Bailey sighs. “Evening. At a country club. My cousin is into, you know, glitz. And the invitation says Black Tie. Matthew said that means he’ll have to wear a tu—”
An expression of sheer horror spreads over her face. She clamps her lips together, but it’s too late. Casey’s mouth is hanging open.
“My brother is going with you?”
Bailey looks at me. Say something, her eyes plead.
“Matt? You and Bailey are—”
“Bailey and I are in cahoots,” I say quickly. “See, she didn’t want to run the risk of being seated with this, ah, this guy. A friend of the, uh, the groom. Whenever she goes home to visit, he makes a move on her, so—so I offered to—to be her date and—and—”
Bailey reaches for my hand and squeezes it.
“Matthew is just trying to protect me,” she says in a low voice. “To keep me from being embarrassed. The truth is that my cousin—the bride…” She takes a deep, deep breath. “We don’t get along. We never have. And when she began planning this wedding she made a big thing out of how sorry she was that I’d be coming to it alone, that everyone else would be bringing someone and she wanted me to bring someone too, but she knew that there probably wasn’t anyone—any man—I knew well enough to ask to go with me, so I lied and told my mother to say that the reason I wouldn’t be going was that—that a rich, sexy guy was taking me away for that weekend and—and— Matthew—your brother—he heard about it and he offered to—to—”
It’s my turn to squeeze Bailey’s hand.
“I told Bailey she’d be doing me a favor if she let me escort her to the wedding because that way I’d have an excuse to spend a couple of days away from the city, breathing in clean country air.”
Casey is staring at me. I can almost see the gears in her head whirring. When we were kids, she’d have listened to that last bit and laughed. But we’re grownups now and, as I said, we’re close. So even as those gears in her brain are still going one hundred miles an hour, she smiles, nods, turns to Bailey and says, “That’s great. I keep telling him he needs a break and now he’s finally going to take one.”
Bailey exhales. Nods. We all sit there for another few seconds. Then Casey gets to her feet.
“Well,” she says briskly, “let’s get this show on the road. Evening wedding. Black tie.” She flashes Bailey a big smile. “Chateau d’Or, here we come.”
Bailey stares at my sister. “Really? The Chateau d’Or?”
Her tone is half awe, half delight. We head for the far end of the mall and when we get there, I understand her reaction. The Chateau is not so much a shop as it is an inner sanctum, all fresh flowers and soft music and gilt-framed mirrors.
But for all that, the saleswoman is low key and immediately puts Bailey at ease. I get waved to a handsome upholstered chair; Bailey gets sent into a fitting room.
Casey huddles with the saleswoman, who nods her head, says Of course and Yes and then hurries off through a curtained doorway.
My sister leans towards me.
“Is there anything you want to tell me?” she whispers.
“Not a thing,” I whisper back.
“You’re going away with a sweet, shy girl for three days and there’s nothing you want to tell me?”
“She’s a woman, not a girl. And I’m not going away with her. Not the way you mean. I’m her friend. This is strictly an act of friendship,”
“Friendship, huh? Three days at a wedding when we both know that weddings make you shudder?”
“The wedding won’t last for three days. “
“You know what I mean.”
“And they don’t make me shudder. I’m just not, you know, into that kind of thing.”
“Not just three days at a wedding. Three days in the country.”
“What’s wrong with the country?”
“Nothing, except it isn’t Manhattan.”
“I like the country.”
“You like Central Park.”
“Trees. Grass. Same thing.”
My sister bends close enough so I’m almost cross-eyed as I try to focus on her face.
“If you hurt this girl,” she says grimly, “I’ll never forgive you.”
“I told you, she’s a woman, not a girl. And I have no intention of hurting her. I like her. I respect her. Didn’t you hear what I said? This is strictly an act of friendship.”
While we’ve been going at each other in whispers, the salesclerk has hustled past us with an armful of gowns. We haven’t paid her any attention; we’ve been too busy squaring off. Now, there’s a discreet cough.
“Pardon me.”
Casey straightens up and turns around. The salesclerk smiles and holds back the dressing room curtain.
Bailey appears.
She’s wearing a long, slender column of pale pink. Later, I learn the color is called blush, but pale pink is close enough. It leaves one shoulder exposed. One pale, lovely shoulder. The gown—silk, I think—clings to the curve of her breasts and embraces her waist; it skims her hips and legs like a lover’s caress. She’s wearing spiked heels the color of the gown and when she takes a step forward, I see that the gown is slit so that when she moves, you get a discreet but incredibly provocative glimpse of ankle, calf and thigh. Her hair is a loose, shiny fall of soft curls drawn away from her flushed face with silver combs.
Beside me, Casey breathes out one word. “Wow,” she says, and brings her hands together in what might be either prayer or applause.
Bailey’s eyes are wide. For a heartbeat, her lips curve upward, but the smile is hesitant and fades as she fixes her gaze on me.
“Matthew?” she says. “What do you think? It this all right?”
The correct response is to say yes, it’s fine, we’ll take it.
But I don’t say anything.
What I do is rise to my feet, walk straight to her, cup her face in my hands and lower my mouth to hers.
12
We get out of the store, out of the mall. I do not make eye contact with Casey.
“Well,” I say briskly, “it’s getting late. Thanks, Case…”
“Thank you doesn’t even come close,” Bailey says, flinging her arms around my sister. The women hug.
Then it’s my turn.
Casey lets go of Bailey, steps up to me and puts her arms around me. She rises up on her toes and puts her cheek against mine.
I’m sure it looks like a gesture of sibling love.
It isn’t.
She puts her lips to my ear.
“Remember the time you were eight and I was ten?” she whispers. “You told Billy Hamilton I had a crush on him and I beat you up.”
“Yes,” I say brightly, “you were wonderful.”
“I can still beat you up, bro. I do yoga. Pilates. Tai Chi. I can see to it that your ass is grass.”
Carefully, smiling as if she said something vastly amusing, I clasp her shoulders and put her from me.
“Not on your best day.”
She throws back her head and gives a big, phony laugh. “Oh, you’re funny!” Then she leans in again. “I also took a self-defense class. They taught us that kneeing a guy in the balls can take him down real fast.” This time, she pulls back without any help from me. She laughs again and pats my cheek. “So keep that in mind this weekend, okay?”
I tell her to kiss my niece for me, say hi to my brother-in-law, and I then I grasp Bailey’s arm and hustle her away.
“What was that about?” she asks as we head for my car.
“Oh, just some sisterly advice.” I dump the last armload of boxes into what passes for a rear seat in a Corvette—by now, it’s jammed to the roof with stuff—and get behind the wheel.
“Advice?”
I nod, start the car, and back out of the parking space. “You know. Bread-and-butter plate is to the left, wine glass to the right, dessert fork’s above the plate. Don’t do anything to embarrass the family name. That kind of thing.”
The deception works. Baile
y smiles and says that if we end up seated with her Uncle Alan, none of that will matter because he’ll grab the wrong plate, the wrong glass, the wrong fork and then everyone else will have no choice but to do the same thing.
“My kind of guy,” I say, and we keep the banter going all the way back to the office, where I pull in next to Bailey’s car and we get out of the ’Vette so we can switch all the packages to her trunk.
Then we look at each other.
It’s not a comfortable moment.
I feel pretty much as if I were fourteen, standing outside her door with the first girl I ever took on a date. Well, no. Not exactly. Back then, my Mom was waiting for me at the end of the driveway in her Chevy Malibu because she’d driven us back and forth to the movies, but I have that same sense of trying to figure what I’m supposed to do next.
Bailey breaks the vaguely uneasy silence.
“Matthew. I want to thank you for—”
“I’m glad to help.”
“I’ll repay you for all the things you bought.”
“No way. I won’t permit it. I came up with this idea; I’ll see it through.”
“I will,” she said, with that tilt of her chin and that look of determination that make her the best PA you could ever want.
“Let’s argue about it after we see if Uncle Al uses the right fork.”
That wins me a smile. Such a soft, easy smile. It makes me want to lean down and kiss her again—but I am done with courting danger. This whole thing is, just as I’d told my sister, one friend doing something helpful for another friend. Nothing less. Nothing more.
Right.
Except doing something helpful for a friend isn’t supposed to make you want to scoop that friend into your arms, carry her off to a quiet place where you can strip her naked and kiss her everywhere, touch her everywhere…
“Okay,” Bailey says. “So, I’ll see you in the office tomorrow.”
“No. Forget that.”
“We don’t have to leave until the afternoon, remember?”
“Yeah. I know. But there’s nothing on the calendar for tomorrow. I checked.”
Another smile. “You checked?”
“I know. I never do. I rely on you. But I looked and we’re clear all day tomorrow. So I’ll just pick you up at your place at noon. Good?”
“You said two.”
“That might be cutting it a little close. Noon, okay?”
“Fine. And, really, thank you.”
“Hey,” I say, “I’m the one who should be thanking you. Without today’s little foray into Mall World—”
She laughs. “Mall World?”
“Without it, I’d never know the difference between Valentino and McQueen and all those other bozos.”
Another smile. “Neither would I. Your sister is wonderful.”
“Yeah. She’s improved some since she was ten.”
Smile number three, and damned if I don’t want to take my PA in my arms and kiss her.
The realization terrifies me. That kiss in front of my sister. Now I’ve come within a second of a kiss in the parking lot where anybody who works for me could see us.
I did mention I used to play football, right? And soccer. Yeah, and I’m still fast on my feet. In a heartbeat, I’m around the side of my car and safe behind the wheel.
“See you tomorrow,” I say.
Then I step on the gas and get the hell away from temptation.
Driving home is difficult. Not the drive itself. What’s difficult is trying to get past those last sudden minutes of, I don’t know, insanity. Wanting to kiss her again.
And again.
And…
I take a long breath, hold it for a count of five, and then slowly expel it. Doing eighty on the highway might not be the best place for Zen, but neither is realizing that something in what had looked like a simple plan has gone terribly wrong.
My brain feels scrambled.
Was it the hours spent learning the differences between petite, juniors, misses and women’s sizes? Not even the positions in football are that confusing, but no, that stuff had all sorted out pretty fast.
Was it the total realization of what I’d volunteered to do? Playing a game of payback to get even with a woman who’d subjected my girl—sorry, my PA—to years of not-so-subtle torture? Nope. Payback’s a bitch, and Vituperative Vi deserves everything she’s gonna get.
Okay, Mr. Contestant. So if it’s not Number One that made you run like a rabbit and it’s not Number Two, what is it? After all, the plan is set. The game is about to begin. I am ready and eager to start.
True.
But I’m also ready, eager and desperate to have my way with my girl. With my PA.
With my Bailey.
I frown. Have my way with who? With whom? Frankly, I don’t give a crap whether it’s who or whom. What matters is that Bailey is not my anything. Well, yeah. She’s my PA. But the rest of it…
Jesus.
What I want to do is fuck her.
And that is definitely not part of the plan.
I could do it too. I’m no idiot. I know women. I know what it means when a woman slips into my arms, when she raises her face to mine, when she makes those soft little sounds as we kiss…
A horn blares. I spin the wheel to the right and it takes a long two seconds of sweat before I avoid ending up on the median, which is unthinkable. I am a good driver. Better than good. I’ve done some semi-pro racing—Corvettes are made for speed, after all—and I take pride in my never-had-an-accident-anywhere-anytime record. Which I came awfully close to breaking just now.
Carefully, I maneuver to the right lane. I take the next exit, pull over as soon as it’s okay to do so, take out my iPhone and hit a speed dial button.
Cooper answers.
“What?”
Not a good sign. He sounds distracted. That gives me two choices. He’s either with a woman—Coop, like me, is no slouch when it comes to women—or he’s just made some kind of scientific discovery that will undoubtedly win him the Nobel Prize.
I don’t care.
I need his full attention, and whether he has to zip up his fly or his head doesn’t matter.
“It’s me.”
“And?”
“Are you in the middle of something?”
“I’m almost in the middle of something. Speak, and make it fast.”
“I have to talk to you.”
“Call back in five minutes.”
Despite everything, that makes me laugh. “Coop. My man. I’m disappointed. Better still, I’ll bet the lady will be disappointed.”
I hear a woman’s voice. Coop answers, but his words are as muffled as hers.
“Five minutes,” he says into the phone.
“Make it twenty, and meet me at The Attic.”
“Done,” Coop says, and disconnects.
* * *
The Attic is one of those places downtown that’s halfway between a dive bar and a cocktail lounge. There’s lots of time-worn mahogany, a string of leather booths, and the lighting is dim. Maybe because of its location, it draws a mixed crowd. Financial hotshots in dark suits, professorial types with leather patches on their jacket sleeves, guys who spent the day working heavy equipment on some nearby construction site. It all comes together just fine. Nobody knows why, only that its regulars are content to leave things at that.
Cooper and I discovered this place when we were eighteen, both of us in our first years at NYU. Of course, discovering it wasn’t the same as drinking at it—we were three years under the legal age—but Coop knew somebody who knew somebody, and so did I. We both put out for phony IDs—except the bartenders at The Attic were smart enough to see right through our pathetic subterfuge. We tried to get in at least a dozen times and finally one night the bartender who’d pointed to the door most often told us to give it up, come back when we hit the magic number and he’d buy us each a round.
So we did.
See, our birthdays are only a month apart
and remember what I told you before? We’ve been friends damn near forever. Anyway, The Attic has remained one of our favorite places, especially when you need to feel, you know, relaxed. The music that blasts from the speakers is good, there’s always an interesting choice of beers and ale, and maybe best of all it’s not a pickup place.
A pickup place is the last kind of place I need this evening.
An old-timer named Charlie is behind the bar. He sees me as I come in and we nod at each other. He raises his eyebrows and jerks his chin at a couple of empty stools at the bar. I shake my head, point at a booth in the corner. I raise two fingers. Charlie nods again and a couple of minutes after I slide into the booth, one of the barmaids puts two large mugs of whatever Charlie has decided is the best beer of the night on the table.
I say thanks.
A second later, Coop sits down across from me. He reaches for one of the mugs, raises it to his mouth and takes a long pull.
“So,” he says, “what’s the emergency?
I look at him. “I never said there was an emergency.”
“You didn’t have to.”
He takes another swig of beer. I lift my mug and do the same.
“Sorry to have dragged you away from…whatever.”
Coop grins. “I was in the middle of an experiment.”
I grin back. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. I’d explain it, but it’s probably over your head.”
I nod. “Would I be right if I thought if had to do with DNA transfer?”
He laughs. Then his expression turns serious. “So, dude, what’s doin’? You sounded like something important was going down.”
I avoid the obvious joke. I mean, a couple of minutes of back-and-forth was great, but there’s no getting away from my situation.
I take a deep breath. Let it out. Take another…
“Jeez,” Coop says, “what in hell happened? One of those houses of yours fall down a mountainside or something?”
I don’t take him up on the chance to do our standard routine, which is him asking me why anyone would pay big bucks for a house built, as he puts it, in the middle of Nature’s Nowhere when Manhattan is out there, just waiting. It’s light comic relief and we both know it, but light comic relief isn’t going to do it for me tonight.
The F-Word: A Sexy Romantic Comedy Page 12
