FICTION

The Ulterior Motive

A short story

She arrives at the airport early, although this time she is not planning to take a flight. Two weeks ago, Robert sent her a short email informing her that he was going to have a stopover in Madrid on his way to a conference in Barcelona and asking her if she would like to meet him for a brief coffee at the airport.

More than six months have passed since their meeting on the flight from New York to Madrid. He gave her his business card when the plane was landing and she was surprised to see that he was a VP in a large international company. She did not have her card at hand and promised to send him an email, so they could keep in touch, which she did almost immediately after leaving the airport. His reply came days later and although friendly, it was polite and distant, and he did not switch to his personal email when writing her.

They stayed in touch for a couple of months after the meeting, sometimes exchanging a few emails in a day, and sometimes remaining silent for weeks, as if experimenting with the rhythm and intensity of their communication. She felt hurt by his withdrawal into sudden silences, and at the same time sensed that her intensity was equally challenging to him. Once they had a video call during her lunch break at work and his breakfast at home. They talked non-stop for an hour until she had to go to a meeting, catching up on each other’s lives, putting a face on each other’s words again. When they hung up, he went silent again. She tried to resume their communication a couple of times after that, but it became more and more infrequent, and eventually, they dropped it altogether.

And there she is now, standing nervously in the waiting area of Madrid airport on a Saturday evening, waiting for his flight from New York to land. She does not remember his face, which she has only seen twice, and just once without the filter of the screen between them. She can only recall his blond hair and the worried look in his eyes. She told her husband, who is currently in Russia for work, that she was going to have dinner with a friend from her book club tonight, and the fact that she lied to him, even though six months ago she had found it easy to tell him the entire story about meeting Robert, makes her uneasy.

She recognizes Robert at once when he emerges from behind the sliding doors. He smiles when their eyes meet and walks rapidly towards her. He is carrying only a small hand suitcase with him and a modest backpack. She realizes she doesn’t know how much time they have for their meeting, and then he’s suddenly there, right in front of her, looking at her and laughing, and then hugging her a moment later, releasing her almost immediately, looking at her again, and then reaching out for her face to brush away a lock of hair that has blinded her for a moment. She is laughing too now.

“Hello, stranger”, she says.

“Good evening”, he says, looking around. He looks tired, older. “I really need a coffee”.

They walk next to each other, looking for a place where they could have a coffee. They haven’t said much yet, apart from a few polite phrases after that initial greeting, and they keep walking in silence until they spot a self-service coffee shop with a couple of empty tables in the corner.

“What will you have?”, she asks.

“Un café americano”, he says slowly, his American accent thick as he pronounces the words.

“Not bad”, she says. “I wasn’t aware you spoke Spanish”.

“It’s probably because I don’t”, he says. “I only know a few important words, and café is among them”.

“I don’t know if I should ask what the others are”, she says.

He starts listing them: buenos días, ¿cómo está?, una cerveza, por favor, guapa.. He pauses, watching her.

“Qué os pongo?”, the guy at the counter says. It’s their turn to place the order.

“You go”, she says to Robert, taunting him. “You can do it”.

And he does, quite easily, in that polite and friendly manner that she now recognizes as his, even though his Spanish is limited to only a few words. She orders a café con leche which he insists on paying for, and they retreat to the only table in the corner that is still available.

She carries their coffee to the table so that he can take care of his luggage. They sit down in front of each other, and she realizes that it’s the first time they are really facing each other directly, except for that video call they once ventured to have, behind the protective layer of their phone screens. On the plane they spent hours next to each other, confined in that tight and intimate space, but they were always protected by the empty seat between them and the possibility of turning back into the safety of their own seats. She looks down at her coffee, picks up the spoon, stirs the coffee with it, puts the spoon back on the plate, looks up at him, aware of how he blushes the moment their eyes meet, and then looks down again. She remembers how they started playing trivia on the plane when the lights went on, not being able to look at each other openly, suddenly too aware of the intimacy they had created.

She looks back at him. He reaches out across the table, where her right hand lies next to the plate, picks it up in his, brings it closer to him, and puts it back on the table. She watches their hands with a certain detachment, as if she were watching a movie scene on TV, as if it were happening to someone else. Even through that imaginary distance, she feels how his fingers brush hers before detaching from her hand.

“You are not wearing your wedding ring”, he says.

She knows it’s not a question, but she feels compelled to answer, to explain herself, to tell him that it has nothing to do with this moment, that she wasn’t wearing it six months ago either, that she actually never wears it, neither her nor her husband, that it can’t be interpreted as a message, although she knows it is a message, that the moment has already passed, and that moment of silence has already converted it into a message. She looks at the fingers of her right hand, which now lies on his side of the table, as if she is the one who has reached out for him.

She draws her hand back, picks up her coffee, takes a small sip. It’s scalding hot. She looks at him, through the blur of the steam of the coffee she is still holding next to her lips, and it makes his face look slightly out of focus, his eyes remote.

“I never wear it”, she finally says. “It gives me allergy”, she laughs, brushes it off as a joke, nervously removes her right hand from the table.

Half an hour later their coffee is gone, as well as — it seems to her — the topics of their conversation. They seem to have touched upon everything that has happened in their lives in these last few months or is about to happen — his mother’s progress with the chemotherapy, her niece’s baptism to which she hasn’t gone, new acquisitions in his company, her recent promotion, the conference in Barcelona he is about to go to, her plan of going to a summer school in Oxford next year — and still it feels like they haven’t really said anything substantial, as if they have only circled each other, looking for a threshold to cross, or a magic word to pronounce, that would somehow allow them to enter that intimate space they had once inhabited together for a few hours.

She looks down and plays with her coffee spoon, not able to come up with anything else to tell him that wouldn’t distance them even more, not willing to bring her reality, her family life, into the conversation, when she realizes that she still doesn’t know how long his stopover is, and how much time they have left for this conversation. She looks up again.

“By the way, when is your flight to Barcelona?” she asks.

He takes his phone out of his pocket, casts a glance at it, then places it on the table in front of him, screen down.

“My flight,” he says not looking at her, his voice trailing off somewhat, “is tomorrow morning. At 8 am.”

“Oh,” she says. She suddenly has many questions, but she is not able to ask any of them. She feels her blood rush to her temples, a prequel to a headache.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I should have told you, but I just couldn’t find the right moment to do so.”

She puts the coffee spoon down.

“It’s OK,” she says, her temples throbbing. “Where are you staying?” she is trying to sound casual.

“I booked a hotel near the airport. It’s called... Clement something. It was the closest one to the airport I could find. Is it any good?” he asks.

“I’m afraid I have no idea,” she says. “I’ve never stayed in a hotel in Madrid.”

She watches him close his eyes wearily, rub them with his hands, then lower his hands on the table, his fingers only a few centimeters short of hers. They both look down, at his fingers, as if waiting to see what they would do next. He taps on her hand lightly.

“Shall we get something to eat?” he says. “I’m starving.”

She draws a deep breath, glances at her phone. It’s not even 9 pm. She would be home in a couple of hours if she stays for dinner.

“I don’t think we can find anything better in the airport than this place,” she says, looking around. “Do you want to order something?”

“Would you mind if we have dinner at the hotel?” he says. “I badly need to take a shower and get changed. It’s been a really long trip.”

She’s suddenly taken aback, but she knows she has already agreed to have dinner with him. She looks at her phone again, as if expecting it could give her the right answer.

He slaps his forehead with his left hand, and when he removes it, and she can see his face again, he looks flushed and genuinely embarrassed.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m really sorry. I’m so stupid.” He shakes his head. “Would you wait for me in the lobby while I shower and get changed? I guess if we take a cab after, we could still find someplace to eat in the city center, right?”

“No, I’m sorry,” she finds herself saying. “It’s OK. It’ll be late by the time we get to the city, and you have an early flight to take. Let’s take a cab to your hotel and see what they have there.”

“Are you sure?”

“Let’s go”, she says, standing up. “We should still be on time to get something before they close the kitchen.”

They hardly talk while they walk through the airport. It’s already dark when they get out. The queue for the taxi is moving fast, but it’s long, and she starts feeling cold. It’s late September, but the day was sunny and hot, and she has not thought of bringing a jacket. By the time they get into the car, she is shivering.

Robert doesn’t ask her to help tell the driver where to go, but in no time, they are on their way to Clement Hotel. She is still trembling when she reclines in the back seat of the taxi, even though it’s much warmer in the car than it was outside. Her head is throbbing badly now. She examines her bag and is relieved to find a few pills of ibuprofen. She turns to Robert to check if he has noticed her do that only to see that he has dozed off.

She struggles to wake him up when they reach the hotel, a red brick building on a narrow street. He seems to be a little disoriented when she is finally able to rouse him, so she pays for the taxi ride.

“I’m sorry,” he says when they stand on the sidewalk and the driver hands them his suitcase. “It’s the movement of the car and the warmth.” He rubs his eyes. “How much was the ride?”

“Forget it,” she says. “You can pay for the dinner.” She turns to look for the entrance and for a moment thinks that the taxi driver must have dropped them off at the wrong place. They are in front of a building that looks more like an apartment building than a hotel. They spot the entrance in a moment though, a glass sliding door, through which they step into a wide but short lobby.

She walks around the lobby while Robert is checking in. Even though she has not been feeling cold anymore in the car, the gray marble floor, and the columns in the center of the waiting area made of light-reflecting metal, make her feel cold again. She rubs her arms and turns to see if Robert has finished his registration.

There are no sofas in the lobby, so they agree that she will wait in his room while he showers and they will head to the dining area then. They should hurry, the receptionist has told Robert, as the kitchen closes at 10 pm, which means they have less than thirty minutes to get there.

In the room, she sits on the chair at the desk, as the only other option would be sitting on one of the twin beds with decorative red velvet scarfs draped across their foot and matching red pillows. She watches Robert get some clothes out of his suitcase, grab the neatly folded towel and the bag of toiletry that the hotel staff has left on top of one of the beds, and head for the shower. He turns back before entering.

“I won’t be long.”

He has left his suitcase open on the wooden floor, and she can see he has brought a few shirts and a couple of matching suit jackets — one blue, and one grey — tangible proof of his corporate life she has not the slightest idea about. “It’s still very much me,” she remembers him saying in one of his emails when she had finally gathered her courage to admit she had been having difficulties in imagining him in his VP role after that brief but intimate meeting on their flight from New York. She is aware she does not know anything about that part of his life, but does she know anything about him at all?

She looks around the room. It looks sterile; there’s not a trace of him — of them — in it, except his open suitcase and the backpack on the floor. She can hear him shut the shower off. Moments later he emerges through the door, barefoot, his plaid shirt unbuttoned and untucked over his light blue jeans, a damp towel in his hands. He rubs his hair with it and throws it back into the shower through the open door. It’s warm in the room now, and she is starting to feel a little drowsy.

“Shall we go then?” he asks, coming closer to her and extending his right hand, as if offering to help her stand up. When she gives him her hand, he pulls her up, but once she is standing in front of him, he does not make a move to go anywhere and does not let go of her hand either. They stand like this for a moment, looking at each other, and then he slowly tugs her towards him. He does not let go of her hand until the fingers of her other hand grip his wet hair.

She breathes in the warm and flowery scent of the mixture of the hotel’s shower gel and shampoo on his neck, and it makes her feel nauseous and overly aware of her throbbing headache and his fingers exploring the clasp of her bra under her blouse. She thinks of the mismatched underwear she is wearing.

She feels like she’s observing the scene from the outside, as if she were watching someone else’s hands help him out of his plaid shirt, trace an old scar on the left side of his bare chest, another tangible proof of how little she knows about his past. She sees her blue cotton blouse crumpled on the floor, entangled with her grey bra, and she can’t remember whether it’s those same hands that have dropped it there, betraying her again, erasing that last frail boundary separating their bodies.

They stand in front of each other, two strangers, not touching for a moment, as if aware that by stripping their clothes away they have also removed all layers of that illusory connection and intimacy they had been wearing just a minute ago, as if aware now that the only thing they still have in common, still hold on to is their loneliness, that ulterior motive that is drawing them towards each other.

On the bed she watches his face suspended above hers, tracing with her finger their age difference reflected in the wrinkles around his closed eyes, around his slightly parted lips. She feels attracted to his desire, to that necessity he has to hold her, his fingers entangled in her hair, as if constantly looking for physical proof that she is still here.

She relishes his weight pressing on her, immobilizing and freeing at once, and she knows that the moment he moves away another type of heaviness will immediately fill that space, and so she draws him closer to her, desperate to prolong that feeling of heavy lightness.

The moment he detaches from her she is suddenly aware of her feet, cold against the red velvet scarf they hadn’t cared to remove from the bed, her headache, a distant white noise only seconds ago, seeping back now with a pulsating force, and an enveloping sense of emptiness that urges her to shift her body, as if moving could help shake that uneasy feeling off. She turns towards him.

He is lying on his back now, his left hand covering his face. She draws it away, connecting her fingers with his, and when he turns to face her, she can see he is crying.

“I’m sorry,” he says, and she knows he is, and she knows that she is too, even though she is not allowing that thought in, not yet, not right now, not when it’s easier to fake that she is sorry for him being sorry, rather than being sorry herself.

“It’s OK,” she says, and she knows it’s redundant, that she had said it earlier today, and that earlier “it’s OK” extended through the night and validated all her later decisions.

He frees his hand, touches her face, her hair, his thumb drawing forms on her right eyebrow, her temple.

“I don’t want you to think I had it all planned,” he says. “I don’t want you to think of me that way. It shouldn’t matter, as I’m leaving in a few hours, but it does.”

She knows he hadn’t, at least not when he was preparing his trip — it’s a room with two separate twin beds, one of which they are sharing now. Was there a threshold, she wonders, a line they stepped on without noticing, an “it’s OK” pronounced in a wrong moment? Or had they been knowingly preparing for that crossing, her lying to her husband, him, holding off the piece of information that might have scared her off?

“Don’t make it only about you” she says, and his thumb pauses on her cheekbone. “It’s about what we both wanted.”

He watches her in silence, his hand still on her face.

“You mean, dinner,” he says after a long pause, and they both burst into laughter, and then she is, finally, crying.

They sit on the bed next to each other, his arm draped over her shoulders, pressing her lightly to him, for what seems a long time. She has stopped crying some time ago, but they don’t talk, as if everything they had inside of them has already been said, clarified, defined, leaving them empty.

She stands up, breaking away from his embrace, starts picking up her clothes from the wooden floor — her crumpled black blouse, her gray and black underwear, her jeans — and goes into the shower without looking back at him. When she reemerges into the room, fully dressed, fifteen minutes later, he is still sitting on the bed where she has left him. His blond hair is still damp after the shower he had taken earlier, stuck unevenly to his forehead. He looks old.

She stands in front of him, feeling empty, cowardly, not able to utter anything meaningful, waiting for him to look at her, expecting him to say something and fearing it at the same time.

She turns away briskly and heads for the door.

By the time she looks back before closing the door, his face is buried in his hands, and he can’t see her.

Thank you for reading my story. If you enjoyed it, you may want to read the first part here:

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