2. Greer
Greer
The dress isn't mine.
It's Indie's, lifted off the hanger from her closet four hours ago, the borrowed armor that came with the promise that I would not look, tonight, like a person who has cried twice in seventy-two hours.
I tell myself that I can wear this and feel like I belong in it. That I can fake my way through three more hours of a hockey gala with a glass of champagne and my best smile. That I am, three months out, completely over Brennan. They all feel like lies.
He's here.
Of course he is. Boston has four million people, six hundred bars, eleven charity galas a season, and tonight, at the Bellamy on Tremont, my ex of eighteen months, the man who left and took the dog, is thirty feet away from me and walking closer.
I set my champagne glass down on a passing tray. The waiter says something polite. I say something less polite and then I am moving, not running, because women in borrowed dresses do not run, toward the bank of elevators on the back wall of the ballroom.
The up button bruises my thumb. Brennan calls my name across a hundred people. Don't turn around. Don't turn around. Don't turn around.
The doors open.
I step in.
I jab eighteen. Indie's suite. The safe end of the night. Just before the doors slide shut, Brennan's shoulder pushes through the crowd toward the elevators. My thumb hits the close-door button six times because that has clearly worked for someone, once, in the history of the world.
The doors close.
I am alone.
And then I am not.
The elevator opens on seventeen. I do not remember pressing seventeen.
I remember pressing eighteen. But the doors open anyway, and a couple is standing in the hallway, and the woman gives me a look like she can tell I'm running from something.
The man gives me a look I stopped finding flattering when I was twenty-two.
I get off because I cannot be in there for one more floor.
The seventeenth-floor hallway is quiet. Cream carpet. Wall sconces every fifteen feet.
Indie’s hotel key is in my clutch. It’s a white plastic rectangle with the Bellamy logo embossed on the front, and not labeled with a room number, because apparently rich people remember which room is theirs.
I am not rich.
I fish the key out and hold it in my fist like a talisman. The plan is the stairwell at the end of the hall. The plan is one flight up. The plan is letting myself into Indie's suite and locking the deadbolt and not coming out until somebody tells me Brennan is in another time zone.
I make it forty feet.
The bourbon and the champagne and the seventeen-minute panic of being looked at across a hundred people by a man who left me all show up at once.
My knees do the thing they have been threatening to do since I put the borrowed Versace on.
I lean my shoulder against the nearest door to keep my dignity off the carpet.
The door gives.
Two inches. Then four. Then the rest of the way, slowly, because heavy hinges do what heavy hinges do, and whoever last came through this door did not push it hard enough to make the latch engage.
I almost fall forward into the suite. The doorframe catches my elbow at the last second. My heel clears the threshold by an inch.
I should back up. I should pull the door shut and find the stairwell and use the stairs like the plan said.
But tonight, I am not a reasonable woman.
I step the rest of the way inside.
The suite is dim. One lamp is on by the window. A man's coat slung over the arm of a couch — long, charcoal, expensive. The faint sound of water running behind a closed door at the back of the room.
I lean against the door for a second and close my eyes. The carpet is thicker than the hallway carpet. The lamp throws a soft circle of light onto a credenza with a half-finished glass of bourbon on it. Somebody is in the shower and I have, ten seconds ago, broken into their suite.
Leaving. I am leaving. I am genuinely about to leave.
The water shuts off.
I freeze with my hand on the door behind me, palm flat against the wood.
There is no good move here. If I open the door now, I have one second to be out and gone before the bathroom door opens.
If I stand here for two more seconds, I will be a stranger in a man's suite when he walks out in whatever he's wearing or not wearing.
I choose the first option. I turn the handle.
The bathroom door opens first.
A man steps out in a towel and a drift of steam. He is six-foot-something. Salt at his temples, pepper through the rest, water beading along his collarbones in a way I have no business noticing within four seconds of seeing him.
He stops. He looks at me.
I expect a flinch. The what-the-hell-are-you-doing-in-my-room and the dial of hotel security.
What I get is a beat of silence, his head tilting half an inch like he's making sure he has the read right, and then the slow set of his shoulders as he reaches without looking back to the bathroom doorframe and pulls a second towel free of the hook.
He is not flinching, not surprised, not doing anything but looking at me.
"You appear," he says, finally, "to be in my room."
His voice is low. Unhurried.
His eyes track me, slowly. The towel sits low around his waist, and there is a feeling, in the lean cut of him, that I am trying very hard to keep out of my voice.
His gaze goes past my shoulder. To the door, which I am realizing for the first time is still hanging open at my back. He looks at the door. He looks at the inside hinge. He looks at me.
He has put it together before I have opened my mouth.
"My friend is on eighteen," I say, too fast, because the silence is going to undo me.
"I got off the elevator on the wrong floor.
I was looking for the stairs. I leaned against your door for a second because my knees were giving out on me, and it turned out not to be latched.
I am — God, I'm so sorry — I am leaving. "
I do not move.
He does not move.
After a long second he says, mildly, "Are you all right?"
That is the wrong question for him to be asking.
It is also the right question for me to hear, and the one I have been steering everybody away from for ten weeks.
My mouth opens to give him the answer I have been giving everyone — I'm fine, sorry again, leaving — and what comes out is, "No. Not really."
He nods. Like that is a piece of information he can work with. His face does not move except to soften half a millimeter at the corner of his mouth.
"I'm going to put some clothes on," he says. "You can sit if you'd like. There is water on the credenza, and bourbon if you want something stronger. Stay as long as you need."
He picks his bag up off the floor on the way, walks past me toward the bedroom door at the far end of the suite, and stops with his hand on the frame.
"I'm Kieran," he says, over his shoulder.
My mouth opens before I have decided what to put in it.
"Greer," I say.
He looks at me one more time, long enough that the back of my neck heats up. Then he closes the bedroom door behind him.
The foyer holds me for a long second. Three months out of a relationship, in a dress that isn't mine, with my heart pounding in my fingertips and a glass of someone else's bourbon catching lamplight on the credenza.
I close his door for him on my way to the chair. Quietly. With the inside of my wrist.
I take the bourbon.
When he comes back out of the bedroom, he is in soft gray sweatpants and a long-sleeved tee, hair still damp, carrying himself entirely in his own again.
He takes the chair across from me and not the couch beside me, which I appreciate enough to notice, and pours himself two fingers from the bottle that turns out to be the Bellamy's compliments-of-the-suite.
He does not ask me what I am not all right about.
That is, somehow, the kindest thing anybody has done for me this week.
We sit for a long minute without talking.
He turns his glass on the coaster. He looks at the lamp, not at me.
The whole seventeenth floor has the quiet hum that lives behind every Bellamy I have ever been in.
Outside the window, Boston is a city built for people who have not just had the worst week of their adult life.
"What were you doing here tonight?" I ask.
"Working."
"Doing what?"
"Standing in a ballroom in a suit," he says, "smiling at people who paid eight thousand dollars to talk to me for ninety seconds about a sport they don't watch."
"You hate it."
"I am very good at it."
"Those aren't the same answer."
"No," he agrees. "They are not."
He pours another half-inch into his glass and sets the bottle down. The lamp catches on the silver at his temples. The intensity of his eyes, capable of looking through others, presents a challenge at any age, but more so at his.
"What about you?" he says. "What were you doing in a ballroom on a Wednesday night?"
"Being my best friend's plus-one."
"Best friend who forced you?"
"Best friend who bribed me. She knows I do not like rooms with more than a hundred people in them."
"What did she bribe you with?"
"This dress. She had it in her closet. She said I had to wear it because it was unconscionable on the hanger and I had to get it into the world."
"It is doing well in the world," he says.
My eyes go to him. His eyes are already on me. Neither of us says the next thing. Twenty-six years on this planet and I have not had a man look at me like that since I was twenty-two and Brennan was still pretending I meant something to him.
On principle, I do not sleep with strangers.
Tonight I am going to. I know it the way you know the weather.
"What do you do, Greer?" he says.
"I fix people who get hit for a living."
The corner of his mouth moves again. Definite, this time. He sets his glass down.
"Now that," he says, "is the most interesting sentence anybody has said to me in two years."
"I'm a physical therapist."
"Sounds like sports, hockey?"
"How did you guess?"