The apartment complex was somewhere on Burton Way, maybe fifteen miles away from the hotel where Antwone stayed. It squatted a little ways from the road with leafed trees and trimmed shrubberies lining its contour. It was a bulky structure, and the cutting-edge look of it delivered the commercial statement that apartments in the lot did not come cheap. But they were definitely worth every penny.
Ava’s room was on the fourth floor. They rode up to it on an elevator. By then, Antwone was holding her hand and was following her lead.
They got indoors and Ava found the light switch. The apartment was pristine and grand with its high ceiling and large windows, its modern furniture, its fancy amenities and its interior design style made of linear and curved lines. The carpeting and the walls were groomed and the balcony offered a beautiful view of the cityscape.
Antwone seated himself on a davenport. Ava disappeared into the bedroom, not before asking him if he wanted to drink something. But he was good. He’d drunk enough for one night. Suddenly, he was itching for a cigarette. And Ava was taking her time. But he resisted the urge to smoke since he was trying to quit.
He stood up again and started poking around the place just to do something.
She came back out of the bedroom.
“What do you think?” her hand movement suggested she meant the apartment.
“It’s nice…”
“Nice?” she repeated. “So you don’t think much of it, huh?” Antwone shrugged and she grinned. She went over to sit on the davenport. “Now I’m starting to believe maybe I overrated it. When I first got here, maybe all that excitement was due to the jetlag or the change of scenery, you know. They were all right; I stayed in New York for too long. You spend too much time in one place and you’ll get excited over anything from another place.”
Antwone nodded absently. He was still standing.
“Come here and sit,” she said. Her voice was flirty and her eyes were inviting.
It was as if she had done something to her eyes in that bedroom. They easily bent your will.
Antwone sat down next to her. His mind was tired but his body was not. A treacherous desire was slowly stabbing him in the waist, and she was responsible for it.
He had not been in the same room alone with a woman and late in the night like this for almost a good half a year, since he’d been on his writing trip.
Now they were looking at each other, but she was looking at him more than he was looking at her. It was in the expression of her eyes, the way they would project the lust that was bottled up inside.
She moved into him and kissed him. She was a good kisser. He loved that about her. Their lips were tight together. But somehow he couldn’t fully get into it though. And Ava pulled away.
“What’s wrong?” she said. “You look so down.”
“Maybe I am,” he said.
“This isn’t how I imagined this. Sure you don’t want a drink?”
“Maybe I’ll get one.”
She got up and went to the kitchen and fixed two glasses of Pernod.
He knew the drink was just an excuse on his part to have her out of his private space; on her part, it was a subterfuge to get him loose and in the mood.
He had first met her on a non-stop flight from New York to London. That was eight years ago or so. His publisher at the time had gotten him up to do a European signing tour for his first published book which was particularly big overseas. And that book had propelled his passion to a career.
He still remembered how his spilling coffee cream over her lapel broke the ice and got them to chat during the flight. And the moment he let out that he was a writer, a published writer, she was twice as delighted. That’s when he learned she was a literary agent. Her grandparents had founded the agency she worked in and, over the years, with its impressive portfolio of clients, it had become a critical mainstay in the New York literary world with a few subsidiaries abroad too.
Many years later, when he found himself in need of new representation after falling out with his then agent, he thought of her. And they reconnected.
Working with her was easy. And they gradually evolved to engage out of the work context. At some point, as part of a natural progression in which two persons see each other and get deep and real with one another, he realized he was growing an attraction to her. And he felt ashamed because she was married, and also because, if it was just a physical attraction, he knew it would have passed eventually.
But it was something else. It wasn’t love though, he was sure of that. He just really liked having her by his side. At the same time, he didn’t want the responsibility of being the other man in an adulterous relationship. It was a matter of principles.
One day, however, they had found themselves stranded for a good half hour in an elevator. He had not talked much then. But she had because that’s how she dealt with stress. The whole time, though, he had avoided looking at her straight. And that’s how she had known something was on. Maybe she had known it all along. But that day, in that elevator, he knew that she had become aware of the way he felt about her and could not pretend otherwise.
Unexpectedly, she had reciprocated those feelings and soon enough they had become lovers, against his better judgment. The first night it had happened, she told him having an affair was not something she normally did, but she didn’t feel bad about it and she didn’t want him to feel bad about it either. Her husband had wasted her love by having multiple affairs of his own, but this was in no way an attempt to get back at him. Indeed, the thought had occurred to her long ago, but this thing with Antwone was simply not that.
Also she had thought of divorcing her husband, but after a while she just didn’t care anymore about his infidelities. A part of her was still attached to him because she knew him better than he knew himself and he knew her better than she knew herself. They were simply good life partners, plus he was a good person at heart and a good friend. He was just a lousy husband, not in bed though, but in general.
All she wanted, she’d told Antwone as their affair went on, was to feel loved again. It sounded a little silly when she had said it. But it was not. Unlike Antwone, Ava didn’t know how to put a kibosh on her feelings. She was a romantic.
She came with the drinks now and handed him one. He took a swig and began rolling the glass between his palms. She looked at him and he said, noncommittally, “You said you were here on business?”
“Yeah, I flew in to meet with this author,” she said. “She’s independently self-published a series of books online and they’re starting to take off. So we want to rep her.”
“Is she good?”
“She’s stubborn.”
“That’s what it takes to survive in this industry,” Antwone said.
Standing by the davenport, Ava now crossed her arms against her chest. Her glass was dangling precariously between two of her fingers. She said:
“Right, but I don’t want to talk about that. I want to talk about us.” Antwone raised his eyes. “I can see something’s bothering you. So what is it?”
“Nothing,” he said and took another swig. “There’s too much ice in this thing.”
“Is it me? Have you been away too long? You don’t want me anymore? You want to break this off?”
Antwone had to grin. “This isn’t your style,” he said. “You don’t make scenes.”
“Be serious for a second, will you?” she said. “I’m only in town for two days, Antwone, I thought we could make the most of it.”
“Does Hank know you’re seeing me tonight?”
Her arms came loose from her chest.
“So that’s what bothers you?” She chuckled, sipped her drink and took a few steps away from the davenport. “Oh gosh… Look, he knows I’m seeing someone but he doesn’t know who. We have an agreement. And—please, let’s not talk about him, huh? I’m here and I miss you.”
“When is he going to be here?”
“I don’t know, sometime this week,” Ava said. Antwone could see that
she was getting impatient. “But I won’t be here,” she added. “Because I’ll be already gone and we’ll have lost all this time doing nothing remotely fun except palaver to death about my maverick, deadbeat husband. Maybe you’d like me to call him up right now and tell him how much you’ve been thinking about him.”
“Stop being so bratty.”
“I’ll stop if we do less talking. What do you say?”
With the look she gave him, he understood her meaning and again felt a primitive arousal pulsing through his body, all the way down to the tip of his toes.
Ava moved back to the davenport and settled down next to him. She took his drink from his hand and put it away along with hers. Afterwards, she ran one hand smoothly through his hair, down his neck and also stroked his lips with her thumb.
All of that felt good. She knew what she was doing; she knew how to rouse his mind. Then, at a moment’s notice, he felt her lips brush along his jawline and her fingernails claw at his chest through his shirtfront.
“I haven’t been able to sleep in days,” Antwone suddenly confided. “Weeks, it seems––”
By now, Ava was pelting the side of his face, but never going to his mouth, with long and greedy kisses.
“I can’t sleep Ava,” Antwone said again. “And when I do, I have this feeling that there’s something inside me. Something wrong. And this book I’m working on… I’m worried about it. I’m worried about my writing... I don’t think it’s good… I don’t think it’s good enough. I don’t think it’ll stack up to Knight of Rain… The female lead in it is just… She’s missing something…”
“You need to stop talking,” Ava whispered while kissing under his lower lip. “And you need a good night’s sleep. Let me help you with that.”
That woman… Antwone thought, she just doesn’t get it. But how tired he was all of a sudden, of all the conflicts within himself… So he let her help him the only way she knew how. And they were kissing at the mouth again. He nearly felt like crying but didn’t out of pride.
And so they went to bed kissing and stripping each other. And as he caressed the Japanese kanji tattoo on the small of her back, nearly forgetting that it had always been there, he now remembered the goodness that her naked body had done to him and his senses in the past, and could no longer waste any more seconds as it lay there looking so overripe and so ready for the taking.
With her white sensitive flesh, her useful thighs and her handful breasts, it seemed that body of hers had been made to be worked on with lips and hands. And so he worked it, worked it hard and slow and took his time at that until she seized in an expression of utter abandon and felt herself drip and flow from her skin to under his while the terrible pleasure he was hammering inside her burnt and burnt and burnt.
After the burning was gone and her body had cooled down, she rested her head on his chest and slowly went to sleep. She dreamed of nothing that night, for there was not the need to for her to sleep well, even as blowsy as she was now.
Antwone looked at her and saw her peaceful face filled with satisfaction, the round shape of her shoulder was outlined by the light coming through from outside the bedroom windows and her naked breasts partly showed in the gloom under the coverlet.
He thought it wasn’t fair that she had gotten what she wanted and could now sleep tight and sound while he again was left with nothing but his loneliness, a loneliness that even sex could not assuage. And now his wakefulness was making it worse. And he could not even write to make it go away.
He promised himself that, next time, if they ever slept together again while they were both in town, it would have to be in his hotel room, with his typewriter handy just in case. An afterthought later, he decided against the idea. Having sex with her wasn’t the answer. That’s why he liked keeping some distance between them in the first place. Sex only created the illusion of a deeper connection which maybe wasn’t there.
Even now Antwone did not know how he felt about Ava and, whenever he slept with her, his feelings were getting even more mixed up. He needed to sort them out first for their relationship to find any kind of grassroots. If you could even call it a relationship. And somewhere there was also Hank in this equation; so this here was definitely not what he really needed. He didn’t know what he needed exactly, but this here was not it.
About thirty minutes after pondering in silence next to Ava’s sleeping form, Antwone wrote her a note and left.
He needed to see that flashing weather beacon again. Somehow, the urge to see it was surprising him, but it was something he just needed to do.
Outside on the street, he walked a little bit before finding a taxi. It was almost two a.m. and the night had gone from cold to chilly.
The ride to the weather beacon tower took seven minutes. There was hardly any traffic out tinseling the streets with their rapid-moving head and tail lights. There were a few people though, couples for the most part, sauntering by on the sidewalks, hands around each other’s waists.
As the taxicab came to a road that turned off from a big public parking space, Antwone saw a man and a woman quarrel and thought that this was some gorgeous time and place to be quarrelling.
The woman was scantily dressed to the point that some of her cleavage and the apex of her thighs were exposed to the chilly air of the night. Yet from the peeks Antwone could see, he surmised that she wasn’t this scantily clad for flair. It seemed it was a practical choice because the way the quarrel was panning out, it looked like it was going to turn into an all-out brawl and so she had maybe pulled her skirt up above her thighs to get herself ready to fight her companion if things got messy.
The taxicab drove past the scene of the quarrel not slowly enough for Antwone to find out what was going to happen between those two.
Besides that little live play, the rest of the ride was uneventful and, by the time Antwone got to where he could see the weather beacon tower, he felt a little more at ease.
He got out of the taxicab and let the driver keep the change for the fare. The weather beacon was there and it illuminated the murky sky.
Its radiance filled him with a sense of serenity and made him go wistful all over again. He no longer had Ava on the brain. He no longer had his writing in his heart. And the entire emotional luggage he had carried with him through his uphill battle with life, right there and then, was lifted from him. He no longer felt the weight of it pull his shoulders down. He was an empty vessel floating peacefully on the surface of calm waters with a silent shore looming in all directions off in the horizon.
If one ever saw a light in the last moments before death, Antwone caught himself thinking, then that light probably looked like this...
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