He steps onto the sidewalk. “Please don’t shut me out.”
His words punch me straight in the gut. Not the words themselves, but the memories they awake. I have said those exact same words in my plea to get Zach back the night Renegade sank.
“There’s nothing left to talk about. We’re done, Zach. I’m done with you. This was just a rebound and that’s all there was to it. For me.”
His eyebrows furrow. “I am tired of you, Zachary. Whatever happened with my mom, I’m glad our paths met again. That way, I got you out of my system.”
He steps closer. “Don’t say that.” He reaches for me but I pull back.
“Leave her alone.” Pierre says.
Zach doesn’t even spare him a glance. “Don’t get involved.” Pierre grabs Zach’s elbow and gets rewarded with a Freezer look on steroids.
The Frenchman shrinks a bit but still persists, “I was drunk last time, but tonight I’m sober enough to see the lady doesn’t want you around. So, please, let her go.”
Zach looks back at me and the Freezer mask shatters to pieces. The shine I’ve seen earlier in his eyes returns. He opens his mouth but there’s no sound. The tension that has emanated from him seems to evaporate. His stance relaxes and his shoulders drop. He lowers his head as if he’s submitting himself to me.
“Lenor, don’t go. I—I’m in—”
“Stop before you make a fool of yourself,” I spit.
He shuts his eyes, nods and finally steps aside.
Pierre is waving at one of the cabs waiting further up the street for the crowd exiting Le Duke. He grabs my hand and drags me with him. I don’t look at Zach. I’m helped inside the taxi, which is fine by me, because there’s no strength left in my body. Pierre skirts around the back of the car and comes to sit next to me in the back seat.
I dare throw a glance through the window. Zach hasn’t moved an inch. I can only see his back and his bent neck. His posture shouts defeat.
If I have defeated him, the thrill of victory should be buzzing through me right now. But there is no buzz. There is nothing.
Because I have lost too.
Chapter 26
ZACH
Paris ~ 18th June, three months earlier.
I awake abruptly.
The early afternoon light splashes across my living room, bouncing between the stark white walls. I blink. I have fallen asleep on the sofa and my head must have wobbled into an awkward angle because my neck hurts like hell.
I hate napping. It’s the middle of the day and I shouldn’t be wasting my life sleeping. It doesn’t matter if I’ve worked until dawn. Life is short. I live in Paris. I should be outside, visiting an exhibition or running up and down Montmartre’s hill until my legs burn. Not crumpled on my fucking sofa. That’s the promise I made to myself when I bought my first club: never to get sucked into that lifestyle. To keep myself clean, healthy, and busy.
I lean forward, resting my elbows on my thighs, and rub the sleep from my face. The same damn movie is playing on my flat screen. I’m surprised that DVD hasn’t jammed. I’ve played it every single week for the past five years. The plane is now lining up on the runway. The noise of the pouring rain meshes with the roaring of its engine. No matter how many times I watch this scene, I can’t help fearing the plane will never take off. Captain Renault is breaking the news to his men: “Major Strasser’s been shot.” He then glances at Rick, who is holding a smoking gun, and he repeats, “… Round up the usual suspects.”
And, as with every time I watch it, I punch the air in triumph. I’m like a kid who still believes the good guys always win. The only problem with Casablanca, it’s that the good guy—Rick—chooses to be ‘noble’ and lets his girl go into that damn plane with the guy she’s married to. A guy she doesn’t love.
My intercom buzzes. I’m not expecting anyone. I hope it’s not Clara. She’s been trying to get ‘us’ back on track. That’s not in my plans, but the idea of hurting her again doesn’t sit well with me. I grab the bottle of mineral water from the coffee table and make my way to the intercom. I take one big gulp and click the speaker.
“Oui?” All I get in response is a gentle buzzing sound. I let a dozen seconds pass. Someone is playing a prank on me and my anger flares up. “Qui est là?”
“It’s me.” A female voice. She’s speaking in English, but not with Clara’s strong Swedish accent. Definitely French. I’m about to ask her name... “It’s me, Louise.”
Dread makes me lean against the door. What the fuck? There are parts of my past I miss sorely. There are two faces I would give all I have, all I am, to see again. Even for a split second.
Louise Carrington’s is not one of them.
“Zachary, please let me in.” The woman used to boss everyone around. Right now, she sounds like she’s begging me.
I buzz her in.
I swivel around and knock back the rest of the water. I move to the kitchen to throw the empty bottle in the bin and return to the living room. I check that nothing personal is visible. I don’t want that woman to have the faintest glimpse of who I have become. Casablanca’s credits are rolling on the screen and I rush to the remote control on the side table. With a jerking movement, I switch the TV off.
She knocks at the door and, I swear, a shiver runs down my spine. I can’t believe it—can’t believe myself. I have to get my act together. I head to the door and pull it wide open.
She stands there and I blink because she awakens long-buried memories I cherish in secret. But the likeness is only skin-deep. All charm is gone.
“What are you doing here? In Paris?” And more importantly, “How did you find out where I live?”
All I get from her is an elegant arch of her eyebrows. But she gets nothing in return from me.
“Can I come in?” I don’t move. “Please.”
I step aside and gesture for her to make her way in. She drops her handbag next to the door. The heels of her stilettos click on the wooden floor while she surveys my living room. In silence. She runs her hand over the top of the Le Corbusier chair and comes to stand before the half-open French windows.
“Nice view,” she finally comments in that impossibly husky voice of hers.
“Thanks, but I’m sure you haven’t flown all the way from D.C. just to look at the view of Montmartre.”
Slowly, she turns around and I notice the changes in her. Those I may have missed two months ago when I saw her in The Hamptons. She’s painfully thin. Her face is sallow and the black shadows under her eyes stand out on her blotchy skin.
“I didn’t have to fly. I live here.”
“What do you mean here?”
“In Paris.”
“Since when?”
“Last week. I’m getting a divorce from Bruce.”
“I’m not sure what I’m supposed to say. My deepest sympathies? Congratulations?”
Louise clasps her hands to her bony chest and gives me a beaming smile. “I’m free, Zachary. At last, I’m free. After seeing you back in April, I realized what I had lost… what I could have.” She bridges the gap between us and now her hands are on my chest. “We’re free now. You and I. My marriage has been a sham for so long but soon it’ll be officially over… and now Lenor is engaged. She’s all sorted and you don’t have to feel guilty or anything. I…”
She keeps rambling and babbling but I turn off the sound of her voice. I replay our last encounter in East Hampton when she broke the news about Lenor. There’s nothing, nothing at all, in what I’ve said or done then that could have given any encouragement to Louise to be here, at my place, today. She’s delusional. I quickly shake off the shock and start paying better attention to her: the feverish glint in her eyes, the trembling of her lips, the shaking of her hands against my chest. My own hands come to rest on her shoulders: I can feel the sharp line of her collarbones underneath my palms.
She’s talking about one last trip to Oxford. One last call of duty and then she repeats the word again and again, like a ma
ntra. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Gently I lead her to the sofa and make her sit down. She’s fidgety and I have the feeling of handling a disarticulated puppet or one of those marionettes you still see sometimes in Parisian street shows.
“Louise.” I call her name softly as if to wake her from a deep slumber. “Louise.”
“Oh, Zachary, I’ve missed you so much.”
She leaps at me but I manage to stop her. Once again I can’t help but notice how angular she has become and I fight the repulsion creeping through me.
“Louise, Louise…” I search her gaze but it’s glassy and unable to catch mine. “How did you find out where I live?”
She frowns as if I’m the one who’s been acting insane. “I hired someone to find you.”
I muffle a What The Fuck! I should kick her out of my apartment or better call the cops. It’s not as if it’s the first time she’s screwed up my life but she’s officially stalking me. But I can’t. There’s something inside me that keeps me from doing the sensible thing, the rational thing. The selfish thing. I look at the woman sitting opposite me. She’s aged. She’s shrunk and she’s Lenor’s mom. Lenor who just got engaged and has a bright future ahead of her. Lenor who should be given a chance to have her own life at last, without being dragged again and again into her mother’s psychodrama.
“Do you want something to drink?” She rewards me with that little girl smile again that is so far from the Louise Carrington I used to know. “Stay there.”
I pat her hand and head for the kitchen. I run the water from the tap and fill a glass. I add a couple of ice cubes and a slice of lemon. I’m trying to gain some time while my brain whirls around trying to figure out what the hell I’m going to do next. I come back to stand next to her and hand her the glass.
She takes a sip and grimaces. “What’s this?”
“Water,” I answer matter-of-factly.
“Don’t you have any vodka?” Her eyes are roaming around the room.
While she’s doing this, I go and check the contents of her handbag. It doesn’t take long to find what I was fully expecting. Two little bottles. I’m far too familiar with the names written on them. Five years ago, mom mixed them with gin and died. She left me behind, free to mess up my life. Two weeks later, I had lost Lenor.
I never want her to go through what I had to go through. She deserves to find happiness with that… Josh McBride. Even thinking about his name makes me want to puke. But it’s not about me this time. It’s about her and, maybe, I can help her be happy. From afar.
“Zach?” Louise is still holding her glass. She must have seen me rummaging through her things but it hasn’t hit home.
She’s so fucking high.
I come back to sit next to her. “Louise, drink the water. It’ll make you feel better.”
She gives me a robotic nod and starts sipping. When she’s done, I take the glass from her and place it on the side table. Then I take hold of her hands. She lets me. She’s not even trying to kiss me anymore.
Her shoulders have stooped. She closes her eyes and whispers, “I’m so tired, Zachary. So tired…” Her head starts wobbling and her eyelids flutter.
I help her to lie down on the sofa and I kneel by her side. It’s like tucking a child up in bed. I keep my voice low. “It’s alright, Louise. Everything’s going to be alright.”
She’s already half-gone but she keeps mumbling, “I just needed to find you. That’s all I’ve wanted to do since I last saw you. All I wanted…” She’s gone.
Once her breathing has evened out, I stand and take my cell from the table next to the glass. The kitchen is the safest place for what I need to do. I dial a number I dialed so many times during my first year in Paris. Why I had waited twenty-seven years to start therapy was a mystery to me. But when I started, I did it zealously. The line keeps ringing and eventually goes to voicemail.
I recognize the guttural voice instantly. “Bonjour, vous êtes sur la messagerie du Dr. Olivier…”
Chapter 27
LENOR
Paris ~ Present.
I swipe my hand over the steamy mirror in Charlie’s bathroom and there I am. My hair wrapped in a towel, my cheeks all flushed after the hot shower, and my eyes red-rimmed, swollen, and—I swear—a fraction droopier than the day before.
My mouth twists. Heartbreak is definitely an aging factor or maybe it’s wild, rough, life-altering sex? I chuckle—a sad, tired chuckle—and pull the skin beside my eyes flat against my head in a feeble attempt to give it some lift. I grimace at my freakish face. I’m a serious contender to play The Joker in the next Batman movie. Then I release the skin and grumble to myself. Twenty years, a facelift or two and quarterly injections of bottie and I’ll look just like that sweet mother of mine.
And there it is again. That heaviness swinging back and forth in the pit of my stomach. It’s not painful—nerve-twistingly, hair-pullingly painful—like on the night when we drove back from Provence and I learned the truth. What happened between Zach and I a dozen hours earlier shifted the pain from the outside—something I had to fight and kick and defeat—to the inside—something I have made mine and will take with me wherever I go, whatever I do, whomever I am with. In other words, I have fought, and I have lost.
I tip-toe across the apartment and slide through the half-opened door of my bedroom. Pierre is still sleeping. Despite what happened last night, what I shared with him, I want to be on my own now. There’s a lot for me to do and I need focus. I take pity on him though. He has helped me at an all-time low point, he has listened, and I owe him a few more hours of slumber.
I grab a pair of jeans and a plain white T-shirt from the drawer of the cupboard. After one last glance at his tousled black hair spread over the pillow, I tip-toe back into the living room and busy myself tidying up the remnants of our drinks. I’m so grateful for the pot of Chamomile tea I kept refilling until the early hours of the morning. It has been therapeutic and helped clear out the tsunami of pain, regret, longing, and remorse. That and the talking.
The cherry on top? No need for any Advil this morning or worshiping of the porcelain throne. I like Charlie’s bathroom, but that isn’t where I intend to spend the rest of my day.
With a freshly brewed pot of Earl Grey, I sit on the couch and switch on my laptop. I spend the next two hours surfing the net, taking notes, and sipping the amber liquid, letting the taste of bergamot fuel my concentration. I’ve had an idea in the back of my mind for a very long time but, of course, me being me, I never did anything about it. There was Josh’s career to think of and where he had to live to make it happen: D.C.. The fact that my beloved father recruited my fiancé into his lobbying empire made my own prospects even more crystal clear.
I grab my cell and dial the number written on the contact page of the website, starting with the international code for the U.S.. It’s an L.A. number. I’ve slept all day so it should be the start of the working day back on the West Coast. I let it ring and I’m about to disconnect when a female voice greets me with a loud and nasal “Good Morning.”
I swallow hard. My throat feels dry despite the gallons of tea I’ve consumed. The voice in my head demands I kicked my own ass—if such thing is anatomically possible—and SPEAK. I keep struggling but then finally, “Hi, hi, good morning. I’m calling in regards to…” After that break-through, I’m on a roll.
Once I hang up, I flick through the pages I’ve scribbled, underlining the most important nuggets of information. I then proceed to write a To-Do-List. There are quite a few items but when I come to the last one, I start chewing the tip of my pencil, and chewing, and chewing until a tiny splinter of wood lodges between my teeth.
That last item reads: Finding the money.
Yep, there‘s a lot to say about this newly proclaimed independence. It’s liberating, empowering, self-affirming but everything has suddenly turned so goddamned expensive. As it is, I have enough to cover the plane ticket back to the States and pocket money for…for how long? I have
no idea. How much is it to rent a room in L.A.? With all those struggling actor-wannabes, there must be places to stay for a part-time student…part-time waitress?
I sigh. I’ll have to wait tables or something like that. I have absolutely no pride issues about being a waitress, although I doubt I have the necessary skills for the job. I let out a groan and hide my face in my hands. I’m no Cassie. I can’t just turn up one morning with ten bucks in my pocket, nowhere to stay, and have my life sorted out by the end of the day. The respect I already have for Josh’s girl is taken up a notch. Plus, I can’t sing to save my life.
Then there’s a ding echoing inside my head. If push comes to shove, I can always reinvent myself as a bartender. One of the benefits of being Louise Carrington’s daughter is that I can mix a mean Vodka Martini, and don’t start me on Cosmopolitans, Mom’s all time fav. My future turns slightly less bleak. Surely L.A. has a decent amount of drunkards with a predilection for fancy, uppity drinks.
The intercom buzzes through my bartending prospects. I’m not expecting anyone. Maybe a delivery for Charlie?
“Oui?”
The answer bounces straight back. “It’s Zach.”
His voice makes my heart swell. It’s bursting against my ribcage, my face blushes, and my hand flows to my throat. He isn’t supposed to come after me. I spent the entire night ‘til dawn reasoning, convincing myself that it has been Adieu. But he has come. He is there.
I buzz him in.
I shut my bedroom door in the back of the apartment and retrace my steps to the entrance door and open it. I sit down on the couch, back straight, hands clasped over my lap. I make a point to avoid a detour by the bathroom to check myself in the mirror and put on some make-up. We are past that.
I hear his steps on the wooden floor.
“Why are you here?” With my eyes now focused on the tips of his sneakers, I forge on, “Don’t—” It’s a croak. I clear my throat, praying for all the frogs to hop out of my voice, “Don’t apologize again.”
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