Just One Drink (42 page)

Chapter 1

Good God, what had I just done?

My head was still spinning, trying to catch up with itself, but so dazed and disoriented that the prospect of genuinely doing so seemed next to impossible. Sunshine poured in through the windows as I sped my way through the unfamiliar hall, clothes pressed up against my naked flesh in a makeshift effort at preserving my own modesty, though at this point I felt certain there wasn't enough shame left in me for it to really matter all that much.

I was extremely conscious of my exposed backside as I jostled through the house, and about halfway down along, I realized just too late that it should have been this that I was covering, given that it was what I was exposing to the man in my wake. Accordingly, then, I took both my sports bra and shorts and pressed them up behind me, knowing, just as well, that this slight preservation of decency really didn't matter either.

He had, of course, seen everything already, not to mention gone a hell of a lot further than that, and nothing I could do after the fact could possibly compensate for that now that all was said and done.

When at last I managed to slip away into the stranger's bathroom, I slammed the door shut behind me. My head light and my chest heaving with anxiety, and the afternoon light still coursing through the tiny bathroom window. It just didn't seem right, it still being daylight... This sort of thing wasn't supposed to happen at all to a girl like me, and if it did it sure as hell shouldn't be taking place in the middle of the damn day.

If this had had to happen, it should have been in the dark dead of night, the blackness covering up all the things I was doing wrong, and creating a mood fitting to the seedy, inappropriate actions that had taken place only moments before.

It had all seemed so perfect at the time... And yet, now that it was over... Oh, Christ...

I gave myself a quick look in the mirror, noting the complete lack of composure in my facial features, which I'd honestly already come to expect to be honest, and finding no surprises. I needed to get the hell out of here as quickly as possible. I needed to get myself clean and pretend as though this never happened, and until then, all I could do was pray to God that I'd be able to keep my cool long enough.

I fumbled a bit with the faucet of this strange shower. I turned it on nearly to full blast, thinking I could adjust the heat accordingly once I was inside, but then I shrieked, covering my lips with my hand, as an intense pang of icy water came showering down upon me. I was used to the hot and cold nozzles being opposite on my own shower, and even this slightest of differences served to drive home the point of how very wrong it was that I should be here.

I cursed it all, adjusting the water so as better to suit me, and then hurriedly attempted to scrub myself from head to toe with a wash cloth, dredging away the salt, the sweat, the sin, and the shame... And yet, no matter how hard I tried, I just didn't feel like I could get clean again. Couldn't eliminate the awfulness of what I'd done, and was stuck with it looming large over my head, haunting me, and making me want to cry.

I closed my eyes beneath the streams of the shower, allowing the water to come drizzling down along my face, my hair made wet and stuck to my flesh, and my lips blaring as I struggled for breath. I thought, hoped, prayed that I would somehow miraculously open my eyes in a few seconds, and this would all have been a dream- a nightmare, really, even if an excruciatingly satisfying one- and that with the peeling back of my eyelids, all would be right with the world as it had been before.

But of course, that wasn't the case. When I opened my eyes, all I could see was the foreign shower stall, and my own wet body, and the seediness of the fact of me trying to wash it all away.

I almost started crying…

But no, I knew that wouldn't do me any good. I had to flee from this, to get away, to put it as far behind me as humanly possible. I dreaded the prospect of having to leave the cloistered protection of the bathroom, of stepping back out into the hallway and peering into the face of my own shame. I wish I could just zip from here to there without having to go through all of the ugly stages leading up to that, but I knew the longer I stayed in here, the worse and worse it would get for me.

At any rate, the water was beginning to chill as it poured down onto me, giving me goosebumps, and I knew that I'd been in here more than long enough.

I shut off the tap, and stood for a moment in the empty bath, water dripping from my body, and shivers running through me as I tried to prolong the inevitable. I took a deep breath, almost painfully deep, and released it, then leaned over the lip of the tub, picking up a warm, fluffy bath towel from the floor.

Even this seemed perverse, somehow. This innocent touch of cloth against skin, so pampered and so comforting, like something I would enjoy in my own home, where I belonged, and without the layer of perversity underlying it that I experienced in the present.

I felt a little bit like throwing up, but I resisted the temptation of giving into my own weakness. If only I'd been that strong only an hour or two earlier...

As dry as I was going to get, I then picked up my strewn jogging outfit from the floor as well, slipping into it with an immense degree of discomfort. They had been damp with perspiration when I'd first taken them off, and now that moisture had cooled, and felt icy and miserable when pressed up against my body. Almost more than anything, I was burning for a change of clothes right now, to be in something that didn't insist on reminding me of my sin with every pressing of fabric against flesh.

But of course, I knew there was no possibility that I could ever be so lucky. Waiting around like this, thinking of the many ways in which things could be better, was only serving to cripple me further in my efforts at a hasty departure, and the longer I let myself dwell on these things, the worse it was going to get.

I was all but departed now, with only that one last hurdle to clear of making my exit. This, of course, was going to be the most unpleasant of all, and I hovered at the door for an extended period, anxious and reluctant to make that first step, and my pulse only intensifying all the while as time ticked on.

Finally, I worked up as much nerve as I possibly could, taking in an intense breath, and clicking open the bathroom door.

There he was, almost immediately upon my setting foot into the hallway. He was at least wearing something, now, if only a skimpy little pair of shorts, and I tried to avoid laying eyes on the rest of him, for fear that I would go spiraling back into temptation once again before I could even think to stop myself.

I looked him very briefly in the eyes, and then cast my glance downward, toward the floor, needing to at least make some effort, but knowing that it would be a meager one. “I need to go,” I muttered, my skin prickling, and my ears ringing just a little bit.

“I had fun. Thank you,” He said, and I could almost feel that perverse grin of his blazing up at me. I, of course, had had fun as well, but I was far too ashamed of this fact to own up to it. “Bye,” I said curtly, turning from him, and making a swift exit toward the front doorway as quickly as I could possibly manage without breaking into a run right there in the hall.

“I'll see you around!” he called after me, though I sure as hell knew that this was as unlikely a possibility as any.

To my credit, I somehow, with an intense degree of effort, managed to maintain myself until I at least made it out onto the street, waiting until the sole of my shoe hit asphalt to go flying out of there like a bat straight out of hell.

And God, did it feel wonderful to be on this footing again, pounding away at the street, springing myself down alleyways and past parked cars, picking up right where I'd left off before that unscheduled and unceremonious distraction, which I now prayed to God I might forget through the drunken bliss of a runner's high.

I tried, with some degree of success, to keep my mind clear of the details of all of this for some time, simply taking in the afternoon, and focusing on my running, and the sweat pouring down along my body. The wet clothes began to feel at least tolerable again as my entire anatomy heated up beneath them, acting as something of a cooling mechanism, if one that was a bit stiff and wrinkled at this point in the day.

But, as block after block rolled by my field of vision, and I grew closer and closer to my home, the guilt began to swell up all over again inside me, burdening me down, slowing me to a crawl, until at last I had to surrender to it, had to allow it to bowl me over, and I collapsed against a mailbox on a street corner, panting and wheezing for breath.

It was only then that I let myself start crying. The tears streamed down my face, saturated with guilt and self-loathing and, even worse, desire, and this third factor only served to amplify the first two even worse than ever.

This wasn't who I was. This wasn't what I wanted out of my life. And God, this isn't how I had envisioned my day going at all...

I was, in point of fact, a happily married woman. My husband, Daniel, was a man I considered my soul mate, and was perfect for me in every way a girl could ever hope to imagine. He was in tune with my every need, and he provided for me, and he was about the kindest, sweetest guy on God's green earth. And there was no shortage of affection or desire for him on my part, not in the least. He was everything to me, and I knew I was to him as well, and that was a huge part of what made all of this so much worse.

Maybe, if we had hated one another, or if we were distant, or if things had been going in any direction other than perfect between the two of us, I could have at least rationalized this all to myself. But, as things stood, I had no excuse whatsoever for my actions, and thoughts of my husband in that moment were like a knife stabbing repeatedly into my already damaged heart.

The two of us were in our late twenties, and had managed to scrape together quite the reasonable life together in the time that we'd been with one another. We had a nice house, fairly decent-sized for a young couple, with two cars and just about everything in terms of material possessions that one could hope to ask for. Daniel worked at a high paying office job, which sometimes kept him a little longer than I might have hoped, but that was easily made up for by the fact that I was all his whenever the weekend rolled around.

I, meanwhile, had become quite the little businesswoman myself, selling makeup and facial products from home, and rolling in quite the extra bit of income for those everyday expenses that popped up here in there. I felt an immense satisfaction about the coexistence that we'd been sustaining up to this point, and lately we'd even been discussing the possibility of having a child together.

It was a huge decision, of course, as we were both well aware, so the talks were sort of in the early stages at the present point in time- he wanted a little girl and me a boy, and we'd already started scribbling down some names just in the event that it should ever take place.

Now, though... Oh God... I didn't even know how I could let myself think that the life I'd had before could continue to be a possibility, and the prospect of having to hide what had happened from my husband seemed almost as devastating for me as telling him the truth.

I had been jogging for a few weeks up to this point. It was, I don't know... I guess a way of getting a little bit of extra release during the day? I was getting a little bit stressed by some things with my own work, and Daniel being at the office as frequently as he was was leaving me a little bit down about a couple of things in spite of myself.

I'd been on the track team during high school, though I hadn't really been running for some time, and I realized that I sort of missed it. Getting a bit of extra cardio in, I reasoned, could be just what I needed to improve my personal satisfaction with my day-to-day life.

It had admittedly been a bit of a struggle at first. I was never completely out of shape, exactly, in terms of being overweight or anything like that. But I was very much out of practice, and for my first few jogs I'd gotten myself awfully damn winded. But, I kept pushing myself to go a bit further, a bit further, a bit further every day, and gradually, it had had an effect on my endurance.

I'd gotten up to the point that running became a real high for me again, making me feel alive and rejuvenated, and more motivated than ever to keep at it and persevere. I was loving this new me, this version of myself that just kept pushing her own boundaries- that is, until today, when I'd finally given in and pushed those boundaries just a little bit too far...