I run away

He had contacted me the moment I put my profile online. I'd known he would; he was sentimental in that way. Now, a year after that contact, here he was, waiting outside my hotel smoking a cigarette. His hair was neatly trimmed and pushed up from his forehead and he was thinner than he had been. It had been ten years that I'd known him but eight since I'd had last seen him. Ten years ago he’d seen me on the street in the East Village, pulling my things from the trunk of a cab and carrying them into the foyer of my new apartment. “Don’t we work together?” he asked.

Ten years since we'd gone home together after the Christmas party. We walked in the cold to my apartment in the East Village. I brought him up to the tiny room, too small for anything more than a bed and a small table. He hardly fit into the tiny bathroom and had knocked over a vase that smashed on the wood floor in the narrow hallway.

I remembered how he laid back on my bed and unbuttoned his dress shirt. I wore a wrap dress of silky fabric, the belt creating a waist and hips where otherwise there were none. I wore nothing underneath the dress but my stockings. I cared for nothing in those days. I thought I would die at any minute and nothing mattered but pleasure. I pulled them off and climbed up on top of him, feeling tiny and precious as he split me in two. His hands on my hips guided me. I was so wet, he gasped. This was how it started.

“I can fuck you right here,” he’d say in the following weeks pushing me up against the brick side of a building and lifting my dress, or struggling with the button of my jeans. He pressed me up against garbage cans and ground into the back of me, holding the bony grip of my hips. “Give me all your money,” he whispered as I lay in my bed on my stomach beneath him gasping for breath, his arm shoved under my neck. His words shocked and softened me, cracking me open like a torch through stone.

And now they walk through the city in the summer heat. Expensive denim sticks to the back of my legs as they walk through the West Village looking for a bar.

“Come to my room,” I want to say to him. She feels such a strong attraction to him. I'm afraid of what I'll do so I say nothing.

I don't need him in order to feel validated as a woman. I don't want him for revenge against my husband, or to feel loved. I already am loved and desired at home. I just want what I always wanted from him: to disappear into sex. If only he were a complete stranger, but it’s the memory of him that has set me on fire. If anything happens, I'll never again be able to face him. Or else, I won’t be able to get enough.

We are drunk, walking back to the hotel from the bar. If he leaves me to my room, and walks out into the night the part of me that is on fire will disappear.

“Come up,” I say. “Just as friends. We can have a drink.”

He looks at his watch and declines. “It’s late,” he says. “I have to work in the morning. Maybe tomorrow evening?”

Flames lick her ankles as I walk through the lobby of the Standard to the cool dark elevator. The video display shows Dante's descent into hell. I walk into her room, waits a beat and text him. I sit down on the white bed; feel the wetness between my legs.

I remember the last time we met, years earlier, just before I met my husband. We met in the Library Bar on Ave A and First. He was there with his friends. He told me that during the time they were sleeping together, he’d still been sleeping with his ex girlfriend, and there were more, other girls. He couldn’t remember clearly, but there had been more. He was drunk in the bar and watched my face for a reaction. I shrugged. I didn’t care; she was not that sentimental.

“You poor bastard,” I told him as we walked out onto the street. “You just want a women who will make you forget that all other women exist.” I wore a thin black skirt down slightly past my knees with zippers from the hem to the hip. He reached down and unzipped one side. My little black flip-flops slapped against the sidewalk. He grabbed my arm just before I turned into the deli.

“I have to go now,” I said.

But he followed me in, surprising me while I bent down to grab a bottle of water. He grabbed my arm, sent me spinning, and kissed me hard on the mouth, “You know it’s not the last time. You know we’ll sleep together again.”

I text him those words, hit send and wait. “Do you remember you said that?” He doesn’t remember, but it’s true he always thought they would.

“I’ve ordered a car and will be there in forty minutes,” he texts. “You have twenty minutes to change your mind.”

I can’t let him. I shut my eyes hard and lean back against the headboard. I want to but can't. If he had come up for a nightcap, as friends, and wound up in bed I could pass it off as passion. But to arrive in a town car is premeditated. A criminal act.

But I'm on fire and there is no oxygen in the cool white room. I get up from the bed and stand in the window beside my bed in my nightgown. The Empire State Building burns bright, the river is full of traffic, of cruise ships and small boats. I open the window and the air-conditioned air of the room rushes out and cools me. No, don’t come, I write.

I lie in bed on the cool clean pillows and reach between my legs. My eyes closed, my mouth slightly open. I remember how he asked me to lie still below him, with my eyes closed while he masturbated above me. I pushed him inside me. “Masturbate into me,” I told him. “Pretend I am a prostitute and you are using me. That is my new fetish.”

There is a knock on the door and I leap off the bed. I peer through the small peephole and sees him. He is impatient. He is now as I remembered him then. All the kindness of the evening has melted away in the heat. I open the door a crack. “No, I can’t. Really. I’m not drunk anymore.“

“Enough,” he says, his dark eyes flashing. “You have to let me in. “He pushes his way through the door, bends down and reaches under my nightgown, pushes aside the lace and inserts two thick fingers. I reach for him. The tip of him pushes back at my fingers. It reaches up and under his belt, which he unbuckles with his free hand. He has pulled his hand out from under my nightgown and holds my wrists with it as though I might run away. I feels my own wetness on his fingers. I try to yank my wrists away but he is too strong, his hand too large and he shoves me down on the floor to my back.

He stands over me now. His pants are unbuttoned. My hand is brought to it and I stroke it but he snatches my hand away, pinning it over my head.

“This is what you want,” he says with clenched teeth and I feels him enter me. “Isn’t it.”

He is sweating and his face is hard and cruel. Yes, this is what I wanted.

And when they are done, they lie across the still made bed. With his long arms he reaches for her feet. “Small and white,” he says.

“Not so small,” I answer. “Big, actually.”

“Maybe,” he says. “But delicate.” I feel his thumb pressing hard into my ankle. “I feel a strange tenderness for you now,” he says.

“That is strange.”

“I don’t know. I think it’s because now you belong to someone. Before, you didn’t belong to anyone or anything. But now you are someone’s wife.”