Chapter 8
Tucker
Autumn’s eyes get big. Her lower lip softens.
Something in my own body answers—a bolt of need.
Her glance falls away from mine, down to the sink basin. She fusses with the soap, peeling off the paper and setting it back in the dish. When she raises her head again, she’s looking at me, not at the mirror. “That’s probably enough practicing,” she says.
“Yeah.”
She leaves me there and goes back into the main room. I stand for a moment, still feeling jolted. Then I follow her out.
When I emerge from the bathroom, she’s standing by the window looking out. I busy myself unpacking my dress clothes into the closet.
“I got us some extra hangers,” she says.
“Thanks.”
“Feel free to use the bottom two drawers in the dresser.”
“Will do.”
This room is the lap of luxury compared to my apartment, and unease takes up residence in my gut. It’s nice—too nice. I haven’t let myself get anywhere near this kind of classy in a long time.
As I finish pulling clothes from my suitcase and laying them in the drawer, a flash of black, glossy as a crow’s wing, catches my eye.
She’s winding her long dark hair up on her head into a gigantic fabric bunchy thing.
I look away as soon as I realize what she’s doing, but it’s too late; I’ve already seen that her arms are lean and toned and a soft, naked white on the undersides.
Heat flashes through my chest, trailing an image of my tongue on that vulnerable flesh.
I close my eyes, fighting it off.
I sit on the edge of the bed, studiously avoiding her, pulling my phone out and busying myself checking my texts (none).
What do people do on their phones for ten minutes at a stretch? I guess social media. I download the Instagram app and sign up for an account with a burner email. If I’m Autumn’s boyfriend, then I would probably have Instagram on my phone.
Not because I want to see what she’s posted.
She goes back into the bathroom, and when she comes out again, she smells like soap and toothpaste and something else, something floral.
She’s also wearing a lot fewer clothes, and that’s a problem.
Before, she was wearing a T-shirt and jeans, and even though the T-shirt was snug enough for me to see through to the outline of her lace bra and small tits, her clothes covered most of her.
Now she is wearing a cut-off tank and a pair of tiny shorts, and she is all lean, strong limbs and curves that, revealed, turn out to be less modest than I thought. Her tits might fit perfectly within my palms, but her ass—
My phone kicks up a text.
Bruce
I have you in my schedule for an 8:30 session.
Fuck me. I never forget my sessions with Bruce. And I can’t very well leave Autumn here and go, not when Weggers’s office is right near Bruce’s studio. Plus I don’t trust Weggers not to have other spies, people who will report back to him if they see me—or Autumn—on our own.
Tucker
Sorry! Can’t do in person, could do Zoom?
Bruce
Sure.
“Sorry—forgot a meeting—are you done in the bathroom?” I ask Autumn.
She nods.
I drag my laptop into the bathroom and turn on the water to drown out noise. A link pops up in my texts, and I click through. The face of my meditation teacher appears in the Zoom window. Bruce is a jolly bald man with a Santa Claus belly and an easy laugh.
“Hello, Tucker,” he says, in his formal, priestly way. “You’re in a bathroom.”
“Yeah.”
I’m counting on Bruce—who I refer to in my head as Zen Bruce, because he is unflappable—to accept this without asking more questions, and he does.
Which is good because I’m not ready to explain why I rescheduled my in-person meditation lesson to Zoom and why I’m doing the Zoom from a bathroom and why that bathroom is in the hotel room of a woman I didn’t know yesterday.
Instead Bruce asks, “Are you seated comfortably?”
Which is an absurd question. Of course I’m not seated comfortably; I’m sitting on the edge of a bathtub with my laptop precariously balanced on the sink. But I say “Yes” because that’s the answer that will result in the fewest additional questions.
Bruce is where I landed after I realized that paying one hundred eighty bucks for a fifty-minute hour of therapy was not going to “fix” me any time soon.
It was actually my therapist’s suggestion.
She said, If you want to sit in silence with someone, I can recommend a really good meditation teacher.
I scowled and ignored that.
And then, not long after that, I stumbled on Bruce’s studio—Zen what I mean: Yes, he’s a sadistic prick), how it feels to play Dead Man’s Bluff (What I say: Ah, you know, not a big deal; what I mean: What the fuck even is that?
Is that supposed to be funny?), and whether it’s true that all my brothers are in love with the women they met fulfilling the terms of their letters (What I say: Gotta run; what I mean: None of your fucking business, and don’t get any ideas about me living happily ever after one day).
“Well,” I say, “it’s my turn, and my job is to bodyguard a happiness influencer, and as it turns out, the way it has to happen is that I am her fake date to a weeklong destination wedding.”
I don’t usually use the word bodyguard at all, let alone as a verb, but then, I also don’t use the phrases happiness influencer or fake date or destination wedding, either. We’re in uncharted territory.
“Hmm,” says Bruce. “That is an interesting turn of events.”
It’s very reassuring, Bruce’s unflappability.
“You haven’t explained the bathroom, though,” he says.
“Right,” I say. “Well. I have to stay in her hotel room. And…”
I stop. Because the truth is…
“You didn’t want to disturb her by having your meditation lesson in the main room,” Bruce supplies as the silence stretches and I fail to complete my sentence.
He’s given me the perfect excuse. All I have to do is agree. Instead I tell him the truth.
“She’s very pretty.”
“Ah,” Bruce says.
As usual, there’s no judgment in his voice.
We’re both quiet for a minute. I’m thinking about how fucked I am, but I don’t say that out loud, of course.
Because no one is fucked in Bruce’s world view.
Just…trying to accept the ever-changing nature of reality with as much equanimity as possible.
Although Bruce doesn’t know the details of what happened two years ago.
He only knows that something did and that I don’t want to talk about it.
If he knew the truth, he might think I was fucked, too.
“Just remember. As Pema Chodron says, ‘You are the sky. Everything else—it’s just the weather.’”
“Yeah,” I say, and then, with a sigh, “Too bad I’m not Pema Fucking Chodron.”