by Holly Rayner
The part of my mind that wasn’t clouded by wine felt a twinge of panic. This wasn’t supposed to happen. Nowhere in my schedule had it mentioned falling in love. I was flying out of Heathrow in the morning and after that, I would likely never see him again. I just had to keep my head clear until I arrived at my hotel that night. Already, we were headed in that direction.
“Do you need to be heading to your hotel?” Umar asked as we passed the Shaftesbury Memorial Fountain with its large statue of winged Eros. Appropriate, I thought bitterly.
“Yeah, I really need to get some rest. I’ve got a long flight ahead of me.” I didn’t want to tell him that I would probably stay up all night chatting with Ginger and sleep the whole way home.
“I’ll call my driver. He’s not far away.”
But he didn’t reach for his phone, not right away. Instead, he stood there tugging at the top button of his jacket, as if not wanting to let the moment go just yet. Silence drifted between us, a silence that was made more surreal by the emptiness of the street—not like the original Piccadilly, which thronged with tourists on any given night of the year.
Umar could never quite hide what he was feeling. It was quickly becoming one of his most endearing qualities. I could sense there was something he wanted to ask me, though he looked hesitant, as if worried that he would be jeopardizing what little relationship we had.
“You know, you don’t have to stay in a hotel tonight,” he said finally. “You could sleep anywhere in the palace—we have more guest rooms than we could ever use. And Kalilah would be thrilled to have you.”
Was he flirting with me? It certainly seemed like it. My heart hammered as I thought through the implications of what he had just asked. He had invited me back to his palace, for the night. Maybe he had something on his mind besides sleep.
“I’d love to stay if I didn’t have a plane to catch in the morning,” I hedged.
“So don’t catch your plane tomorrow,” he said seriously. “Stay with me for a few days.”
I laughed shyly, which probably wasn’t the politest response. “And how am I going to get home, Umar?” It was the first time I had called him his name to his face, and he smiled as if enchanted by it.
“Spend a few days here in Sabah. We haven’t had nearly enough time together. You’ve barely even seen Londontown.”
Despite his carefully cultivated air of professionalism and self-assurance, there were moments when a quiet vulnerability peered out from behind Umar’s eyes. He seemed lonely. I wondered how long it had been since a woman had stayed the night, and if perhaps there was something more than the allure of celebrity that had led him to pick up the phone and call me that night.
“Look, I’d love to stay the night, I really would. In the palace, I mean.” Oh Lord, that had come out all kinds of wrong. “It’s just—”
“What’s wrong?”
I couldn’t answer that question honestly, because that would have meant revealing that, having declined his offer of a free luxury hotel stay in some foolhardy display of independence, I could only afford a single night’s stay at the hotel I had booked.
“Well, I looked into it,” I said slowly. “When I was planning my trip, I wanted to see if I could stay for a few nights, but after tonight, the hotel is booked. There are no vacancies. I guess there’s a convention in town or something.”
I crossed my fingers and prayed he didn’t ask me to name the hotel. That was exactly the sort of thing he would do.
“Oh, you should have told me sooner,” he said without batting an eye. “You can stay with us for as long as you want. You could even stay for the rest of the week if you wanted. I know Kalilah wouldn’t mind and, honestly…” he said shyly, “neither would I.”
My stomach did a flip as I absorbed what he had just said. The hopeful look in his eyes, the earnestness in his voice, the way he continued to button and unbutton that top button—Umar was flirting with me.
And now he was taking me home for the night. Maybe for several nights. And I really didn’t know if I was ready for a transatlantic romance with a man whose image of me consisted mostly of lies.
Chapter 11
Shannon
By the time we reached the palace, Kalilah and her friends had already gone to bed for the night. It was a momentous prospect: the two of us alone, with no one to interrupt us. I hoped Umar couldn’t hear the sound of my heart beating as he led me up the stairs to a room on the third floor with an old-fashioned four-poster bed.
Setting my luggage down with a thump on the floor at the foot of the bed, he said, “Well. I guess I’ll see you in the morning then.”
“I guess so.”
Perhaps it was just my imagination—it was late and I was still half-drunk on the wine and the warmth of his smile—but as he lingered by the door, I had an odd feeling he was waiting for something. As if maybe he was hoping I would invite him to stay, or would ask him a question that would then turn into a conversation that would lead to us making out on my bed.
But nothing of the sort happened. He said, “Please don’t hesitate to text me if you need anything,” and left the room, looking as disappointed as I felt.
I brushed my teeth in the adjoining restroom and changed into my footie pajamas, then clambered into bed and texted Ginger.
Hey, you busy?
Right away the answer returned: No more than usual. You want to chat?
Yes, please.
Video?
Sounds perfect.
I called her up on my phone. In another moment, her frizzy hair and enormous rectangular glasses filled the screen in front of me. I don’t think I had realized how much I missed her until I saw her. It was a relief to see a familiar face after the day I had just had.
“So, how did it go?” she asked in a teasing voice. “Did he make violent love to you?”
“No, thank heavens.”
“Don’t pretend you wouldn’t have wanted it.” She wagged her finger at me.
“I’ve done enough lying for one night, I think. Maybe enough for a lifetime.” I told her about our dinner at the seafood place and how I’d skirted Umar’s attempts to inquire about my career. “I feel bad for lying to him, but what else was I going to do? It’s kind of amazing how one lie snowballs into another.”
“Yeah, once you get on that train, it’s hard to stop.” Ginger folded her hands under her chin thoughtfully. “If only you hadn’t lied to him in the first place—”
“But now that I have, I don’t have any choice but to keep lying.” I placed one hand over my forehead, rubbing at my temples. “Sometimes, I just wish I could fast-forward three or four years into the future, when all the lies I was telling him are true. When I really am the glamorous, high-society woman he seems to think I am.”
“Yeah, hmm.” Ginger brushed a long strand of carrot-colored hair out of her face. “Did it ever occur to you that maybe he likes you just for who you are, and not for who you’re pretending to be?”
No, of course that had never occurred to me. Why would it? “What are you suggesting?” I asked.
“I think the image of yourself that you’re weaving, this glamorous fake Shannon, is a lot less interesting than the genuine article. And I think maybe Umar is less interested than you think in that other Shannon. You said you didn’t have a lot of trouble steering the conversation away from your career and celebrity lifestyle. Maybe that’s because he didn’t want to talk about it.”
“Huh.” Once again, Ginger had proven herself the most perceptive person in the room.
“I mean, I’m no expert,” she added. “I can’t claim to know what’s going on inside the man’s head. But from what I’ve seen of him, and from what you’ve told me, it sounds like he was drawn to you because you’re genuine, and flawed, and down-to-earth. All the qualities you project in your music. And that’s the real you, whether you believe that or not.”
“Flawed?” I said, incredulous. “Since when is being flawed a good thing?”
&n
bsp; “It’s a great thing,” said Ginger, grinning a little, “because it means you’re not hiding anything. And it means you can be dorky, and awkward, and vulnerable, and you don’t care what anyone thinks. Personally, if I was a handsome, rich man, I would want to go out with the real Shannon, the flawed Shannon. The Shannon who is kinda shy and kinda quiet and kinda anxious, but always herself.”
It took me a minute or two to see what Ginger was getting at. She seemed to be suggesting that I had concocted this elaborate ruse partly in the hopes of getting Umar to like me—which would have been a novel interpretation of my motives, for sure. But if that were true, it meant I was having trouble letting go of the deception because I couldn’t bear the thought of him seeing the real me. The me who was flawed and messy and scatterbrained and not really sure where her life was going. Just the thought made my stomach ache.
“I feel like you might be the only one who would want to go out with that Shannon,” I said finally. “No one else knows me the way you do.”
“That’s because you don’t let anyone else in, Shanny,” Ginger said. She gave me a tender look, and I knew if she could have reached through the screen and stroked my hair in that moment, she would have done it. “There’s always a wall. This time, it just happens to be a wall made of lies.”
“How do I take it down, then?”
I had hoped she might have some wise answer, but here, Ginger seemed just as perplexed as me. “I don’t know, Shanny. I really don’t. Just be glad you’re coming home in the morning and you won’t have to worry about it.”
“I wish that were true.” Somehow, I had neglected to tell her the worst news. “He’s asked me to stay for another few days. And I told him I would.”
“In that case, I really don’t know what to tell you.” She pursed her lips thoughtfully. “These next few days could be great, or they could be a disaster.”
“They couldn’t just be normal, could they?”
“No, probably not. Just promise me you won’t fall in love with him, Shanny.”
“Ginger.” I gave her a stony glare. “I’m only going to be here for another three days at most.”
“I know. But I know what you’re like.”
I never felt more annoyed with Ginger than when I knew she was right about something and I didn’t want her to be.
Chapter 12
Umar
The next few days were tense and giddy and a little frustrating all at the same time. I wanted Shannon to know that I liked her. I didn’t see any reason to hide my feelings, but at the same time, I had to maintain a certain air of cool and reserve lest she get the impression that I was over-zealous. We had only just met and there was no telling whether she would ever come back to Sabah. She couldn’t know the way my heart beat when we sat together in the limo, the animal hunger that clawed at me when she came down the stairs in her sleeveless dress, swathed in a cloud of perfume like an old-time movie starlet.
The days that followed were some of the happiest I had experienced since my daughter was born. We spent an afternoon in Sabah’s capital city, Cafta, navigating the narrow streets with their market stalls and olive-sellers and women in colorful shawls with baskets on their heads and boys playing football as I had done in these very streets some twenty years before. Over it all hung the familiar heady smell of fish and jasmine and honeysuckle.
I glanced over at Shannon, half-expecting her to be awash in nostalgia as I was. But she looked pale and agitated, and anytime someone jostled her elbow, she glowered.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“It’s so crowded here,” she managed to say. She seemed to be having trouble breathing. “It wasn’t nearly this crowded in Helsinkitown.”
“I didn’t know crowds bothered you so much.”
“They didn’t used to.” A bearded man in a long black smock strode past us ringing an enormous bell. “I think maybe being a musician and having to perform in front of people has made me wary of them.”
“Then we’ll go where the crowds can’t find us.”
I led her down an empty side street between two white stone buildings to a part of the city that felt completely unchanged from twenty years ago. A peacock shuffled by us in an empty courtyard, fanning its tail feathers in a stately manner, while our security detail trailed behind us at a distance. If I closed my eyes, I could almost imagine myself transported back to a childhood before internet and cellphones had invaded Sabah, when the purest thrill was standing in the back of a musty shop and smelling the different varieties of coffee.
“I miss how quiet the world was back in the old days,” I told Shannon. “I don’t know if you remember it.”
“I remember being very young and staying with my brother at our grandma’s lake house,” said Shannon. “When we took our canoe out on the water you couldn’t hear a sound but the flutter of birds’ wings for miles around.”
“It feels like there are fewer places like that than there used to be.” I drew a deep breath: from somewhere nearby came the rich smell of wood smoke and ambergris. “I love coming to the old part of the city for that reason. I used to stand here on the street corner with my uncle while he sold chutney and shish kabobs. I remember the first time I made a sale; I was so proud of myself.”
I stole a glance at Shannon to make sure I wasn’t boring her. She was wearing a pair of too-large sunglasses and a broad smile. “Funny how we keep coming back to those places,” she said. “Maybe Woodfell isn’t the classiest place in the world, but it’s home, you know?”
This was something else I loved about Shannon: her complete lack of pretense. I never got the sense that she was putting on a front to impress me. She had spoken openly about the struggles of growing up poor and how it made her later success all the sweeter. “Some things you can’t help feeling sentimental about,” I said.
“That was the whole theme of my first album. There’d been a lot of buzz about that album. I’d met a lot of other celebrities—”
“And you were already feeling disillusioned.”
She glanced over in surprise. “You could tell?”
“I’ve been listening to that album on loop for the past week or so. I can hear it in your voice. And I’ve been in that position. I know what it’s like.”
“Yeah.” She nodded sadly. “You meet the world’s greatest and brightest and walk away disappointed. Some of those people are genuinely talented, but a lot of them are just well-connected, or lucky. And not all of them are good people.”
“And so you decided to write about it.”
“Well, yeah.” In the distance, we could hear the call to prayer echoing from the minarets. “I’m an artist, that’s what I do: I took all my angst and frustration and poured it into song. I wrote about how being smart and glamorous and sophisticated can blind you to certain things.”
“Like the beauty of a small town.”
“Exactly!” Shannon’s eyes gleamed with the thrill of being understood. “I think a lot of folks misunderstood what that song was about. I had intended it as an attack on the pretensions of the elite in their fancy clothes and their fancy cars with their big, fancy weddings. I always wanted to be the girl in leather boots and torn jeans who crashes an expensive wedding reception.”
“Really? I thought that came through loud and clear. We’ve all wanted to be that person at one time or another.”
“Have you really?” Shannon eyed me warily.
I gestured at the street in front of us, at the white dust that seemed to coat everything, at the brass locks and dogs’ bones and discarded green cloth. “I grew up in Cafta. No one who grows up in Cafta grows up rich. Growing up, all I wanted was to get out of here. Go to Paris or London or Moscow. Instead, I ended up bringing Paris and London and Moscow here.”
“An astonishing achievement, really,” said Shannon.
We were standing parallel to each other, so close that I could have reached out and taken her hand. I don’t think she would have minded if I had. Instead I
motioned toward a rickety flight of stairs just ahead of us, leading up and up.
My eyes on the stairs, I asked her in a quiet voice, “How would you like to get away from our guards for a bit?”
At first Shannon acted as though she had misheard me. “Are you serious? Can we do that?”
“We can certainly try.” Without another second’s hesitation I sprinted up the stairs, Shannon laughing as she held onto my arm as though afraid of being left behind.
At the top of the stairs, we found a pillared rooftop garden where stood a single old woman wearing a black and white keffiyeh and watering an assortment of succulents. She wandered among the rows of plants with ghostly delicacy, the sort of person who might fade out of existence if you nudged her on accident. Flocks of white doves crowded the rims of the stone fountains or pecked at bird seed that had been scattered along on the ground. Here and there, I was surprised to see my own face or Shannon’s gazing back at me from some unexpected location, for the garden was full of mirrors: mirrors hidden behind ferns and under stones, mirrors half-buried in the potting soil, mirrors on the railings.
Although no one objected to our presence, I still felt like we had wandered into some place where we shouldn’t have been. It was something of a relief when Shannon said she was done looking around and asked if we could go back down now. I could tell from the tone in her voice that she had felt it, too—the eeriness of the place.
Instead of going out for dinner that night, we shared a private meal in the palace. Shannon ordered pasta agnolotti filled with diced braised tongue and served with truffles and creamy parmesan, while I asked for my usual comfort dish of smoked salmon potato cakes. I couldn’t help thinking how shabby my own dish looked next to hers, and wondering whether I ought to have requested something fancier.