“If he doesn’t respect us enough to show up for dinner on time then I’m going to—”
“Baskia Benedict, what has happened to you? Are you this way around your friends? Are they bad influences? I’ll have to talk to Mellie. She has impeccable manners. Her mother raised her right. I don’t know where I went wrong with you.”
Baskia could think of a few ways. But it wasn’t so much that. The real reason danced toward her lips. She swallowed, afraid the truth might make her cry, and she was not going to ruin her eye makeup. “I just wish—never mind.”
“You just wish what? Your father and I sent you to better schools? Paid for more enriching activities? Offered more opportunities for you to interact with some of the finest people society has to offer?”
“Mother,” Baskia shouted. In that moment, she wondered if that woman was her own flesh and blood, if she was actually related to someone blind to reality. She pushed against this schism, wanting to distance herself from her mother’s arrogant and detached attitude. “You just don’t get me.” She tossed her napkin on the table. “I’m leaving.”
“But you haven’t eaten.”
“I’m not hungry,” she said when she slammed the door, adding, “but I am thirsty.”
The cab carried her away from the stately stone buildings and elegant holiday decorations adorning shops and street lamps along the Upper East Side. She watched as the lights of Times Square flashed by the window, passed rows and rows of unremarkable apartments, and into the heart of the west village. On her way, she sent out texts to a few people that she actually wanted to see, leaving London out of the loop.
In the third floor walkup, her friends met her with excitement and questions about the rumors circulating. “So, tell me, just how big is Drake’s yacht?” Gigi asked, her red curls bobbing up and down.
“I don’t think she’s wondering about the size of his yacht, but the size of his…” Ali added with a wink.
“I heard you were in rehab,” Carlito, a hairdresser, said. He thrust a glass of champagne in her hand.
“Of course you weren’t, honey. But I heard rumors that you eloped. Spill,” said Natalya, a tall, imposing Russian model.
The truth was far less glamorous than any of them imagined, but she didn’t want to say so. The word eloped jogged up thoughts of Trace, but she didn’t want to involve him either. She could say she was doing charity work, the charity case being herself. Everyone stared at her, but she didn’t know how to answer.
Carlito laughed. “Is it too saucy to share with your besties?”
“Or do you know he’ll go blabbing to everyone,” Ali said. “I heard you had a falling out with London. Girl, you can’t let anyone chase you out of town.”
“Don’t tell me you were recruited for a top-secret campaign for spring?” Gigi said.
“No, I just needed time away,” Baskia answered vaguely.
“See? Rehab. Told ya,” Carlito said, waving the rest of them off.
“I was not in rehab.”
“Well, by the way things were going before you vanished off the face of the earth; you were on your way to Betty Ford.”
“If I was going to rehab I wouldn’t go there. Not that I have anything against it, but—”
“But what?” Natalya asked.
She didn’t want to say she needed time to figure stuff out. That she needed to get away from all the partying and get her head straight. She looked down at the glass in her hand and took a sip. She watched herself slip right back into her old role.
“I’m an international woman of mystery,” she said jokingly, but felt campy and inauthentic around her cosmopolitan friends. She feared she’d lost her edge.
The room broke into laughter.
“Told ya, Drake,” Gigi said confidently.
“Do you have a sugar daddy? Don’t even tell me you were in the Maldives,” Ali said longingly.
Baskia pinched her thumb and index finger together and ran them over her lips.
“Her lips are sealed,” Carlito said, identifying the gesture. “With enough booze in you, I’ll find out.” He laughed like a super villain.
Baskia supremely doubted that.
Chapter Fourteen
After polishing off a bottle of champagne, the group hailed a cab to bring them to the glowing, whitish-blue entrance of Iced. Baskia wondered if the crisp leaves, the evening wood smoke, and Trace had been a dream. She moved in rhythm with the music, joined in the laughter, sipped from the never-empty glass in her hands. She had an early morning the next day, they all did, but that didn’t stop them from partying.
“Natalya got us into the VIP area. Come on, let’s go,” Gigi said, tugging Baskia away from a guy with long, blond hair. She was ready to do anything to forget Trace that night.
The strings of lights hanging on the ceiling guided her up the stairs and into the private party area. Everything in the space was a take on ice, with white banquets, chandeliers dripping with faux icicles, Lucite tables, and the crackled frames of mirrors backlit in soft blue.
At the sight of London across the room, Baskia almost shivered. She’d gotten thinner, if that was possible. Her hair wasn’t as full and lustrous as it once had been. With Nels at her side, Baskia identified the cause.
Baskia caught her eye, but London didn’t acknowledge her.
Nels spoke up. “Look what the cat dragged in.”
The dullness in London’s eyes and the chilly décor made goose bumps break out on her arms. “I should ask the same question,” Baskia shot at Nels.
“What was that? I didn’t hear you, sweetie,” London said, unsteadily getting to her feet. She took Baskia, stiffly, in her boney arms. “You look great. Where the hell have you been?”
“She won’t tell,” Carlito said. “But we’ll find out. Oh yes, we will.”
London’s sly smile pulled on her lips as if she was also up for the challenge.
Baskia tossed back the rest of her drink as if to say, just try it, and then moved toward the group dancing by the railing. The mass of partygoers below writhed to the music. As Baskia popped a groove, she spotted London leaning over the table, inhaling deeply.
Ali caught her looking, “Everyone’s doing it.”
“Not everyone.”
“So it was rehab then?”
Again, Baskia took a drink from the glass in her hand. “Nope.”
The rest of the night was a flash of lights, the thrum of beat-heavy music, liquid falling smoothly down Baskia’s throat, and burning in her chest like fire. A warm, pleasant ripple butted up against her thoughts. Something had taken up residence in a corner of her heart. In disjointed images, like snapshots fluttering to the floor in the crowded room, she saw the hearth in the cabin, glowing brightly like a beacon guiding her toward truth. In her vision, Wes stacked wood and sipped coffee like there was nowhere better to be. Then there was the allure of Trace’s tattooed arms. The night took on a murky quality that had Trace popping up from the shadows, edging her farther and farther from sobriety. The vodka and tonic blurred his outline in her mind. She held him in her vision; she needed to turn her head a little more and her lips would be on his.
Later, she woke, for the first time in months, in an unfamiliar bed, almost naked, and hung over, dreadfully, blackout drunk, hung over. The digital clock across the room blinked ten o’clock. A skinny guy with black hair, still half spiked, the other half mussed from sleep, shifted next to her.
“Shit.”
She flew around the room and collected her things. Regret accompanied every step. Without saying good-bye—she couldn’t even remember the guy’s name—she fled the loft. Getting her bearings, she hailed a cab to her parents’ apartment, in desperate need of a shower.
Fortunately, only the housekeeper met her at the door. In a rush, she prepared for the day and was back in a cab, late, but ready for her meetings.
The next few days followed this pattern with Baskia partying until the early hours, avoiding questions about where
she’d been all those months, and winding up in strange beds, sometimes dressed in her clothes from the night before, sometimes not.
A stylist pulled and tugged on her hair, chatting with the girl in the next chair about a model, they both knew—arrested at a club for drugs.
The hard partying had just been a flash; she reminded herself, a dalliance. But like the edge of a cliff, she’d stepped too close and saw the potential devastation scattered below in shattered lives and dreams. She’d drank and fooled around with a few guys during her time back in the City, but it had been meaningless. In less than a week, she’d be back on the mountain, breathing the fresh air, determined to get her life sorted out. What she was doing was just an interlude; she tried to convince herself.
By the end of the third day of the show, exhausted and with blistered feet, she ran low on tolerance for her own behavior and her mother’s antics. She returned to her parent’s apartment, having missed Sunday dinner.
“I told you, I was working,” Baskia retorted to her mother’s inquisition that started up the second she entered. She stormed down the hall to her old bedroom.
“Like I’ve always said, it isn’t going to last. Before you know it, you’ll be covered with scandal; what about Brighton on the cover of those magazines? Is that what you want? Or are you going to become an alcoholic, struggling to make ends meet, because I’ll tell you what, we will not be supporting—” Anne wore a mask of concern as Baskia interrupted.
“Let me ask you this, what were you doing when you were eighteen?”
“I was most assuredly not out at clubs all hours, reeking of cigarettes and—you don’t smoke, do you? Tell me you don’t smoke. It’ll ruin your skin. Have you seen Tabitha Roxbury? She looks one-hundred years old.”
“I haven’t seen Tabitha, but I can assure you I don’t smoke.” She’d tried it when she was sixteen and in Paris, but left the cigs on the continent. “Going to dinners and clubs is part of my job. But not to worry. I’ll be gone in a few days.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“No, Mother. I’m not. I will go to Columbia next fall. I promise, but I can’t do it now. Not yet.” With those words, the tightness in her chest that threatened to squeeze the life out of her with uncertainty and confusion, lifted for the space of a breath as if to assure her she’d made the right choice. She’d wait until the fall semester and start fresh.
“I will not have my daughter become some recluse atop a mountain. It’ll be worse than Scotchie’s affair or Angela’s breakdown. I couldn’t bear it.”
Baskia shook her head. “Are you so afraid of what your friends might think that you don’t want me to at least try to be happy?”
Anne stumbled backward as if Baskia’s words had rushed at her with the force of an avalanche. “I just don’t see how going up there will make you happy. You’ll be alone.”
“And so will you. I think that’s the problem,” Baskia said, slamming the door.
^^^
For the next few days, Baskia turned down invitations to parties and dinners. Instead, she focused on the show and squeezing in a few last minute photo shoots.
“You look fabulous, darling,” Ritchie said, in a thick Italian accent. He was one of her favorite photographers, who she met in Rome on a beautiful set outside the coliseum. The late afternoon light shone perfectly, fading softly from white to yellow, and then into gold. “But do, tell me, what has happened to Kate London? She looks—ratty, whispy, like an old leather shoelace.”
Baskia’s smile turned into a laugh.
“Bellissima.”
“Speak of the devil,” Ritchie’s assistant said after a few more clicks.
“Thought I’d find you here,” London said, striding into the studio. “Ritchie, why haven’t you called?”
“Please Miss, out of the light,” he said to her as if he hadn’t just gossiped.
London pitched on her heels as she moved to the other side of the room. “Whoopsie. Didn’t see that cord.” Her eyes were dark and puffy.
“Gaze toward the window, Baskia darling,” Ritchie instructed, obviously annoyed by the visitor.
Baskia surveyed London from the corner of her eye. She had bruises on her legs, bare even in December. The white, faux fur coat she wore was matted. She looked like she’d been in a train wreck; a ride Baskia was glad she’d gotten off before it crashed.
“How long are you back? Better yet, where did you go? It’s easier to talk out of the club,” London said, her voice rasping.
“I’ll be leaving on Saturday,” Baskia answered between shots.
“So soon. But you haven’t been to the new club on Eighth. And of course there’s always a party at Nels’ and my place.”
“You live together now?”
“Yeah,” she said, shrugging.
“Are you together-together?”
London snorted. “That depends.”
Just then a guy in a puffer coat appeared.
Ritchie lowered his camera. “I will not work like this—” He eyed his assistant.
“Baby, we’ve got to go,” the guy said to London, putting his arm around her waist and pulling her in for a kiss. “I’ve been waiting for you to get away from Nels—” He stopped himself, looking around. “I thought this was some kind of lounge.”
“No, this is a professional—a closed, shoot. You must leave. Be gone,” Ritchie said, sternly.
London left in a huff, eyeing Baskia sharply on the way out.
“See ya later, hon,” she called, despite her vengeful expression.
Ritchie swore in Italian under his breath. “You stay away from all of that, yes?” he said, gesturing disgustedly toward the door. “Basta. Enough nonsense. Let’s get back to work.”
Baskia nodded, pulling herself away from the shaky ground London created when she’d marched in the room. Seeing her friend falling from grace and a respected industry professional’s reaction to her, strengthened Baskia’s resolve to get things figured out. As the camera’s shutter clicked away, she reasoned the sooner away from London and Anne, the better.
On the last night of her stay in New York, Baskia went out to a wrap dinner with several of the top models from her agency, the agents, PR people, stylists, and an assortment of other guests. It was a glamorous event; praise for her work on the runway rang in her ears, and congratulations for several of the spreads she’d recently appeared in came with hugs and pats on the back. She was in her element, accepted, adored, and respected.
When London appeared a few hours later, buzzing around the room, leaving uncomfortable and questionable looks in her wake, Baskia felt sorry for her, but also embarrassed by association. She saw the detour she’d nearly taken in the way her lank hair hung greasily from her head, the knock-off dress—a couple inches too high on her legs—and her laugh, a bit too loud.
The next morning, as she sat at the bistro table, in her parent’s kitchen, thoughts of the night before preoccupied her. Her mother droned on about the future, Will’s bright prospects, school, Mellie, and her father’s big merger. She couldn’t shake the feeling that not only did she have a second chance, but in a way, she’d given it to herself.
However, Baskia realized that she was just as judgmental and attached to certain ideas as her mother. Guilt clung to her for not trying to help London. What kind of friend was she? She knew all too well that London’s mother died because of her drug addiction and didn’t want to see the same ending for her friend.
“So will you meet with him?” Anne said, measuredly.
“Who’s that? What?” Baskia asked, her mother’s voice penetrating her thoughts.
“Dane Sinclair. Will you have dinner with him?”
She shook her head. He was the son of someone in her mother’s circle. The words offshore commodities and heir, whispered from her memory. For one thing, Baskia wasn’t interested, but what troubled her was Anne’s fixation on her future, shortcutting the present.
Witnessing one extreme possibility
for her future in the form of London’s downfall, and on the other end, turning into the same self-centered, pretentious, social climbing creature as her mother, made her want to flee.
“Baskia. Listen, what about that friend of Will’s?”
“Who?” Baskia asked, distracted, ready to rail about how this was her opportunity to get it right. She had to try. If she didn’t, she couldn’t live with the person she was sure to become, a clone of London destined for addiction and loss or like her mother, clinging to status and using her children, and her deceased friend’s children, to fulfill the emptiness and regret that tormented her.
“Tracey Wolfe of course. Will’s former roommate.”
Baskia choked on the lemon infused water she’d sipped. “What?”
“We had a lovely conversation a month or so back. He was staying at the cabin with Will. Strangely, he answered your phone.” She shrugged. “You and Will had stepped out. I never did catch up with you, but he mentioned what a lovely girl you are. He seemed like such a gentleman.”
Baskia scrolled through her mind to when this might have happened. It must have been during Trace’s second visit when she was out with Wes. She’d forgotten her phone in her haste to get out the door. She shifted uncomfortably. “What else did he say?”
“Well, that the three of you had been discussing majors and career paths all weekend. He assured me your future is promising. I’ve been trying to place his parents. He’d mentioned his father, Augustine Wolfe; though I don’t recognize the name. Well, anyway, I guess I’m just wondering what happened between then and now? It’s not too late. You can get back on track.”
Baskia wanted to shout that Trace happened, that’s what. And that gentleman had her more confused than ever. Something thumped and fired in her chest. She wanted to run to Trace’s arms, to feel his lips on hers, alone, and away from the world, in the secluded cabin.
“It’s unfortunate you’ll take a stranger’s word that my future is promising. If you’d just listen to me, you’d know that already. I’m not wasting my life. I’m taking it in my hands, away from you who’d shape me in her image, away from the leaches who are just in it to be seen and chase an ever-elusive high. I assure you, my life is going to be great.” Baskia rushed to her room and packed her things. She grabbed a few books from the shelf, a box of old photos, and her camera.
On the Mountain (Follow your Bliss #5) Page 12
