Page 9 of Dirty Work
Chapter Six
I’m standing at the sink in the bathroom of Bryan’s apartment, having seen it last night for the first time.
It wasn’t what I was expecting.
Not just sex for the first time. But his apartment, too.
A young guy, 30 years old, good job, but not the rainmaker that some of the other guys at the firm were. He would probably have a huge TV, a couple of couches. Nothing in the fridge besides a few beers. Maybe some old Chinese food containers. I expected to open his cabinets and find stale cereal, a few loose plastic forks and knives thrown in there haphazardly.
I expected him to unlock his door, guide me into the apartment and grab a cold beer from the fridge and tell me to have a seat in his living room. The big TV, maybe it would be on mute and left on all evening while we were out at his birthday party. A bag of chips crumpled on the coffee table, if there even was a coffee table.
And when I would excuse myself to the bathroom, where I expected there to be no toilet paper. For there to be a tube of toothpaste that had clearly been squeezed at the top, by its opening, instead of being squeezed from the bottom.
This is one of my pet peeves. And I would have to have a little talk with him about not throwing his shampoo bottles out while there was still a little bit left in the bottom of the bottle. We aren’t made of money, I would say. Do me the courtesy of using all the shampoo before you throw the bottles away.
What the hell is wrong with me? I’m already having little arguments with him in my head. We would bicker like an old married couple. Even though we just met yesterday.
As we left the bar after his birthday party, we held hands all the way from Second Avenue to his apartment on the Upper East Side. We held hands stumbling out onto the street in the heavy early fall night, we held hands in the cab that raced uptown to his apartment. We held hands as he slid one of his palms up my thigh and to the edge of my panties, the ones I had selected just for him.
I was still skeptical as we exited the cab and he gave the driver a fifty dollar bill. He must be drunk, I’d thought. When the driver started to make change, however, Bryan waved his hand through the plastic shield separating the front seats from the back, telling him to keep the change.
We held hands as he swung the cab door closed behind him, and held hands as he waved to the doorman and night attendant sitting, looking bored, at a desk in the lobby.
The building wasn’t what I had expected. The lobby was marble, cool and white but with an added dimension of warmth from the flickering fireplace, painting the corners of the room with light. My shoes made that clicking sound that I hated, a sound that could only be produced by the kind of shoes I didn’t like wearing, that were corporate, that I had forgotten I was even wearing until her own steps betrayed their presence.
“This is where you live?” I’d asked him.
“Yeah. This is where I live.”
“It’s...really nice.”
“Oh. Yeah, thanks.” Bryan seemed a little bored by my comment. Of course he knew it was nice. He lived there, he slept there every night - ostensibly, although I suspected that he had an open invitation to stay over at any number of girls’ apartments on any given night - he paid the condo charges, he tipped the doorman every New Year. It was nice because he had selected it and he had chosen to live here because it was nice.
I was starting to realize that maybe this Bryan character had money. I’d assumed that he was one of these upwardly mobile guys who came from a good family, but who was a little greedy and wanted a life of relative prestige and the cash that came with it. A couple of cars, nice apartment. Maybe by the time he was 40 he would have a house in Scarsdale or Connecticut. Maybe after he made partner he would sell his modest Midtown apartment and upgrade to something bigger.
But what he had wasn’t what I was expecting.
Of course, I didn’t want to be too forward and start blurting out a bunch of questions.
How do you live here? This is, like, an old money kind of place.
Sure, I didn’twantto start blurting out those kinds of questions.
But of course, I couldn’t help myself.
“This is your place? I don’t get it.”
A smile tugged at the corners of Bryan’s mouth. “What don’t you get?”
“I mean, this place is really nice. Like, really nice.”
“Sweetheart, there are a lot of things you don’t know about me yet. But you will.”
So now that I’m standing at his bathroom sink in the light of day, I realize that Bryan must have come froma lotof money. There was no way a 30 year old guy could have a place like this.
The fridge didn't have even one old takeout container in it.
