Mandy Makes Her Mark

by Ruby Laska

  “Meaningless,” Tad echoed, not taking his eyes off her. “A word I’ve thought a lot over the last year.”

  “What are you talking about?” Mandy asked, knowing she should just get up and walk away, having delivered what was probably the best parting shot she was going to manage. But she could feel the warmth of Tad’s skin even without touching him, and she caught occasional whiffs of soap and spice and salt, a good manly smell that had been imprinted on her indelibly last night and which provoked a scandalous response in her body.

  Tad sighed, but didn’t look away. “Do you know what I’ve always wanted to be, Amanda? A screenwriter. Since I was ten years old, when I wrote my first script.”

  It was the last thing she expected him to say. “You wanted to write?” she asked in astonishment.

  “Yeah.” Tad laughed bitterly. “I know. Crazy, right? I came to LA without any idea how hard it is to get work, and I started modeling to pay the bills—but only after I got a few dozen rejections. Apparently I suck at it.”

  “You…wait. You write movies?” Mandy struggled to make sense of what she was hearing. It was true that Tad was occasionally compared to a young Brad Pitt. And he had the body to pull off any superhero role. “What, like action flicks?”

  “Hardly.” Finally, Tad broke his gaze, staring down at his hands. “I’m more the Sundance Festival kind of guy. Wish I was, anyway.”

  “Did…did Luna know?”

  More bitter laughter. “Yeah. She knew.”

  “She never said anything.”

  “I’m sure she didn’t think it was worth mentioning. Not since all I ever heard back was ‘Not for us’ or ‘No thanks.’ You may have noticed that your sister doesn’t tolerate failure.”

  Mandy thought back to all the nights when Luna went out on the town solo, breezily claiming that Tad didn’t feel like coming along. “All this time, you’ve been writing?”

  “Yeah,” Tad said, suddenly sounding tired. “Two or three scripts a year, on average. Close to twenty rejections each, by the time I make the rounds. Not much reason to keep going.”

  “So you quit.” Now it was starting to make sense finally. Tad had given up. Was maybe getting ready to spiral downward.

  “No,” Tad said sharply. “I’ll never quit. It’s in my blood.”

  “But why didn’t you ever say something?”

  He grabbed her hand so fast she didn’t have time to pull away – and then he squeezed, hard. “Because of you.”

  “Me?”

  “Because of what you always say. ‘Skills pay the bills.’ You showed up here and built the agency from nothing. You made it clear that you wouldn’t settle for anything less than top talent. How was I supposed to tell you I’d been rejected for the tenth time? The hundredth?”

  Mandy gawped at him. “But…why would you care? You’re a sought-after male model—”

  “But I didn’t want you to see that when you looked at me,” Tad said. He relaxed his grip on her, sliding his fingers along the sensitive skin under her arm. “I wanted you to see…me. The real me. But not until I succeeded at something.”

  Something warm and dangerous was uncoiling inside Mandy. Tad had noticed her, all those months and years when he pretended indifference. Tad had wanted her. “But…what about Luna?”

  Tad shrugged impatiently, as if she’d asked about a fly buzzing about his elbow. “Would it surprise you to know that we never actually slept together?”

  “What?”

  “There wasn’t any chemistry. After our first few dates, we didn’t even bother to try.”

  “But then—why did you keep seeing each other?”

  Another shrug. “We met each other’s needs. We didn’t fight. She didn’t want to get below the surface and neither did I. She needed someone to be seen with, and I guess I got used to playing the part. I don’t know, I guess I thought maybe it would get better over time. But I don’t think we’ve had a single meaningful conversation in the last two years. In the end, I just got tired of pretending.” His voice grew hoarse. “And I got tired of wanting you so badly I could barely stand to come to work.”

  “You?” Mandy shivered, despite the warmth of the evening. “You wanted…me?”

  “Like the sun wants to shine,” Tad said. “Like a fish wants water. I just didn’t have the guts to tell you. Until now.”

  “I never knew,” Mandy said. She felt her resolve weakening. “Someone like me…doesn’t end up with someone like you.”

  “You’re wrong,” Tad said. “I’ve watched you, shutting yourself in your office over lunch, reading your library books. You look so sexy in reading glasses, by the way. I know you save the ribbons from bakery boxes. I hear you talking to the cleaning lady about her grandchildren and I know you’ve memorized all their names and ages. You ask for extra lemon in your tea, you have pictures of Alaska on your screensaver, and you try really hard to come up with unique gift ideas for Luna’s birthday even though she forgot yours.”

  “How…how do you know that?” Mandy whispered.

  “Because I remembered.” Tad took a deep breath. “May tenth. It broke my heart when you spent it alone. You deserve better. You deserve the best, Amanda. I’ll never forget. I promise. Give me a chance.”

  And she would have kissed him then. Even after, when Mandy was replaying the whole scene over and over in her mind, she had no doubt that it was the moment she finally believed what she’d been longing for all these years: that Tad could be hers, that he could be the man she went home to every night, the one who made her happy. That beauty really was in the eye of the beholder, even when the beheld was an ordinary girl with extraordinary dreams.

  She would have slid over on the bench and wrapped her arms around Tad and kissed him. Except just as she made up her mind, Tad made a choking sound. His spine stiffened and his hands clutched the bench. He was having a fit of some sort, Mandy realized in shock. His mouth was opening and closing, he was blinking uncontrollably and his color had gone from sun-kissed gold to ashen gray.

  “Are you choking?” Mandy demanded, alarmed. “Having a stroke? Heart attack?”

  Tad barely shook his head, mumbling something unintelligible.

  “What did you say? Tuna? Ruin?” Mandy waved her hand frantically in front of his face, trying to make out his words. “What are you trying to say?”

  That was when she heard footsteps on the path. A shadow fell across the moon. A note of familiar perfume on the breeze.

  “What the hell are you two doing out here?” The strident voice cut through the sultry evening.

  Mandy looked up and saw a beautiful woman towering over her in high heels and a short skirt. Standing two feet away was the one person Mandy thought she wouldn’t have to deal with this disastrous weekend.

  “He’s trying to say Luna,” her sister said coolly, bending down to give Tad a peck on the cheek before turning to give Mandy a conspiratorial smile. “I guess I took him by surprise. Thanks for watching him for me. Although you might not need to watch him quite so closely.”

  Tad finally seemed to regain the use of his muscles, staggering to his feet. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “Oh, baby, I thought you’d be surprised,” Luna pouted, jutting out a hip and posing with her head tilted prettily.

  “I’m surprised all right. Since you said you never wanted to see me again.”

  “Oh, that. I was a little miffed, that’s all. But I’ve had time to think about it. We just needed to give each other a little space. I’m ready to try again, aren’t you? Compromise, communication, blah blah blah – I’m game if you are, baby.” As if to show just how game she was, Luna smoothed the shirred silk over her hips. Mandy recognized the dress, a sample from the Donatello line Luna had shot in Milan three weeks ago. Its neck was so low-cut, and its skirt so short, that it had had to be taped to her skin for the shoot. Mandy idly wondered how Luna had managed to get it to stay on this evening even as she watched her fleeting bliss shatter into a thousa
nd bits.

  Tad wasn’t what she’d thought. He was a man with dreams, and hopes, and plans, a man of depth, a man who’d actually noticed her. He’d somehow seen beyond the walls she’d put up, into who she was on the inside. And for one brief, glorious moment Mandy had truly thought they might make it work.

  But now, her sister was standing in front of her, displaying all the reasons why her hopes for a future with Tad were nothing but a doomed fantasy. Some of those reasons were on full display and others were draped in silk and coated with makeup, but the bottom line was that Mandy would never be able to compete with the glamor her sister could summon without even breaking a sweat.

  “I’ll leave you two to talk,” Mandy said stiffly. “Early shoot, and so forth.”

  “Oh yes. How was that, anyway?” Luna asked, taking her place on the bench, practically sitting in Tad’s lap. Mandy noticed that he didn’t exactly protest, even when Luna slid her arms around his neck with the sinuous movements of a python. “Did everything go all right?”

  No thanks to you, Mandy thought. But out loud, all she said was, “We managed.” Lark would probably reject every shot, but Mandy wasn’t about to give her sister the satisfaction of knowing about the disaster with Jayde and her last-minute substitution. Perhaps Tad would fill her in later, after they had their reunion and made up from their lovers’ quarrel.

  Already the things that Tad had confided seemed like a dream. He was never meant to be a screenwriter, she was never meant to be a model, and they were never meant to be together. And now Luna had arrived to set things back to normal.

  Mandy was already a dozen yards down the path when she heard Tad call her name. Amanda.

  Then she heard her sister’s laughter. No one calls her that.

  Mandy brushed angrily at the tears dampening her eyes, and broke into a run.

  No one called her by her real name. And no one was coming after her.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Morning arrived much too early. Mandy had taken three of the nighttime pain relievers she kept in her travel bag for emergencies. Usually one of the pills was enough to make up for time zones differences and nervous episodes, but this was one night when she didn’t want to take any chances. She couldn’t bear to replay the scene in the rose garden one more time.

  Now, however, with her phone alarm ringing on the nightstand and pink dawn light streaming through the plantation shutters, it all came rushing back to her. “Tad,” she whispered, her throat dry and her voice cracking. He’d been hers, for a span of moments. And now that he’d been ripped from her once again, it was too late to go back to pretending that she didn’t care.

  All those months, pretending that she wasn’t interested in finding a relationship. The evenings in front of the television, convincing herself that reality TV was better than an internet date. The days when Tad stopped by the office, when she couldn’t focus on a single task.

  The exquisite pain of being invited to the apartment he shared with Luna, where the two of them avoided looking at each other. She thought he disliked her, but all this time, he’d felt it too—the pain of longing, the guilt of wanting someone he couldn’t have. But all it took was one look at her gorgeous sister for Tad to realize what a mistake he’d nearly made.

  Mandy took her second shower in twelve hours, taking care not to scrub as hard. The makeup artist would not be pleased to find her skin raw and ruddy.

  She dressed in the jeans and black sweater so many models favored—after her years in the business she could adopt their uniform with ease–and headed to the beach. This time, however, she stopped in the lobby and filled her bag with fruit from the bowl on the registration desk. She wasn’t about to starve to death on the same day that she perished of heartbreak and embarrassment.

  They were shooting on the dock today, against a backdrop of bleached wood and the riot of flowers spilling from planters lining the path. Deirdre was already directing her crew as they set up their equipment. And in the middle of the dock, on a stool someone had dragged down from the manor, Sylvie sat flipping through a magazine, a pair of black-framed glasses perched on her nose.

  “Hey, Mandy,” she said, without looking up.

  “Ah, Mandy,” Deirdre said briskly. “Change of plans. Lark was absolutely delighted with the test sheets. He wants to shoot a couple of the bridal gowns this morning.”

  “Of course,” Mandy said efficiently, relieved to have the distraction of work. “I’ll help Sylvie get started now.”

  “No, no. He wants the gowns on you. He loved the contrast of your hair against the ivory shantung.”

  “Me? But I’m not even a real model. And I’m, well, not going to fit into the samples.”

  Deirdre smiled indulgently. “Which is even more perfect. Lark has decided to reverse the shoot. The plus gown on you, the sample bridesmaid gown on Sylvie. He says sales of the larger gowns have eclipsed the regular sales in the last quarter. He had the gowns driven down from Miami overnight.” Deirdre leaned in close. “You’ve captivated him, my dear. He tried to call you last night—he refused to believe there’s no cell service on this island.”

  “But…Sylvie? Are you okay with this?”

  “More than okay,” Sylvia said, turning a page. “Those things weigh, like, a hundred pounds each. And it’s supposed to get up to eighty-five degrees today. Better you than me.”

  Mandy nodded dumbly. The idea of her as the feature model in the shoot was absurd, but the important thing was that the shoot hadn’t been a disaster. The client was happy. The catalog was a go. And if there would soon be a hundred thousand copies of a photograph in circulation of her as a blushing bride – something that seemed unlikelier than ever after her latest love-life debacle—well, it was just how the job got done.

  So what if she had to spend another grueling day being stitched and shoved and pinched into the gowns, twirling and posing and smiling for all she was worth, when all she really wanted to do was cry? She could do this—for the company, for the future…for Luna.

  Her sister was bound to wander down with Tad at some point to see how the shoot was going. And Mandy was going to do her best to pretend it was all just business as usual. Mandy working her heart out and the two of them just being their glamorous selves, gliding through life being the envy of all who encountered them. Now Mandy knew a secret about Tad—that under that gorgeous exterior were secret dreams and dashed hopes, like most ordinary people had—but those were things that would stay hidden. As for Luna…Mandy knew her sister as well as anyone in the world, and she could say with authority that underneath her sister’s beautiful but vacant exterior was an equally vacant interior. She probably had stunning lungs, a superlative heart, pretty veins; she could probably model for an anatomy textbook as easily as for Vogue; but for the first time Mandy understood that her sister, though extraordinary in some ways, was even less than average in others.

  Mandy was destined to be alone. But at least she had her work. The agency. The models she mentored and guided. It would have to be enough.

  She sighed and headed for the tent where a gorgeous gown waited, a gown that would make some bride very happy on her wedding day.

  #

  “Perfect!” Deirdre called, clicking away, smiling encouragingly between shots while her assistants grasped and tugged and yanked and occasionally stabbed Mandy in their zeal to make the gowns drape correctly.

  “I’m starving,” Mandy whispered. She and Sylvie were posed back to back beneath a weathered wooden post from which fish were apparently strung to be measured. One of the assistants had scrubbed the fish scales and gunk from the dock before the models took their place there, but Mandy had felt something suspiciously squishy under the toe of one of her beaded pumps. At least she wasn’t responsible for cleaning the gowns, only wearing them.

  “Really? I couldn’t possibly eat, I’m stuffed to the gills,” Sylvie said, patting her perfectly flat stomach, which was currently covered in shimmering pink lace. “I had a second slice o
f toast. Oh, get it—gills! Like a fish!”

  As Sylvie giggled at her own lame joke, and Deirdre took a few candid snaps to capture the moment, Mandy couldn’t help but smile. The “toast” had actually been pieces of dry cracker only a few inches wide, smeared with some sort of protein spread that tasted suspiciously like hand lotion. But Sylvie had taken pity on her and offered her an extra piece.

  Jayde’s departure had prompted Sylvie to be kind to Mandy. And spending a day and a half as a model had given Mandy new perspective. She’d never take her models for granted again.

  “Oh crap,” Sylvie suddenly exclaimed, snapping out of her languid pose and grabbing Mandy’s arm.

  “What’s the matter? Pin? Zipper?” Mandy was now an expert on tailoring injuries and she rushed to help, but Sylvie was staring down the path to the manor, mouth agape.

  Mandy turned to look. So did Deirdre and the assistants, one of whom muttered something and started backing away.

  “…even if I have to row it myself!”

  The strident voice reached Mandy’s ears just as she spotted her sister, being followed by Zeke, the boat captain, who was struggling to drag her two suitcases along the uneven path.

  “The boat has a motor, ma’am,” he panted. “No need to row.”

  But Luna wasn’t paying him any attention. She strode toward Mandy with a look of fury on her face.

  “He doesn’t want me back!” she snapped. She was dressed in a black jumpsuit with cutout shoulders that showed an expanse of creamy skin before clinging tightly to her torso, showcasing every curve.

  Idly, Mandy wondered what sort of bra was required for such a garment. Her mind was going several directions at once. Tad doesn’t want her, the little voice inside said urgently, trying to get her attention. But Mandy was in a state of suspended animation, watching her sister’s perfectly made-up face contort in a mask of anger.

  Not sadness. Hardly devastation. And certainly not heartbreak.