Don't Mess With Me

Jade

The recording was still going.

Lena’s voice continued coming through the phone speaker at the center of the breakfast table, clear and unhurried, saying the things she had said at the pool the night before in the specific low voice she had used so that nobody else would hear. Everybody at the table could hear now. The ocean below the terrace was audible in the gaps between her words. A gull. The distant sound of a boat.

I’m about to go back to my room. Drop it off when you come up. I moved rooms; I’m in the ocean suite. Room 304.

The number hung in the morning air.

Room 304.

Hayes’s room.

I watched Lena’s face while the recording played. The color had left it entirely. She was very still, the way people go still when they are calculating and finding that the numbers are not working out the way they were supposed to. Her eyes were on the phone in the middle of the table and her fingers were around her coffee cup and she was holding it in the specific tense way of someone deciding something.

I saw it a half second before it happened.

She lunged.

Her arm came across the table fast, and her hand went for my phone, and she got her fingers around it and pulled, and in the same instant I reached for it back, and then everything happened at once. The coffee cup went over with a crack. Hot liquid across the tablecloth. Leo pushing back his chair. Talia making a sharp sound. Lena on her feet now with my phone in her hand and her face transformed into something I had never seen from her, something that had nothing left of warmth in it at all.

“Give it back.” My voice came out completely level.

“You recorded me.” Hers did not. “You had your phone recording me the whole time.”

“Yes,” I said. “Give it back.”

She was breathing hard. Her fingers were white around my phone, and her eyes were doing the thing eyes do when a person has run out of prepared responses and is operating on something rawer than strategy.

Then a hand closed around her wrist.

Hayes.

He had crossed from the terrace entrance to the table in the time it took all of this to happen, and his hand was around Lena’s wrist now with a grip that was not violent but was completely immovable, and the look on his face was the coldest I had ever seen it, which was saying something.

She let go of the phone.

I caught it.

Hayes released her wrist and stepped back and said nothing.

I looked down at my phone. The recording was still running. I turned the volume up one more notch and set it back on the table and let it finish. Lena’s voice, the last line of it, filled the terrace one final time.

Thank you, Jade. I’m really sorry to bother you.

The recording ended.

I picked my phone up and locked the screen and slipped it into my pocket. Then I looked at Lena across the overturned coffee cup and the wet tablecloth and the completely silent breakfast table.

She was looking at me with an expression that was cycling through several things too fast to name.

“I wasn’t going to use it,” I said. My voice was very quiet and very clear. “I didn’t come down here this morning to do any of this. You gave me the option to just have breakfast and let it go.”

She opened her mouth.

“I’d think very carefully before you say anything else,” I said.

She closed it.

I looked at her for one more second. Long enough to make sure she understood that the woman standing across this table from her was not the same woman who had sat at a dinner three years ago and walked out of an alley without saying a word. That woman had been twenty-two and full of feelings she did not know what to do with. This woman had spent three years learning exactly what to do with them.

“Don’t mess with me, Lena,” I said.

I pulled my chair out and set my napkin on the table and said goodbye to Leo and nodded at Talia and touched Brooke’s shoulder as I passed her and walked off the terrace.

I was through the hotel lobby and outside in the clear Montauk morning before I took a full breath.

Brooke found me on the bluff path twenty minutes later.

She did not say anything immediately. She fell into step beside me, and we walked with the ocean below us and the tall grass on either side of the path moving in the wind off the water.

“You recorded it on purpose,” she said eventually. Not a question.

“She came to my lounger and started whispering,” I said. “Something felt wrong. I hit record.”

Brooke was quiet for a moment. “Three years ago you would not have done that.”

“No,” I said. “I wouldn’t have.”

We walked another thirty seconds.

“Hayes pulled her hand off your phone,” Brooke said.

“I know.”

“That’s interesting.”

“Don’t,” I said.

She held her hands up, and we kept walking.

I heard what happened on the terrace after I left from Leo, later, in the car on the way back to the city. He told it simply and without editorializing, which was its own kind of editorial.

After I left, Lena had tried to say something to Hayes. She had started a sentence that Leo could not fully remember, something that began with his name.

Hayes had looked at her for a moment.

Then he had picked up her coffee cup from where it had fallen on its side on the tablecloth, set it upright, and said, in the same even voice he used for everything, “You should pack. We’re leaving in an hour.”

Then he had walked off the terrace.

Lena had stood at the breakfast table alone.

Leo told me this and then said something about traffic on the expressway, and I agreed about the traffic, and I looked out the window at the highway moving past, and I thought about Hayes picking up that cup and setting it upright without a word and what that meant, and then I thought about something else instead.

Because thinking about what it meant was a direction I was not willing to go.