“Don’t leave, Cole. Wait!”
But Cole loped with impossibly long strides down the aisle. She panicked. She couldn’t let him leave. He’d go looking for information, and the first person he’d call would be Wendy.
“You,” she said, swiveling on Trey, “you don’t leave. This is not what you think.”
“Right.”
“He could ruin everything. Don’t you get it?” Her jaw was tight with frustration. “He will tell your sister.”
Trey looked at her out of hooded eyes, a look that made her blood run cold, because although they were still the same whiskey colored eyes that had gazed upon her with passion only minutes earlier, now they gleamed, impenetrable.
“Whatever. Do what you gotta do.” He swaggered into her cubicle and sprawled on her chair. “I’ll just make friends with Min Jee here.”
“Honey,” Min Jee said, “it’s me who’s going to ask the questions. I had no idea Kelly had so much going on.”
Kelly turned away, ignoring them both. Trey was angry, but he hadn’t stormed away, so he must believe her at some level. She would deal with him later. On swift feet, she headed toward the elevator banks, avoiding both Lee’s curious look and the avid stares of the guys working on the routers, who were likely to dislocate a vertebra if they strained any harder to see what was going on. She met Cole at the elevator bank, where he pressed the button with increasing annoyance.
“Didn’t realize I was putting such a cramp in your style, Kelly. I’ll be out of your apartment tonight.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“Nothing has changed, has it?” He glared at the lights above the elevator door, rising too slowly for his taste. “You can write code that’ll make this company millions of dollars, but you wouldn’t know an asshole if he came with a blinking label.”
“Promise me you won’t say anything.”
“Right. I get it. Nobody knows. I know Wendy doesn’t.” He took one turn, and then, as Min Jee would say, he was right up in her grille. “Because if Wendy knew, she’d get the girls together and chap your ass for falling for her asshole brother again.”
Kelly tried very hard to suppress the fury that rose up within her. “You,” she said softly, “don’t know anything about it.”
“I know that guy fucked you before. And it was your first time. And then he wrote all about it, in lurid, full-color detail.”
Yes, folks, the rug matches the curtains.
She flinched. “That was fifteen years ago.”
“People don’t change. He’s going to hurt you again. It’s just a matter of time.”
The elevator rang, and the doors slid open. Cole made a move to step in, but paused as two burly men in blue swaggered out, one talking into a mouthpiece on his collar.
With a chilling sangfroid she didn’t even know she possessed, Kelly’s arm shot up. “Over there. Two guys. Human resources.”
The men nodded and strolled off. Cole slipped into the empty elevator.
“Wait.” She slapped her hand on the frame to stop it from closing and then wedged her foot against the slider. “I made you a promise, Cole. I haven’t said a word to the girls about you—your job, your apartment, anything. Now you have to make a promise to me.”
“I’m not making you any promises.”
“Wendy deserves to hear this from me.”
He shot a glance at her. A strange, bruised, disbelieving glance that cut her to the bone. “For Wendy’s sake, I’ll hold. But I’m not going to hide this from everyone forever.”
Kelly stepped back and the elevator slid shut. She watched the numbers drop while she wondered how she’d gotten herself into this situation. How she’d gotten herself tangled up in so many lies.
She had to get out of this office. She swiveled to return to her cubicle only to be greeted by the sight of a dozen heads shooting down, like some geek Whac-A-Mole game.
And this time when she advanced down the aisle, it was a long, hard walk of shame, and she made a point of keeping her chin high but her gaze averted. She arrived at her own desk to find Trey in full flirt mode, deep in conversation with a giggling Min Jee.
She must have looked utterly wrecked because the cocky smile he’d turned to her froze and then faded. He shifted his weight so he wasn’t leaning so close to her office mate.
“We need to get out of here,” she said, “before the security brutes figure out it’s me causing all the trouble.”
“Let’s go.”
He stood up, sidled by her, and headed down the aisle. She caught his hand and tugged him to a stop. Her throat felt like sandpaper, and her head was beginning to throb. She wove her fingers with his and stepped very close.
She spoke quietly to the knot of his tie. “Are you still interested in lunch?”
He made her wait through long, agonizing moments.
“Cover for her, Min Jee. She’s going to be very late.”
Kelly leaned back in the upholstered chair, naked under the terrycloth robe emblazoned with the logo of the hotel. She stared out the window, watching the line of yellow cabs zoom down the canyon of lower Broadway. She still felt languorous from a vigorous bout of sex with Trey, who was at the door to the hotel room right now signing for room service.
All in all, she thought, her heart pinching, a fancy hotel suite in a snobby Manhattan hotel wasn’t a bad setting for the end of a relationship.
A tall glass of ice tea appeared before her. She followed bare arm to bare chest, to Trey’s grinning face.
“I figured you’d be thirsty.”
She took the glass and forced a smile. The sheets of the bed behind him were a knotted tangle, the pillows askew, and the comforter in a heap on the floor. Jealousy, she’d discovered, was a lusty bedfellow. For though she’d explained all the way to the hotel the somewhat edited reason for Cole’s presence in her apartment—and Trey with feigned casualness had conceded he believed her—he’d nonetheless jerked her into his arms the moment the door to the hotel room closed behind them.
It was a reflex, she told herself. A very primitive need on his part to stake his claim. To think of his lovemaking in any other way was just to make a romantic muddle of it, and the last thing she needed right now was a false sense of hope. She would keep her feet flat on the floor—brace them, like she did on the trawler in a rough sea—and not let her wavering emotions unsteady her from what she knew was best.
Trey slipped two silver-domed plates on the table, along with linen napkins, silver utensils, and tiny crystal salt and pepper shakers. Before he sat down, he took away the silver domes. On the china plate before her, fragrant and warm, lay a crusty panini sandwich. Apparently, arugula was a kind of lettuce.
She savored two bites before she set the sandwich back on her plate and watched him tuck into a steak.
“I am sorry.” She twirled the glass of ice tea in its puddle of condensation. “About the whole thing with Cole.”
He shrugged and waved his knife, cutting off the whole discussion.
“It is going to cause some complications,” she added.
His chewing slowed. “You said he was leaving your apartment.”
“Oh, he is.” She traced her plate’s rippled gold edging. “The guy can’t bear to look in my face anymore. In any case, that’s not the kind of complication I’m talking about.”
His shrug was a flex of the shoulders, and his attention stayed on his food. “You think he’s going to tell my sister.”
“I know he’s going to tell your sister.” She curled her freckled legs up on the cushioned chair. “Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow. He hasn’t spoken to her in a while. But eventually, he will.”
“So let him.”
“Just like that?” Over the past months, she had prided herself on learning to understand every flicker of Trey’s facial muscles. She’d made a study of it, forcing herself to develop that particular skill with this particular man. But she couldn’t read anything in his expression now, as he sa
t with his head down, his shock of hair just showing the first signs of thinning. “Trey, we’ve been lying to her for over three months.”
“Technically, I haven’t. She never asks who I’m seeing. She’s got her hands full with this wedding.”
“That’s an excuse.” Kelly knew Trey didn’t want any friction with his sister. He’d once confessed that Wendy was the only person in his family who’d even had an inkling of compassion for him since he’d been forced out of his position in that London bank. “You didn’t want to deal with the shit storm, either.”
“If she had asked me, I’d have told her flat out.” The knife flashed in her direction. “It’s you who wanted to keep this on the down low.”
Trey continued to cut his steak into bite-size pieces. It was certainly true that she’d suggested they keep the relationship a secret. If the girls knew, they would have called an intervention, and she wouldn’t have been able to explain to them why she’d forgiven Trey.
Because what he’d confessed to her at Wendy’s engagement party in January—blessedly alone in the light-bedecked winter pavilion—was a glimpse into the boy Trey once was, and an insight into the man he’d become.
“Kelly, here’s the thing a lot of women don’t know. To a young guy, a pretty girl is like a lioness in lipstick. If he approaches her right, she might give him a chance to get to know her. If he fumbles, or stutters, or says something asinine, she’ll cut him cold. Those pickup guys gave me confidence. I didn’t realize, until long after, that they asked way too much in return.”
Now she watched him eating across the table, while her gaze lingered on the red highlights gleaming in his hair. That night, his confession had seemed so heartfelt, his expression so vulnerable, and it had taken a great force of will to calmly reassure him that all was forgiven, and then, even more calmly, to walk away from him. Only when he pursued her six weeks later did she loosen her grip on her libido, and then her heart.
Now she had to prepare to leave him again, with as much dignity as a fisherman’s daughter could muster.
“Do you remember that brunch we shared a few months ago,” she murmured, running her fingers through her tumbled hair, “that dim sum place near my apartment?”
It was one of her favorite local finds—a tiny storefront Cantonese restaurant that served massive amounts of steamed dumplings and rice noodle rolls, along with bottomless pots of fragrant jasmine tea.
“I remember you originally offered me a breakfast of powdered milk, store-brand instant coffee, and frozen cans of orange juice.”
She flushed, remembering the look of horror as he perused the contents of her kitchen that first rainy March morning before suggesting in his most polite way that they go out for brunch.
“I’d have eaten anything after that.” Trey pointed a piece of steak at her. “And I believe I did—chicken feet, right?”
“They called them phoenix talons,” she confessed. “That waiter spoke English, you know. He just wanted to see the look on your face. He did that to me, too, the first time I showed up.”
“Yeah, I figured there was a reason every Chinaman in the room was grinning.”
“It wasn’t all bad.”
“Oh, no. Those buns with the bean paste—”
“Three orders, I remember.”
“Yeah, they were something.”
“And do you remember when we went bowling?”
Trey laughed into his napkin. “I think that was the first time I understood what it was like to be a minority.”
The two of them had been the palest people at the lanes off Times Square, a lively bowling alley that—despite all the new neon lighting, fancy fruit drinks, and shiny polished lanes—still exuded the smell of stale tobacco and cheap spilled beer, a particular blend that she always associated with the ten-pin bowling alleys of her youth.
She remembered teasing him about his reluctance to wear rented shoes. “If I remember correctly, I whooped your ass.”
“Oh yeah, I sucked. The rum shooters didn’t help.”
“You know,” she said, picking up her sandwich, “that might have been my favorite date of all.”
She bit into her panini, not really tasting it, sensing as she did his sudden stillness. His fork and knife clinked as he laid them on the plate, and she felt a little tremor inside her. It was going to take more strength than she thought to make sure this lovely affair ended with as much dignity as possible.
“What’s going on in that techie head of yours, Kelly Palazzo of the Gloucester Palazzos?”
“Come on, Trey.” She felt a swelling pressure in her throat. “We had a really good run of it, didn’t we?”
He looked at her as if she’d just sprouted wings. “Whoa. Whoa.”
“I don’t want to ruin all this.” She gestured to the hotel room with its down comforter and flat-screen TV and impossibly big bed, meaning so much more than the place. “I mean, it’s really been great, Trey. It’s been exciting and incredibly romantic, and you’ve just been…well, you’ve been wonderful. But I know you didn’t get into this expecting forever.”
“Hold on—wait a minute.”
“I understand you better than you know.” Her breath caught in her throat; it hitched against her will. “I know, from Wendy, that you rarely stay with a woman more than a few months—”
“Hey—”
“—and I don’t want to make things difficult. I told myself, way back in March, that if things got complicated—messy—well, I promised that we would just skip that part and go right to the end.”
His face mottled. “You’re breaking up with me.”
“I’m Kelly Palazzo.” She held up her hands, palms out. “I’m a working-class girl from the wrong part of Gloucester. The only reason I got into Vassar is because I hooked the admissions officer with the sob story in my essay—you know, about how my father’s living depended on the seasonal runs of whiting and how I nearly broke my mother’s budget insisting on bags of lemons so I could scrub the smell of fish off my skin every night.”
She could tell, by the way his eyes widened, that she was going too deep—into waters he’d never be able to fathom.
“Do you have any idea what it means, for a girl like me, to attract a guy like you? It’s fairy godmother stuff, Trey. I’m a freakin’ geek. After our little scene in the office today, my social cred went up, like, a trillion gigabytes. But midnight is coming, and the ball is over.” She leaned across the table and covered his hand with hers. “Let’s cut bait now, before everything gets complicated. That way, we’ll both leave with good memories.”
His thumb came up from under her hand to stroke her fingers. He fiddled with them while a line deepened between his brows. The sound of cab horns and squealing tires drifted up from the street.
“You’re always taking me by surprise, Kell.”
She shivered a bit at the sound of the nickname.
“I mean, if I didn’t know you better, I’d think you’d practiced all of that.” Hurt brown eyes, wide and wounded. “That you were playing me, somehow.”
“Trey, I wouldn’t know how to ‘play’ anyone.”
“You’re making it too easy.” He shifted his weight against the chair. “I mean, one word, and I’m cut loose entirely.”
“No anger, no hurt feelings.” Damn her eyes, prickling already. “And absolutely no regrets.”
How long could she do this? She focused on the wink of a gold fleck in his left eye, becoming more blurry as tears gathered. Then, to hide the tears, she dropped her gaze to the naked V of his chest, growing more and more blotchy under the influence of some internal struggle.
The silence stretched. Her heart swelled, choking her. She tried, very hard, to smile.
Trey tightened his grip on her hand and fixed her gaze across the silver, china, and linens. His face looked strange. There was no laughter in his brown eyes, no devil-may-care Wainwright looking for a quick and easy joke to slip them both out of the moment.
“You�
��re not like anyone else I’ve ever dated.” A muscle moved in his cheek. “The girls I’ve known have certain…expectations. You don’t. You take me as I am. It’s weird. And it’s really good.”
And for a moment, she felt like a very tiny, charged particle in a very quantum world—a world where you can know where you are or how fast you’re going—but never both at the same time.
“Kell,” he said. “I am not letting you go.”
chapter eight
Wendy leaned back against the stern pulpit of Parker’s forty-foot sailboat, shading her eyes against the sun winking between the jib and the mainsail. “Hey, Parker, the telltales on the jib are fluttering. You want me to trim it?”
“I got it.”
“I’m right here,” she said, picking up the handle by her feet. “I can crank the winch—”
“That’s my job.” Parker came out of the forward cabin clutching a glass of cranberry ice tea in one hand and a frosty microbrewery beer in the other. “We made a deal. Your only purpose today is to soak up some sun and give me an eyeful of that fine, blue bikini.”
Wendy took the drink out of his hand, hoping Parker didn’t notice the strain it took to make her smile reach her eyes. She handed him the handle for the winch and then slid down the pulpit to settle on the port bench.
She let her gaze linger on her fiancé. The sun blazed on his hair, bleaching more white streaks in the blond mop that flopped in barbershop perfection over his brow. That hank of hair had always begged for her fingers to run through it, even when he was a ten-year-old stealing her pencils at their private Montessori day school. Of course, he’d long grown out of the skinny brat phase, maturing into the athletic young man whose diffident, let’s-not-take-this-too-seriously attitude had gradually coaxed her out of the brooding celibacy of her post-Soho days. For a girl so battered by stormy seas, Parker’s arms had proven to be a peaceful harbor.
Yet now the sight of him, lean and sunburned, only pinched her heart. For though she’d carefully avoided the subject as Parker tacked out deeper into Long Island Sound, eventually, Wendy knew she’d have to bring up Birdie again.
One Good Friend Deserves Another Page 10
