Denial. De Nile.
“Thirty-one. You?”
“Twenty-five.”
“Did you want to be a makeup artist since you were a little girl?”
It was an accident. I was so comfortable with him, it felt so right sitting in his arms, I just forgot to lie. “No, I wanted to be a doctor so I could help my mom.”
The moment it was out of my mouth, I tensed. I didn’t talk about her. I didn’t talk about my past. What was I doing?
Nico kissed my forehead. His hand tightened on my leg. “Easy, darlin’. I won’t go there if you don’t want me to.”
I was quiet a moment, gathering myself. Listening to the sound of Nico breathing.
I felt safe with him. Something I hadn’t felt with a man in a very long time.
Maybe ever.
I said, “Sometimes, when things get really bad, I just remind myself that life is a boot camp. We all start out soft, weak. And then we’re tested. Over and over. It’s hard. It’s painful. At the end of it—if you survive, if you don’t give up—you’re tough. You’ve earned your stripes. And you get to graduate to the next level.”
That’s what my mother had called dying: graduation. She’d believed death was just a change of worlds, but certain things—like suicide—could snare a spirit between worlds, where it would exist in a never-ending limbo. So no matter how bad things became, no matter how much pain she was in, she’d never consider ending her own life to escape.
Even when I’d offered to help.
You don’t graduate if you give up! She’d been angry with me, her words a brittle rasp in the silence of the barren hospice room as she lay gray and wasted on the narrow bed, struggling for breath. Never quit, Katherine, no matter how much you might want to. Never, ever give in.
I took a breath, trying to control the waver in my voice. “So I just focus on not giving up. It’s really the only thing I have control over.”
And it was the only way I could honor the memory of my mother.
Nico put his hand on my face. I looked at him, biting my lip.
He whispered, “You have any idea how fuckin’ beautiful you are, Kat Reid?”
Shit. I was going to cry.
He kissed me. A tear slid down my cheek, and he wiped it away with his thumb.
“Crème brûlée.”
I frowned at him, confused. “What?”
“That’s what you’re like. Crème brûlée. Tough on the outside, layer of hard-ass sugar. But on the inside, you’re all soft and creamy sweet.”
His blue eyes. That’s all I could see. Endless, fathomless blue.
“You know what makes me stop crying?” I sniffled.
His voice came very gentle. “What, darlin’?”
I tried to appear as pathetic as possible. I might have even batted my lashes. “Kisses. Lots and lots of kisses.”
His look grew warm. His smile came on slow and wicked. “Careful what you wish for, beautiful.”
Then he kissed me again, only this time it wasn’t sweet. It was scorching. He laid me down on the couch and gave me the hottest, deepest, most soulful kiss of my life. I kissed him back, spinning into oblivion, not even remembering to worry about what happened next.
I had officially jumped off the cliff, and was falling.
Nico and I spent the rest of the afternoon doing things I’d never imagined a rock star would do with a woman: Talking. Watching TV. Snuggling on the couch.
It was bliss. It was weird, but it was bliss.
He had to leave at six to go to a recording session. Apparently he’d been working on some new songs and was eager to lay down the tracks. I admit I felt a little relieved that he had somewhere else to be, because the more time I spent with him, the more flimsy my three-date resolve became.
When he kissed me good-bye at the door, it dissolved altogether. I had a sneaking suspicion he could tell, because he left with a chuckle and a gleam in his eyes.
The look of a man with a foregone conclusion.
I worked the next two days, so we didn’t see each other, though we talked on the phone a few times every day. In between the phone calls, Nico would send random texts that said things like, “You know you’re dying to see me right now,” and “I’m in the mood for a mouthful of crème brûlée,” and a simple, sexy, “Three, baby. Three.”
He wasn’t about to let me out of that one.
And then it was Saturday. My birthday.
Twenty-six years old. How the hell did that happen? Eighteen to twenty-five had gone by so fast, I felt like if I blinked, I’d wake up and be two hundred.
Every year, I’d dreaded my birthday as if it were an impending visit to the gynecologist to check on a suspicious-looking vaginal sore. So of course I didn’t come right out and tell Nico it was my birthday. He’d had to drag it out of me.
“So. Tonight.”
That was his way of asking me on another date. Or our first official date, or whatever. I wasn’t sure exactly how I was going to count the next one point five dates, but I’d figure that out when I got there. He called me first thing Saturday morning, making me wake up with a smile.
I sat up in bed and rubbed my eyes, dying for coffee. “I can’t tonight. I’m busy. I’ve got a . . . thing.”
“A thing? I haven’t seen you in two days, we got another one and a half dates to get down to, and now you have a thing?”
He didn’t sound happy. The man hated not getting his way.
“It’s . . . me and Chloe and Grace are doing a girls’ night. That’s all.”
“Oh. Cool. Saturday is the girls’ regular get-together night?”
“Um, no, you know, it’s just whenever we can. Everyone’s schedule is so tight, and Chloe works all these crazy hours because of the flower shop, so we . . . just try and make it a priority to see each other.” I cleared my throat. “Whenever we can.”
I heard a low, menacing grumble. “You already said that. You gonna tell me what the deal is, Kat, or am I gonna have to come over there and make you tell me?”
He’d emphasized the word “make.” I wasn’t sure if I should have been scared or turned on. Either way, a little thrill went through me.
“Okay. It’s . . . kind of my birthday today. And the three of us spend it together every year. So. That’s it.”
I could have sworn a crackle of electricity burned through the phone. “Your birthday. And you were gonna tell me about this when?”
Bossy. I made a face at the phone, and tried to sound innocent. “I’m telling you about it now.”
“Yeah, and I had to pull a few teeth to do it, too. What’s that about?”
Why did he have to be so observant? I could never get away with the tiniest bit of avoidance with him. Most other men I’d known were too oblivious to the nuances of a woman’s voice or expression to recognize trouble signs, but Nico was like a hunting dog with a champion nose. He didn’t miss anything.
“I’m guessin’ by you bein’ quiet that means you don’t wanna talk about it.”
I almost sighed in relief. I should’ve known better.
“Which is exactly why we’re gonna talk about it. Trust, Kat. Remember?”
Fuck. Fuckity-fuck-fuck!
After another moment of silence on my end, Nico said, “You still with me on that?”
Yes. I was. And holy hell was it hard.
“Okay. Here’s the thing, Nico. I have a lot of sad stories. But I’m not the kind of person who thinks talking about them is a good idea. Dwelling doesn’t help. Feeling sorry for yourself doesn’t help. Brooding on all the bad shit that’s happened only makes it worse. So, I don’t dwell. I don’t brood. I learn my lesson and move on.”
Nico waited quietly for a moment before speaking. “Got it. You don’t like to dwell, so we won’t dwell. But you’re still gonna tell me what happened on your birthday that makes you not like it.”
I heard the determination in his voice. From prior experience, I knew this was only going to go one way: his. So as long
as we weren’t going to dwell, I might as well cough it up.
Trust. Right?
“My dad left us on my eighth birthday.”
Silence. It made me nervous, so I kept talking.
“He actually didn’t even remember it was my birthday. I had a little party with my friends at our house, ate some cake, opened some presents, but he never showed up. He finally came home late that night, and just started packing his bags. I was already asleep, but my mother said he didn’t say much. He just told her to tell me he was sorry, then he left. I never spoke to him again. He lives in Ireland now.”
My voice was steady. It didn’t waver once. “With his other family. The one he left us for.”
Nico’s silence frightened me. I began to worry I sounded pathetic. Did he think I was trying to get his sympathy? Was I coming off like a whiner?
“Baby.”
That’s all he said, but I knew by his tender tone that he didn’t think I was pathetic, or trying for his sympathy. Emotion swelled over me. I had to swallow a few times before I could talk again.
“Anyway, that’s the deal with my birthday. So me and the girls will be sitting around the living room tonight stuffing our faces with ice cream and drinking too much, and watching Ryan Gosling be the most dreamy man in the world.”
“Is that right? The most dreamy man?” Nico drawled. He was playing along, letting me off the hook, keeping his word that we wouldn’t dwell.
For that, I fell a little harder for him.
“Yep. Definitely the most dreamy man in the world. Maybe in the entire universe. No one could compare to my Ry-Ry.”
“So he’s up there with Bob, the toothless wonder?”
“Whoa! Bob has six teeth, remember?”
“I stand corrected. So Ry-Ry is up there with Bob, the six-toothed wonder? Those are your two main men?”
I laughed. He was teasing, but I also heard the subtext loud and clear.
“Wellll . . . ” I sighed, pretending to concede. “There may be a new contender for the title of main main man, but the jury’s still out on that one. I have another one point five dates to get through before I could give you an accurate idea.”
His low chuckle went all the way through me. “Keep me posted.”
“I will. And . . . I’m free tomorrow night. I mean, if you are.”
“For you, baby, I’m always free. It’s a date.” He paused. The playful tone he adopted made it obvious he was leading me, pretending to try to add. “Date number . . . ”
“Two point five.”
I must have said it a little too quickly, because the low chuckle came again.
“That’s right. Two point five.” His voice lowered. “After tomorrow, there’s only half a date left between me and paradise.”
And the girls around the world collectively swooned.
“And Kat?”
“Yeah?”
Nico’s voice grew soft again. “Happy Birthday, sweetheart.”
He hung up. I stared at the phone.
Maybe birthdays weren’t so bad after all.
At exactly seven that night, Grace rang the doorbell. You could set the world clock to that woman’s timing. I opened the door to find her dressed in a pair of black silk lounging pajamas, a red feather boa, and a pair of sky-high red heels. She held a shopping bag in her arms.
“You drove over here like that?” I was still in my jeans.
Grace looked affronted. “Why? Who’s going to say anything about my outfit in this neighborhood? Have you seen that hobo at the end of your block dressed like Princess Leia?”
I wasn’t sure “hobo” was the PC word for the homeless man who dressed like characters from Star Wars and begged for money to pay for an intergalactic ride home to his mother planet, but she did have a point. Venice Beach was known for its colorful characters.
I took the shopping bag from her. She set her handbag on the console and shucked off her heels.
“Let’s put this stuff in the kitchen.” I winked at her. “Where the drinks are.”
“Now you’re talking!”
I’d made margaritas by the pitcherful, and had set out a smorgasbord of unhealthy, fattening snacks on the table. The ice cream was in the freezer. All six gallons of it.
I poured her a drink, we toasted to getting old, and I went to change into my PJs while Grace got to work on the nachos.
Forty-five minutes later, Chloe showed up, breathless.
“Sorry I’m late! Happy Birthday!” She crushed me into a hug, then sailed past me into the kitchen. She set a wrapped present on the counter, and immediately began stuffing her face with the seven-layer dip Grace had brought.
“Everything OK?”
She winced at me like a puppy that’s about to get a spanking for peeing on the rug. Even her gulp looked guilty. “Uh. Yes?”
Grace and I shared a look. Chloe’s lack of poker face was as legendary as Grace’s anal need to be exactly on time. This could only mean one thing.
She was hiding something.
If that asshole Miles hurt her again, I was seriously going to take a bat to his skinny, Ivy League knees!
I crossed my arms over my chest. I’m sure I didn’t look imposing in my pink cotton Hello Kitty pajamas and matching pink boa, but my voice was firm. “Chloe.”
Usually that would be enough to get her to spill. But she shook her head and stuck her nose in the air. “Nope. You’re not getting it out of me. It’s a surprise.”
Her face was getting red. Grace and I shared another look. “A surprise?”
Nodding, Chloe shoveled more dip into her mouth. She said something I interpreted as, “For your birthday,” although it sounded closer to “Fuhr thurr burffy” because her mouth was full.
“Is Ryan Gosling coming to dinner?”
Grace asked it lightly, because of course Ryan Gosling wasn’t coming to dinner, but Chloe looked as if she was about to choke. Seven-layer dip sprayed from her mouth like confetti.
Remembering a threat she’d made on my last birthday, I gasped. “Oh my God, Chloe, please tell me you didn’t hire a male stripper!”
Grace clapped gleefully, bolting upright in her chair. “Please tell me you did!”
Chloe pressed her lips together, and shrugged. She started casually wiping dip from the tabletop.
“You’ve got to be kidding me.” I couldn’t believe this! A stripper? Was she crazy?
Judging by her braying donkey laugh, Grace thought the whole thing was the height of comedy. “We are so videoing this! What time is he coming? Or is there more than one?”
“More than one? What?” My voice kept getting higher and higher. More than one male stripper—oiled, sweaty, and probably gay—grinding on me in my living room was my idea of hell.
“You’re not getting any more out of me, girls, so just drink up and let the party happen.” Chloe poured herself a margarita and drank it in one swallow.
Male strippers.
In the words of the famous Japanese philosopher, Kenji, “Sweet baby Jesus, what did I do to deserve this shit?”
So I resigned myself to the inevitable. We ate. We drank. We laughed. We put on The Notebook, and we drank some more, and all the while I was waiting for the doorbell to ring and deliver up a hot mess and a whole lot of humiliation for my birthday gift.
But when the doorbell finally rang, that wasn’t what Fate had in store for me at all.
“Oh, Kath-er-ine! Door for you!”
Grace, sitting cross-legged on the living room floor with her fourth margarita in hand and the red boa now tied around her waist because it kept shedding feathers into her drink, sang out the moment the doorbell chimed. When I groaned, she and Chloe fell into a fit of giggles.
“You are the worst best friends ever.”
I was lying on the couch with my feet over the arm, gorging myself on rocky road. I dumped the near-empty ice cream container on the coffee table and stood. I adjusted my own boa, fluffed my hair, and took a few wobbly steps toward the
door, girding my mental loins for what awaited me on the other side.
“Wait!”
Chloe climbed to her feet. Literally. She had to use the edge of the coffee table as a prop. It took several sloppy attempts before she finally made it upright, grinning like a loon, looking ready for the gay pride parade in her cowgirl pajamas and rainbow boa.
We’d all had quite a few drinks. Margaritas, champagne, and possibly one or two shots of tequila at the end of The Notebook, when Allie and Noah die together in bed in the old folks’ home, and I cried so hard snot ran down my face.
That goddamn movie gets me every time.
Chloe linked her arm through mine. “Grace, c’mere! Get her other arm.”
Grace stood and did as she was told. I began to worry. “Support on both sides? Please tell me this isn’t going to be so bad I’ll faint.”
In answer, Chloe hiccupped. She was still grinning madly, a wild glint in her eyes.
I looked at the closed front door. “Are there, like, a hundred strippers waiting on my front porch right now?”
Grace stared at me with a straight face. “Don’t be ridiculous. I’m sure there’s a hundred horny strippers. Who are into foot bondage. And what one of my clients refers to as ‘wet work.’”
I stared at her. “Do I really need to ask?”
“Peeing on his partner.”
I formed some very exotic mental images in the few moments it took the three of us to stagger from the living room to the front door.
With a grand flourish, Chloe swung wide the door. And there they were, standing proudly abreast in my front yard: an eleven-piece mariachi band, complete with giant hats, tight pants, pointy cowboy boots, and more machismo than a gang of Spanish bullfighters.
They were flanked by a pair of massive floral arrangements in urns. The grass they stood on—all the grass in the yard, as a matter of fact—was carpeted in lavender rose petals, inches thick. From the branches of the two gnarled willow trees near the sidewalk swayed hundreds of votive candles, casting flickering light over everything. Dozens of lavender hydrangea plants had been placed along the little white fence that ran the perimeter of the yard, lending to it a Martha Stewart garden party chic.
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