“I don’t know how to do this,” Alessandra admitted. “Talking to men was easy when I was beautiful. But now …”
Harry was looking at her, studying her very naked, very plain face, his dark brown eyes so intense. It was as if the crowd around them had ceased to exist, as if they were the only two people standing in that fast-food lobby. He touched her hair, pushing a limp lock back behind her ear.
“The haircut really sucks,” he told her.
She closed her eyes. “Yes, I believe you mentioned that once already today.”
“But it’s just hair.”
“Spoken by the reigning king of bad hair days.” She reached up and took off his baseball cap. His hair, as usual, was standing up in all directions.
He shrugged. “Maybe we should just get matching Mohawks.”
Alessandra had to laugh.
He touched her again, his fingers warm and slightly rough against her cheek. “You’re still beautiful,” he said softly. “Too beautiful. It scares me, ’cause if someone looks at you too closely …” He shook his head.
And again, Alessandra didn’t know how to respond. “And you’re saying this,” she finally said, “because you’re dying to fuck me?”
Harry shouted with laughter. “Oh man,” he gasped. “I have got to watch my mouth. If I have you saying the f-word, I must be using it far too often.”
“I can’t figure out what you want.”
“Well, if you do figure it out, tell me. I’d love to find out myself.”
“Friends,” Alessandra said about a hundred miles west of the Mickey Ds where they’d stopped to get lunch. She turned to face him as he drove. “That’s what I want, Harry. I want us to be friends.”
Harry glanced at her. She was looking at him so intently, her face so serious—as if she were afraid he’d tell her no, no he didn’t want to be her friend. “I thought, you know, that was kind of what we are. I mean, aside from the fact you still haven’t forgiven me for using you as bait to catch Trotta.”
She nodded, still so serious. “I’ll forgive you, if you promise it won’t happen again. Ever.”
He held out his hand. “Deal.”
She tentatively slipped her fingers into his, barely even shaking his hand before she pulled hers free.
She took a deep breath. “About what you said before,” she started.
Harry knew exactly what she was talking about. “Al, I was way out of line. I’m really sorry if I made you uncomfortable.”
“It would just be a lot easier for me right now, if we didn’t make this too confusing. I’d like to—”
“I’m a grown-up,” Harry told her. “You don’t have to worry, I can—”
“Keep sex out of the picture.”
“Keep my pants zipped.”
“Good,” she said.
“Good,” he said, trying to find one single reason why the complete absence of sex in their relationship was, indeed, a good thing. Because Allie wanted it that way was the best he could come up with. And oddly enough, that was a good enough reason.
George swore softly and switched off the TV in disgust. “Figures the one week I’m in the hospital is the week before the baseball season starts. There’s nothing on but stupid talk shows and dirt-bike racing. If I wanted to watch thirteen-year-olds ride dirt bikes, I’d have had a family of my own.”
Kim looked up from the magazine she was flipping through. “Poor baby, you’re bored.”
“Bored and cranky and dying for a cigarette.” He’d been weaned almost entirely from the pain medicine that had made him float comfortably above both the bed and his body. His leg alternately ached and stung. He was sick of hospital food and completely worn out by Stan coming in all hours of the night to take his blood pressure and check his bandage. Dude.
“Poor George.” Kim put down her magazine and leaned forward, giving him a sympathetic smile and unobstructed view down the front of her blouse.
George felt a flash of guilt. She’d been nothing but sweet to him, spending every minute of the allotted visitors’ hours by his side for three days straight. She’d gotten a motel room near the hospital, paying a price she probably couldn’t afford just to be near him. And yet every time he looked at her, he wished she were Nicki.
Nicki—who didn’t even care enough to call him on the phone.
“I know what I like to do when I’m bored,” Kim told him with a devilish smile. She pulled her chair closer, slipped her hand beneath the light cotton spread that covered him.
“Um,” George said. Her fingers were cool against his thigh. He reached down to catch her hand before she found the edge of his hospital gown. “These doors don’t have locks.”
“So?”
“So these doors don’t have locks.”
“That makes it more exciting,” she whispered. “Just think, we could be walked in on any minute.”
“My point exactly.”
“That wouldn’t be boring.”
“That’s a good point, as well, but it’s just … perhaps a little too nonboring for me.”
Kim stood up and pulled the curtain around the bed. “How’s that?”
She was serious. George laughed. “Kim! God, this is crazy.”
“So I’m a little crazy. I thought you knew that about me already.”
She sat down, this time on the edge of his bed. She pulled aside the blanket, careful of his injured leg.
“Kim …”
“You’re not really going to tell me to stop, are you?” She leaned forward to kiss him, softly, lingeringly on his mouth, as she slowly pulled up his hospital gown.
She kissed him again. On the chin. On the throat. On the chest. On his stomach. She smiled up at him before she lowered her head once more.
George drew in a breath and closed his eyes. Kim had been right about one thing. He was definitely no longer bored.
* * *
Nicole went into the hospital, trepidation churning in her stomach.
George was going to live. She knew that. According to his doctors, he was doing remarkably well, healing nicely, no signs of infection, prognosis positive.
Still, she knew until she walked into his room, until she looked into his eyes and saw for herself that he really was okay, she wasn’t going to be able to concentrate.
The past few days had been awful. It had taken her five times longer than usual to accomplish the mundane little tasks she had to get done. During her meetings in D.C., her concentration had been way off. Her mind had been several hundred miles north, in upstate New York.
Nicole forced herself not to pace as she got onto the elevator that would take her up to George’s floor.
“Are you telling me that Griffin first came to your house as some kind of knee breaker?” Harry was eating Chee•tos from the bag, and the tips of his fingers were bright orange. “Christ, would you look at this? Forget dye packs. They should just throw these things in with the money during a bank heist. I’m marked for life.”
“He wasn’t exactly a knee breaker,” Alessandra gave him a crooked smile. “More like, you know, a ball breaker.”
“Griffin?” He shook his head. “I still can’t see it.”
“He was working for a law firm that assisted some of their clients in debt collection. When I first met him—I was still in high school—he was delivering papers for my father to sign, some kind of application for a second mortgage. The interest rate was a joke, it was so high, but it would pay off the people who wanted to break his knees. My father didn’t have to sign, but if he didn’t, the next man who came to the door would be carrying a baseball bat instead of a briefcase.”
Harry looked almost as bad as she did. His chin was covered with more than stubble but far less than a beard, and his eyes were bloodshot. It had been more than twenty-four hours since they’d made their only motel stop, and while Alessandra had slept off and on since then, Harry hadn’t. As they drew nearer to Colorado, she wondered if he intended to drive straight through.
“So Griffin set up a second mortgage,” Harry guessed, “probably taking a percentage from both the mortgage company and the bookie, and ended up dating and then marrying the poor bastard’s underage daughter. What a deal.”
“Actually, my father didn’t get the mortgage.”
Harry glanced up from the road. “He didn’t?”
“And Griffin didn’t even ask me out until I was eighteen, even though I knew he wanted to. He was infatuated with me.” She sighed. “At least he was at the start.”
“We don’t have to talk about this, if you don’t want.”
She looked over into Harry’s eyes. “Really,” he added. “If it’s going to make you feel bad, let’s not go there.”
For a man whose default mode was irreverent humor, he could be remarkably sensitive, uncharacteristically gentle.
“There’s not that much to tell,” she told him. “Griffin paid off my father’s debt. He signed me up for elocution lessons, enrolled me in a finishing school—”
“A finishing school?” Harry laughed. “God, I didn’t know they still had those. You must’ve been bored out of your mind.”
“I was flattered by Griffin’s attention. He clearly thought highly of me.”
“He was turning you into his little creation,” Harry countered. “Pouring you into the trophy-wife mold.”
“I didn’t mind. At least not at the time. The day I turned eighteen, Griffin took me to dinner and asked me to marry him.”
“Did you, like …” He started again. “Did you have to marry him? I mean, Christ, the pressure had to be intense, if he’d spent all that money on you and your family.”
“No,” she said quickly. “No, I wanted to. I really did.” At least that’s what she’d managed to convince herself. “He was everything my mother had been telling me—for years—that I’d wanted. You hear something often enough, Harry, and you believe it. I’d been hearing that the only way I would get ahead in life was to use my looks. Marry a wealthy man. Be a perfect wife so he wouldn’t ditch me when I got older. I wasn’t smart enough to do anything else—I heard that enough times, too.”
“You know now that they were wrong, right?” Harry asked. “You’re one of the smartest people I know. You spend all your time reading. I’ve never met anyone who can read as fast as you.”
Alessandra smiled. “It’s funny how good that makes me feel—you know, hearing you say that. When I was in high school, if a teacher complimented me on a project that I’d done well, I was like ‘Whatever, but hey, what do you think of this new color eyeshadow I’m wearing?’ ” She laughed. “I was stupid—because I didn’t realize that I had other options, other choices. It never even occurred to me to go for this creative writing class at school, even though I loved to write—because only the kids who had straight As got into it. So I didn’t even try. It never occurred to me to say, ‘Wait, I don’t want to marry Griffin,’ not because I had anything against Griffin, but because I didn’t want to get married. I’d just always assumed I would get married—I didn’t think I had a choice about that. And he seemed so perfect—handsome, rich, connected … And I really did think I loved him. Of course, I was a child.”
“He was so much older than you. That didn’t bother you?”
“Not until later, until I realized that our entire relationship was built on him telling me what to do, and my doing it without question. I married him when I was nineteen, thinking that would instantly make me a real adult. After all, there I was. A married woman. But all it really did was extend my childhood another seven years. I made virtually no decisions during our marriage. I had no say in our life.”
She sighed again. She’d tried so hard to make her marriage work—to the point that she’d neglected her own personal needs. “But back when I was eighteen, Griffin was my personal Prince Charming. He was so handsome and high-class, and he had money and a great job—or so I thought. I honestly didn’t realize who he was working for, Harry.” She corrected herself. “At least not at first.”
“But eventually you knew.”
“Yes,” she said. “Eventually I knew.”
Yet you didn’t leave him. Harry didn’t say the words aloud, but Alessandra heard them anyway.
“I loved him,” she said quietly. “But you know what, Harry? He didn’t love me. He just liked owning me, and when I turned out to be defective, he got rid of me.”
“He was nuts.” The tone of Harry’s voice left no room for argument. “I mean, look at what he did. He makes bad investments left and right, and loses all of his liquid assets. He could have sold that mausoleum you called home and reduced his expenses, but instead, he keeps investing, and keeps losing his shirt. So what does he do next? What’s the solution he comes to, financial genius that he is? He steals a million dollars from Michael Trotta. Now, not only is that biting the hand that feeds you, but it’s also fucking insane. Is it any surprise that he would dump you? No. Because the man definitely had a screw loose.”
“Our marriage hadn’t been working for years,” Alessandra told him. “If he hadn’t left me, I would’ve left him. Not right away. But I like to think that, eventually, I would’ve been strong enough to walk away from him. But I wasn’t ready to give up on him yet. I don’t know, maybe I was scared. Or maybe I was just making another mistake, hanging on when there was no hope. Maybe I never should have let myself love him in the first place.”
“You can’t choose who you love or how much you love them. I learned that the hard way.”
“With your ex-wife?”
“No.” Harry moved into the right lane. “Look, let’s stop and get something to eat that won’t dye my intestines neon orange.”
“No fair. After I told you about Griffin …? You can’t end the conversation just when it’s getting interesting to me.”
“Wanna bet?” He pulled the car onto the exit ramp, heading into the parking lot of another in a relentless string of McDonalds. “I need coffee. I’m starting to see double.” He parked and turned to look at her. “You want to take a turn driving?”
Alessandra was surprised. “Do you trust me?”
He reached across her to open the glove compartment and take out his wallet. “Would I have asked you, if I didn’t trust you?”
“No.”
“No is correct.” He handed her a ten-dollar bill. “The winner gets to buy the coffee, while the loser in the baseball cap calls New York to check up on George.”
“Harry. How can we really be friends, if you won’t talk about yourself?”
Harry climbed out of the car. “How can I talk about myself when I’m so worried about poor George, lying in that hospital bed, probably in terrible pain …?” He closed the door but then opened it right away. “Hey, get me one of those apple pie things, too, will you?”
Nicole took a deep breath outside George’s room. She could hear the phone ringing inside. One ring, then two. Then three. And four.
If he was asleep, the phone surely would’ve woken him.
A nurse was breezing past, carrying a tray of medicine down the hall. She slowed. “Can I help you?”
The phone rang again.
“I’m here to see George Faulkner,” Nicole said. “Is he out having tests or something?”
“No, he’s in his room. You can just go on in.”
The phone finally stopped ringing as Nicole opened the door, but the room was quiet. It was a double, but the first bed was empty. “Hello?”
There was a flurry of furtive movement from behind a thin curtain pulled around the bed on the far side of the room. Was the doctor back there? Or a nurse, changing his bandage? “George?”
A dark-haired woman emerged from behind the curtain, straightening her shirt and fixing her hair. “Gee, is it time for George’s sponge bath already?” she asked.
The woman wasn’t a doctor or nurse. Not even close. She was Kim. The stripper. Nicole’s evil twin.
Kim was actually wearing a leopard-print blouse. Nicole didn’t think
she’d ever seen one outside of a cheap bar or nightclub. The thin fabric stretched tight across the woman’s incredibly generous breasts, leaving little to the imagination. Her pants were so tight they might’ve been tattooed on, and her shoes had high, spiked heels. Fuck-me shoes, George used to call them.
How appropriate.
Nicole walked by her without a single word and pushed past the curtain. And there was George, sitting up in a hospital bed, intravenous tube still running into his arm, dressed in a hospital gown, a blanket pulled loosely up to his waist. His lean face was clean shaven, but his hair was uncharacteristically rumpled and perspiration beaded on his forehead and aristocratic upper lip.
It was so obvious what he and Miss Blow Job had been doing.
As Nicole watched, the stripper took her purse from the windowsill and reapplied her lipstick.
Nicole silently cursed herself for not expecting this, for letting herself stupidly fantasize that George would be waiting for her visit, that he would be glad to see her. She cursed herself for walking into a situation in which he’d managed to hurt her. Again.
“Well,” she said. Years of practice hiding her emotions made her voice sound matter-of-fact. “Looks like you’re feeling better.”
He was honestly surprised to see her. Surprised, and dreadfully chagrined. He sat awkwardly, trying to hide the obvious physical evidence that she’d walked in on him being serviced, so to speak, in his hospital room, of all places. “Nicki. God, I wasn’t expecting you.”
“Obviously not.”
Behind her, Kim cleared her throat.
George looked even more embarrassed. “Oh,” he said. “Yes. Nic, this is Kim Monahan. Kim, Nicole Fenster. Nicki’s my—”
“Boss,” she interjected. “I’m George’s boss.” There was no way in hell she was going to give Suction Lips the satisfaction of knowing she was George’s ex-wife.
“Nice to meet you.” Kim stepped closer, starting to hold out her hand, but Nicole backed away, turning to look at George.
She had no intention of shaking the other woman’s hand. She knew only too well where it had recently been.
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