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“You were sensational!” Gwen, the sweet middle-aged president of Women of Note, gave her a long hug. “I haven’t heard the audience that excited for a long time. You really had them.”
“Hey, thanks.” Jenny mopped at her forehead again, and laughed, energy still rushing so strongly through her it had to come out somehow. “The crowd was the best. I had a blast.”
“It showed.” Gwen smiled, looking down at the hot pink sandals on Jenny’s feet. “By the way, I meant to tell you how much I love those shoes.”
“Designer knockoffs. I got them at a discount outlet for thirty-nine ninety-five. No lie. Get yourself a pair.”
“Oh, I couldn’t.”
“Why not?” Jenny looked at her, direct, challenging. “If you like them so much, why not?”
A flush of pink only slightly less loud than the sandals tinged Gwen’s generally pale face. “Oh, but, I don’t wear…shoes like that.”
“Then start.” Jenny grinned. “That’s how it was for me. I just started. Felt like a complete imposter for a few weeks, and ended up growing into them. Trust me, if you love them, then you have a hot-pink-sandal-wearing person caged inside you, too. All you have to do is let her out!”
“Oh, gosh.” Gwen’s blush deepened. “My husband would—”
She clapped her hand over her mouth. Jenny winked. “I heard nothing. Buy the shoes and enjoy them. Next time I’m in Milwaukee I’ll call you and we can go out on the town in them together. Okay?”
Gwen nodded doubtfully once, then more firmly. “Okay. Are you ready to eat? You must be hungry.”
“Famished. I think I sweated off twenty pounds. Let me shower and change and I’ll be right out.”
Dinner was the usual loud and fun affair after one of her lectures. Great food at a place called Eagans—she’d eaten in so many places in so many cities over the past six months she could hardly keep track—with women stopping by her table to tell their stories, confess their “sins” or ask her to sign their copies of What Have I Done for Me Lately?
She still couldn’t get over how this had all happened. One month she’d been a bank teller and Paul’s fiancée. The next, she was single, living with her friend and roommate in college, Jessica, writing the book in an angry rush on nights and weekends while Jessica cheered her on. Some of the anger was directed at Paul, who had treated her so badly and cheated on her, but most of the anger she aimed at herself. How had she not seen this train wreck coming? How had she allowed herself to became so passive that Paul had cheated on her just to ease his boredom? She couldn’t blame him completely. Partly, sure, she had no problem with partly. Or even mostly.
The sick irony of course was that he’d made her into that passive woman. Telling her what to wear, what to eat, what to say. Not outright, she wasn’t that weak. But subtly. “Wow, three of those cookies has twelve grams of fat,” as she was stuffing the fifth one into her mouth. “Sure, we can go to the movies tonight. Of course there’s an oldie on TV I was wanting to see.” “I like that dress. Or there’s that red one you look so much skinnier in.” Criticizing her conversation at parties, answering “no” automatically for both of them when waitstaff offered a predinner cocktail or dessert.
Through it all, she sat, bump on a log, smiling graciously, pathetically eager to please, insisting she was madly in love, letting him make her over into a spiritless, mindless Paul-reflection.
Not until she’d been without him a few weeks did it start to dawn on her how insidious their relationship had been, and how creepy that his control of her had felt so safe. And if this disaster had happened to her, a college-educated, upper middle-class woman from the liberal northeast, there must be others by the tens of thousands.
If her nearly seven-figure book sales were anything to go by, she’d vastly underestimated that number.
When the manuscript was finished, Jessica had shown it to a girlfriend who had a literary agent friend. Nothing would ever change Jenny’s life so radically, she was sure, as the day that agent called saying Xantham Press wanted to buy her book. Jenny had barely even comprehended what she was saying, let alone been able to foresee the changes in store for her life and for herself.
Having her book published, having her words mean so much to so many women…it validated her existence and her worth in a way Paul could never even have begun to understand. More amazingly, she hadn’t really understood how much she’d needed it, either. With that nurturing, freeing validation she had blossomed into the kind of person she’d always dreamed of being, wearing what she wanted, saying what she liked, doing what she pleased. Growing up shy and overlooked in a country club town of beautiful people, she never would have seen herself evolving this far in a hundred years.
Unfortunately, her publisher very understandably wanted a follow-up book, to keep her—and them—riding the wave. But writing a book that had poured out of her in an extended fit of passion and in a need to document her pain was very different from sitting down on purpose and conjuring something up. Her next book was tentatively titled Jenny’s Guide to Getting What You Want.
What Jenny wanted was to be able to write the book. Three chapters lay on her desk, as they’d lain for the better part of the last year, each page practically red from all the revisions and crossouts and edits….
In short, the book wasn’t happening. Her regular online advice column and the occasional pieces she wrote for women’s magazines presented no problem. They were satisfying and fun even if they were only rehashes of What Have I Done for Me Lately? So maybe this would be it for her, a one-shot wonder. Better to have shot once than never to have shot at all was how she’d decided to look at it, though she wasn’t sure her publisher agreed.
After dessert at Eagans—she always ordered dessert now, without Paul to give her The Disapproving Look—she thanked her hostesses warmly and, declining their offer of a ride, walked the few blocks down Water Street to the Wyndham Hotel, enjoying the chilly night breeze off Lake Michigan on her still-heated face.
Up in her room, she went into her antihyper routine, to calm herself down after the rush and excitement of a lecture/performance so she’d have some hope of falling asleep. First, the deep warm bath, then lavish amounts of perfumed powder and lotion so she smelled way too strong, then the bright coral silk teddy she adored, the kind Paul thought made her hips look big, and a long, leisurely emptying of a cup of herbal tea in bed reading the New York Times. Not that news was always restful, but fiction risked bringing on the can’t-put-it-down syndrome, and she’d never had a problem dropping the paper when sleep overwhelmed her.
Halfway through a front section so full of natural and political and man-made disasters she was starting to get depressed, she rolled her eyes and picked up the Sunday Styles section. Nothing could be more soporific than that. A few pages of wedding and engagement announcements and grinning rich people at fund-raisers should put her right off to dreamland.
Tomorrow she’d be on a plane back home to New York, arriving in time for a lunch date with her agent, then she and Jessica were going to the Metropolitan Art Museum to see—
Jenny gasped, sat bolt upright and held the paper closer. Oh. My. God. Oh my god. Omigod.
Ryan Masterson.
Ryan Masterson.
Only he didn’t look like Ryan Masterson. He looked like…she wrinkled her nose and peered at the awkwardly smiling tuxedoed image. Ryan Masterson’s boring twin brother.
Was this what Wild Boy Masterson had turned into? Geez o Pete, was nothing sacred? The sexiest rebel alive reduced to posing at some society event with Frumpy Dame So-and-so and Squeaky Debutante This-’n’-that?
Had hell, in fact, frozen over?
She couldn’t stand it. What a waste.
And yet…okay, he wasn’t twenty-one anymore. Being wild and angry was hot as hell in high school and college, but she supposed it wouldn’t help in the career department.
Imagine the résumé: Exceptionally skilled at sullen smoldering looks and general bad attitude. Expert in alcohol consumption and high-speed motorcycle operation. Some experience with mild street drug use. Unpredictable outbursts available upon request. Vast experience in seduction of women, including one shy straightlaced girl from Southport, Connecticut, who had never forgotten a second of their time together….
Jenny’s rapturous sigh trailed off. But of course he had probably forgotten, most of it anyway. Before that summer when they’d both been home from college—she from Tufts and he from UC Berkeley—he’d undoubtedly thought of her only as the daughter of his widowed mom’s friend from down the street. She’d thought he was way hot, like every other breathing female that saw him, and made herself sick with nerves every time their families got together—his family being a loud, out-of-control one with six kids and an always stunned-looking mother; hers consisting of her and her parents, jovial, but reservedly so, warm, loving…quiet. Jenny and Ryan had overlapped two years at Fairfield High, but they hadn’t acknowledged each other as more than familiar faces passing in the hall, though once in her sophomore year he’d made a point of complimenting her performance in Brigadoon and she’d nearly hyperventilated. That was it.
Why he’d turned to her of all people…Maybe at such a turbulent time he’d needed someone rock-solid predictable and not at all challenging.
Jenny lay back, holding up the picture of his staid, respectable face, bland smile in place for the camera. If his name hadn’t been under the photo, she wouldn’t have believed…
He was extraordinarily good-looking, no question. She’d bet heads still turned. But not like before. Not like when he strode around the village of Southport, Connecticut, looking like a savage bomb that could go off any second.
Not like the night a month or so after the motorcycle accident that killed his best friend, when he came to her house while her parents were away, pale and haunted, soaked by the rainstorm he’d been walking through, dark hair hanging over his forehead, blue eyes glowing behind the clumped strands.
On her doorstep, he’d mumbled something she hadn’t heard. She’d let him in anyway, and he’d stopped next to her, fixed her with an angry pleading look she’d never forget, and to her total rapturous shock, he’d kissed her. Not a sweet peck, not a gentle “may I?” kiss, not the soulless kisses Paul had given her. But a hot, hard rush of a kiss. A kiss she measured all subsequent kisses against.
That night and many nights after, in the park by Southport harbor, in cars, on the country club golf course, on the beach by Long Island Sound, she’d let him use her body to rid himself of his rage and his guilt over his friend Mitch’s death. She’d never told anyone, not about the visits, not about the sex, not about the way he’d cried in her arms after.
She’d just wanted to heal him. And then, sweet, ignorant, impressionable girl that she’d been, she’d fallen in love.
Jenny tossed the paper aside. Right. Love. Who knew anything about love at age nineteen? It was a crush, that’s all, born of his appeal and the thrill of being the one he’d picked out in his time of grief, the last girl anyone would have expected, least of all her. Predictably, the night she’d finally given voice to her feelings, he’d run. Far, fast and into someone else’s arms. No big surprise, though it had hurt like hell anyway.
She picked up the paper again, as if he still had the ability to draw her, after all these years, even as an image on newsprint. What did Ryan Masterson now think of what he’d been?
And what would he think of what shy, sweet Jenny Hartmann had become?
3
“TELL ME ABOUT your childhood.”
“Oh.” Christine smiled at Ryan over the white-cloth-covered restaurant table and stalled with a sip of beer. She preferred white wine, but he’d made some comment about Thai food killing any chance a wine had, and she couldn’t very well order it after that. “Charsville, Georgia. Southwest corner of the state, not far from the Alabama border. I guess you knew that already.”
“I did, yes.”
He looked at her expectantly and she kept smiling, searching for what to say next. He’d told her about his childhood, mostly pleasant impersonal facts, though she got the feeling all had not been rosy, even in such privileged surroundings. Maybe he’d tell her the whole truth someday, as she would tell him hers. But not today. Charsville was an entirely different world from Southport, Connecticut. You could count the number of wealthy on no fingers. People didn’t live large there, they grew up, married, had kids, grew old and died. She didn’t want to give Ryan any chance to think she wasn’t good enough for him.
“It was a safe, quiet, wholesome place to grow up.” As long as you didn’t venture out when the Dargin brothers had been drinking. “People didn’t lock their doors, kids hung out at the Dip-Delite ice cream and candy store, and everyone knew everyone else’s business.”
She gave a laugh as if the last was a quaint and lovely trait, whereas she’d found it a suffocating junior high existence.
Ryan was listening politely, but watching her with a blue-eyed intensity that unnerved and excited her at the same time. What was he thinking?
If she had her way, he’d be thinking thoughts that had nothing to do with her childhood past and everything to do with her womanhood and her future. Especially because being across the table like this for so long, she’d barely been able to keep herself from imagining their first kiss, though she doubted it would happen tonight. But maybe soon? They’d had a nice time so far, talking easily, laughing together and sharing food.
Or was he wondering why he’d asked her out in the first place, this small-town girl from nowhere with nothing of real substance to say? Should she embellish her life? Beef up her education from a two-year degree earned in four years to a four-year degree earned in two? Casually drop some mention of her mom’s catering business and her dad’s club? Ryan would picture elegant cocktail parties, pools and golf courses—things he could relate to. He didn’t need to know Vera Bayer threw kids’ birthday parties, and that the pool at Dick Bayer’s men’s club involved cues and drunken betting.
No. She’d keep to the bare-minimum truth. Any false picture she painted would come crashing down when he met her parents.
“What kind of girl were you?”
“Shy. Lonely. A dreamer.” With iron determination driving her life. “But I knew what I wanted.”
“Which was?”
“To leave Charsville, live in New York and see the world someday.” And marry someone exactly like you.
“Why New York?”
“After small-town living?” She lifted her eyebrows, thinking no other answer was needed, but he still seemed to be waiting for an explanation. “The bigger the better as far as I was concerned. But L.A. has earthquakes, and Cairo and Tokyo were too far away and exotic for me.”
“Makes sense.” He nodded seriously where she expected him to laugh. Was it her imagination or did he look disappointed? What had she said? What was wrong with loving New York?
“So I came here.” She forced herself to calm down. Ryan could undoubtedly live anywhere in the world he wanted, so he must love the Big Apple, too.
“I’m getting tired of the city.” He picked up his beer and tipped it absently back and forth, staring at the shifting liquid. “I’ve been thinking it’s time to move on, maybe back to Connecticut. I’m thinking of looking at houses in Southport or Fairfield.”
Dang, darn, hell and damnation. How was she going to get herself out of this one? It would be so nice when her time with Ryan no longer felt like a job interview.
“Well.” She gave a laugh that, thank the lord, didn’t betray her dismay. “I was just going to say, now that I’ve lived here even this short while, I’ve been thinking I didn’t know myself all that well wanting to come here. But I thought I should give Manhattan a year at least, before I did anything I’d regret.”
“Very sensible.” He nodded slowly, eyeing her speculatively over his glass. “Would you like to go back to a smaller town someday, to settle permanently?”
“Oh, yes.” Sweet Jesus. Was she dreaming? “Definitely.”
“Back to Georgia?” He seemed anxious about her response.
“Oh, no. Not Georgia.” She beamed, her heart enjoying a Texas two-step. “I’d feel like I failed if I went back.”
“I understand.” The tension left his face; he lifted his beer across the table, eyes warm. “Here’s to a new future for both of us.”
“To a new future.” Together. She clinked her glass with his, wanting to shout a few rounds of her sister Iona’s favorite cheer: “Hey, go, go, go, hey, go. Charsville Chiefs…hey go!” Unless she was wrong, she, Teeny Bayer, was under consideration for the position of Mrs. Settle Down In Connecticut.
Please don’t let me blow it.
The waiter came to clear their plates and returned with the check, which he put on the table between them. Should Christine offer to pay? Some men were insulted—as if the woman thought he wasn’t capable of taking care of her. On the other hand, if she wanted to keep the “friends” pretense up, she should probably not assume Ryan had planned to take her out.
She reached for her purse at the same time he slapped a credit card on top of the bill and shook his head at her. “My treat tonight.”
Tonight? As if there would be others? She withdrew her hand from her purse and beamed at him. “Thank you, Ryan. The meal was delicious.”
“My pleasure.”
And there they were, smiling at each other across the table, and warm joy started flooding Christine’s body and her heart. His pleasure. Ohh, she’d love to show him pleasure of all kinds. Pleasure at the front door welcoming him home, pleasure in the kitchen eating the dinner she cooked and pleasure in the bedroom later that night.
One step at a time, Christine.
The waiter brought back Ryan’s receipt; Ryan thanked him and shoved it into his wallet. “Ready?”
“Yes.” She got to her feet, hoping her yellow linen sheath didn’t have too many horizontal wrinkles across her lap, and picked up her purse, even more pleased when he waited for her to precede him out of the restaurant. The last guy she dated had been in such a New York hurry all the time, he’d rush off without even glancing to see if she’d followed. The day she met Ryan, she’d ended that relationship, which was going nowhere in that same New York hurry.
Out on the sidewalk, they strolled along 14
Street. Christine forced her feet, which wanted to skip, to keep a slow, even pace. Strolling meant Ryan intended to prolong the evening. He hadn’t hustled her into a taxi, or fled down the sidewalk so she could barely keep up. Strolling was another good sign in an evening that had already been full of them.
They passed a street musician playing a saxophone, and stores with bins of perfect produce laid out on the sidewalk stands. She loved New York, especially at night. The energy, the lights, the natives out enjoying their city. She loved feeling part of something so huge and so important and so vital to the world. If she and Ryan worked out, she hoped Ryan would want to come into the city often after they left.
“I’m curious about something.”
“Mmm?” She imbued her voice with a touch of sensuality and was rewarded out of the corner of her eye with the sight of him turning to look at her. She made sure she appeared calm and peaceful.
“You grew up in Georgia. What happened to your accent?”
“I lost it on the way here.” She did turn then, to smile at him. “Somewhere over Virginia.”
Her accent had been disposed of deliberately, starting when she was a girl, imitating TV or movie personalities, practicing over and over in her favorite spot, a copse near a stream a short way from home. A place where she could escape two brothers and three sisters and two parents and the all-too-frequent visiting aunts, uncles and cousins, and have room and quiet to think her own thoughts and dream her own dreams. She’d even taught herself rudimentary French from books and tapes she’d gotten from the library, to be ready for the trip she’d someday take to Paris.
She always knew she’d come north to live—New York or Boston or Chicago—because she didn’t belong in a small Southern town and never would. And she’d wanted to fit in here from the start, not be pegged as an outsider the second she opened her mouth.
“Let me hear it.”
“Hear what?”
“Your accent.”
Christine rolled her eyes. “Why sugah, whatevah for?”
He laughed and swayed toward her so they bumped shoulders, which felt as intimate as a kiss on this crowded beautiful city street.
Way too soon they got back to Bank Street and inside their building, to the familiar smell of wood and carpet and a faint whiff of cleaner. Way too soon the elevator ride was over, their walk down the hall finished in front of their two doors.
“Good night, Ryan. Thank you for a really fun time.” Christine smiled warmly and took a step back toward her apartment so he wouldn’t think she was angling for a kiss, though frankly, she’d like nothing else right at that moment. His lips were as appealing and sexual as the rest of him. Sharply defined, slightly full, but not at all feminine. The kind of lips that would leave you no doubt whatsoever that you were being kissed.
