Blonde Ambition (11 page)
“Come on, Adam!” Sam shouted anyway, getting into it.
Dee stood up and pumped the air. “Woo-hoo! Go, Adam!”
God. School spirit. It was enough to make Cammie reach for her dark glasses and pretend she didn’t know them.
The game restarted. A Beverly Hills player inbounded the pass to Adam, who dribbled three times and then fired a bounce pass to a forward in the right corner. Then Adam streaked across the court without the ball as the Van Nuys crowd counted down.
“FIVE! FOUR! THREE! TWO!”
At the two-second mark the forward heaved the ball back to Adam, who took it at the top of the key, just outside the three-point circle. He pump-faked …
“ONE!”
And let fly with a rainbow of a jump shot.
“Go in the basket!” Sam screamed as the buzzer sounded, ending the game.
The ball swished home. There was a huge roar from the Beverly Hills fans as Adam’s teammates mobbed him. The Van Nuys fans, though, were stunned into silence, unable to believe that they’d just been beaten on a three-point basket launched only moments before time ran out. As the Van Nuys coach dashed onto the court to berate the impassive officials, Cammie almost smiled. It was too funny. People really cared about this shit.
Out on the court, Adam’s grin was high voltage as he high-fived his teammates. Cute smile. In fact, the whole package was cute. But of course, he wasn’t Cammie’s type. The celebration wound down; Adam and his teammates ran back toward their dressing room, but not without acknowledging their cheering fans. Adam waved toward Cammie and Sam. Cammie watched Sam wave back. Big time. Which left Cammie with two big questions.
What was going on between them? And if there
was
something going on, why hadn’t Sam talked to her about it?
The post-game party was at the home of Kyle Bauersachs, one of the substitutes on the Beverly Hills team. However, his father was the most successful personal injury lawyer in southern California, which was why the family owned one fantastic mansion off Bellagio Road in Bel Air and another oceanfront one in Malibu. Mr. and Mrs. Bauersachs permitted Kyle to host one post-game party per year, at the mansion of his choice.
Kyle had chosen Malibu this year. To ensure a good crowd at the Van Nuys game, he’d passed the word that any student who brought his or her ticket stub could come to the after party. Some enterprising kid had printed fake stubs and sold them for five bucks a pop, which accounted for why guys pushing a decade older than high-school were hitting on the high school girls. And why so many cars were trying to get over Topanga Canyon that there was a traffic jam at the turn onto Pacific Coast Highway.
Cammie somehow got separated from her friends soon after they came through the front door, so she strolled around on her own. The house was ultra-modern—in fact, it looked like it had been lifted wholesale from the set of
A Clockwork Orange.
All stark furniture, right angles, white walls, and vaguely phallic-looking sculptures, the main living room was a seething, writhing mass of students and friends celebrating the unlikely victory.
Cammie saw Kyle coming out of the kitchen, a case of Belgian beer in his arms. He was still in his basketball jersey, since he hadn’t gotten into the game. His eyes lit up when he realized that Cammie Sheppard had actually showed up at his party. “Cammie! Hi!”
She waggled two fingers at him. “Nice party, Kyle.” “Hey, thanks. Catch me later, let’s dance!”
She nodded, thinking, Over my cold, dead body, you loser.
She wandered into a game room, filled with pool tables, Foosball sets, and a giant plasma television that was showing music videos. To her left was a wide corridor that evidently led to a suite of bedrooms. A guy Cammie had never seen before leaned against the door frame and scanned her from head to foot and then back up again. At least twenty-five, and he already had a beer belly.
Ex–USC frat boy, Cammie thought automatically. “What’s your name, sweetheart?” The frat boy was saying hello.
“I don’t have one,” Cammie said, dripping vocal icicles. “When’d you graduate from the University of Southern California?”
“Two years ago,” Frat Boy 25 said. “I’m Lenny. Kyle’s cousin. Mmm, you look good enough to eat. You been down to the hot tub, clothing
very
optional?”
“Gee, I haven’t, Lenny. Not yet, anyway. You heading that way?”
“Oh yeah.” Frat Boy 25 was practically drooling. “Well, when you get there, Lenny, go fuck yourself. That is, if you can unearth any equipment below that gut of yours.” Cammie pivoted and walked away, wondering why so many guys were such complete assholes and whether their mothers raised them to be that way.
Cammie toured the living room—wall-to-wall dancing—went out to the deck—drugs, drinks, and various stages of foreplay—and headed down to the beachfront patio—all of the above. But she was alone. Everyone seemed to be having a fabulous time but her. She slipped off her shoes and let them dangle from her fingers as she left the patio and walked through the lush sand all the way to the ocean’s edge, where the raucous sound of the party mixed with the steady
whooshwhoosh
of the incoming swells.
There she stood at the high-water line and stared morosely at the breakers. What was wrong with her lately? She just couldn’t seem to get into a party mood. Even flirting was starting to feel like wasted energy.
Then Cammie saw movement in the moonlight about thirty yards down the beach. Adam Flood, in jeans and a sweatshirt. He was alone, too. Cammie watched as he skipped a flat stone against an incoming wave—the stone bounced five times before sinking into the water. Then he fished for something in his pocket, and Cammie heard the sound of a set of keys being extracted. Only then did he look up and see Cammie smiling at him.
“Leaving?” she asked. “You’ve come the wrong way. Valet’s up by the Pacific Coast Highway.”
Adam shrugged. “Don’t seem to be in a party animal frame of mind.”
“Me neither.”
Adam laughed. “Color me shocked. I thought ‘Party Animal’ was Cammie Sheppard’s middle name.”
“Maybe you don’t know me as well as you thought you did.” Cammie’s voice was almost a purr as she did an instant revise of her thought processes. Maybe flirting was fun after all. She fell in next to him, and they sauntered back toward the house. “You played a great game tonight.”
He looked amused. “As compared to—?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, have you ever been to a basketball game before?”
“Not recently,” Cammie admitted.
“Not ever,” Adam corrected.
“If you want to be technical about it. But I had fun.” About halfway back to the house they reached an array of cushioned wooden benches that belonged to Kyle’s family. Cammie sat and patted the seat next to her. But Adam rested on the next bench instead. He rubbed the back of his neck. “Man, I’m whipped.”
She was about to offer to massage it for him, but something stopped her. “That last basket was fantastic.”
“Thanks. You can’t imagine how many times I’ve taken that shot in practice and missed.” His smile crinkled the corners of his eyes. For the third time in twelve hours Cammie noticed how cute he was.
“Fifteen? Fifty?” Cammie asked, though she knew Adam’s question was rhetorical. Then she remembered something that had been utterly unimportant in her life until this very instant. “You know, my dad has a skybox at the Staples Center. I’m sure he could hook you up if you wanted to see the Lakers sometime.”
Cammie expected Adam to jump at the chance, but he didn’t. “You know, I’d rather play on that court when no one else is around than be in the stands for game seven of the play-offs,” Adam said softly. “Ghosts.”
“Ghosts?”
“Yeah. If you listen hard enough. Magic, Jerry West, Kareem. Ghosts.”
Cammie had lived in Los Angeles long enough to know that Adam was referring to Los Angeles Lakers greats of the past. “Well, if you ever change your mind …”
“Thanks.” He stood but hesitated. “Did you want to go back in, or—?”
“Hang out with me a few more minutes, okay?” she pleaded. Then she took a shot in the dark. “I know you want to go find Sam, but … I thought we could talk.”
He sat again, albeit reluctantly. And he didn’t say anything about Sam, which Cammie interpreted as a good sign. She stretched, showing off her diamond-and-ruby navel ring plus the gold belly chain that sat above the top of her jeans. She saw Adam notice it. How could he not? He was hetero and breathing, wasn’t he?
“Can I ask you a question?”
“Shoot.”
“Well, I know that you and Anna … that is, I heard how badly she treated you.”
Adam shook his head. “I don’t want to talk about that.”
“I understand. It’s just … Sam is my best friend,” Cammie said, oozing sincerity. “And I really don’t want to see her hurt.”
“Sam? We’re not … We’re buds.”
Interesting. Because Cammie had been convinced that Sam wanted a lot more from Adam than friendship. Well, it served Sam right for spending her time with that bitch Anna instead of with Cammie. Cammie would have figured out Adam’s only-friendship vibe a long time ago and warned Sam that Adam wasn’t into her.
Adam checked his watch. “Hey, I really have to go, Cammie.”
“Never hurry, never worry.” Cammie smiled, quoting her favorite childhood book,
Charlotte’s Web.
Adam grinned. “You’re an E. B. White fan?”
“That book always reminds me of my mom,” Cammie said, standing up and stretching luxuriantly. “Can I walk you back to the house?”
Adam stood, too. “Sure.”
Out of the corner of her eye Cammie spotted Sam heading toward them. “But first,” Cammie said, “there’s something I’ve wanted to do ever since that final buzzer went off.”
“Yeah?” Adam asked.
Making sure that she and Adam were positioned so that Sam had the best-possible sight line, Cammie wrapped her arms around Adam’s neck. Then she gave him the softest, most promising of kisses. “Good job,” she whispered in his ear.
“Uh … thanks,” he said, edging slightly away from her.
Understandable. He’d probably never been hit on by a girl with as powerful a mojo as Cammie’s. But the truly, deeply weird thing was, at that moment, her focus wasn’t on showing Sam who was boss. She wasn’t even thinking about how much Adam had to want her after that. Because the most bizarre thing had just happened:
she
was the one, not him, whose breath caught in her throat. Because all she wanted to do was to go on kissing Adam Flood.
A
nna twisted her key into the front door of her father’s house and disarmed the alarm before it could send a silent alert to the Beverly Hills police department. Once the alarm was off, she slipped out of her black velvet Chanel ballet flats and dangled them on two fingers as she headed upstairs to her room. Before she undressed for the night, she remembered that she’d turned off her cell phone at Dublin’s, so she powered it back up. It hadn’t been activated for thirty seconds before it chimed.
“Hello?”
“Anna? Are you okay?” Ben. Sounding panicked. “Yes, I’m fine,” she assured him.
“I called you four times,” Ben said. “Once you didn’t answer, the other times your phone was off. You scared the piss out of me.”
“I was working,” Anna said as she sat on her bed. “Clark Sheppard took me to the set of
Hermosa Beach.
”
“And kept you until midnight?” Ben asked. “What a schmuck.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t pick up your calls.” She wondered what she should tell Ben about Danny Bluestone. If anything.
“As long as you’re all right. So, listen. Didn’t you mention that tomorrow was some kind of city education conference, so there’s no school?”
She had.
“So I thought we could spend the day together. Maybe head down to the South Bay beaches or up to Carpinteria—the weather’s supposed to be great. And then tomorrow night we can have dinner at my house. My parents want to meet you. If you can deal, that is. So, you up for it?”
“Sure,” Anna said. Ben’s idea really did sound like fun, except perhaps for the dinner-with-the-parents part. But she couldn’t very well tell her boyfriend that she didn’t want to meet his folks. And Clark hadn’t said anything to her about having to work that day.
“Great. I’ll pick you up early, say nine?”
She agreed, they said good night, and then Anna hung up. For a moment she sat on her bed, staring at nothing, convincing herself that she really
did
want to spend the day with Ben. It would be fantastic. All those romantic feelings for him would still be there. She was sure of it.
She picked up her messages. Ben. Ben
again.
And then her father, calling from Arizona.
“Hey, sorry I missed you. I just wanted to tell you that your sister’s doing fine at White Mountains. She actually hugged me before I left—that’s gotta be some kind of progress. I spoke with one of the counselors there, who’s pretty optimistic. So listen, I’ve decided to take a few more days off, maybe a week. Thought I’d drive over to Taos in New Mexico and get in some skiing. Thought you might want to join me. Call my cell and let me know. Hope you’re not too lonely rattling around in that house. Make sure Django takes care of whatever you need, honey. Ciao.”
He clicked off. So did Anna. She pulled off her clothes and padded into the bathroom to shower, thinking that it was typical of her father to suggest that she join him, as if school and other commitments simply didn’t exist.
After her shower she slipped into the antique lace nightgown her grandmother had given her on her last birthday, got into bed, and turned out the light. Moonlight streamed in through the window; arched lines of light and dark played over her paisley quilt. She lay there, gazing at them, wondering at her own behavior.
Beware of what you wish for.
Anna had wished for Ben. Her wish had come true. Yet only a few days later she’d found herself with Danny, as if she didn’t have a boyfriend at all. And what about Django? She liked him. A lot.
Anna knew what her best friend in Manhattan, Cyn, would say. Cyn would tell her in that all-knowing way she had that flirting meant she wasn’t ready to be tied down. But what if it simply meant Anna was fickle? Or that she was afraid of a real relationship? The last thing she wanted was to be like Cammie Sheppard, who reveled in flexing her sex appeal simply because she could. It was so … so … tawdry.