The beautiful white rooms looked different now. I felt some form of possession over them. I owned the calm that had come to them and claimed a temporary hold over their mystique. When she and I—the superstar’s wife and I—walked into them, I felt different than I had the first time I’d come there.

Downstairs was the Jaguar that had carried us past the blur of downtown lights to the feet of the hotel. We’d gone up to the 64th floor, come into her apartment like we were both coming home, saw the city bleeding in through the windows, and felt each other’s presence in that kind of extreme awareness that happens when desire takes your clothes off before you do.

In the car Kayla had told me she was angry at me for putting myself in danger, and that she was angry at the entire world because that’s all there seemed to be anymore, the dangerous decision to do something and the dangerous decision not to.

I think she was intrigued by me, by the thought of us, because I was different than the other men who guarded her life. She wanted me for both my distance from her world and for my envy of it. She knew the secret I had lazily tried to hide—that I wanted her too. It wasn’t because I loved her or even wanted to love her. It was because I needed to have her, even if it were only for a small amount of time.

I needed to own something as out of my reach as Kayla Forrest.

© 2008 ISAAC PERRY

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