by Jason Starr
She smiled, then said, “Well, all right.”
Holding hands, they walked to Fifth and he had no trouble hailing a cab this time. There was such a strong connection between them and the conversation was so lively that the fifteen-minute cab ride to East Thirty-second Street seemed to take only a few minutes.
When the cab came to a stop in front of the brownstone, Peter said, “This is it.”
“This is what?” Katie asked.
“You’ll see.”
Peter gave the cabbie a twenty, letting him keep the ten-plus dollars change. Then Peter took Katie’s hand and led her up the stoop.
“Whose apartment is this?” Katie asked.
Peter didn’t answer, just took out a set of keys. He opened the door, flicked on a light and watched Katie’s expression. He’d expected to see a combination of shock, awe, and disbelief, but she seemed more confused than anything. But this was okay—she didn’t know that the place was hers yet.
“So what do you think?” Peter asked.
“Where are we?” she said.
“Your future home.”
She looked at him seriously and said, “My future what?”
“This is where you’re going to live,” Peter said. “Where we’re going to live, I mean. So what do you think? It’s not fully renovated yet, and, don’t worry, you can make whatever changes you want. We can throw everything out if you hate it, start over from scratch. The important thing is that you’re comfortable, that it’s a place you can call home.”
“Wha-what?” Katie stammered. “Wait, what’re you talking about?”
“This is our apartment,” Peter said. “I bought it for us.”
Katie stared at him, probably in shock, then said, “You bought an apartment for us. Come on, this is, like, a joke, right?”
“I know it’s a lot for you to handle all at once, but I wasn’t really working at the health club. Well, of course I was working there, but I only got the job so I could meet you. I thought it would be romantic if we met like that, like something in a movie. And it was, wasn’t it? I mean, the way we met. Wasn’t it perfect?”
She still didn’t seem very happy. It was okay. She needed a little more time to digest everything, that was all. The joy would come soon.
“Look, I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said. “You got the job to meet me? Why did you have to meet me?”
“Because I was in love with you,” Peter said. “I’ve always been in love with you, Katie. I want to spend the rest of my life with you.” He dropped to one knee, took out the ring box from the inside pocket of his jacket, opened it to reveal the sparkling two-carat diamond, and said, “Will you be my wife, Katie?”
He’d been planning for this moment for weeks—hell, in a way, for years. He knew she would look at him with shock at first, and then the smile would come and she’d be so excited that she’d probably start shaking. It might take her a while to be able to speak, but at least she’d start nodding and eventually she’d say, Yes. Yes, of course I will. Yes.
“What the fuck’re you doing?” Katie said.
The response was such a surprise, such a total shock, that Peter continued looking up at her, smiling expectantly for several seconds, before the words registered.
Wondering if it was possible that she actually didn’t get what was happening—maybe it was too overwhelming for her—he proposed again.
“I want you to be my wife, Katie. Will you marry me?”
“Can you just get up, please?” she demanded.
He didn’t understand.
“But why—”
“Just fucking stop it, okay?” she said.
He stood up and tried to hold her hand, but she wouldn’t let him.
“Come on, seriously,” Katie said. “Whose apartment is this?”
“Ours.”
“Oh, I forgot. Because you’re so rich, right?”
“Right,” Peter said.
“Oh, yeah. Where’d you get the money?”
“When my parents died. There were insurance policies.”
“And you spent all this money on me, why? Because you’re so in love with me?”
“Exactly,” Peter said.
“I don’t even know you.” Katie was nearly screaming. “We just met. I mean, met again. I mean, please, please tell me this is all a joke.”
“It’s not a joke, Katie. I’m in love with you. Always have been, always will.”
He didn’t understand why she wasn’t hugging and kissing him and telling him how much she loved him. She was looking at him like she hated him. This was all wrong. How had this happened?
“I’m sorry I proposed,” he said. “It was too much, too fast, wasn’t it? I should’ve showed you around the apartment. Wait till you see the bedroom. I got us a Charles P. Rogers bed.”
“You’re out of your mind.”
“If you don’t like it, we can exchange it. We can exchange everything.”
“Just shut up!”
Why was she yelling?
“I know this all must seem sudden,” he said.
“Sudden? This is absolutely fucking nuts.”
She left the apartment and hurried down the stoop. He followed her, not bothering to close the door.
“Wait, where are you going?”
She didn’t answer, just kept walking. This wasn’t like a love story at all, or was it? The guy tells the girl he loves her, the girl panics, the guy stops her and convinces her he really does love her, the girl realizes she does love the guy, and the guy and the girl live happily ever after, the end.
“Katie, come on. I really do love you. Everything I said is true.”
“Please just leave me alone.”
“You’re supposed to stop now.”
She shot him a look, then walked faster, nearly at a jogging pace, and he reached out and grabbed her. He meant to do it gently, just to get her attention, but he yanked too hard and spun her around back toward him and she nearly fell down.
“Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean that. Are you okay?”
“I’m going home,” she said and marched away toward the corner of Third Avenue.
Following her, Peter said, “Let me take you home at least. I want to make sure you get there safely.”
At the corner, Katie signaled for a cab and one zigzagged across the avenue and pulled up next to her.
“I’m going with you,” Peter said.
“Don’t touch me,” she said.
He backed away and she got in the cab and slammed the door.
“I’ll call you tomorrow!” he screamed as the cab sped away.
TWENTY-FOUR
Staring out the cab Window, past her blurred reflection, Katie’s thoughts were swirling and she was getting a migraine. It seemed like her life was getting crazier every day. She had no idea what she’d done to deserve all this crap, or what she had to do to get things back to normal.
In her apartment, she popped two Advils, washed up quickly, and got into bed, waiting for her headache to subside. Finally it did. She still couldn’t believe that what had happened tonight had actually happened. Had Peter really proposed to her? Did he really say that he’d bought an apartment for them? Up until the apartment thing, she’d been having a pretty good time. It had been annoying that he’d made her wait in the cold while he tried to hail a cab, and all the over-the-top romance crap, with that ridiculously expensive French restaurant and all the gushy hand-holding, was too much for her. Still, he’d seemed like a nice, considerate guy who’d survived an awful tragedy. She couldn’t see going out with him, though, and she’d been planning to tell him at the end of the night that she wasn’t looking to get into a relationship right now and that she just wanted to be friends. Then, next thing she knew, he was kneeling down, asking her to fucking marry him.
She had to tell someone about what had happened. This was way too nutty to keep to herself.
She called Amanda and said, “You won’t believe what just happe
ned to me.”
“What?” Amanda sounded bored, uninterested.
“Did I get you at a bad time?”
“No,” she said, like her mind was still elsewhere. “What’s up?”
Katie told her the whole story, expecting her to be floored. But when she was through, Amanda just said flatly, “Wow, that’s pretty weird.”
“Pretty weird? Are you fucking kidding me? It’s beyond weird, it’s ridiculously weird. But it’s funny you said weird because my friend Jane was telling me just yesterday that when Peter was growing up he was known as the weird guy and I was, like, defending him. And then I go out with him tonight and all this shit happens. I mean, he actually bought an apartment for me. You should’ve seen this place. It was spectacular. It must’ve cost him, like, a million dollars. He said he got his money from some insurance policy. I thought he was this poor guy, working at a health club, and he turns out to be Mr. Moneybags.”
“That’s funny,” Amanda said, but she seemed very distracted.
Amanda’s lack of interest was really starting to piss Katie off.
“Are you even listening to me?” Katie asked.
“What? Hey, I’m watching Lost. Can I call you back in about an hour? Or maybe tomorrow?”
Katie couldn’t believe how rude and self-centered Amanda was being. Last night, when Amanda was upset about Will, Katie had stayed on the phone with her for a half hour, letting her vent. But now that there was a crisis in someone else’s life, she couldn’t even pause her stupid show to give some support. Bitch.
“Whatever,” Katie said, and hung up.
Katie went out to the living room to see if Susan was around. The door to Susan’s room had been closed earlier, and it was still closed. Tom was probably over and they were probably doing it. Susan had such a perfect, stable little life. Katie couldn’t imagine what it would be like to have a steady, reliable boyfriend, to not have some new crazy thing happen to her every fucking day.
Back in her room, Katie’s head was throbbing—though it wasn’t nearly as bad as before. She went online and checked her e-mail, and then she mindlessly surfed the Net, going on craigslist for a while, and then visiting friends’ blogs. It was too hard to concentrate because she was distracted, replaying stuff Peter had said to her. She didn’t know if that apartment really belonged to him, and he really was rich, or if he was just fucking with her head. And, God, had he really said that he’d “always” loved her? Growing up, she’d never had a clue that he was in love with her, or that he even had a crush on her. And it was kind of disgusting, considering she’d only been thirteen when he’d moved from Lenox to upstate New York. What was he, some kind of pedophile?
Then she remembered how he’d pulled up his pants at the restaurant to show her that scar on his leg. When he’d told her about the fire and what had happened to his parents, she’d felt sorry for him. But wasn’t it weird that he’d never mentioned the fire before? Maybe he was self-conscious about the scar or didn’t like talking about his past—a lot of guys were like that. That made some sense, but the other day he’d talked about how his parents had died, but said nothing about a fire.
Katie realized she hadn’t Googled Peter at all yet. This was unusual for her because she routinely did Web research on every guy she went out with. Most of the time she couldn’t find a lot of information online, but any little tidbits were nice to know and helped to make her feel secure that the guy she’d met at a bar or wherever wasn’t some lunatic. Although Googling guys sometimes gave a false impression and worked to her disadvantage. Before she’d gone out with Andy, she discovered that he’d graduated with honors from Michigan and had been in a fraternity. She’d thought he was an all-American, clean-cut, nice guy. Nothing she’d learned online indicated he was a raping misogynist.
“Idiot,” she said. “You’re such a fucking idiot.”
The searching was getting her nowhere. There were too many Peter Wellses in the world, and none of the results seemed to relate to the one she knew. Then she remembered him saying that he’d moved from Lenox to Colonie, New York, which was very close to Albany. It figured that a fire that had killed two people and seriously injured another would have been a major local story.
She went to the Albany Times Union’s Web site and did an advanced search in the newspaper’s archives. She thought he’d mentioned that his parents had died six years ago and she hoped the stories were still available online. She did a search for the past seven years and was discouraged when she went through several pages of recent results that yielded nothing. But the newspaper’s database seemed to be large, going back at least several years, so she continued searching. After a couple of minutes, she was getting tired and was ready to give up when a headline caught her eye:
COLONIE MAN NO LONGER SUSPECT IN
ARSON INVESTIGATION
The Albany County District Attorney’s office has announced that charges will not be filed against Peter Wells, the twenty-one-year
Suddenly Katie was a frantic wreck. She had to read the entire article immediately but, damn it, she had to register and pay two dollars. She went to her purse and fumbled for a credit card. Typing her personal information into the registration form, she was so frazzled that she made several mistakes, even misspelling her own last name. Finally she finished the process, entered the password that had been e-mailed to her, and was able to read the rest of the story.
It was pretty much what she’d expected. Peter had been the focus of an investigation into the cause of the fire when it was discovered that he was the recipient of two one-million-dollar insurance policies. But officials had concluded that he was innocent of any wrongdoing, and an investigator was quoted as saying, “There is no evidence to show that Mr. Wells was responsible, nor that he acted in any way other than heroically.”
Katie read the article three or four times. The brief description of the fire—“rapidly spreading”—and mention of what had happened to Peter—“suffered severe burns”—jibed with what he had told her at the restaurant. But she still felt extremely disturbed.
Then Katie returned to the list of search results and saw that there were other articles about the fire—six of them. She spent several minutes purchasing them and printing them out, and then read them in bed, in chronological order.
The fire had taken place in the middle of the night, while the family was asleep. Peter had tried to save the victims, but couldn’t, and had suffered severe injuries himself, winding up in serious-but-stable condition. In the days afterward, he was hailed as a hero, but then doubts arose about the cause of the fire as information about the insurance policies was revealed. Investigators suspected that the fire had started when a halogen light in the living room accidentally ignited the drapes, but were questioning Peter anyway. After a brief investigation—according to the dates of the articles, it had only lasted a couple of days—Peter was declared innocent of any wrongdoing.
Later, Katie was trying to fall asleep, but she kept stirring. So maybe Peter didn’t set the fire that had killed his parents, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t psycho. What kind of person gets a job at a health club just to meet someone? What kind of nut buys an apartment for someone he hardly knows? What kind of lunatic proposes to someone he’s gone on two dates with? And they weren’t even really dates, not as far as she was concerned. For all she knew, Peter was so crazy, he’d killed Andy.
She had to get a grip, stop jumping to so many conclusions. Just because a guy was obsessed didn’t mean he was a killer. But the thing that kept gnawing at her, that scared her most, was that she had been so oblivious. The way he’d gone overboard on their dates, how he always seemed so concerned about her, how he acted like he knew her, should’ve been indications that there was something seriously wrong with Peter Wells. Everything he did always seemed planned, like he’d been watching her for years, getting to know her from a distance. It was almost like he’d been stalking her.
Suddenly Katie sat up and turned on the light. T
he way her pulse was pounding, she was afraid she’d pass out or have a heart attack. She almost screamed for Susan to come into the room, but managed to control herself.
How could she have been so fucking blind? The other day, near the coffee cart outside the subway—the guy she’d seen in the sunglasses and the baseball cap. She’d been in denial about it since then, but not anymore. Peter had been watching her that day. She was sure of it.
PART THREE
TWENTY-FIVE
Peter decided that, all in all, his second date with Katie had been a great success. Of course, it would’ve been nice if she’d said yes and accepted the ring and hadn’t run away from him like he’d had the plague, but he had to focus on the positives. They’d strengthened their connection during dinner. He’d scored points by showing her his scar, increasing her respect for him. He didn’t have a chance to kiss her, but he’d held her hand for a long time and she’d seemed very comfortable having skin-to-skin contact, even more so than on their first date. He imagined her, in her apartment, seriously regretting her behavior. It was only a matter of time until she called him to say that she’d made a huge mistake and to beg for a second chance. He wouldn’t be cruel and make her squirm. Nope, that wasn’t his style. He’d take her back right away.
The soaking tub had been installed and was functional. Peter luxuriated in the salted bath, breathing in the aroma of a scented candle. He had prepared a wicker basket of rose petals to sprinkle onto the water for his first bath with Katie. In her honor, he spread them around the tub.
He rested for a while with his eyes closed and then he turned on the LCD TV, which he’d installed above the tub, and played the DVD of the BBC version of Pride and Prejudice. Ah, was this the life, or what? As far as Peter was concerned, a better love story—hell, a better film—had never been made. It had always been hard to choose a favorite scene because the whole movie was so memorable. But if he had to pick one scene to watch again and again for the rest of his life, it would be the one where Elizabeth Bennet is standing alongside Mr. Darcy’s sister, who’s playing the piano, and Mr. Darcy gazes at Elizabeth longingly from across the room. God, that look of restrained, yet uncontrollable desire for a single woman was something that Peter had longed for since he could remember. Sometimes he’d practice “the Darcy look” in the mirror. It was hard to get it right by staring at himself, rather than at the object of his desire, but it got to the point where he could do it at will. It didn’t seem forced, either. It was as if he were channeling Mr. Darcy. He’d used the look on Katie several times—at the gym and during their dates—and it had definitely worked its magic.