New Year's Eve 2006, about to be 2007. Night of revelry and forgetting. This is the night you fuck a stranger at midnight or, rather, in the hours after. Perhaps it will be a worthwhile person you will fuck again later, and perhaps it won't, but at least it will be a new person.
"Six o'clock," Thomas told his ex, Sabina. Today, of all days, she insisted on Discussing Things in Person. "Absolutely no later than six." An argument with an ex that started late and dragged on too long could ruin his night. He was going to two parties.
"Fine," she said. "Six it is. Whiskey Lounge."
The streets were already teeming when he went outside. On Sixth Avenue, he was swept up by a river of chanting celebrants. As he tried to escape the crowd, he noticed that many faces seemed angry. Some people carried banners. "No blood for oil," they were chanting, "No blood for oil."
He'd just reached the subway when Sabina called his cellphone. It was 5:47. "I'm here!" she screamed. "Some hedge fund rented the whole place. It's two hundred Harvard kids flashing their money. I can't hear anything, and I'm getting groped! Meet me back at my place!"
Sabina's apartment was on Forty-Eighth and Seventh, with a clear
promotion
view of Times Square if you leaned out the window. Forty minutes to fight his way ten blocks there. Crowds had already backed up past Fiftieth. He had to duck under police barricades to enter her building.
At the door she met him in a black silk slip and nothing else. He came in, and they looked at each other. Sabina had long dark hair and a figure as tall and appealing as wine being poured. Her eyes were almond-shaped; a few freckles stood out like spices on her cheekbones and nose.
"So," she said.
"So?"
"You haven't even called."
"Well, after the things we said last week...."
"So we said some things," Sabina said. Through the black slip,
"Get your clothes off," Sabina said, falling on the black leather.
her nipples appeared hard. "You just didn't feel like calling? You can't treat your girlfriend like that. All I wanted was to hear from you."
The roar of the crowd, twelve floors below, was audible. Everything was out there.
A faint blush rose under her freckles. "If I'm not your girlfriend anymore," she said, at last, acidly, "I'd like to be notified."
"It's been a confusing year," Thomas said. "Sometimes things aren't easy to define."
"Get a dictionary," she said. "Coward starts with C."
"Possessive starts with P," he said. "Bitch starts with B. I should go. I have plans."
"Fine," she said.
"Okay," he said.
When they kissed, the black slip slithered off her body like it had never been there. She was unbuckling his belt and freeing his cock, already hard, as he kissed and bit her neck, and as with one hand he gripped her small, perfect ass, lifting her almost off her feet so she had to stand on tiptoes while she massaged his cock with both hands. She pulled him to the sofa.
"Get your clothes off," Sabina said, falling on the black leather. To the dim mad noise of the revelers below, he did. She had tears in her eyes. "Get in me," she said. Thomas knelt and she guided his cock inside her. That perfect, familiar fit. That fevered, almost psychotic pleasure of leaving this world, sliding into a different one. "Fuck me," she said. "Kill me."
Her knees draped over his shoulders, forehead grinding into his collarbone. Her fingers clawing his ribs. Her sudden silence as she climaxed, face turning red, freckles disappearing. As soon as she had finished, he pulled out and came on her breasts and throat.
She lay panting on the sofa, fumbled for a box of tissues. Thomas went to the window, opened it, leaned out. The screams. It wasn't even 8 p.m., and the crowd stretched from Times Square to the park. A hundred thousand, he thought. What was there to be so excited about?
