Two #2
He negotiated with suppliers, he hired and fired waiters, he drank wine at the bar and sometimes he would talk to her and sometimes he would spend the entire day not even seeing her, while she watched him and lusted.
And then, finally, in a burst and a rush so intense she could still feel it in her stomach, he took her to his apartment and fucked her standing up in the kitchen and again in the bedroom and once more in the bedroom and she would have taken more, she wanted more , which was like nothing she’d ever felt in her life.
Her first orgasms administered by someone else.
It was a disaster to think of those early days with Judd.
She’d never sleep again. So she turned to the Justice for Angel website—Angel, her beloved Georgian mutt—but there was no news.
She sent another five-dollar donation to the rescue group, via Paypal, along with a short note ( with love from your friend Amy in New York!
). Five dollars equalled about fourteen Georgian lari .
Judd would have had questions, maybe, if he ever looked at their credit card statements.
“Samartlianoba Angelozi-istvis,” she said out loud: justice for Angel.
Sending the five dollars, an almost daily ritual, calmed her heart a bit.
A little thing of her own, something Judd didn’t know about, and of course the help for poor Angel, lost somewhere in Tbilisi.
If she were in Tbilisi, she would know how to find Angel.
It had become her sub-specialty, the locating and securing of lost pets.
Ever since her time at the shelter around the corner, she’d been doing it: using an owner’s old T-shirt to lure a blind Doberman out of hiding, tracking a parakeet through the holly bushes that lined her childhood sidewalks.
And then, volunteering at the Avenue D shelter, she’d learned to night-vision video.
She’d reunited more tearful, grateful people with their lost animals than she could count.
But she was here, and the people in Georgia were there, so all Amy could really offer was money and goodwill and her own heartache.
AT SIX-THIRTY IN the morning Roxy stood up abruptly, which the cats took as their cue, meowing and trotting toward the kitchen, and Roxy stood there patiently while the four cats got their kibble and tuna and then started inching toward the door, she had to pee, please please I gotta go.
“Okay, okay,” Amy said, in her slippers and her pajama pants.
They trudged down the stairs, Roxy too polite to pull on her leash but doing that waddle she did when she really had to pish, and then outside to her favorite sidewalk linden, the one that had its own tiny gate and a sign that said “please be respectful” over a silhouette of a squatting dog with a red line through it.
And when she was done peeing, Roxy barked, barked, turned to the left.
“Judd?”
“Ame,” he said. He was holding the Whole Foods bag, his khaki barn jacket, his ratty pajama pants, his running shoes, red eyes. “I’ve been walking for five hours.”
“You don’t have to be a martyr, Judd,” she said, which was something her mother liked to say to her when she was a child and trying to make her mother understand that life was hard.
“I didn’t know where to go.”
“There are a lot of hotels in this city.”
He looked at her bleakly. Roxy tilted her body toward the apartment building’s door: she had watered the linden, time to go back inside. Amy and Judd stood there, looking at each other, both sleepless, both exhausted in every possible way. They were too old to keep going on like this, weren’t they?
Roxy, still too polite to really pull, started to nudge.
“Come on,” she said.
The three of them trudged up the stairs silently, Roxy in the lead. Amy thought: Why hadn’t he gone to a hotel? Or to the restaurant? He had the key to the restaurant—well, maybe he had. Gone to Le Coin. Maybe he was lying, trying to make her feel bad for him—
It was strange, she thought—she thought this often—how out in the world he was so gregarious and in command, but at home he was so often needy, almost childish, and, like a child, prone to breaking things and then thinking he could be forgiven by looking at her pitifully and saying he was sorry. The ridiculousness of the charming man.
In the apartment, in the kitchen, they set about their regular routines: Judd fed Roxy, Amy swept the cat food off the counter into the sink. “Coffee?” she asked, out of habit.
“Did you sleep last night?” he asked.
She shook her head.
He was quiet for a second. “Come,” he said.
She stood frozen by the sink.
“Please,” he said.
He was, to this day, the only man she’d ever loved. She was too tired to think.
She followed him to the bedroom. She took off her slippers.
He lay down under the comforter in the big oak bed that was one of the only things she’d brought to the marriage, the big oak bed that her mother had kept in storage and shipped out to them as a wedding present. It had been her grandmother’s.
She looked at his huge body under the comforter and waited for her stomach to roil, but instead all she could think of was the white kitten curled up in the embrace of the grieving black terrier. She got in the bed, curled up next to him.
“Amy—” he said.
“Not now,” she said.
And within minutes they both were asleep.