“You paid for the room.”
“Are you staying tonight?”
I wanted to stay. I didn’t want to go home, where depression and grief threatened to overwhelm me. “I’ll leave if you want me to,” I said.
“I don’t want you to leave. I want you to sit the fuck down and eat something.”
Somehow, his snapping and frowning was better to me than leaving, so I crossed to the table and pulled out a chair. The food was still hot, and it smelled amazing. He’d ordered Vietnamese pho, and Mandarin chicken on salad, and a burger, and some spaghetti, and some salmon with vegetables. There was wine and dessert. Cheesecake, my favorite.
“I didn’t know what you liked to eat,” he said as I stared at all of it. “If you want, I can order something else.”
I choked back a laugh, because there was so much food. He’d done a really kind thing, and the last thing I wanted to do was laugh at him. I wanted to curl up in his lap and bury my head in his neck and tell him how much his kindness meant to me. I didn’t. We were off the clock, and Henry wouldn’t approve of this.
Not that I cared. I was going to quit.
“Thank you,” I said. “I guess I’m kind of hungry after all.”
“Did you have a good shower?”
There, that was sarcasm. And a little more irritation.
“I feel better now.” I looked up and met his gaze. He’d lowered the lights, or maybe it had just gotten darker outside. “I’m sorry. It was the wrong poem for me at the wrong time. Things have been… It’s been a stressful week.”
“He didn’t go to rehab, did he?” He didn’t say it in a mean way. If he had, I would have crumbled into dust, but he said it sympathetically. Of course, he’d known all along that Simon wouldn’t go, just as I’d known that he wouldn’t go.
“We had a really big fight,” I said.
W’s face didn’t change. He possibly breathed a little deeper, a little faster. “Did you lock yourself in your room again? Your safe room?”
“No,” I said, which was a lie. I pulled the sixty dollar burger across the table and picked up my knife. “You want to split it?”
“You can have the whole thing,” he said, reaching for the pho.
“I can’t eat the whole thing. Plus I want to try some of the salad and spaghetti too.”
I sawed the gigantic burger in half and thought to myself that for once I’d be putting something bigger than W’s cock in my mouth. Maybe he was thinking it too, from the expression on his face as I bit into it.
It was a great burger. It made me feel better. As for W, he ate the pho with chopsticks—expertly—and it was pure sex to watch. Not just because of his dexterity and beautiful long fingers, but because of his teeth and lips.
Our session was over. There could be no more sex. Neither one of us wanted to cross those lines, but some other line was being crossed. We were eating together, sitting across from one another at a table.
“Anyway, I’m sorry I flipped out,” I said. “It was a nice piece of poetry. I always love your poems.”
The word “love” felt heavy and guilty on my tongue, because I really meant that I loved him. I just wanted to say the word love. His eyes narrowed, or maybe I just imagined it.
“I think you should leave Simon,” W said.
“I know.”
“You have your own money, don’t you?”
The burger tasted less delicious now. I put it down and poked at the spaghetti. “I have money. But I’ve been supporting Simon for a while.”
“Why?”
“Because I loved him.”
Loved. I didn’t mean to use the past tense, but the word came out and echoed around the room. Afterward, resounding silence. I ate a few bites of salad. W ate his half of the burger, and the salmon, and the rest of the spaghetti. He poured me a little more wine. It was probably a full five minutes before either of us spoke again.
“This is good wine,” I offered shyly.
“What do you know about it?” he scoffed.
I knew nothing, obviously, but he wasn’t being mean. He was being…insecure.
There in the dim light, over wine and quickly emptying plates, I saw that he was nervous beneath all his violence and posturing. He was insecure, just like I was insecure. He only masked it well. The mask came back within seconds, the hard look, the curve of his lips. He made a motion down the side of his face, a curling finger.
“Your hair looks darker when it’s wet. You look different.”
“My natural hair color is dark,” I confessed. “Dark brown.”
“Why do you bleach it blonde?”
“Because men like blondes.” I looked up at him from under my lashes. “You asked for a blonde, or Henry wouldn’t have paired me with you.” I didn’t know if I was flirting or lecturing him.