The sex was not gentle. They were almost hostile. He did not love her, and she did not love him. But Casey liked the way he moved and admired his lack of self-consciousness. He was excited by her, and she found that its own kind of stimulus. It was hard to tell who was in control, or maybe neither was. When she was done, she put on her clothes to go to her room. Hugh didn’t ask her to stay, but before she left, he kissed her for a long time—the only tender moment of the evening.
The next day, she golfed brilliantly, and the clients were both impressed and peeved by the female summer intern’s solid game. Walter said, “All right, Han,” when he heard that she’d shot a seventy-eight. Even she was surprised by how well it went considering her lack of playing. After the long client dinner, she returned to her room, and not ten minutes later, Hugh came by.
“It’s me,” he said from outside the door.
Earlier that morning, before going down for breakfast, she had read her Bible, jotted down her verse, and prayed. She had prayed for forgiveness. When she heard Hugh’s knock on her hotel room door, she hesitated. Thirty or forty seconds—the extent of her resistance.
Hugh had brought her a bottle of wine, but she refused. She’d already had several glasses at dinner. “I don’t need it, either,” he said. “It’d be better for us if I didn’t.” He laughed, then kissed her and removed her blouse. They didn’t talk much again but went on to try new things. She was amazed by how much he knew about sex. This was the most monstrous bit she was learning: It was not hard to put Unu out of her mind and to focus merely on the bodies.
Casey looked at Hugh’s face after she climaxed. He reminded her of Jay, not because they looked so much alike, but because, like Jay, Hugh seemed perennially amused. They were the kind of men who could laugh at disparate things—in a good way, they faced life with humor; but in a bad way, they appeared to lack humanity at times. She had been with Hugh when he laughed at a homeless man’s drunken soft-shoe dance on Eighth Avenue and could recall how Jay would imitate his Indian friend’s accent behind his back.
Now, she had done to Unu what Jay had done to her. She had neglected Unu’s feelings, although the memory of her own humiliation had not yet gone away—when she saw Jay at the reunion, the image of him with the sorority girls had been helpful. It made their not being together anymore more plausible. Didn’t she love Unu enough even as a good friend to not hurt him? Could she have foreseen when Hugh proposed the golf trip that this might occur? She didn’t think so. Not completely. And Casey had violated her own morality, however broken and taped up it might have been; she had not believed she could do this.
Casey lay back on the pillow, her body covered loosely with the bedsheet.
“What are you thinking about?” Hugh asked. “You don’t look very happy.”
“I thought men didn’t talk after sex.”
“What do you know of men?”
“You got me there.”
Casey sat up, then swung her legs off the bed.
“If you wait for a little while, we can go again.”
He couldn’t see her face, but Casey was frowning. The way he’d said this made her feel bad. She had done plenty of sport fucking in her time before Jay and was amenable to doing more, but somehow, the way Hugh said “go again” bothered her, as if what they had just done were no different from a game of tennis. Unu never said things like that. Their lovemaking had been passionate and erotic, and despite his unwillingness to remarry, she didn’t doubt his commitment to her. She felt unworthy of Unu suddenly. He’d be better off with someone else. It wasn’t as if Hugh were a stranger. She had known him longer than Unu, but she didn’t know if he’d had feelings for her. Maybe it shouldn’t have mattered. She didn’t love him, either.
Casey lay down, feeling tired and unmotivated to wash up before going to sleep.
She kissed him on the mouth, wanting to test her own feelings. What was this they were doing?
He pressed his lips against hers, and she could feel the weight of his body.
“I don’t even like you.” She wanted to hurt him.
“I can’t stand you,” he answered. “But I’ve wanted to fuck you for quite some time.”
“Why?” she asked, trying to appear tough. She pulled her body away from his and propped up her face on bended elbow.
Hugh stroked the curve of her hip bone. “Who can explain it?”
Casey thought he could have said many things. Hugh was a good talker, after all. He was an institutional salesman. He could have said he liked her, her body, that she was pretty, that he liked her smile, her eyes—the crap men said to get sex. He could have delivered the words with some half-felt admiration. But he hadn’t. He didn’t know why he wanted to fuck her, and he wasn’t even going to try to pretend. Maybe she could have been anyone to him.