"Wow." Erin's voice was flat, her mind traveling with Melody and Ben in a compact rental car between Tampa and some small, idyllic beach community in central Florida. She wouldn't put it past Melody to have an ulterior motive in planning this trip, altruistic as it seemed.
"Is Nate going, too? Why didn't she pick Nate to lead this project when you have so much on your plate already?"
When Ben spoke again, he sounded a little deflated, as if her question pierced his ego. "She told me she didn't want anybody else leading it but me." After a few seconds he laughed. "Or she could just still be pissed at Nate for the whole Adrianne thing."
He gave Erin a sidelong glance. Nate, a noted playboy, had gone out with Melody's sister for more than a year—which was a long relationship for Nate. But earlier this year he'd met another woman at a work seminar and dumped Adrianne by text. Erin knew from Ben who knew from Nate that Adrianne and Melody had been scoping out rings. And Adrianne had been shattered.
It was ballsy for Nate to go out with his boss's sister in the first place, Erin had thought. But then, it was classic Nate.
"It's a wonder she's not still pissed at you about Cat," Erin said, and then wished she could suck the words back in. Cat, or Catherine, formerly Melody's closest friend, was a subject she and Ben didn't broach often since if things hadn't taken the turn they did, Ben might have been married to Cat right now instead of Erin. They'd been living together in Cat's former house in University Park when Erin had finally acknowledged her own feelings for Ben.
Before he could answer, the toneless, simulated female voice of Ben's GPS system broke into their conversation. "In point-four miles, exit onto Griffin Street South." Erin was thankful for the interruption.
They spent the next few minutes finding their way to the correct street, the correct hotel, and then the correct parking garage. By the time they exited the car and took the elevator up to the hotel's mezzanine-level ballrooms, all thoughts of Cat and Adrianne and Nate and Melody had dissipated. Ben tucked her arm in his as they approached the door to the party, and a thrill shot up Erin's spine as she replayed his comment about walking in "with the sexiest woman at the party" on his arm.
It fizzled a few seconds after they entered the room, after Melody glided over to greet Ben—completely ignoring Erin—wearing not a boring corporate-issue dress but a slinky electric blue sheath that brought out her (bulgy, fish-like) blue eyes, cinched at the curves of her hips, and stretched tight across her flat stomach.
* * *
Nate tossed back his head and let out a loud guffaw. "You should have been there, Erin." He glanced over and treated her to one of his wide roguish smiles. She couldn't help but smile back—it was an automatic reaction to Nate. "I haven't seen my man Ben that lit up since we lived in the apartment on Malcolm."
"I was not drunk." Ben shifted uncomfortably in his chair, giving Erin's hand a quick squeeze under the table. In her peripheral vision, she saw him shake his head almost imperceptibly at Nate.
"What are we talking about?" Melody slid her willowy frame into an empty chair a few seats down from Erin's, beside Liang Chin, the scientist from Johns Hopkins, and far enough around the big, round table for Erin to have a clear view of her face.
Melody was fair-skinned with a complexion that was almost translucent, like that of a sallow china doll. Her straw-straight, flaxen hair was in a low, casual knot at the nape of her neck with spiky strands poking through the bun and several tendrils hanging loose to brush her shoulders. Her large, wide-set eyes were her most prominent feature by far—cornflower irises with a ring of ice around the pupils, and slightly bug-like, or fish-like, in their protuberance.
Liang shifted his position to welcome Melody, crossing his legs in her direction and smiling in a private, familiar way that caused Erin's eyebrows to lift. She knew he was married, but still she glanced down, past his plate of half-eaten hors d'oeuvres, to note the platinum wedding band on his ring finger. And then she saw with some alarm that Melody's hands, folded in front of her on the table, were entirely bling-free.
"We're talking about Ben tossing back the double malt scotches in St. Paul," Nate said with an easy laugh.
Erin returned Ben's hand squeeze, feeling him stiff and uncomfortable beside her. She took a quick peek at his face, noticing that his forehead was wrinkled in consternation. She knew he hated being talked about like this, being seen as anything less than professional in the presence of Liang, who he respected a great deal—that was clear every time he brought up the doctor's name.
"Come on, guys," Ben said. "It wasn't as bad as they're making it sound." He glanced at Erin, meanwhile rubbing the back of her hand in circles with his thumb. The gesture was too fast to be reassuring. "Nate's the one who got lit."
Nate laughed again. "Nah, I just had a normal Thursday night," he said, still chuckling. "You were more interesting because you've turned all straight. Old and married and boring now." He gave Erin a playful wink.
"Yes, and chock-full of newfound marital wisdom," Melody said in a smooth voice. "He spent hours talking me down after you went upstairs."
She looked at Nate as she said this, but then her cool eyes cut directly to Erin's face which was frozen in a mask of shock. Quickly, Erin composed herself and shot a wry smile at Nate.
"You guys should stop with the inside jokes," she said, tilting her head at him. "Some of us weren't there, remember? If it's the night I'm thinking of, I was holed up in a conference room, trying to wrench a thousand hours of video into some semblance of a story line with a bunch of wackos around me cracking jokes. Not too unlike you lot, actually." She returned Nate's wink. "Who knew scientists could be funny?" Beside her, Ben was still as stone.
"Oh, yes," Liang said, completely unaware of the tension crackling at the table between Erin and Ben, between Ben and Melody, between Erin and Melody, with Nate caught in the middle of it all. Nate wore a cat-ate-the-canary look that Erin had seen before when she'd held onto his arm as he confronted the mother of his ex-fiancée on the sidewalk in front of the church where his ex had just gotten married. He and Erin had crashed the wedding on a date—a friendly date, no more—in the early days of Erin's blog.
Nate seemed to know he'd said something he shouldn't, but from the befuddled look in his eyes, Erin was confident he didn't know what it was.
All of this happened in a split second, and in the meantime Liang continued, "I have been meaning to ask you, Erin. Tell me about your work. Ben says that you're on the staff of a reality show, YOLO. Is that the name?" He had an apology in his eyes. "I'm sorry. I'm not very familiar with what's on television. We—how do you say it?—cut the cord? We don't watch much TV in our house now that the girls are getting older. My wife is a stickler with the electronics and devices." Erin knew from Ben that Liang and his wife had four-year-old twin daughters.
She squeezed Ben's hand again—to reassure him, admonish him, or simply wake him up, she wasn't sure. He seemed to slowly shake himself out of his trance, shifting in his chair and gripping her hand more tightly between his fingers. His palm was warm and sweating.
Erin glanced at Melody before she answered, seeing that she was no longer looking at her but staring down into her champagne glass with a smug, satisfied look on her fishy face.
"No apology needed," Erin said, smiling warmly at Liang and pushing forward into a conversation about her work, glad for the distraction from Melody and her manipulations. What was she trying to pull? And why was Ben so jumpy about it?
Erin described the show's concept to Liang, spending extra minutes indulging in descriptions of her more colorful co-workers. She answered Liang's questions and then turned the talk to the therapy trials, wanting the focus to shift from her and Ben. This got the others talking, all except Melody who seemed to feel her work at the table was done. She excused herself, and her chair was taken by a man Erin hadn't met, a rep from the Minnesota manufacturing company. Soon the table was full, and the conversation didn't require her participation.
There was music in the room, a jazz quartet playing in one corner—big pharma pulling out all the stops, as Erin had come to expect from these events—but nobody was paying attention to the band. Certainly no one in their party of thirty or so was on the parquet rectangle of a dance floor.
Erin tugged at Ben's hand. He wasn't taking part in the conversation either except to answer direct questions, and she could feel the rigid sullenness that draped over him like a damp blanket, his reluctance to face the questions Erin knew he knew she had for him.
"C'mon. Let's dance," she whispered into his ear.
At this he seemed to wake up. "Dance?" He looked at her, his brow furrowed, and then at the empty dance floor. "This isn't really a dancing kind of party." His muscles were rigid again.
"Live a little." She let her breath trail into his ear, onto his neck. Forgiving him just a little with the gesture, though inside she was terrified by whatever it was he was hiding.
He stared at her for a long moment and then pushed back in his chair, moving awkwardly to his feet. "My wife wants to dance," he said by way of explanation to Liang and Nate, who were the only two people at the table paying them any attention. Ben shrugged and took Erin's hand.
Liang laughed. "We do what the wife wants to do." His eyes twinkled at Erin. She really liked this quiet, brilliant man she'd heard Ben speak of so many times, always with a respect that bordered on reverence. She saw now why he inspired this reaction.
Nate rolled his eyes. "Whipped."
Now that he was on his feet, Ben thawed by slow, measured degrees. He almost seemed like himself as he made a sweeping gesture with his arm toward the dance floor. It was empty apart from a group of five or six people who had migrated onto one corner, two of them researchers Erin had met from Ben's lab, the others strangers who must have been employees of Lanakin, the pharmaceutical manufacturer.
The group wasn't dancing, merely standing at the edges of the dance floor, chatting with cocktails and wine glasses in hand.
"Are you really making me do this?"
Ben didn't seem annoyed but more relieved as they moved to the center of the floor. He wrapped his arms around Erin, lifting the hand he still held and pressing it between their bodies.
His lips curved into a small, lopsided smile.
"Always starting the party," he said, shaking his head at her with a sort of awed affection. "You hardly know the people here, and still you're the most comfortable person in the room."
As if to prove his statement true, another couple edged onto the dance floor three or four yards away. The musicians morphed into a different melody that was more up-tempo, as if they were thrilled someone had finally noticed they were there.
Erin swept the room with her gaze, not finding Melody. She hoped maybe she'd gone home, though she doubted she was that lucky.
They danced in silence for several minutes, long enough for the band to change tempo once again. By now a third couple had joined them on the floor, and two or three women, all holding wine glasses, swayed together in a corner.
The atmosphere of the gathering had shifted subtly…becoming less stiff and phony and businesslike, a little looser. Erin's mind whirled at a faster pace than the music.
After several minutes of dancing in silence, she looked up at Ben.
"Melody was talking about the trip to Minneapolis," she said, a simple statement of fact.
Ben's posture didn't change, didn't stiffen, and that observation reassured her by a tiny degree. "Yes." He didn't elaborate.
Erin mulled this over, swaying with him in slow circles to the light, pleasant rhythm of the jazz drum. "Your most recent trip to Minneapolis. She was talking about the night you spent in the hotel. But you called me that night. You ordered room service, and you said you were going to bed."
She recalled now that what she'd told Liang, Nate, and Melody at the table earlier had been wrong. She hadn't been in the writers' room that night. It was the night she'd crashed on the living room sofa in her condo, the night she'd eaten ramen while on the phone with Ben, reassured that he was alone in his hotel room, Melody already on a flight back home.
She looked up at him again. "You lied to me."
"I did tell you I was going to bed. I wasn't lying." He seemed on the verge of saying more, but Erin stopped him by pulling up on their interlaced hands, lifting one finger to shush him.
"I don't want to talk about it here," she said, resting her cheek against his shoulder and not breaking time with the music. "I just want to dance with you." She mumbled the words into his lapel.
He turned her slightly, giving her a view of the main doors to the ballroom, about thirty feet away. As she watched, Melody reentered the room alone, walking straight to the open bar in the corner and coming away with another flute glass of champagne. Her eyes skimmed the room until they landed on Ben and Erin, and she glanced quickly away. Erin watched as she continued scanning the crowd, seeking a conversation to crash or a body to sit or stand beside.
She looked very alone.
Erin's thoughts spun themselves into a convex, a cyclone that made comprehending them impossible. It was as if her head were filled with static, the dull roar at the center of a storm. She concentrated outside of herself on the complicated patterns of the music—the staccato drum beat, the alternately sweet and melancholy story the pianist's fingers told as they glided over the keys.
She held tightly to Ben, afraid to let go of the music, to let even the slightest of her fears break through the storm in her head. She'd come home for Ben's protection, for the strong, solid reassurance of his arms in the face of Leo's offense, his overstepping of lines, and his disregarding of vows.
She'd come home afraid Ben would fault her for not recognizing Leo's interest, for not doing more to discourage him.
And instead she learned that for weeks Ben had been lying to her. Lying to her about Melody of all people. Her nemesis—hers, not Ben's. Melody wasn't a threat because she coaxed Erin's husband into working ever longer hours, because she was ambitious, and demanding in boardrooms, and aggressive in her management approach.
No, she was a much, much worse kind of threat because her ambition was for Ben.
Tonight she'd dragged them all into a game where Ben was the prize, and Erin's biggest fear was that, with her work and Ben's drawing them further and further apart—soon to separate coasts—Melody might win.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Broken Promises
September 12, later that night
Erin was sullen on the car ride home.
Though the party was still swinging when they left, everybody in high spirits from the progress of the therapy trial and the wine and liquor that was flowing freely from the bar in the corner, Ben had quietly said his good-byes to Liang, Nate, a few others Erin didn't know, and they'd slipped out the main doors of the ballroom.
He hadn't said good-bye to Melody. In fact, he'd cut Nate off mid-sentence when Melody had started walking toward them and hustled Erin away. When that happened, a sharp pain hit Erin deep in her stomach. Was he afraid Melody was going to say something even more damning? If so, what was it exactly that he didn't want Erin to hear? What had happened that night in Minnesota?
They were off the interstate and driving on city streets less than five minutes from home when Ben finally broke the silence.
"I know you're pissed at me. You have every right to be."
Erin was looking out the side window and didn't answer. She didn't look at him.
"I'm sorry I didn't tell you I left the room after you called that night," he said. "But nothing happened with Melody. Nothing. I swear to you."
She processed this but still didn't say anything. At hearing Ben say Melody's name again, so casual, so familiar, a sharp pang ripped across her gut. It was as if the name was cutting into her insides. Hot tears sprang to her eyes.
Ben swallowed convulsively. Erin watched his reflection in the window, glancing over at her every few seconds. Was this the
action of the nonguilty? Why would he automatically assume she'd think something had happened with Melody if it hadn't? She squeezed her eyes shut, and a tear escaped and traced down her cheek.
He didn't say anything else, but the urgency of his driving spoke for him. Usually he drove methodically, prudently—a Dallasite through and through. Right now, though, he was speeding over the urban residential boulevards, taking stop signs at a slow roll and making the turn onto their street sharply enough that she had to brace her feet against the floor mat to keep from leaning toward him. Instead of easing onto the pronounced lip of their driveway, he bounced the car right over it, jolting Erin in her seat.
She looked at him, feeling truly terrified for the first time that he'd already cheated on her, that it wasn't just something he'd been thinking about or was afraid he was being accused of. Why else would he act like this?
Instead of driving into the garage, he pulled up beside her CRV in the driveway and stopped. He put the car in park and cut the engine before he met her gaze, and when he did she fell apart.
Suddenly she couldn't see him through her tears. Sobbing and feeling ridiculous about it, she fumbled to unclick her seat belt and reached for the door handle. Before she could open it, he reached across the car and put a hand on hers, stopping her.
"Erin." His voice was urgent. "What is wrong? What's the matter?"
She yanked her hand away, but a second later his arms had engulfed her. She hadn't even heard him undo his seat belt. The tears were still coming, pouring, to the point that it didn't make sense even to her. She was wheezing as she grappled to untangle her limbs from his.
After a few more seconds of struggle, she fell limp and let him hold her. He didn't say anything but planted small kisses over and over again on the top of her head. When her breathing began to level out and she was no longer crying uncontrollably, he pulled back and peered into her face with a frightened expression. "What is it? Why are you crying like this? I'm sorry. I'm so sorry I didn't tell you I left my room after we talked that night. I should have told you. I'm so sorry."
This Is 35 Page 16
