“And,” she continued, somehow finding her way to a moral high ground, “you really ought to let her go. Liberty deserves better than someone who cheats on her.”
“Laila,” he pulled himself from the bed and put on the sweatpants that were crumpled on the floor, “this cannot happen again. It’s not worth it. I have something real with Liberty; she’s the kind of woman I could marry. And you . . . well you’re . . .” he let the thought trail off.
She was quiet and curled her head to her knees; he’d hurt her, which he’d intended to do, but he suddenly saw the danger in it. She could ruin things for him faster than any other person.
“Laila,” he said, coming back beside her on the bed, “we have fun; you’re an incredibly sexy girl. But if Liberty ever found out . . .”
“What, you think I’m going to tell her? I have as much to lose as you do. More! My family . . .”
“There you have it, all the more reason to stop this nonsense.”
Cameron wondered why he was making this so hard for himself. There was a city full of anonymous young beauties at his disposal for those moments when the existential dread brought on by the thought of being tethered to one woman overwhelmed him. Certain friends of his had even turned to prostitutes once they were married: fewer complications; less chance of the girl’s getting attached and losing her mind, causing trouble. But Cameron didn’t want to be like them—weak, gluttonous. And of course, if his parents ever found out he’d been seeing prostitutes, they’d be apoplectic; that was a PR nightmare waiting to happen.
“But that’s just it,” Laila said, calm now, resigned, responding as though she could hear his thoughts. “The fact that both of us have so much to lose is what makes it ideal. It’s mutual assured destruction. I know you’d never tell, and I’d be a thousand times worse off if this got out. I don’t have any other family; at least your parents and sister would still love you.” She did not add the obvious, which was that he was a rich man many times over.
She suddenly looked much older than her twenty-five years—something about her eyes in the dim morning light that crept through the curtains. He felt a stirring of renewed desire; there was something dark at the core of this girl. He didn’t need to know about its origins, but there was a mix of fear and anger and desperation in her that made her wild. Poor Tom Porter; no wonder she’d destroyed him. He’d reached out to Cameron after their breakup—having felt, the latter supposed, that they’d formed a real bond over the holidays—and the two had met up for a drink where the poor sad sack had spoken of nothing else. He pitied Tom, for Tom was piteous in the wake of his heartbreak, but seeing this wreckage deepened what so intrigued Cameron about Laila. Here was a drug that could ruin a man.
“Mutual assured destruction.” He laughed. “Bleak, but I suppose that’s one way of looking at it.”
It was an elegant line of thinking, he had to admit. For what he wanted was, of course, everything: the thrill of the possibility of being caught and a way to reassure himself that he was invulnerable to it.
“Think about it,” she said, smiling. Moments later, she was dressed, kissing him on the cheek, and gliding out the door like the devil called back to hell.
Laila walked in the door to Nora’s penthouse quietly, hoping her cousin would still be sleeping. She carried her heels in her hand and was naked beneath her dress. In the morning light, she saw that her lingerie had been ripped to shreds, so she abandoned it, presumably to be discovered by a curious maid. She found Nora in the kitchen frantically stirring pancake batter, singing along to a Katy Perry song that was blaring.
“Good morning,” Laila said sheepishly.
“Oh, good morning,” Nora said, “you look like a lady with a story to tell.” Her cousin was distressingly cheerful, manic even.
Laila forced herself to laugh. “Not much of one, I’m afraid. Some random from the party. We went out drinking after; terrible idea. Made out and passed out. I snuck out this morning before he woke up.”
“Oh, you bad girl.” Nora’s laugh was shrill. Her eyes were sparkling. With what? Cocaine? She knew the twins indulged occasionally but also that Nora—like all of them, it seemed—had a bevy of prescription drugs in her medicine cabinet, so really, it could be anything.
“And what’s going on here this morning?” Laila asked carefully.
“Pancakes,” Nora declared. Laila noticed now that her cousin was drinking a mimosa.
“Do you have friends coming over?” This would be a surprise, that Nora had friends.
“No,” Nora said. “Just felt like making them. But now you’re here!” She put down her batter and poured a second mimosa for Laila, who sat down reluctantly, plastering a smile on her face. She wanted more than anything to go and sleep off her night, let the dust settle, and process her conversation with Cameron. In the moment, she felt as though she’d played her cards adroitly; Cameron was besieged by a Madonna-whore complex. The more she played the whore, the more he would need her, for Liberty was his obvious Madonna. Cameron was an outrageously wealthy man: a life could be made as his mistress. And then, perhaps, she could keep her family too. She’d never have to threaten them with blackmail in order to survive. Otherwise her options seemed to be ever narrowing to this one unappealing prospect.
As she sat there, she heard her phone buzzing with a text message. She looked at it discreetly, hoping it was from Cameron.
Hi Laila. I hope that you don’t mind that I got your number from Leo. I was pulled away before I could ask you about writing something for the Spec. Can I call you sometime?—Blake
Laila’s mind flashed back to her brief interaction with the handsome young scion the previous night, how he’d stared at her in that familiar way. She’d been thinking about Cameron that night, the plan to show up at his door already forming in her mind, so she hadn’t noticed. She’d taken his attentiveness to be nothing more than the natural charm of a man in his position.
Can you call me at noon? she replied.
“Who are you texting with over there?” Nora’s voice sounded almost as if she knew it was Blake—although she couldn’t have.
“Oh, just the guy from last night,” Laila said. Her phone trilled a response, and her hungover mind contracted with happiness. I’ll call you at noon.
“Are you going to see him again? Who is he?” Nora’s voice had the edge of an interrogator.
Laila shrugged. “Maybe? I don’t know.”
“Men!” Nora spat, angrily flitting around the kitchen and placing a pile of pancakes before Laila.
“Yeah?” Laila was so thrilled about the texts from Blake that she dug into the pancakes, not minding the carbs, the fat from the butter, the sugar in the syrup. “Bad night?” she ventured.
“Just . . . disappointing,” Nora said, settling in next to Laila with a stack of pancakes of her own.
“What happened?” Laila did not especially want to sit there and listen to Nora’s litany of top-shelf first-world problems, but it was her obligation as their semipermanent houseguest.
“I got myself all worked up to see Blake, and he barely noticed me! He talked to me for, like, five minutes,” Nora said.
“Well, it was his party. Maybe he was just distracted?” Laila ventured. Not too distracted to notice her, she noted with a flush of pride.
“I asked him if he wanted to catch up later,” Nora said sulkily, “but he blew me off. Said he’d love to, but he’s just so busy with the newspaper.”
“I’m sorry, honey,” Laila said. “But you want to be with someone who really wants to be with you. You shouldn’t waste your time worrying about anyone else.”
“Someone who really wants to be with me. And who would that be?” Nora said wistfully.
“What about Larry? You know he’s crazy about you! Maybe you should give him a shot.”
Nora rolled her eyes at the mention of her most ardent suitor, whom she had deigned to see only once or twice since meeting him. Yet he, for whatever reason, had hung in there.
He adored Nora, and her ambivalence only served to increase his slavish devotion.
“You think Larry is the best I can do?”
“Of course not.” Laila knew she needed to tread carefully, though she saw it would be helpful to encourage the idea of him. “I just think an older man might be more apt to really see everything you have to offer. To appreciate how sophisticated you are.”
“Maybe,” said Nora, depositing a bite of pancakes in her mouth. “Maybe.”
Blake called Laila at noon on the dot.
“Laila, I hope this isn’t out of order to call you like this. I know we only spoke briefly last night.”
He was like something out of an old-fashioned movie. It amazed her. When she’d finally managed to break free of Nora, Laila had spent an hour frantically Googling him before their call. His father, it appeared, was a wealthy but especially unsavory character: a developer who’d briefly been jailed for a heady mix of high-class crimes including blackmail, witness tampering, and illegal political contributions. Blake seemed to have kept his nose excessively clean, perhaps in reaction, and had made a number of successful real-estate investments while an undergrad at Harvard. Impressively, he appeared to have paid the rumored $10 million for the Spec out of his own funds.
“Of course not,” she said. “I was sorry we couldn’t talk longer.”
“The life of a literary agent. Very glamorous,” he said. His voice was playful without sounding like he was making fun of her. “So yes, I asked around.”
“Ha!” she said. “If you only knew. Glamorous is the last thing it is.” She decided not to mention that she was only an intern. “Nice stalking, though.”
He laughed. “Now that I’m a newspaperman, I have to get in the habit of doing my research. Though I’d prefer to get my information straight from the real Laila, if I should be so lucky.”
A wild thought danced through her mind that she was going to fall in love with this man. Perhaps she already loved him. During the hour of skimming interviews with and countless photos on Patrick McMullan, a vision of a life with him had sunk its roots into her mind. However privileged he was, he was clearly also very bright and was serious, like Liberty. She’d read that he’d been the one to start up his family charity foundation. Here was someone whose love could, in all ways, elevate her.
“Speaking of which,” he continued, “I’d really like to see you again. I’m headed to my place in Montauk for the weekend; could you meet me for a late lunch before I take off? I know it’s last-minute.”
“Sure, I think that could work. April is a bit early in the season for Montauk, isn’t it?”
“I like getting out there when the place isn’t full of awful summer people, when it’s quiet and cloudy, and I have the waves all to myself.”
“Surfing? Brrrr!”
He laughed a warm, hearty laugh that she felt settling on her like a cozy blanket.
“Well, I do wear a wetsuit. Balthazar at two?”
“Yes.”
Two hours later, Laila put on a cream-colored eyelet DVF dress, threw her trench over it to protect her from the spring rain, and headed to the nearby bistro. Balthazar seemed like a place where they would run into someone Blake knew. She couldn’t decide whether or not she hoped that they would. On the one hand, she couldn’t pretend that she wouldn’t love to be seen with Blake Katz. On the other, she wanted to spend some uninterrupted time getting to know him. And then there was the issue of Nora—but she didn’t want to think of her just now. She was sick of her life being circumscribed by the twins, though she didn’t want and couldn’t afford to lose them.
Blake stood when he saw her coming through the door. He was dressed casually in smart jeans and a light sweater. She leaned over to kiss his cheek when she reached the table; he looked and smelled absurdly clean, as though his whole being was spotless, including his soul.
“You look gorgeous,” Blake said, “thanks for coming to meet me.”
“I was happy to hear from you,” she said. “A little surprised, though.”
“That just shows that you don’t know me yet,” Blake said, settling back into his seat, his words becoming half lost in the din of the restaurant. “I don’t let good things pass me by.”
“You mean like the Spec?”
“I see what others can’t sometimes,” he said with a broad smile.
“What makes you so sure I’m a good thing?” She delicately unfolded her napkin on her lap.
He shrugged.
“Well, for one thing, you’re Leo’s cousin, and Leo is good people despite some of his . . .”
“Eccentricities?”
“Ha-ha, exactly. Honestly, I can just tell. Call it my sixth sense.”
She laughed. If it hadn’t been delivered so earnestly, she would have thought it was a line. But Blake seemed sincere; a rare quality anywhere but even more so in cynical, sarcastic New York.
“Your sixth sense?” she asked. “You see good people?”
She blanched; was that a stupid joke? She realized she was nervous. To have woken up next to Cameron and be sitting here now with Blake gave her whiplash. But if Cameron wanted his chance to be made good by someone better than himself, could she not want the same? If she was to be Cameron’s secret, hidden whore, could he not be hers as well?
“It’s something I’ve had to develop, being my father’s son,” he said. “My dad has it too. He taught me tricks.”
“Oh? Care to share your secrets?”
“So,” he said, leaning forward, hands on the table, “you have to study someone’s face. But you have to do it without them seeing you, because if they do, you won’t be able to tell anything. You want to catch them at rest, in between conversations, in a lull. There’s always a moment when the mask comes off, and you see the person underneath,” he said, brushing her chin with his thumb. “Like when I saw you that night at the party.”
“We talked for five minutes.”
He shook his head. “It was later. I saw you standing by yourself at the edge of the room. Maybe you were searching for someone; I don’t know. But you were kind of smiling to yourself, and I thought, Look at her; she’s in awe. There’s this miraculous moment where someone’s childhood self kind of filters through the cracks.”
Laila was stunned. Being seen through the cracks in her facade was the thing she feared most and, consequently, exactly what she longed for.
“Oh God,” he said, leaning back and raking his hand through his hair, “have I just completely creeped you out?”
“No!” she said. “No, not at all.” Impulsively, she reached out and grabbed his hand across the table. He seemed reassured.
“Phew!” he said, his face brightening into a charming smile that crinkled his eyes. “Truthfully, it was the same with Sam Green the first time I met him; he still owns a minority stake in the Spec, and I would never replace him as editor in chief. I guess I knew right away that I wanted to have him as a mentor.”
“What’s he like? I only met him briefly at the party, but he seemed lovely.”
“He’s amazing.” Blake’s eyes lit up with admiration. “I mean, I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that most men his age would not be excited about the idea of a twenty-five-year-old investor stepping in to save the day, but he took me under his wing. I grew up with the Spec; that’s why when I heard about its financial troubles, I had to step in. New York is, like . . .” Blake gestured as though trying to pull the words out of the air. “It can seem like it’s all about money, but without its cultural institutions, it’s nothing! No one would want to live here.”
“You sound like Leo.” Laila smiled, thinking about her cousin’s rants about investment bankers and traders, his slavish little fan base who tripped over themselves to share their liquor with him when they saw him in a nightclub.
“Well, Leo knows of what he speaks. It’s different growing up here, you know?”
“Yes,” Laila said. “Well, I mean no, I don’t know. My childhood was nothin
g like all of your’s.”
“Tell me,” he said, “tell me everything.”
Much to Laila’s surprise, she did just that. While she omitted the tawdry portions—the affair, naturally; no reason to share the unsavory details with someone she’d just met—she embellished nothing. She told him how disappointed she was to have never met her grandfather after coming so close. He was a good listener, unusually so for a man, and drew her out.
When the bill appeared and Blake swiftly produced his credit card, Laila’s stomach sank. Their time was almost up.
“I have a crazy idea,” Blake said as the waiter walked away. “Come to Montauk with me for the weekend.”
Without hesitating, she said yes. Somehow her hangover seemed to have dissipated. Next thing she knew, she was racing home to the twins’ apartment to pack a bag. Suddenly, she froze in the middle of the room, remembering the last time she’d accepted an invitation for last-minute travel. But this felt different on every level. This felt like nothing less than the universe delivering her in a new direction.
“Hey, what are you doing?”
Laila had been so lost in her thoughts about her new paramour that she had failed to notice that Nora had appeared in the doorway of the guest room.
“Oh, um . . . packing.”
“Packing? Where are you going?”
Laila needed a story, but no obvious lie appeared. Instead she let a big smile take over her face, and she let her very real excitement about the turn of events surface. She didn’t need to hide what she was doing, after all, only with whom.
“Okay, promise you won’t tell?”
Nothing thrilled Nora more than a secret.
“Of course! Oh my gosh, what?” Nora whirled into Laila’s room and sat on her bed, hands clasped around one another.
“Well . . . it’s the guy from last night. I just had lunch with him, and he wants me to go away with him for the weekend to the Hamptons. I know it’s impulsive, but I like him so much, Nora!”
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