Dylan looked at him in surprise. She expected him to say that she was the lucky one. Grant seemed to read her face.
“He is, y’know?” he said. “Lucky, I mean. He may be rich and famous but you’re a gem too, and I hope you never forget it.”
Dylan smiled. “Thank you. That’s nice of you to say.”
“No, it’s not. It’s true. It can be heady stuff dating someone who has that kind of public recognition, I bet,” Grant said. “I’d bet it makes someone who’s like a regular person, let’s say, feel overwhelmed. Just don’t start feeling . . . honored or anything. You’re a great girl and he’s a smart man for having chosen you.”
Dylan looked down, embarrassed by all the praise.
“And I didn’t mean to call you a ‘girl’ by the way,” Grant said. “You’re a great woman, I should have said.”
Dylan laughed. “No offense taken.”
For a moment, they looked at each other and there was a sense that they had perhaps broken down the barrier between boss and employee a little too much. Grant slapped a hand on the table.
“Anyway,” he said. “I actually was getting some work done. And I bet you were too, so I’m going to get back to it. And don’t worry—with the exception of my wife, who I could never keep a secret from anyway—I will not breathe a word about this to anyone until and unless you do yourself.”
“Thank you,” Dylan said. “I appreciate it.”
“And even though I’m a Yankees fan myself, I wouldn’t be opposed to some signed memorabilia once the season gets underway.”
He winked at her as he left the room.
Dylan finished her coffee and returned to her office, feeling buoyed by her conversation with Grant. His advice that she not start to feel “honored” by Mark’s choosing her was so astute it was almost as though he’d opened a little window on her forehead and peeked into her psyche. Not a day went by that she didn’t wonder how and why Mark chose her; what it was that he saw in her that she didn’t see in herself.
Her cell phone rang and she looked at the number, smiling.
“Hey,” she said. “I was just thinking about you.”
“Good things?” he asked.
“Always.”
“So Dylan,” he began. And somehow she knew that at the end of that beginning would not be good news. “Something’s come up. And I need to be away tonight.”
She mulled that over for a moment. It was an interesting sentence, because it told her absolutely nothing, and that was not at all like him.
“You there?” he asked.
“Yeah, I’m here.”
“It’s just something I have take care of before camp,” he continued. “I’ll be back tomorrow night.”
“Will you be home when I get back later?” she asked. “Or will you have left by then?”
“I’ll probably have left . . . I have to fly out.”
“The airport reopened?”
“A couple hours ago. This was something planned before the storm and now that everything’s getting back to normal, I can go take care of it.”
A part of her wanted to interrogate him, but she shoved the urge back down. That was a throwback from other relationships, other men who had been less trustworthy. If their little tiff about Patricia had proven anything, it was that she had to leave her old baggage behind in this new relationship or risk losing him.
“Okay,” she said finally. “So I’ll see you tomorrow night then. Any idea what time?”
“As early as I can. I’m guessing flights are still all screwed up. But I’ll call you tonight, okay?”
“Okay.”
“See you soon. I love you.”
There was an awkward pause while he waited for her to return the endearment.
“Okay,” she said finally. “’Bye.”
When the connection was broken, Dylan closed her eyes and took a deep breath.
8
“So what is it?” Ava asked her, as they walked down Fifth Avenue. “What’s stopping you from saying it?”
“I don’t know,” Dylan said. “I just . . . I freeze.”
“Well do you love him?”
As they dodged a particularly large and grimy pile of snow, Ava looped her arm through Dylan’s.
They were heading out for Indian food, liberated from their respective apartments now that the snow had stopped falling and the plows had done their work.
“Yes. And every time he says it and I say nothing, I wonder if he thinks I don’t.”
“Of course that’s what he thinks,” Ava said unhelpfully. “Remember when we used to joke about that? How we’d say to some guy, ‘I love you’ and he’d go, ‘thank you’? You don’t even say that much.”
“But he has to know that I do.”
“Oh really, why does he have to know?” Ava pressed.
“Because I show him. Because I moved in with him. Because . . .”
“And he does all the same things and yet you still called me the day after he said it and asked whether I thought he really meant it,” Ava pointed out. “You really have to get over this pathological thing where you think you’re unlovable.”
“I don’t think that,” Dylan said, shaking her head.
Ava looked at her skeptically. “I blame your mother. My mother, as messed up as she was, at least hugged me and told me she loved me. Your Mom? I don’t even remember her smiling at you when we were kids.”
“Let’s not get into that old discussion again, please,” Dylan groaned.
“I know you don’t like to talk about it, but if it’s affecting your relationship with Mark, maybe you need to work through this, y’know?”
“It’s not like I never told a guy I loved him before.”
“Maybe you were able to tell those other guys before because you didn’t really love them,” Ava shrugged. “Maybe you were able to tell them because then it was just words.”
“Could we please just have a nice dinner and leave the psychoanalysis for some other time?” “Yes,” Ava said. “Because I have something exciting to tell you.”
Ava’s exciting news, told as they were being seated in Tandoori Palace, was that she was involved with someone new. A newspaper reporter she’d exchanged email with for work for the past year had asked her out for a drink and they’d hit it off. But there was one minor catch.
“So he’s still legally married,” Ava said, and when Dylan shot her a look, held up a hand.”I know what that sounds like. But it’s not like that. They’ve been separated for over a year.”
“Yeah?” Dylan asked taking a sip of water. “And they’re not divorced why?”
“Property settlement issues,” Ava said with a wave of the hand, as though it was inconsequential.
Dylan let her shoulders sag. “Ava. This just sounds like a recipe for drama to me. Why do you keep picking these men? Staying with Jacob would have been better.”
“Yeah, Jacob who was still so immature he broke up with me before every holiday to avoid giving me a gift? Right. Jacob is a boy. Max is a man.”
“Yes. A married man.”
Ava held up the menu. “Let’s order. I’m not going to let you rain on my parade.”
Dylan rolled her eyes and began looking over the menu. Jesus, they were both a mess. She had the perfect man who she would probably wind up driving away and Ava had the crappy men she seemed unable to let go of.
They ate way too much and drank more wine that was advisable, and laughed and talked until it was late. Then they walked back out into the New York night, where the sidewalks had begun to come alive once again. Couples walked hand in hand, and groups of people ventured out, stopping at the corner bodegas and looking in store windows, elated to be outside once again after several bleak days of relentless snow.
Dylan and Ava stopped for Krispy Kreme donuts and large cups of coffee before making their way back to Ava’s place where Dylan had decided to spend the night. No point rushing home if Mark wasn’t there and she and Ava hadn’t spent n
early enough time together since the holidays.
“We’ll be up all night,” Ava said as they got in. “With all this coffee and sugar.”
“So I’ll tell you all about Mark’s cute cousins in the DR,” Dylan offered. “It was like a freakin’ Chippendales show when they were hanging out by the pool . . .”
Ava groaned. “Oh, don’t tell me that.”
Dylan laughed and dumped her bag, fishing out her cell phone to turn it off. Since she didn’t have a charger, it was probably better to conserve battery strength until she got home.
“Oops,” she glanced at the console. “I missed a bunch of calls.”
She scrolled through and as expected, they were all from Mark. The last call he’d made was just past eleven-thirty.
“Call him back, let him know you didn’t slip on a patch of ice and crack your skull,” Ava said sipping her coffee.
“I didn’t say it was Mark who called,” Dylan mumbled.
“Who else would it be?” Ava said reaching for a donut. “The only other person who calls you that excessively is me.”
Dylan rolled her eyes and took the phone with her as she sat on Ava’s futon to remove her boots. Mark answered right away and Dylan lay back on the futon, anticipating a fairly long conversation. It had been quite some time since she’d been away from him overnight she now realized.
“Hey,” he said. “Where are you? I’ve been calling all night.”
“I’m with Ava,” she said.
“I’ve been calling the condo and your phone. I had no idea where you were.”
So that makes two of us, Dylan thought. Because I have no idea where you are either.
“We went out to dinner and hung out for a little while. I guess I didn’t hear the phone in my bag,” Dylan explained.
“Okay. Well you should check in every once in awhile,” he said. “I almost asked one of my brothers to go by and see if you were alright.”
“No need. I’m fine. I’ll probably stay with Ava tonight.”
“You probably will, or you will?”
“I will. So don’t send out any search parties.”
Mark laughed. “Okay, so I’m being stupid. But there’s power outages all over the city and I’m a plane ride away . . .”
“I’m fine. Apart from a little too much to drink at dinner and being hopped up on coffee, totally fine,” Dylan said. She curled up on her side, the phone pressed against her ear.
“I’ll be back tomorrow. It’s looking like I might get an early flight, so I should be home before seven, I think.”
“Okay.”
There was a brief silence and then Mark’s voice again. “I have to go. See you tomorrow night, okay?”
Dylan held the phone away from her ear and looked at it in disbelief. That was it?
“Mark?”
“Yeah?”
If she could make herself say the words, now would be the perfect time. He was safely out of sight, faceless on the other end of the line. And she had no idea where he was or what he was doing. Telling him she loved him right now would be the perfect way to ensure that whatever he was doing, wherever he was, he would think about her when he hung up.
But she couldn’t do it.
“You have a good night.”
When the connection was broken, she turned over onto her back to the sight of Ava watching her from the kitchen, chewing thoughtfully on a mouthful of donut. She raised her eyebrows at Dylan.
“Couldn’t do it, huh?”
“Shut up,” Dylan said.
She went to sit next to Ava and took a sip of her coffee, reaching into the Krispy Kreme box for a donut.
“And also, since you’ve been obsessing about where he went, why didn’t you just go ahead and ask him where he was?” Ava said, her mouth full. “You know he would have told you.”
Dylan paused for a moment. “He probably would have.”
“So why didn’t you ask?”
“I’m working on the trust thing.”
Ava nodded. “Got it,” she said, sounding as though she didn’t get it at all.
It was quite one thing to be understanding and mature about Mark’s inexplicable caginess when she was at Ava’s but it was quite another once she got back to the empty apartment. Dylan had gone in to the office once again because even though it was likely to be deserted, there was very little for her to do at home other than clean or watch television. This time Grant wasn’t in so she’d spent much of the day alone, digging herself out from the pile of paperwork that she’d allowed to languish for way too long. By the time she left, it was dark out, and she felt inexplicably lonely as she walked toward the subway. Ugly piles of grey snow stacked up at every intersection depressed her, and she pulled her coat closer, trying to occupy her mind with something other than questions about where Mark might be.
Ever since she was a teenager, from the moment she’d first started dating, Dylan knew she was prone to get ahead of herself where relationships were concerned. She was the girl who practically ceased to exist when she had a boyfriend. Everything became about him. Friends, schoolwork, even Ava took second fiddle to the guy of the moment.
It was the thing about herself she hated most, the fact that she reeked of desperation when she was in a relationship. She was always the one to say ‘I love you’ first; the one to force ‘the talk’ about being exclusive. When she met Mark, she had been single for the longest time in her life since she was sixteen and was just beginning to get the hang of it. For the first time that she could remember, she felt okay being alone. And then he had to show up and overwhelm her with attention. She felt like a junkie who’d been off her drug for a long time, who was just beginning to feel comfortable in sobriety when someone came along with a much more potent intoxicant than she could even have believed possible.
Something about the timing felt off. She was supposed to be thinking about law school and about figuring out who she was going to be for the next period of her life. Instead she was back where she’d always been, hanging her happiness almost completely on what someone else did or didn’t do. Even as she pushed her way through the turnstile and waited on the subway platform, she tried to think of what a “normal” girlfriend would be doing.
She stopped at Whole Foods and bought wine, Cornish hens, wild rice and asparagus spears for dinner and when she got to the apartment immediately got to the task of cooking and getting everything cleaned up. Afterwards, she changed into workout gear and walked over to the gym a few blocks away. Putting on her iPod, she ran on the treadmill hard and fast, until she thought her lungs would burst. She ran for almost forty-five minutes without noticing. When the treadmill slowed, she was almost surprised, and when it stopped she jumped off and bent over at the waist, hands on her knees.
A hand on her back caused her to look up. She pulled her ear buds out and looked up. It was one of the trainers, looking a little concerned.
“You went pretty hard there,” he said. “You okay?”
“Perfect,” Dylan said.
She did feel better actually. Instead of taking a shower, she ran back to the apartment and as she rode up in the elevator felt energized and empowered. Working out had always been her therapy. She almost always felt better afterward and this time was no different. This time it had definitely served the intended purpose.
As soon as she opened the door, the first thing she noticed was the bag by the door.
“Hey.” Mark came out of the bedroom, bare-chested and wearing faded jeans.
“How was your trip?” Dylan asked, keeping her voice airy.
“Good.” Mark grabbed her by the waist and kissed her. “How was your workout?”
“I cooked for you,” she said pulling out of his arms. It was uncomfortable to be held while she was this sweaty, even if he didn’t seem to care.
“I saw. I didn’t want to eat without you, but I’m starving.”
“I’ll only be a moment. I’ll shower while you set the table?”
“Sure
.”
Dylan washed up quickly and pulled on one of Mark’s white undershirts that fell almost to her knees. She joined him in the kitchen where he had set their places at the center-island and even lit candles. Watching him move around, getting the food together and opening wine, Dylan felt her curiosity peak once again. That and a slender reed of suspicion.
“I’ll get the hens,” she said, to occupy herself.
When she opened the oven, it was warmer than expected. Her shoulders sagged. She’d left the oven on.
“I overcooked them,” she said quietly.
Mark came over and crouched next to her. Grabbing a nearby oven mitt, he pulled the dish out of the oven and together they looked at the Cornish hens.
“They’re not burned,” he said. “We can still eat them.”
“They’re dry,” Dylan said, standing. “They’ll taste like crap.”
“No they won’t. C’mon, let’s eat. I’m dying here.”
Dylan sat at her place, trying to restore the earlier sense of confidence her workout had produced. Mark put a hen on each of their plates and served helpings of the garlic asparagus and wild rice, sitting down and bowing his head for a few moments to say a silent prayer as he did before every meal.
“Smells good,” he said encouragingly as he cut down the center of his hen.
“Dylan picked up her own utensils and ate a forkful of the rice.
It was pretty good, if she did say so herself. She sipped her wine and tried the asparagus. That was good too.
“What the hell . . ?” Mark was pulling something out of the cavity of his bird and holding it up with two fingers.
It was the plastic sac that contained the neck, gizzard, heart and liver of the hen. Dylan looked at it in horror. She had forgotten to remove it. She’d washed the birds, how was it that she’d overlooked . . .
Then Mark was laughing; a full-throated belly-laugh, head thrown back. He dropped the plastic sac next to his plate and shook his head. Just as it seemed he had regained his composure, he began laughing again.
Dylan felt her face grow hot with embarrassment. She couldn’t even cook a simple meal without it turning into a fiasco. And before she could stop it, she was crying, the tears spilling down her cheeks and her face crumpling. It took Mark a moment to realize but when he did, he stopped laughing immediately and in an instant was up and pulling her into his arms.
The Seduction of Dylan Acosta Page 13
