Chapter 4: The Bucks Party Crasher
The ghost of Jake’s hands lingered on her skin for a week, a phantom brand. She moved through her days in a haze of normalcy that felt like a poorly performed play. She packed lunches, kissed scraped knees, made love to her husband with a frantic, guilt-ridden enthusiasm that left him pleased and confused. The secret stone inside her didn’t grow lighter; it gathered mass, pulling everything toward its dark center.
Friday night was book club. Or at least, that’s what she’d told Mark. The other women discussed characterization and plot over pinot grigio, while Lisa sipped vodka tonics with a focused, desperate speed. The words on the page blurred. All she could see was cracked plaster and neon. All she could feel was the devastating fullness, the split.
She left early, claiming a headache. The cool night air did nothing to clear the static in her head. She got in her car but didn’t drive home. She drove downtown, the streets becoming seedier, the lights more garish. She parked somewhere she wouldn’t remember. The red dress she’d stuffed in her tote bag was a cheap, stretchy thing, bought in a feverish online moment after that night. It was too short, too tight, a costume for a woman she both feared and longed to be.
Another hotel. A different one. This one had a gaudy lobby, all mirrored pillars and synthetic purple carpet. A banner hung crookedly: Congrats Brandon! Last Night of Freedom! The whoops and laughter echoed from an open suite door down the hall. She walked toward the sound, her heels unsteady on the plush pile, the vodka a warm, courageous tide in her veins.
The suite was a cave of noise and sweat. Strobe lights from a rented machine pulsed erratically. Empty bottles cluttered every surface. A half-naked dancer was grinding against a pole in the corner, but most of the men were clustered around a beer pong table, their roars punctuating the bass-heavy music. The groom, Brandon, was easy to spot—the pale guy in the cheap plastic crown, his tie already stained with something amber.
Lisa leaned in the doorway, watching. This wasn’t like seeking out Jake. That had been a specific, targeted hunger. This was a compulsion, a need to prove the other woman wasn’t a one-time phantom, that she could be summoned anywhere, with anyone. That she was real.
She pushed off the doorframe and weaved through the crowd. The smell of body spray and whiskey was thick enough to taste. A few men noticed her, their eyes widening at the dress, the obvious intrusion. She ignored them. She went straight to Brandon.
He was mid-laugh, his head thrown back, when her fingers closed around his silk tie. She yanked him down to her level. The laughter died in his throat, replaced by startled confusion.
“Your bride won’t mind if I borrow you for ten minutes,” she whispered directly into his ear, her voice a slurry promise. Her breath was vodka and mint.
Before he could process it, she was pulling him, stumbling, toward a hallway at the back of the suite. His friends erupted. “Get in there, Brando!” “Ten minutes on the clock!” “Fuck yeah!” The catcalls were a wave of sound pushing them forward. Brandon, drunk and propelled by peer pressure and sudden, unbelievable luck, didn’t resist.
She found a bedroom, a small, messy annex with coats piled on the bed. She kicked the door shut with her heel, muting the noise to a dull throb. Brandon stood there, blinking, his crown askew.
“What’s your name?” he slurred.
“Doesn’t matter,” Lisa said, and she pushed him back onto the pile of coats. He landed with a whoosh. She didn’t undress him. She just hiked the tiny red dress up around her waist, revealing she wore nothing underneath, and climbed on top of him, fumbling with his belt buckle.
“Whoa, hey, wait—” he stammered, but his hands found her hips, gripping the generous flesh through the cheap fabric.
“Shut up,” she said, not unkindly, but with a flat authority that silenced him. She freed his cock, which was half-hard with shock and booze. She was dry. She spat into her hand, wet him roughly, and then guided him inside her, sinking down with a grimace of effort.
It was a tight, uncomfortable fit. He wasn’t as big as Jake, and there was no slow burn, no building heat. It was just a mechanical joining. She began to move, riding him with a frantic, grinding rhythm, her eyes squeezed shut. She wasn’t thinking of him. She was trying to conjure a feeling, chasing the ghost of a demolition that had ruined her for everything else.
“Fuck,” Brandon grunted beneath her, his hips bucking upwards to meet her strokes. “You’re… fucking wild.”
She opened her eyes and looked down at him. His face was flushed, his eyes glassy with alcohol and this unexpected gift. He was a stranger. A nice-looking stranger, probably an accountant, about to pledge his life to a woman named Stephanie. And she was using his body to try and scratch an itch that was buried too deep to reach.
The hollow ache inside her widened. This wasn’t working. The roughness felt performative. The dirtiness felt clinical. She leaned forward, putting her hands on either side of his head, and increased her pace, the bedsprings squeaking in protest under the coats.
“Come on,” she urged, her voice a hard chant. “Fucking come for me. Give it to me.”
It was all the encouragement he needed. With a choked-off gasp, his body stiffened, and she felt the weak, pulsing spill of his orgasm inside her. His grip on her hips went slack. He panted, a dazed, happy smile spreading across his face.
Lisa climbed off him immediately. She tugged her dress down. He lay there, spent and grinning.
“That was incredible,” he mumbled, reaching for her. “What’s your—”
She was already at the door. She pulled it open, the wall of sound from the main suite hitting her again. She walked out, not looking back, straight past the hooting men who slapped her ass as she passed. One of them shoved a crumpled bill into her hand. She didn’t look at it.
The hallway carpet seemed to swallow her footsteps. The elevator doors closed, and in the silent, mirrored box, she finally looked at herself. Smudged mascara. Lipstick gone. The red dress looked absurd now, cheap and pathetic. The bill in her hand was a twenty.
She hadn’t come. She felt nothing but a cold, greasy emptiness and a faint, sore throb between her legs. It wasn’t a brand. It was a transaction.
The demolition night had been an earthquake. This was just scattering the ashes. And as the elevator descended, she understood with a clarity that sobered her more than any coffee ever could: she wasn’t trying to find that woman again. She was trying to destroy the part of herself that remembered how it felt to be truly alive, even in the filth. She was trying to make the memory so ugly it would finally, mercifully, let her go.
She dropped the twenty in a lobby trash can on her way out into the cool, indifferent night.