She answers on the fourth, but I don’t hear her voice. I hear the pulsing of heady music. “Cecilia?”
“Victor?”
“Yes.”
“Wait a minute!” The beat of tropical house blasts and her words are muffled by laughter and the shuffle of bodies.
She’s at a nightclub. “Where are you?”
“What?”
“Where are you, Cecilia?”
“I’m at Ivory!”
I grit my teeth. “Are you coming home tonight?”
“Yes, of course I am. I’m just going—” The rest of her words are unintelligible, lost in the beat and laughter.
“How are you getting home?”
“Taxi. I can’t hear you very well.” Her voice is giggly. Like she’d been after Conway’s dinner, only worse.
“I’ll come pick you up.”
“What?”
“I’ll come and pick you up!”
Her voice turns into a squeak. “Now?”
“No. When you’re ready to leave.”
There’s the sound of shuffling again, and then a door shuts. I hear a woman yelling about someone cutting in line. “Now I can hear you better,” Cecilia says, her voice dropping. “Hi, Victor.”
“Hello. Text me twenty minutes before you want to leave and I’ll pick you up, okay?”
“Okay,” she breathes. “That’s very kind of you.”
“I don’t want you out in the city alone at night.”
“I’m with friends.”
“Still. Text me.”
“Okay. I’ll send you—” The call clicks off, and she’s gone on the other end, lost in a bathroom stall at a club downtown.
I shouldn’t have offered. Shouldn’t have insisted. But here I am, pulling on my jacket and grabbing my car keys. I pass the hideous glass dick vase on my hallway table. She put it back after I threw it in the trash.
It sets my nerves on end. Teasing me. She’s teasing me.
The elevator takes me down to the garage and the black Range Rover I use too rarely. Steven is more convenient day to day, skilled at parking and discreet.
The engine purrs to life under my hands.
She might not have texted yet, but I’m not going to sit at home and wait. Better to be in the city, to be moving. The streets of New York are filled with taxis and mopeds, delivering late-night food to drunkards and partygoers.
I weave through traffic with one hand on the wheel. Refuse to think about what I’m doing, the boundaries I’m crossing. Cecilia and I are not friends. Cecilia and I cannot become friends.