Drained.

That was the best, the only word to describe how Rachel left me feeling.

Satisfied was a close second.

I reached out, found her hand with mine. She had small, delicate hands and I liked the way they felt.

When was the last time it felt that good to be with a woman?

I didn’t know. I wasn’t certain it ever had. Because Rachel was so different from the women I was normally with.

I took in as deep a breath as my lungs would allow, held it, then let it out slowly. Rachel’s sheets and comforter were in a chaotic tangle at the foot of the bed, partially wrapped around our legs.

As the haze of pleasure over my senses retreated, I could hear the distant noises of the city intruding again. Car horns, the roar of engines. Shouted conversations.

I wanted this moment to linger longer. And I looked forward to holding Rachel all night long.

My eyelids, so heavy, drifted shut. I felt my breathing slow.

Then I felt Rachel shift her weight on the bed, moving onto her side. One of those small and lovely hands touched my chest. My eyes opened. I smiled when I saw the way her hair hung around her face while she looked down at me.

“Hey,” I said.

Rachel met my eyes, then glanced away. She took her hand away as well.

“You can’t stay,” she said.

I sat up. Her headboard was cool against my bare back. “Oh?”

“Yeah...” Rachel said. She shifted so that her legs hung off the side of her bed and her back was to me. She looked over her shoulder at me. “This has to be a onetime thing. I’m just... I’m at this point in my life, in my career, really, where I really, really don’t need any sort of personal distraction.”

“Personal distraction? That’s what you think this is?” I said.

“That’s all that it can be,” she replied. She reached under a lampshade and turned a low wattage bulb on, casting a pool of light out around it that softened the shadows of the bedroom.

So this is what that feels like, I thought. I leaned my head back against the plaster wall behind the headboard and rubbed at my eyes, unable to stop from smiling a little.

It wasn’t a happy smile. Rather, a sardonic, mirthless one.

“Something funny?” Rachel asked.

“Usually I’m the one who says something like that after something like this,” I answered.

“So you understand, then?” she said.

“Understand? Yeah.” Accept? Hell no.

“Because if you stay I know it will turn into something else. Something I can’t handle. Please don’t stay.”

I thought I caught a hint of, But you can. You can stay. I won’t stop you.

I should have stayed.

I knew that as soon as I, once again fully dressed, set foot outside the door of her apartment. She closed it behind me before I could say anything else. The deadbolt shot into place, the sound the period at the end of the sentence describing our relationship.

I thought about banging on the door, demanding she let me back in. But I knew that wouldn’t work. Would just strengthen her resolve.

I left.

I should have stayed.

***

IT WAS IN A SORT OF daze that I made my way down to the sidewalk. Almost to the sidewalk, anyway.

“You look a little lost.”

I turned towards the voice. She stood by the checkerboard wall of mail boxes, a canvas grocery bag hanging off one shoulder. The thin neck of a bottle of wine, the screw-off kind, poked out from the top of that bag. She was a shorter woman with curly black hair that fell to her shoulders.

“Not physically,” I said, “Only in all the other ways that matter.”

I wondered then if there wasn’t something I could say to Rachel through her door that might get me back inside.

I hadn’t realized how much I’d invested in her in the short time we knew each other. I’d let my guard down around her. And she let hers down around me.

That’s the problem, I knew. She’d said as much. But there had to be some way to make her see that sometimes it was okay to let your guard down. That not all deviations from the path that she’d laid out for herself were bad.

“Maybe,” the dark-haired woman said, “I can help you find yourself in all those other ways again.”

I recognized that tone in her voice. When I looked at her, I also recognized that look on her face. The way she looked me up and down.

She wanted me.

It wasn’t a question. Merely an observation. One I’d been able to make about women for a long time.

She reminded me of those women I usually found myself with, somehow. And it immediately put me off of her.

“If I needed any sort of help, you wouldn’t be the one giving it,” I said.

Then something else happened that I expected to happen. The woman’s pretty features twisted in sudden anger at being spurned.

Behind her, through the glass of the front door, I saw cars zip past. Including some taxis. I could just give my driver a call and have him here in the Town Car, but I thought I might just take a cab back into Manhattan.

I wanted more time by myself. Where no one knew me for who I was.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” she said.

“It means No,” I said. I started for the door.

“You’re an asshole,” the curly-haired woman said.

“You don’t even know the half of it,” I replied. I pushed the door open and made my way to the curb.

I held my hand up, hailed a cab.

I climbed in. While we pulled away from the curb, I looked back at Rachel’s building.

I should have stayed.