“I’m freaking out,” she said.
“I mean, it’s not that messy,” he said.
She didn’t crack a smile. “Look at this.” She handed him a manuscript, or, on closer look, a screenplay.
The screenplay. The Rory Kincaid feature film.
“Son of a bitch,” he muttered. “Where on earth did you get this?”
“What difference does it make? I just want to know how we can stop this from happening.”
Matt pulled out his desk chair and sat, thumbing through the pages. “We can’t.”
Lauren sat on the edge of his bed and put her face in her hands. “I was afraid you’d say that. Can you believe this?”
He wanted to jump in and start reading the thing. But Lauren had clearly come to him for some kind of reassurance, and the least he could do was try to give it to her.
“This doesn’t mean anything,” he said, tossing it onto his desk. “He doesn’t have shit. We have the real story. By the time this thing sees the light of day, it will be old news because this documentary will be everywhere.”
“How can you be sure?”
“This is just a draft of a script. It’s only seventy pages. I doubt it’s finished. It sure as hell isn’t a shooting script.”
She looked unconvinced. “I’m really upset about this,” she said.
He sat next to her. “I know. It’s understandable. But there’s nothing you can do about it except know that (a) most feature-film scripts don’t even get made, and (b) you helped bring the true story to the screen. You have your own say, which people will care about and listen to infinitely more than this guy’s crap.”
She looked at him. “I never thought I’d say this, but I’m glad you’re doing this movie.”
“Really?”
She nodded. And then, in his exhaustion and stress and relief and simple raw attraction, he kissed her. Again. She kissed him back, her arms moving around his neck. He pulled her on top of him as he fell back on the bed. The absolute force of his desire was shocking to him. It was as if the hours of intense conversation had been leading to this moment.
“Lauren,” he said, gently moving her off him and onto her back. Her hair was coming loose from her ponytail. He found the purple elastic band and gently tugged it off. He kissed her just under her jaw, then lower, feeling the pulse at the base of her neck. He tried to slow it all down, to give her a chance to stop him. Hoping against hope that she wouldn’t.
Lauren didn’t want to speak, afraid the intense feelings she had for Matt, the overwhelming drive to have him touch her, would burst like a bubble if she said a word. In that moment, she felt like she was coming up for air after nearly drowning, and all she knew was that she could still slip back under. She took his hand and moved it to her breast, kissing him. He slipped his hand under her tank top, touched her, and then pulled it off. He unhooked her bra and drew her in close so they were chest to chest. The sensation brought tears to her eyes.
When his hand moved lower, to the top of her shorts, she helped with the button and zipper.
“Do you have anything here?” she asked.
“God, no…this was the absolute last thing on my mind.”
It didn’t matter, not really. She hadn’t had her period in a while. Maybe it was the running. Or maybe her body had just given up, the way she had.
It was reckless, but she didn’t care. Where had being careful, being safe and good, gotten her?
She pulled him on top of her, and all that had been weighing on her, strangling her, finally released its hold.
Afterward, her eyes filled with tears. For the first time in as long as she could remember, they were tears of happiness instead of grief.
Chapter Forty-Five
I’m too old for contact sports,” Beth said, balancing on a raft across from Ethan, who whacked her in the shoulder with a noodle.
“Oh, come on, Mom,” Stephanie said from the chaise longue. “It’s fun. A good way to get out your aggression.”
“That’s what baking is for.”
But she was just playing the part of the curmudgeon. She was thrilled to see Stephanie spending time with her son. And she had heard Stephanie knocking on Lauren’s door first thing in the morning. Her instinct about this summer had been right. Things were getting better, at least where the girls were concerned. As for Howard? He was gone for the day, back in Philly working on sublease prospects. They’d barely spoken since the argument about moving. And now she was about to double-down on the house.
When Ethan climbed out of the pool for a snack, Beth swam to the shallow end and called for Stephanie to join her.
“I want to talk to you about something,” Beth said.
“Wait, Mom. I have to say something first. You were right. I need to spend some time by myself. Be alone for a while. Focus on what’s important.”
“Really? And what about Neil?”
“I’m over it. Not happening,” she said.
“Okay, well. I’m proud of you, sweetheart. And I want you to know you have my support. That actually brings me to what I wanted to talk to you about.” Beth hesitated, wondering if the suggestion would seem too pushy, controlling. “I’m not planning on leaving here at the end of the summer. And I would like you to stay too.”
“For how long? Ethan has to get back to school.”
“He can go to school here. They have a wonderful elementary school.”
“You want us to…live here?”
Beth nodded.
“What about Lauren?”
“Gran left the house to us as a family.”
Stephanie’s eyes filled with tears. “You mean it?”
“Is that a yes?”
Stephanie hugged her. Beth exhaled.
Lauren inched away from Matt under the sheet so he could slip from the bed to turn up the air conditioner. It was a window unit, and it wheezed loudly and seemed to rattle the entire room.
“How do you sleep with that thing?” She smiled, sitting up against the headboard, pulling the sheet high over her breasts and tucking it under her arms like a tube top.
“I usually don’t,” he said, sliding back onto the bed, next to her but over the sheet. He’d put his boxers back on. “So…that happened.”
She smiled. He kissed the top of her head. “You okay?” he asked, and she nodded.
She braced herself for the guilt; so far, it hadn’t come. Instead, she felt an odd relief, a sense that somehow a former version of herself had been restored. But since there had never been a sexual version of herself that didn’t involve Rory, it couldn’t be a return to anything. It was something new.
She reached for her top and shorts and put them on under the sheet.
“Don’t go,” Matt said.
“Just need the bathroom.”
She didn’t plan on staying, but still, it was nice to hear him ask her to. On the way to the bathroom, she passed his desk and the map of index cards taped above it. She told herself not to look, not to think about Rory and the film. She wanted Matt and Rory to be separate, not only in that moment, but forever in her mind. But one card caught her eye: Stephanie reveal.
She turned to Matt.
“What’s this mean?”
Matt jumped up, looking at the board as if wondering how it got there. Or maybe wondering how he had left it there.
“It’s nothing,” he said, moving next to her, taking a few sheets of printer paper, and tacking them over the index cards.
Was he serious? “You’re not letting me look at the storyboard?”
“Lauren, I don’t want to talk about the film right now. I don’t want to think about the film right now. I just want to be you and me—a man and a woman. I think we both deserve that for just an hour. I know you sure as hell do.”
He put his arms around her, and she forced herself to look into his green eyes, not at the words hanging on the wall. He kissed her.
“I’m going to make a run down to the kitchen for coffee. How do you take yo
urs?”
“Um, milk and sugar.”
He hesitated.
“What is it?” she said.
“I’m hoping you’ll come see me in New York.”
She looked at him blankly, the words not quite registering. “You want me to…come to New York?”
“Well, yeah. Don’t look so surprised. Some people find it an interesting place to visit.”
She smiled. “So I’ve heard. But seriously. This is…I have to process this.”
He kissed her cheek. “Okay, process. I’ll be back with coffee.”
When he was gone, Lauren used the bathroom, then looked at her reflection in the mirror. Her cheeks were flushed; her face appeared different to her own eyes. For the first time in a very long while, she felt pretty.
She ran her hands under the water and stared at her wedding band. A sob rose in her chest, but she held it back. It’s okay, she told herself.
The ring should come off. But she couldn’t bring herself to do it.
In the bedroom, the maze of index cards called to her. Stephanie reveal.
What did it mean? Was Matt hiding something from her?
Lauren walked to the desk. She didn’t know exactly what she was looking for, but the flip book was still there—the place where he kept hard copies of his interviews. All the discs were in chronological order, and she quickly found the one labeled with Stephanie’s name and a date. But she’d seen it already. There was no “reveal,” nothing much of interest at all. She kept looking, not sure what she expected to find. And then she saw it: Stephanie #2.
Heart pounding, she slipped both files in her pocket. And she left.
Beth placed the hot-dog buns facedown on the grill for just a few seconds before dropping them onto the serving tray. Stephanie had set up her iPhone on a dock to play a monotonous female pop album—Lady Gaga or Katy Perry or some such. But it was the sound of happiness, because it had been the backdrop to telling Ethan the news that he would be living at the beach from now on, and his little face had lit up in a way that Beth would remember for the rest of her life. She only wished Howard had been there to see it. A shared smile between them over Ethan’s joy might have been a bridge back to each other.
“Aunt Lauren!”
Beth turned around. Ethan ran up to Lauren and jumped into her arms.
“Hey, kiddo. Easy there,” Lauren said.
“I thought you were working today,” Beth said.
“Yeah, long story.”
“Aunt Lauren, I’m going to live here! With you! Forever!” Ethan said.
Lauren eyed Beth. “Forever, huh? Well, I don’t know about that. We might have to ship you off to Hogwarts at some point.”
“Sit and have lunch with us,” Beth said.
“I can’t, Mom. I have stuff to do. I need to be alone.”
Okay.
Chapter Forty-Six
Lauren emptied every drawer in her bedroom hunting for her computer charger, mentally combing over the past week in her mind. When had Matt interviewed Stephanie a second time? Was there any way he’d just forgotten to mention it to her? Had she seen him the day it happened?
She finally found the charger under her bed. She didn’t even bother moving to a chair. She plugged in her laptop and slipped the HD card into the port.
The clips filled her screen, and before she pressed Play, she could see that Stephanie was in Matt’s room. This bothered her in ways she couldn’t fully deal with in the moment.
Stephanie wore jeans and a T-shirt with a black and pink floral design. Her face was tight with tension.
Lauren watched impatiently, waiting for whatever it was she’d thought she’d find. Five minutes in, she paused, backed up a few seconds, and hit Play again.
“I’m not talking to you today to help you make a movie,” Stephanie said. “I’m talking to you because you shouldn’t make this movie.”
“Why not?” Matt asked off camera.
“Because Rory Kincaid wasn’t a hero.”
“You’re the only person out of the dozens I’ve spoken with who has a negative opinion of Rory Kincaid.”
“Well, maybe that’s because I’m the only one who really knew him.”
“I doubt your sister would agree with that.”
“She would if she’d ever, for one minute, trusted me when I tried to tell her that he wasn’t worth her time. I tried to warn her.”
“She might have thought you were jealous. Maybe you still are,” Matt said.
Stephanie snorted. “So that’s how you want to play this? I’ll be the jealous-sister villain of your movie? Come on. You can do better than that.”
“I can’t—not if you don’t give me something better.”
“Nice try,” she said.
“Where were you in the summer of 2010?”
“I was here. At the shore.”
“Where was Rory in the summer of 2010?”
“He was also here.”
“Where was Lauren that summer?”
“She was taking classes at Georgetown.”
“Is there anything you want to tell me about that summer?” he asked.
“It was uneventful,” Stephanie said. But her face told a different story.
“Was Rory faithful to your sister?”
Stephanie glared at him indignantly. And said nothing.
Lauren, heart pounding, paused the video. What the hell was Matt getting at?
The summer, a low point in her relationship with Rory, was a time she’d avoided going into detail about with Matt. It had been confusing and painful, and in the end she liked to think of it as an insignificant rough patch.
It was the summer after Rory’s rookie season, the summer she should have just graduated from Georgetown. They had planned to spend July at the Green Gable, but she was two credits short of graduating, thanks to all the time she’d missed traveling to LA. She’d asked him to spend the summer in DC with her instead. Obviously, the steaming-hot city wasn’t the ideal place to spend July and August, but she hadn’t expected him to actually refuse. He gave her a litany of reasons he couldn’t change his plans and go to DC instead of the shore.
“So what if we already told our friends?” she’d said. “So what if Emerson is visiting you for the Fourth of July? This is about us.”
Rory was unmoved. Had he just been looking for an excuse to get away from her? Hurt, she’d said, “Fine. I can get more work done without you around.”
They didn’t speak for a few days.
When he finally called, the conversation felt perfunctory. Lauren was afraid to say what she was really thinking, which was Is this over? If it is, let’s just end it. She wasn’t ready for the answer.
Her one consolation was that a professor had helped her get an internship at the Washington Post—the newspaper once run by her idol Katharine Graham. Four days a week after her classes, she went downtown to K Street, where she experienced the energy of the real DC—not the academic bubble of Georgetown, but the bustle of the town. Every day, she would pick up her lunch at one of the cafés filled with people running to and from Capitol Hill, all of them wearing ID tags around their necks, signifying their importance and access.
She realized she had spent too much of her time in DC lamenting her distance from Rory. But that summer, she felt the magic she had experienced that first visit during junior year of high school. And if her love affair with Rory Kincaid was fading, the one she had with Washington, DC, was going strong.
Still, every morning between classes, she called Stephanie at the shore and asked if she’d seen Rory out the night before. The answer was always no, until late July.
“Yeah, I’ve been seeing him and his friends at Robert’s Place.”
“Did you talk to him?”
“Not really.”
Completely unsatisfying. But what did she expect? Answers about what was going on in Rory’s mind from a drunken bar conversation he’d had with Stephanie? She stopped asking.
Two more week
s passed without a word from Rory. She weakened enough to ask Stephanie, once again, if she’d seen him. Was he still at the shore?
“Forget about him already, will you?” Stephanie snapped.
“Why should I?” Lauren said. “We’ve been together six years!”
“Well, clearly it’s over.”
Lauren slammed down the phone. All sorts of clichés ran through her mind, like Don’t shoot the messenger and The truth hurts. But none of them made her any less furious at Stephanie. How could she be so callous?
And then, the most surprising phone call of the summer. It came on a Saturday afternoon.
“Where are you?” Rory asked.
“In DC. Obviously,” Lauren said. Where did he think she was?
“No. I mean where in DC?”
“Politics and Prose.”
“I’ll be there in ten minutes,” he said.
What?
For fifteen, twenty minutes, she sat in the bookstore café, fighting the urge to look around the room. Instead, she stared at the same page she had been reading when he called, trying to figure out what was going on.
“Hey.”
He pulled out the seat across from her and sat down. If this were a movie, or if he were a different person, he would have maybe used a cheesy line like “Is this seat taken?” But it was Rory, and Rory just focused his intense eyes on her. He was tan. He looked beautiful.
Before she could say anything, his big hands enveloped her small ones.
“I’ve missed you.”
She started to speak, but nothing came out. What was there to say? He’d come back for her.
A month later, they were looking for houses together in Los Angeles.
Lauren hit the Play arrow on Stephanie’s interview, then skipped back a few minutes.
“Was Rory faithful to your sister?”
Suddenly, Lauren felt sick. The summer came back to her in sharp cuts.
Stephanie had pulled away from her so completely.
And Rory had committed to her so absolutely.
No.
Hands shaking, Lauren removed the disc and inserted the first interview. She didn’t realize what she was looking for, didn’t understand that her subconscious was already piecing together what her conscious mind couldn’t handle.
The Husband Hour Page 26
