They’d started on opposite sides of the back bench seat, then gradually had moved closer together, but Nate hadn’t tried a thing.
She was starting to get frustrated with that.
“So,” she said, deciding it was time to figure out where he stood. “You … don’t have a girlfriend?” Ugh. That was ballsy. What if he did? Then what would she do? Make up a boyfriend from another school? Go on and on about him like Jan Brady’s “George Glass”?
“No.” He looked away for a moment and even though it was dark in the car she could tell from the gesture that he was nervous. “You don’t have a boyfriend?”
“No.” Actually, she’d never had a boyfriend. He’d probably think she was a loser if she said that, though. Other kids had started “going out,” whatever that meant, in sixth grade.
A tense moment passed between them.
Then he moved closer and reached his hand behind her back to draw her closer to him.
Finally.
She closed her eyes and when his lips touched hers she melted against him. It wasn’t her first kiss now, they both knew that, but it was good. Really good. He moved his other hand firmly against her back, drawing her closer, making her feel warm and safe. And when his tongue touched hers, all of the muscles in her body tightened. Her pulse raced. Why hadn’t they been doing this the whole time?
How long had they wasted the dwindling night, sitting here talking?
He smelled like winter air, leather, and soap. He tasted like … she didn’t even know what he tasted like, he just tasted good. Almost familiar. Whatever it was, she wanted more. She drank him in, not thinking about what would happen next. It was like there wasn’t even a question.
She was with him now.
Now he would always be part of her. She just didn’t know it yet.
* * *
The next day, Erin slept in, partly because the beer had gone to her throbbing head and made walking around difficult, and partly because it was more fun to roll over in bed and remember kissing Nate over and over again than it was to get out of bed and actually start a day in which she didn’t have any plans.
Eventually, though, she’d had to. And, true to form, the moment she got out of bed, her mother heard her footsteps and asked her to take the trash out to the garage. So Erin hopped gingerly out in bare feet, opened the garage door, tossed the bag into the can, and closed the door, turning around just in time to see a guy walking past on the street, looking at the house.
He had on a hat and winter coat, almost completely obscuring his face, but she’d know those eyes anywhere.
Nate Lawson.
Something inside of her thrummed to life and made the blood push through her veins like it was a race.
Nate was walking past her house, either to catch a glimpse of her or at least to see where she lived.
The uncertainty, the questions, the hope he would call, and the fear he wouldn’t … all of that wasn’t necessary this time.
He felt the same way she did.
She went back inside smiling.
Chapter 2
Present
I could not figure out how the bitch had made it to her sixteenth birthday without someone killing her.
Roxanne Tacelli. Brattiest fifteen-year-old I’d ever met, and I could completely remember being a rather difficult fifteen myself, so that really was saying something.
Yet here I was, events coordinator for the Farnsworth-Collingswood—one of the top luxury resorts in the world—planning the ultimate Sweet Sixteen party for her, under the doting eyes of her parents, the watchful eyes of my employer, and the electronic eyes of multiple VTV cameras, which were filming the entire event for a reality TV show that promised to suck the soul directly out of anyone who watched it.
The Farnsworth-Collingswood Hotel Group had two locations, one in Geneva, Switzerland, and one in Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C. Both were the same sleek, modern European style with quirks and bells and whistles galore—everything from indoor water parks to landing strips for small aircraft and the ability to acquire just about any amenity a guest could want (for a price) and so both were major party destinations. And we’re talking huge parties.
My job as events coordinator was therefore, usually, a blast.
Usually.
“Okay, so, Erin, I want bowls and bowls of all green M&Ms,” Roxanne, age fifteen, was saying. “I heard rock stars do that. With my face on them. They can do that, right?”
They could, but I didn’t have time to answer.
“Or pink,” she went on, nodding to herself, like I’d just pointed out how much prettier her already cosmetically altered face would be on pink. “What do pink M&Ms mean?”
At first I didn’t answer, assuming she was just in the middle of her stream-of-consciousness list of I wants, but then I realized there was silence and all eyes were on me.
“Um. Erin?” Roxanne clicked her tongue against her teeth. “Hello?”
I looked up from where I’d just written pink MMs, get high-res picture smaller probably better and said, “I’m sorry?”
Roxanne sighed and rolled her eyes like little brown marbles circling my apparent ineptitude. Really, she was a cartoon. “What do pink M&Ms mean?”
They mean you’re a spoiled-rotten little snot whose parents will piss away their money on just about anything, thereby proving everything every manifesto-writing wack job has ever said about the class system in America. I gave a wan smile and said, “They mean you’re going to have the best birthday ever.”
It was the same voice I would have used with my daughter when she turned six.
Despite the fact that Roxanne acted like a six-year-old, she was savvy enough to know when she was being talked to like one, and she didn’t like it.
“Right.” She snorted. “So green means you’re horny and pink means best birthday ever!”
Her mocking of my own fake enthusiasm was incredibly insulting. Probably in part because of its accuracy.
But I could barely react to that before her mother’s indulgent chuckle filled the air. “Roxanne, I don’t know where you come up with this stuff or where you learned such words!” She touched a hand to her too-bright red hair (clearly an attempt to match Roxanne’s copper color) and I noticed the lipstick she wore—almost the same shade as her hair—had smeared onto her whitened front tooth. Her face was smooth and lineless, forcibly so, but her hand, with its crepey texture and sun spots, showed her true age. Especially next to the artificial color of her hair.
I sighed inwardly. If my kid were saying that kind of thing to adult strangers, I’d take her by the ear, nun-style, to the nearest bathroom and wash her mouth out with soap. Or at least threaten to—I’d always found the threat of embarrassment was much more effective with Camilla than actually following through.
Of course, Camilla—who was also fifteen—was a thousand times more mature than Roxanne.
“All right, so pink M&Ms with your picture on them,” I said, trying to rein this conversation back in. “Do you want them to say anything on the other side? Roxanne Amber Tacelli 16, or maybe something more personal to you?”
Roxanne wrinkled her fake nose. “Isn’t that, like, your job?”
“Isn’t what my job?”
“Thinking of that kind of thing. I don’t know what they should say on them! You think of that!”
I smiled. “You might not like what I come up with.” My phone rang and I looked at it.
There was a text from Camilla: Can I go to a concert at Verizon Center with Lela tonight?
“Excuse me a minute,” I said to Roxanne, and texted back. No way. Last time you went out with Lela I had to pick you guys up and she puked tequila all over the car. Not an ideal influence. I returned my attention to Roxanne. “So what were you saying?”
“Just make a list of suggestions.” She gave an airy wave toward my notepad.
I had a few already.
“What else do you want, honey?” her father asked, spea
king for the first time in about forty-five minutes (the last time being when he asked how much to write the deposit check for, after which he had then, without flinching, written it).
“Horses.”
“Horses?” I echoed.
She nodded. “I want pure white horses at the party. Just, you know, standing around. Decoratively.”
“That’s not possible—” I began.
“Wonderful idea, honey!” her mother exclaimed, like she’d just disproven one of Einstein’s theories.
This was ridiculous. “But the party is in the water park.” One of the big draws of the resort is that it has a large indoor water park, themed like a huge, sprawling shipwreck. It’s Gilligan’s Island on steroids. And the entire thing is constructed from painted cement, plastic trees, and corridors of chlorinated water, churning through the fake foliage and down elaborate, and sometimes hidden, slides.
I couldn’t even imagine putting horses in that environment. It would be dangerous for absolutely everyone involved. Especially the horses. Why couldn’t everyone here see that?
“Surely you could make it work,” Roxanne’s father blustered, and I could sense he was ready to pay to make it work, even though it was patently impossible.
“What about…” I thought quickly, trying to come up with something even more fun than horses. Something, perhaps, not actually alive. “Balloons?” If my daughter were just a little older I might have been better at coming up with age-appropriate suggestions, but nevertheless I was certain Roxanne, like every kid, could be distracted from anything as long as you presented another, shinier thing.
That wasn’t going to do it, though.
Roxanne looked at me like … well, like I’d just suggested balloons. Let’s face it, I wasn’t exactly an ace at thinking quick.
“I want horses!” she cried, and turned her suddenly tearful eyes to her father.
I want an Oompa Loompa NOW, Daddy!
“Then you will have them,” her father said, patting her arm awkwardly.
“And…” She bit her thumb, thinking—I was sure—of new ways to torture me. “I want to arrive in a helicopter.”
I sighed. “Again, not compatible with the indoor pool idea.”
“Take the roof off!” she cried.
“You know that’s not possible, right?” I looked at her father. A man with that much money had to have at least a little sense about that kind of thing.
“What would it take to remove the enclosure and put it back after the party?” he asked, his hand jerking reflexively toward his checkbook.
I gaped at him in stunned silence for a fraction of a second before saying, “You saw the pool area, right? Enclosed or not enclosed, and it is enclosed, there’s no way to land a helicopter in there.” I imagine they pictured it teetering atop the volcano slide or maybe hovering over the whole works while Roxanne slid, fireman-style, down a rope into the middle of her party.
“What if you have your guests leave the party area and congregate outside to see you arrive?” I saw her objection form first in her brows. “Or,” I added quickly, “maybe not even come into the party area until you’re there.”
She clapped her hands together. “That’s perfect! Then they can all follow me in! Like a bride or something.”
God help her future wedding coordinator.
And divorce lawyer.
“Maybe we could just shut the pool area and turn the lights out until Roxy arrives,” her mother suggested. “Then she could arrive in the helicopter and lead the way in. It will be like a surprise party, only the guests will be the ones surprised.”
All right, that could work. I jotted helicopter and unhappy guests on my list. “No problem.”
“On horseback!”
I was about to voice another strong objection to livestock when my boss, Jeremy Rambaur, walked up. Jeremy was in his mid-forties, and as tidy as you can imagine, from his perfectly slicked hair to his pencil-thin mustache. I think he imagined he looked like a modern-day Errol Flynn, but to me he looked a lot more like John Waters. He was so firmly in the closet that I’m not even sure he knew he was gay, though once, after a couple of peach daiquiris, he had confessed to me that he thought Paolo at the front desk was “pretty delish.”
If we were in a seventies sitcom, he could have been played by Paul Lynde.
“How are we doing?” Jeremy asked, putting one hand on my shoulder and one on Roxanne’s. “How’s our little star?” He was asking her, but I knew that Jeremy himself was totally ready for his close-up. He might even have been more invested in this VTV thing going well than the girl and her parents were.
Roxanne pressed her lips together and somehow managed to shrug with her eyebrows. “Well, she says I can’t have horses at my party.” She nodded in my direction.
“What?” He looked at me, puzzled.
“In the water park,” I clarified, fully expecting an understanding to come into his eyes. “I said we can’t have horses in the water park.”
“Oooh.”
I nodded and waited for him to turn those lemons into lemonade for her.
“That”—Jeremy looked at her sympathetically—“could be a problem. Consider what would happen if, erm, nature called for one of them. You wouldn’t want to be the girl remembered as having a sixteenth birthday that smelled of horse dung, now, would you?”
That was good. I had to hand it to him. He knew damn well how stupid it was to even suggest putting horses in that area, but the only way he could get through to this girl was to appeal to her vanity.
How had I missed such an obvious trick?
“Eeeew!” was Roxanne’s predictable reaction. “No! Forget the horses.” She looked at me, like it had been my unforgivably stupid idea in the first place.
“Okay.” I pretended to scratch the item off my list.
When I’d turned sixteen, my best friends Theresa and Jordan had thrown me a surprise party in Theresa’s living room. My boyfriend had lied badly about us needing to go by her house on the way out to dinner, so I knew something was up, but pretended to be surprised. It was a small party, my two best friends, their boyfriends, and the two of us—and it was one of the best nights of my life.
Roxanne would never have understood that.
For her it had to be huge, glamorous, and completely about everyone watching and admiring her. You could just tell she was already thinking this party had to outdo any subsequent efforts by her friends to top it.
I made a mental note to suggest to my daughter that maybe her sixteenth birthday would be most gratifyingly spent if we did it while building houses in a disaster area or perhaps in an Appalachian outpost.
I didn’t ever want Camilla to be as wretched and ungrateful as Roxanne was.
“Is everything else going well?” Jeremy asked, his voice overly solicitous. “Everybody happy?” He was desperate to keep this party—and the TV show—here. And already Roxanne had threatened to “just forget the whole thing” three times, a threat that apparently only I recognized as a total bluff. If she just forgot the whole thing now, even her parents and their bank account wouldn’t be able to coordinate it all in another place half as nice with four weeks’ notice. And there would be no guarantee it would be telecast.
“I guess.” Roxanne pouted.
“The production company is going to start shooting tomorrow,” Jeremy went on, a little lilt of glee in his voice. “It should be a lot of fun!” He didn’t say it, but his voice held the words, Oodles and oodles of fun!
I saw my exit. “Well, with that in mind, I really better get back to my office—”
“What about those white birds?” Roxanne interrupted, leveling a challenging gaze on me.
I stopped. Oh, no. “I’m sorry?”
“You know, those white birds they let fly into the air on special occasions? What are they? Eagles or something.”
“Doves?” I asked, picturing them lifting into the air in glorious celebration of Roxanne’s birth, and then pelting, one
by one, into the glass roof, only to fall down into the pool, broken necks contorting their bodies into little curved and feathered knots.
Where, if Roxanne had her way, they could then be trampled by drowning horses.
“Doves!” she said, looking into the distance and nodding. “I think so.”
“Let’s hold off on living creatures altogether for a moment,” I said, then, feeling a warning look from Jeremy, added, “just long enough for me to get an idea of what kind of food you want.”
That launched Roxanne into a long list of her favorite foods, everything ranging from Almas caviar (the mention of which made her father stand up a little straighter and clear his throat—a little telekinetic power, and his checkbook probably would have spontaneously combusted) to Cinnabon.
I jotted it all down, trying to figure out how a caterer was going to deal with this, but that wasn’t my problem. I couldn’t take it all on myself. It wasn’t like I was going to be up in my kitchen for the next four weeks baking cinnamon buns for her.
When Roxanne finally stopped for a breath, I said, “You know, I want to get right on top of this so we can make sure we have the best caterer possible for your party.” I gave her a quick smile. “You have my card, right? You let me know if you think of anything else you need or want.” I turned to leave, but Roxanne caught me.
“I don’t have your card.”
I knew that, of course. As surely as I knew if she did have my card, I’d be hearing from her day and night. What could I do? It was my job. I stopped and was reaching into my pocket for one when Jeremy handed one over to Roxanne and each of her parents, shooting me a look in the meantime.
“I got these from your office just in case,” he explained pointedly. “Something told me you might forget them.”
I held up my hand with the card in it. “I didn’t.”
Always Something There to Remind Me Page 2