More Than A Maybe (7 page)

Gradually, though, I feel a dark suspicion creeping over me — and I take a breath to help me give it voice.

“Okay,” I say, looking straight at Xavier. “Fine. So now I know what you do. But what about me? You never asked.”

His eyes widen a bit, and he gives a little pause before answering. “Well, I just assumed that since you were dancing exotically at a gentlemen’s club that you are an . . .
exotic dancer.
”

You just assumed.
I feel my arms fold in front of me. I can’t be sure, but I’m beginning to wonder if all the silences on this trip might be related to more than just the car. I wonder if it’s actually a lack of interest on Xavier’s part.
Maybe he thinks he knows enough about me
. It reminds me depressingly of growing up with my mother — the way she’d just
assume
that she knew the kind of person I was, how she just
assumed
what I was going to do with my future.

I can hear the irritation beginning to creep into my voice. “Is it really fair to
assume
that, though?” I ask. “That just because I was dancing tonight, that’s what I am? Just a dancer?”

Xavier taps a thumb against his chin. “Just a dancer?” he says. His face is calm; his voice carries the same quiet authority as when he’d first spoken to me at the club.

“Those are your words, Alice. Not mine,” he says, his voice growing hushed. “I have no contempt for you, nor anyone else at that club tonight. None whatsoever.”

His words give me a hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach. Even so, I’m not going down without a fight. “Maybe not,” I say, “but still, it’s not like you exactly approve, either. You said so yourself. ‘Not my cup of tea,’ you said.”

“And it’s true,” he says. “But don’t mistake my dislike of crowds for my dislike of women. I just have a preference for more . . . intimate settings.”

An intimate setting.
The way he says it sends a tingle through me. I find myself wondering for a moment just what that phrase might mean to a man like Xavier Black.

He takes a deep breath. “I didn’t see you as
just
a dancer tonight. Or
just
anything. I saw you as a dancer. If you truly see the other girls at that club as
just dancers,
you’re suggesting that they’re doing something silly, or stupid, or wrong. Is that how you see them? Or whoever took the time to teach you all those moves I saw tonight?”

“No,” I admit. “I
don’t
see them like that.” I think about that cellphone snap I took with the other girls. Just a few hours ago, we’d all been on the same team, ready to take on the world. Now I’m trying to dismiss what they do to make myself feel better about my failure tonight. It might be a totally different kind of dancing, but somehow I doubt that Ginger Rogers would approve of my attitude.

Still, any pricking of guilt is balanced by another realization, and I feel a wicked thrill shoot through me.
He
’d 
noticed my routine after all.
It made sense — certainly he’d had no trouble catching me when I took my tumble off the stage. He must have been paying more attention than I’d realized.

Xavier looks forward at the rushing gray blur of the oncoming highway . . . wherever we’re now going, we’re getting there awfully quickly. And then, in the next moment, he turns, and his gaze is suddenly locked directly with my own.

It’s like he’s communicating with my very soul.

“Tell me, then . . .” he says, his voice now sharp. “Who exactly are you?”

The question is unexpected — and it’s one I don’t have an answer to. It’s like a sudden pressure on my shoulders. Nobody has ever asked me that before . . . not my mother. Not Jayla.

Not even myself.

The tears are coming again, and now I’m not sure that I can hold them back.

“I . . . I don’t know,” I say.

Xavier says nothing, but somehow I sense his understanding. He moves his hand to the inside pocket of the coat around my shoulders. The back of his hand brushes lightly against me, and for a moment I can feel the soft touch of his skin. He produces a beautiful handkerchief of royal purple silk, and presses it into my palm.

“In that case,” he says, “tell me who you were. And perhaps a bit of who you would like to be. I will take you home.”

***

I open up to Xavier. I tell him about growing up under the constant demands of my mother, how she died. The medical school, the waitressing. I tell him about all of the fantasies in my Book; all those long nights huddled with the Goddesses on Turner Classic Movies. I tell him about Jayla, that first interview at Mirages . . . I even tell him about Kiki on the DVD and my living room practice with the broomstick. That makes him smile.

He says nothing, but this time I feel like his silence has a different purpose. He takes it all in, nodding from time to time. I have no idea why it should be so interesting to him . . . but it is. And then, when I’ve finally gotten it all off my chest and made generous use of his handkerchief, he speaks.

“So that’s who you were,” he says, opening his strong and elegant arms in a wide gesture. “So how about now? What will you
be?
”

It’s a question I’ve had since my mother’s death, but here in the car the answer finally comes to me. The words seem to crackle with danger, and I force them out of me before I have time to reconsider.

“I want to be beautiful.”

The sentence seems to suck the air from the car.

I find myself awaiting some response from Xavier — one of those cheerful, polite reassurances that men always keep up their sleeves for moments like these:

Oh, I think you’re very attractive!

You don’t have anything to worry about!

You just need to have a little more confidence!

But he doesn’t say anything — not for a long time. When he finally replies, all he has for me is a single word.

“Why?”

It’s another question with no easy answer. But even if it isn’t easy to put into words, I want Xavier to understand. I
need
him to understand.

I feel a tingle of gooseflesh; little hairs begin to raise along the back of my neck. My breathing quickens involuntarily as the words tumble out:

“Because I need beauty, Xavier. I need to see it all around me — in the mirror in the morning and everywhere else. I need to wake up and just know when I do that every new day will be packed full of wonderful things. Love. Energy.
Excitement.
I want to have
fun,
Xavier, days and weeks of actual jaw-dropping fun. I want fascinating friends, and delicious food, and back-to-back months of impossible sunsets. And when I get there, I want people to notice me. Look at me. Take one glance and know why I should be there. They’ll see me and they’ll whisper:
She’s right where she belongs.
”

Saying those words aloud feels like a cleansing. I’m breathing hard, my heart is racing, but I feel incredibly light, weightless,
reborn.
Whatever I’d been forced to keep inside is out of me now. I’ve just written the manifesto of my future. A declaration of independence from my past.

I actually know what I want.

And then I find myself wondering how it sounds.
Fantastic? Ridiculous?

I look at Xavier, half-expecting him to erupt in laughter.

He doesn’t. He just stares at me with those eyes of his for a long, long time. He’s thinking, hard. About what, I can’t be certain.

At last he speaks. “We’ve arrived.”

“What?”

“Your apartment,” he says, pointing out the window. “This is your building, correct?”

I hadn’t even noticed. The car has indeed stopped — it’s somehow parked itself directly across the street from my building.

“Oh,” I say, trying to steady my breathing. “Right.”

I unfasten my seat belt and make to remove Xavier’s coat from my shoulders.

He stops me. “Keep it for tonight. I have others.”

“Are you sure?” I ask.

“Absolutely. Keep it safe for me, until you see me again. And I
will
be seeing you again,” he says. He speaks the words as if the decision has already been made. The thought that I’ll actually be seeing Xavier again fills me with a glow of joy.

He takes his phone from his pocket — the same exotic-looking black rectangle I’d seen earlier at the club. “I’ll need your number, of course.”

I groan. “But I can’t get yours. My phone’s still back at Mirages.”

“Don’t worry,” he says. “I’ll call once you get it back.”

I tell him my number. He taps it into the phone, smiling at the look of curiosity on my face.

“Nice phone. Another top-secret Xavier prototype?” I ask.

He laughs. “Is it that obvious? It’s another little mystery, yes — but one I may unravel for you in the near future. But as for right now, I need one more thing.”

“What’s that?”

“A name.”

I frown. “You know my name.”

A straggly bit of my hair’s fallen into my eyes again. Xavier reaches forward, brushing it aside with his fingertips.

“I know two of your names, actually. I don’t know which one you prefer, however.”

I take a deep breath. “Veronica Kane,” I say. “Call me Veronica.”

Xavier gives me a solemn smile as he enters the letters into his phone.

“Very well. Goodnight, Veronica.”

I open the door and step out into the night, the click-clack of my heels rapping a confident beat against the concrete. I want to look back at Xavier, so very much . . . but I force myself not to. I walk straight toward my building, holding out as long as I possibly can.

When I finally turn around and look behind me, Xavier’s car is gone.

“You have GOT to be kidding me.”

Jayla stares at me with her mouth open, a blend of shock and disbelief plastered across her face. She’s been holding her salad fork in the air for a good two minutes now, a lonesome crouton balanced precariously on the end. She simply hasn’t found a good time to put it in her mouth.

We’re sitting at a cozy corner table together at an Olive Garden near my apartment. I’d checked my Gmail on our sputtering old Dell PC last night to find six frantic emails from Jayla, all wanting to know just where the hell I’d disappeared to. I’d let her know I was fine, and she’d set up an early lunch the next day so she could give me back my gym bag and cellphone.

To tell the truth, I’d been pretty worried about facing her . . . I was half-terrified that she’d be furious at me for disappearing from Mirages without saying anything.

It turns out I have nothing to worry about, though, and I learn again just how great of a person Jayla really is. She’d been all smiles and big hugs when she’d first seen me . . . and better still, she’d told me that she totally understood. Stagefright is a pretty common occurrence, it seems, especially with the amateur dancers.

“Don’t worry about it. Nobody’s even mad or anything,” she’d told me. “Billy said to tell you that it’s all part of the fun. Said you’re welcome to try again anytime.”

Not likely,
I’d thought. I’d kept it to myself, though. Instead, I’d changed the topic to one much more pressing on my mind: Xavier. I’d told Jayla about my adventure in the alley, how he’d offered me his coat. I’d even let a few choice details slip about the adventure in his car, once Jayla had been sworn to secrecy — how I’d almost had a heart attack when Xavier had taken his hands off the wheel.

And that’s why she’s now completely frozen. It’s a new experience for me — my stories don’t usually have that effect on people. I decide to attempt to break the silence.

“You okay?” I ask, fluttering my fingers in Jayla’s face, trying to revive her from her catatonic state. I flash her a grin. The crouton takes the opportunity to fall off the end of her fork, clattering against the dish holding her half-eaten salad.

She finally finds her voice. “What? That’s . . . that’s
it?
You sure there was
nothing
after that? You swear? You better not be holding out on me, bitch.”

I smile at that as I shake my head. “Nope. Really, that’s all there is.
‘The failed stripper stumbled through the door of her apartment and woke up the next day on her sofa, still wearing her makeup’.
The End.”

Jayla gives a sympathetic laugh. “That sucks . . . but
The End?
No way. Trust me . . . it’s definitely
To Be Continued.
No way this is over,” she says, turning her attention back to her salad. She starts chasing the fallen crouton around her plate with little furtive stabs of her fork; I’m detecting some serious jealousy in her body language. “And this Xavier guy . . . what kind of name is that, anyway? He sounds like . . . like . . . ” She makes a vague gesture with her hand. “I dunno. Sounds fake to me. Like maybe he’s got a whole drawer full of passports, and only
one
of them says Xavier.”

“That’s what I thought, too,” I say. “So I Googled him.”

“Of course you did.”

“And . . . anyway, yeah,” I say, trying to recall all of the details. “He is apparently a real, actual guy. Xavier Black. Did you ever hear of a company called BlueHorizon?”

Jayla nods, slowly. “Yeah . . . I think so. Sounds kinda familiar — some kind of Internet startup thing?”

“Kind of,” I say. “More than just Internet, though. They’ve done engineering stuff, social networks, aerospace. I read an article that called BlueHorizon a kind of — how did they put it? ‘Silicon Valley in a box’. Xavier founded it together with his brother. He’d come up with these new inventions and business ideas, and then make these little teams to bring the best ones to market. His brother ran the business side of things. It was looking like the next Google for a while, but . . . ”

“But not now?” she asks.

I take a sip of my iced tea and shrug. “It gets kind of murky, but there was some kind of falling out with his brother.” I remember how Xavier had acted in the car — what he’d said about not being able to trust anyone in Silicon Valley. “He left just before BlueHorizon had their IPO a few years ago. Nobody’s really sure of all the details, but he walked away with something like $1.2 billion.”

Jayla’s eyes pop open. She just shakes her head. “The dumb luck on this bitch right here! Falls butt-first into a lap of luxury. I swear to you, there is no justice in this world. Where’s
my
Xavier, huh? Tell me again how you two met . . . ?”