Yes!he responded.Funny enough, that’s been on my list for a while too. It’s super hard to get a reservation, but let me check with my Amex concierge.
So the next day, there we were at Don Angie, the scenery familiar to me from Laura’s Instagram stories, except the space seemed darker and more crowded in real life. I pretended like I was seeing the menu for the first time even though I had looked it up online beforehand to match the dishes on the menu to the pictures Laura had posted.
“Hmm, I’m really feeling the tuna crudo tonight…” I said.
“Oh, I actually don’t eat raw fish.”
“Do you mind if I get it anyway? Their portion sizes are small so I could probably just finish it myself.” I knew I was being rude, but I also knew that he wouldn’t say no.
When the appetizers arrived, I took small bites, chewing slowly as though trying to extract the maximum flavor from every morsel. David was already on his second mojito. It was easy to get him to talk so that I wouldn’t have to. I tuned in every thirty seconds or so to pick up a tidbit of information about which I could formulate a question. In the meantime, I imagined Laura tasting the same food, the cold tuna sliding down her throat, her tongue picking out a stray piece from behind a molar, the garlic staying on her breath until it was washed out by a generous sip of sauvignon blanc. But only if she really sloshed around the sauv blanc. Maybe she didn’t. Maybe that was just me.
After all, it was easy to do the math. I was three sips in. The glass was twenty dollars and I was about one-fifth of the way through. Each sip was the equivalent of $1.33. I pictured a dollar bill, a quarter, a nickel, and three pennies sliding down my throat. The dollar bill would be easiest to swallow, the saliva breaking it down until it was the texture of papier-mâché. The coins would feel metallic and cold against my tongue, and when I tried to swallow, they’d get stuck somewhere in my esophagus. The feeling was so vivid that I needed two giant gulps of wine to feel like I could breathe again.
To someone like Laura, the cost of the wine was negligible. I was sure that she didn’t slosh. She just drank. That meant I should also stop sloshing and just drink. After all, she wasn’t better than me, and I’d prove it. I stopped doing mental mathon the second glass. The second glass turned into a third, and when the waitress asked if we’d like another bottle, I immediately responded yes. By then, I couldn’t even count how many glasses I’d had, let alone the monetary equivalent of what I drank.
When the check came, I offered to pay for half, but unsurprisingly, David volunteered to cover the whole thing. I pretended to be disappointed. I suggested we go back to his apartment and he responded “yes” a little too enthusiastically. By now I was really feeling the wine. I was not used to being so drunk in a setting that wasn’t a party, that familiar burst of confidence that seemed wasted on the fact there was only one person to witness this bubbly, charismatic version of me. When he unlocked the door to his unit, I walked straight to the bedroom, but not before accidentally opening the bathroom door. I took off all my clothes before David even made a move. At first he wasn’t sure what to do, but then he took off his clothes too.
“I have an idea,” I said, giggling. I felt like the room was spinning a little bit, and I grabbed onto David’s shoulders to orient myself.
“What’s your idea?” he asked while running his hands down my bare back.
I almost changed my mind about what I was going to say next, but the look in David’s eyes told me that there wasn’t a lot I could do to turn him off from this moment. I was a naked twenty-one-year-old standing in front of him in his apartment. I hadn’t thought about this before, but I remembered that I was a bit younger than him, so my 70th percentile attractiveness to him was probably more like 80th. So to him, I really was sexy.
“How do you feel about role-play?” I asked, impressed with the confidence in my own voice.
“Oh. Uh…I mean, I’m open to it. What do you mean, exactly?”
I giggled. “Okay, but promise you won’t be weirded out.”
He sat on the edge of the bed. “Weirded out by what?”
Even in my current state I knew I couldn’t reveal everything. I’d keep it vague, make up a much more vanilla backstory. I knew from last time that I didn’t need much; my mind could fill in the gaps.
“I just love the idea of pretending to be someone I’m not. Pretending to be a specific…persona, I guess.”
“Okay, I could be into that,” he said, an amused expression on his face. “And what persona is that?”
“So,” I said, plopping my hands on my lap. “I want you to pretend that my name is Laura.”
“That’s it?” He furrowed his eyebrows. “Just like…call you Laura while we’re doing it?”
I giggled some more. “Yes. And I guess the rest of it doesn’t make too huge of a difference…but pretend I’m like a rich trust fund girl. Like a really hot, rich trust fund girl that you’re just super grateful to be with.”
“Uh, okay. Yeah, I think I can do that. But then, who should I be?”
“Just yourself. Except you’re like, really really into the fact that you’re hooking up with this really hot girl with the perfect body.”
“Well.” He looked around self-consciously. “I mean, that shouldn’t be too hard. I am into this.”
I stopped myself from rolling my eyes. “That’s very sweet of you. So yeah, just continue being into it and pretend I’m the hot trust fund girl.”
“Okay.” He nodded. “I can do that.”
“Great!”
In the beginning I had to remind him to say my name. He stumbled a couple of times, started calling me Elizabeth, but it wasn’t long before he got the hang of it. I closed my eyes and imagined my body morphing into Laura’s. I imagined it was Laura’s hair that was pressed against the pillow, that it was Laura’s skin that was being touched by David’s hands. I imagined David’s excitement in fucking someone so beautiful, so out of his league, and I became excited by his excitement. Eventually I realized that I could maintain the fantasy even with my eyes open. I enjoyed watching David’s lips part to form the shape of Laura’s name. I could tell he liked all of it too; maybe the fantasy was contagious, maybe he thought that he actually was fucking Laura too.
Afterward I went to the bathroom and looked in the mirror. I was surprised and disappointed to see that it was not Laura’s face staring back at me. It was just my face, Elizabeth’s face, bloated and red from the alcohol. I suddenly felt overcome by shame, shame that trickled down my spine like a shiver. It was one thing to imagine myself as someone with attributes that belonged to Laura; it was another to request someone else partake in this fantasy with me. What if David told someone about my request? What if he already thought I was a freak? I was too drunk to go back to my dorm so I stumbled back into bed. David was already asleep with his mouth open, a line of drool connecting his lower lip to the sheet.
