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  • No
  • Margaret MacInnis (bio)

You are not a slut. At least this is what you’ve been telling yourself for the past eight months, but when the phone in your hotel room rings at 3:30 in the morning and the desk clerk asks if you’re expecting a visitor, you feel like one. You hear the surprise in the clerk’s voice, in his you-look-like-such-a-nice-girl tone, but maybe what you hear is concern, not judgment. After all, you’re surprised and concerned yourself.

“What?” you say, throaty, half-awake, as if you didn’t hear.

The man repeats himself. “Are you expecting a visitor?”

After you ask who it is, though you know, you listen for the name of the man who thinks it’s acceptable to come to your hotel at 3:30 in the morning. When you hear his voice, your stomach flips in seventh-grade-crush style. Why does he have to have this effect on you? You’re angry. You’re hurt and angry and irrational (you’re being irrational, he would say), but something is shifting. You’re awake (and alert) enough to recognize that something is shifting.

Tonight at your friend Marina’s reading—one of the reasons for which you have made this trip—he ignored you. Last night the two of you fucked the way you have always fucked each other, as if it might be the last time. And then tonight, after all that, he ignored you. Last night, you now have decided, was the last time. With a glass of red wine in hand, he moved about the crowd, working the room the way he does, the way they all do, yes, you included. You drink too much, laugh too loudly, kiss a friend on the lips a second too long, and wrap an arm tightly, possessively around a waist as if you are entitled. At their worst writers are bottomless pits of need and want. Pathetic. The man you wish you didn’t love circled around, careful not to touch you, careful not to get too close to the slippery edge. [End Page 255]

In the crowded room, happily married Marina (the only one who knows your secret) pressed her back against yours, which had a calming effect, but when you turned your neck (your beautiful neck, he would say) slightly, discreetly, you saw him leaning into her. The room went out of focus when he complimented her reading. That voice, that voice, that euphonious voice he had used on you eight months earlier, after your reading. While you both sat on the bench beside the fountain, he leaned into you with his warm mouth on the spot between your neck and your earlobe, and whispered how beautiful you were, how strong, how talented. And that was all it took for you to slip and tumble. No one has to tell you: pathetic. But here in this hotel room alone with yourself you know something is shifting.

The desk clerk is still there, waiting for you to respond, and when you do, you shock yourself. “No, I’m not.” You say it again, louder, clearer, to convince yourself that you said it. “No.” And you hang up the phone. You’re awake now. You get up to pee. At the bathroom sink you splash cold water on your face. With your eyes closed you reach for the towel hanging on the back of the door. You open your eyes, look in the mirror. Yeah, you might be a slut.

For January this city is unseasonably warm, so before you get back into bed, you turn off the heat. You pull the sheet over your head, still thinking of him, of how you followed him all over New England, and then up to Montreal for the Jazz Festival, where, so close to home, where anyone could have seen you, you boldly held hands in the street. As if you are watching some artsy independent film in which someone is fated to lose everything, you watch the two of you at that rooftop café. Spread upon the table is wine, a crusty white baguette...

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