“Shoot.”
I lower my voice several notches: “How far, exactly, did you go with Nick?”
Chrissy throws back her head and laughs. I can see two fillings shining on her back teeth. “Oh man, you really must like him.”
My face burns. “What does that have anything to do with it?”
She rewards me with a big grin. “Why do you wanna know so bad?”
“I’m just… curious.”
“Curious,” she repeats. “Okay. Gotcha.” She studies my face for a second. “He didn’t fuck me, if that’s what you’re wondering. We just… made out a few times. That’s it. Not for lack of trying on my part, especially when I first started working for him. Believe me, if he’d been interested…” Her eyes get a distant look that makes me uneasy, but then it passes. “Anyway, now he thinks of me like a sister or something—off limits.” She giggles. “Whenever some lowlife who’s meeting with him in his office starts hitting on me, he gets all pissed off at them. It’s sweet.”
I can imagine that. Nick is protective of Chrissy—I can tell by the way that he talks about her. But considering I caught them in a liplock, I always wondered how far it went. It’s a relief they never went all the way, although I’m not sure why.
_____
I have now had close to a hundred performances at Cleopatra’s. Although I vary my performance each night, there are a few constants:
I am always wearing something tight, short, and clingy.
I always sing “Total Eclipse of the Heart.”
Nick Moretti is always in the audience.
Tonight I’m wearing a skintight red dress that comes down mid-thigh, making me self-conscious about every extra pound on my body, although Alice swore I was rocking it. I’ve lost some weight this year, but it never seems like enough when I look at the other girls performing. Alex used to make comments about my needing to diet, but after I mentioned it to Nick once, the comments abruptly stopped.
I’ve gone through my set of songs, some new but mostly old. And now I’m on my finale: “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” Whenever I sing it, I’m always singing it to Nick, so I set my eyes on his usual table.
But he isn’t there.
It’s not like I could stop in the middle of the song. I belt it out the best I can, all the while wondering where Nick is. He’s never missed one of my performances. Not even one. Does this have something to do with what Seth did the other night? It must.
Of course, it could be any other number of things. Nick might look healthy but he is in a wheelchair—maybe he’s sick. Maybe he’s in the hospital. Sometimes it seems like that’s the only thing that would keep him from showing up for a performance.
And there’s one other possibility:
Maybe he’s in jail.
It’s all I can think about as I get through the number. No time for an encore—I smile and wave only briefly at the round of applause at the end. I race backstage, where I find Alice fixing up her own makeup for her performance.
“Alice,” I say breathlessly.
She looks at my reflection in the mirror and smiles. “Everything okay, Jess?”
“Have you seen Nick tonight?”
Alice leans closer to the mirror to apply her mascara. “No, I don’t think so. Why?”
“He just…” I squeeze my fists together. “He’s always here for my performances, but… he’s not here tonight.”
She shrugs. “He might be with Lori.”
“Lori?”
“She’s a waitress,” she explains. “I’ve seen them leave here together a bunch of times. And she’s not on duty tonight.”
A jab of jealousy gets me right in the chest. “Oh.”
Alice grins at the look on my face. “Hmm. Don’t you have a fiancé or something?”
“Yes.”
Except Seth is the last thing on my mind right now. All I can think about is how much I missed seeing Nick in the audience tonight. It didn’t feel right singing without him watching me. I want to sit with him at his table and share a drink. I want to look into those sexy dark eyes.
I want Nick.
I find my purse and fumble around in it for my cell phone. Before I can second guess myself, I select Nick from my list of contacts and call his number. It rings several times before going straight to voicemail.
I bet he’s with that Lori girl. And why shouldn’t he be? It’s not like he’s got any obligation to me. He told me to leave Seth and I refused.
I should just go home to Seth and forget about him. I’ve got a great job that I love. I’m getting married in a couple of months. Why am I still obsessed with the guy I loved in high school?
But at this moment, all I can think is I need to find him.
Now.
Chapter 29
Nick
When Lori suggested getting together tonight, I almost said no. Jessie performs tonight and I haven’t missed it once. But then I got to thinking about how she’s getting married soon to that asshole and it’s clear she’s not leaving him. If him smacking her in the face didn’t get her out of there, what else can I do to convince her? So to hell with her. I’m allowed to go out with a cute waitress. Why the hell not?
It’s not like I need to spend my life protecting her. I don’t think Seth will be hurting her again after Steve paid him a visit.
“I could come over to your place?” Lori suggests. Then she adds hopefully, “Or we could go out to dinner somewhere?”
I almost laugh because the girl is twenty years old and it makes perfect sense that she’d want the older guy she’s hooking up with to take her out someplace fancy and expensive. “Sure, babe,” I say. “We can go anywhere you want.”
“Really?” she breathes.
Shit, it’s easy to impress a twenty-year-old.
“Anywhere,” I say.
To be fair, there are some places in the city I can’t get into on a day’s notice. Not many, but a few. I’ll have to hope she doesn’t pick one of them.
Lori ends up picking WD 50, which is an upscale restaurant on the Lower East Side. It’s not an easy place to get a table at, but I make a few calls, and I’m in. It’s all about knowing the right people.
The parking is rough on the Lower East Side, so I get my driver to take us there. I pick Lori up in front of her building, where she looks like she’s been waiting for hours, even though I’m on time. She’s wearing a short tan dress that’s so close to the color of her skin that it makes her appear nude. If I could get a hard-on from looking at a girl, I’d have one right now. But I can’t, so I don’t.
Lori waves excitedly at me and skips over to the limo. There are times when Lori seems much older than twenty, and other times when she seems like she’s eight. Now is a prepubescent moment. She leaps into the car before the driver can get out and hold the door open for her. As her legs slide into the seat, I see that…
“You’re not wearing underwear,” I note.
She grins at me. “Well, I don’t want a VPL.”
“VPL?”
“Visible panty line.” She tugs on the hem of her dress and looks at me curiously. “Um…”
I raise my eyebrows at her.
“Where’s your…” She furrows her brow. “You know.”
At first, I can’t figure out what the hell she’s talking about. Then it hits me. “My chair is in the trunk.”
“Oh!” She giggles. “I was wondering what you were going to do.”
Christ, this girl is way too young. Why am I doing this to myself? Lori isn’t going to help me forget about Jessie. This isn’t going to evolve into a meaningful adult relationship.
Still. She’s very sexy. And she’s not wearing underwear.
WD 50 doesn’t have the look of a restaurant that takes months to get into—it’s in a brick building that looks like it ought to be condemned, and the steel shutters on the barber shop next door is covered in graffiti. This is the kind of neighborhood where you get mugged if you’re not careful—I’m glad I didn�
�t take my BMW. You wouldn’t even know this was WD 50 except for the tiny neon sign in the corner of the window.
Maybe I should tell the owner about a better location for his next place. I can give him a good rent.
The driver gets my wheelchair out of the trunk while Lori waits on the curb. For a moment, I think about how it was nice in the car, with my chair out of the way. It always complicates things. Even the girls who pretend like they don’t give a shit—they all give a shit.
I never been to WD 50 before and I always get anxious about places I never been to before. All sorts of issues can come up, even in spite of the laws. There might be a bunch of steps to get to the only entrance. The doorway might not be wide enough. The tables might be too low. Or too high. Even though I told them on the phone I’m in a wheelchair, the table they give us might be all the way in the back, where I have to push my way past seats positioned inches apart.
It’s exhausting sometimes.
But none of that happens in WD 50. There are no steps to the front door, the doorway’s wide enough as long as I take my hands off the wheels and propel myself by holding onto the doorway, and we get a table right in the front where the seat is already taken away so I’ve got room to park my chair.
Lori immediately orders a glass of wine and I’m grateful they don’t card her because she’s not actually old enough to drink. I can’t remember the last time I dated a girl who wasn’t old enough to drink. Every person in the restaurant is probably looking at Lori in her skin-colored dress and me over a decade older and in a wheelchair, and thinking I’m Lori’s sugar daddy. And I am, I guess.
“This is so cool!” Lori chirps. “You know, my roommate’s boyfriend has been trying to get her in here for months. And he’s an I-banker.”
I shrug. “Not as well-connected as me.”
She grins at me. “She’s going to be so jealous. Seriously.”
Would she? Maybe not, if she knew who Lori had to fuck to get the table.
Lori studies the menu intently, a crease between her perfectly shaped eyebrows. “Nick?”
“Uh huh?”
“What’s foie gras?”
“It’s duck liver,” I tell her. “From a duck that was force fed to fatten it up.”
She crinkles her nose. “How do you force feed a duck?” Before I can answer, she says, “Oh, I know! You put the food on its bill!”
Ba-dum ching.
Lori looks down at the menu again. “Octopus? Ew! I don’t want to eat an octopus.”
Christ, she’s young. This dinner is making me feel like an old man taking his teenaged daughter out to dinner. “So don’t get octopus.”
She chews on her lip. “Caviar? Isn’t that, like, fish eggs?”
“Yes, it is.”
“So why is it so expensive? Don’t fish make, like, a million eggs? It should be really cheap!”
I force a smile. “True caviar is from a farmed sturgeon and they take about twenty years to reach adulthood and make eggs. So that’s why good caviar is so expensive.”
How the hell do I even know that? I probably heard it from some girl I was dating who dragged me to one of these places where I asked the same dumb questions that Lori is asking right now. I’m from Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. What the hell do I know from caviar? I sound like a pretentious prick. I’d take Ma’s meatballs over “true caviar” any day of the week.
Lori lowers her eyes. “You must think I’m a dumb kid.”
I shake my head. “Don’t worry about it.”
She puts her thin hands on the table, clasped into a fist. “I’m sorry. I’m just excited to be here with you. I… I really like you, Nick.”
Her brown eyes are big and earnest. I’m sure she means it on some level. She likes being at a fancy restaurant with me, where I’m going to pick up the exorbitant tab. She likes that I own the club where she works. She likes that I got her an audition for a modeling shoot for a magazine. What’s not to like about all that?
“I like you too,” I say.
Her eyes light up. “Really?”
“Really.”
“Really really?”
It takes all my self-restraint not to roll my eyes. “Really really.”
A big smile spreads across Lori’s heart-shaped face. “You know, all the girls at Tootsie’s are super jealous that we’re actually sort of dating.”
“Are they?” I ask disinterestedly as I take a sip from my water glass.
She nods her head. “Oh my God, yes. Especially after I told them you gave me the best orgasm of my life.”
I start coughing as the water goes down the wrong pipe. “Jesus Christ, that’s what you talk about?”
“Well, yeah.” Lori smiles again. “It’s true, after all.”
Don’t get me wrong—I’m not bothered hearing Lori’s telling everyone I gave her a great orgasm, if that’s true. I’m no dummy though. If she talks about that, what the hell else is she telling them? We’ve been together five times now and she knows more than a lot of other girls get to know. She’s knows I got issues getting it up, and I ‘fessed up about the pill I’d be taking to help things along. And things went okay, but not perfect. Last time we were together, I lost my hard-on right before penetration, and it took some work on her part to get it going again.
Christ, do all the waitresses at Tootsie’s know about that now?
I don’t want to think about it. But maybe I need to stop fucking our staff members. I wouldn’t do it, except who else am I going to meet?
Lori orders WD 50’s version of an “everything bagel.” It comes with smoked salmon threads and “crispy cream cheese,” which sounds disgusting but Lori loves it. I get the entrée that contains foie gras, even though force-feeding a duck sounds cruel to me. And Lori is mucho impressed when I hand the waitress my credit card without even opening the book with the check in it.
“You didn’t even look to see how much it costs!” she cries.
I shrug. We got two entrees and a few glasses of wine. What’s it going to cost? A million dollars? There’s nothing in the check that’s worth seeing or spending any time or energy thinking about. But I’m not surprised that the move impressed Lori, and maybe that’s why I did it.
Lori puts her hand on top of mine. “Do you want to go back to your place now?”
I could go home with Lori. It would be fun and it would be a release. It’s not like I got a girlfriend right now. But at the same time, I know I can’t do it. Lori’s a sweet girl, and for whatever reason, she seems to really like me. It’s wrong to keep fucking her and dating her when I don’t care about her at all.
It’s become obvious any attempts I’ve been making to get Jessie out of my skull aren’t working at all. I can’t stop thinking about that girl.
I’ve got to go see her.
Now.
Chapter 30
Nick
I go straight to Cleopatra’s. I’m going to miss Jessie’s entire performance, but hopefully I’ll catch her before she leaves. I’ve got to see her. I’ve got to tell her everything. That I love her and she can’t marry that other guy. I don’t want her to spend even one more night with him.
I’m so nervous, I can barely think straight.
When I get to the entrance, I ask the bouncer if he saw her leave yet. He says no, which is a relief. I didn’t miss her, although she’s probably on her way out.
I scan the club quickly when I come in and I don’t see her anywhere. That means she’s probably backstage, maybe in the dressing room. I head to the back, to the four steps to get to the backstage area.
Four steps—no railing. Four goddamn steps and I’m stuck. I bang my footplate against the first step hard enough that my legs jump.
I could see if I could grab the host or Alex to help me, but I don’t want to risk missing her. I can do this myself. Where there’s a will, there’s a way.
Carefully, I lower myself out of the chair onto the steps. This isn’t something I do a lot, but I’m capable of it. My therapi
sts in rehab taught me to deal with every kind of situation. The first time they told me to get up a bunch of steps, I said, “Are you fucking kidding me? I’m in a wheelchair.” But at some point, I’ve been grateful for everything they taught me.
I lift my butt onto each successive step and pull my legs up with me. On the third step, my left leg goes into spasm and it takes a second to calm it down. That’s the step where I grab my chair and pull it up so that it’s waiting for me at the top. Four steps isn’t so hard. The tricky thing is doing a whole flight.
Once I’m at the top step, I transfer back into my chair. I haven’t transferred off the floor in a while and it sets off a sharp pain in my shoulder, which takes a few seconds to subside. I’m thrilled to be at the top of the steps. Now I just gotta find Jessie.
I head to the dressing room, figuring that’s my best bet. The door is closed and I’m not the kind of creep who will bust in on a bunch of girls changing, so I knock and wait a minute for someone to answer. I adjust my tie and my legs, trying to look as good as I can manage.
But it isn’t Jessie who opens the door. It’s Alice—the singer Tony has been boning.
“Nick.” Her eyes widen when she sees me. Alice and I have flirted before, but I always think of her as Tony’s chick. I don’t mess around with her. “What are you doing here?”
“I…” I tug on my tie nervously. “I was looking for Jessie. She around?”
A smile plays on her lips. “Why do you want to know?”
What does Alice know about me and Jessie? I wonder if Jessie talks to her about me. What the hell does she say? “I need to speak with her.”
Alice lowers her voice several notches. “I think she’s hurt you missed her performance.”
She noticed I wasn’t there. That’s gotta mean something.
“Tell her I’m sorry,” I say. “Something came up.”
“Was that something named Lori?”
“No.” I shake my head. “Look, Alice, please just get her out here.”
My stomach flip-flops until Alice laughs. “Oh, don’t worry. She’s been calling you frantically for the last half hour. I don’t think I could stop her from talking to you.”
The Girl I Didn't Kill For (Jessie & Nick Book 2) Page 16
