Opening Act (24 page)

Another layer of doom seemed to drop over him like a sheet. “I'm not?”

“Of course not! There are going to be plenty of hotels when we're on the road. This is our last chance to relax in the comfort of an actual home.”

He blinked. “
Whose
home?”

She tweaked his arm. “Whose do you think?
Daddy's.
”

“He's got a place there?” he asked, but he was thinking,
Of course he does
.

“I've told you before, Daddy's bicoastal. He's got a beautiful apartment on the Upper East Side, overlooking Central Park. You'll
love
it.”

“Oh. Okay.” He sat back. He was feeling strangely sorry he'd asked. It was like she'd told him,
We have the most beautiful cage for you to stay in. Everything you could ask for; you won't even notice the bars.
Testing this out, he said, “It sounds pretty convenient. I'm guessing I can just jump on the subway and head downtown. Kinda hoping to take in some of the clubs while I'm there.”

“Oh, don't worry about that. We can use one of Daddy's cars for wherever we want to go. Also, he and I have put together a pretty tight schedule for you, parties and openings and things like that. We don't want to waste a minute of your time there. It's all about exposure, exposure, exposure.” She glanced at her watch. “Almost boarding time. I wonder what's delaying my upgrade request…”

She got up and went to harangue the gate agent. Shay stayed behind, alone in the crowd, and thought,
This may be my last chance. If I get up now and leave, I can be out of here before she even notices I'm gone. I can grab a bus and go somewhere new and start over and no one will ever find me…

But of course he didn't move a muscle, except to restlessly shift in his seat, until the time came to board the plane.

Loni shouldn't have cared whether he was in town or not. She'd always known he was leaving anyway, so what did it matter
when
he left? But when she heard that he'd flown to New York the day after she'd made love with him—flown off with the woman he was apparently some kind of item with to shoot a magazine spread for some trendy magazine—she felt as if she'd been punched in the stomach. Maybe it was worse that a photographer had snapped a photo of them as they entered the airport and she got to see what this Pernita looked like. It was just as she'd feared. Pernita Hasque might've been sculpted out of soap and sprayed with sex. Women like that just weren't
natural
. Not that men ever cared.

She lay on her bed and just concentrated on breathing. In…out. In…out. It wasn't difficult, but if she didn't pay attention, she might…just…stop.

She examined her mental state with characteristic ruthlessness and realized that deep down she'd been kind of hoping that Shay would make some dramatic reentry into her life—come back and explain himself and make everything all right. Ask for a second chance, and…well, get one.

Schoolgirl, soap-opera stuff. The kind of stupidity she actually
mocked
in other people.

And here she was, lying limp on her bed because…because her life was not a fairy tale. Because she was an adult who made mistakes and didn't want to accept the consequences. Didn't want to do the hard work of getting back on her feet and making her life what she wished it to be.

But…that was the kicker. She'd thought with Shay she
had
been making those hard decisions. She
had
been in control. She hadn't thrown herself at him; he'd pursued
her
. And even then, he'd had to earn her respect. She knew now that it was all an act—him pretending to listen to her as she went on about poetry, about art, about creativity. He was just a practiced, polished seducer who instantly sussed out the way into any woman's heart. Or, rather, her pants. Better women than she had fallen prey to guys like that.

And yet…and yet…even now she couldn't let go of the idea that he
hadn't
been pretending. Admittedly she was young, but she wasn't entirely inexperienced. And she'd been completely convinced by everything he'd said to her, by the look in his eyes, the look
behind
his eyes. They'd engaged each other, met each other on a higher level. They'd
connected
.

Well, so what if they had? Tonight he'd gotten on a plane with a woman who had more invested in her hair than Loni spent on her entire education. That was the hard lesson of the world. Hearts don't matter, minds don't matter,
money
matters. Money and power.

She rolled over on her back, and found herself once again staring at the crack in the ceiling. Reflexively, the lines she'd written about it came back to her:

       
A hairsbreadth divide that does not divine—meaning

       
gutters when division uncouples a nullity—

Division had uncoupled a nullity with her and Shay, all right.

This was ridiculous. She got to her feet and swept her hair away from her face. Then, with a big gulp of air to summon up all her courage, she went out to the kitchen and made dinner. Chicken cutlets from a bag and frozen carrots. It was that kind of world.

The next morning Zee got her long-awaited job offer, and after the first rush of euphoria, she plummeted into a weird kind of nervous moodiness.

“You should call Byron,” she told Loni. “I mean it.”

Loni laughed. “You're very sweet. But that bridge done be burned.”

“No, I mean it,” she said, sitting on the side of Loni's bed. She'd burst in to tell her the news and found Loni half awake, scrolling through e-mails on her phone. “It's not too late. It's never too late, not for anything.”

“It's too late for this,” Loni said, pushing herself up to sit propped against her pillows. “I told you the things he said to me. I can't just
ignore
them.”

“But, you've said before, he goes a little crazy every now and then, loses his mind, and then an hour later he's all right again. What if that's what happened this time? What if an hour after he walked out on you, he was all regretful and everything? And wishing he could apologize? I mean, he's a poet, right? He's allowed to rage out sometimes. It's part of the whole artist thing.”

“Then he could damn well
have
apologized. And he's not a poet. He's a poetry
professor
,” Loni replied, then muttered, “which is more than I can hope to be.”

“Except…” Zee balled her fists and play-pounded Loni's skull. “Come on, idiot. You can't
not
know how incredibly into you he is. He's probably killing himself over what he said and worried that if he tries to apologize and you shut it down, he'll have to go and…I don't know. Kill himself or something.”

“Byron Pennington will never kill himself,” she scoffed. “He'd never deprive the world of so much literary genius. He'd consider it cruel.”

Zee sighed. “You're not taking me seriously.”

“You're not
being
serious. You're just…look, a week ago, I had this big job lined up, my future was made. And you had nothing. Now, our situations are exactly reversed. You've got your hot new gig, and I've got a great big crater of zip, zilch, nil, nada. And you're a very sweet and very empathic girl who remembers what that felt like, and you want me to join you back on the other side of the fence.” She stroked Zee's forearm. “I love you for that, really. You're a stand-up friend. But…it just ain't happening.”

A funny thing occurred while Loni was saying this. Zee's face underwent a series of contortions, like she was in some kind of agony. Loni had no idea what was behind it. Could the girl not stand being complimented or something? Whatever the reason, she decided not to torment her any further with more comments on what a great friend she was.

Instead, she said, “And anyway, Byron's sure to have offered the job to the other woman he had lined up. He'd promised to let her know as soon as I made my decision, and I sure as hell made my decision. So that's it. The job's not even there for me to take anymore.” Loni still hadn't found it necessary to tell Zee about Shay, and she felt a little bad hiding from her very compassionate friend that the true cause of her depression might actually be more from a one-afternoon-stand than the whole thing with Byron.

Zee's lower lip trembled. It looked to Loni like Zee felt personally responsible for her predicament, which was totally insane. Loni had made all her own decisions—every last lousy one of them.

“Well, then, at least call him to smooth things over,” Zee said. “You say you've burned that bridge, but it can be rebuilt. I mean, you're going to need him, aren't you? He's, like, your only reference. Wherever you go, for whatever kind of job you end up doing, there's no one else you can have people call but him.”

Loni was about to quip something back but stopped herself. In fact, Zee had a point. If she allowed Byron to remain banished from her life, she'd essentially be back to where she had been when she graduated high school. Everything that had happened since would be effectively erased, because the only human being on the planet who could testify to its value was someone she'd cut the cord to.

She heaved a big, resigned sigh. “Okay. You're right. I'll call him. I will.”

Zee leaned in and gave her a hug, then hopped up and said, “I'm making pancakes. Interested?”

“Love some. Do we have any blueberries?”

“Bought some on my way home,” Zee said, leaving the room and shutting the door behind her. “Because I knew you'd ask.”

Left alone, Loni fondled her phone for a minute before opening her address book. She hovered her fingertip over Byron's number.

But she didn't press it.

Later
, she thought.

After breakfast.

But breakfast came and went, and still she procrastinated. Eventually she realized she was waiting to think up the perfect opening line. But of course there was no perfect opening line, because this whole situation was so completely
im
perfect. So in late afternoon, seated outside the apartment building on a rusty porch swing that made a sound like a tortured cat whenever it moved on its hinges, she called him. She'd just let the moment tell her what to say.

He answered in a hushed voice: “Hi.”