Thin, Rich, Pretty

by Harbison, Beth

  “We came here without warning her,” Nicola pointed out, reaching over to trade a piece of her Caribbean jerk pizza for a slice of the BLT. She’d wanted to try everything on the menu. “So what’s the difference?”

  “This is a public place. It’s not so much of an ambush when it’s a public place, because there are so many people around. Going to her house . . . I don’t know—it just feels like there’s a different protocol.”

  “Hm. I see what you mean.”

  “On the other hand, this should be such good news for her that she won’t care if we warn her first or not.”

  “Should be. Then again, it might be more of an ‘I could have had this all these years if it weren’t for you’ than a ‘thank you so much, I thought I’d never see this again!’ for her.”

  Holly shrugged. “We don’t have to tell her we took it. We could say we were hiking in the woods today, found it, and remembered it looked like the one she’d lost.”

  Nicola tried to keep from laughing, but she couldn’t. “Not even Meryl Streep could pull that act off.”

  “No?” Holly laughed. “I guess you’re right. We have to face the music.”

  “After we eat.” Nicola took a bite of the BLT. It was amazing. Given the choice, she would have preferred to sit here all day and eat every different pizza on the menu.

  “Excuse me,” a voice interrupted.

  For a second, Nicola thought it was the waitress and was about to ask if she could bring one of the pear gorgonzola pizzas over, too—after all, they could save the leftovers and eat them during their O.C. viewing tonight. But it wasn’t the waitress. It was a woman who looked to be in her mid-twenties, with a stylish dark bob and red lipstick.

  “Yes?”

  Holly set down her pizza and dabbed her mouth with her napkin.

  “I’m really sorry to interrupt, and I swear I’m not usually this person, but”—she rolled her eyes—“I have to say, I am such a fan.”

  Nicola swallowed. “You are?”

  Meanwhile, Holly, oblivious, asked, “Of what?”

  Nicola shot her a look.

  Uncertainty crossed the woman’s eyes. “Wait . . . you are Nicola Kestle, aren’t you?”

  Pleasure flowed through Nicola’s veins. “Yes.”

  “Oh!” Across the table, Holly’s face went red. “Sorry! I always forget!”

  This was the second time in an hour Nicola had been recognized. She was thrilled.

  “Can I get your autograph?” the woman asked, looking around haplessly. “I don’t have paper.”

  “Here’s a napkin.” Holly handed it over. “And I have a Sharpie in my purse.” She started to dig.

  “You just happen to have a Sharpie in your purse?” Nicola asked.

  “You’d be amazed how often this comes in handy. See? Now you can sign the napkin, a pizza box, a glass, whatever you want.”

  The woman’s jaw dropped. “Oh! A glass! What a great idea!” She reached for Nicola’s water glass and handed it to her. “Would you mind?”

  Nicola looked around. Could she get in trouble for writing on a glass? Would anyone even care? Well, she didn’t, she decided after a moment. This was a great moment, and she’d sign the wall if someone wanted her to. She wiped the condensation from the glass with her napkin, then asked, “What’s your name?”

  “Phyllis. Spelled the usual way.”

  Over the years, Nicola had learned there was never a usual way. “P-h-y-l-l-i-s?”

  Phyllis nodded. “So will there be a sequel to Duet?”

  “There’s been talk.” Yeah, talk of a new actor and actress taking on the next generation roles. “But nothing is sure yet. We’ll see.”

  “I would sign a petition, anything. I just think you are the best. You’re so real. I felt like I could relate to you.”

  This gorgeous woman felt like she could relate to the Nicola Kestle she saw on-screen? That was amazing. Because, frankly, if she had been on screen, there was probably no way Nicola would have felt she could genuinely relate to her.

  Of course, everyone had different personal demons, and there were probably few people in the world who were so physically beautiful that it made up for anything and everything else they might feel.

  “Thank you,” she said to Phyllis, though she was growing consumed with thoughts about keeping her nose in its current broken state rather than healing or going back to a cosmetic surgeon to have it “fixed.” The “fix” hadn’t worked the way she’d hoped it would.

  She didn’t want to be “fixed” anymore.

  “Thank you,” Nicola said, handing the signed glass to Phyllis. It still had water in it.

  “No, really, thank you.” Phyllis looked her over. “I really almost can’t believe it’s really you.”

  Join the club, Nicola thought, but she said, “It was a real pleasure meeting you, Phyllis.”

  She watched, pleased, as Phyllis walked away with an obvious bounce in her step. It had been a while since Nicola saw someone react to her in any way even close to that. She had to admit, her ego liked the boost.

  “Oh my God, you’re, like, a movie star!” Holly said.

  “Sort of. For the moment. What happens if this is all swelling and my nose goes back to being small and straight?” Never before in her life could Nicola have imagined this being a concern to her.

  “I don’t know. I guess you’ll just have to learn to deal with being classically beautiful.”

  “But I don’t want to be classically beautiful anymore! I want to be me again. No matter what that means!”

  “You’ve always been you!”

  “Come on, don’t start that Glinda the Good Witch stuff with me. You know damn well I looked cripplingly different when you first saw me this week.”

  “I wouldn’t have said it was crippling. . . .”

  “My grandmother didn’t recognize me,” Nicola argued. “That was crippling. My agent didn’t recognize me. The producers who wanted to audition me based on the fact that they’d written the part with me in mind didn’t recognize me, so they hired someone else.” Nicola closed her eyes for a moment and pinched the bridge of her nose. “I appreciate your support, I really do, but the time for honesty has long since arrived. I look like some dull Barbie doll. My stupid New Nicola Project was a complete failure. You could find a million mes just walking around West Hollywood with your eyes open. Now.”

  “Except . . .” Holly sort of winced. “I’m not sure that swelling is going down that much more. I’m afraid it looks like I sort of knocked the cartilage . . .” She couldn’t finish, she just gestured. “Out of line, I guess.”

  “I hope so.” Nicola sighed. “I seriously hope so.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Seriously. If you broke my nose back into a reasonable replica of its former self, I’ll be indebted to you forever.” Nicola smiled. “I can’t tell you what a nightmare it has been having a face that isn’t my own.”

  “I can imagine it was disconcerting, but not to the point where you’d want it smashed.”

  Nicola laughed. “Well, no, I guess I wouldn’t have specifically asked for you to smash it. But if people recognize me again, it’s got to be better. To hell with being beautiful, I want to be me.”

  Holly looked at her and nodded. “I think I know what you mean.”

  Nicola suspected she did. “I used to think it would be the ultimate dream come true to get my nose fixed and to be what people might actually consider pretty. But to look in the mirror, or pass a store window and catch your reflection, and to see someone . . . else . . .” She shook her head. “It’s like having someone ape your every move. It’s been disturbing.”

  “You know, when you hinted toward this before, I thought you were being falsely modest.” Holly took a sip of chardonnay. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Modesty is good. And you are so beautiful that who could believe you were really unhappy with it?”

  “Look, I don’t know how ‘beautiful’ I actually look r
ight now, but I do know, for a fact, that I’d give anything to feel like myself again. Anything.”

  “Now that I understand.” Holly gestured toward the food in front of her. “I’m eating what I want to for the first time in weeks. And it’s not to say I’m going to pig out and purposely gain all the weight back to make a statement, but it feels damn good to eat what I want. Wait, make that, to do what I want.”

  “And what you want is to have some pizza.”

  “That’s right!”

  “So it’s not so weird that I want to go back to ugly from pretty.”

  “You were never ugly!”

  “You know what I mean.”

  Holly laughed. “Yeah, I guess I do. You want to go from pretty to ugly, and I want to go from thin to fat again.” She pointed a finger at Nicola. “We’ve learned our lessons and want to tap our heels together now and go back home.”

  Nicola raised her wineglass. “There’s no place like it.”

  “So now we get there by taking the yellow brick road to Lexi’s house.”

  22

  As it turned out, Lexi was surprisingly good at painting.

  Walls, that was, not pictures.

  “It’s all about the tools,” she said to Greg after he marveled at the precision with which she’d painted his bedroom and then the dining room with its complicated angles and elaborate crown molding. “Once I had the spackle and I discovered that old album cover was the perfect maulstick. I mean, look how perfectly straight my lines are!”

  “Old album cover?” Greg’s eyes fell upon Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A., which was now covered in less-than-patriotic beige, tan, and primer. “Are you kidding me?”

  She pressed her lips together. “Remember yesterday when I went to the garage to ask you—and I specifically said this—an important question?”

  “The Redskins’ pregame was on!”

  She shrugged and dabbed a little touch-up semigloss white onto the doorframe. “It would only have taken a few seconds to answer.”

  “So you decided the answer was yes?”

  She gestured at the perfect paint job she’d done. “Are you saying the answer was no?”

  He looked at the walls, scrutinized the corner, even touched the baseboard. “No,” he said at last. “I guess not.”

  “Ha!”

  “Actually, I have to say the furniture looks really good the way you moved it around in there, too. You made it look like a model home.”

  “Isn’t that the idea?”

  “Yeah, but I . . .” His voice trailed off. “It’s not exactly my gift.”

  She laughed. “No kidding. But you had the furniture all wrong. Heavy pieces all bunched up together makes it look like the room is half the size.”

  Greg shrugged. “I will absolutely bow to your superiority in this area.”

  “Good. You should. And you shouldn’t have brought that stupid La-Z-Boy back in.”

  “It’s comfortable!”

  “It’s huge and ugly.”

  “Granted.” He folded his arms in front of his chest and leaned back against the doorframe. “But it’s comfortable.”

  “We are never going to agree on this.” She smiled. She didn’t mind disagreeing with him.

  Which was a good thing, since she was certainly getting used to it.

  “You know,” he said. “I wasn’t really sure this arrangement between the two of us was going to work out at first—”

  “You weren’t exactly my Barbie Dream House roommate either.”

  The dimple showed in his cheek. “And yet you hid it so well.”

  “Right. I should be an actress.”

  He gave a half smile and looked at her in a way that made a shiver tickle down her spine. He took a step toward her. “The thing is, I think we work pretty well together.”

  “Apart from your piggy ways, leaving dishes in the sink, and so forth,” she softened, just talking about it. “I think you’re right.” For all his faults—and she was ready to point out scores of them—he was really pretty endearing.

  Actually, when she watched him do his thing, using power tools and turning a wall into, say, a gorgeous arched entryway, he was more than endearing.

  He was sexy.

  “I mean really well.” Greg hesitated and then, practically circling his toe on the floor before him, added, “I got an offer on the house today.”

  That stopped her in her tracks.

  She put the paintbrush, bristles up, in her front pocket. She’d given up on keeping these jeans clean a long time ago. “Did you take it?”

  “Not yet, but I will.”

  “Oh.” She swallowed. This sucked, but it was what he wanted. It was what they’d both been working toward. “Congratulations. That was a lot faster than I expected.”

  “Yeah, well, when the Realtor said he wanted to bring people by, I figured we’d just get some helpful feedback, not an offer. But since we’re in this to sell it, I had to be open.”

  “Of course. Why not?”

  “Because . . . well, I know you thought you’d be here longer.”

  It had been only a month. Initially they’d talked about this taking eight months or so, and when he pointed out there were no guarantees, it was probably both of them who thought that meant it might be longer.

  “How long until we have to be out?” she asked.

  “A couple of months. The best I can hope for is a late September or October settlement date.”

  She nodded, mute. Obviously she’d known she couldn’t do this forever. When she started, she wouldn’t even have minded the idea of wrapping up quickly. What she hadn’t planned on was actually feeling at home with this guy in this house that needed so much work.

  “We’re damn good, aren’t we?”

  He nodded. “That’s what makes this all the more difficult.”

  “Makes what more difficult?” What now? Wasn’t it bad enough that she had to find a new place to live? That her time with him was over before it even felt like it got started? What could possibly make this more difficult?

  “This.” He cupped her face in his hands and kissed her.

  Lexi had been kissed before—there was no denying it, from Josh Stenberg in first grade right on through Drew Ardner three months ago—but this kiss felt like the first. She could have died satisfied if it was the last.

  Then he pulled back and said, “So, there’s that. And I’ve got a proposition for you.”

  “Wasn’t that a proposition?”

  He smiled and looked right into her eyes. “I guess it was. Maybe I should wait for an answer on that before I give you the next one.”

  She raised her chin. “I’ll have to think about it.”

  He shook his head. “Then you’re going to have to think about it in conjunction with this: There’s another place, down River Road, close to Seneca. I’ve had my eye on it for years. It’s gone into foreclosure, and I was thinking, if you don’t have other plans right away, that maybe we could . . .” He was clearly struggling to come up with the words. “Do our thing there.”

  “Our thing being . . . ?” She could think of quite a few things she’d like to do with him.

  “What we did here.” He gestured around them. “Renovating. Staging. Selling. Or maybe not selling—I haven’t gotten that far. But I know I just complicated things, and you might not want to stick around, knowing how I feel.”

  “That’s right, you took a big chance on getting slapped, didn’t you? I might have been shocked!”

  “I wouldn’t put it past you.” His smile widened. “I wouldn’t put anything past you. I think that’s one of the things I like best about you. You feel what you feel, and you put it right out there.”

  She laughed. “Oh, sure, you say you like that now—”

  He pulled her back into his arms so close, their breath mingled. “I will always like that about you.”

  Warmth spread through her chest and out into her limbs. This was unlike anything she’d ever felt bef
ore.

  Happiness.

  When he kissed her again, she sank into it, allowing herself to feel every sensation, every clichéd butterfly of it.

  Until they were interrupted by the doorbell.

  “Ignore it,” Greg murmured against her mouth.

  “We can’t! What if it’s the Realtor?” She smiled as she drew away. “Besides, we have work to do.”

  “Fine. There’s a hole I need to patch in the back room anyway.”

  “Go!” Part of her wanted to run back into his arms and ignore the rest of the world, but most of her wanted to string this out as long as she could, enjoying every moment of it.

  How long did it take to fall in love?

  When she opened the door, she was greeted by two faces, both of them familiar but out of place. She cocked her head, hoping it would come to her before she had to admit she had no idea who they were. “Yes?”

  “Lexi,” one of them said. She was the shorter of the two, with glossy brown hair, warm brown eyes, and—

  That was it, Lexi remembered. “Holly! How nice to see you! How . . . weird to see you—?”

  “One of your coworkers at Sephora gave me your address,” Holly said quickly. “After I swore up and down that I wasn’t a stalker. And I’m not,” she hastened to add.

  “O-kay.” This was odd, but not scary odd. Lexi wasn’t sure what to do. She looked from Holly to her friend, who also looked familiar. Tall and thin, with long auburn hair and light blue eyes. Her arm was in a blue sling.

  “We need to talk to you,” Holly went on, speaking in urgent tones. She gestured at the woman with her. “This is Nicola.”

  “Nicola Kestle.” The other woman held out her good hand, and Lexi knew who she was all at once. The movie star! No wonder she hadn’t been able to place her—she was so out of place. “We were in the same cabin as you back at Camp Catoctin back in eighth grade,” Nicola went on.

  “Right. Of course, I’ve seen you since then.” Lexi looked her over. She looked a little different. Maybe it was because her child face was still hovering somewhere in Lexi’s memory, mingling with the woman before her now.