Hot and Bothered

by Liz Maverick

  “Stay in Paris. Be my girlfriend,” he said, a dashing look in his eyes.

  It was the closest I’d ever come to swooning.

  “The first part, I can’t do anything about. I’ve got a job to do.”

  “And the second.”

  “Are you asking me to go steady?” I asked, grinning ear to ear. “Are you suggesting you’ve already won me back?”

  “Yes, and…no. I am suggesting nothing of the sort. The night is young. And it’s time for class. We put math behind us and move to economics. When someone wants to consume something very, very badly, what you have is a serious case of demand. Have I told you how beautiful I find your supply curves?” With that he tossed me on my back on the mattress.

  I squealed with delight. Seriously, I squealed.

  Chapter Eight

  Anna wasn’t home when I got back to the apartment. I stood in the empty living room and sent her a text full of emoticons that suggested I a) was happy and b) was particularly happy with last night, and she sent one back saying she was out with Christian—making me just a little bit nervous with her use of an exclamation point after his name. But a post-mortem and giggle session was going to have to wait for tomorrow because the owner of the Italian villa my boss wanted me to buy was in Paris for the night, and we’d arranged to have an early lunch.

  I wasn’t fond of these types of events. There was usually a language barrier of some level and depending on the temperament of my dining companion, I often had to work hard to keep the conversation from flagging over the course of the meal by asking lots of detailed questions about the property to which I usually already had answers.

  I would have preferred a quiet night out with my sister. We seriously needed to catch up, what with Jack occupying much of my time and brain cells. It wasn’t escaping my notice that Anna had been hanging out with Christian more and more during her stay, and that exclamation point made me worry she was following in her sister’s footsteps on a path that was big on short-term experience and not much else. Our paths would cross with the Marchand brothers over and over in the future if we wanted them to, and I didn’t want her to find herself digging out of an awkward situation like I had. She hadn’t brought it up yet, and I couldn’t figure out if they were sleeping together or not, and I didn’t think there was any need to point out that there was no more chance of her having a long-term relationship with Christian than there was of me having one with Jack.

  That said, I’d had dinner with far worse. My companion was quite wealthy, very handsome and clearly too single to be carrying an entire villa in his real-estate portfolio, so it didn’t surprise me he wanted to sell it. That said, he wasn’t happy about it, and I found it in my heart to have some sympathy for a man who seemed to have everything he could want except a large extended family. Maybe if you didn’t spend so frivolously you could afford the upkeep, I thought, and then admonished myself in the next minute for judging him. Maybe his father spent it all, and he was left with a lot of maintenance and not a lot of funds. Maybe his father was like Jack’s father, and it was all caught up in some twisted familial power play. And maybe if I wasn’t so hung up on Jack, I’d drink more and flirt some and suggest he find someone like me to manage it as a rental so he didn’t have to give it up.

  But I was hung up. So hung up my fingers positively twitched thinking about the cell phone I’d muted and buried in my bag as I smiled at the handsome Italian in front of me who was probably feeling incredibly emasculated talking about divesting his grandfather’s grandfather’s grandfather’s property and wondering why his mojo, his accent and his muscular forearms weren’t making a visible impression on the girl in front of him.

  Said girl was really having difficulty concentrating. Was my cell phone blowing up in my purse? Had Jack sent me a message about last night? We had tentative plans to meet at the Louvre tomorrow night, but it would be delicious if he called to say he couldn’t go a minute without thinking of me. Maybe he’d beg me not to leave the country. Maybe he’d beg to go with me. What would I say? Maybe I’d do it. Maybe I’d stop running. You’re on the job, Cass. Focus on the client.

  But maybe it wasn’t hopeless. Maybe something could be done. If the hotel really was a good investment, why couldn’t…oh, my God, why wouldn’t my boss go in on it with Jack? It was right up Brooks’s alley.

  As it turned out, my cell phone was blowing up in my purse. Unfortunately, not one stick of dynamite was from Jack. Not a text. Not a voice mail. Just Anna, who’d called five times. I dialed her from the taxi and through her copious nose-blowing and tears, all I could get out of her before I made it home was something about “‘those fucking Marchand brothers.”

  My heart sank. If we’d happened upon Christian Marchand in the street, I would have given the taxi driver a clear directive to hit him.

  When I got to the apartment, the door was open with the bolt out and resting against the frame. “Anna?”

  “Omigod, Cass. Omigod.” She raced from the kitchen with a bottle of wine in one hand and a bottle opener in the other. But it was the damp mascara plotzed all along the bottom of her eyes that made me really think something might be wrong. “You didn’t answer the phone. And I can’t open this fucking thing!”

  “What’s wrong?” I opened the bottle on autopilot, more watching my sister wring her hands and swipe under eyes. I handed her the bottle and she shook her head. “It’s not for me…it’s for you!” but then she took a swig anyway before shoving it back at me.

  My stomach dropped. “Say whatever it is right now,” I ordered.

  “Didya already sleep with him?”

  “What? With Jack? Many times and in many configurations,” I said.

  “By any chance did you tell him he should go to hell after?” she asked.

  “No, I told him we should go to the Louvre. Anna…”

  “He was with another woman last night.”

  “What?”

  “He was with another woman last night. Kissing another woman, her hand where hands aren’t supposed to be when you’re in a public restaurant. I think she was giving him a hand job. Swear to God.”

  “What?” It’s all I could think to say. No other words would form. This was the only “weird inevitability of us” I was ever going to experience. This feeling that as soon as I turned my back on Jack, I was going to get my ass kicked and my heart stomped.

  “What?” Cold horror welled up in the space where my heart had been on fire not twenty minutes earlier. I sat on the edge of the couch and dropped my bag and put the wine bottle to my lips for a good, long swallow.

  “Cassie?”

  “Not yet,” I muttered, taking another drink. Anna sat down next to me. We sat there for a while, on the edge of the couch, listening to the soft tick of the wall clock, swigging wine from the bottle.

  “Cassie?”

  I put one finger up to silence her and went into the bathroom where I promptly puked up all the wine I’d just drunk and then brushed my teeth and gargled a hundred times and then stared at myself in the mirror. I washed my face and carefully put my hair up in a ponytail. Then I took a deep breath and went back to my sister.

  “Shame on me,” I said.

  She looked at me wide-eyed.

  “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “You saw this yourself?”

  “I was with Christian last night. At the last minute we changed our dinner plans. It’s a place he and his brothers always go to…here in the neighborhood. Pea Pod or Pee Pan or something.”

  “L’Epi du Pan,” I said woodenly.

  “Yeah, okay. And see, I don’t think anybody expected…well, obviously Jack cares about you, so it’s super confusing…”

  Obviously.

  “Besides, he’s French, which well, you know the French. I guess it’s complicated. They always have…”

  “A bit on the side?” I spat.

  Now it was Anna’s turn to
look like she might puke. “I tried to reach you as soon as I saw what was happening. I was on my way back from the bathroom, and I literally left the restaurant and came home and texted Christian that I was sick. He doesn’t know unless he saw Jack himself and put it together.”

  I shook my head. “It’s really okay,” I said, actually feeling a chill set in as I forced myself to locate the shard of ice in my heart that still hadn’t thawed. Looked like I’d be needing it again. “The sex was amazing. It was a fantasy bubble that has burst somewhat earlier than I would have liked it to, but it wasn’t as if I didn’t enjoy myself.”

  We stared at each other, and I could practically see the wheels in Anna’s brain turning as she tried to process what she thought she should do now to make me feel better.

  “You’re a sweetheart, sis,” I said. “You already cried all my tears for me.”

  “It’s not fair,” she said, her big, sweet heart breaking for me all over again. “You deserve better.”

  I shrugged.

  “So are you going to tell him you’re not going to the Louvre or are you just going to stand him up?”

  “Oh, I’m going to the Louvre,” I said, almost surprising my own damn self with the amount of poison I injected into that simple phrase.

  Anna arched an eyebrow.

  “But it’s not until Wednesday. I’ve got two days.” I stood up, desperate to be productive to prove I wasn’t squashed like a bug. I grabbed my laptop and clicked on email.

  “To do what?” she asked.

  I accessed the filter settings and reset Jack’s email to be treated like SPAM and sent immediately to TRASH. “To finish my job and get an earlier ticket out of Paris.”

  “Do you want to hang out today?”

  “Nah. I think I’d just like to be alone. Keep your plans.”

  After she’d reapplied her makeup and headed out the door, I showered and did my face, put on some skinny jeans, one of those iconic navy-and-white boatman tops with a cardigan and flats and grabbed my red Chloé bag and a pair of enormous Jackie sunglasses. If I looked like I was mourning Jack, this time I wasn’t going to show the world. And since my sister didn’t come back until dinnertime, she never saw me slip back into the apartment with a box of pastries, mow through said pastries one after the other and then bury my face into my pillow.

  I guess Anna hadn’t cried all my tears after all.

  I cried for a long time, feeling like that same high school girl who shows up at school to find out she’s lost control of her own narrative and will need to graduate before she ever begins to get it back.

  How did I get it back?

  What do you do when someone disappoints you? What do you do when you are flooded with insecurity and low self-esteem because some shit couldn’t wait the extra two days so you could leave the country before he took up with someone else?

  I sat down in front of the mirror and stared at my blotchy face. Jack’s not a shit. He’s just floundering, held back by fear of harming his brothers’ financial security, going through the motions of life hoping that something happens that will let him be who he wants to be.

  That something could have been me. And maybe it still could be, in some way. Because I remembered how I felt in high school. Lost. Literally floundering. Going through the motions of life.

  For a brief shining second I thought I’d have Jack at my side, and then he was gone and it hurt like hell, and the aftermath was a mess and the trauma still clung to me ten years later, like vintage smoke. But I built myself back up through college, and I got a great job that kept me moving so that I never had to stand still and build anything for myself, which meant I never had to lose anything ever again.

  I could keep moving and put this episode with Jack behind me just like I’d done ten years ago.

  My suitcase was still sitting in the corner of my room like I was always halfway out the door no matter how long I was planning to stay. And with the end of my stay looming, I’d already checked off all but a few small to-do items. After I moved our travel plans up, I’d have just one more thing to add to my list; there were many ways I could think of to punish Jack, but the one I liked the best required a fax machine and a transatlantic phone call.

  Chapter Nine

  Jack greeted me the way I would have wanted him to greet me if I didn’t know about his extracurricular activities. He brightened when he stepped onto the terrace of Café Richelieu and saw me seated with a brilliant view of the enormous glass pyramid fronting the Louvre. He flushed slightly like an image of our naked bodies might have just popped into his head.

  My Jack had showed. The one with the leather sneakers and jeans that showed off his great ass. His Vuitton messenger bag hung low across his back, his hands plunged in his pockets, his jaunty grin promised a day of fun.

  I so would have loved walking through the Louvre with him, holding hands, me telling him true stories about famous pieces of art, him telling me completely made up bullshit about less-famous pieces of art. We would have laughed all day.

  A wave of sadness and anger made my eyes prick with tears. I quickly tamped them down, letting the sharp edges of the envelope in my hands create enough pain to keep me on my toes.

  His expression turned wary as I failed to respond to his mood with like joy.

  I stood. We air-kissed. I closed my eyes, fighting the way my body wanted to respond to his, not giving myself an inch, and then I quickly sat down.

  “Cass—?” he began.

  “Did you have dinner at L’Epi du Pan on Friday night with a woman who was giving you a hand job under the table?”

  He stared at me, a vague queasy expression swamping his face. “Yes,” he finally said. “I stopped her, but yes.”

  I almost died. I guess I thought he’d deny it. L’Epi du Pan was very crowded with small tables that were shoehorned into a rather small space.

  “Cassandra—”

  “No,” I said quietly, raising my palm to stop him from speaking. “Here’s how it’s going to go. We obviously are dealing with some sort of insurmountable cultural difference that makes it possible for you to mess with multiple women at the same time. Something that makes you want me to feel like you and I mean something one night just so you can blow it up the next day.”

  I started trembling and took a deep breath to calm down. I didn’t want to feel this way, and I sure as hell didn’t want him to know I did. “I’m leaving your country tomorrow. Don’t you think you could have waited a day before making me feel like that stupid high school girl who gives it up to the first guy who claims he loves her and then wonders why he never calls?”

  I shook my head in disgust. “This all could have been such a nice memory. I would have gone, feeling like we’d really somehow repaired the past. That maybe we could never have anything long-term but that we’d fixed what got messed up. We could have been such good friends, Jack. How could you mess with me again?” Jack opened his mouth but I silenced him with a violent hand motion, my rage making my hand shake. But I didn’t raise my voice. Oh, no, I kept it level and calm.

  “I like you, Jack…no, that’s a lie. It’s more than that.” Damn, damn, damn. It’s true. “For some stupid reason, we make sense. We fit together. And you’re the biggest idiot I’ve ever met. This is for you.” I handed him the letter I’d printed out from my boss’s email that morning.

  Jack took the paper in a daze and read it through, his face turning hotter, his other hand compulsively pulling on the collar of his linen button-down. “Cassie,” he said in a strangled voice.

  “Do not attempt to explain yourself,” I said in a voice that dripped so much venom, I must’ve still had a stash leftover from high school. “I’m going to stand up and go home and finish packing. You’re going to take this opportunity and run with it, and you’re always going to remember that I made it possible. That I believed in your ideas. That I believed in you. And that you let me get away.”

  I left him and the letter from my boss, detailing a bu
siness arrangement that could finance Jack’s hotel chain, on the table and I turned, feeling all badass and horribly sad and so, so cold all at once.

  I don’t just like you, Jack. I love you. And now I’m going to run, run away and have wild Italian monkey sex with a handsome client who’s still wondering whether he forgot to brush his teeth that day or I just don’t like men.

  Actually, today I just don’t like men.

  By the time I made it back to the apartment, wild Italian monkey sex with a handsome client was already off the menu. My boss had emailed that he was enroute to Europe with stops both in Paris to meet with Jack and in Siena to meet with me. My boss, who hated travel, who always begged me to find ways to avoid putting him on a plane, was that excited about Jack’s hotel. Well played, Cassandra, I thought glumly.

  On the plus side, he could meet Anna, which would go a long way when it came time for me to suggest that he employ her. Anna never looked as good on paper as she did in real life. I guess I was the other way around.

  I’d already packed the bulk of my stuff in preparation for the flight out of town, and my main suitcases were waiting by the door. Anna was another story, but obviously I’d known her long enough to know that she would come through. I’d had the cleaning crew come in and do a last pass, and the place gleamed. The paperwork was complete, with gold-embossed folders on a tray ready to tell the first set of renters where to eat, where to party, where to walk and what to see. I’d hired a city manager to handle keys, emergencies and cleaning between rentals.

  There was nothing for me in Paris anymore. Really, I just wanted to go home. My cell phone rang as I headed to the metro. Jack. I declined the call and muted the phone.

  Anna was on the phone when I walked into the apartment twenty minutes later. “Oh, wait,” I heard her say, and then her face popped around a door frame. “Jack’s on the phone.”

  “Hang up.”

  “This is the third time he’s called.”

  “I told you to hang up on him. Or better yet, stop answering it.”