Nantucket reds. These girls knew the names of directors and playwrights and gallerists; they’d gone to prep school with their children. They knew the books on the bestseller lists and had opinions on which ones didn’t belong. They knew about things not just in their home cities, but in other cities, too. They knew the neighborhoods, the street names, the restaurants, the stores. They had boyfriends in those cities. They had boyfriends, somehow, with jobs in office buildings. Whitney had been watching girls like that from behind glass for practically half her life. She sat at the window of the hotel lounge facing the sea and the storm. They were very much in the ashcloud now. The room jumped with the next flash of lightning. She finished the email she’d started at the bar, and sent it. She looked exhausted, a little flushed. When she drained her spritz, the busser approached and asked in English if she was finished with her drink. She turned up into his face and said she still had some left even though they could both see that she didn’t. He was wearing all white. He had slick black hair and strong tanned arms. He looked college-aged, Jenna-aged. She imagined Jenna in a place like this, in a place like this or any other place like it in Barcelona or Paris or New York or L.A. The same general outlines, the same purple and pleather. The sort of place no one wanted to see with the lights all the way up. Jenna Saisquoi. What the hell was that the other night? Some double life. Some party life. It had never been Whitney’s scene. And it never would be again. The darkness. The anonymity of it. The slipping into corners, into bathroom stalls. The scumminess of the whole thing. The danger, the needless vulnerability. The pit that she’d experience the next morning, in daylight, at the office, seated at the conference-room table during a meeting, knowing what she’d done the night before and how and where and with whom. That guilt. Always that guilt. It lived inside her like a broken gene. The busser returned and he had another fresh drink with him. “She says it’s on the house, third one’s free at brunch, her special rule for you,” he said. “Wow,” Whitney said, waving thanks to the grinning bartender, “lush life.” “Hmm?” he said, and Whitney smiled the full width of her head and pulled herself higher in her seat. He lingered there and she felt his eyes on her body. On her exposed stomach and waist, on her neck and arms and chest, on her legs that stretched all the way up into the running shorts that had ridden up practically to her hip bones. She let him hang there and her skin felt like oil in a skillet. She met his eyes and he was waiting for an answer to something. “What’s that?” she said. And he said, “I just wanted to know if you’d like me to take the empty one now.” Her face felt hot and she laughed stupidly and nodded and ran her hand through her hair. He smiled and took the glass and left her alone at the window. She had to pee and the bartender pointed to the bathroom, touching her shoulder as he showed the way. Her skin was humming, turned all the way up. She caught herself in the mirror again. It was the best her body had looked all trip. She felt empty, her stomach felt coated with spritz. She hadn’t eaten all day and now she wasn’t even hungry. The lines of her body shimmered in her reflection thanks to the sparkling wine. The room smelled like the honeysuckle of her summers growing up. The doors of the three stalls were ajar but she bent herself over, looking for shoes. She tested the air with an “Hola?” and nothing replied but the drone of the centralized air. She pulled the edges of her shorts up farther than they’d been in her seat near the window. She pulled them way up and admired the tautness of her ass, clenched like fists, hard and soft at the same time like boxing gloves. Her face was losing some of its snap—she knew she had only a couple more years before she’d have to double the effort. But her butt looked good and it dialed her up further. She looked at the door that led back into the bar and when it didn’t move she slowly peeled down the front of her shorts and admired the way the plane of her stomach fell flatly into her pubic hair. She slipped a hand down the front of her shorts and was surprised to find herself as wet as she was. She moved to the stall farthest from the door and locked herself in. She dropped her shorts and sat on the hard plastic seat and lowered her longest finger between her legs. She felt the busboy’s eyes on her body again. The sizzling skin still. College-aged, Jenna-aged. She imagined the busboy watching her now. She imagined the bartender watching him watch her. She imagined the two of them slipping her into one of the hotel suites. 1-2-Tres. She imagined herself in a hotel suite that looked like the hotel suite in Santa Monica. She imagined Adrien Green. She imagined herself with Adrien, in all the ways it had gone. She felt that surge in her body she’d never felt before that night, the suspicion that it was going where it was going, the rush. She couldn’t push it to that place again herself—it was a door she didn’t have a key to. And so as it backed away from an edge, the images shifted. She imagined Will with a faceless young associate at a Young Lawyers Night, his hungry mouth and hungry eyes and hungry fingers moving across her body the way they rarely moved across hers anymore. She imagined
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