“I’m sorry, too,” she said, in a small voice that hurt him more than her yelling had. “I shouldn’t be surprised. You always wanted the new thing, right? No secondhand coats for you. I’ll bet Miss Maisie doesn’t have any nasty scars on her chest, right?”
“Rachel.” He could hear her crying, and he didn’t know how to comfort her, didn’t know what to say.
“And she’s probably not spoiled. Pulled herself up by her pretty little bootstraps, I bet. Not like snobby Rachel and her snobby sorority friends, right, Andy? Be honest. I was never good enough for you, and no matter what I did, I was never going to be.”
She hung up the phone, and wouldn’t answer it for the next two hours, at which point his teammates came by, rowdy and shouting and wanting to know why he wasn’t at the bar. He went down, thinking that he’d have a few beers and try Rachel again. But there was Maisie, in a short dress that left her long legs bare. This time Andy didn’t hesitate. He gulped a Scotch, grabbed Maisie around the waist, pulled her into a hug, and whispered, “Want to see my room?”
They’d started kissing in the elevator. Then they’d raced down the hall, hand in hand, with Andy fumbling for the key card and Maisie whispering, “Hurry, hurry.” Once they were in the room, he pushed her back against the wall and kissed her hard, almost angrily, until she wriggled away. “Let me use the little girls’ room,” she said. Andy lay on the bed, still dressed, waiting, until she came out in nothing but a bathrobe, standing in front of him barefoot. “Hi there,” she whispered, letting the robe slip off her shoulders, and stood there naked except for panties that were just a scrap of black lace.
“Like what you see?” she whispered. And oh, God, she was unbelievable. Like something out of a movie or a magazine. Her breasts were small and perfectly shaped, topped by taut nipples big as blackberries. He yanked her toward him, and bent and sucked.
Unreal, he thought, as his hands skimmed the curve of her hips, then cupped her ass. It was like she was a different species from Rachel, her waist so slim, her bottom so perfectly firm and round. Her pubic hair had been trimmed into a triangle that looked like an arrow directing him down. She was wet when he touched her, and she came almost as soon as he’d pushed himself inside, throwing her head back and sighing. “Handsome,” she whispered. “Oh, you handsome man.”
The next morning, he’d woken up to the sound of running water. He’d rolled onto his side in the fragrant, rumpled sheets, deciding how he should feel, if he was supposed to hate himself or feel like he’d gotten away with something, and who at the bar had seen them leave, and whether everyone knew. The water turned off, and the door opened, sending a puff of steam and the smell of soap into the room. When Maisie, wrapped in a towel, walked toward him, Andy braced for a scene, thinking that she would want promises, assurances that what they’d done had meant something, and that they’d see each other again. Instead, she’d kissed him lightly on his forehead. “Early call time,” she’d whispered. “Here’s my number.” She put a scrap of paper on the nightstand, twisted her wet hair into a bun, pulled her dress on over her head, slipped on her shoes, and sashayed out the door. There had been no talk of fate or destiny or how they were meant to be together. She just gave him a smile, a last look at her perfect body, the beautiful angles of her cheeks and chin, and then she was gone.
When he’d gotten back to Oregon, all he found was the note that Rachel had left him. I wish you all the best, it said. By then he did feel guilty—a one-night stand was one thing, a breakup was something else. For two weeks he called her every day, morning, noon, and night. She never answered. He would have flown to see her, but he was in the most rigorous phase of his pretrial training—as Rachel knew. Then one afternoon his phone had rung, and it was Maisie, saying she was out in Vancouver, shooting editorial for a fashion magazine, and could she visit when she was done? Andy had said, “Sounds great.”
At his apartment, which he’d carefully purged of all signs of Rachel, Maisie told him about the shoot. “It’s a big spread on some dead lady writer, so they’ve got, like, a bunch of important male writers being, like, Henry James and diplomats and architects and whatever.”
“Who are you supposed to be?”
“Edith Wharton,” Maisie said proudly. “Remember that movie Winona Ryder was in? With all the great costumes? Edith Wharton wrote the book that was based on.”
“Why didn’t they get an important female writer to be Edith Wharton?”