A Week in New York(33)

“Kiss me,” he said.

I trailed my fingers up his chest. And then up his neck, I brushed my thumbs across his lips. His eyes closed and I knew I had to remember his face just like that. My hands reached around his neck and I pulled him toward me. I took his bottom lip between his teeth, like I knew he liked, and then sucked and bit. I pushed my tongue against his and he reached around me and cupped my ass. I loved his obsession with it and I grinned against his lips. Kissing him was not like kissing anyone I’d kissed before. I realized that, from now on, there would be a Before Ethan and an After Ethan divide in my life. Before Ethan, kissing was always a prelude to the real stuff, but I could kiss Ethan forever. I was sure that he could make me come just by kissing me, with no other part of his body touching me. I sighed. And he pulled me away from the wall and walked me over to the bed. I held my hands up above my head and, breaking our kiss for just a second, he stripped my shirt from me in one quick movement.

***

“Give me your phone,” I said to Ethan. He had ordered Chinese and we were sitting on his sofa picking at the 187 dishes he’d had delivered. I was wearing a Columbia University T-shirt I’d found on a chair. He was in his boxers. It might have been the best evening this week, and that was saying something.

Ethan got up, walked to the console table on the other side of the room where his phone was, and came back and handed it to me.

I tapped and scrolled, trying to find my name in his contacts. “I can’t find me,” I said, looking up at him. He took the phone from my hands pressed some buttons and then handed it back. I was under Beautiful Anna. Oh, sweet mother of god, why couldn’t I find a man like this in London?

I brought up the menu and hit delete and then tried to find our text messages.

“What are you doing?” he asked me gently.

“Deleting me from your phone,” I replied, while scrolling through his messages. He didn’t respond.

“This is going to be harder than it should be for me, and I need to make sure there’s no ambiguity left behind. No promises to break, no room for disappointment.” I knew that if I left him a way to contact me, I would spend my days back in London wishing and hoping. When I wasn’t looking, Ethan had gone from Uncomplicated Fun to something else. I didn’t want to think what. I deleted our message thread. Done. We were done after tonight. My stomach churned and I felt something in the back of my throat.

He reached for me and dragged me on to his lap, my phone still in my hands as he pushed my hair off my shoulder and kissed my neck. He wasn’t making this easier.

“Sometimes I forget that I didn’t know you my whole life,” I said.

“Anna,” he replied and kissed my neck again. “My beautiful Anna, I’d never break a promise to you.”

I turned and held his face in my hands. “I know you think you wouldn’t, but it’s inevitable. And I can’t do it again,” I said, dropping my hands to my lap. “I can’t hope or wish for anything but a perfect evening this evening, which is what this is. Thank you, Ethan. You put my heart back together and made me believe there could be something better out there.”

He didn’t say anything. Part of me was relieved—but there was something, a voice right at the back of my head, that was urging him to ask me to stay, to tell me we could be together, we could make it work between us, that it wasn’t just a fling for him, that he felt something. Something more, something different. I wanted him to tell me that he felt for me what I felt for him. But I got silence.

No promises, no ambiguity, no bullshit.





Ethan

I didn’t know what to say. She sounded so sad. I wanted her. I wanted her to live in the city and for us to hang out and date and all that stuff. But she was right. She lived 3,000 miles away and we’d known each other a week. She’d seen parts of me I’d never shown anyone, but we’d still known each other for a week. And I’d never had a relationship with a woman that lasted more than four hours. A week was a lifetime in my world, but in reality it was still a week. Fuck. It was an impossible situation and she was making the right decision. The sensible decision.

If we stayed in touch, how would that play out? My job wouldn’t allow me to fly out to London regularly, and even if it did we’d probably only see each other once a month or something. I’d seen plenty of relationships poisoned by distance. I didn’t want to poison what we had. I didn’t want her to end up hating me. This week we’d escaped reality. There’d been no expectation, no everyday shit to muddy the waters. But still, there was something between us. Did she feel it?