One Night Only by Catherine Walsh
2
Stupid Grayson Group and their stupid cultural center. Stupid Matthias and his stupid visionary mind. Stupid me and my stupid dull one.
I fling my suitcase onto the bed and unzip it. There’s still some sand inside from last summer when Annie and I visited her family in Florida. We spent a lot of time eating shrimp and drinking beer and drunkenly video calling Paul at 2 a.m. his time.
It was a good weekend.
Now I shake the sand onto the floor. I have a few planned outfits I want to wear but what about everything in between? The majority of my closet is office based, the rest of it embarrassingly casual. None of it is suitable wedding-week attire.
Uninspired.
“Within budget” is what they meant to say.
“Following the brief with practical yet stylish adjustments” is more like it.
You want inspired you whack on another million bucks, Grayson.
My phone buzzes on the bed and it takes me a moment to locate it underneath all the clothes. It’s a text from Dad.
Bon voyage!
I stare at it, feeling a little guilty. We were supposed to be going camping soon, our annual father-daughter tradition, but with the trip to Ireland, I can’t afford to take any more time off work. He said he didn’t mind but I know he’s disappointed. He’s been on his own since I moved to the city, and though I try to visit when I can, it feels like every year we’re seeing less and less of each other.
“I’m alive!”
I quickly message back as Claire’s voice sounds from the hallway and emerge to see her eyes glued to her own phone as she untucks her blouse from her tight pencil skirt. She’s already swapped her heels for a pair of sleek black trainers.
Claire is a lawyer for one of those large corporations that no one has heard of but that quietly runs a million companies and probably a small country somewhere. She tried to explain her job to me once. Something with taxes. A lot of reading. A lot of meetings. No actual court experience. “I’m a sellout,” she said seriously to me once. “But a sellout who is going to retire by forty.”
She’s rooming with me to make as much money as she can to buy her own place and I’m grateful for it. She gets the bigger room and insists on paying a lot more rent than I do. There’s no way I’d be able to afford this place otherwise. It’s a decent two-bedroom on Avenue A with sunlight and closet space. The neighborhood gets a little rowdy on the weekends, but I love it and it’s near enough to everything that I can’t imagine living anywhere else.
“What crawled up your butt?” she asks when she sees me.
“Nothing.”
“You packed yet?”
“No.”
She rolls her eyes and gestures me back into the bedroom, where she collapses into the flea market armchair I squeezed beside the bed.
“Doesn’t it rain all the time in Ireland?” she asks, examining my suitcase with a critical eye.
“Yes, but it’s nearly June. And Paul says that’s a myth.”
“Throw in a fleece. Do you have an adapter?” She sighs when I shake my head. “I’ll give you mine.”
“Thanks.” I dump a pile of T-shirts into the case, followed by my jeans.
“Bad day at work?”
I glance at her in surprise. “How did you know?”
“No reason,” she deadpans as I kick a discarded jacket out of the way.
I frown down at my clothes. Do shoes go in first or last? “Turns out I’m not the creative genius I thought I was,” I explain. “Our new client doesn’t like my design and, as it turns out, neither does my boss.”
Her face falls. “I’m sorry.”
“Yay, vacation time, I guess.”
“It will be good for you. There’s a reason I go to some nameless, extremely sunny beach every year. You never take a break.”
“I take breaks,” I protest.
“Sex with random men when you feel like it is not taking a break.”
“It is to me,” I mutter. “This is my plane outfit,” I add, ignoring her look as I hold up the sweatpants and sweatshirt.
She nods in approval. “And don’t forget to put on a face mask before you land.” She pats the skin under her eyes. “Helps those bags.”
“I don’t get bags.”
“You definitely get bags. And let’s try some serum, shall we?”
Claire’s obsessed with her skin-care regimen. Our bathroom is crammed with cleansers and exfoliators and strange contraptions that look like they belong in a doctor’s office but apparently “stimulate blood flow.” All of this plus her quarterly Botox injections sometimes makes me more than a little paranoid about my one-step moisturizer routine (I recently graduated to using it morning and night) but she assures me with my babyface cheeks and supposedly tiny pores that I don’t need to worry.
I guess it’s one upside to getting constantly carded by bouncers ten years younger than me.
“Don’t drink any of the plane wine,” Claire continues. “The last thing you need is a hangover on top of jet lag. I’m speaking from experience.”
I dump the sweatshirt onto the bed. “You’re kinda sucking all the fun out of this, you know that?”
“It’s five hours. It will fly by. Literally. And then you will be in a whole new country on a whole new continent and I will be extremely jealous.” She plants two hands on the armchair and hauls herself up. “I’m going to order too much pad thai. You want in?”
“I already ate.”
“Cold pizza doesn’t count toward your five a day,” she sings, shuffling out of the room.
Bras. Underwear. I count them out day by day, including some spares because, honestly, who knows and grab a handful of socks from the drawer. The suitcase fills quickly, especially when I add in Annie’s presents from friends unable to travel for the wedding. I keep my nicer heels in boxes under the bed and I drop to my knees to pull them out when I spy something glinting on the floor.
It’s a watch.
I don’t own a watch.
Crap.
I bang my head against the bed frame as I pick it up, the metal strap cold in my hand.
For one second, I think about throwing it in the trash or selling it on eBay. Then I remind myself I am not an awful person. I don’t have a good excuse anyway. We swapped numbers last night and I haven’t gotten around to deleting it yet.
I take a picture and message my one-night stand. I think this is yours? I keep my tone polite, not wanting to give him the wrong impression when he was so keen this morning. I’m leaving it with my roommate. Going out of town for a few days.
Friendly but formal.
Too formal?
I stare down at the text, deliberating. Smiley face? Or is that too inviting? Maybe I— oh my God just send it. I hit the button, hesitate and send another.
This is Sarah by the way.
Unless I didn’t tell him my name.
From last night.
Ugh. Too many texts. But too late to take it back.
I throw my phone on the bed and continue packing. It’s barely a minute later when his reply comes.
I’m outside now.
What the… Is he kidding? I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror, dressed only in faded gray shorts and a sports bra I should have thrown out years ago. The skin around my eyebrows is still a stubborn pink, smarting from my wax down the block.
I stand in the middle of my room, listening hard for the sound of the buzzer or a knock on the door. When nothing happens, I scramble over the bed to the window, which is already open in the faint hope of a night breeze. We’re on the second floor and the light is beginning to fade. A couple of people are smoking on the corner and a man across the street is talking loudly into his cell. But there’s no one waiting below.
He’s kidding.
He has to be.
I abandon the window and head for the kitchen, grabbing a T-shirt so I’m semi-decent, and peer through the keyhole, squinting at the warped bubble of hallway.
There’s no one there. I huff a sigh of relief as my phone trills with another text.
Made you look.
The little—
I turn my phone off and grab a plastic freezer bag from the kitchen, dropping his watch inside, before I knock on Claire’s open door. She’s sitting in the middle of her neatly made bed, still in her work clothes and glowering at her laptop.
“The guy from last night left his watch in my room,” I say to her without preamble. “I told him he can drop by and pick it up. Is that okay?” I wait but she doesn’t look up from the screen. “Claire?”
“The hot guy you slept with forgot his watch. Got it.”
“Thank you.”
“How do you do it?”
I turn back at her question, already thinking about my packing. “Do what?”
“Meet people so easily?”
At first, I think she’s joking, but the look on her face is completely serious. “I don’t know. You talk, you drink, you bring them home. It’s not rocket science.”
“Are you sure about that?”
“Pretty sure.” I laugh. “Where is this coming from?”
She closes her laptop lid, shifting so she’s facing me. It’s like she’s about to launch into a presentation. “I think I’m becoming a spinster.”
“You’re twenty-eight.”
“Which would make me a spinster in Jane Austen times.”
“And at thirty-one what am I? A crone? You’ve got everything going for you. You don’t need to meet someone.”
“I know I don’t need to, Sarah. But I would like to. Is that so terrible? Does that make me a bad feminist?”
“Did your sister get engaged again? Is that what’s going on?”
“Mark’s moving to Seattle.”
I straighten in surprise. “Moving moving? Forever?”
Mark works on the floor above Claire. She’s been obsessed with him since before we even met. All I ever hear is Mark cut his hair. Mark wore a new suit. Mark made eye contact. They kissed once, years ago, after a late night of crunching numbers or shredding files or whatever it is they do. According to Claire, they never spoke of it again. Except she, of course, never forgot it.
“A trial run for a few weeks while they open the new office,” she says. “But everyone knows they’re going to give him a good position there. He’s so talented they’d be idiots not to.”
“That sucks.”
“Not that it matters,” she says firmly. “He has a girlfriend.”
“Had a girlfriend,” I remind her. “You told me they broke up months ago.”
“Yes, but it was serious. They were practically engaged.”
“Practically engaged isn’t actually engaged. You’re too scared to say anything to him.” But she’s tuned me out, the glow from the screen illuminating her face as she opens her laptop again.
“He’s moving anyway,” she mutters. “So, unless you can teleport me to Seattle, that’s not happening.”
“I’ll work on it.” I lean against the doorframe, my own troubles momentarily forgotten. “If the guy from last night comes for his watch, I give you permission to flutter your eyelashes at him.”
I get a smile for that. A small one at least. “I wish I could come with you to Annie’s wedding. I bet there will be loads of single men there. Men with beautiful accents and sparkling eyes.”
“Sparkling eyes?”
“Because they’re so charming.”
“You need to get laid.”
“I know,” she says sadly. “Maybe I’ll ask your watch man.” She glances at me, narrowing her eyes. “What time are you leaving?”
“Four thirty.” I wince at the thought.
“I have to be up at six for my spinning class, so if you wake me when you leave, I will kill you.”
“Noted.” I leave the watch on her dresser and close her door. “See you next week.”
“Bring me back an Irish husband!”
I get to work on the mess I’ve left my bedroom in, knowing I won’t have the energy to clean it when I get back. I even put fresh sheets on the bed before I set my alarm. A few years ago, I would have stayed up, but I can already feel last night’s activities catching up with me and I climb into bed as my energy drops.
I turn my phone back on because I don’t know how to survive an evening without it but there are no more messages from my one-night stand.
To distract myself, I reread the email from Annie, flicking through the photos. Outside a siren wails and I glance to where my suitcase waits, packed and ready to go, and finally, finally feel the first stirrings of excitement.
Screw Grayson. Screw Matthias and Harvey and the beauty therapist who left my right eyebrow bleeding. Screw cocky watch guy and my 4 a.m. start.
My best friend is getting married. I am going on vacation.
And I’m going to enjoy every damn minute of it.