Chapter Twenty-Two
The Gramercy Park Session
The Gramercy Park Hotel was gorgeous, full of art and glittering things. I got there early just to sit in the lobby for a while, with the grand chandelier and rich scarlet carpeting flanked by black and white tile. I’d been there a few times to see clients, but the old Chere hadn’t really appreciated how amazing it was. The new Chere noticed artistry and design.
I watched the door. I’d come early enough that I hoped to see W arrive. I sat out of the way, but in view of the entrance, for the secret thrill of watching him walk across the lobby on his way to our date. Of course he’d look amazing, as always, in his dark, stylish business clothes. I wore a form-fitting, deep green dress. It was demure but not too demure. It was classically tailored and fit all my curves to perfection. I hoped he wouldn’t cut it off.
I thought back to our first session, to my horror, my naiveté. My blindness. How angsty and stupid I’d been back then. Maybe that was why he’d blindfolded me during our last session, so I could realize how far I’d come. He still scared me a little, but he thrilled me a lot more. He made me feel alive and strong, like I could do anything.
I knew I had to tell him these things one day. Maybe not today, but someday I wanted to explain the ways he’d changed me and improved my life.
His roughness, his violence had cracked me open somehow, made me all new and better, and his kisses had made me realize I was more than a whore. The first day, the very first day, he’d rejected Miss Kitty in favor of the real me. He’d preferred the real me, and was, in fact, the only client who’d ever wanted the real me. Somehow, he’d made me want the real me too.
More than that, he’d helped me find the strength to leave Simon. My ex’s gallery show was about to close. I wondered if he’d thought any more about rehab, or if he was going to continue along his self-destructive path. If he was, I wasn’t going with him. I was on a new path now.
After twenty minutes, I looked at my watch, and the room number Henry texted me. I would have liked to see W arrive, but he must already be waiting upstairs. Was he getting ready for me, thinking about me? Feeling hot for me?
I tucked my bag under my arm and sashayed across the elegant space, smiling like a minx. The hotness came first. I had to let W run roughshod over my body and exorcise all his demons before I said anything about how much he’d come to mean in my life. That was the type of conversation to save for afterward, when he held me and gazed into my eyes, and made sure, with his gruff and awkward questions, that I was okay.
I’m very okay, thanks to you.
I took the elevator to the tenth floor and took a deep breath as I walked down the hall. He gave me the best butterflies. When I got to the door I raised my hand to knock, then I realized it was cracked open, propped on the bar lock.
I double-checked Henry’s text. This was definitely the right room. I pushed it open a little, bracing for W to pounce on me and do something scary.
“Hello?”
The room was moody and lush, done in dark velvet and mahogany wood. I tiptoed inside, looking around. “Hello?”
When I was finally convinced he wasn’t going to jump on me, I noticed the dress on the bed, and an envelope with my name on it. I let the door close and walked across the room. I stood beside the bed and drew my fingers along the dress’s neckline. It was a replacement for the one he’d cut up last week, new with tags.
I was grateful for the dress, but I didn’t want to touch the envelope. I felt afraid.
“Hello?” I called again. “Are you here?”
I strained to hear him speak back to me, to breathe, to growl, to make that low, derisive laugh. I went into the bathroom. Nothing. He wasn’t here. No one had been here in a while now. There wasn’t the faintest whiff of his cologne.
He’s going to knock in a minute, I told myself. He’s fucking with me. No, he wouldn’t knock, he’d just sneak in and scare the shit out of me. I spun around, the hair prickling at my nape, but he wasn’t there.
“W,” I said softly, knowing there’d be no reply.
I went back out into the main room and pulled the drapes open. The room looked down on the treetops of Gramercy Park. A park view, of course. Always the best. I looked back at the bed. The dress.
The envelope with Chere written on it in W’s blocky script.
I went and picked it up, and walked back to the window, unfolding the white paper and angling it toward the light. There was no greeting, no date or name, just one line in the middle of the page.
Good luck, starshine.
I stared at the words a long time, rereading them, trying to understand them past the roaring panic in my brain. He couldn’t mean…goodbye? He wouldn’t just leave me like this, without saying goodbye. He wouldn’t just end us.
I sat in a chair in the still, lush room, and looked at the paper, and the dress, and I knew with a sick, sinking dread that I wasn’t going to see him again. He had chosen, for some reason, to terminate our relationship: our working relationship, our emotional relationship, our connection, all the experiences that had helped us bond.
“Why?” I asked, but there was no answer. I covered my face with my hands and leaned over, devastated by emotion. “Why, why, why are you doing this?”
I thought back over our last few sessions. What had I done? Was it because I’d talked about leaving the business? I thought I’d made it clear that I’d be happy to keep seeing him.
I wasn’t listening for a knock anymore, or the sound of his footsteps behind me. I knew he was gone, and that this beautiful velvet room was the last room he’d ever reserve for us. I held the paper to my nose and thought I smelled the faintest note of him. In a day, perhaps as little as an hour, it would be gone. Why hadn’t I asked what kind of cologne he wore? He might have told me that, if he wouldn’t tell me his name.
It killed me that I didn’t even have a name to hold onto. I had nothing but a small collection of poems, and fuzzy, adrenalized memories that would also start to fade. Maybe I could find him, with enough money and ingenuity, and persistence, but why even try, when he obviously didn’t want to be found?
He’d left me.
He’d deserted me.
He hadn’t even given me the chance to say goodbye.
Coward, I thought. You’re a fucking coward. You’re chickenshit. I loved you.
I looked down at the dress, the perfect, new, intact dress lying across the bed as I’d lain across the bed so many times. I didn’t understand. I thought he’d come to care about me.
Good luck, starshine? What the fuck?
I left the hotel, and I left the dress, because I knew I’d never wear it again. I went home and arranged all his poetry around me on the bed, trying to figure out what had happened, what had gone wrong between The Carlyle session and Gramercy Park. As I looked at the verses together, themes emerged. Dreams, longing, darkness. Mystery and lust. I read them again, and again, and as much as I didn’t want to, I began to comprehend what had happened.
I’d rather have the dream of you
With faint stars glowing
I’d rather have the want of you
The rich, elusive taunt of you
It was a pretty, poetic way of saying he didn’t want me, the real me, the way I thought he did. It was all right there in the poems. What he wanted was the dream, the fantasy. He wanted Miss Kitty, as much as he insisted on calling me Chere.
And when Chere got too real, too human and complicated, he didn’t want me anymore. When I talked to him about continuing to date him as a person, a real, available person and not an escort, he must have been shaking in his thousand dollar shoes. He must have been doing everything in his power not to run away. Well, now he’d run away.
Love lies.
I understood it. I didn’t like it, but I understood it. His sexy charisma had blinded me to reality. He’d made me imagine he cared about me, made me believe he might want an actual relationship. God, so embarrassing. He’d wanted sex; that was all. I’d gotten carried away by my fawning, needy fantasies, just as I’d done with Simon a decade ago. Simon seduced me with painting, W seduced me with poetry, but the outcome was the same. Thank God W had been kind enough to save me from my idiocy and fuck off out of my life.
Jesus, this was so hard. My eyes ached from crying, but my heart ached worse. I stood and walked to my window, and made a promise to myself as I looked out at the darkening cityscape. No more relationships. No more co-dependence on others. No more fake emotional shit.
From now on, Chere was going to be in a relationship with Chere, and the rest of the world could go fuck itself. I’d keep his poetry as a reminder, a warning about how awful and wonderful people could be, and how easily they could leave you.
This was it for me. I was finished. I was never, ever letting go of my heart again.
* * *
Chere and W’s story is continued in Taunt Me (Rough Love Part Two), and concluded in Trust Me (Rough Love Part Three):
It’s been two and a half years since the mysterious W disappeared from Chere’s life, and things are getting better. Sort of. She’s nearing the end of her design program and looking forward to a new career, even if her heart is shuttered for good.
But loneliness is a powerful thing, and she finds herself tempted by a no-strings-attached BDSM partner who happens to be her former professor. She knows it’s a terrible idea, and that he could never live up to W’s level of passionate mayhem, but she’s been waiting so long to be bound and hurt. She’s been waiting so long to feel something…
Unbeknownst to her, someone from her past has been waiting too. And when that someone realizes she means to move forward with this new partner, he barges back into her life to express his displeasure in the only way he knows…
W and Chere’s story will continue with more ups and downs, more passionate sex and passionate denials, and general fucked-up longing. There’ll be more poetry, and more complicated emotions to sort through. Most of all there will be fear about what comes next in their dauntingly unconventional relationship. Her fear…and his…