by T. Torrest
It felt like life. It felt like me.
We came back to the bar sweaty and out of breath, and the boys relinquished our stools so we could collapse.
I took a huge swig off my beer. “Hey,” I said. “You guys crashing at my place tonight?”
Lisa answered for all three of them. “No, thanks. May as well let hubby here take advantage of his designated driver for the next eight months.”
Pickford piped in, “I plan on it,” giving his wife a lascivious grin.
“I meant as long as you have me, you may as well use me… oh forget it. That’s an even worse setup.”
We started laughing as Pick leaned down to kiss his wife.
I thought it was sweet how those two managed to still be crazy about each other after so many years. But saying as much would just be sappy. So instead, I went with, “Hey, get a room, you two. You keep kissing her like that and she’s gonna get pregnant a second time, and then you’ll have twins.”
They laughed, then Bruce talked Pick into playing a game of foosball, leaving Lisa and me alone again. I thought she was going to press me for more details about Trip, but instead she surprised me when she said, “I gotta say, you’ve been like the old you again. You haven’t been you for a long time, you know. But I like how funny you are when you’re happy.”
It was an unexpected revelation, but the fact was, I was happy.
I mean, God. I had a wonderful fiancé, and I was only a few short hours away from inevitable career success. I was young, I was healthy, I was out with some of my favorite people, and I had just reconnected with an old friend. What was there to be unhappy about?
“Thanks. Hey, you sure you want to drive all the way home tonight? You just have to be back here for lunch tomorrow.”
“Well, that’s kind of why I’m bothering. What are we going to do with Pick and Bruce all day while we’re out? Besides, Pick’s too damn tall for a normal bed, much less that futon. I’ll just come back in. It’s no big deal.”
* * *
I staggered into my living room and collapsed onto the futon, spent. It was close to four, and I figured it was pretty likely that I had officially messed up my internal clock after two late nights in a row.
There were no messages on my machine (I’d checked as soon as I got in the door), and I deflated a bit when I realized that Trip hadn’t called. I wasn’t very proud of myself for that.
My body was exhausted, but my mind was actually feeling pretty wired. I considered cracking open Sheldon’s Best Laid Plans, but my eyes wouldn’t focus. I tried watching TV, but infomercials weren’t really cutting it. I grabbed the half-eaten canister of Pringles off the coffee table—thanks, Bruce—and dove in, ignoring the crumbs that were gathering in my cleavage as I sacked out, half-drunk and slouched in my seat.
I finally face-planted into a throw pillow, too lazy to make the trek to my bedroom. I was on the verge of catapulting into a glorious, beer-induced slumber when the phone rang. I opted to ignore it, assuming it was Lisa’s obligatory call letting me know she got the troops home safely. But when my machine clicked on, an achingly familiar voice was suddenly echoing around my small apartment.
I bolted upright.
“Hey, Lay-Lay. Did you know that the blue that accents every TRU hotel is officially called Wilmington Blue? Yeah. My father had the color specifically created just for his hotels.” Trip snickered casually, as though calling someone in the middle of the night to share some random trivia was a completely normal thing to do. “Anyway, I’m just lying here, thinking about last night, kinda outta my head. Why don’t you ever answer the phone?”
I stared at the cordless handset, right there on the side table, just inches from my grasp. It wouldn’t have taken much. Just a slight shift of my hand and I could’ve picked it up and stopped the recording. But who knows what could happen? What secrets of the heart would I divulge to the man who made it ache? Half-drunk and nostalgic was no way to find yourself on the phone with your ex-boyfriend when your fiancé was clear across the country. What if Trip tried to see me again? In that state, I didn’t think I’d be strong enough to tell him no.
“Hey. Remember Homecoming night? When I came to your house after the dance? Do you remember what I told you?”
My heart clenched, fracturing just the slightest bit as the long-repressed memory resurfaced.
“I told you that you were completely different from any other person I’ve ever met. Remember? The thing of it is… the thing of it is, Lay… is that that’s the truth. It was then, and it’s maybe even more true now.”
My hand flew to my mouth, and then I froze. He was leaving the message for me, yet somehow, listening to it managed to make me feel like I was eavesdropping.
“I just want to talk to you some more. We can do this, you know. We can be friends. I mean, can’t we? We’ve always been… Jesus, Lay. We’ve always been really good at that. At being friends. I always knew I could count on you. I still know that. Don’t ask me how. I just know.” He gave a little chuckle and added, “Unless, of course, you’ve managed to flay me alive with that article of yours. Damn. Maybe I’m speaking too soon.”
Despite my inner turmoil, a smile edged its way across my lips.
“Just pick up your phone next time, alright? Please? I went nine whole years without seeing you, and now, here I am, only a day later… and I miss you. I miss you, Lay. Anyways, sleep tight. I’ll try again tomorrow.”
My hand shot out involuntarily, quickly grasping for my phone and answering with a frantic, “Trip!”
…but I didn’t make it in time. The machine clicked off, and instead of Trip’s voice, I was met with a dial tone. I ended up sitting there, staring at the receiver, perfectly still, for several minutes.
Trip had been trying to get in touch with me over the past few weeks, and out of obligation to my fiancé, I had dutifully ignored every one of those calls. After what had happened at the hotel, I wasn’t willing to take the chance that something like that would happen again.
Yet we’d spent the entire night together, and aside from a little flirting—okay, a lot of flirting—we’d managed to keep our heads about us.
And our hands to ourselves.
I reached over and clicked off the lamp, then trudged my way past the blinking light on my answering machine and into my bedroom. I opened my bottom nightstand drawer and rifled through a few layers of godonlyknowswhat before coming up with a pink, satin-covered cigar box. I flipped the lid and dug around to the bottom, my hand navigating through the stack of papers and postcards before coming up with a pale blue envelope, the likes of which I hadn’t laid eyes on in years. I had already memorized every word long ago, but I pulled out the piece of notebook paper inside and reread it anyway, my eyes zeroing in on one sentence in particular: I could be in love with you.
I curled under the comforter and pulled it up to my chin, feeling my heart splinter as my brain raced.
Trip was lonely. I knew that now. It was there in those pauses in his message, the fact that he’d bothered to call at such an ungodly hour. The spirited boy who loved me had grown into a desolate man. He was all the way across the country from his new life and trying to grasp onto the remaining shreds of his old one.
And what had I done the whole time he was here? Used him for my own selfish career gains and then promptly blew him off.
I rolled over and stared out the window. Aside from being exhausted and out of sorts, I was also feeling mildly buzzed.
That’s the only reason I was crying as I fell asleep.
Chapter 21
HANGING UP
The next morning, with only about three hours’ worth of sleep in me, I couldn’t get to the newsstand fast enough to pick up my Sunday copy of New York Today. I practically threw my money at poor Felix before bounding up the stairs to my apartment, scattering the sections across my bed. I dug around until I came up with my copy of Now!, finding a full page cover shot of Trip for my efforts. Even on grainy newspulp, the pict
ure looked fantastic, his fitted white T-shirt hinting at the smooth, muscular chest underneath, his piercing blue eyes jumping right off the page.
It was a never-before-seen studio shot that Rajani in the art department had hunted down for me, and I was glad, because right there, no matter how many articles were written about him from the junket or the other interviews that day, I knew my story’s picture would immediately stand out from the standard promo packet offerings.
The words, “TRIP WILEY: HOLLYWOOD’S HOTTEST RISING STAR” were aligned neatly in a column next to the pic and “An interview with Now! reporter Layla Warren” in smaller type underneath.
Reporter Layla Warren! I was practically giddy.
I flipped in a few pages, until I found the actual article itself. Formatted beautifully over two entire pages, my words (my words!) were framed around a few carefully chosen shots from Trip’s life. They’d used a stock photo from the publicity packet for the main inside shot, but I ended up digging out my yearbook and pulling a few from my own private collection for the insets.
I’d titled it “Quite a Trip”, and the words were right there printed on the page in 48-point-font above the studio still of a very intense-looking Trip Wiley. I’d highlighted his “I’ve never shied away from hard work” quote, which was enlarged and bolded and plunked right in the middle of the article.
It looked spectacular.
Even though I’d written the damnable thing, I sat there cross-legged on my bed and read every word in its entirety all over again. The interview had required some extensive editing before my final draft, but I managed to turn it into a really great piece, offering a much more personal side to Trip than would be found in any other periodical that year. I’d straddled the line between my own personal relationship and professional, detached journalist perfectly. The story wasn’t supposed be about me, after all. It was all about him. I hoped he’d agree that I’d done him justice.
I sat down at my computer and ripped off a quick email to a few special people, attaching the story from the Now! website, because I knew a handful of them wouldn’t have known about it nor been able to access it otherwise.
That’s about the time my phone started ringing off the hook, and it didn’t stop the entire morning. The chain-phoning started with Sylvia, but I barely got in a full conversation with her before she passed the receiver off to my father.
“Hi Dad!”
“Loo, the article looks terrific! And Trip looks all grown up. Didn’t I say that, Sylvia? How grown up he looks?”
I could hear her agreeing in the background as I asked, “Did you see the photo credit I gave you? Alongside the graduation shot?”
“No, I… Ha! There it is. Kenneth Warren! Look, Sylvie, I’m famous!”
I started cracking up. Leave it to Dad to get so excited. “Dad! Focus!” I laughed out.
“I’m just kidding, sweetheart. We love the article. You did a fantastic job, really.”
“Thanks.”
“You and Lisa coming swimming later? I haven’t seen her since hearing the big news.”
“No, sorry. It’s a New York Sunday this week. She’ll be coming in later. But I think Pickford said he was going to head over. She’ll probably drop him off and then pick him up after our lunch, though, so you can see her then.”
Pick didn’t need a reason to visit my father, but using the pool was as good an excuse as any. It was pretty much the only time the poor guy wasn’t in pain. I happened to believe that my dad’s pool held mystical healing powers, too, and it sucked that I was missing out on the final weeks of using it. The thing had a heater, but it was still going to need to be closed up in the next week or so. It was Jersey, after all.
“Sounds good, Loo. I’ll defrost some hot dogs.”
I had the sharpest pang of homesickness when he said that. I hadn’t lived in the man’s house for close to a decade, but suddenly, all I wanted was to crawl into my old bed, in my old room, and just be a kid again. Strange to have that thought on the very day my big career was being launched. Stranger still that the thought could have been brought on by the mere mention of some frost-bitten Sabretts.
I was just saying my goodbyes as the phone beeped, so I clicked over to talk to Lisa.
Even though I was going to see her in a few more hours for our lunch date, she was way too excited about the article to wait until then to offer her congratulations. I was pretty excited to talk to her, too. We couldn’t really find a private moment at the bar the night before, and it was too loud to have any sort of in-depth conversation anyway. I was just dying to tell her everything that had happened on Friday. We kept the conversation trained on my article, though, knowing we could save the rehash of my Trip evening until lunch.
I hung up with her just as Bruce called—probably at my father’s reminder—but I took the sentiment as it was offered and thanked him profusely for the congrats.
But when I picked up the phone and heard Cooper’s voice, I nearly squealed into his ear. We liked to think of ourselves as still in touch with one another, even though we’d sometimes go entire months without speaking. He was actually a practicing whatever lawyer down in Baltimore, and I knew he was putting in crazy hours gunning for a promotion at his firm.
“Cooper! It’s so good to hear your voice, my friend. How are you?”
“I’m good. Exhausted. Cranky. But good. But the real question is: how are you, Miss Famous New York Reporter?”
“I’m great! Flying pretty high right now. You read it?”
“Of course I read it. The second I got your email. It was great. I think the best part was when you mentioned the ‘love triangle’ Trip was embroiled in back in high school.”
I started cracking up. “Yeah, well, I suppose you would, Angle C.”
Just then, my call waiting beeped in. I asked Coop to hang on and flashed over.
Click!
“Hello?”
“I was not a cocky teenager.”
Ha! It was Trip. I’d finally answered one of his calls, and I couldn’t even talk right then. But I knew I would be answering from then on. I laughed in his ear and asked him to call me back in five minutes.
“Wait, Layla, I-”
Click!
“Hey Coop, speaking of love triangles... I’ll give you one guess who that was on the other line.”
He guessed correctly, I confirmed, we laughed. We chatted for a few more minutes. He told me all about work and the girl he was seeing in the rare minutes of free time.
“Gosh, Coop. Sounds like you’re really burning it at both ends these days.”
“I am. But Suzy’s been great. She’s very patient.”
“And also very lucky,” I gushed.
I figured it was as good a time as any to tell him about my engagement to Devin. Aside from Lisa and Trip, he was the only other person I’d spilled the news to.
“Engaged? Holy shit, Layla. Congratulations. I’m kinda stunned here.”
“Yeah, well, me too!”
He laughed. “That’s great, though. You sound happy. It’s been a while since I’ve heard the old you.”
Why does everyone keep saying that?
But I didn’t open up that can of worms and just said, “Thanks.”
“Huh. Wow. So how long have you-”
Beep!
“Crap. Hey, Coop, I’m sorry. I gotta wrap this up. I’m pretty sure that’s Trip calling back. I already blew him off to talk to you. I’d better get that before he-”
Beep!
“Okay, but call me back later in the week. I want to get the whole story about this Devin character.”
“You got it. Love you! Bye!”
“Love you, too. Bye.”
Click!
“Hello?”
“Cocky. Cocky? Really, Layla?”
I couldn’t stop myself from giggling. “Trip, I’m sorry, but this can’t actually be coming as a surprise now, can it?”
“You make it sound like I was an asshole.”
I’d meant to say “were”. I didn’t have any claim on who he was presently. After years of growing apart, I’d essentially only known the adult version of Trip for a couple days.
“Now I’m arrogant? Layla, you’re killing me here.”
I knew he was just busting my chops, so I bypassed another apology and asked, “Ever hear of artistic license? Sometimes a reporter is required to use a bit of exaggeration in her writing. It makes for a more interesting story. But okay, cockiness aside, what did you think of the rest of the article, Mr. Hollywood’s Hottest Rising Star?”
He conceded. “Well, I liked when you called me that.” We laughed. “And I really liked the part where you hinted at all the sexual energy in the room during the interview. Was that just for the story, too?”
I’d specifically chosen the word energy over tension. The latter implied it was something between us as opposed to just something he was giving off. But he knew better. And so did I.
The safety of the handset between us allowed me to toss out, “Sometimes a reporter is required to be brutally honest as well.”
I could hear his shock over the phone. Seriously. It sounded like he’d just gotten punched in the gut. It was staggering.
His breath expelled as he pulled himself together. “Hey, uh. It’s my last full day in town. I was going to swing by my mother’s house and say goodbye. You want to come?”
Bad idea.
“I can’t. Lisa’s coming into the city. We have a lunch date.”
I explicitly didn’t invite him. And he could tell that I didn’t.
“How about tonight? You can meet me at the hotel.”
NO!
“Probably not the best idea, Trip.”
“Look. I really want to see you before I go. Can’t we... I mean, isn’t there any way...”
“Probably not,” I answered, despondently.
