Chapter 9
SASHA
Iwoke up because the light was wrong.
Not the alarm. There wasn't an alarm. The light came in across my bed, and it lay over the foot of the covers like something spilled. I lay there and looked at it and didn’t understand a thing about my own life.
Then, my body did what my body does. It went off like a fire bell.
I was up on one elbow with my heart slamming before I was even properly awake, reaching for the phone, running the count in my head—the group checking out, the linens, the delivery, the ice machine, who was on, who was late, who needed me—
And then, I remembered.
I had done it.
I lay back down slowly onto the pillow with the phone in my hand and my pulse going, and I remembered doing it. The remembering was so strange that for a second, it felt like remembering something out of a dream.
I had stood in that empty lobby, after the linen closet, after the folio. And before I could talk myself out of it, I had gotten out my phone and moved a shift.
It took eleven minutes. That's the joke. It took eleven minutes and two texts. Then, it was done, and covered, and handled, and the building was going to open in the morning exactly the way it opens every morning, with or without me standing in it.
Then, I wrote to Izzy.
I typed it three times. The first draft had an explanation in it. The second draft had an apology in it. The third draft had both, and it was four lines long. I read it back and put my hand over my mouth in a dark lobby because I sounded like a woman asking permission to be sick.
I deleted the whole thing.
Taking the morning. Personal. Devon and Missy are covering. I'll be in after lunch.
I sent it and put the phone face-down like it was hot.
She wrote back inside a minute.
Of course!!! You never take time, take the whole day if you want.
Three exclamation points. She meant every one of them. She meant it so easily, so instantly, without one second of hesitation, that I stood there in the dark with the light of that phone on my face and felt something go through me that I couldn’t name and didn’t want to look at.
It had always been that easy.
That was the thing. It had always been that easy, and I had gone years without ever once finding out.
She didn't ask why.
I noticed that. I noticed it and left it alone, because I was tired, and because it was late, and because a woman who has never asked for a thing in her life doesn’t get to be aggrieved the first time nobody wonders why she's finally asking.
Take the whole day if you want.
I didn't take the whole day. I didn’t want to get carried away.
But I took the morning. And I came home over the bridge with my hair down and didn’t set an alarm. I slept the way a stone sleeps at the bottom of a creek. The light woke me up at an hour I hadn’t seen from that side of the day in longer than I could account for.
I lay there.
That was the whole activity. I lay in my bed, in my room, in my condo, and I looked at the ceiling. There was nothing I was supposed to be doing.
It was awful.
Not at first. At first, it was a kind of luxury so foreign that my skin didn't know what to do with it.
But then, a minute went by, and then another one.
My hands started going, plucking at the sheet, and my mind started throwing up things I could be handling.
The delivery. The ice machine. Rashad. Verlie.
You are not on shift, I told myself.
Then, what am I?
That's the part that got me. I lay in the sun on my own bed and couldn’t answer that question. Take the desk away and I didn’t know who was left in the bed.
The harbor was out there doing its business past the window. A shrimper going out. The light on the water like somebody had thrown a handful of coins at it. I could hear the building, mine, the paid-for one, making the small sounds a building makes.
And I thought about him.
I hadn't stopped. I'd been thinking about him under everything, the way you think about a bill you haven't opened. Now, there was nothing on top of it anymore, and it came all the way up.
Clint.
He'd dislodged something. He came into my building and asked me one plain question. It was like a man putting the flat of his hand on a wall and finding out the wall was a door.
What would you be doing if you weren't standing there?
I had been standing there for so long. My mother stood there before me.
I'd been sitting in that linen closet with a coloring book since I was old enough to be told to be quiet.
In all those years, all those thousands of people I have handed a key to, not one of them had ever turned the question around.
And he wasn't even doing anything. That's what kept getting me. He wasn't charming me. He'd stood at my counter with his hands empty and his bag on the floor and just—waited. Like a man with nowhere on earth to be. Like my answer was worth the wait.
I put my forearm over my eyes.
Dubai.
Even in my own bed, in my own head, it made me want to laugh at myself. It made my face go hot. That was a woman in a hallway talking big to a stranger. The woman lying in bed in the morning light knew exactly what stood between her and Dubai.
I didn’t have a passport.
I have never had one. Not once. I had never held one in my hand, never filled out the form, never had the photograph taken.
I had been out of South Carolina—Savannah, a wedding in Charlotte, a bad weekend in Atlanta with a man I don't think about.
But I had never been on an airplane that went over water.
Most of my life had happened inside a circle you could drive across before lunch.
I had told a man that circle was ten miles wide, and I had been rounding up.
So, Dubai wasn't a plan. Dubai was the moon. It was a thing I said out loud once, in a hallway, to a stranger who looked at me like it was reasonable.
I lay there in the light and thought about that a while.
And then, I thought about his hands.
My mind went there the way water goes downhill. I let it, because there was nothing else I was supposed to be doing.
The forearms. Sleeves shoved up and the muscle running down them like rope under the skin. The veins standing up along the back of the hand. The way he had set that bag down on the floor of my lobby. Quietly. Like the marble was mine and he knew it.
The way he crossed the room. That unhurried, ground-eating walk, like the floor belonged to him and he had graciously decided not to bring it up.
And the three feet.
That was the thing that took me apart, lying there. He had walked me the whole length of that lobby and up in that elevator and down that hall. He had never once come inside three feet of me. Not once. Not a hand at the small of my back. Not a body angled in. Not one inch taken that wasn't offered.
I have been touched by men who never asked. I have had a hand land on my hip at that desk while I was printing a receipt.
He had stood in a hotel hallway with nowhere to go and given me every inch of air I had put between us. He had done it on purpose, and he had done it like it was nothing.
Something turned over in me, low down.
I lay still.
Absolutely not, I thought. It came out weak, and I heard how weak it came out.
I do not masturbate. It isn't a rule and it isn't a virtue.
It's just that a woman who gives the whole day away comes home with nothing left in the tank—not for herself, not for anybody.
I would get into that bed at night and I would be gone before my head found the cold part of the pillow.
There was no room in my body for wanting anything.
I had almost forgotten it was a thing my body did.
And now, the light was coming in across my bed, and I had a whole morning in front of me that belonged to nobody, and there was a man in the Magnolia Suite with gray eyes and old boots who had looked at me like I was a question worth the wait.
I turned my face into the pillow.
Then, I rolled onto my back. I let the sheet slide down, and I stopped arguing with myself.
The air moved over my skin. That's all. Just air. My breath went shallow. My hand went flat on my stomach and lay there a moment, not doing anything, just being a hand on me.
He's in my building, I thought. He's under my roof.
And there it was—that low, hot, rolling thing, coming up out of me, from underneath, slow.
I let it come.
My hand slid down from where it had been resting on my stomach, fingertips dragging over warm skin, slow enough that I could feel every inch of the path I took.
The sheet had already slipped low on my hips; I pushed it the rest of the way off with my feet and let my thighs fall open.
No rush. For once, the time was mine, the room quiet except for the faint creak of the bedframe and the sound of my own breathing.
I thought of Clint’s hands—those big hands I’d watched.
I pictured them on me instead, teasing my skin as they moved lower.
My own fingers followed the thought, tracing the crease where my thigh met my body, then slipping inward to the slick heat already waiting.
A soft sound slipped out of me when I finally touched my clit—light at first, just circling, teasing the ache that had been building since the moment he’d said my name in that low Texas drawl, like it was a road he intended to travel.
I kept the pace lazy, indulgent. One finger, then two, gliding through the wetness, spreading it up and over that swollen little bundle of nerves.
My other hand moved to my breast, rolling a nipple between fingers the way I imagined he might—firm, unhurried, like he had all the time in the world to learn me.
In my mind, he was behind me, chest pressed to my back, those thick forearms caging me in while his gravel-rough voice murmured my name against my ear again and again, each syllable a promise.
I dipped two fingers inside myself, curling them, and my hips rolled up to meet the thrust. The stretch felt good, but it wasn’t enough.
I wanted more—wanted the weight of him, the scrape of his stubble on my neck, the way his shoulders would flex under my hands.
Still, I took my time, fucking myself slow and deep, thumb working steady circles over my clit.
Every time the pleasure started to crest too fast, I eased off, breathing through it, drawing it out until my thighs trembled and the sheets were twisted tight in my fist.
I let the fantasy sharpen: Clint Dane on his knees between my spread legs, eyes locked on mine while those strong forearms held my thighs open, his mouth replacing my fingers.
The image alone pulled a broken moan from my throat.
I pressed a third finger in, fucking myself harder now, greedy for the burn, for the wet sounds filling the room.
My back arched off the bed as the coil inside me tightened, tighter, until it finally snapped.
The orgasm rolled through me in long, shuddering waves, my walls clenching around my fingers while I rode it out, hips jerking, his name a quiet, desperate chant on my lips. I didn’t stop moving until the last tremor faded, until I was boneless and gasping, slick all the way down my thighs.
Afterward, I lay in the wreck of my bed with my heart coming down slow.
I did not feel guilty.
I waited for it. I lay there and I waited for the shame to come and find me, because I have been well raised and church raised and I know how that goes. And it didn't come. Nothing came except my own breath, and the sound of the water outside, and the tick of the air in the vents.
What came instead was something I had no name for. I lay there and turned it over until I did.
I'm not dead.
That was it. That was the whole revelation.
I laughed. Out loud, alone, my arm over my eyes.
And underneath the laughing, way down, something that felt like grief. Because a woman doesn’t get to be that surprised about her own body unless she has been gone a very long time.
He’s waking me up, I thought.
And I didn’t like that. I didn’t like it one bit. That's a dangerous sentence and I know exactly what kind of woman it belongs to. I have checked her in, and I have handed her a key, and I have watched the doors close on her.
It isn't him. I sat up and put my feet on the floor. It is not that man. It's the question.
That's what I decided, sitting on the edge of my bed with my hair everywhere and the harbor going by. He had asked a question.
What would you be doing if you weren't standing there?
I got up. I made coffee. I stood at my window with the cup in both hands and looked out at the water, and past the water, and I thought about a lobby with a ceiling somebody built to prove a point.
Then, I sat down on my sofa, in my T-shirt, with my hair down and my legs folded under me, and I picked up my phone.
And I typed, with two thumbs, like a woman doing something illegal: how to get a passport.