Wore Me Out
Colin has his headphones in and his eyes fixed on his phone, but he still notices the instant Natalie crosses into the terminal. She shows up for their 6 a.m. flight in sweats she’s probably had since college, hair piled in a lump, more on one side of her head than the other. Yesterday’s mascara is still under her eyes. Colin asks her if Kenny gave her a ride, and Natalie says she took a cab.
He passes her his sunglasses like dawn won’t be occurring when they take off hours from now, but it’s the first time she smiles. There’s seven of them from Sales on the trip, something about making quotas or finding new lines of clients, he doesn’t know. He probably spent most of that meeting zoning out.
They’re going to Utah, like Utah is a place that people go.
He hadn’t been to bed, afraid he’d sleep through the 3:47 a.m. alarm. He wants a Cinnabon and some vodka and whatever other bad choices the airport can provide him. He yawns, rubbing at his chin, and wishing he’d shaved.
They move through security like the living dead, like cattle, like things that stumble slack-jawed toward a destination. Except for Cynthia, who came in a full business suit, complete with stockings and a fancy brand of heels he doesn’t know the name of. She is gunning for a promotion, which is stupid since no one on this trip has the authority to make a decision about that. Natalie drags her duffel behind her like it has wheels, even though it doesn’t. He almost offers to carry it, but it’s too early and too late for him to know if TSA counts that as someone else messing with your bags.
Colin doesn’t want to go to this conference he knows nothing about, but that makes sense. Colin doesn’t want to do anything related to work. He just wants to get paid and stretch his vacation days, but here he is with his boarding pass and his photo ID, en route anyway.
He watches Natalie reach into her pockets ahead of him, pull out a coin purse with her keys attached, a pack of gum, and a crumpled Kleenex that she put back into her pocket.
The woman wearing latex gloves motions her forward, then makes her put the sunglasses in the bin with all the rest of her crap. She obliges, but Colin can tell it annoys her as well. She puts them on again immediately post-metal detector before she even picks up her clogs.
Their gate is the farthest one from the two-seat bench provided for an entire airport to sit and put their shoes back on. And the whole way he wonders if their pilot’s slept at all, or if he, like Colin, just figured there probably wasn’t a point.
When they arrive at their appointed gate’s selection of uncomfortable chairs that are too small and always have parts that poke you in places that don’t need to be poked, Natalie curls up in one like a pill bug you find underneath a rock. She pulls her hood down, so all he can see is her mouth.
Colin stares at her lips from across the aisle, going fugue, until the stewardess announces forty-six minutes later that their rows can start boarding. He nudges at her calf with the toe of his still untied sneaker, and she sighs, moans, and begs him for five more minutes.
Calls him Kenny.
He wakes up bleary-eyed when they’re asked to return their tray tables and seats, even though he doesn’t even recall hearing they were allowed to move them in the first place. The plane descends, and he jumps slightly when they touch the ground, as though it’s unexpected.
Up a row, by the aisle, Natalie’s stretching her arms over her head, elbows pointing wide, and he can almost feel the pops of air escaping from his own joints.
Her dark hair has come loose, and she looks about nineteen in a hoodie from her alma mater. Colin watches her until the guy next to him clears his throat for a second time, obviously anxious to wrestle his carry-on from the overhead compartment.
She waits for him at the end of the tunnel and makes him promise to sit next to her in the van so she doesn’t wind up getting stuck with Cynthia.
They spend the ride whispering about how Salt Lake City is all mountains and homeless people. Her breath smells like peppermint.
He’s going to have to wear a name tag. Like, honestly, he’s putting on a tie so that people can ask him, “Oh, Colin with one L?” while looking right at it on his shirt pocket. It’s ridiculous.
His watch still says it’s 11:34 a.m., but he’s pretty sure he’s got time before the Meet and Greet Mixer Breakfast that’ll include all crappy pastries and weak coffee.
They’re staying at a Marriott across from the Convention Center that seems to have accepted a challenge to use as many prints as possible in their design. The carpet doesn’t match the curtains, neither of which match either of the chairs. It’s vines and geometrics and a jumbled mess of patterns and colors. The tie he’s packed is blue and somehow clashes with everything. With one last pull still needed to achieve a crooked half Windsor, he hears a knock on the door.
Natalie’s standing there in the hallway in the black dress pants she wears almost every day and a button-down with stripes so thin they look like they were drawn on with a pencil. She looks indifferent, her face the female mirror to his. Maybe when they had started together three years ago, they were excited. To be twenty-two with that many personal days and a company phone had seemed like everything Colin couldn’t wait to get to while sitting in Corporate Finance 201 and every marketing lecture.
It got old around the time his college girlfriend dumped him, and Natalie started dating Kenny. He went on job interviews for better positions, but that never went anywhere. So basically, it became fully obvious that this was, in fact, his life and not just part of its ongoing trajectory.
And, yes, he recognized he should have hooked up with Natalie when he had the chance. But she’s the kind of pretty that takes a while to notice. Which he likes, he realizes, more than those girls who are conventionally good-looking but kind of shit about following up on dating apps. Her eyes are a little too big, and her upper lip can nearly disappear if she smiles wide enough, not that Colin really has to deal with that all that often in their office. She’s got great tits, even in this tragic work shirt.
He thinks rapid-fire about her in his room⎯on the bed⎯the taste of sweat on her hip, even though she hasn’t moved from leaning against the door frame.
On the nightstand, his phone buzzes, and he goes to grab it while Natalie reminds him they’re going to have to sit near the front if he doesn’t hurry up.
It’s from Casey, a text, Hope u landed ok. The office is quiet without u =). She wants them to be something serious so badly that even being the type of guy that he is won’t discourage her. It’s easy to picture her sitting at her makeshift desk near reception, their little business school intern. He and Casey aren’t really a thing, unless sleeping with her a handful of times counts as a thing. She wears dresses that are probably too short to be work appropriate, and that’s mostly why Colin’s going to respond. But Natalie calls his name, and he just slips the phone into his pocket, grabs his keycard off the dresser, and heads for the door.
All he wanted while they were holed up in a conference room, on chairs that were somehow worse than those at the airport, was to fall asleep, facedown, directly on top of his bed’s comforter—the only white thing in the entire room.
But after an entire day of tuning out generic PowerPoints by watching Natalie doodle in the margins of her agenda, he’s too tired to fall asleep. All Colin can think about is how someone was paid today to explain to them how to use hashtags on Twitter. Plus, the room isn’t the right temperature, and he can hear the TV from next door through the walls. He’s on his seventh wind and just waiting for it to break.
So he treats himself to a drink at the hotel bar, not bothering to change out of his t-shirt and basketball shorts. Maybe it will mellow him out, turn off his brain and shut his eyes.
One beer has turned into two and a half when he notices Natalie coming through the lobby in a yellow dress he’s never seen before. Not that it’s the kind of thing you’d wear to a soulless office to make phone calls. Her hair is in a thick braid that reminds him of loaves of bread at a bakery.
He calls out her name, too loud, so other people turn to stare at him, but she looks, and that’s all that matters.
She comes to sit next to him in her dress the color of scrambled eggs fresh out of the pan, dandelion smudges, and soft baby chicks. Settles right on the barstool and makes him guess how many points of interest she walked past without going inside.
“I’m the worst kind of traveler,” she informs him before asking the bartender for a Jack and Diet Coke, easy on the ice. “I just want everything to be like home.”
The Sam Adams he’s had is probably why he asks her to tell him about home. What are the things that she likes about it, a question he never would have asked her in their elevator or breakroom.
Natalie plays with the straw in her drink once it’s placed in front of her, disrupting the carbonation, talking about her sister and this place she gets really good chai and one window in her apartment that she likes to look out of and feel introspective.
She makes him come up with something to follow that, and laughs when he says he likes knowing what number all of his favorite stations are on TV.
The conversation goes on as their drinks get lower and warmer in their glasses. Colin keeps bumping their knees and brushing her arm, touching her without meaning to⎯animal magnetism. Her lipstick is wearing off, so her mouth looks more like it did at 5 a.m., and that was still today. That time that seems so long ago like another person must have lived it.
Her phone chirps in her purse, and he fantasizes her turning it off, ignoring it, keeping all her attention focused on him. But she pulls it out instead and smiles. Differently than she did at the airport. Differently than she ever smiles at him.
“Kenny?” he asks, and she nods, typing out a reply.
He thinks about how he still hasn’t even told Casey he landed.
“What’s the deal with you two anyway?” even though he doesn’t want to know. Just wants to pick at his feelings like a scab.
“What’s the deal with me and my boyfriend of two years? I love him, you dummy,” she says, still clicking out a message.
Colin wonders if he’s ever been in love with anyone. How he probably should have been by now, or at least known definitively that it was happening.
“Why didn’t he bring you to the airport this morning?” he asks, picturing Kenny with his too-curly hair still passed out in bed while she quietly carried her stuff out to a cab.
“It was so early, Colin,” and he thinks about how he would have gotten up to take Natalie to the airport like it’s something that’s actually true. He probably wouldn’t even remember that Casey had a flight if she mentioned it.
He wants to stop interrogating her, but not enough apparently. “Does he love you? You said you love him, but does he love you?”
She places her cell down on the bar and twists her body to look at him more fully, and he feels his shoulders tensing up. “I’m pretty sure he does.” She sounds so confident, even though there’s nothing confirmed by what she said.
And then she puts her hand on his, the first time all day she’s been the one to initiate the contact, and it’s terrible in its insignificance. More terrible than the way she looked in his sunglasses, or her whispered breath against his ear, or the way right now, when he has an impulse to count the birthmarks on her collarbone.
“Do you need to talk about something?” she asks, like she’s his mom, or a guidance counselor. “Is something going on with Casey?”
He laughs a laugh that’s more a scoff than anything else and tells her he just wants to finish his drink.
This is only happening because he’s drained and a little in the bag. It has nothing to do with the way he gets up most mornings and looks at himself in the mirror to shave only to think, Who the fuck is this asshole? Which is why he comes in sometimes with a five o’clock shadow so thick, it reminds him of someone on their way to rock bottom and how that’s worse than having to look in the mirror in the first place.
Nothing’s wrong in his life, but nothing’s all that right either.
If he didn’t run into her, he would have walked past her room at least once tonight, too nervous to knock, except still thinking everything that’s happened between them was a sign that he probably should summon the courage. He’s a coward on top of everything.
But, he offers to pay her tab, and she obliges⎯a small victory.
Colin wants to put his hand on the small of her back, imagines the sensation as warm and yellow as melting butter against his palm. Use that hand to guide someone else’s girlfriend back to his room, so she can pet his hair to wake him up the next morning. So she will perch on the edge of a tub to watch him shave and kiss him with kisses that feel like salves to anything that’s ever ailed him. Let that motion, that initiated pressure against her spine, turn him into somebody different, even if it’s just for a little while.
There’s no Colin with one or two L’s. There’s no Colin at all.
They’re the only ones in the elevator, and she leans against one of the walls with her eyes closed, talking about how tired she is, how she just wants to take off her shoes and she can’t believe in less than a day she’ll be back on a plane, and can he believe it?
He nods like she can see him, and just lets her ramble.
At her door, she says she’ll see him tomorrow while she’s already inside, her body mostly a sliver. “Thanks for the drink.”
“No problem,” leads to him only seeing the tendons of her forearm where it’s getting ready to secure the safety latch, and so he says her name to get a few more seconds. Maybe more than that. The power of liquid confidence.
“Yeah?”
“Not going to invite me in for awhile?”
She looks exasperated, like his mom used to look when he’d remind her he needed a newspaper to do his homework with⎯which should be grosser than it is. “I’m exhausted. You’re not exhausted?”
“What’s a half-hour more going to do at this point?” He grins in the way Casey has told him can convince her to do anything, like get her off under a blanket while her roommate watched Twister with them on the other side of the living room.
Natalie opens the door wider, an invitation that he already knows he’s going to push. “You’re a bad influence, Colin. This is exactly why I have to get a snack from the vending machine every day at 3:30 p.m. now.”
Stepping in, he notices first the clothes strewn all around, a record of everything he’s seen her wear today. It’s not hard to want to add the yellow dress to the collection. Maybe right there, beside the rumpled dress pants. She slips off her shoes with her opposite toes.
“I can’t help it that I make good suggestions.” Colin flops himself on the bed, which doesn’t smell like her. Yet. He presses his face into the comforter, imagining that almost-cookie scent of Natalie’s.
She crosses over to the bay of windows, the breeze from the air conditioner stirring the skirts of her dress slightly. She’s actually opened the curtains in her room, the city lit up warm with the temple glowing like a beacon. Somewhere beyond that, which he can’t really see, those mountains are snowcapped and intimidating. The city’s so open and so closed in, somehow at the same time.
Natalie turns to look at him, her fingers jangling the chain. “They never wash those things, you know. It’s probably covered in jizz.”
He can feel his dick jump against the mattress. “So, you won’t come sit by me?”
“Colin.”
He tries to make himself seem innocent. “What? Cause it’s a bed? You can’t just sit on a bed with me?”
“I don’t think Kenny would like it,” Natalie says, even though she’s already on her way to moving closer. “Or Casey.”
“How is this any different than when we sit in the lounge at work?”
“You know why it’s different,” and it’s thrilling that this is happening, whatever it is that’s happening right now.
“I’m going to turn on the TV, okay?” Colin stretches to grab for the remote.
Natalie says, “But you don’t even know the channels here,” which means she was really listening to him down at the bar. She gets close enough to fold the comforter back, finally sitting on the sheets at the corner of the bed.
Colin pokes his head up over the ridge she’s made to see how upright she’s holding herself. “What do you want to watch?”
“We shouldn’t be doing this.”
He asks her, “Do you want me to go?” only because he’s pretty sure she’s not going to make him leave.
“I don’t know.” He watches her, taut. “No. But put on HGTV.”
It’s basic and annoying, but she wants it, so he doesn’t even argue and just presses the channel arrow on the remote. Maybe it’ll be something they’ll recollect upon when they’re furnishing their first place together, so he allows it. The couple is trying to decide which house they’re going to buy for their growing family, and every single place looks terrible. But Natalie starts to undo her dark hair, fingers combing through it, looking somewhat wild. She leans back too, her spine relaxing, and when the next episode starts, Colin doesn’t even know where the family chose to live because he’s been so focused on her.
A realtor droning in the background, he reaches out to touch her hair, stark against the white of the bedding. It’s soft. “I wanted to kiss you at Christmas.”
“What?”
“After the holiday party. When it was snowing.” The two of them standing out in it while Kenny went to get the car. Colin had had too much to drink, and every Uber he tried to call kept dropping him, while the snowflakes were getting caught in the fancy curls Natalie had set into her hair. Cheeks pink. It almost happened.
She pulls away, the strands tugging out of his fingers. “I think you should go.”
“Come on, Natalie. I was just being honest.”
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” she says, getting off the bed and walking away from him. Like he’s some kind of feral dog she can’t turn her back on. “This was a mistake.”
“Why, though?” He sits up. “Because you know what I know? There’s something here. And I think you know there’s something here.” Because he can’t be the only one. There’s no way, with all the glances and conversations and the fact that he is here right now in this hotel room, that she hasn’t considered this.
“I’m with Kenny.”
“Again though, Natalie, why? It doesn’t make sense to me.”
“It doesn’t have to make sense to you!” And then she’s swinging the door open, and Colin knows the moment is well and truly broken but still can’t stop himself.
Heading toward her, he desperately pleads, “Tell me you at least think about it, Nat. Come on, tell me it’s not just me,” because that’s how she makes him feel. Desperate. He needs to hear her confirm it, even though his evidence of whispers and looks feels like enough to label his hypothesis as accurate. Friends don’t glance at one another the way they glance at each other. Acquaintances don’t share secrets the same way people who’ve thought about one another naked do.
“Goodnight, Colin,” she says firmly, and it makes him sigh and head back into the hallway.
The only noise is the door mechanism locking him out.
Part of him still wants to knock.
But he goes back to his room to stare at the ceiling and jack off to the mental image of her waking up next to him, all loose hair and parted mouth. In the hangover of it, cum drying on his fingertips and a t-shirt he’s probably going to leave behind on purpose, the guilty piece of him wonders what it’s like to be a decent person. To not hit on someone else’s girlfriend or do things like decide to finally text Casey back the very untrue: I wish you were here.
He flicks back to the list of messages, and Natalie’s is there from last night. You’re literally the only way I’m going to get through this trip. He wants to delete it. The text and her contact information and her, if he could. But he just turns off the screen with his thumb.
Colin lies in the dark and already knows he’s not going to shave tomorrow.
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Danielle Hirschhorn started writing on storybook paper in Brooklyn, New York. She is currently working as an Elementary Media Specialist while completing her thesis work at Columbia College Chicago. Hair Trigger contains her first two publications.