Just One Night 1_ The Stranger(6)

This doesn’t feel innocent. This feels fucking amazing. It feels like I’m coming alive.

I didn’t know it could be like this.

It’s the last intelligible thought I have before he brings me to the brink again. I feel his shoulders tense under my grasp and then he pins my arms over my head, physically constraining me when my ecstasy can’t be held back at all. The combination makes me wild and I thrash my head from side to side and buck my hips forward, forcing him even deeper inside of me. He groans and pushes faster and harder, as our crescendo moves us closer to a dizzying climax.

I cry out one more time as we come together, right there on the floor of a suite at the Venetian.

I didn’t know it could be like this.





CHAPTER 3





I DON’T BELIEVE IN an afterlife. I’ve always thought that when someone’s gone, they’re gone. Maybe that’s how it is with moments, too. I have the memory of being with Mr. Dade, only two nights ago now, but with nothing tangible to connect me to that memory, that moment has simply . . . stopped breathing.

He held me afterward and stroked my hair. The tenderness had been out of place. I wasn’t prepared for it. So I simply got dressed and walked away. He didn’t try to stop me but there had been something in his expression as he watched me leave that made my pulse quicken. He wasn’t looking at me the way a stranger would. He was looking at me like he knew me . . . maybe better than he had the right to.

Simone was back in our room when I got there. She pressed me for details but I gave her little. I placated her with stories of flirting with a mysterious man in a bar with glass walls while he plied me with spirits that cost a little too much and tasted like seduction.

She was disappointed. “You’re a lost cause,” she complained as I traded the Herve Leger for the innocuous white robe provided by the hotel. She zipped up the dress in a garment bag. As I watched it get swallowed into the black plastic, I was reminded of a coffin. It wasn’t just the moment that was lost to me; I was also burying a version of myself . . . burying it inside a garment bag that wasn’t even mine.

But as I sit in my Los Angeles office, with its light yellow walls and neatly organized files, I realize that’s how it’s supposed to be. It was a dream, that’s all, and like all dreams it has virtually no consequences. The lessons it teaches can be studied or dismissed. It was just a few hours of time during which my subconscious was able to take over and a little hidden part of me was allowed to dictate a story in vivid colors. A story marked by its passion and excitement, two things that can never be maintained for long in real life.

Just a dream.

I pull out a client file. My job is to tell other people how to do theirs. Invest your time and money in this, not in that, and so on. I came to think of corporations as people long before the Supreme Court weighed in on the subject. They’re multifaceted entities, just like us. And, like people, the successful corporations know which parts of themselves are worth developing and which parts must be suppressed, hidden from the public eye. They know when to cut their losses.

To me, the only part of the personhood of corporations that people have gotten fundamentally wrong is the idea that money is a company’s form of speech. In truth, money is a corporation’s very soul.

And that makes me a spiritual advisor.

I smile at that idea as I review my file in anticipation of passing the collection plate.

“Kasie Fitzgerald, we’ve struck gold!”

I look up to see my boss, Tom Love, standing in my doorway. My assistant, Barbara, stands behind him, smiling apologetically. Tom never gives anyone a chance to announce him before barging in. His last name seems like an unfortunate joke since I have never seen him give or inspire anything that resembles love.

“We have a new account!” Tom says as he steps inside and closes the door behind him, apparently unaware that he has essentially slammed the door in Barbara’s face.

I close the file in my hands. I am not the person Tom runs to when a new account comes his way. I’m still working my way up here and my climb is made all the steeper by the fact that I used Dave’s family connections to get my foot in the door. An Ivy League education should have been enough . . . but then nothing is ever enough these days. You have to graduate at the head of your class, have internships under the direct supervision of the captains of industry. You have to have a solid golf game.

I have a job that many magna cum laude Rhode Scholars would kill for. I got it because I’m smart, capable, and have an Ivy League education . . . and because my boyfriend’s godfather is one of the cofounders of the company.