****
She fell against the door, and for a moment her overloaded mind went blank. Two long breaths later, the door banged and she jumped.
“Let me in.” Elliot’s mutter sounded like a demand. Or desperation.
“I need a shower.”
“Let me in, Em. Now.”
“After.”
A thump. Elliot must have rested his forehead on the door. “Fine, after. How long?”
How long? Forever. “Twenty minutes,” she heard herself say. “It’s a lot of makeup.”
More voices in the hall. The party was spilling out into the private areas. She heard Elliot push off the door. “Eleven-twenty now, so eleven-forty. No more.”
No more was right.
Under the hottest water she could stand she scrubbed off the makeup, the sweat, the cum, the life she used to have. Everything was changed. This was impossible. She’d made the biggest mistake of her life.
She scrub, scrub, scrubbed – and then stopped. A thought banged into her head, and she turned the water down.
Elliot set me up. This is his idea of a joke. Put the shy girlfriend to the test. A grand experiment, a performance piece.
And I fell for it. And I loved it. And I’d do it again.
What have I done?
How could she have dreamed she’d stay anonymous? She always knew people by how they walked, how they stood. Of course others would recognize her the same way.
She sank onto the warmed tile of the shower. She was the biggest idiot in the universe. She couldn’t stay here. She couldn’t breathe.
She looked at the clock. Eleven-thirty. Her throat was dry from sobbing. She was so hungry. She had ten minutes to get out of here.
She whipped the towel around her body, drying as fast as she could. It touched her nipples and she jumped so hard she nearly slipped on the tile. She left her hair still in the ponytail from hiding it under the wig, not taking the time to brush it out.
In the bedroom she didn’t even turn on the light, but she had to flick the overhead on in the closet. Her travel bag, complete with its TSA-approved collection of toiletries, stood at the ready as always. She popped it open and pulled everything black off hangers and out of drawers and threw it in the bag. She was out of the closet with five minutes left.
She spent three minutes in a frantic search for her messenger bag, the one with her wallet, phone, and work deck. She found it hiding behind the closet door, and now there was no time to leave a note. She decided he deserved nothing but an e-mail. He doesn’t deserve even that.
With less than a minute to go, she was out the bathroom’s other door, into the hallway to the spare bedroom and down the stairs to the garage. She pushed open the outside door and didn’t stop moving until she was more than two blocks away at a taxi stand on
Market Street
. She couldn’t remember if she’d waited for the lights at the corners or not.
Her phone started to buzz. She pressed ignore, and dialed for Josh and Ginny’s land-line. An older lady answered, and Emily remembered the couple was on their anniversary weekend in Napa. She apologized and clicked off just as another call came in. She hit ignore on that one too, looking up and down the street. Where? Where?
“Where to, lady?” It was the taxi driver.
Her phone buzzed again. She remembered Elliot had its tracking code. She turned it completely off.
“Fisherman’s Wharf.”
Tourist Central. He’d never think to look for her there.
****
The next day and night were a blur, complete with dreams of Mona Mother-in-Law dripping diamonds and disappointment as she dissolved into a Dali-esque stream. But by Sunday afternoon Emily couldn’t stand the cement-walled Wharf motel room one minute more and went to see the seals on the nearby pier. She could usually watch them, and the people watching them, for hours, but today everyone seemed to be tired or fighting.
She didn’t want to fight. She didn’t want to feel. She didn’t want to know she was the biggest dupe in all the universes.
By Sunday night, after an entire nacho salad and two margaritas, she was ready to fire up the electronics. According to her phone record Elliot made only one more call after the three she’d disconnected Friday night. On principle, he always refused to leave voicemail, but he’d left one this time.
“Where are you?” His voice was tight, controlled; she could hear the party in the background. She deleted the message. What did he care? He was probably glad to be rid of her. I had it right the first time, at the coffee shop. I am such an idiot.
But his e-mail was somehow harder to ignore: “Please tell me you are safe and well.” Still smarting, she answered: “I am safe and well. We are through.”
She stayed up half the night trying to decide whether to ask for her things from his apartment or just write them off. She would miss her flute, but it’s not as if she’d played it in a decade. And there was no time like the present to give formal notice to her tenant. Looked like she’d need a new place to crash.