Goodbye To All That (19 page)

Jill contemplated leaving the can of soda behind, but her willpower failed her. Clasping its cold, damp surface, she rose from the table and followed her mother out of the room.

“And don’t you worry about Abbie’s bat mitzvah,” her mother added as they strode past a shelf stacked with four-packs of toilet paper en route to the door back into the store. “Your father and I will be fine. Just tell the folks at that fancy inn you booked that they’d better not try to cheat you.”

“Right.” As if anything in life—getting a fair price per plate or getting your parents back together—could be accomplished just by telling someone something.

Melissa sensed that the reason Jill was freaking out was because their parents’ marriage was falling apart. And Melissa couldn’t blame her sister, because she was freaking out, too. And she was doubly freaking out because Jill was the Bendel sibling who was supposed to put things back together, not fall apart herself.

If Jill couldn’t fix the rift between their parents, why couldn’t Doug? He was the oldest. The doctor. The hot-shot. Why couldn’t he just step up and get the job done?

Luc shuddered and groaned, and Melissa remembered to shudder and groan, too. She rarely had to fake it with him, but it wasn’t his fault that she was distracted by concern about her sister and fury with Big Irish Aidan. If she could give Luc the satisfaction of thinking he’d satisfied her, she’d do it. He was such a nice guy, after all, and so handsome, plus he wasn’t a lawyer. For that alone, she owed him a fake-O.

She still didn’t know if he was The One, if she was in love, if this thing was going to last. She felt more or less comfortable with him, but whenever she talked to him about buying a bigger apartment, he acted as if it was all her decision. Which it was, but that implied that he wasn’t anywhere near ready to discuss sharing an apartment with her. Plus, he didn’t have any money to chip in toward the exorbitant purchase prices Kathy the Realtor kept quoting her. He did get big tips, but nobody could afford a New York apartment—or even half an apartment, since Melissa would be paying for the other half—on tips.

Wasn’t the housing market supposed to be in a slump? Shouldn’t prices be plummeting? In Manhattan, plummeting prices meant a million dollars might buy you two baths instead of one and a half.

Luc groaned again, and Melissa sighed and gave her hips a helpful wiggle. Luc propped himself on his arms and smiled down at her, evidently quite pleased with himself. She managed to smile back at him, and reached up to brush a floppy lock of hair off his face. His hair was so impeccably styled, it looked great even when it was mussed from sex. He’d cut and shaped her hair to look good after sex, too—or at least he assured her it looked good after sex. She wasn’t in the habit of leaping out of bed and sprinting over to the mirror to check out her appearance immediately after.

“You hungry?” he asked as he rolled off her.

It occurred to her that he was in her home, which made her the hostess and therefore the person who should be offering food. Did his question mean he wanted to think of her home as his home, too? If so, why was he so passive whenever she talked about real estate?

She wasn’t hungry at all—she’d stayed late at the office, working until seven-thirty, and one of the other associates also working late had ordered too much Chinese, so Melissa had wound up consuming half a tub of leftover lo mein at her desk. “There’s some cheese in the fridge,” she offered Luc. “Cheddar—the kind you like, with the red wax.”

“Great.” He swung out of bed and crossed to the kitchen alcove at the opposite end of the room. Her vantage point gave her an excellent view of his broad, naked back, and she admired it in an objective way. He had a fine physique and an utterly sublime tush. She bet Aidan O’Leary’s tush wasn’t so sublime.

Christ. Why was she thinking about O’Leary? She ought to be thinking about Jill and the inn trying to rip her off. She ought to be thinking about her mother, drudging away for minimum wage at the kind of store where people bought stuff they didn’t need because they wanted to make use of some discount coupons they’d cut out of the newspaper. For crying out loud, Melissa ought to be thinking about the gorgeous, sexy, bare-ass man pulling a brick of cheddar cheese out of her fridge.

“So, guess who made an appointment for me to rescue her from her hair today,” he called over his gorgeous, sexy shoulder as, back still to her, he sliced the cheese into domino-size chunks and pared away the wax rind.

Eager to shove notions of O’Leary’s butt out of her head, she actually put some thought into guessing. “Someone from show-biz? Or politics?”

Luc shook his head. “Someone from Massachusetts.”

Jill? No, she would have told Melissa when she’d called her earlier that day. Their mother? What would she be doing with a two-hundred-fifty-dollar haircut when the only people who’d see her were those coupon-clutching bargain hunters?

“Your sister-in-law. Dr. Doug’s wife.”

“Brooke?” Why would she travel all the way to New York for a haircut? Surely she could spend just as much money, and a lot less time, patronizing a Newbury Street salon in Boston.

“We talked hair that weekend at your sister’s house,” Luc told her. “She asked for some suggestions, and I gave her a few ideas. I figured she’d just take them to her stylist and see what he could do. I didn’t expect her to make an appointment to travel to New York just to get a more dimensional coloring.”

How many stylists actually thought about dimensional coloring? Luc was one of the very few. For that reason alone, people might be willing to travel two hundred miles for the privilege of having him work on their hair.

Still, the notion of Brooke coming to New York for a hair appointment with Lucas Brondo of Nouvelle disconcerted Melissa. “Could you pour me a glass of wine while you’re up?” she asked.

“The white?” He pulled a green bottle from her fridge, removed the cork and filled the goblet that had been balanced upside-down on the drying rack beside the sink. He carried it and a plate of cheese and crackers to the bed, then hopped on beside her and handed her the glass. She thought briefly of cautioning him not to spill cracker crumbs onto the sheets but decided such a comment would make her seem shrewish and petty. The guy had brought her a glass of chardonnay, after all. And he’d just made love to her skillfully enough that she’d had no trouble convincingly faking an orgasm.

She sipped the cold, dry wine and settled back into the heap of pillows propped against her headboard. “So Brooke’s coming to New York?”

“Next Tuesday.”

“Funny that she didn’t call me, given that you and I are
 . . .
” She didn’t finish the sentence, because she wasn’t exactly sure what she and Luc were. “Not that Brooke and I are the closest of sisters-in-law,” she continued. “I always feel as if there’s a barrier separating us. She’s kind of aloof.”

Luc shrugged. Melissa wondered whether that meant he agreed, disagreed or had no opinion.

“She’s coming to New York. The least she could do is let me know,” Melissa continued, deciding after brief consideration that she was mildly pissed. Brooke didn’t merit becoming severely pissed over. “What are you going to do with her hair?”

“I’ll see what she wants,” he said, then popped a Wheat Thin topped with a slab of cheese into his mouth.

Melissa tried to figure out what she found so troubling about this. Luc worked on women, and a few men, all day long. He gave them what they wanted, just as he gave Melissa what she wanted. Melissa wasn’t jealous. She was pleased about his success. It meant he earned more, which in turn meant he might eventually want to go in on the purchase of an apartment with her, if their relationship was fated to last. It also meant that her family might not act so subtly disapproving about her being involved with a hair stylist—a beauty professional, a grooming expert, a tress
artiste
. His level of achievement would reflect well on her.

But still
 . . .
Brooke. Melissa had never felt wholly comfortable with her sister-in-law. She’d been in college when Doug had gotten married, and Brooke had considerately included her and Jill in her bridal party. But there was always that wall. That barrier. Brooke was so pretty and polite and polished and freaking
perfect
. Not only had she created a proper nuclear family by having two children, but she’d been efficient enough to have them both at the same time. And she’d chosen such chic, androgynous names for them. Mackenzie Bendel? Madison Bendel? That whole branch of the family acted as if they were super-rich WASPs, which, except for the Anglo-Saxon Protestant part, they were.

“Next Tuesday, huh,” Melissa said.

Luc eyed her quizzically. “What’s the problem?”

“No problem. It’s just that if she’s coming all the way to the city, she could at least give me a call and asked if I’m free for lunch, or a drink, or something. She’s my sister-in-law, for God’s sake.”

“Do you want me to have her call you when she’s in the chair? The coloring takes a while. She’s just going to be sitting around.”

Melissa shook her head. “If it’s not her own idea to call me, what’s the point? Anyway, I’ll probably be in court with Kiss-Me-I’m-Irish.”

Luc’s expression grew bemused, but he didn’t question her. She wondered whether that meant he respected her privacy when it came to her work or he just wasn’t interested. Either way, she was kind of glad he didn’t ask. She didn’t want to discuss Aidan O’Leary with him.

To be sure, she was hesitant to discuss her work with him at all. Partly because she was a lawyer and he was a tress
artiste
and talking about her career might emphasize the difference between them in educational level and professional stature—not that that difference mattered to her, not that it
should
matter, but she’d hate for him to feel inferior to her. And partly because
 . . .

She sipped some wine and turned to gaze at the window. Dots of light slipped into the room between the slats of the Venetian blinds, the reflections of headlights and streetlights and flashing red tower lights, warning low-flying airplanes of skyscrapers and antennas. Even in this residential Upper East Side neighborhood at nine p.m., the city was alive with lights.

She didn’t want to discuss her work with Luc because she’d been thinking about Aidan O’Leary while Luc had been making love to her. And that was more unnerving than her parents’ divorce or Jill’s anxiety on the phone that afternoon, or the price of real estate in Manhattan. Or Brooke’s New York City hair appointment.