by Megan Crane
“You must be jet-lagged. Or maybe you’re just insane.” I held up a hand when she started to speak. “Even if I could somehow overlook the fact that Nate is hosting the freaking party in the very house where I discovered him sucking face with Helen—and who could overlook something like that, Georgia? Seriously?”
“But it’s not like it’s actually his—”
“Even if I could lobotomize myself so that I no longer cared about these things, the fact remains that I made a total ass of myself last night. I can’t walk in there and pretend that I don’t care that Nate’s with her of all people when forty-eight hours earlier I was belting out Janis Joplin three inches away from their faces. And it’s not like I can pretend it didn’t happen, either, because everyone we know watched me do it!”
“First of all,” Georgia replied, looking down at me, “I need you to breathe.”
She had a point. I took a deep breath and relaxed my spine into my chair.
“If you don’t want to go to a stupid Halloween party, then you shouldn’t go,” Georgia said. “Nobody would blame you if you wanted to hide away somewhere and lick your wounds, letting Nate, Helen, and everyone else realize exactly how much all of this is hurting you.”
“Okay, good-bye. Reverse psychology is the last thing I need right now.” I debated telling her what Nate had said about things being better this way, because he couldn’t be who I wanted him to be. But I was still mulling it over, and just waved my hand in her direction. “Go to court.”
“I’m just saying—”
“Are you wearing fake eyelashes?” The best defense was a good offense. “To the courtroom?”
“There’s no reason not to accentuate the positive.” Georgia smiled serenely, batting those fake eyelashes at me so I could better appreciate their length. “Cosmetics are just shrewd marketing.”
“You sound like your mother,” I accused her. Fighting words. Georgia winced.
“That serves me right for talking about your wounds,” she said. Then shook her head. “Do you know, the woman called me on my cell phone while I was on my way to trial to let me know that she’d had a dream. And do you know what she dreamed?”
“Grandchildren?” I guessed. With Georgia’s mother it always came down to grandchildren, one way or another.
“That I died alone and unloved, because I was too picky,” Georgia said. “This is what she says to me, five seconds before a trial. What am I supposed to do with that?”
“Date a nice guy for a change?” I suggested, and laughed when Georgia just made a face. Because she and I both knew that Georgia’s fatal weakness was for hot guys with commitment issues, the younger and more feckless the better. If they were actively mean to her, well, hell! She’d fall in love.
“I can hardly stomach the dates I have,” she muttered. “I’m going to be late—I’ll see you later.”
I watched her haul open the heavy Museum door and stride back out into the cold, congratulating myself on avoiding further talk of the Halloween party. And also for being lucky enough not to have a mother who called me to ask when I was getting married, as Georgia’s did several times a day.
Georgia’s mother was Greek and had very clear ideas about the kind of man she envisioned her only child with: a Greek. Everything else was subject to interpretation but the Greek part was ironclad. Georgia wasn’t permitted the luxury of choosing, say, a big American mutt of indeterminate ethnic origin like her own father. Georgia had been enthusiastic about her destiny until the dark day she discovered George Michael’s true sexuality—having somehow believed he was heterosexual for most of the eighties.
These days Georgia’s mother had subsided into a sort of dull hysteria that she expressed via dramatic voice mails. You didn’t have to speak Greek to get the gist of them: hurry up and give me my grandchildren before I die.
My mother, happily, wasn’t prone to the my daughter is about to cross over into her thirties and is thus about to be a spinster panic. Though she didn’t necessarily get me, she never overtly interfered, which I figured was the better deal. Because Georgia’s mother was just scary.
The moment that cemented my lifelong fear of the woman came while we were still in college. We’d all been out to dinner with Georgia’s parents and were sitting in the car outside our dorm. In the throes of my collegiate self-absorption, I’d chosen to whine about how I would obviously never find love because I was twenty or some such unbelievably young age, which of course I thought was old as the hills, and blah blah blah. This, naturally, led to a withering self-analysis in which I concluded that I didn’t actually deserve love because of the width of my thighs. Georgia’s mother reached over and grabbed me high on the leg, startling me so much I actually jumped.
“You listen to me, Augusta,” she said, startling me with her invocation of the name as well as her weird, creepy voice. “You will breed strong children with these thighs.”
Needless to say, that ended the conversation. I slunk off into the dorm, embraced the post-traumatic stress along with my friends’ hysterics, and contemplated my thighs with horror ever after. Not enough, then, that they were the first part of me to register the ingestion of chocolate. Not enough that my ass, at twenty-nine, now covered more parts of my upper thighs than I had ever imagined possible when I was sixteen. No, my thighs were breeding thighs. How delightful. How enticing and sexy. Perhaps I should trot that one out on the off chance I ever dated again, which seemed unlikely unless the gentleman in question had an unusual affinity for interpretive classic rock—
“And have you noticed my thighs?” I could say brightly, between the appetizer and the musical number. “A Greek woman assures me I’ll breed strong children with them, you know. Very Oracle of Delphi, it’s true. Just FYI.”
When I got home from work that night, I was exhausted. It had been a long day of sending falsely cheerful e-mails around to my extended group of friends, as a form of damage control that of course fooled no one, all the while swearing to my inner circle that I was never leaving my small one-bedroom apartment again.
It was the same one-bedroom I’d been living in since I left college, for anyone keeping score on their “she’s a loser” card. It was the one-bedroom that had been considered flashy and high-end by my friends back then, as they huddled in studios or shared places with the hygienically challenged while I got my master’s degree at Simmons. The very same one-bedroom that was now considered a breath above squalor by these same friends, who had moved on to Real Adult Homes now that we were all about to hit the Big Three Oh. I would have liked to move on myself, and would have, were it not for the whole mortgage issue. But then, no one was a librarian for the money. (I repeated that phrase to myself sometimes as often as seventy times a day.)
And anyway, I had my dog and my books, so what more did I need?
When I pushed my way through my front door, my silly dog was jubilant at the sight of me. Linus leapt into the air and wriggled madly, which he would keep doing until I stopped everything and concentrated on saying hello.
I tossed my mail across the counter in my little galley kitchen—a selection of credit-card and utility bills along with two large, brightly colored square envelopes I suspected contained more holiday invitations. It had been suggested to me that deciding to become a recluse just as the holiday season was swinging into gear was like shooting myself in the foot, and I had to admit Amy Lee had a point. We had a big group of friends, all of whom believed in throwing parties. People who could barely afford to pay rent went all out to send engraved invitations. Every party was an opportunity to one-up the previous one, and we were nothing if not competitive. It wasn’t as if I thought Nate and Helen were likely to keep themselves in seclusion to spare my feelings. So why should I hide myself away, as if I were the one who’d done something wrong?
I looked at my silly dog instead of following thoughts of Nate and Helen to their usual depressing conclusion, as he cavorted around in circles—a completely unapologetic spaz from his bla
ck-and-tan head to his oversize paws. I held his furry head between my hands and kissed him on his doggy forehead until he was calm and I was smiling.
Dogs: better for what ails you than the latest pharmaceuticals.
When the phone rang, I was feeling better. So much better, in fact, that I failed to check my caller ID before picking up the receiver.
I was a dumbass.
“Gus?” drawled the familiar voice. I froze. There was a pause, and I was sure I could hear him smirk. “It’s Henry. It’s been a while.”
Several consecutive life sentences would not be long enough to have not seen or heard from him, I thought. Several consecutive life sentences spent burning alive, in fact, would not even begin to be long enough.
And anyway, it had been about a week. Hardly long enough to qualify as “a while.”
I wasn’t exactly rational when it came to Henry. I could admit it. Even thinking about him made my stomach hurt. Hearing his voice made me break out in a sweat. He was like the flu.
“Henry,” I bit out, by way of a greeting. It wasn’t actually rude, I told myself. It was just his name.
To say that I disliked Henry Benedict Farland IV, known more simply as Henry and/or Beelzebub, was to so vastly understate my feelings that it was almost funny. Among other things, he was Nate’s roommate and one of the people in my extended group of friends I’d known without knowing well for years.
Nate, naturally enough, adored Henry. I’d long suspected this had something to do with the fact that Henry was tall and in phenomenal shape, while Nate was shorter, stockier, and was obsessed with the size of his biceps in comparison to Henry’s. It was a guy thing.
But the most important thing about Henry was that he was the one who had let me into the house that night eighteen days ago. If he hadn’t opened the door, I would never have seen Nate and Helen together in the kitchen. If it hadn’t been for Henry, I would still have Nate.
I just couldn’t forgive him.
“So this is the situation,” Henry said in that overconfident, lazy voice of his, the one I figured they taught on the beaches of Cape Cod. “Nate’s convinced that you’d rather be dead than seen in the same room as him. Tell me that’s just Nate being dramatic.”
“Help me out here,” I said, ignoring him. Along with the sickening image of Nate and him sitting down for a cozy chat about me. Because why shouldn’t they? They lived together, after all. What a nightmare. “You’re calling me why, exactly? To explore my emotional terrain?”
“I’m not much for exploring,” Henry said. And why should he be? With ancestors who partied it up on the Mayflower, the “explorer” gene had probably been bred out sometime around the Boston Tea Party. The only thing Henry ever explored, as far as I knew, was the number of little floozies he could hook up with in a single evening. (And he could hook up with quite a few.)
“Thanks for calling—” I began in an overly chipper tone, meaning to hang up on him as quickly as possible.
“Here’s the thing,” Henry said smoothly before I could slam the phone back into the cradle and pretend he didn’t exist. “You never RSVPed to the invitation for the party tomorrow.”
That was because I’d received the invitation the day after discovering Nate and Helen in that house. The day after Henry had made sure I’d discovered them. I’d shredded it into bitty pieces and laughed at the very idea of entering that place again. I opened my mouth to tell him so.
“And I don’t blame you,” Henry continued. “But I think you should come. So what if Nate and Helen are there? Why should you care about them?”
“I can’t think of a single reason,” I said. Very snidely, because I was slightly surprised that he sounded . . . nice.
“I’d like to see you myself,” he replied as if he hadn’t heard the snideness.
I didn’t know how to process that statement. I told myself I didn’t want to know how to process it, because I didn’t want to know why he wanted to see me. There was a whole part of the night after I discovered Nate and Helen together that I was actively repressing. Which was the other, equally compelling reason I didn’t want to go to the Halloween party.
“I don’t know what my plans are,” I told him, through my teeth. I was clenching them tight together once again, a habit that made Amy Lee cringe.
“Of course you don’t,” Henry practically purred. Like he knew I was almost lying outright. “Well, you know where we live, so by all means, drop by. If you aren’t too busy.”
And then he hung up, because he was the Prince of Darkness and had to have the last word.
I stared at the phone in my hand. I had actually managed to shove Henry Farland and his part of the night I’d found out about Nate and Helen out of my mind.
Okay, that was a big lie. I wanted to forget about the Henry part. I was so upset and horrified by the Henry part, and by the worry that Nate knew about the Henry part (even if, technically, Nate had no grounds to complain, having, at that point, literally just dumped me), that my mind veered away from it in a panic every time a stray thought crept in.
But blame Henry I could. And did.
Henry’s problem was that he had the great fortune to be both rich and good-looking, and he’d used those attributes to cut a wide swath through the female population of Boston, to say nothing of the Cape and Islands. He could be quite charming, and even entertaining, but only to those who weren’t foolish enough to fall for him. He could be hilarious, particularly when standing in corners offering social commentary at large gatherings. The girls who fawned over him (and, just as often, his wealth) didn’t think so. They adored Henry right up to the point where he stomped on their hearts and discarded them, at which point they loathed him, usually while crying. He, naturally, never seemed to be affected one way or the other by the women who loved him. He was womanizing scum, no matter how amusing he might occasionally be in between inflicting heartbreaks.
I knew all this from near-personal experience, thanks to the epic crush Georgia had had on Henry for years back when we first met him. (This would be yet another reason I was working so hard to repress.) She didn’t just see Henry somewhere and think he was hot, either. She pined. She constructed elaborate plans to spend time in his vicinity, even if it meant befriending his various floozies. We once drove all the way out to his parents’ summer place on the water in Dennis so that Georgia could monitor his comings and goings one memorable Memorial Day weekend. It was like Henry was Georgia’s ex, except without his own side of the story, because the thing about epic crushes was that they had nothing to do with the crushee and everything to do with the crusher. Nonetheless, I was still mad at him, years later, on behalf of Georgia’s yearning, unrequited heart.
It just made his actions that night eighteen days ago all the more hideous, in my opinion. And would make the Halloween party equally awful.
I wasn’t prepared to deal with Nate, who I was still an emotional wreck over. I wasn’t prepared to deal with Helen, who I wanted very badly to harm—preferably in a permanent, disfiguring manner. And I certainly wasn’t prepared to deal with Henry, who of the three of them I hated in the most uncomplicated fashion, because he was the easiest to despise.
None of which I could really talk about to my friends. They had never liked Helen, had expressed doubts about Nate the moment Helen started cozying up to him, and had maxed out on insightful conversations about Henry years ago. (Slurs and mean-spirited rumors about him, however, were always welcomed.)
That was fine, I thought then, collapsing onto my couch. I was fine. I told myself to breathe. There was no need to get confused about the objectives here. I was going to attend the party because I needed to be seen having a carefree, marvelous time. Last night’s spectacle had to be erased. Or, anyway, mitigated. I would have to perform this same act no matter where the party was being held. The fact that I’d have to face Henry, too, just meant that I would have to prepare for the—
“Good God,” I told Linus. He thumped his tail against
the floor. “This party is going to suck.”
chapter three
The fact that Henry lived in his own brownstone in the same neighborhood as certain unsuccessful presidential candidates with ketchup-heiress wives just added fuel to my dislike, I told myself as we approached Henry’s house on Friday night. I couldn’t imagine renting in Henry’s neighborhood, much less owning. I couldn’t imagine owning anything, including nice furniture. Much less an entire house that was so spacious he rented out the top half to “friends” like Nate. It wasn’t that Henry went out of his way to rub his wealth in other people’s faces—it was more the fact that he didn’t have to do any rubbing. It was already right there, in your face, in the form of a brownstone in Beacon Hill.
We trudged up the front stairs and squared our shoulders. Or I did, anyway. I’d been to so many parties here, one more shouldn’t matter much one way or the other. Deep inside, however, I was thinking of the last time I’d been here, and my subsequent vow never to return.
“No one prepared me,” drawled a voice from above us, rich with sarcastic glee. “Gus Curtis? At my house? They said it wasn’t possible!”
I looked up and there was Henry Farland himself, lounging in the open doorway before us.
There was something mesmerizing about him, with his bright blue eyes, honey-blond hair, and a smirk that could draw blood. He looked dressed to kill. In his case, probably literally.
“Henry,” Amy Lee bit out in an abrupt tone. “A pleasure, thanks for the invite, beautiful home.”
Without bothering to wait for a response, or express her solidarity with me by—I don’t know—punching Henry in the stomach, Amy Lee barreled past him. Headed, I assumed, for the bar. Amy Lee had been tired of Henry when it was Georgia who wanted to rant about him all the time. This probably felt like déjà vu to her. Oscar shot me an apologetic look and hurried after her, just doing that manly head-bob thing with Henry as he passed.
