I turned around as a great sigh of relief escaped my lips when I saw Graham Elliott, an executive at Roland House, my publisher, approach with his arms out. Graham was tall, thin, and as usual, impeccably dressed. His hair had gone silver when he was in his thirties, twenty-something years ago, but his face was tanned, youthful, and free of lines. Graham would have been the perfect man for me—older, reliable, handsome, successful—if he hadn’t been gay.
“Graham, darling, how have you been?” I gave him a hug and whispered in his ear. “Save me, please.”
“Nice to see you, Zoe,” he said with a knowing wink. He nodded at Carla and Andrew. “Carla, Andrew.”
They wrinkled their noses at him and said his name as if it left a bad taste in their mouths. In unison, they said, “Graham.”
“Andrew and Carla, it was nice seeing both of you,” I said, backing away. “But I have to call it a night.” I glanced at my watch as if it were a countdown to midnight clock. “Graham, we should meet for drinks or dinner before I leave.”
“Yes,” he nodded. “I’d love that.”
“Well, you all have a good night and I’ll see you all later.”
I waved from over my shoulder as I bolted toward the exit, keeping my head down to avoid eye contact with anyone else.
I burst out the door, sucking in the crisp night air as I asked the doorman to please hail a cab for me. I stood off to the side, waiting, trying to go unnoticed. I didn’t want to talk to anyone else.
I just wanted to get away from all these horrible people and the memory of Mark in the bathroom. And with any luck, the memory of Mark himself.
* * *
I don’t even recall the ride home. It was a blur. A complete blur. I felt awkward and confused. I wanted to talk to Mark but at the same time, I never wanted to see him again. He had no right to be in that bathroom, whether I was his mistress or not. There were boundaries in any relationship, though Mark would never let such things stop him from getting his way. Still, the sex had been amazing. I had actually orgasmed, something I rarely did with Mark.
Typically, with Mark, it was, “wham bam thank you, ma’am” and then he was gone before I could catch my breath. I was always left to finish myself off. I could still feel the orgasm from tonight shaking through my knees. I’d only been manhandled like that by one other man in my life: Chad Walters, my college boyfriend who I hadn’t seen in years.
Chad was a control freak, but in a good way. It was always his way or the highway. The sexual positions were always of his choosing and rarely, if ever, did he give me any form of control. He liked it rough and so did I. He liked to play and explore and he let me know over and over how he was in control. Sometimes his nature got on my nerves, but ultimately the sex was so fucking great I didn’t care who was in control. I would have left him sooner if I hadn’t been so addicted to his cock.
After a while, though, I began to feel used by Chad and that was how I was feeling now with Mark. I felt I had no choice but to leave. A few months in Costa Rica would do me a world of good.
After college, I took a job a few states away on purpose and cried the entire drive there. I felt horrible for breaking things off with Chad. I felt horrible for leaving him the way I did. I loved him. I really did. And he loved me and there I was running away.
Chad called and begged me to return several times, which was so unlike him. It almost made me think the whole control thing was just an act and that he really cared for me. Gradually, however, time and distance took their toll and we slipped away from each other. The last time he called, I didn’t even answer the phone and he didn’t bother to leave a message.
Even though he was gone, Chad had never strayed far from my mind. It still hurt to hear his name and every relationship I’d had since, didn’t compare to what we shared. We shared some intimate moments that were better kept secret. But sometimes secrets knife you until they bleed free. And that’s what happened to me.
All the secrets Chad and I shared, things that were meant to remain just between us, ended up in my diary. Then, the heart-spilling, jaw-dropping, erotic moments ended up in a book, then on the shelf of every bookstore in the world. I changed the names of the characters, of course, but now my entire relationship with Chad had been read by tens of thousands of lusty readers. Yes, another bestseller. Fiction to everyone, sweet memories to me.
Somehow getting it all out was like therapy. It took me years to write that story and tell it just as it happened. Every detail, every date, every sexual moment, that I could recall. Along with some secrets I never
even told him.
Writing that first book helped me close a chapter in my life that needed to be closed. Somehow, even though it was closed, it never seemed to go away. It didn’t seem to ease the feelings. It seemed to create more urges than I had to learn how to live with— urges I knew could never be fulfilled because he was no longer in my life. I had to learn how to live with the void of knowing there was nothing that could ever completely erase or ease the feeling of loss I felt when it came to losing Chad.
Mark surely didn’t fill that void. If he wasn’t married, who knows what would have become of us. But he was married and I was just the mistress who sat by the phone waiting for him to call.
We couldn’t make plans because his family always came first, which I completely understood and was okay with, at least at first. I knew he’d never leave his wife. I’d never asked him to leave her. Not once. I figured if he was going to leave her, he was going to do it on his own, not because of me.
I wasn’t there to make such decisions for him. Just like he wasn’t going to be making decisions for me. Meaning, I really had no obligation to tell Mark anything that was going on in my life. It wasn’t like we were that close. It was mostly about the sex. Or the thrill of the sex. The feeling of doing something dirty we really shouldn’t be doing in places where we shouldn’t be doing in.
And it was also about having someone to talk to who understood my crazy life. Mark spent his days as an attorney at a big firm uptown, but he was a successful author in the moonlight—spies and assassins and all that— and he could commiserate with the daily ups and downs of the author life. We talked every day. The conversation was usually more satisfying than the sex. It was just nice to have someone to connect with.
My writing kept me busy and I never had much of a social life. I didn’t count the tours and book signings as social events. They were more like forced labor. I’d fly into town in time to show up at some bookstore that Amazon had yet to kill, welcome the crowd, read a steamy passage from my book, shake hands, pass out hugs to people I didn’t want to touch, sign books, smile for the camera…
It was torture for someone like me, who could barely stand to be in crowds, much less crowds where everyone was facing me, wanting something from me, reaching out like a zombie horde with my book in their decaying hands.
Sadly, that was the only time I ventured out to really interact with people. Aside from those trips, I was pretty much a hermit, living in my little Manhattan cave with my fingers tapping on the keys to my laptop, creating sex scenes for thousands of horny, lonely women—like me— to enjoy.
I typically wrote all night until sun-up, then slept the mornings away and forced myself to get up around one or two in the afternoon.