8. Ursula
— ? —
Ursula
The Claremont Spa smells like eucalyptus and privilege, that specific scent of places where the membership fee is more than most people make in a year.
I’ve been coming here for a decade, once a week, two hours of facials and massages and the kind of quiet that money can buy.
It’s the one place in Manhattan where I’ve always felt safe.
I should have known Renata would find a way to ruin that too.
Matteo insisted on coming with me today, which I found ridiculous at first. “It’s a spa,” I told him. “They’re going to wrap me in seaweed and make me listen to whale sounds. I don’t need a bodyguard.”
“Humor me,” he said. And because the way he said it made me think arguing wasn’t worth it, I did.
Now he’s waiting in the lobby with a magazine he’s definitely not reading while I have my treatment.
The aesthetician is new, a nervous girl who keeps glancing at the door like she’s expecting someone to burst in.
I try not to let her anxiety infect me. I’m here to relax.
I’m here to forget, for two hours, that my life is a disaster.
The treatment ends. The nervous aesthetician hands me a robe and tells me my clothes are in locker seventeen, and I pad down the hallway to the changing room with my muscles loose and my mind, for once, blissfully empty.
My locker is empty.
I stand there for a moment, dripping slightly, staring at the space where my clothes should be. My dress, my underwear, my shoes, my bag with my phone and my wallet and my keys. All of it, gone.
“Excuse me.” I flag down an attendant. “There seems to be a problem with my locker. My things are missing.”
The attendant wrings her hands. She’s young, probably an intern, and she looks like she might cry. “I’m so sorry, Mrs. Rothwell. Your things seem to have been... misplaced. We’re looking everywhere.”
“Misplaced.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“My clothes were locked in a locker with a key that only I had, and they’ve been misplaced.”
“I... yes. I’m so sorry. We’re looking.”
I know exactly where my things are. I know exactly who “misplaced” them. And when I walk into the relaxation lounge, I find confirmation.
Renata is reclining on a chaise with a cucumber mask on her face and a glass of champagne in her hand. She doesn’t open her eyes when I enter, but her smile spreads slow and satisfied beneath the green paste.
“Oh dear,” she says, not moving. “Wardrobe malfunction?”
I stand in the doorway in my spa robe, barefoot, exposed.
Three other women are in the lounge, all of them watching with barely concealed interest. This is what Renata wanted.
Me, humiliated. Me, forced to hide in a treatment room while someone fetches me something to wear.
Me, reduced to the level of the scared waitress at the gala, except there’s no one here to be kind to me.
She thinks this is my breaking point.
She’s wrong.
I remove the robe.
Under it, I’m wearing exactly what I was wearing when I went into the treatment: a towel. One small towel. It covers me from chest to mid-thigh, and not a lot else.
I walk across the relaxation lounge.
Past Renata, who has opened her eyes now and is staring with her mouth hanging open beneath her cucumber mask. Past the three other women, whose phones are definitely coming out. Through the reception area, where the front desk staff freeze mid-conversation.
Into the lobby.
Matteo looks up from his magazine.
His expression goes through approximately seven stages in two seconds: confusion, concern, shock, appreciation, heat, more heat, and finally something that looks almost like pride.
“Your membership here is revoked.”
I’m speaking to the front desk, not looking away from Matteo. My voice is calm. Pleasant. The ice queen at her finest.
“Ma’am?” The receptionist sounds like she might faint.
“Ms. Renata Calloway. Revoke her membership. Have her escorted out. Now.”
“I... Mrs. Rothwell, I’m not sure I have the authority...”
“Call your manager. Tell them Ursula Rothwell is standing in your lobby in a towel because one of your members orchestrated the theft of her clothing. Ask them if they’d like to discuss it further with my lawyer.”
The receptionist picks up the phone.
Behind me, I hear commotion. Renata’s voice, shrill with outrage. “You can’t do this! This is ridiculous! I’ve been a member here for fifteen years!”
“And now you’re not.” I still don’t turn around. “I’d suggest you leave quietly, but I know that’s not your style.”
“You bitch. You absolute bitch. You think you’ve won something? You think parading around in a towel like a whore is some kind of victory?”
“I think walking out of here in paper slippers is going to be the highlight of your week.” I finally turn, and I let her see the ice in my eyes, the frost that has protected me for decades. “Goodbye, Renata. Do give my regards to Bennett.”
Security arrives. There’s a brief, undignified struggle. Renata is escorted out the front door in a spa robe and paper slippers, her cucumber mask still half on her face, shrieking about lawsuits and revenge and how everyone will be sorry.
The lobby goes quiet.
I become aware, suddenly, that I’m standing in the middle of a five-star spa wearing nothing but a small towel, and that Matteo is still looking at me like I’ve hung the moon.
His eyes drag down the length of me, over the towel, over my bare legs, and heat follows the path of his gaze like he’s touching me.
For two weeks I have been at war with this.
Wanting him and hating that I want him, cataloging his forearms and his throat and his hands and then flogging myself for it, telling myself a decent woman in the wreckage of her marriage would not be this hungry.
Standing here, half naked and victorious and watched, I feel the last of that guilt let go of me.
I loved a man who never wanted me. I spent thirteen years being cold because being cold was safer than being ignored.
If my body has decided it is done being ignored, if it wants this man’s hands and his mouth and whatever crude thing he’d say into my ear while he took me apart, then fine. I am done apologizing for being alive.
I want him. I’m going to stop pretending I don’t.
“I need clothes.” My voice is steadier than I feel. “Mine were stolen.”
He already has his phone out. “Sofia. The Claremont Spa on 74th. Now. Yes, everything. Her exact size.” He pauses, listening. “I don’t care. Empty the showroom if you have to. Twenty minutes.”
He hangs up. Looks at me. A smile tugs at the corner of his mouth.
“You walked across a five-star spa lobby in a towel.”
“Yes.”
“With your chin up. Like you were wearing couture.”
“It’s all about the attitude.”
“It’s about a lot more than that.” He shrugs out of his jacket and drapes it over my shoulders. It’s warm from his body, and it smells like him, and I have to resist the urge to bury my face in the fabric. “Come on. Let’s get you somewhere more comfortable while we wait.”
The private lounge is empty, thankfully, and Matteo sits me on a velvet settee and orders tea and doesn’t say anything about the fact that I’m still shaking slightly. Adrenaline. That’s all it is. The adrenaline of confrontation, of victory, of watching Renata escorted out in paper slippers.
Not the adrenaline of Matteo’s jacket on my shoulders and his eyes on my bare legs.
“How did you know my size?” I ask finally, because the silence is getting unbearable.
“What?”
“You told your stylist my exact size. How did you know?”
He has the grace to look slightly embarrassed. “I notice things.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only answer you’re getting.” He meets my eyes, and the look on his face makes my chest pull tight.
“I’ve been paying attention to you for thirteen years, Ursula.
I know what size you wear. I know you take your coffee sweeter than you’d ever admit to.
I know you hate wearing heels but you do it anyway because you think it makes you look powerful.
I know you laugh at terrible puns when you think no one’s watching, and I know you haven’t laughed nearly enough in the past decade. ”
There’s nothing I can say to that.
“I also know,” he continues, quieter now, “that your husband never noticed any of those things. That he looked at you like a piece of furniture. That he made you feel like ice because it was easier than letting you feel anything at all.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I watched it happen. Every dinner party. Every gala. He talked over you. He dismissed your opinions. He treated you like an accessory, not a partner.” His jaw tightens. “I wanted to punch him approximately four hundred times.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Because you weren’t mine to defend.”
The words hang in the air between us. Because you weren’t mine. The implication of that past tense, of what he’s not saying but meaning anyway.
The stylist arrives before I can respond, thank God. Sofia is a tiny woman with a sharp bob and sharper eyes, and she wheels in a rolling rack that contains approximately half a boutique’s worth of clothing. Dresses, blouses, pants, lingerie I definitely did not ask for. All in my exact size.
“Try them,” Matteo says. “I’ll wait.”
“I can’t let you buy all of this.”
“You can and you will.” He settles back into his chair like we have all the time in the world. “Consider it compensation for having to deal with your husband’s mistress.”
“Ex-husband. Soon to be.”
“Soon to be ex-husband’s current mistress. The woman who stole your clothes. The woman who tried to humiliate you twice in one week.” His eyes meet mine. “Let me do this, Ursula. Please.”
The please gets me. Matteo Salazar does not say please. Matteo Salazar demands, commands, takes. He doesn’t ask.
But he’s asking me.
I try on six dresses. Each time I emerge from behind the screen, Matteo shakes his head or nods or, once, makes a sound like he’s been punched in the stomach.
“That one,” he says about a green silk that matches my eyes. “We’re buying that one.”
“We?”
“I’m buying all of them.”
“You can’t...”
“Watch me.”
He’s impossible. Arrogant. Controlling in a way that should infuriate me.
He makes me feel like the most beautiful woman in any room.
“Thank you,” I say quietly when the stylist has packed up and the dress is on my body and I feel like myself again, a thing I’d stopped expecting. “You didn’t have to do any of this.”
“I know.” He stands, moves toward me, stops close enough that I can feel the warmth pouring off his skin. “I wanted to.”
“Why?”
“Because you walked through a lobby in a towel with your head high like you were wearing couture.” His hand comes up, brushes a strand of hair from my face.
“Because you didn’t let her win. Because you never let anyone win.
And because someone should see that. Someone should make sure you know how remarkable you are. ”
I can’t get a full breath. His fingers are still in my hair, and his eyes are dark, and I want him to kiss me so badly I can taste it.
But he doesn’t. He steps back, offers his arm, and leads me out of the spa into the bright Manhattan afternoon like nothing happened at all.
Except everything happened.
Everything is happening.
And I have no idea how to stop it.