Afraid of the Dark

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After dinner, Pete and I didn't go back to the hotel that Fall Out Boy's management and the magazine had booked for us. Instead, we strayed from the straight and narrow path laid out for us by the people whose sole jobs were to organize our lives.

Personally, I liked living an organized life; I had spent all my life up until that point making plans and following through with them. Plans are steady. Plans don't fail you. Plans will get you where you need to go.

Pete and I didn't stick to the plan.

Once we had each paid separately (by my insistence) and Pete had left a hundred dollar bill as a tip for our waiter, Pete hailed a cab out in front of the restaurant. Though we had walked down to the restaurant from our hotel, I assumed that he just didn't want to walk back because we were both slightly drunk and it was freezing cold outside. As we climbed into the warm backseat of the cab, I was grateful. The last thing I wanted to do was walk all the way back to the hotel.

But when the driver asked, "Where to?" Pete took me by surprise.

"Nowhere, really," said Pete, shrugging. "Can we just drive around for a while?"

The driver raised his eyebrows at Pete in the rearview mirror, but apparently agreed. It was dark already and I pressed my forehead to the cold glass of the cab window and watched the streetlights pass by us, one after another along the side of the road. My head was swimming and all the lights of the city seemed to move too.

We looped around a couple of blocks in figure eights for what felt like hours. When all those streetlights started to blur together, I was beginning to feel a little nauseous. I was tired of the cab.

"Where are we going, Pete?"

He was already looking at me when I turned to him. He looked away quickly as if ashamed, or maybe as if to pretend like he had just happened to glance my way. "I don't know," he said. "Where do you want to go?"

"I don't know." I was tired and my head felt so strange, but I didn't want to go back to the hotel. I wasn't ready to give him up for the night. Not yet.

He wasn't wearing his seatbelt, so he turned and leaned his back against the closed car door so I was facing him directly. His face lit up orange every now and then as we passed a streetlight, his dark eyes only partially illuminated in the half-light. I could barely make out his expression, but he looked concerned to me. "Are you tired?" he asked.

"No," I lied. "Put your seatbelt on."

He laughed. "Why? It's pointless."

"Pointless? What if we have an accident?"

"Sarah," said Pete, laughing still and shaking his head at me, "don't worry. We won't have an accident."

"You don't know that," I snapped.

Pete was nonchalant. "Well, if we have an accident, we have an accident--"

"And you'll break your neck or crush your skull or knock all your beautiful teeth out--"

"So?"

"So?! So?!"

"So, don't worry about me."

And the thing is, he was right. He was so right. Why should I worry about him? He wasn't mine to worry about. I didn't have the right to look after him.

We both felt something change after he said that to me--realizing, I guess, that we were slowly but surely crossing boundaries inch by precarious inch (and that's a scary thing to realize)--and it got quiet. Pete sat up straight in his seat, but didn't put his seatbelt on, and looked out the window for about half a block. Then he told the driver to let us out.

Pete handed the driver a wad of cash to pay for almost an hour's worth of non-traveling while I stood on the curb and tried to figure out where the hell he was taking me this time. Boutiques lined the street, but none of them looked like the kinds of places Pete would want to spend time in, and I doubted that I could afford anything in those stores anyway.

Unless Pete wanted to buy me something...

I wouldn't allow myself to pursue that line of thinking. Gifts--that was yet another boundary to be wary of. To overstep.

No. No more overstepping boundaries. Remember, he's a married man--he has a kid--a baby at home--

But it was so hard to remember these things when he was smiling at me.

"Alright," said Pete, grinning as he grabbed my arm just above the elbow and nudged me along beside him. "Ready?"

I eased my arm out of his grasp as carefully as I could. "Ready for what?"

He led me another ten or twenty feet down the street and then stopped me beneath a deep green awning with gold trim. There, he followed me through a set of revolving doors into what appeared to be some sort of hotel.

I stopped dead in my tracks. The lobby was huge (especially for New York City), with pristine white marble floors and rich couches and tables and chairs scattered here and there. A fireplace big enough for me to stand in took up most of the left wall; set into the right wall were three shiny silver elevators. One long desk spanned the length of the far wall, and one tall, red-lipsticked lady sat alone behind it.

It was definitely a hotel. A very nice hotel. A very nice hotel that was not the very nice hotel we were supposed to be in.

Why had he brought me here?

"C'mon," said Pete. He winked at me over his shoulder as he brushed by me, grazing his fingertips against mine as he passed. On purpose?

I stood there rooted to the spot, my fingertips tingling from the skin contact and my mind racing. "What--what are you doing?" I blurted out.

He turned to face me and jerked a thumb over his shoulder, indicating the long desk at the far end of the lobby. "Getting a room," he said, like it was the simplest thing in the world, his eyes wide and innocent.

"A--a room?"

My brain refused to process what he was saying to me. I think my body knew that if I thought too much about me and Pete in some hotel room together, with no plans and no organization and no one else in the world having any idea where we were or what we were doing there, it might cause me to have some sort of mental breakdown. I don't know if I could take it.

While my brain tried hard not to think about any of this, Pete just looked at me like he couldn't understand what could possibly go wrong with this great idea--like me and him in some random hotel room wasn't the perfect recipe for disaster. But I think he must have known very well what he was doing, just like he knew what I was thinking. He must have been thinking the same thing.

He just didn't care, I guess.

Or maybe this was just more important. Maybe it was bigger than Ashlee. I know it sounds like I'm making excuses, but honestly, there is a reason for every bad decision made. There is something about it that appealed to us at the time, even it was something shallow, like money or fame or sex. And usually there's a really big con, and we saw it there all along, but somehow the pro outweighed the con--if not logically, emotionally. Physically.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that sometimes people need to cheat on their spouses more than they need to be faithful to them. It's the epitome of selfishness, yes, but human beings are essentially selfish. That's why we're programming computers to do everything for us and sending spaceships to Mars while the second-most advanced animals on the planet are still digging up bugs with sticks--survival of the fittest and all that.

As the lovechild of the bloodthirsty music industry and the even bloodthirstier media, my job at one of the nation's top music magazines taught me a lot about survival and success. There are a lot of traits necessary to be successful in life, and many of them are good, but some of them are bad, too. Selfishness is one of the worse ones.

But it's necessary, and it's real, and it's inside everyone. Sometimes it only shows through occasionally, in little ways; sometimes it's ever-present; sometimes it surfaces only once in a lifetime, in a huge way.

Like cheating on your wife with a girl you've only known for five days.

Pete acted like the idea had never even occurred to him, though. He just gave me this look like he couldn't figure out why I was being so difficult, his brows furrowed, lips pursed. For someone who never lied, he was good at putting on a facade. It was almost unsettling, how convincing he was.

Still, I tip-toed around the issue just in case he wasn't faking. "Don't you think that...people might get the wrong idea...?"

His eyes widened, as if with sudden understanding, his expression abruptly horrified. "Oh--no--that's not--it's not like that--"

"I know, I know, I just..."

"I just thought--you know--" He shuffled his feet against the smooth marble. "I thought we could get a room and just, like, you know, do an interview or something. Nothing too scandalous."

He winked at me again and smiled. He was trying to be cute. See? his little half-smirk seemed to say. I'm just a big kid at heart. I'm too sweet and naive to cheat on my wife!

Yeah, right.

I laughed nervously. "Well--okay--sure--"

"I mean..." He looked right at me then, his gaze intense and genuine. "You're tired, I can tell. I just thought it would be nice to be alone for a while."

"Okay," I agreed, for the second time. "Sure."

He beamed at me in triumph and bounded away to the front desk. It was a shallow victory though; as always, I couldn't have said "no" to him anyway. I never stood a chance when it came to Pete.

"Yeah, I'd like to rent a room," I heard him saying to the clerk.

"For how long, sir?" asked the clerk in a cheery voice.

"Just one night."

With a sigh of resignation, I followed him over to the desk and tried not to think about where that "one night" may lead.

"Name, please?"

"Declan MacManus," said Pete, leaning casually against the desk.

"Declan?" She frowned doubtfully at the computer screen, pale fingers fidgeting against the keyboard. "How do you spell--"

"D-E-C-L-A-N."

I raised an eyebrow at him. "Elvis Costello?" I mouthed, so that the clerk wouldn't overhear--though I doubted that she even knew who Elvis Costello was, much less his birth name.

Pete pretended to be astonished. "So you really are a music journalist, then! And here I thought you were just some fangirl looking for an excuse to sneak into my hotel room and smell my underwear or something."

The clerk looked up expectantly, waiting for Pete to and I to finish our little exchange (which, understandably, seemed to have confused her quite a bit) before interrupting. "Excuse me, sir--what did you say your last name--?"

"McManus: M-little C-M-A-N-U-S." He spelled it all out with a straight face, his expression as serious as I've ever seen it, like it really was his name. For all his insistence on complete honesty, he really was a good liar.

And lying is a skill, not a talent. I was beginning to wonder if he was really ever honest at all--if he was just such a good liar that he was able to make it seem like he was being honest, when really everything about him was an elaborate tangle of lies. I wondered if he was a fraud, a sham, a series of fake names and fake expressions and fake one-liners and nothing more. I wouldn't have put it past him.

Did it really matter if he was real, though? If not, I was in love with an illusion, but the real Pete was equally unattainable. Either way, he would never belong to me.

Pete signed a piece of paper (with "Declan MacManus"'s signature? Who knows) and the lady gave us two keys to one room. Pete and I both reached forward to take a key, and I could practically feel her judging me as she saw his wedding ring and my bare ring-finger and put the two together. She watched us leave with her big red lips pursed and I wondered if she thought we were having an affair.

I wanted to turn around and inform her that our relationship was strictly professional so there was no need for her to break out the Grand Stink-Eye, but then Pete touched the small of my back as he steered me towards an elevator and I melted into his touch, so I shut my mouth. No need to make a liar out of myself.