Chapter 21: New York II

-- WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 9, 2008 --

My alarm would have gone off at 7am, but I woke up before that and silenced it early, despite the time zone jet lag. I lay in bed for a long time, staring at the ceiling and lost in thought. And when 7am actually came around, I looked down at the head trapping my left arm beneath her pillow, rolled over to spoon myself behind her, and started kissing my way up the back of her neck while reaching around to fondle her tits.

Rania moaned in her sleep, making annoyed noises at first, but after a few seconds they became more gentle purrs of contentment. One of her hands slid on top of mine, helping me cup her boob. And she sighed and snuggled her cheek a little deeper into the pillow before cutely recoiling at the ticklish sensation of my lips on her neck.

“What time is it?” she murmured, her eyes still closed.

“7am, and it’s a school day,” I replied.

She sighed, stretched her legs, and arched her back before extending both arms forward to stretch them as well. Keeping her arms extended, she rolled onto her back and stretched her hands to the ceiling. But she then abruptly dropped her hands onto her chest and smacked her lips while sleepily trying to open her eyes and look up at me. “Morning,” she greeted with a sheepish smile.

“Morning to you too,” I replied warmly before bending down to peck her lips.

Humming happily with a youthfully innocent expression that made her look like a content schoolgirl, she smiled with her eyes closed and buried her face into my chest. I wrapped my arms around her and hugged her tightly. And taking a deep breath, I asked the question that had been preying on my mind all morning.

“Hey, uhhh ... How much do you remember about last night?”

“Hmm?” she mumbled into my chest. Pulling her head back, she looked up at me with furrowed eyebrows. “You mean, do I remember the royal pounding you gave me six ways from Sunday last night?”

I chuckled and shook my head. “After. Just before you passed out. You, uh ... You sorta mumbled something.”

Rania blinked a couple of times and looked thoughtful. Then, shaking her head slowly, she gave me an apologetic look and said, “Sorry, don’t remember. I’m guessing I mumbled it so bad that you couldn’t understand it?”

“Uh, no actually. I heard you loud and clear.” I popped my eyebrows. “You said, ‘I think I love you.’”

Rania’s eyes popped open WIDE. “I said what?”

I gave her a tight smile. “Actually, the full sentence was, ‘Fucking A, Ben. I think I love you.’”

“Oh, well that’s better,” Rania said in relief as she flashed me a smile. “I must’ve been pretty delirious from all the orgasms.”

I shrugged. “Must’ve been.”

Rania laughed, a little too loudly. “I must’ve really scared you. Girl you barely know professing love after two nights fucking each other’s brains out. Not exactly the sort of thing a hotshot Casanova wants to hear.” She looked a little nervous, blushing and averting her eyes.

I sighed and frowned. “Why do you do that?”

She looked up at me, confused. “Do what?”

“Keep categorizing me as one of the predatory hunters out to add another notch to my bedpost. I’m not a hotshot Casanova.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean any offense.” She visibly shrank before me.

I sighed again. “I’m not offended. I’m just trying to understand. And I’m trying to figure out where WE stand with each other. One minute, you seem absolutely thrilled to be here with me. The next, it seems like you’re expecting me to throw you aside like so much trash.”

Rania blinked twice, staring at my chest. “Well, aren’t you going to?”

“Of course not.”

“Then what happens on Saturday? What happens when you fly back to California while I stay behind?”

I took a deep breath. “What do you want to happen?”

“I don’t know. What do YOU want to happen?” She was staring at my chest again, refusing to meet my eyes.

Reaching down, I gently tilted her chin up to face me. “I want to kiss you goodbye, thank you for a wonderful week together, and promise to remain friends. I don’t want to mislead you into thinking this is going to turn into a serious, romantic relationship, at least not right away. I’m coming off this thing with Adrienne and you’re coming off your own breakup. I don’t think losing control of our emotions and rebounding is the right thing to do, for either of us. We’re young – you’re even younger than me – too young to have any be-all/end-all expectations of each other after only two nights. But at the same time, I want you to realize that you’re NOT just a notch in my bedpost. You’re special. I really LIKE you. That’s why I want to spend this time with you.”

Rania flicked her eyes up to mine but returned her gaze to my lips, despite me continuing to hold her chin. “I like you, too. And you’re right: rebounding isn’t the right thing to do. So I agree: it’s best that we separate on Saturday as friends.”

“I’m glad we’re in agreement.”

She looked up at me, her eyes tight, and gave me an equally tight smile. Then she rolled away from me and slid off the bed.

I may be pretty dense when it comes to recognizing girls’ emotions, but I knew enough to recognize things weren’t as settled as her words would like me to believe. “Rania...” I called after her.

“We need to get dressed. I can’t be late for work again,” she called over her shoulder as she headed into the bathroom.

Quickly, I hopped off the bed and followed after her. She turned on the sink and started splashing her face. Her toiletries and makeup had already been arranged on the counter. I reached over to rub her back, standing alongside her and staring at her from the side, not at her reflection in the mirror. “The last thing I want to do is hurt you. I’m just trying to be honest here.”

“Thank you for your honesty,” she replied with a wet face as she looked up at my reflection. She grabbed a tube of facial wash and squeezed a dollop into her hands. “But I’m a big girl, not some love-struck teenager. I can take care of myself.”

“I know you can. But it also feels like there’s an emotional wall between us that wasn’t there before, and I don’t want you walking out of this hotel room with any regrets.”

“I’m fine,” she insisted, mid-facewash.

I arched an eyebrow and stared at her reflection. “Is that ‘fine’ the way it is in the dictionary? Or ‘fine’ the way that -I- define it?”

That got Rania to chuckle, and she paused to rinse her face off before standing up straight and patting her cheeks dry with a towel. “I’m fine, as in dictionary fine. Thank you for your concern, but we’re good. I’ve had a great time these last couple of nights, and I’m looking forward to...” she paused to quickly count in her head, “ ... to sharing three more. But I really have no expectations beyond that, okay?”

“You sure?”

“I’m sure,” she stated firmly, and she caressed my cheek before pulling my head to hers for a kiss.

Rania’s kiss did wonders for reassuring me, and she gave me a warm smile when she broke away. But then she started pushing on my chest, saying, “Now out with you. I gotta pee.”

I held my hands up defensively and backed away with a smile. “I’m going, I’m going.”

She smiled all the way as she closed the bathroom door. Alone outside in the bedroom, I took a deep breath, exhaled slowly, and headed for the closet to get dressed.

Rania got off work at 5pm and took the subway into Manhattan. She and Moon were waiting in the JKE lobby when June and I arrived, and the four of us stayed close to Wall Street to do some more shopping, do some more sightseeing, and also get something to eat.

Dinner was at a nice but cramped vegetarian restaurant. Moon spent more time giggling and tickling June than actually eating the salad in front of her. Rania, likewise, didn’t eat much. Actually, Rania was pretty subdued overall. She still smiled and chatted and even flirted with me. But I could tell that her initial enthusiasm over our blossoming relationship was starting to wear off now that it was our third night together, and I started to wonder just a bit if we’d even make it to Saturday.

Not that I wanted to confront her about it. Kim’s Sunday morning warnings about emotional confrontation were still fresh in my mind, and I realized that making a big deal out of her mood would only do that: make a big deal out of it. Creating a larger issue would mostly likely end up being the fastest way to ensure that Rania never again took the subway back to see me after work, and perhaps I’d already made the mistake of confronting her too much too fast by asking her about the big L-word this morning.

So I played along. She’d insisted this morning that she was “fine”, and I was going to behave as if I thought things were “fine” between us. But I was also going to try and get to the root of the problem ... gradually.

Moon had decided the four of us would take a ride on the Staten Island Ferry, not to go anywhere but just to see the sights. It turned out to be perfect for what I had in mind, since the best views of the Manhattan skyline were from the outdoor side decks, the nighttime air was still as cold as ever, and the sounds of waves and wind all but drowned out conversation unless the person you were speaking to was only inches away.

Rania snuggled in against my chest, keeping herself close to me for both warmth and private conversation. I turned my back to the headwind to shield her, and opened up my peacoat to wrap it around her slender body. From just beneath my chin, she kept up a running commentary about the landmarks she recognized, like the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge that connected to Brooklyn, the Statue of Liberty, and even some smaller buildings on the shoreline that weren’t in any tourist guide.

But there was only so much even a native New Yorker could say about the view. In-between Rania’s travelogue, I asked how her day at work was, how things were going with her family, and whether or not they’d gotten suspicious about her spending these three nights away from home, especially during the weekdays.

Her mom was suspicious, asking if she’d met a “boy”. This wasn’t a new suspicion; her mom had asked the same question every other month prior to Hassan. Rania told her the same thing she always told her: that her mom would only meet him if things ever got serious, otherwise there was no way in hell she’d want her mom to scare the guy off early.

Work was work, not much to say. It paid for her credit card bills. She did tell me about a creepy co-worker who kept staring at her but wouldn’t talk to her. She figured he probably jerked off in the employee bathroom to magazine pages of her cosmetics advertisements. I laughed and told her I’d done that myself in college to Adrienne’s first Sports Illustrated magazine, although certainly not in the employee bathroom.

That led Rania into asking about Adrienne. She seemed sad that her old friend hadn’t really kept in touch with her. Apparently, Adrienne still texted Moon regularly and they’d meet up whenever she was in town. But ever since Rania had dropped out of modeling and moved back home, she only got updates on the still-famous supermodel through the news, tabloids, or from Moon.

I told her that as far as I knew Adrienne was doing well, that she was very happy with her new girlfriend, and that I was happy for them both. They were a good match for each other.

“But what about you?” Rania asked quietly, looking up at me with those big brown doe eyes. The harbor wind whipped her hair back from her forehead. “You’ve been her boyfriend off and on since high school, and whether she’s publicly outed herself as a lesbian or not, I know the truth. I saw it with my own eyes when the two of you visited here together. She loved you. She loved making love with you. What the two of you had together was ... it was the real thing.”

“It was, but now it’s over,” I said quietly, taking a deep breath and staring over Rania’s head.

“What happened?”

I sighed. “We grew apart. We ... we fell out of love. It happens.”

“But why? The whole time she was living here in New York, she never stopped loving you. I have to admit, when she used to tell us stories about her ex-boyfriend Ben back in Berkeley, I didn’t really believe her. She got this faraway look in her eyes when she talked about you, and honestly, I thought that look meant she was making you up. I thought she was spinning some fantasy story, full of rich detail because she was trying to sell the idea of actually being heterosexual, even though it wasn’t really true. But it WAS true. That look in her eyes was there because of how MUCH she loved you. And quite frankly, we were absolutely SHOCKED to hear you two had broken your engagement.”

“It was my fault, really. I did it to myself. I got distracted by other things. I put all my energy and focus into other relationships. I took her for granted, just kept going through the motions, assumed she’d always be there, and then one day...” I sighed.

“One day you looked up and she was gone,” Rania finished sadly.

But I shook my head in the negative. “No, she was still there. She’d never gone anywhere. Yeah, she traveled quite a bit, but it’s not like she moved back to New York. She was right there, waiting for me in the apartment we shared, still as in love with me as ever.”

“Then what happened?”

I sighed again, took a deep breath, and confessed, “One day ... One day I woke up and... -I- didn’t love her anymore.”

“What?“

I shook my head. “I didn’t love her anymore. I mean, I still loved her, and I always will, but I wasn’t ‘in love’ with her anymore. I didn’t have that all-encompassing urge to be with her as much as possible. I didn’t find myself missing her when we were apart. We made love, we fucked each other’s brains out, then we kissed and each went along with the rest of our day without a backwards glance.”

“The honeymoon phase was over.”

I shook my head again. “I just ... I don’t know ... I don’t know when it happened. I don’t know how it happened. I just know that it happened.”

“No big unforgivable sin? Nobody cheated, did they?”

“No, absolutely not.”

“Some little quirk of her personality that finally got to you? Eroded your affection?”

“No, nothing like that.”

“Nothing? You just woke up one day and realized you weren’t in love with her anymore for no particular reason?”

“It wasn’t that simple.”

“So what did happen? You just came to this realization, told her you’d fallen out of love, couldn’t even give her a real reason why and broke up with her? Because I have to say that’s a pretty shitty way to treat somebody.”

There was raw pain in Rania’s voice, so I blinked a couple of times and looked down at her carefully. She quickly averted her eyes, but I gently took hold of her cheek and redirected her back up to me. Frowning and doing my best to express my concern for her, I asked softly, “Is that what happened to you and Hassan?”

Rania averted her eyes again and swallowed thickly. She let me hold her close, but her gaze was on my chest. Taking a deep breath, she exhaled slowly and finally flicked her eyes back up to meet mine. “More or less.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Asshole,” Rania huffed and pushed off me, muttering, “Let go of me.”

I relaxed my grip but didn’t let go of her completely. She backed away, anger flashing in her eyes as she looked up at me. I’d seen the look before, by the doors to the nightclub balcony when she first accused me of just trying to worm my way into her panties. There was some old resentment there, resentment she was projecting onto me.

“I’m not him,” I reminded her carefully. “I’m not Hassan.”

Rania pursed her lips and narrowed her eyes, waging some internal debate in her mind. Obviously, she knew I wasn’t actually Hassan, but she hadn’t decided just yet whether or not I was like Hassan.

Fortunately for me, she took a deep breath and pushed herself into my chest again, turning to set her cheek down on my shoulder. “I know you’re not,” she murmured quietly, barely audible above the background noise. Then she repeated, “I know you’re not.”

I didn’t say anything. I simply held her and stroked her hair.

Rania shuddered for a moment, exhaled, and finally inhaled as she looked back up at me. “I’m sorry.”

“You don’t need to apologize.”

“I guess the pain is still a little raw. It’s just hard to wrap my head around sometimes, you know? Nobody cheated. There was no big unforgivable sin. He was great. He was nice. He was kind. Everything was going fine, until the Saturday before New Year’s, I was asking him about our plans to go out on New Year’s Eve, and out of the blue he told me he was breaking up with me.”

“I’m sorry.”

“He insisted I hadn’t done anything wrong. He said it was nothing in particular, nothing within my control. He said I was sweet, and beautiful, and intelligent, and sexy. He got along with my parents, and my parents got along with his parents. But after almost a year together, he just ... wasn’t in love with me. The big spark that he’d hoped would come had never really materialized, and he didn’t think it ever would. He didn’t think it would be fair to keep dating me, to keep me off the market and prevent me from finding a man who would love me the way I really wanted. So he said he was breaking up with me for my own good.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Is that what happened between you and Adrienne? You realized you weren’t ‘in love’ with her and you broke up for her own good?”

“Something like that.” I took a deep breath and thought about how to explain. “We’re very different people, Adrienne and I. You saw some of that when we visited together. She’s Miss Party Central: going out dancing, experimenting with drugs, and jet-setting around the world. I work a day job, and I’ve got a young son at home to take care of. We got engaged rather suddenly, and a little by accident. We never really worked out the issues an impending husband and wife should work out, like where to settle down, and when. Most importantly, we never really answered the ‘Do you want kids?’ question. She knows I do, but I know she doesn’t. Maybe we both thought we could change each other’s mind? I did hope she’d eventually want to have children with me, and I’m sure part of her hoped I’d be okay with the son I already had.”

“Sounds more like you two had irreconcilable differences than there being ‘no reason’ to break up.”

“I suppose. But the thing is: we never talked about this stuff. We just kept going on with our lives, operating on routine, maintaining the status quo. In some ways I feel like we could have kept going on like that forever without anything changing. But the status quo never stays the same forever.”

“Don’t I know it.”

“And if you’re looking for some big event, a reason why we broke up, I guess you could say it was because of Sasha.”

Rania frowned. “Adrienne’s new girlfriend?”

“Old/new. Sasha was my girlfriend first, during my senior year of college. Adrienne came back into my life, the two of them hit it off, and after a while it made more sense to call us a ‘triple’. I had two girlfriends, and Adrienne and Sasha were girlfriends with each other as well.”

Rania’s jaw dropped. “Your first girlfriend stole Adrienne from you?”

I grimaced. “I wouldn’t say she stole Adrienne from me.”

Rania snorted. “Um, she’s with her now, and you’re not anymore. Sounds like stealing.”

“It just happened. I know Sasha didn’t mean for this to happen.”

“Just like I’m sure you didn’t mean to fall out of love with Adrienne. But it happened.”

I sighed. “It did. One day I looked up and realized how in love they were with each other. They spent ALL their time together, and I’d become an afterthought. They were going everywhere without me. Their love for each other bloomed. And when I realized I was losing them, I called them out on it.”

“Then what happened?”

I shrugged. “They apologized, offered to spend more time with me, and rebuild our three-way relationship.”

Rania looked at me incredulously. “And what, you turned them down?”

I sighed and gave her a helpless look. “I wasn’t in love with them anymore. They were happy together. So I set them free. The damn thing of it all, I wasn’t even hurt. Adrienne said that I always knew we wouldn’t work out. She said I knew who she was, knew she wasn’t the settling down and having kids type, and always knew our engagement would eventually fail. So when it did, I just sort of accepted it and moved on. Everyone kept expecting me to feel this huge emotional loss, but all I felt was numb. And I think my lack of emotion about it bothered – still bothers – Adrienne more than anything else.”

Rania looked up at me, studying me. “You’re still numb, aren’t you?”

I glanced down and arched an eyebrow at her.

“You’re even numb with me. Now granted, I’m coming off a breakup and you’re coming off a breakup so losing our heads and rebounding isn’t really the right thing to do. But ... you’re still numb. You couldn’t conceive of starting a real relationship with me even IF you felt that kind of connection.”

I frowned. “I don’t know. How could I tell?”

“You know when you know, but with me, you clearly don’t know.” Rania started pushing at my chest again, and I relaxed my grip to let her take a step back. This time she completely walked away and took a few steps along the railing before turning back to me. With a sigh, she dispiritedly muttered, “I’m sleeping with a robot.”

I frowned and stepped toward her, my arms extended. “I’m sorry. I never meant for my burdens to--”

“No. Stop. It’s okay.” She took a step back to maintain distance between us and also held up both hands. “It’s alright. I’m not mad at you. You’re being honest, and I appreciate that. You’ve shared some pretty intimate details of what’s going on in your life, and I’m glad you think enough of me as a person to do that. It’s good that I know where I stand with you. I didn’t sleep with you that first night intending for us to fall in love with each other or anything, but it’s good that I understand that the chances of me convincing you to fall in love with me are basically zero. That knowledge keeps me grounded. It keeps ME from losing my head over you, because it would be so easy to lose my head over you. It would be easy to let my emotions carry me away and put me in another situation where I love a guy more than he loves me. Better I know the score in advance, right? So ... thank you ... for that.”

Her words said ‘thank you’ but her tone was a mix of ‘you’re a cold-blooded reptile’ and ‘I’d rather spend my night with a drunk hobo from Queens than you’. I held up my hands defensively, gave her an earnest look, and stated, “The last thing I want to do is hurt you.”

“I know that. I appreciate that.” Rania tried to give me a smile, but it was clearly forced.

I finally dropped my hands and gave her a sad look.

After we disembarked the ferry, Rania went straight home.

-- THURSDAY, JANUARY 10, 2008 --

Rania got off work at 5pm, but she didn’t take the subway into Manhattan. Instead, she went home to have dinner with her parents, although she texted me to text her when I was done with my work obligations so that she could meet me at my hotel.

I was relieved that she still planned to meet me at the hotel. After last night’s conversation, I wasn’t entirely sure if I’d ever see her again. And I still didn’t know how she’d act around me once we DID meet up. But finding out would have to wait. As I mentioned, tonight I had work obligations: June and I were having dinner with “The Boss”.

Dinner tonight was NOT at a nice but cramped Japanese restaurant, nor a nice but cramped vegetarian restaurant. Tonight’s venue was considerably larger, had significantly more room between each table, and offered an eclectic variety of contemporary French dishes. It also had two Michelin stars, and the menu prices were appallingly high – like, if your bank account doesn’t have at least seven digits before the decimal, you’ll have a heart-attack when you get the bill kind of high.

Thank goodness I wouldn’t be paying for it.

June was still my dining companion tonight, seated in the plush armchair immediately to my left. But the other two people seated at our square table for four were not Moon or Rania. Instead, our hosts were none other than Mr. Jonathan Kwong, owner and President of Jonathan Kwong Enterprises (and my landlord), and his ever-present personal assistant Cassandra Cooper.

June kept calling our boss “Mr. Kwong” for the first fifteen minutes, despite his insistence that we both call him “John”. She had an easier time with “Cassandra”, but even so, it took a couple of glasses of wine to calm her nerves enough for her to settle down.

Thankfully, she warmed up pretty fast after that. This wasn’t intended to be a business dinner, even though all four of us were only too aware of our respective roles within the company. Rather, while John would not be directly involved in our training, he still wanted to spend time with me and June outside the office to better get to know us. It had nothing to do with my past relationship with Adrienne or the fact that we’d already spent some significant time together. Hell, I’d double-teamed his wife with him. No, he did this at least once with ALL his employees who made it to a certain level within the company, and tonight was simply our turn.

Everyone had a good time, even June. There were no Caesar salads on the menu, but for the first time in a long while, I actually thought it wouldn’t matter. Moon had taken on the role of trying to expose June to new foods and new flavors the past few days. But whereas June had always bristled at Adrienne’s attempts to force her into at least trying new dishes, Moon had a way of coaxing and encouraging June into doing so, a method that had been far more successful. So tonight when I explained that June was still refining her palette and would appreciate our hosts’ suggestions, Cassandra was quick to recommend a few items, and June was both grateful for the assistance and even a little eager to try them out. If nothing else, I knew my co-worker actually cared what kind of impression she made on the boss and his assistant more than she’d ever cared what Adrienne thought of her. It was simple job security.

June had also discovered this week the wonderful things that alcohol could do to a person’s body and mind, so she was equally willing to accept whatever wine selections the boss and his assistant made. Thankfully, she’d also discovered what a hangover felt like, so she was able to keep herself in check. All in all, an appropriate amount of wine loosened June up so that she no longer hid in my shadow, both literally and figuratively, but she also didn’t get out of control. And the four of us passed the meal away in pleasant conversation.

Hell, if I didn’t know any better, I’d swear June was flirting with John Kwong.

But at the end of the evening, we went our separate ways. John had a Maybach with personal driver that picked up him and Cassandra to take them back to JKE and its helipad for the ride back home to Montauk. He offered to take us back to our hotel, but I insisted that it was in the other direction from the office, and that we’d be fine with a cab. He reminded me to put the cab on my expense report and waved us off. And then June and I were safely ensconced in a yellow and black-checkered Ford Crown Vic for the ride home.

“Have a good time?” I asked June as I buckled my seatbelt.

“Absolutely,” she beamed. June was definitely much quicker to smile when she was a little buzzed. “Even though he’s this ridiculously wealthy, super-duper-famous billionaire, John is just so ... so down to earth. I thought I’d be more intimidated with just the four of us, but he’s easy to talk to. He’s really nice. He’s ... He’s...”

“Really good-looking?” I jested.

June blushed and averted her eyes. But a moment later, she grinned and leaned across the backseat to peck my cheek. “You’re cute, too.”

I blinked in surprise, but June was already back in her seat looking straight ahead as if she’d never even kissed me. She didn’t even look embarrassed about it, and a moment later she turned back to me, saying, “How about you? Have a good time? I know you enjoyed staring at Cassandra’s breasts.”