Chapter 26: Chapter 26

IT’S after seven by the time we sit down to eat. I pour more wine and watch Vicky pick up her fork.

“You think the sauce survived?” she asks.

“I know it did.” I set down the bottle and stand behind her, rest my hands over her shoulders. “I think you’re going to be pleasantly surprised with this dish.”

She looks up at me. “You just think you’re Mr. Awesome.”

“Kind of.” I kiss her cheek.

“I’ll be the judge of that.” She swirls the noodles in the sauce. “The talent portion of Most Eligible Bastard contest,” she jokes.

I lean in closer. “I do believe I aced the talent portion of the contest earlier tonight.”

“Hmmm,” she says. “Good point.”

She slips the forkful of fettuccini between her pretty lips.

A sheen of pure wonder creeps into her gaze. “Oh my god,” she says.

“What’s that?”

She gazes back up at me, brown eyes sparkling. “Parmesan garlic taste freak-out.”

I sit down. We eat. A lot. She actually has seconds, like the best date ever.

After dinner we take Smuckers out, strolling around in search of dessert. We decide on a bag of warm baklava from a food truck. We take it into Central Park and sit on a bench, feasting while we watch an extremely acrobatic man dance to a fiddle and a snare drum.

Vicky makes exactly zero jokes about what I’ll refer to as The Smuckers Incident. In fact, she doesn’t have to; all she has to do is look at Smuckers and then look at me with an utterly innocent expression, and the joke is in the air.

“Fuck off,” I growl.

“What?” she laughs. “I can’t look at you guys now? My two fave guys?”

“No, you can’t,” I snarl.

I’m not mad. It’s fun. It’s all fun with her, like the best kind of escape, the way it was at Southfield Studios, us hiding from the world and carving out our own zone of simple pleasure inside the larger, more complicated real world.

She leans against me. Whatever hesitation she had about us being together before seems gone.

What was it?

She’s an enigma, but I don’t mind. The more layers of her I peel away, the more I like her. The more I want her.

I put my arm around her. She snuggles closer and something in me warms.

It’s strange sitting in the park with Vicky. And it strikes me as strange that it would strike me as strange…until it occurs to me that every activity in my life fits into one of two categories: seduction and business.

Sitting in the moonlit park fits into neither. It’s just nice.

How did my life get so unbalanced? Even my beach house in the Hamptons—I use it to entertain clients or I don’t use it at all.

It’s not there for pleasure, and I certainly never take women up there—I don’t like to give them the wrong idea, which is that our short-term hookups might not be short-term hookups.

“Hey,” I say. “What are you and Carly doing for Labor Day weekend?”

“I don’t know,” she says. “Nothing special.”

“You want to get out of the city? I have a beach place in the Hamptons.”

She sits up, seeming alarmed.

I brush a strand of hair from her eyes. It’s so sexy when she wears it down. “What is it?”

“Well…” She stares at a crushed Pepsi can, shining in the grass. “With everything so crazy…”

No, she means.

I almost don’t comprehend it. She’s taking the one night, no roles thing seriously. Treating this as a hookup. It defies my understanding of the universe, like water swirling the wrong way down the drain.

I spent most of my dating career enforcing hookup rules. I recognize it when I see it.

Three words: No. Fucking. Way.

I set my fingertips to her chin with the gentle touch that gets her hot. I brush a kiss onto her lips. “Why not extend it?” I say. “Vacation holiday. Who says we can’t extend it? Nothing intruding.”

Her pulse bangs in her throat. “Just for the record, things will be set right.” She watches my eyes. It’s important to her that I get that. It feels right to trust her on that.

“I’m not worried about that. I take you at your word. I’m not talking about the company, I’m talking about this.” I lower my voice. “You know you want to. We’re in this far. Let’s keep it going. All the complications. Screw it all. Three more days.”

This gets her thinking about it.

“We leave the whole spiderweb of our lives behind,” I say. “We leave it here.” I kiss her again. “Or, actually, in the limo.”

“I can’t leave Carly.” She puts her hands in her lap. “Not for a weekend. I mean, she’s sixteen. She would probably be fine. She’d love me to leave her with the place to herself but—”

“I didn’t mean just you, I meant both of you,” I say. “I’d love to meet her and have her up with us. The best beach is just a few blocks away. We have a full staff. She can have her own room. We could leave Friday, early.”

I can tell she’s thinking about it. “The traffic….”

“Right,” I say. “If only I owned a strange machine with a propeller on the top of it that could fly right over cars and buildings. Oh, wait, I do.”

She grins. “Tell me it’s not blue.”

“It’s blue.”

She studies my eyes, as though she’s not sure whether to take me seriously. What’s going on? Am I pushing things too fast?

She pulls out her phone, swipes around, then groans. “Carly has two day-long can’t-miss dates to run lines with her girlfriend,” she says. “They’re trying to get leads in the fall production. I forgot they carved those out for this long weekend.”

“Have her bring her girlfriend. Trust me, we have the space.” I trace the shell of her ear. She’s caving.

“Of course, they might not get much studying done. Two of the guys from One Direction have rented the place next to mine. They might be rehearsing for some kind of duet tour. It could be distracting.”

Her jaw falls open. “Seriously?”

“Would I joke about something like One Direction?”

“This feels like blackmail,” she says. “If I don’t say yes and she finds out, she’ll literally kill me.”

“That would be terrible,” I say.