by Hazel Hughes
Making her way between the linen-covered tables, Elizabeth reflected that Canteen was several notches above the usual cheap but tasty ethnic fare Abbie plied her with. Perhaps, with the whiff of potentially big money from her collaboration with Cullen, Elizabeth had moved up a level in Abbie’s roster of clients, like in an air-miles program. Perhaps Abbie now considered her, if not gold class, then at least silver. Or maybe, like Elizabeth in the lingerie shop, Abbie could smell the money that was almost hers and was just giving in to the urge to splurge.
But then again, Elizabeth thought, as she got closer to the table and saw that Abbie was not alone, maybe not.
The woman sitting across from Abbie radiated wealth. Her expensively maintained baby-blond hair was cut in a choppy shag and her pale gray leather jacket was tailored perfectly to her slim physique. She was a few years older than Elizabeth, she guessed, taking in the delicate webbing of lines around the woman’s eyes.
“Hi,” Elizabeth said, not succeeding in keeping the question mark out of her voice. She included both Abbie and the woman in her smile. The blonde nodded her head and reciprocated with a smile that did nothing to conceal her obvious head-to-toe appraisal.
“Lizzie! Hi, honey. Long time no see,” Abbie said, offering Elizabeth a chair. Elizabeth sat down before noticing that the table was set only for two.
“Lizzie, this is Melanie Potsdam. She’s a senior agent at Creative Force Literary and Screen Management,” Abbie said, rising and placing one plump hand on Elizabeth’s shoulder.
Melanie extended her hand. “Call me Mel,” she said, with that cool measuring smile.
Elizabeth shook Mel’s hand, sure the confusion was evident on her face now. Why was Abbie introducing her to another agent? Was she being traded, like a baseball player, to a different team?
“I’ve got to run, honey.” Abbie hoisted her massive black bag over her shoulder. “But I’m sure you two ladies will have loads to talk about.” She rolled her eyes and giggled. Elizabeth glanced at Melanie, who was still staring at her, knowing smirk firmly in place, then back at Abbie.
“Oh, Lizzie,” Abbie said, shaking her head like Elizabeth was a child who was not so bright, but whom she was fond of all the same. “You know CFLS, right? Sebastian Faulkner’s former agency? Mel represented Sebastian.”
Elizabeth felt her jaw drop. She looked back at Melanie, comprehension dawning. The blond’s smile widened.
“Abbie,” Elizabeth hissed, but her agent was already walking away, her ample hips brushing the narrowly separated tables as she went. That meddling bake-sale is going to get an earful, Elizabeth thought, eyes returning to her dining partner. If I live through this lunch, that is.
Melanie had managed to pry her eyes off Elizabeth, but she was still smiling as she looked at the menu. “Should we order first? I hear the snapper pie is outstanding. And that meatloaf smells to die for.”
Elizabeth had no appetite whatsoever. “Mm-hm,” she said, on autopilot. “It does.”
“Great.” Mel hailed a passing waiter with an arch of her eyebrow. “Two orders of meatloaf, please. And,” she looked at Elizabeth and winked, “a bottle of Malbec. And if you could bring the wine right away, that would be fabulous.”
“Like, yesterday,” Elizabeth muttered, under her breath as the waiter walked away.
Mel heard her and laughed, fixing Elizabeth in her appraising stare again. Elizabeth toyed with her napkin, folding it and unfolding it and finally spreading it on her lap.
“So Abbie didn’t tell you she was setting this meeting up. Some agent,” Melanie said at last.
“Well, she’s more like a friend ...” Elizabeth began.
“Right,” Melanie interrupted, with a harsh humorless laugh. “Wait till your books stop selling.”
Elizabeth didn’t respond, exhaling with visible relief as the waiter returned with the wine.
“So, how is Sebastian?” Mel asked, lowering her glass after a long drink.
“Oh. Fine,” Elizabeth answered, drawing the word out. The two women shared an ironic chuckle.
“Yes, he is,” Mel said, some of the edge slipping off her smile, softened by the wine. She looked at Elizabeth with that considering look again. “You’re just his type,” she said.
Elizabeth’s eyebrows shot up. If she was his type, then what was Mel? The two women didn’t look a thing alike. Where Mel was a typically tiny LA size zero, Elizabeth was long and lanky, curved like a cello. Mel’s style was cool and expensive and edgy and hip. Elizabeth’s was, well, not.
“You know,” Mel gestured to herself, “natural. No Botox, no fillers, no grapefruit tits. But still sexy.”
“Right.” Elizabeth really didn’t know what to say to this woman who had been Sebastian’s former lover, the woman who had supposedly had her life turned upside down by him.
“A bit young,” Mel continued, squinting. “Not that he doesn’t go for the young ones too, on the side.” A picture of Naomi Clamp flashed through Elizabeth’s mind. “But he usually likes his main course a few years older than you. Late thirties?” she asked.
Elizabeth nodded. “Thirty-eight.”
“Forty-five,” Mel gestured to herself. She sighed, twisting the base of her glass between two fingers. The way she kept staring at Elizabeth like she was a cashmere sweater marked down to half price made Elizabeth feel distinctly uneasy. “He must love that hair,” Mel sighed, suddenly reaching across the table to touch a strand. Elizabeth flinched and Mel sat back in her chair as if just realizing how inappropriate the gesture was.
“I’ll bet he loves twisting his fingers in that,” Mel said through a clenched smile, “when he’s got his cock in your mouth, doesn’t he?”
“Uh, look, Mel,” Elizabeth said, the color rising in her cheeks. “I’m sorry that things didn’t work out between you and Sebastian, but I had nothing to do with that.”
“No, of course you didn’t.” Mel’s gaze seemed to lose its sharpness, as if she were thinking of something else altogether. Or maybe it was the Malbec.
“And I don’t know why Abbie wanted us to meet,” Elizabeth began, but Mel interrupted, her gaze razor sharp again, cutting through the fog of wine that was beginning to blur Elizabeth’s focus.
“Don’t you?” Mel put her elbows on the table, leaning closer to Elizabeth. Elizabeth resisted the impulse to lean back in her chair, away from the intensity of Mel’s eyes.
“She wanted you to understand exactly what you’re getting into, sweetie. Let me give you the numbers,” she said, lowering her voice to a hiss. She held up her hands, fingers splayed wide. “Six. Six figures. Per episode. That’s the deal I got Sebastian with NBC. One. One day after he signed the contract and we celebrated in a suite at the Millennium, on my dime, I got a call from his assistant telling me he had decided to take on new representation. His assistant!” Mel spat out the word. “He couldn’t afford the rent on his Encenita dive, never mind an assistant before he met me.”
Mel paused to take a drink, then held up one hand. “Three. Three months in therapy since Sebastian left me, and counting. Two. Two million dollars. That’s my husband’s divorce settlement. Of course that doesn’t count the legal fees and child support. Or the house in the Hills. Yeah, that’s right,” she continued, taking in Elizabeth’s shocked expression. “My husband sued me. Got full custody of the kids. Proved I was an unfit mother. And, at the time, I guess I was.” Mel’s eyes started to well up with tears, her nose reddened. Then she seemed to regain her composure, inhaling sharply and fixing Elizabeth in her gaze again. “Addicts don’t make very good mothers.”
“You developed an addiction during your relationship to Sebastian?” Elizabeth asked, looking down at her wine glass. It was, unsurprisingly, empty.
Mel picked up the linen-wrapped bottle and refilled both of their glasses. “Ha,” she sniffed. “Yeah, I was addicted to him.”
Elizabeth felt like an icy hand had reached down her throat and grabbed her stomach. That was exactly how Sebastian ma
de her feel. Like when she quit smoking. She hadn’t seen him in several hours now, and she could feel her nerves beginning to jangle, craving her next high.
Mel sat back in her chair, taking a sip of her wine. “Has he started to hurt you yet? Persuade you to do things you don’t want to do,” she lowered her voice, “sexually, I mean?”
“No!” Elizabeth responded too vehemently. She ran her hand over her C-section scar, still tender and raw under the tattoo. She had wanted that. She felt the cold stone of the church wall pressing into her naked thighs, her cheek, as Sebastian took her from behind. She had wanted that, too.
Mel gave her a knowing smile. “Well,” she said, “he will.”
The expression on Elizabeth’s face must have registered as disbelief, because Mel’s smile broadened.
“Oh, you don’t think so? You think you’re different? Ha! Let me tell you about Sebastian.” Mel leaned forward, her forearms on the table. “See, guys like Sebastian, hot, rich, they don’t need to try to get pussy. They practically have it handed to them on a plate. So you’ve got to ask yourself, why would he want me when he could have that?” Mel tossed her head in the direction of the pretty young waitress, taking orders at the table next to theirs. “Or that.” She tilted her chin at the table behind Elizabeth.
Elizabeth glanced behind her. Two slender twenty-something girls in tight jeans laughed and picked at their salads, glossy shampoo-commercial hair falling around their shoulders.
Mel raised her eyebrows in a complicit, questioning expression. “Am I right?”
Elizabeth didn’t say anything, thinking back to the morning before Sebastian seduced her. She pictured him back-lit by the window, telling her he had wanted her even before he met her. Telling her he wouldn’t touch her unless she begged him to.
“I’ll tell you why he’s not much interested in twenty-something poontang.” Mel lowered her voice to a harsh whisper, so Elizabeth was compelled to lean in closer. “Because that would be too easy. Those girls, they have nothing to lose. It’s like playing go-fish with a five year old. You, me, we’ve got everything at stake. We’re playing five card stud and cashing in the house for chips. And that’s got to be pretty exciting for someone like Sebastian. Making a woman risk everything,” she rapped the table with her knuckles, “for him.”
Mel sat back in her chair and took a long drink of her wine. Elizabeth did the same. She looked around the restaurant. The voices, the clanking of silverware on china, the laughter suddenly seemed abrasive.
She looked back at Mel who was staring at her again with that hard, considering gaze.
“I’m going to make a prediction for you, Elizabeth.” Mel said her name with deliberate emphasis on each syllable. “Guaranteed 99.9 percent accurate.” She tapped the table with her index finger as she listed each point. “He will debase you.” Tap. “He will make you give up everything you love for him.” Tap. “And then,” she paused, holding her hands up and shrugging, “he will leave you.”
*
When Elizabeth got back to the Mercer after lunch with Mel, she was more than a little drunk. She gave a tipsy wave to the girl at reception as she swayed to the elevator.
She and Mel had finished the bottle of Malbec, leaving their meatloaves virtually untouched. Though the food had practically made her salivate when she saw it on the plates of the other diners when she walked in, meeting Mel had murdered her appetite.
Elizabeth had to try sliding her room key in three times before the little light on the card reader finally blinked green. Sebastian was still out. Elizabeth paced the room, wondering where he was. For one thing, she was itching to confront him. Red wine always made her argumentative. For another, she couldn’t help the niggling suspicion that if he wasn’t with her, he was probably with another woman.
Susan’s face popped into Elizabeth’s head, haughty and knowing. Elizabeth shook her head, worrying the soft pad of her thumb with her front teeth. No, she thought, too old. Then she remembered what Mel had said, about Elizabeth being younger than the women Sebastian usually went for.
She stopped pacing and leaned forward on the desk, looking into the mirror above it. She certainly didn’t feel young right now. Her patchy sleep schedule combined with the half liter of red she had just consumed weren’t doing her eyes any favors, she noticed. Thin, jagged red lines zigzagged across the whites, like cracks on the ice of a pond after the first thaw. Her complexion was holding up remarkably well, though, and she didn’t look all sunken-cheeked and dehydrated the way she normally did after a string of late nights. She brushed her hands over her wine-flushed cheeks and said out loud, “Must be the looove hormones,” giggling at the sound of her voice. Her laughter sounded slightly crazed in the empty room.
Oh, God, Elizabeth, she thought, what the hell are you doing?
Her conversation with Mel had been like a painfully strong cup of coffee, waking her out ofher sleep-walker’s haze. She was risking everything for Sebastian, she realized: her marriage, her kids, her home, and, as Abbie had made clear by arranging the meeting, her career. And if she was to believe Mel, she was even compromising her physical health and her sanity.
But that was the problem. She couldn’t completely believe Mel. She couldn’t let go of the conviction that her relationship with Sebastian was different, that she was different from all the women who had come before. Sebastian had told her that she had changed him, that she was the only woman who had ever seen him for who he really was beneath the chiseled abs and brooding eyes, that she made him want to be a better person. And she believed him.
Elizabeth had never had such a strong physical and emotional connection with anyone. When their eyes connected, she really did feel that she could see into his soul, and he into hers. And when their bodies connected ... Elizabeth shivered at the thought. Just touching his hand seemed to rearrange all the electrons in her body, never mind when they actually had sex. Sleeping with Sebastian was like taking an amazing drug that hadn’t been invented yet, one that combined the dreamy sweetness of hash with a sharp spike of adrenaline.
Elizabeth walked over to the window and looked down on the busy street below, the street that in just a few days with its cupcake kiosks and tourists had become so familiar, the view that in another forty-eight hours would be replaced with the view from her kitchen window in Fairfield. Because whatever Mel said and whatever Elizabeth felt didn’t really matter, when in just two days she would be leaving New York and Sebastian anyway. That was the beauty and the curse of their affair. Like a viral infection, it was self-limiting.
Just then she heard the shunk of a key card being inserted and removed, and the door opened. Sebastian was wearing his pea-coat, his cheeks and nose pink from the cold, and he was holding an incongruously feminine ribbon-handled pink bag. In her drunk and emotionally tangled state, Elizabeth found him beyond beautiful.
“Hey,” Sebastian said, putting the bag down and sitting on the edge of the bed to take off his boots, “you’re back. How was the meeting?”
Elizabeth crossed her arms over her chest protectively, leaning against the wall. “Very informative,” she said. “Where have you been?” Her voice sounded so accusatory. The wronged woman, she thought. Definitely not the vibe she had been hoping to project.
Sebastian stood up, shrugging off his coat as he tilted his head in the direction of the pink bag. “Shopping,” he said, a half-amused, half-confused smirk on his face.
He walked toward her with the measured stride of a panther confident of his prey. “What’s up with you?” he asked.
Elizabeth turned her back to him, looking out the window again. Sebastian stood close behind her, his hands warm on her tense shoulders.
“Nothing,” she said.
Sebastian buried his face in her hair, nuzzling her neck, inhaling deeply. “Ah-ha,” he purred, his voice tinged with laughter. “You’ve been drinking.” He turned her around to face him, her arms still crossed defensively. “You smell like you had a bath in mid-priced red
. I’m guessing,” he sniffed the air, “something from Argentina?”
Elizabeth pushed him away from her and turned to face the window again, embarrassed and angry.
“Ooh, an angry drunk,” Sebastian said. She could feel him behind her, his body radiating heat. He wrapped his arms around her waist. “And I had you figured for a horny drunk,” he whispered in her ear, pressing himself against her and holding her tight. “So you and your agent had a liquid lunch, hm? Is that what you literary types get up to in the middle of the work week? Naughty, naughty.”
Elizabeth squirmed out of his grasp. “I wasn’t with Abbie,” she said, sitting down on the bed facing him. “I was with Mel.” She looked at him to gauge his reaction when she said the name. So far, nothing. “Mel Potsdam?” she prodded.
The amused smile stayed on his lips, but slipped out of his eyes. “Ah,” he said.
They stared at each other silently, Elizabeth’s eyes challenging, Sebastian’s expressionless.
“I take it your agent and Mel know each other?” Sebastian asked, leaning against the wall beside the window.
Elizabeth shook her head. “Abbie has a friend of a friend at CFLS. Mel happened to be in town. She thought we should meet.”
“You told your agent about us?” Sebastian asked, his face still impassive.
“No. Not exactly. She pieced it together from some things I said and how I wasn’t returning her phone calls ...” Elizabeth trailed off, looking at the floor.
“Huh.” Sebastian folded his arms across his chest, looking out the window. “So how is Mel?” he said, lightly.
“In therapy. Bitter.”
Sebastian looked at her. Later, when Elizabeth looked back on this moment, she would reflect that if Sebastian’s eyes had shown anything else – hatred, amusement, pity, embarrassment, anything really – she would have left him then and there. But Sebastian’s eyes were sad.