Beautiful Stranger (20 page)

Because it wasn’t nice to leave, that’s why. God. Sometimes she just got so sick of being
nice
.

“You’re frowning,” Logan pointed out.

“Oh!” Anna remembered herself. “I just couldn’t remember the last time I was here. And it’s bugging me. Sorry, James.”

“No big deal,” he assured here. “You’re here now.”

Her stomach grumbled. Logan had said something about eating. But here they were at the Met, after hours, without a croissant in sight. They turned down another hall. James pushed open wide double doors.

“The Hart Room,” he announced triumphantly.

Anna stepped in and gasped. The room was furnished with priceless seventeenth-century antiques. And she recognized them. Because they had once belonged to one of her great-great … well, she didn’t exactly know how many greats—a
lot
—maternal grandmother, Mary Elizabeth Hart, who had hailed from Ipswich, Massachusetts.

“I remember,” Anna breathed, looking around at the priceless antiques. She’d been little—eight years old, maybe? The Harts had donated the furnishings to the Met, but a lawsuit over a complicated will meant the furniture had sat in storage for years and years, being put on display shortly after the time Anna had seen it in the first place.

They had been studying the Founding Fathers in school. Her first-grade class had taken a special tour of the furniture—arranged by Anna’s mother—which the public had not been allowed to see. The furniture looked like something from a princess’s house. All the girls ooed and aahed over it. The boys, Anna remembered, had been bored to death.

They had all been told not to touch
anything
. But thinking that she was somehow entitled to enjoy the furniture that had belonged to her family more than the other children, Anna had climbed onto the ash-and-pine four-poster bed from which red velvet panels and priceless tapestries were hanging.

“Anna Percy, get off that bed this instant!” her teacher, Ms. Duke, had bellowed.

Anna remembered how humiliated she’d felt. Not that it was such a big deal. But she was always such a good girl that to be publicly reprimanded had made her cry in front of her entire class. Which had only humiliated her even more. One did not show emotion in public. That was Jane Percy’s motto. At age eight, Anna had already blown it.

And now here she stood, among that same furniture once more. The carved cupboard of pine and walnut, lined with blue-and-white tin-glazed earthenware, the white oak baby cradle.

“I’ll just leave you two alone,” James whispered. He stepped out the door and closed it behind him.

“The site of your grand humiliation.” Logan pointed to the four-poster bed.

“I can’t believe you remember that.” Anna shook her head in disbelief. “How in the world did you get James to let us in here?”

“My aunt Clarissa was in charge of the Met’s fund-raiser this year. Plus my uncle Chester donated some of the money for a new school on James’s reservation upstate.”

“So you’re just all-around connected,” Anna teased.

“It has its perks,” Logan admitted sheepishly. “I feel better when the money goes to good things. Anyway, this room isn’t even open to the public yet. I seem to recall that you mentioned an appetite. Follow me.”

He led her around the bed to a tarp covered by a red blanket. On it were an old-fashioned picnic basket and champagne chilling in an ice bucket.

How had he done this? When had he organized this? Who had he had to bribe to do this?

Anna grinned. “This is just … incredible of you.”

They sat, and Logan opened the champagne. “I couldn’t decide if it was a great idea or just crazy,” he confessed. He poured champagne into two crystal flutes. “I was hoping it would remind you of how far you’ve come since that day. How happy you are, on the verge of starting Yale, all that.”

He handed her a baguette glazed in Brie. She bit into it, feeling guilty. Now
there
was an emotion with which she was familiar. Yes, Ben had dumped her. But here she was with a handsome, brilliant, thoughtful guy she’d known since she was a kid, one who’d gone to a lot of effort just to put a smile on her face. She was on the verge of starting Yale, her lifelong dream. So how could she not be happy? How was it possible that she felt so …

She put down the baguette. “I am an ungrateful, horrible person.”

“Wow, I was just thinking that myself,” Logan teased.

“No, seriously. You are terrific. This—this is terrific. I have everything. So I can’t figure out why I feel so bad.” That wasn’t honest. She should be honest. “Actually, I can.”

He took a sip of champagne. “Do tell.”

“I—I hate that I’m even saying this. I had a miserable time at the Yale Club.”

Logan didn’t respond right away. He just chewed a bite of sandwich and washed it down with some champagne. “How come?” His tone was completely nonjudgmental, which Anna appreciated.

“I don’t know. That’s what I mean. It’s what I’ve always wanted and now that I have it, I don’t know if it’s what I want at all. …”

Damn. Had she really just said that out loud?

Logan didn’t look shocked, though. He just waited, patiently, for her to elaborate.

“I went to L.A. to change my life,” she explained, thinking this was an intimate thing to share with a guy she didn’t know all that well. On the other hand, she’d known him longer than any of her Los Angeles friends, including Ben. “I thought I could—believe me, I know how ridiculous this sounds—reinvent myself. And then on the way there—on the plane—before I even set foot on West Coast turf, I met a guy. Ben.”

Logan nodded. “The guy you just broke up with.”

“Are you bored to death? Am I totally self-involved? I really should just shut up now.” She winced, afraid she had overshared.

He reached for her hand. “I really do want to hear this.”

Anna bit her lower lip pensively. “So … I feel like everything I’ve done since I went there has to do with him. That I’ve been … defined by him, somehow, which was not my plan at all.” Her eyes met Logan’s. “You know that expression, Wherever you go, there you are?”

“Yep.” He reached for a grape and popped it into his mouth.

“I think I was the same me in L.A., just me with a boyfriend,” she admitted. “I have had some adventures, but honestly? I don’t feel like I’ve changed my life much at all. In L.A. I’m still the girl from New York. And here in New York … I’m still longing for something else. But I don’t even know what that something else is.”

She paused to take a breath, then plunged on. “I don’t know why I told you all that. I’m sorry.”

Anna realized that Logan was smiling at her. Why?

“I can’t think of one thing I said that was remotely amusing.” She sighed. “I’m surprised you’re not asleep in the big canopy bed.”

“I’m smiling because life is amazing and bizarre and crazy,” he mused. “All the feelings you had at the Yale thing? That’s how I felt at mine.”

“You’re kidding,” Anna insisted.

He took her hand with one of his, then held up his other palm. “I swear. I didn’t want to say anything, because I figured you were all psyched about your experience, so why put a damper on it?”

“Did you meet your future roommate?” she asked eagerly. “Was he—?”

“He smokes a pipe. He races sailboats. His other hobby is foxhunting. He name-dropped royal this and royal that. And I know the precise location of his family’s three homes. Does that explain it?”

“Too well. My roommate was an entirely different kind of eccentric. It wasn’t just her, though. It was the whole atmosphere. There’s a creative writing workshop, and I guess some incoming students were handpicked for it. Evidently I wasn’t even considered. And do you know how I felt? Crushed. Absolutely crushed. Which is ridiculous, I know. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t feel it.” She drained her champagne.

Logan took a container of fresh strawberries drizzled in dark chocolate from the hamper and set it on the blanket. “There’s also the legacy issue for a lot of them.” He stopped himself. “A lot of us.”

Anna nodded and popped a raspberry into her mouth. “Me included. My father went to Yale. So did my grandfather.”

“And my dad went to Harvard, undergraduate and business school. Then he took over the hotel chain and built it into the monster it is today.” Logan sighed. “I can’t even blame my parents for all these second thoughts I’m having. They’re fine with me not going into the family business. They could have asked me to go to the Cornell School of Hotel Management.”

“And miss Harvard? Never. Which makes us equally insane,” Anna surmised. “And now I’ll be up all night, tossing and turning, trying to make sense of out it.”

“Overthinking everything. You’re a female me.” He regarded her thoughtfully. “This guy you talked about, Ben. Do you love him?”

Once again, Anna was struck by how awkward it was to discuss this with Logan. And yet, in another way it just felt right. Sitting amidst her ancestors’ antique furniture, in one of the world’s most celebrated museums late at night, pouring her heart out to a long-lost childhood friend somehow couldn’t be any stranger than her surroundings.

“I wish I knew, Logan.” She exhaled. It hurt to even think about Ben. “I guess it doesn’t matter anymore, though. He definitely doesn’t love me.”

Logan looked at her, sympathy etched into his eyes. “It’s better to have loved and lost … all that.”

“Sometimes it doesn’t feel that way.”

“Yeah.” He leaned over and brushed some stray wisps of blond hair from her cheek. “If it makes you feel any better, I got my heart broken last year, too.”

Anna smiled sadly. “It doesn’t. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone as nice as you.”

“And on that note …” He gulped down the last of his champagne. “How about if we go down to SoHo? I know this great little blues club on Thompson Street. The musicians are killer. They show old movies on the walls and serve a French pastry version of dim sum.”

“We just ate,” Anna pointed out, putting the leftover fruit back in the picnic basket.

“We hardly ate anything. Besides, who cares?”

He was right. Who cared? When they’d packed up everything from their picnic, Logan tugged on the door so they could leave. It didn’t budge. He put the picnic basket down and tried again.

“It’s either stuck or locked.” He took out his Razr but couldn’t get service here in the bowels of the museum. Anna tried her cell. Same result.

“The guards must make rounds,” Anna guessed, trying to think logically. “So one of them will come find us.”

“Eventually,” Logan said ominously.

“James knows we’re down here. He’s not going to just leave us here.”

“Maybe he thinks he’s doing us a favor.” He scratched his chin. “So how about … we take advantage of it.”

For a moment, Anna thought Logan meant they should tear off their clothes and have sex. And while she liked him,
a lot
, she was still stinging too much from Ben to do anything even remotely close to something like that.

“All clothing will stay on, Miss Percy,” he joked, as if reading her mind. “I’ve got an even better idea.”

“Better than sex?” she teased. “Guys never say that.”

He leaned close and pointed to the bed. “Let’s get in it. There’s no teacher here this time to bust you.”

“What if it hurts the bed or something?” Anna asked, her brow furrowed.

“Your great-great-great-whatever slept in that bed every night. I don’t think you and me lying on it will suddenly destroy it.”

She eyed the bed, then turned to him with a smile. “Let’s do it.”

She climbed in first, and he followed right after her. She lay on her back, legs splayed, just as she remembered doing all those years ago.

“Fun?” Logan asked.

“Definitely.” She rolled over and looked down at him. “Thanks for this.” Then she leaned over and kissed him softly on the lips. The next thing she knew his arms were around her, and the kiss turned into something amazing and passionate that she hadn’t expected or anticipated. But then, maybe that’s what made it so special.

Vermilion Dreadlocks and a Nose Stud

I
Climb the Stairs
.

Anna read the name of the play off the playbill she’d been handed by a black-clad usher with vermilion dreadlocks and a nose stud. Finding seats was easier than she’d expected—they were in the Westsider Theater, a ninety-nine-seat house on West Twenty-eighth Street in Chelsea, where there just weren’t that many seats to begin with. The stage had no curtain, just two sets of wooden stairs leading to a white-painted wooden platform. Other than that, the playing area was just the bare floorboards.

“Honestly, I never thought Tabitha could write worth shit,” Cyn confided. “But I promised her I’d come to this, so whatever.” She fished in her purse for a pack of cinnamon Trident sugarless gum. “You want?”

Anna declined. Tabitha Matheson had been a year ahead of them at Trinity, and had gone on to the creative writing program at Columbia despite Cyn’s doubts about her talent. Her mother was an editor at the
New York Review of Books
and her father was a New York University literature professor and a poet who’d twice been a winner of the Walt Whitman Award for Achievement in American Poetry. His teaching was a sinecure, and he spent all his time on poetry. Yet Tabitha lived in an Upper East Side town house even more lavish than where Anna had grown up, since Professor Matheson’s great-grandfather had been a founding partner of Matheson and Matheson, the venerable Wall Street law firm.

As the theater filled with lots of young Brooklyn artist types and parents of actors, Anna tried to read the program, but she kept thinking about the Yale party and her date with Logan last night. The date was like the best dream—they’d lain in the ancient bed for what felt like hours, revealing the truth about what they’d thought of each other way back when. It turned out that Logan had been intimidated by Anna, because she was the only person in their third-grade class who read better than he did. She was astonished to recall that she’d thought exactly the same thing about him. By the time James came to unlock the door, with a wink that made Anna suspect he really
had
locked them in on purpose, she knew that whatever happened, she would feel close to Logan for a long time—even if they parted ways and didn’t see each other again for years, the way they hadn’t all this time. Shared history meant a lot.