A minute later, we push apart and he grins. “By the way, you looked to the left again,” he says.
“Should we stop?”
He runs his hand over my leg. “No, I think maybe we should practice.”
We do for the rest of the drive.
***
I don’t have sex with Sam, but only because I’m not that spontaneous and I want to shave above my knees first. Not even passion can get past my mental gatekeeper, the Dread Lady Overthinker.
The moment we arrive at the hotel, I rearrange my wig so we look like we’ve done nothing in the car but chat platonically and check our phones. My lipstick continues to be tonight’s real MVP, and I don’t need to touch it up at all.
Conscious of the security cameras, we don’t make out in the elevator, although Sam’s hair is disheveled and his lips are even fuller from kissing in the car. He leaves me chastely outside my suite, where I manage to lock the door and take a single step before I sink down on the wooden floor and curl up in a rictus of unbelieving happiness.
Which immediately turns to total terror. What have I done? We had a good thing going, a collegial thing, and I’ve blown that right out the window. What if he regrets this in the morning and it’s weird? What if Fangli is mad? What if I turn into a jealous shrew of a woman, furious this has to be kept secret from the world?
What if I get hurt? I haven’t been with a man since Riley. I should have at least taken a ride on the merry-go-round before I buckled in for the roller coaster.
There’s no one I can talk to. Fangli is asleep and so is Anjali. I don’t know what to say because I don’t know how I feel, exactly. It’s almost like the first time I had sex, where I wanted to tell everyone and also hug the secret to myself to savor it.
Too wired to do anything as banal as sleep, I putter around my suite tidying and thinking. Fretting. Sam put Todd out of my mind but now that I’m alone, I’m worried about what he’s going to do. My severance from work is safe but what if he comes looking for me? What if he tries to contact me or threaten us? He’s vindictive; I know that from how he treated people at work, how he treated me. I hate that the amount of real estate he should take up in my head should be the size of a hovel, a subcloset, but instead he’s living rent-free in a sprawling mansion.
A knock comes at the connecting door that leads to Fangli’s room. “Are you awake?” she asks through the door.
I open it. “Yeah.”
“I can’t sleep and I saw the light under your door.” Fangli rubs her eyes. “Can I come in for a bit?”
“Let’s sit on the balcony.” It would be nice to have the company and take my mind off worrying about Todd. But now that there’s another human near me, I’m almost bursting with my Sam news. That gets diverted almost immediately when Fangli touches my hand.
“You were the one who had Sam make me agree to talk to someone,” she says. “Thank you.”
“The decision was yours,” I say. “I think you were ready.”
“Sam’s been trying to get me help for years.” She takes her hand back, and the chair leg scratches as she shifts it along the concrete balcony. “I didn’t realize how heavily it weighed on him.”
“He was worried about you.”
“I know, but I didn’t want to admit it.” Fangli raises her face to watch the full moon flooding the sky. “I thought it would be death for my career. That’s what my manager said. He told me to cure myself because it wasn’t that bad.”
“Cure yourself?”
She glances at me out of the corner of her eye and gives me a small smile. “It didn’t work.”
“No, I imagine not. It didn’t for me.”
“You tried, too?”
“Failed the same way I wouldn’t be able to cure my own pneumonia or cancer through willpower.”
“I never thought of it like that.”
I think over what I want to say. “You said it would be bad for your career.”
“My manager said if it was known I had problems, no one would hire me. They would think I was unpredictable.”
“When was this?”
She thinks. “Five or six years ago.”
I make up my mind. “You’re more established now. Other people feel like us. It might help them to know they’re not alone, if you think that’s something you can do.”
The long silence makes me worry I’ve gone too far. Then her soft voice rises. “I think so, too. But I don’t have the courage.”