious ejaculate.

A Semiregular Receptacle forHis

Enough with the book titles. Honestly.

But yes. If she’d had some effect on him, however small, she wouldn’t mind the imbalance. Because he has affected her, profoundly.

The man who can’t even be bothered to read her books.

She examines the toilet’s many buttons and blinking lights. What can it do other than warm your butt? Suggest some firming exercises? Slim it down with a little lipo? She presses a button and jumps when a little arm whizzes out from under the seat, spraying water.

Why does it sting that he’s never read her books? She should be glad. Immensely relieved, in fact. Because if he had cracked one open, Mr. Super-Genius, Analytical Man, surely he would have noticed certain, let’s say, essential similarities, between himself and her hero. He couldn’t have failed to observe that Julian Blackwell is the eighteenth-century teenage ghost version of him, Nick Holloway. Romanticized, superficially altered, but undeniably him: his intelligence and intensity, his caustic wit, his quick gestures. The sound of his voice. The way he kisses.

It’s all Nick. Nobody knows, but he would know, instantly.

She tried to disguise him at the time. She really did. But she was writing in a fever. Not in control of herself or what was pouring onto the page.

How could she be? She was so desperately, uncontrollably in love.

She moves to the door, but hesitates. She needs another minute. Maybe they’ll make an announcement soon, and she can saunter back into the room free and easy, instead of skittering around, constantly checking her phone. Fritzy Jenny is getting tiresome.

It happened maybe six months into their little arrangement.Everything was going great, it was low-key, casual. Exactly what it should have been. Until they had plans to meet one night, she was getting on the train, and he texted her. A work emergency had come up, and he was sorry, but he couldn’t makeit.

She read it and fell to pieces.

This is it it’s over he’s tired of you he’s making an excuse, it’s over it’s over it’s

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