26 Sixteen Hours Before the Disaster
Sixteen Hours Before the Disaster
Somewhere in the room, a phone kept ringing. I turned over in bed, pulled on the comforter, and wrapped it around my head. I heard a screech.
“Will! It’s cold!”
“Don’t you have another blanket?”
“No.” Tiffany pulled it back on top of her. “And do you mind getting your damned phone or else turning it off? It’s been ringing for half an hour. Who the hell could need to get ahold of you that bad?”
I managed to find it inside my shoe on the ground. I saw the name on the screen and silenced it. “It’s my fiancée.”
“Poor thing.”
Tiffany got up. I saw the outline of her naked body walking through the room, opening a drawer, and slipping on a pair of sexy lace panties.
I sat up. I was naked too. I smiled at her wryly—she knew what I was after, it was something naughty, and she chuckled and got back into bed.
I slipped a finger into the elastic band to pull her underwear back off.
“Today’s my birthday,” I said as I did so. “How about if you’re my first present?”
“What’s the second?”
“I’m not sure.” I reached up and grabbed her right breast. “What can you ask for when you’ve got everything?”
“You’re an idiot, William. A handsome one, though.”
“And one who knows how to make you scream.”
I slid a hand between her legs, and she closed her eyes and bit her lip.
Then I got on top of her and went inside her.
I pushed hard, deep. Sex has always been like that for me, a pleasure, but a cool one, mechanical and efficient.
Lust isn’t emotional; it’s all about what the eyes see.
Tiffany’s bouncing breasts, her voice moaning in my ear, her slender body, her face contracted in pleasure.
All that was because of me. Even if it was vain, the idea turned me on so much, that I stroked faster, and as the end was in sight, I felt her nails digging into my back.
“Fuck,” I said as I pulled out and fell to one side.
“Yeah, you’re good. I’ll admit it,” she joked before toying with my hair. “You in the mood for breakfast?”
“You’re kidding, right? I’ve got stuff to do. What time is it anyway?”
I looked at my phone to check the time and saw another missed call from my fiancée. Her name was there at the top of the screen: Lena. Four letters that gave me an eerie feeling I tried immediately to ignore.
I stood and tried to find my clothing around the bed—a sock here, a T-shirt there.
When I was ready, I turned back to Tiffany.
She was still trying to put on her bra. I helped her, closing it with a soft click.
She turned and smiled at me. A pleasant, sweet smile that bothered me instead of flattering me because it meant that the challenge, which was the fun part, was over.
“We’ll see each other soon?”
“I don’t know. We’ll talk.”
That vague, impersonal we’ll talk was my way of abandoning ship.
I left Tiffany’s apartment and got into the red convertible I’d bought a few months ago to celebrate my new job at a major firm after a grueling selection process.
My black Audi was back at home in the garage gathering dust. It had been a gift for my twenty-first birthday, but something about it made me uncomfortable; it was too serious, too classic, too cheap.
The home I’d grown up in appeared before me as I took the last right, with its sloped roof, its creeping vines over red brick, its perfect yard and garden, just begging for a feature in Architectural Digest.
I found my parents in the kitchen with its slate-gray cabinetry. Dad was at the table reading the newspaper, which I thought was idiotic—I’d told him a million times he could just get his news for free off the internet. Mom was at the stove. She smiled at me over her shoulder.
“Good morning, hon. Happy birthday! Time just flies, doesn’t it!” Her voice was singsongy. “You didn’t tell us you were spending the night out.”
“I like to improvise,” I responded.
“Were you with Josh and the guys? I hope you had fun. By the way, I made your favorite breakfast: pancakes with honey and raspberries.” She laid the plate on the table.
She’d arranged the raspberries so they looked like eyes on the pancakes and squirted the honey on to make a smile.
She used to do the same thing when I was a kid.
I pushed it aside. “Thanks, but I’m not hungry.”
“Not even a little?” she asked insistently. “Is it because of your new workout and diet? I promise you can cheat for your birthday. It’ll be fine. You can’t just live on chicken and rice forever.” She dried her hands on her old, faded apron.
One of the things I used to hate most about my mother was the way she could have so much money in the bank and still act like she was barely getting by.
When the cleaning lady came, she’d do chores with her just for fun, as she said, and she still cooked all the meals.
She never fit in with the other women in the neighborhood after we moved, never joined their little group that wore their high heels to go grocery shopping together or met on Fridays for their mani-pedis.
“I’m not in the mood, okay?”
“Fine.” She took the plate and walked off, mumbling to herself. “I’ll keep them in case you want them for lunch.”
Dad tossed the newspaper aside and scowled at me. “You could be nicer to your mother. She went shopping first thing in the morning to get those damned raspberries.”
I rolled my eyes and yawned. Then I said I needed some shut-eye and went up to my old room, the place that had been my refuge when I was just a lonely little boy, the place I still turned to after I’d learned to stretch my wings, mold myself to others, fit in, turn into the kind of person I’d never imagined I could be.
It was a spacious room with mint-green walls.
On the upper shelves were countless trophies for track and field, plus a few for soccer.
The bed was big, with a beige comforter.
Under the window was a dark wood desk. I took a look outside.
It made me feel nostalgic: I’d done it so many times when I was little, trying to catch a glimpse of Josh in the house next door.
I fell back in bed and closed my eyes. I’d only slept three or four hours the night before, and I drifted off easily.
It was seven at night when I woke. The pink early evening light was flooding the room. I looked for my phone and read dozens of messages from high school and college friends, my aunts and uncles, Josh and Lena.
I called Lena as I looked for clean clothes in the closet and grabbed a towel, ready to jump into the shower.
“Will? William?”
“The very same,” I said.
“Where did you get off to? I’ve been calling you all day. I was worried about you! I thought something bad might have happened.”
“Relax, babe.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing. I spent the night with the guys and then I came home and I’ve been asleep all day. I had a headache.” That, at least, wasn’t a lie. “Everything cool with you?”
She needed a second to quell her irritation. “Same as always. Dad’s barely shown up this week, he was busy with a big client. Mom’s driving me crazy, she won’t shut up about the wedding.”
“What has she done now?”
“You’re going to want to nip this in the bud. It’s the third time she’s changed the menu and she’s torturing the girls who are doing the floral arrangements.”
“When I get back to New York next week, I’ll make sure everything’s in order. I mean, it is our wedding.”
“I needed to hear that.” Lena breathed a sigh of relief.
“I gotta go, babe.”
“I guess you’ve got plans.”
“Nothing crazy. At least, I hope. Just a couple of beers somewhere.”
“Sure. By the way…” She paused and then her voice turned sweet and tender, full of love and devotion: “Happy birthday, Will.”
A shiver ran up my spine when I hung up and set my phone down on the nightstand.
For a few seconds, I stared at the toe of a sock sticking out from the top drawer.
Just hours before, I’d been caressing Tiffany’s body, but it felt like years ago, an eternity.
On my way to the shower, I promised myself I’d stop acting like an idiot once I’d made it to the altar, as if signing the marriage certificate would somehow mean a before and after.
That would be it for the one-night stands, the flings.
I would become a better version of myself.
I could do it. I knew I could. It wasn’t the first time I’d told myself that.
I walked down the stairs with my hair still damp.
In Nebraska, the summers are hot and the winters brutally cold. It’s a deceptively simple place, and I felt sometimes like the people were too, stagnant, set in their ways, ignorant of other people, other places, of the broad expanses of the ocean.
“You’re leaving already?” Mom intercepted me on my way out of the kitchen.
“Yeah. I don’t really know when I’ll be back.”
“All right.” She came close and touched my cheek. There was something…something complex in that gesture. “Your dad’s out in the yard because there’s a meteor shower tonight. The Perseids. Maybe you want to hang out with him awhile?”
“Sorry, I’m already running late.”
“Okay. Well, be careful.”
I walked out. Spending a few weeks of my summer vacation at the family home was exhausting but also refreshing.
I was used to being free in the big city, and going back here was like donning a straitjacket.
I hated having to explain my comings and goings.
But it was also like setting foot in a time machine, seeing a world that never changed.
It calmed me down to think that no matter what happened, no matter if the rest of the world went to hell, here I would always be the famous, incomparable, beloved Will Tucker.
I was going to the Pearl with Josh and Daren.