by Meg Cabot
“Maybe somebody left something,” he said, getting up and looking around the room. “You know. K rations, or something. Whatever it is forest rangers eat.”
Lou had lifted her purse and was rifling through it, her long red curls hiding her face. “There was nothing in the file cabinet?” she asked, into her bag.
“I didn’t get all the way through it.” Jack went back over to the file cabinet and yanked open the first drawer once again. He stared blearily into it, not really seeing all the files and papers jammed into it. What was with Lou Calabrese, anyway? It was true the two of them had never had the best working relationship, due primarily to her own sensitivity about her work and Jack’s insistence on authenticity. And it was true about him and Vicky not parting on the best of terms. But that had been ages ago. So what was up with Lou Calabrese?
Women usually liked Jack. He could say that without being conceited, because it was a fact. He didn’t know why this was so—whether it was because he’d always gotten along with his mother, or if it was simply because he genuinely liked women. He’d even been able to maintain cordial relationships with his exes—well, except for Melanie. But look at Vicky. She understood that he could not give her what she wanted—a wedding ring—but did she hate him? Far from it, so far as he knew. Lou seemed to have a bigger problem with their breakup than Vicky did.
So what was wrong with Lou Calabrese? When she’d looked at him just then, after he’d put his arm around her, he could have sworn he’d seen fear in those gentle brown eyes. Fear? Fear of what? Him? What for? Jack had never done anything to Lou Calabrese.
Well, okay, there was the I need a bigger gun thing. But come on. She couldn’t possibly feel threatened because he’d changed one measly line of her precious script…even if it had been her first script, the one she’d sold just out of college, the one that had made her a name in Hollywood. Writers, he knew, were funny about their work, thought about scripts the way some people thought about their children, and couldn’t bear to hear them criticized….
Still, hadn’t she walked away from Hindenburg with an Academy Award? Wasn’t that proof enough for her that she could write? What did it matter that he’d changed a single line? Okay, maybe an important line. And maybe the line he’d substituted for it had turned into a catch phrase that thirteen-year-old boys all over the country were wearing on T-shirts and writing on their skateboards.
But come on. That meant he couldn’t even put an arm around her, when she was crying, without getting his head bit off?
“Aha!”
He looked over his shoulder and spied Lou pulling something from her bag. Something wrapped in tinfoil.
“I knew I had some in here somewhere,” she said, holding the object high. She’d unzipped her parka, he noticed, and though the cable-knit sweater she wore beneath it was on the bulky side, he didn’t have any problem at all making out what lay beneath it, which were two extremely fine—and that was without, he was reasonably certain, the aid of silicon—breasts.
“What’s that?” Jack asked, though he didn’t care, really. His appetite had fled, to be replaced by a hunger of another kind…a hunger he was pretty much assured he was not going to get to appease any time soon.
“Peanut brittle,” Lou said. Then she turned back to her bag. “And I’m pretty sure I’ve got some wintergreen Lifesavers in here somewhere, too. What about you?”
Jack dragged his gaze reluctantly away from the front of her sweater, and turned his attention back to the file cabinet. What was he thinking, anyway? He wasn’t even sure he liked Lou Calabrese. Why should he? She certainly didn’t like him.
And what had all that hooting about Melanie Dupre been about? Sure, Melanie was no rocket scientist, but it wasn’t like she was some innocent babe in the woods, either. Melanie knew which way was up.
“Townsend?” Lou’s voice was still husky from her tears. “Any luck?”
“No,” he said, slamming the first drawer closed, and opening the second. “Not unless you count what looks like a lot of data about the migratory habits of the arctic tern. Apparently, somebody’s doing their dissertation on…hey. Wait a minute.”
He struck paydirt in the third drawer. A box of saltines, a half dozen little Denny’s jelly packets, and….
“Eureka,” he said, and pulled out the half-full bottle of Cutty Sark that had been hidden, deep in the back of the bottom drawer, beneath a paperback Audubon guide to birds of North America. “God, I love ornithologists.”
Lou, clearly unimpressed by the whiskey, looked hopefully at the jelly packets. “Are any of those orange marmalade?”
“Excuse me.” Jack presented the bottle with a flourish, the way Vanna White turned over the letters on “Wheel of Fortune.” “Perhaps you failed to notice what I am brandishing here. Blended, I realize. But it’s still a perfectly palatable whiskey. I know, because I used to partake of the Cutty regularly back before I could afford single malt.”
Lou, sinking back onto the cot, was peeling back the tinfoil from the brick of peanut brittle.
“I wouldn’t know,” she said, biting into the candy. “I don’t drink. Throw those crackers over here. And the jelly. Is there a knife, or anything?”
“You do too drink,” Jack said, closing the file cabinet drawer with his foot, since his arms were full of whiskey and crackers. “I saw you drinking champagne at the Copkiller III premiere.”
“I don’t drink hard liquor,” she said, chewing. She held the brick of peanut brittle towards him. “Want some?”
“No, I don’t,” Jack said, settling down on the cot beside her—and ignoring her wary look as he did so. “How can you eat that stuff? Doesn’t it stick to your teeth?”
Lou seemed to reflect on this. “Yeah,” she said after a minute. “But it comes loose eventually. And then you have a tasty snack for later.”
“That,” Jack said, dumping the saltines and the jelly onto the cot between them, but keeping hold of the whiskey bottle, “is disgusting.”
“Oh, and what you’re doing isn’t?” she asked, as he pulled the stopper from the bottle’s mouth and lifted it to his lips. “You don’t have the slightest idea who was drinking from that bottle last.”
Jack, feeling the fiery liquid course down his gut, said, “No, I don’t. And I don’t care, either. Besides, the alcohol’ll have killed whatever germs the guy might have been carrying, if the cold didn’t get ’em first.” He held the bottle out towards her. “Come on. Have a toke.”
“Uh, no,” Lou said. She’d opened the box of saltines, and was dipping them, one after another, into one of the packets of jelly. “I told you, I don’t do hard liquor. The last time I did it, I woke up the next morning feeling like my head was going to explode.”
“Yeah? Well, what were you drinking?”
It was hard to tell in the dark, but he thought her cheeks turned a little redder. She muttered something indistinct.
“I beg your pardon?” he asked.
“Bailey’s Irish Cream,” she said more clearly.
“Oh, you poor innocent,” Jack said. “No wonder. But you see, that’s not real liquor. Real liquor is your friend.”
“Liquor,” Lou assured him, “has never been my friend.”
“Yeah,” Jack said, reaching for a saltine of his own. “Under normal circumstances. But this is hardly what I’d call normal circumstances. I mean, come on. You’re stranded with a man you despise in the arctic wilderness in the middle of a blizzard.”
“I don’t despise you,” Lou said, using a cracker to scrape up what was left in the jelly packet she’d peeled open.
“Yeah,” Jack said. He was not successful in squelching a feeling of triumph that she had admitted she didn’t despise him. It was ridiculous, he knew. To be happy that she didn’t hate him. What was he, in the seventh grade again? “But you don’t like me.”
“Well, that’s true,” she said matter-of-factly.
Great. He’d had to push it, hadn’t he? Why couldn’t he ever
leave well enough alone?
Fine. Two could play that game.
“And you survived a helicopter crash,” he pointed out. “And not one, but two murder attempts.”
“Don’t remind me,” she said, going for the peanut brittle again.
“And you shot a guy,” he couldn’t help adding.
She glared at him. “Do you have a death wish?” she wanted to know.
“And right about now—” He looked at the glow-in-the-dark face of his watch. “Yeah, I’d say right about now, your ex and my ex are probably slipping into a heart-shaped Jacuzzi, sipping some Dom, and nibbling on oysters in the half-shell…and each other, of course—”
“Gimme that.” Lou leaned over and snatched the bottle of Cutty from him, then brought it to her lips. After she’d choked down a swallow and handed the bottle back to him with stinging eyes and an aggrieved expression, she said, “Just remember, you asked for this.”
“I know,” Jack said. “I’m a big, bad man, debauching nubile young screenwriters—”
She snorted. “Oh, yeah? If this is an example of your debauching technique, I swear I don’t see how you get laid so often.”
Now he was the one who was choking. “Wh-what?”
“Oh, please,” she said, rolling her eyes. “You heard me. Is there any woman in the business you haven’t slept with?” She took the bottle from him and took another pull on it. “With the exception of me, of course?” she asked, after she’d stopped coughing.
“As a matter of fact,” he said with wounded dignity, “there is.”
“Oh, yeah? Who?”
“I haven’t slept with Meryl Streep,” he said. “Yet. But hope springs eternal.”
She laughed. When Lou Calabrese laughed, it was impossible to remember that the temperature was well below freezing, and that an arctic blast was buffeting the four meager walls around them. Lou Calabrese’s laughter was like the sun coming out after a month of rain. Like a cold beer after a long hot hike. Like a hot shower after freezing all day. It was amazing to him that he’d never realized it before.
“So you think she’s the one who paid Sam to off you?” Lou wanted to know.
He blinked at her. Even in the semi-darkness, her skin looked impossibly clear, her cheeks smooth as cream. “Who?”
She was looking at him like he was slow. “Meryl Streep. You know. ’Cause she’s mad she was left out.”
“You know,” he said, his mouth feeling dry all of a sudden. “Somehow I doubt it.”
She just smiled and broke off another piece of peanut brittle. Jack had never met a woman who carried peanut brittle around in her purse. Listerine Pocket Paks, maybe. Vicky had always had echinacea. But actresses, who were perpetually on diets, didn’t tend to carry high-calorie candy in their handbags. The foil, he was able to see, had some writing on it. It said, Thank you for supporting the Sherman Oaks Central High School band.
Sherman Oaks. That must be where she lived. Hardly the section of southern California in which you’d expect to find an Academy Award–winning screenwriter living. The hills, maybe. Or the canyon. But not Sherman Oaks, which wasn’t a bad part of LA. It just wasn’t…well, it wasn’t very glamorous.
“How about you?” he heard himself asking. “I mean, now that Barry’s…you know.You seeing anyone?”
She narrowed her eyes at him. “Yeah,” she said. “Robert Redford. Hey, maybe we could double. You and Meryl and me and Bob.”
He took a pull from the Cutty. “I was only asking,” he said. “I mean, you’re a vital, attractive woman. There must be—”
She plucked the whiskey bottle from his hands. “Don’t even try,” she advised him, after taking a long swallow.
“What?” He shrugged.“I was only asking.”
“Yeah, well.” She reached up to wipe her mouth—cherry-red, and without, he knew, the help of lipstick, since he’d have noticed if she’d put any on—with the back of a smooth white hand. “Don’t.”
He whistled, low and long. Her voice, which was full of a note of warning, had said more than her words.
“Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know. I mean, you and Barry—you were going out with him back when I was on ‘STAT,’ right? And that was—”
“Six years ago,” she finished for him, handing the bottle back. “What part of don’t didn’t you understand?”
Maybe it was the Cutty. Maybe it was their near-death experience. Maybe it was the fact that the two of them were trapped in a nine-foot-by-nine-foot room, with a blizzard raging outside its walls, and only each other’s body heat to keep them from freezing to death. Or maybe it was just those brown eyes, so filled with intelligence, wit… and pain.
In any case, he ignored her warning, and blundered on.
“Six years is a long time,” he said. “I mean, you two were living together, right? In Sherman Oaks? What happened?”
She scissored an incredulous look in his direction.
“What happened?” she echoed, in a voice that cracked. “What do you think happened? Your girlfriend Greta, that’s what happened. Too bad you didn’t keep her on a shorter leash.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Hey,” he said. “I could say the same thing about you. I mean, your boy Barry isn’t exactly blameless in this.”
She took the bottle from him, took an enormous swig, and this time neither choked nor coughed. Her eyes did not even water.
Her enunciation, however, was not exactly clear.
“For your information,” Lou said, pointing an accusing index finger at his chest, “Barry would have married me, if your shtupid Greta hadn’t come along. I mean, he was getting ready to make a commitment.”
He took the bottle of Cutty Sark from her. She had clearly drunk her limit.
“Honey,” he said. “I got news for you. If, after six years, the guy still hadn’t made a commitment, he wasn’t gonna.”
“Ten,” she said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Ten years,” Lou said. “We were together for ten years. Until shtupid blond Greta Woolshton came along. We were gonna get married. We were gonna buy our dream house in Santa Barbara. We were gonna have kids. Were you and Greta gonna have kids?” She punched him in the shoulder—surprisingly hard, too, for a woman. “Huh? Were you?”
“No, we weren’t,” he said, moving the whiskey bottle carefully out of her reach. “Hey, you weren’t kidding about not being able to handle hard liquor, were you?”
Lou did not appear to have heard him. She placed both hands on her chest, just above her high, round breasts, and said, emphatically, “I was going to marry him. You were just using Greta for sex. Therefore, my loss is greater than yours.”
Thinking back to the day he’d first met Barry, on the “STAT” set, he said, “Believe me, Lou. You didn’t lose a thing.”
She dropped her hands back into her lap. “I did, though,” she said, with a sniffle, looking suddenly tragic. “I lost my girlhood. I lost the best years of my life. I wasted them on a guy named Barry.” She said the name again, in tones of utter disbelief. “Barry.”
Jack regarded her solemnly. “The best years of your life, huh? What are you, twenty-eight?”
“Nearly twenty-nine,” Lou declared, her eyes wide at the horror of it all.
“Ancient,” Jack said. “You’re right. You better chuck it all in. You’ll never love again.”
The big brown eyes narrowed. “At least I have loved,” she said. “Tis better to have loved and lost than never—”
“That,” Jack said, quickly, “is one movie I have seen. I’ve even read the book. Listen, you better eat some more of those crackers, or something. You’re crocked.”
Again, she did not appear to hear him.
“You’ve never loved anyone,” she said, accusingly. “Not like I loved Barry.”
He blinked at her. “How would you know?”
“Oh, please,” she said, waving a hand at him as if to say, Go on. “Melanie Dupre. I am so sure! What do you guys t
alk about, anyway? Her cuticles?”
This seemed to strike her as riotously funny. She clutched her stomach, she was laughing so hard. Jack regarded her unsmilingly. It didn’t matter that she was right—conversation with Melanie was never brilliant. It was the fact that she seemed to think she was so morally superior to him because during the course of her ten-year, monogamous relationship with one man, he’d been with…well, a lot of women.
But hey, in the end, who was the loser, huh? Him, whose heart was still unabashedly, unapologetically whole? Or her, whose heart was broken?
Abruptly, Lou stopped laughing.
“Oh my God,” she said, all trace of humor wiped from her face. “I killed a guy.” She looked at him, naked panic in those big brown eyes. “Jack! I killed a guy today!”
Then she pitched forward, landing with her face between his jean-clad thighs.
Looking down with some surprise at her bright copper curls spread out across his lap, Jack reached over and shook her by the shoulder. “Lou?”
When she didn’t respond, he shook harder. “Hello? Lou? Are you all right?”
A muffled groan came up from his crotch. It sounded like she’d said, “Barry Kimmel can kiss my ass.” He sat her up, just to make sure she was still breathing, and she said it again. Yep. Barry Kimmel was clearly no longer one of Lou Calabrese’s favorite people. Much like…well, Jack Townsend.
Not knowing what else to do, Jack stretched her out on the cot. It smelled musty, but he figured in the state Lou was in, she wouldn’t notice. He put one of the moth-eaten blankets over her and reflected that, so long as they had one another’s body heat to warm them, they might just be all right until morning.
At least as long as those snowmobilers didn’t come back.
11
“Ma’am,” the flight attendant said. “I’m sorry. But you’ll have to put your dog back in its carrier.”
Eleanor Townsend looked dismayed.