21 Stolen Kisses

by Lauren Blakely

  I flash a smile back. Not because I’m eager to read yet another script. But because this is par for the course. Everyone, everywhere, it seems, has a TV show in them, and they’re always asking me to read them. To do to their show ideas what I did for Jewel’s. Make them soar to the top.

  “Sounds great, Randy,” I tell him, then give a quick nod good-bye as I head out into the warm May evening.

  Then there’s a clap on my shoulder. I swivel around to see my buddy Matthew. He’s a critic for a top-notch music magazine and he works in the same building. He’s never once asked me to read a script for a friend, a cousin, a neighbor. I like that about our friendship.

  “Superhero coworkers?” he says, raising an eyebrow. He must have been behind me and heard the whole conversation.

  I shrug as we walk uptown. “You never know where you might find the next big hit.”

  He laughs, tossing his head back. “You’re far too nice. What are the chances you’ll find a gem in some random script thrust your way?”

  “What are the chances you’ll find the next great band in the files record companies send you?” I fire back.

  “Touché, mate. Touché. Though, speaking of the next great bands, Jane and I are going to see one tonight at Roseland. It’s not nearly as exciting as seeing a cancan show on Broadway, or what have you, but want to join?”

  I roll my eyes as a bus rumbles by, spewing a plume of exhaust. “Ha-ha-ha. Mock my job, why don’t you?”

  “It’s not quite mocking your job though, is it? Since I’m pretty sure you go to those Broadway shows for fun, not work,” Matthew says, as we near the avenue.

  “What can I say? I’m the straight guy who likes Broadway musicals,” I say, owning it. So what if I like theater?

  “I’m just messing with you. Are you on for Retractable Eyes?”

  “What time?” I ask, glancing at my watch.

  “Late. Ten. Do you need your beauty sleep?”

  “I can handle it. I’m heading to Jewel’s house now for dinner and to go over her script.”

  “When are you just going to get down on one knee for her?”

  I scoff. “That’d be a never.”

  There’s a strange silence between us, and then a clearing of his throat as we near the subway entrance. “Right. I nearly forgot. It’s not her you’re keen on,” he says quietly, his voice serious for the first time. He’s the only who knows about Kennedy. “Is that why you still go there?”

  “No,” I say, answering quickly and truthfully for the most part. Of course, I like seeing Kennedy. Though like isn’t truly the right word. Crave would be more accurate. But that’s all complicated by the fact that I actually care about her mom, and not only because she’s my biggest client. Jewel Stanzlinger is the reason I’ve earned the regard I have and the client list that came after her. Our business partnership is one of the rare Hollywood-style stories of loyalty and faith. I started working with her back when I was an intern in college, and she was looking for her first break. She was the long-suffering-last-on-the-totem-pole writer for several middling daytime soaps that have since gone off the air. She told me her idea for Lords and Ladies and I quickly landed her a better writing gig on another soap, then pushed hard and fast to make her head writer. She upped the spice factor, boosted the intrigue, and tossed in even more sordid affairs. The whole time she refined and reworked and rewrote Lords and Ladies until it was unpassable. Then I sold it to LGO mere weeks after I graduated from college. It’s one of the biggest TV shows in the country, and I now have one of the most enviable client lists of any TV lit agent in the country, let alone any agent my age.

  I owe it all to Jewel.

  Which probably makes me the biggest idiot in the world for falling in love with her daughter. Four months after it ended, those feelings for Kennedy show no signs of dissipating.

  Zilch. Nada. Goose egg.

  I really should go see the band tonight. Just to get my mind off her.

  “See you at ten,” I tell Matthew when he reaches the subway entrance.

  “See you then. And be careful,” he adds, because he likes to look out for me when it comes to the hornet’s nest of my romantic choices.

  “I will.”

  I make my way to Jewel’s, and along the way I spot a burst of yellow and white at a bodega across the street. I stop in my tracks, then glance at the crosswalk. The closest car is fifty feet away, and even though I don’t have the light, I race across anyway, slowing my pace as I come closer to what caught my attention in the first place. A bouquet of daisies tucked amid a stuffed assortment of flowers, of roses and tulips and lilies and daffodils. The eye of one of the daisies almost looks like it’s in the shape of a heart.

  She would love it, so I buy it.

  As I turn onto her block, my heart starts beating faster and my palms are sweating, and this chemical response pisses me off. I should be able to manage my reactions better. Hell, I saw her the other night at the party. I’ve seen her plenty of times since she ended our relationship four months ago. I should be able to get a better grip. But seeing as how I just bought her flowers, I doubt I will. Or can. Or want to.

  Somehow, as the brownstone looms into view, all four stories of its Central Park West splendor, the home befitting a woman of Jewel’s stature, I manage to get my emotions in check.

  I hold the flowers in one hand as I ring the bell.

  Kennedy answers. Her brown hair is wavy and lush, and I know how it feels sliding it between my fingers. They itch to touch those soft strands. Her green eyes light up when she sees me. Her lips quirk up in a smile as she holds the big door, keeping it open only so far. Creating a shield. A temporary five-second cocoon.

  She eyes me up and down, and I can tell she’s lingering on my shirt. It’s purple, tailored perfectly, and tucked neatly into my charcoal-gray slacks. She’s obsessed with my shirts. I don’t have a problem with this. I like this obsession.

  More than I should.

  I am a lost cause to her, and now as my heart thumps harder, it doesn’t piss me off. It reminds me of everything I once had that was pure and perfect and true.

  “Purple,” she says in a breathy voice, like it’s a dream, like it’s a word that has wings and breath and can fly away, far from here. It transports me back in time, reminding me of a night from many months ago. The night she tried on this shirt. She looked stunning in it, and my breath catches from the intensity of the memory. I am surrounded by memories of her, and I can’t let them go. I don’t want them to fade. Ever.

  “Purple,” I repeat, low and soft, like it’s our insider secret. I say it so low it’s almost unspoken. But she can hear me.

  “How was your day?”

  “It was good,” I say. “How was yours?”

  “It’s not bad.”

  “I heard you can’t stay tonight.”

  “No. My dad has an art thing.”

  “Art thing. Sounds like fun. If you like art,” I say, with a wink. I know she likes art. I know so many things about her, and I want to know so much more.

  “I like art.”

  “I picked up some flowers. You can pretend they’re for the house.” Then I whisper, as I point to the eye of the flower. “But they’re not.”

  Her eyes widen and her jaw falls open. “I love it.”

  “Me too.”

  She grabs her phone to snap a picture of the eye of the daisy. “For my collection,” she adds.

  “I know, K,” I say, and she presses her teeth into her lip as I call her by that name. As if she’s holding inside all the things I store tightly in me too.

  Kennedy

  I don’t want to move away. I don’t want this moment to end. My heart is still doing a wild tap dance in my chest because he’s early. My wish to the universe came true, and even though I’ve seen him countless times, I can’t tear my eyes away from him.

  His brown hair is thick and messy, and right now he’s five-o’-clock-shadow-stubbly. I have to hold my hands behind my ba
ck so I don’t reach out and run a thumb along his jawline, then thread my hand in his hair, letting it slide through my fingers as I line my body against him.

  I resist, staying rooted to this spot so I don’t give in to all that I want.

  His dark-blue eyes twinkle. He looks only at me, and my skin heats up in an instant. No one has ever looked at me like he does. I doubt anyone ever will.

  Noah Hayes is the most beautiful person I’ve ever seen. Inside and out. In every way. Every now and then, I wonder why my mom never went after him. Considering his looks and her appetite, he’d be obvious prey. But all I can figure is she needed one man who wasn’t disposable. And maybe that’s why he’s the only man who’s been a constant, because he’s the only man my mom’s never had a fling with. He is her best friend, her confidante, and for all intents and purposes her business partner. More than that though, she thinks of him like a son. His own mom is gone, so my mom watches out for him. She loves him in some sort of protective way.

  Which makes the situation all the more messed up.

  Our Stolen Kisses

  Our lips didn’t even touch for our first kiss. You weren’t even present for it.

  I kissed a picture you gave me. You’d seen me time and time again bent over my phone, thumbing through photos. Finally, you asked what I was looking at one night when we were sitting across from each other in my living room. No one else was around. They’d gone out for gelato, and you were reading a script. You looked up from the pages.

  “Texts from a boyfriend?”

  You raised an eyebrow. Your voice was laced with curiosity. So much it gave me hope that you were praying I’d say no.

  I shook my head, and showed you my phone.

  “My collection of found hearts,” I said, and my own slammed into my rib cage. Showing you something that mattered to me was risky. But I’d take that risk.

  “Found where?”

  “Nature. The street. Animals. Anywhere,” I said, and then watched as you scrolled through the app where I stored the pictures I found. A coral reef in Australia in the shape of a heart. A chalk drawing on a sidewalk. Two tree branches intertwined into a heart.

  You looked up from the screen, the corners of your mouth curving up.

  “The tree branches are new. I just found them on a blog and added them,” I said, my voice dry.

  “You find these often?”

  I shrugged. “When I need to.”

  “Why do you need to?”

  “They give me hope.”

  “I wonder when you’ll find one next,” you said, as if you were merely musing on the topic.

  A few days later, after I’d finished dinner with my dad, you sent me a picture. I opened the text with shaky, hopeful fingers simply because it had your name on it.

  “Found this for you,” you wrote, and attached a picture of a chocolate-brown horse with a white heart-shaped spot on his nose.

  I kissed the screen.

  Chapter Five

  Kennedy

  Lane waits at Columbus Circle. He’s on his bike as well, and we barely even bother with hellos, instead nodding and taking off downtown, helmets on, ready for the thrill of racing through rush hour and conquering the cars. Riding like this requires a supreme focus on not getting killed, which has the welcome benefit of keeping my mind off the whole messed-up situation with Noah.

  We zip through traffic on the way to the West Village so we can stop by my father’s latest show that he arranged, an exhibit of famous love letters from history’s greatest writers, sharing wall space with photographs of men, women, girls, and boys writing.

  Soon we arrive at our destination in the West Village, a thin and narrow block with cobblestoned sidewalks and arty boutiques and too-cool-for-school cafés every few feet. It’s one of those movie blocks, the kind where the heroine in the romcom walks down the street at night wearing some tulle skirt and cute heels and a little clutch.

  We lock our bikes to a nearby post. The ride did the trick—my overactive brain and rebellious heart have settled into the here and now as I survey the scene.

  Already, crowds of thirtysomething hipsters in black jeans and slouchy tops are spilling from the inside of the gallery onto the sidewalks. A banner across the glass windows says LETTERS FROM THE HEART, the name of this exhibition—the photographs are for sale; the famous love letters are on loan and they’re the lure.

  I spot a familiar face down the street, a lopsided and smarmy grin I know well, watching the crowd at the gallery, while nursing a coffee at an outside table. My heart lurches. It’s my dad’s ex–business partner, Jay Fierstein. My mom was involved with him last year.

  I scowl.

  “That’s the guy your dad hates?”

  I nod. “For many, many reasons. His lawyer has been all over my dad’s lawyer about the company split.”

  “What is he doing here? Spying on your dad?”

  “I wouldn’t put it past him,” I say, then spot my dad inside, listening to a small crew of curious onlookers discuss the meaning of a drawing of a girl carrying a heart two times larger than her body. My dad is a graying man, with tuft-like hair barely covering his head, like a baby duck’s. I wave to him, then show Lane the original of a love letter Zelda Fitzgerald wrote to her husband, F. Scott Fitzgerald.

  There’s nothing in all the world I want but you—and your precious love—All the material things are nothing. I’d just hate to live a sordid, colorless existence—because you’d soon love me less—and less—and I’d do anything—anything—to keep your heart for my own—

  “Is that where your inspiration came from for the famous love letter?” Lane asks.

  “Famous unsent love letter,” I add, glad to be able to talk freely with someone. Lane’s the only person besides my shrink that I’ve ever told about Noah. “My dad was working on this exhibit back then when I started writing it. I should have just blamed him, huh?”

  “Totally. Parents always deserve the blame.”

  “I mean, really! He was constantly talking about famous love letters, showing me copies of them. What was a girl to do?”

  “What you did of course. Write one yourself,” he teases.

  Lane and I finish reading the letter. “It’s a beautiful letter, don’t you think?”

  “Oh, totally. Especially when you consider she was completely bonkers and F. Scott was a total lush,” he says.

  “Lane!”

  “It’s true though. You’re all Ms. Just the Facts, Please. So you should know Zelda was diagnosed with schizophrenia and whiled away her days at a sanatorium while F. Scott drank himself silly,” he says as a twenty-something girl brushes past us and gives Lane a thorough once-over from stem to stern. It’s almost impossible not to, because his surface is spectacular. Lane’s hair is light brown with hints of gold. It’s thick and full and invites fingers to be run through it. His eyes are hazel, or maybe green, or sometimes light brown. It’s not that they change with the weather or his mood. Eyes don’t change. It’s just that they’re a lot of colors, and every shade is alluring. They are the kind of eyes that can melt a woman with one look.

  “You are so not fun. You’re like a gigantic buzzkill,” I say as we amble past the other letters, reading Franz Kafka’s words to the woman he loved: “The doors are shut, all is quiet, I am with you once more.” Then Hemingway to his wife: “If anything happened to you I’d die the way an animal will die in the Zoo if something happens to his mate.”

  As I read the words again, I can’t help myself. My mind returns to him, the effects of the bike ride are washed away with words, and I am thinking once more of the man I can’t forget, the one who gave me flowers because he found the heart in one of them. I might keep company with cold, hard facts in my notebooks about my mother, but inside of me, in the places she can’t touch, I know who I am. A purist. A lover of love. I adore love letters, and professions of love, and true, heartfelt moments when two people know they’re meant for each other.

  Maybe that�
��s because I know how it feels. I had it for six perfect months with Noah.

  I feel my dad’s arm around me. “What a surprise to see you here,” he says playfully.

  “A total shock.”

  “Hello, Mr. Stanzlinger.” Lane shakes my dad’s hand even though they’ve met plenty of times. “Good to see you again, Lane.”

  My dad leans in closer and tells me, “We’ve already sold ten photographs. I so rock. Say it. Say my dad is the best art consultant in all the world.”

  “You are embarrassing me,” I say with a smile, even though he’s not and never could. His clients love him, museums love him. He has an impeccable reputation. Because of him, I plan to study art history when I start at NYU in just a few months.

  Someone calls him away, and as I watch him join another group of prospective buyers, I can’t help but feel this familiar flicker of pity for him. He’s this outgoing, savvy, smart businessman, but yet he was totally hoodwinked by my mom. Sometimes, I want to ask if he’s over it. But how do you ever get over that kind of betrayal? Have the wives of all the married men my mom canoodled with gotten over it?

  I haven’t. I sucked in all her secrets for years, wrote them down in my notebooks, lied for her, lied with her, until I couldn’t take the pressure of them building up in me anymore.

  One day, I told my dad everything.

  So that would be me who caused the breakup of my parents’ marriage three years ago. But for anyone keeping track, I really broke up their marriage many years ago. Maybe I do deserve an “A” on my chest. Make it a double “A” for “Aiding and Abetting.”

  I stop at a reprint of one of the rarest love letters of all-time. This one is from the writer Honoré de Balzac to the married countess Hańska. “I can no longer think of anything but you.” The letter is gorgeous, but it comes from a situation I can’t abide: an affair.

  And that’s when it hits me.

  Amends.

  I can make amends for being her henchman.

  *

  “Let me get this straight. You’re going to send love letters to the wives of the men your mom had affairs with?”