“I’m sorry,” I said, reaching for his hand.
“I hate complaining about it, because it feels like I’m being unappreciative and I’m not. I know how lucky we are, how lucky I am … I know that I’m living this dream life and I don’t want to be this bastard who’s like whining, but we could all use a couple of months of just doing nothing. And if they continue to stuff us down these fans’ throats, they’re bound to lose interest. Right?” He looked to me then, sincere.
“I don’t know. I kind of like having you stuffed down my throat.”
His eyes grew wide. “You’re naughty. Come here.” He pulled me into him, my head on his shoulder, legs over his lap. “Wherever did I find you?”
“Vegas.” I smiled. “So is there nothing in your contract that addresses vacation time?”
“Vacation time. What a quaint idea. Most groups get months of downtime with the natural ebb and flow of putting out an album and supporting it, touring, and then the time it takes to gear up to do another one. We just don’t have that luxury.”
“So you’re just beholden to the record company?”
“We’re beholden to our management first, and they run a very tight ship.” His hand was in my hair, comfortable. “Oh, Graham says hello, by the way.”
“Who’s Graham?”
“Graham, with our management company. He was at lunch today. You met him in New York.”
It clicked then, the nattily dressed laptop fellow from the Four Seasons. The one who could not have been more dismissive. I’m sure he was surprised to find me still in the picture.
“Speaking of lunch…” Hayes raised his head up from the couch. “Daniel!”
“Daniel. Yes. So that’s Daniel.”
“Wow. So lunch with Daniel?” There was more than a hint of suspicion.
I laughed at that: the idea that I would entertain anything with my ex-husband ever again. “Trust me, it was just lunch.”
“I’ve seen your ‘just lunch.’ I’ve been on the receiving end of your ‘just lunch.’” He smiled. “It’s not always ‘just lunch.’”
“With Daniel, it’s just lunch,” I said definitively. “I’m going up for Parents’ Weekend at Isabelle’s camp at the end of the month and he wanted to pass on a couple of gifts for her birthday.”
He let that sit there for a moment, and then, satisfied: “How is Isabelle?”
“She’s fine.”
“What did she say when you told her about us?” His hand was on my knee, beneath the hem of my linen skirt. It had started.
“I didn’t…”
“You haven’t told her?” His eyes widened, huge blue-green pools. “What are you waiting for?”
“The right time. I was dropping her off in the wilderness for seven weeks. I didn’t think it was appropriate to lay that at her feet before heading out the gate. ‘By the way, I’m fucking one of the guys from your favorite band. Have a great summer!’”
He was quiet for a minute, thoughtful. “‘Fucking’? Is that what we’re doing?”
I paused. “Well, not right this moment. But I’m guessing soon, yeah.”
He nodded his head, slow. “And what about the in-between times? When we’re not having sex and we’re just enjoying each other’s company. Like now. What do you call that?”
It felt like a test. “Friendship?”
“Friendship,” he repeated. “So we’re just friends?”
“I don’t know. That depends.”
“Depends on what?”
“On how many friends you have…”
He nodded again, weighing his response. “I have a lot of friends,” he said slowly. “Most of them I’m not fucking.”
I didn’t say anything.
“What is it, Solène? What is it you don’t want to ask me?”
“I want to know if there are others.”
Hayes took his time responding. “Right now?”
I nodded.
He shook his head. “There are no others.”
“What does ‘right now’ mean to you exactly? Today? This evening? This week? What does that mean?”
He took a moment too long to formulate his answer.
“You know what? Never mind. I don’t want to do this to you. I don’t even know that I want to know.”
“Okay,” he said, slow, careful.
“You’re trying not to hurt me.”
He nodded, biting his lip.
“Fuck.”
“I’m trying not to mislead you,” he said, soft, his hand moving in my hair. “I just want to make certain we’re on the same page.”
“Hayes, I haven’t done this in a while. I don’t even know what the page looks like.”
He chuckled at that, kissing the top of my head. “It looks like this, Solène. We get together when we can, and we really, really, really enjoy each other’s company. And I wouldn’t say we were just fucking.”
I took a moment to process that. “Are you doing that with anyone else?”
“That? Right now? No.”
“Right now this week?”
“Right now this month. Does that work for you?”
I nodded. “If it changes, will you let me know? I’m not going to lose my mind, I just want to know.”
“If it changes, I will let you know.”
He kissed my head again, and I could feel him breathing me in. So much lay in what we were not saying.
“What’d you do while I was gone?” he asked. His hand had found its way back to my knees, rings cool against my skin.
“Went through all your stuff. I sold your underwear for ten thousand dollars on eBay.”
“Only ten?”
“Turns out fourteen-year-old girls don’t have that much money.”
“They do in Dubai.” He smiled, his fingers traveling farther up my skirt, prying open my thighs. “Are you splitting the proceeds with me?”
“I wasn’t planning on it.”
He laughed then. “Somehow that doesn’t seem fair.”
“Life isn’t fair.”
“It’s not.” He’d arrived at my underwear, the tips of his fingers tracing over damp cotton. “You know how I know that? Because tonight I get to have you … and no one else does.”
“You’d better earn it. Hayes Campbell.”
“I always do.”
* * *
It might have been the ghosts of the Chateau Marmont, and the feeling that wild things had happened there. It might have been the fact that we’d been separated for two weeks. It might have been my sudden determination not to be replaced. But that night, although Hayes might have had another word for it, we fucked like rock stars.
He was thorough and intense and insatiable. And the third time he handed me a new condom package to open, while he simultaneously disposed of another, I paused.
“Do you never need recovery time? Ever?”
He smiled, shaking his beautiful head. “I’m twenty.”
I tried to remember what sex with Daniel was like in the beginning, and sex with my two boyfriends in college, and sex with the boy from Saint-Raphaël, all who were in the realm of twenty, and while I could remember the appetite, I did not recall this level of stamina. But maybe that was just me getting older.
“You tired?” he asked, taking the condom from me and slowly rolling it on. Just watching him do that was a turn-on. Hayes, with his dick in his hands.
“Yes. But don’t let that stop you.”
He laughed. “Do you want to stop? We can stop, Solène.” Even as he was saying it, he was lifting me by the hips, hoisting me above him, determined. Round four.
He took his time guiding it in. Eyes peeled to mine, teeth sinking into his bottom lip, hips rising. “Just say the word and we can stop.”
“Really?” I smiled.
“Really.” His hands moved up over my hips and around to my ass. “Although, I’m no expert, but … it feels to me like you don’t want to stop.”
“Is that what your dick is telling you?”
“Fu-uck.” He started to laugh. “I think I might love you.”
“Don’t say that.”
“I’m just putting it out there as a possibility.”
I stopped moving then, folding into him, close. “Not even as a joke.”
“Okay,” he said, serious.
“You’re trying not to mislead me, remember?
“I like you.” I kissed him, deep. “A lot. But as long as you’re fucking other people, you’re not allowed to make jokes about being in love with me.”
“I’m sorry.” His hands had moved to my hair, holding it out of my face.
Neither of us spoke for a moment. And then: “Are you angry with me?”
I shook my head, rising up off his chest, moving on top of him again, not wanting to lose this precious thickness. His gift that kept giving. “Does it feel like I’m angry?”
He smiled, even as his breath was quickening, his hands cupping my breasts. “I’m not sure. I can’t read you.”
I didn’t respond, but the thought went through my head that maybe it was better that way.
When it was over and I lay on top of him, feeling the layer of sweat between us and drinking in his four-times-over postcoital scent, he held me, tighter than he ever had, and said nothing.
* * *
In the morning Hayes blew off an appointment with his trainer and chose to come with me to the gallery instead. “I want to see what you do when I’m not with you,” he’d said at some point during our debauched night. He’d uttered it at a moment in which its meaning could have been taken in a variety of ways. But when we awoke, he made himself clear. “So it’s Take Your Lover to Work Day, right?”