Just Friends

by Robyn Sisman

  “Oh, I’m not with this lot.” Freya trilled with laughter at the very idea. “I just, er, came in to buy a book and, er, decided to sneak a free glass of wine. It’s my birthday,” she added, as if this were an explanation.

  “Oh, yeah?” Leo looked unconvinced.

  “What about you?” she countered. “Found any nice girls?”

  “Me?” Leo’s dark brows snapped together. “Jesus Christ! I wouldn’t be seen dead with these losers.” He had the perfect face for sneering, Freya thought. “No, I’ve got one of my writers downstairs signing books. I’m just hanging out till he’s finished.”

  “It’s not . . . Jack, is it?”

  “Who? Oh—Jack. No. Wish it was. He decided to stay with Ella Fogarty.”

  Freya nodded. Good for you, Jack, she thought.

  “No, I missed a trick there.” Leo gave Freya a brooding look, as if it were her fault. “I just hope Ella knows how to extract the right level of advance. These publishers are such tightwads.”

  “Mmm.” What was he talking about?

  “The word is it’s very good. Even better than Big Sky. Maybe bestseller material.”

  Freya tried not to goggle. Jack had finished his book! She took a slurp of wine to cover her surprise, choked, and had to be patted on the back. “I always knew he’d do it,” she croaked.

  “It didn’t look that way back in the summer,” said Leo. “Even though I tried getting him on my list I wasn’t sure he’d ever perform. It looked like he was heading nowhere. Then something happened to him, I don’t know what.”

  I do, Freya thought. Her heart sang.

  “Maybe it was the marriage,” Leo suggested.

  “Bollocks!” Freya exclaimed. Candace Twink could no more inspire Jack to write a novel than she could fly to the moon. The woman couldn’t even see her own two feet! Catching Leo’s startled glance, she added, “I mean, I don’t see why that should have any particular impact on his writing.”

  “Well, I do. I’d say that was a real punch in the balls.”

  “Would you?” Freya smiled brightly. What was a punch in the balls? Was he calling Candace a ballbuster? She didn’t seem to be doing too well with conversations tonight.

  “I mean, from the old man,” continued Leo helpfully.

  Freya frowned. “What, you mean cutting off his allowance?”

  “The guy had an allowance! Jeez, these spoiled rich boys. No, I mean the business with the girlfriend.”

  “What girlfriend?”

  “The one he married, of course.” Leo’s tone implied that she was a half-wit. “I mean, what a great story. There’s a novel right there.”

  “You think so?” Freya cocked her head intelligently. She was utterly mystified.

  “Well, sure! You introduce your girlfriend to your father, and the next thing you know they’re getting married. It’s your worst fucking nightmare.” He cackled maliciously.

  Freya stared at him, openmouthed. There was a strange noise in her head, like one of those complex 3-D puzzles clicking into place. The very week she’d left for England with Jack, Candace had gone out on the town with Jack’s father. Jack’s father liked women. Candace liked money. Candace wanted to be someone. Leo had said father. Freya took a gasp of breath as the glorious, miraculous, obvious truth arrowed into her brain and finally hit the bull’s-eye. Candace had married Jack Madison senior! Which meant . . . which meant that Jack wasn’t married after all!!! She burst into hysterical laughter.

  Leo was looking at her as if she’d finally flipped.

  “I just think it’s terribly funny,” she explained, raising her hand to hide a huge, foolish grin. He wasn’t married!

  “You women are so callous.” Leo shook his head in disgust. “Just think how upset the poor guy must be about it.”

  “Who? What?” Freya couldn’t concentrate with all the voices jabbering in her head. Jack wasn’t married! He was free! He’d even finished his book! How wonderful he was.

  Leo rolled his eyes. “Isn’t Jack upset that his, i.e. Jack’s, father has married his, i.e. Jack’s, girlfriend?”

  “Don’t be daft!” Freya scoffed. “Jack wouldn’t care who married her. She’s a bimbo, for heaven’s sake! You could count her brain cells on the foot of a three-toed sloth. Jack’s much too good for her. I mean, he’s so . . . talented and so . . . funny . . . and nice and handsome and—” Whoops! She was babbling. “At least, some people seem to think so,” she ended feebly.

  “Oh, I get it. . . .” Leo gave her a sly look. “I heard you’d moved in with him for a while. But you couldn’t get your hands on him because of this other girl, right? Now the field is clear, you can start chasing him again.”

  Freya drew herself up tall. “I was never chasing Jack,” she informed him with dignity. “We were just friends.”

  “Oh, sure,” he said skeptically.

  “We still are!” she insisted, stung.

  “Really?” said Leo. “Then how come you’re not with him now instead of hounding poor single men?”

  “What?” He’d lost her again.

  He sighed at her stupidity. “Didn’t you say it was your birthday?”

  “So?”

  “You know: you and Jack—the bet?”

  “What bed?” Freya blushed scarlet. She pictured the moonlit room in Cornwall, Jack smiling down at her, his hands tugging at the straps of her dress. Of course, she hadn’t forgotten. But how on earth could Leo know about that?

  “Bet,” Leo repeated, as if to a moron. “B-e-t. Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten.”

  Freya stared at him. Her heart was beginning to pound. Of course, she hadn’t forgotten. The hot night at Café Pisa, it seemed a lifetime ago—Jack saying, “I’ll be there”—and her making that stupid crack about marrying a lord. Only it was Jack who’d gotten married. Except he hadn’t. . . .

  “As in poker? About six months ago? In Jack’s apartment? Are you having trouble with your ears?”

  “The bet!” shrieked Freya, so loudly that the room hushed for a moment and everyone stared. Her mind whirled. The eighth at eight. Oh, my God, he might be there now!

  She grabbed Leo’s wrist and looked at his watch, forgetting she had a perfectly good one of her own. Nine-fifteen. He’d think she wasn’t coming—that she didn’t care—that she’d meant it when she said she never wanted to see him again. Oh, Jack, wait!

  Oh, God, Oh, God. She started to sprint for the escalator, then turned back and slung an arm around Leo’s neck. “Come here, you bastard ten-percenter.” She gave him a smacking kiss.

  Leo rubbed his cheek, a look of astonished recognition spreading across his face. “You’re in love with him!” But Freya was already gone.

  CHAPTER 36

  The waiter pounced on Jack’s empty glass and shot him a dirty look. Jack had lingered for almost an hour over two Bloody Marys; outside, there was a queue waiting for tables. Yet again the waiter asked if he should open the champagne; yet again Jack told him to wait.

  How much longer? Jack had spent many hours of his life waiting for women. He still hadn’t figured out exactly what they did all that time, but he knew that whatever it was took them twice as long as one could possibly imagine. In fact, in female terms, Freya was barely late at all. Candace, for example, had kept his poor father waiting in the Oaksboro church for forty-five minutes—and that was for her own wedding. But she had turned up in the end. They were on their honeymoon now in Candace’s dream destination, Las Vegas. Candace Twink was a remarkable woman in her way.

  Her note had been lying on the hallway floor of his apartment when he got back from Cornwall.

  You bastard! Harry from upstairs told me where you’ve gone and who with. I always thought there was something between you and Her. Well, chacun a son goo, as they say in France. I have too much respect for myself as a woman to play “second fiddle.” It is time for me to focus on my own life-goals and fulfill my potential as a human being. DON’T call me.

  It had not immediately o
ccurred to Jack that Candace’s “life-goal” might be to marry his own father. In fact, when he opened the letters from Candace, Lauren, and his dad, all on the same subject (though Lauren’s was much the funniest), he’d almost broken his no-drinking rule. Once he’d recovered from his surprise, the news of the marriage seemed entirely appropriate, though even he was struck by the single-mindedness with which Candace had embraced her destiny. Overnight, she had reinvented herself as Scarlett O’Hara. With a ruthlessness that inspired awe, if not admiration, she had repudiated her background, her friends, and very nearly her own family, eagerly agreeing to celebrate the wedding at the Madison home and admitting only a small group of terrified Twinks, who stood outside the church in an ostracized huddle wearing their best Macy’s suits. Jack now suspected that, even as she’d composed her note of dismissal, Candace’s eye had been firmly fixed on a prize infinitely more valuable than himself. Jack had accepted his father’s offer of the role of best man, “to show everybody we’re still friends,” as his father put it. “Everybody” meant the whole of Oaksboro and practically everyone Jack had ever known. He was in no doubt that they all knew exactly how the happy couple had met. The story of how a man approaching seventy had stolen his own son’s girlfriend was too good not to broadcast throughout every barroom and hairsalon in the county.

  Oddly, the potential humiliation of this situation had had the opposite effect. Contemplating Candace in her wedding creation, her left hand locked tight into the crook of his father’s arm and displaying several thousand dollars’ worth of diamond ring, Jack had felt no jealousy at all, only a faint sadness that this was her narrow definition of happiness. He felt sorry for his father with this absurdly young trophy wife, who was unlikely to make him any happier than his previous four. Dad’s cronies might josh about old dogs and lead in pencils, but the truth was that his father had not been up to the challenge with a real companion with a brain, like Lauren. Jack knew he wanted to do things differently.

  Still, it was going to take some getting used to, having Candace for a stepmother. Jack longed to tell Freya the whole story. He knew how hilarious she’d find it. But she wasn’t here.

  Jack looked at his watch: nine-fifteen. She must come. She must! He had arrived with such excited expectancy, even while warning himself to expect nothing. Every time the door opened he had looked up, hoping it would be her. He’d secured one of the most desirable tables in a quiet corner, romantically lit. He’d enjoyed choosing the champagne (dry? brut? pink??) and ordering it at once, so that it would be waiting for her in its frosted bucket. He wanted to tell her about his book. He ached to see her face—her smile, her eyes, her lips.

  Tonight had been his real deadline for months. Valhalla’s, the eighth at eight. All summer and into the autumn, riding back and forth in the pickup, listening to country songs of love and loss and longing, he’d dreamed of this chance to tell her that he was sorry, and to prove to her that he had changed. Sometimes he thought of those dog graves in Cornwall, carved with the names of King Arthur’s court, and imagined his own inscription: Sir Jack, not very chivalrous knight. Freya had banished him; and only Freya could recall him. If she chose to.

  Jack gripped the edge of the table, so tight that his thumbnails whitened. He wanted her here—now. He missed her company and her laugh; he missed her cleverness and her fighting spirit; he even missed their arguments. Ever since Cornwall he’d been unable to think about any other woman: again and again he’d found himself waking from vivid erotic dreams; his mind full of her eyes, her breasts, her legs . . . He remembered how she had looked, lying on the bed beneath him. She’d once said to him, “You don’t want a woman like me.” But she was wrong. Freya was exactly the woman he wanted. She was the only woman.

  Here was the waiter again. Jack waved him away and checked the time: nine-thirty. Once again he ran through the reasons that might explain her lateness. But he was kidding himself. She wasn’t late; she had never intended to come. She wasn’t sick or stuck in a meeting or stranded without a cab; she wasn’t here because she didn’t want to be.

  Jack glanced again at the champagne resting in the bucket beside him, and the sheaf of flowers waiting on her chair. The flame of hope that had been burning inside his heart flickered one last time and went out. Well, that was it. He could take a hint. He wouldn’t bother her again. He signaled to the waiter to bring him the check.

  CHAPTER 37

  Where were they all? She couldn’t believe it. Cars raced toward her, headlamps blazing, paintwork rippling with reflected light, but she couldn’t see a single cab. Wait! There was one. Damn, its light was off. Freya strained her eyes down the avenue. She thought she could just make out another one, lined up at the traffic stop. The lights changed. Yes! She stepped off the curb and waved wildly. The cab put its blinker on. Thank God! Then, to her fury, it stopped about ten yards before reaching her and someone else got in. Freya shook her fist as it shot past. Now the traffic lights had turned to red again, banking up another wave of cars. She pictured Jack in the restaurant, waiting for her, looking at his watch, wondering if she was coming. Frantic with impatience, Freya turned and began to walk.

  Was she was kidding herself? Would he really remember the bet after so many months? Even if he did, would he turn up after the terrible things she’d said to him? Jack probably wasn’t even in New York. She knew now that he hadn’t married Candace, but he might still be canoodling with some little sugarplum down under the ol’ magnolia trees.

  Still no cabs. She could see the crisscross flash of Thirty-Fourth Street ahead of her. It was already nine-thirty. This was hopeless. Should she give up? She stopped dead, catching her breath, trying to decide. There was a ringing in her ears, drowning out the sounds of the street. Into the muffled hush, as clearly as if old Mrs. da Filippo were standing right next to her, came the words: A woman always knows. And when she knows she must act.

  Freya broke into to a run, long coat tangling in her legs, high heels stuttering on the sidewalk. She remembered the terrace in the moonlight, when the heel of her shoe had come off, how Jack had picked her up in his arms. A flame of desire licked through her. She had known then, but she hadn’t trusted her heart. She had let fear of rejection and her own stupid pride stand in her way. But she knew now. And she was suddenly certain that, against all the odds, against reason or probability, Jack was waiting for her. She would race into the restaurant, breathless—she could see his incredulous smile. She’d be smiling, too. She’d walk right up to him and say . . . What would she say? The words formed in her mind—words she had never allowed herself to speak aloud—like a tight bud swelling, unfurling, bursting open to the light. I love you.

  A cab! She waved at it desperately and it stopped. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

  Freya fell back against the seat, amazed at the idea she had just admitted into her mind. She loved him! Well, of course, she loved him. Hadn’t she been carrying him around in her heart for months? She missed his laugh. She missed his company. Some nights she couldn’t sleep for wanting the touch of his body.

  At last! Here was the long plate-glass curve of the restaurant. There was a queue outside, figures huddled into coats, stamping their feet. Freya squashed dollar bills into the cabdriver’s hand, and raced to the door of the restaurant.

  “Hey, you! Get in line!” called a belligerent voice.

  “I’m meeting someone,” Freya tossed over her shoulder.

  She pushed her way into the entrance. A crowd of people was clustered two and three deep around a long chromium bar. She barged her way through and walked straight into the sea of tables, head swiveling this way and that. Her heart slammed at her ribs. Where was he?

  “Excuse me, miss, do you have a reservation?”

  Freya jerked her head impatiently at the polite male voice without looking around. “I’m meeting someone,” she repeated, stepping farther into the room. She felt a chill of panic. He must be here.

  “May I have the name?”

&n
bsp; Freya turned reluctantly, taking in the white shirt, black trousers, professional smile.

  “Madison,” she told him, with a tiny thrill at saying the name aloud.

  “If you’d just come with me—?”

  Freya followed him to his smoothly sculpted lectern and held her breath as she watched his forefinger skim down the open pages of his reservations book.

  “Madison! Here we go,” said the man. Freya could have kissed him. Yes! “But that table was booked for eight o’clock.” He cocked his arm fussily to check his watch. “I think he’s gone.”

  No! Aloud she said, “Are you sure? Which table was it?”

  The man put out his hand to stop a young woman who was passing, a slim blond in a black dress. “Suzie, this lady was supposed to be meeting Mr. Madison, table twelve. Do you happen to remember if he left already? Suzie takes the coats,” he explained.