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

the crowd, arm in arm.

      I thought: I still hardly know anything about him. We haven’t had actual sex. But for the moment I felt comfortable, almost as if we’d been lovers for years. Anyone who saw us would have thought we were a couple.

      I gave him my claim ticket, and he retrieved my coat from the clipboard girls. I didn’t make eye contact with any of them. The doorman opened the door. Matthew and I went outside. He let me go first, very gallant and cool for a guy who’d just fingered me in the host’s bathroom and made me steal his drugs.

      The night was cold and clear. Matthew hailed a cab and put me in it and gave the driver what I could tell would be more than enough money for me to get back to Greenpoint, tip included.

      ‘I’m sorry. I can’t leave, after all. I have to stick around till the end. It’s my job.’ He kissed me on the forehead. ‘Weird job, huh?’

      Only later would I learn just how weird Matthew’s job was.

      I would have stayed to the end of the party with him. But he hadn’t asked. Had he kicked me out of Val Morton’s apartment? Or had he protected me from something I wasn’t ready to experience?

       Matthew

      Val Morton’s new superstar cardiologist talked him down to one cigar a week, and because Val Morton saw his cigar as a sociable thing, and because Heidi was involved with her charities and he didn’t like to drink alone, he’d text me to come see him, and he would ply me with brandy and light up a cigar and talk about his favorite subjects.

      One of those subjects was how he’d always wanted to direct. He didn’t care where or how, film or TV or theater, a music video for fuck’s sake, he wanted to be the one deciding the narrative, making decisions that weren’t just about money. I always wanted to ask why, with his private fortune, he couldn’t just find a project he liked and finance it himself. But I didn’t say that, because I knew that what Val really meant was that he wanted someone, preferably someone important in Hollywood or on the New York stage, to ask him to direct. I thought: Everyone wants something—something they can’t and don’t have.

      One night—clearly Val had started drinking some time before I arrived—he again got onto the subject of directing.

      He said, ‘For now the best I can do is to stage little dramas involving real people. Call them performance pieces, reality TV without the TV, I don’t give a shit what you call them. That’s partly where you come in, dude, facilitating and so forth…’

      Once again, I knew what he meant. He was directing the little real-life drama starring Isabel and me.

      When Val Morton met Isabel at his party, he agreed that she would be perfect to do—and be—what we needed, though he still hadn’t told me exactly what that was.

      It was my idea, not his, to play around with her in Val’s bathroom. Val had gotten more insistent about the fact that he wanted me to wait a while before I actually fucked her, and I was willing to go along. A little waiting never failed to heat things up. I felt bad for Isabel, but I was working for Val. Anyway, she wasn’t getting hurt. Neither of us were. We were having fun. I would have liked to fuck her, but I was being paid to act out whatever story my boss was spinning.

      Whatever play he was directing.

      By the end of that party at Val’s, I still had a hard-on from the stuff we’d done in the bathroom. But as we were leaving, Val signaled me to get rid of her and stick around. I was sorry to have to put her in a cab.

      After all the guests had gone home, and Heidi had gone to bed, Val called me into his study, a kind of glass atrium built onto the roof, like a Victorian conservatory, again over the objections of the Landmarks Commission, and in this case of his own co-op board.

      He sat at his desk, J. P. Morgan’s actual desk, and I stood before him.