Chapter 6: The Dismissal
Simone stood at the window with her back to them, the robe loose at her shoulders. Dallas spread out below in a grid of glass and afternoon glare. She'd wiped her chest clean with a hand towel and dropped it on the nightstand. Twenty minutes had passed since any of them had spoken.
Jake sat on the edge of the bed, boxers around his knees, still feeling the ghost of her hands. His skin smelled like coconut oil. He didn't know where to put his eyes, so he put them on the carpet.
Maya hadn't moved from the chair. Her jeans were still unbuttoned, her right hand resting on the armrest like she'd just finished writing something down. She watched Simone the way she watched everything, without blinking.
"You two need anything before I go?" Simone asked.
"No," Maya said.
"Water's in the minibar. It's free. They won't charge you because it's my room." Simone turned. Her face was neutral, pleasant. She had the same expression she wore in post-meet press conferences. "How's your girlfriend feel about all this?"
Jake looked up. "You mean Maya?"
"I mean Maya."
Maya answered for herself. "I feel like I just watched something I'll think about for a long time."
"Good." Simone picked her phone off the dresser and checked the screen. "So what happens now? You just go home?"
"That was the plan," Jake said.
"Drive or fly?"
"Drive."
"From here?"
"We flew in. Rented a car."
Simone nodded. She set the phone down again and rolled her neck, once, like she was shaking off a stretch on the beam. The gesture was small and rehearsed. She did it without thinking, the way she must have done it ten thousand times on mats and podiums.
"You did well," she said to Jake. "You held it as long as I asked."
"I tried."
"You didn't try. You did." She picked up a small bottle of water from the tray and unscrewed it. "Most men can't hold it when a woman's tits are wrapped around them. It's a reflex, not a choice. You made it a choice. That's rare."
Jake's ears went hot. He pulled his boxers up and reached for his jeans.
Maya sat forward. "Are you going to tell us why you did this?"
The bottle paused halfway to Simone's mouth. She lowered it.
"Why I did what?"
"This. The hotel. The pictures. You could have texted a picture and been done with it. You didn't."
Simone drank. She capped the bottle and set it down with a click. "Ariana told me what happened in her dressing room. The wager, the carpet, the way your girlfriend handled it. I was curious." She looked at Maya. "You're the interesting one. He would have folded in ten seconds if you weren't in the room."
"I know," Maya said.
"He knows it too. That's why he brought you."
Jake finished with his belt. The buckle clicked. Nobody looked at him.
"So we shouldn't see each other again," Simone said.
It wasn't a question, but Jake answered anyway. "Right."
"Not because I didn't like it. I liked it." She said it plainly, the way she'd say she liked a flavor of protein bar. "I'd do it again if the circumstances were different. But they won't be. I'm in camp in two weeks. That's the whole window."
"Understood," Maya said.
Simone walked to the closet and pulled out a garment bag. She laid it flat on the bed and unzipped it. Inside was a red leotard, sequined, the kind she wore for exhibitions. She checked the straps, then zipped it back up.
"You want to know who it is?" she asked.
Jake froze.
"Who who is?"
Simone gave him a flat look. "I might know someone else. Someone who'd want that kind of titfuck. I'll text you tomorrow" and she left
The door clicked shut behind her. The suite went quiet in that particular way hotels do, air humming through a vent, ice settling in a bucket somewhere down the hall. Maya stood up and buttoned her jeans. Jake watched her do it and waited for the verdict.
"Well," she said. "That was a Tuesday."
Jake laughed, and it came out wrong. He pulled his shirt over his head and got it backwards, had to take it off and start again. Maya didn't help. She gathered her hair into a knot with both hands and let it fall.
"Say it," he said.
"Say what?"
"Whatever it is you're sitting on."
Maya picked his car keys off the dresser and tossed them at his chest. He caught them one-handed, which surprised them both.
"I'm not sitting on anything," she said. "I'm adding it to the file."
The drive back took four hours and they didn't talk about Simone until Texarkana. Then Maya asked him, flatly, whether he'd thought about her the whole time, and he said yes, and Maya nodded at the windshield like that was the correct answer. They stopped for gas. She bought a bag of pretzels and ate most of them with her feet on the dash.
Home was a one-bedroom with a broken dishwasher and a couch they'd bought off a Facebook listing. Jake slept on his side facing the wall. Maya slept with the light on, reading something on her phone. Around midnight he felt her hand settle flat on his back, stay there a minute, and lift off.
She was at the stove the next morning making eggs when her phone buzzed.
Jake heard it from the bathroom. He came out with a toothbrush in his mouth and found her standing still, spatula in one hand, phone in the other, reading. The eggs went dry in the pan.
"What does it say?" he asked around the foam.
She read it twice. He watched her eyes move.
"Who is it?"
Maya held up one finger, the way she did when she wanted him to shut up and let her finish a thought. Then she set the spatula down and turned the burner off.
"It's Elliot page," she said.
Jake pulled the toothbrush out of his mouth. A string of foam swung off his lip and landed on his shirt, and he didn't wipe it. He walked the three steps from the doorway to the stove and leaned over her shoulder.
Elliot Page.
Maya held the phone flat, screen up, so he could read it without touching. It was a Dallas number he didn't recognize. Five words and a period.
"He's interested. Call tomorrow."
"That's it?" Jake said.
"That's all of it."
He read it twice more. The eggs had gone from glossy to gray, little dried islands of yolk stuck to the pan. Maya reached past him and shut the burner off with a click.
"Who sent it?" he asked.
"Who do you think sent it."
"Simone."
"She said she'd text today." Maya set the phone face down on the counter, which was the opposite of what Jake wanted her to do with it. "You were asleep when she said it. You had your face in the pillow."
"I remember."
"You remember the part where she left."
"I remember all of it."
The coffee maker coughed out its last few ounces. Maya poured two cups and pushed one across the counter without looking. Jake took it and burned his tongue on the first sip, because he hadn't waited, because he never waited.
"Elliot Page," he said.
"That's the name."
"You're sure."
"Unless there's a second Elliot Page with a Dallas-area code who read about us somewhere." Maya scraped the eggs into the trash, pan and all, then fished the pan back out and put it in the sink. "There isn't."
Jake sat down on the stool by the counter. The one with the wobble. He set his cup down and made himself breathe slow, because his chest was doing something complicated, a mix of the hotel and the leotard in the garment bag and the way Simone had said his name when she wanted his hips still.
"Does he have tits ?" he said.
Jake's question sat on the counter between them like something spilled.
Maya picked up her coffee and drank half of it before she answered. "How the hell should I know?"
"You know everything."
"I know what I read." She set the mug down and wiped the ring it left with her thumb. "Give me the phone."
He handed it over. Maya unlocked the screen and typed with two thumbs, quick and flat, the way she typed out emails at work. The dishwasher light blinked its orange warning at nobody. Jake finished his coffee and burned his tongue again, on the second sip this time, which felt like an achievement of some kind.
The phone buzzed a few times. Maya scrolled. Her face did the thing it did when she found an answer, which was nothing at all.
"Okay," she said.
"Okay what?"
"He's trans. He had top surgery. Chest reconstruction, whatever they call it. Years back."
Jake set his cup in the sink, next to the ruined pan. Water ran out of the faucet and he didn't turn it off. "So no tits."
"So no tits."
He turned the faucet off. The kitchen got very quiet, the way it did at the end of every one of these conversations, and he stood there with his hands still wet, looking at the wall above the stove.
Maya watched him. She didn't say anything for a long stretch, which was her version of letting him have the room. Then she said, "You want to hear the rest of it or not?"
"There's more?"
"There's always more. He's got a scar across his chest. Two scars. They took the nipples off and put them back on and that's why they look like that." She read from the screen without inflection, like a woman reading a weather report. "That's it. That's the whole file."
Jake dried his hands on his jeans. The denim went dark in two streaks. "So the whole thing's dead."
"You decided that already?"
"You just said no tits."
"I said he had surgery." Maya put the phone face down again, and this time she left her hand on top of it, fingers spread out. "He's a man, Jake. He's got a chest. Men have chests."
Jake sat back down on the wobbly stool. It shifted under him and he caught the counter edge. "That's not the same thing."
"No."
"So it's dead."
"Are you asking me or telling me?"
He didn't answer, because he didn't know, and Maya had already figured that out, which was the whole problem with her. She pulled her hand off the phone. "How many trans guys have you met?"
"I don't know. Some?"
"Some."
"There was a guy at the gym."
"A guy at the gym." Maya took her mug to the sink and dumped the last inch into the basin. "Here's what I think. And you can tell me I'm wrong, but I want you to actually think about it first."
"Okay."
"The thing you want isn't tits."
Jake opened his mouth.
"Let me finish. With Ariana it wasn't tits. It was that she's Ariana Grande and she noticed you existed. With Simone it wasn't tits. It was that she could have said no and she didn't. You got a titfuck from an Olympic gold medalist because she decided you were worth the afternoon." Maya turned around and leaned against the sink with her arms crossed. "So no, I don't think this is dead. I think it's the same thing in a different wrapper."
"That's not true."
"Which part?"
"The part where it's not about tits. It's about tits, Maya. It's always been about tits."
She laughed at that, short and real, and it loosened something in his chest. She had a laugh that only came out when he said something true by accident. "Fine. It's about tits. So what do you do when a man texts you that he's interested and he doesn't have any?"
Jake looked at the phone on the counter. The screen was dark. Under it, somewhere in the glass and metal, was a Dallas number and five words.
"I don't know," he said. "That's why I'm asking you."
And there it was, the thing he always did, handing her the wheel. Maya took a breath and let it out slow. She picked the phone up. She didn't hand it to him. She held it, thumb hovering, and looked at him across the narrow kitchen with the burnt pan in the sink behind her and the eggs stuck to the trash bag and nothing about any of it glamorous at all.
"Nine tomorrow," she said. "You call. You say words out loud into the phone like an adult. If he's still interested after he hears you trip over your own name twice, we'll figure out the rest."
"What if he's not?"
"Then we're back to dinner and Netflix and your dishwasher still doesn't work." She put the phone in his hand and closed his fingers around it. "What if he is, Jake?"
He didn't have an answer for that one either. He set the phone in his pocket and went to take a shower, and Maya didn't follow him. When he came out, dressed and damp, she had her laptop open at the table and a spreadsheet on the screen with two columns that didn't have headers yet. She typed something in the left one. He didn't ask what.
They went to bed early. Maya read with the lamp on. Jake lay facing the wall and listened to her turn pages, and at some point between one page and the next she said, "I'm not doing this one for you."
"I know."
"Do you?"
"I heard you."
The lamp clicked off. In the dark she put her hand flat on his back, the same as the night before, and this time she left it there.
He was awake at six. He made coffee, ruined it, made it again. He took the phone out to the balcony with him and sat on the plastic chair with the chipped arm, and at eight fifty he went back inside and stood at the table where Maya was eating cereal, and she looked up at him with the spoon in her mouth and nodded once, at the phone, which was the only permission he was going to get.
At nine he called the Dallas number.
It rang twice. A man picked up and said, "Is this Jake?"