Carrie Blake - The Woman Before You - An intense, addictive love story with an unexpected twist...

One night, after not having heard from him for days and not having thought of anything else, I dreamed I gave him a present. It wasn’t clear in the dream, what the present was, but I woke up remembering his smile, how in the dream he’d hugged me, how warm and happy I felt.

I thought: It’s a sign. I’ll send him something. A little thank you present. Thanks for the lovely drink. Thanks for buying the (I wouldn’t need to say ‘most expensive’) mattress. Businesses sent thank you gifts all the time. They showed their appreciation. That’s how you built customer loyalty, which was something Steve talked a lot about, though no one had ever bought anything from us twice. So what would customer loyalty have meant?

But what could I give The Customer? Matthew ? What did a man like that need? How could I base my decision on a coffee shop exchange, a sex game in the store, and a chaste drink on the terrace? And a dream I only half remembered.

Every day, on the walk from the subway to Doctor Sleep, I looked in every window. I was shopping for The Customer. For Matthew. But nothing seemed right.

Then one warm afternoon—on my lunch break—I was going to meet Luke for a quick picnic in Tompkins Square Park. I passed this funny little store, part joke shop/part kids shop, the kind of place you hardly see anymore in New York except in the East Village. In the window was one of those Mexican card games, Loteria, like bingo but with pictures, beautiful old paintings of the world, the sun, the musician, the jug, the cactus, the tree, the heart—and words in Spanish on the card and the board.

The image that caught my eye was El Melon . A cantaloupe, sliced open, pinkish orange, juicy and full of seeds. A picture of a cantaloupe. A picture of sex.

I bought the set, and sent the card to Matthew’s penthouse, in an envelope addressed to Matthew Frazier. I hoped that he would open it himself, rather than the assistant he’d listed on his sales receipt—whom I’d never met—or the housekeeper.

Nothing happened. No reply. I imagined him throwing my card in the trash. What a stupid gift I’d chosen. Why would a hot rich guy who sipped cocktails on the terrace want a funky old picture of a cantaloupe?

A week later the package came back to me. The stamp on the slightly battered envelope said that no one by that name lived at that address. Why had he done that? Did he not want to hear from me? Why had he gone so far as to pretend he didn’t live there?

Meanwhile, I couldn’t stop thinking about Matthew. His hands, his body, the way he smiled at me from across the table at the coffee shop, the sound of his voice when I’d lay on the mattress at the store. I got interested in sex—obsessed, you could say— in a way I’d never been before.

Now, when Steve went out to do whatever he did at lunch, I watched porn on my computer. I’d found a little clip in which a guy who looks like Matthew is interviewing a girl for a job and he somehow persuades her (I watched it without sound) to have sex on his desk in many different positions. I’d come every time I thought about Matthew’s voice saying, ‘Lie down. Please. Let me see.’

Sooner or later everyone wants a do-over. Sooner rather than later, everyone reaches a point when they say, Okay, guys, roll it back. Let’s try something else. Begin again. Give it another ending.

Especially if you are like me. If your life, like mine, took a turn for the worse early on, and nothing can get you back to that place you were before the bad thing happened.

I’d had money and comfort, high hopes. All the advantages, as they say. I’d grown up on the South shore, south of Boston. In a big house near the water—not right on the beach, but close enough so I could hear the ocean from my bedroom.

I’d made a mistake. I’d fallen. I wanted to climb back up. I longed for it like some people long for their childhood home.

My childhood home was comfortable. My dad was a bank executive and amateur photographer. He took lots of arty shots of my beautiful mother, who didn’t work, and who every so often had to be sent away for mysterious reasons. Only later (after both my parents died) did I figure out that Mother had a little problem with alcohol and pills and went, occasionally, into rehab.

The summer before I was supposed to go to college, my younger brother Ansel and I stole our neighbor’s car. Not just any car. A Mercedes convertible. Our neighbor didn’t deserve a car like that. Not just any neighbor. Doctor Graves. Graves was his actual name, I always said when I told this story. The Doc was a total dick. He’d called the cops on us, twice, when my brother and I accidentally drove over the edge of his lawn. What was his problem? We were kids, just learning to drive.

To get up the nerve, my brother and I got trashed on some candy-sweet alcohol drink concocted selectively from the back of our parents’ liquor cabinet. We cut holes in tube socks and put them over our heads and told Doctor Graves we had a gun. He knew we were the boys next door, but the papers were full of rich suburban psycho teens committing murders. He could see the headline about the killer prep school boys. How did he know we weren’t like that? He handed over the keys.

I won’t pretend it didn’t feel great, taking the car out on the highway. We knew the back roads better than the cops. We had a big head start. We parked near the beach. My brother leaned down and felt under the back of his seat and said, ‘Holy shit. Why does Doctor Graves have a gun? What does he need a hand gun for?’ Maybe the doctor thought he needed a hand gun to protect his Mercedes from punks like us.

Even drunk, I was the big brother. I grabbed the gun from Ansel. The gun went off. The bullet grazed my brother’s hand. A scratch. I freaked and called 911. Ambulances and cop cars came screaming up to where we were parked. It must have looked really bad, there was so much blood all over the front seat.

We both knew that it was an accident. Ansel made a complete recovery, with only some minor nerve damage in that hand.

But he hasn’t spoken to me in the fifteen years since the accident. Maybe he saw something in my eyes when the shooting happened. Maybe he knew that I always believed our parents loved him more.

Ansel has been the family success, the success I was supposed to be. Or maybe he was always the one who was supposed to be successful. Last I heard, he’s an architect, with an extremely profitable residential practice on Eastern Long Island. A cousin who gets in touch with me every couple of years (last time he was tracing some kind of genealogy thing) told me that Ansel had had a few serious relationships, but he’d never married. No wife, no kids. You had to wonder why what that was—maybe because Mom and Dad provided such an uninspiring example of marital bliss.

Anyhow, when we had our little … accident, I fell on my sword for my brother. My dad and mom had excellent lawyers who pleaded the grand larceny charge down to probation, a huge fine, and a class D felony on my permanent record. The college counselor at St. Andrews wasn’t thrilled about being bothered in the middle of summer vacation, just when he thought the whole college mess was sorted out. He called Dartmouth, where I was headed, to ask if a felony conviction would be a problem. Yes, in fact, it would be a problem. A gigantic problem.

That was the start of the slide. My friends went to college. Mom and Dad suggested community college, the only place that would take me, but I decided to move to New York and live on my own in the world’s most expensive city, which meant a counter job in a gourmet take-out fried chicken stand and a walk-up on a pre-gentrified block in Crown Heights. I would really have gone under if I hadn’t lucked into a series of brief affairs with generous older women.