Chapter 22 #3
After the song ended, when they stood on the floor holding each other while the music shifted and the couples around them separated?
Was it when Kelsey lifted her head and looked at Elizabeth and said nothing, hoping her face would say what her mouth couldn’t? Had she miscalculated?
She kept glancing at Elizabeth’s profile, searching for a crack in the composure, some sign that the woman from the dance floor was still in there, breathing beneath the surface.
But Elizabeth’s jaw was set and her gaze was fixed straight ahead and miles away, somewhere Kelsey couldn’t follow, and her expression was the same flawless neutral she wore in lobbies and conference rooms and anywhere else vulnerability might be observed and recorded.
The elevator arrived with a soft chime. They stepped inside.
The doors closed, and the mirrored walls multiplied them into an infinite regress of couples standing side by side in formal wear, not touching.
Kelsey watched the numbers climb in the display above the door.
One. Two. Three. She was acutely aware of the six inches of air between Elizabeth’s hand and hers.
Six inches that had been nothing on the dance floor, that had not existed at all when their fingers were interlaced and their bodies were pressed together from chest to hip, and now felt like a distance she did not have permission to cross.
She thought about the contract. Not with the giddy absurdity of ten minutes ago, not with the breathless, disbelieving joy of a woman who’d just been kissed on a patio by someone she’d been wanting for months. The giddiness was gone.
In its place was a creeping, cold clarity that settled over her thoughts like frost on a windowpane. The contract said this ended Sunday afternoon. That was tomorrow.
They would drive back to the city in Elizabeth’s car with the leather seats and the satellite radio, and the miles would unspool behind them, and at some point Elizabeth would transfer five thousand dollars into Kelsey’s bank account, and Kelsey would go back to Astoria and her roommate and her shifts at 72 & Brew and the life she had been living before any of this happened.
Before the overheard phone call and the impulsive offer and the wine bar and the printed documents and the slow, excruciating, wonderful process of learning what Elizabeth Moretti looked like when she forgot to be careful.
The elevator opened. They walked down the hall, their footsteps muffled by the thick carpet, and Kelsey felt the fantasy collapsing around her with the quiet efficiency of a set being struck after the final performance.
The flowers were fake. The lights were coming down.
The audience had gone home and the stage was just a stage, boards and tape marks and the faint smell of dust, and Kelsey was just a woman in a borrowed dress walking toward a hotel room that wasn’t hers.
Elizabeth stopped at their door. She pulled the keycard from her clutch with steady hands, those hands that had trembled against Kelsey’s jaw on the patio, and the electronic lock beeped and the green light flashed and the door swung open into the dark room.
The king bed was visible in the pale wash of moonlight coming through the window, the wide expanse of white duvet smooth and undisturbed, and the sight of it hit Kelsey like a fist to the sternum.
They were sharing that bed.
She had known this all day. She had known it since they checked in and opened the door and saw the single king and the two nightstands and the carefully arranged throw pillows, and at the time it had been a source of nervous electricity.
Now it felt like a trap. Not because she didn’t want to lie next to Elizabeth, but because she did, desperately, and the wanting would keep her awake all night, staring at the ceiling in the dark while Elizabeth’s breathing evened out beside her, while Elizabeth slept the sleep of a woman who had filed the evening’s events under temporary lapse in judgment and moved on to the next item on her agenda.
She would not sleep. She knew this with the certainty of someone who understood her own body’s cruelties. Her pulse would not quiet. Her skin would not stop remembering everywhere Elizabeth had touched her.
Elizabeth stepped inside. Kelsey followed.
The door closed behind them with a soft, definitive click, and the silence of the room wrapped around them, broken only by the faint hum of the air conditioning and the distant, muffled ghost of music from the reception two floors below.
Voices and bass and the suggestion of a world still celebrating, still dancing, still full of people who were exactly where they wanted to be.
Kelsey stood just inside the door. Her shoes were hurting, the balls of her feet throbbing with the particular punishment of heels worn too long on a hard floor.
Her heart was hammering against the inside of her chest in a rhythm that had nothing to do with the walk or the elevator or the distance down the hall and everything to do with the woman standing three feet away from her in a dark room with one bed.
Kelsey bent at the waist and slipped off her heels, one after the other.
The carpet fibers sank under her bare soles, cool and thick, grounding her against the sway in her legs.
She set the shoes aside by the door, toes flexing into the weave, chasing the relief that spread up her calves.
Then she took off her necklace, leaving it draped across her weekender.
The fantasy was over. She tried very hard not to let that land as heavily as it wanted to. She had known, hadn’t she?
She had known from the beginning, from the moment she sat down across from Elizabeth in the café and said the most unhinged sentence of her life, that this was not something she got to keep.
One tipsy kiss on a patio, one slow dance where Elizabeth forgot to hold herself apart, should not have given her this much hope. Should not have rearranged her entire internal landscape so thoroughly that losing it felt like grief.
But it had. And it did.