Adulation (40 page)

To my surprise, Josh had beaten me to my apartment after work, his car already sitting in the drivewaywhen I pulled up. When I entered, I found a luxurious orchid sitting on the table in the dining area, but nosign of Josh. I called out his name, and he emerged from the bathroom.

“Hey, Sun,” he said with a lilt in his voice. I had heard him use this voice at managers’ meetings. You just knew a pep talk was coming. From what I could tell, it rarely worked.

“Hey,” I replied. He kissed me hello, pulled me to him in an embrace, and held on a good tenseconds longer than usual, at least. I let go and looked at him, somewhat bewildered. “Everything OK?” Then I remembered Georgie’s diagnosis: breakup anxiety mode.

“I’m happy to see you,” he replied.

I smiled. “Me too.” My attention returned to the orchid. “That from you?” I asked.

He nodded. “You haven’t been keeping up with your Forty for Forty flowers item, so I decided togive it a little kick.”

I walked over to the orchid and took in its beauty, thanking him as I did.

“Did you wanna go out tonight? I’ve been putting in overtime at Georgie’s all week and had adouble shipment today, so I’m kind of spent.”

“We can stay in if you want,” he answered. It was hard to read whether he was genuinelyaccepting, or disappointed and politely acquiescing. He turned on the TV and flipped to the Yankees

game.

I showered and reemerged in a T-shirt and pajama bottoms. He pulled me to him on the couch and took in a whiff of my hair.

I filled him in on my latest sales numbers, progress on Georgie and Marcus’s wedding plans, and Theo’s news about Thailand and Haiti. “Have you given any thought about where you’d like to go on our trip?” I asked. “As exotic as Thailand might be, I was thinking about something a little lower maintenance, like Hawaii. I’ve never been there.”

“Actually, I was thinking more along the lines of Disney World. You, me, and the kids.”

I pulled back and dropped my jaw. “Wow.”

“Is that wow good, or wow are you fucking nuts?”

I found myself thinking a little of both.

“Just...wow,” I said. “I didn’t think we were up to that step yet. I mean, I had a wonderful time with your kids at the soccer game, but an entire vacation? Is that something you’ve ever done before?”

“Nope. And that’s not all, Sun. I’m thinking of buying a house here on Long Island. I spend most of my time here anyway, so why not?”

Some inexplicable force moved my body from its seated position to standing up and several paces back from Josh, as if escaping the reach of his grasp.

“A whole house?”

He laughed. “Why not? I’ve been divorced for a long time, almost as long as you. I have enough for a down payment. It’s better for the kids to have a backyard to play in—”

“One that they have to take a train to get to?” I interrupted.

He ignored me. “Plus you can have a room of your own to use as an office-slash-writing space.”

“Josh, slow down,” I said, making a pushing away gesture with my hands and feeling woozier by the minute. “Where do you fit into the picture? I mean, what if Whitford’s goes under? What happens to you?”

“Maybe I’ll manage your self-publishing venture. I’ve really enjoyed working with you on that. And the bigger it gets, the more help you’re going to need. Hell, maybe I’ll start my own e-book publishing company. There’s definitely a demand for it right now.”

“Whoa. Wait just a minute, Josh.”

“I thought we were on the same page, Sunny. You said we were OK. You said you were all in

now.”

“I am, but...just not so
fast
.”

A thick silence suddenly filled the room. I could practically see it, like a soot-colored fog. More frightening was when I saw it fill his eyes.

“I’m sorry,” he said, sounding embarrassed.

“No, I am,” I said. I sat beside him again. “Can we just watch the game? Then we can talk about it afterward.”

He let me snuggle up to him, but his body felt stiff, the muscles in his back and arms clenched. Derek Jeter hit a blooper midfield, one hit closer to his three thousandth, while the crowd cheered as if he had knocked it out of the park. Neither of us even flinched.

We watched two more innings in silence before Josh suddenly grabbed the remote and turned off the TV with a flick of the wrist.

“There’s something more between you two, isn’t there,” he said.

“What are you talking about?”

“You and Danny Masters. It’s not just a little celebrity crush.”

“I...” My mind drew a blank. What was I supposed to say?

“What happened that day you met? Was it just the wannabe thing or did something else take place? I swear, Sun, I’ve pored over that YouTube clip like it was the freaking Zapruder film and there’s no denying that he’s
 
looking
 
at you. Like he knows you and
 
wants
 
you.” He continued after a beat, as if impatient for me to respond. “And I watched you watch him on the Oscars with that
 
exact same look
.”

My first thought was,
 
He pored over the clip?
 
Something about this admission creeped me out a little. Yet once the superficial was out of the way, it sank in that Josh had noticed the very thing I had hoped and prayed all this time had been more than just a figment of my imagination: Danny Masters was
 
looking
 
at me. And I at him.
 
Something
 
was there. As if after all this time, there was finally confirmation. But how to explain it? How to put it into words?

“I don’t know how to say this without sounding like some obsessed, idiot fangirl, but there was a connection. It couldn’t have lasted more than five minutes, but it felt like in another place and another time, we were meant for each other.” My voice quavered slightly as I said the words—I had never said them out loud. “And ever since that day, I’ve felt like I belonged there instead of here.” This time I was the one who couldn’t wait for a reply. “I’m sorry, I know that’s crazy.”

Josh’s expression turned to ice. He quickly stood up and crossed the room, as if repulsed to be near me. Then he turned to face me again. “Your little
 
we have a connection
 
delusion is just that. It’s an excuse to not be in this relationship and to not be in the real world. For crying out loud, Sunny, when are you going to wake up? If Danny Masters
 
really wanted
 
you, he would’ve combed the ends of the earth looking for you. And if you
 
really wanted
 
him, you would’ve done the same. It’s a pipe dream, don’t you get it? Just like your
 
Leave It to Beaver
 
dream with Teddy was, and that stupid list of yours.”

As I watched his mouth in seeming slow motion, that thick cloud of silence had morphed into a funnel cloud of anger, whirling around the room, threatening to suck me into its center. He was bitter. Resentful. And although I couldn’t blame him, I didn’t need the classic Joshua Hamilton condescension

that was about to follow.

“I’m putting in my two weeks at Whitford’s,” I blurted.

He looked as if someone had just smacked him in order to shut him up. “When did you decide

this?”

“Just now.”

“Holy God, and you say
 
I’m
 
moving too fast?”

“You’ve been wanting me to quit for how long now?”

“That’s not the point, Sun. You can’t just quit on a whim. You need a plan first.”

“So I’ll make a plan,” I said, resolute.

“And will it include me? Or will it include your other boyfriend? Because I gotta tell ya, it’s pretty crowded in this apartment already.”

I don’t think I had ever desired to hit someone the way I desired to hit Joshua Hamilton at that moment.

I grabbed my peacoat, messenger bag, and keys.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“Theo’s,” I snapped.

“In your pajamas?”

“You’re right, Josh. This apartment is too crowded right now.”

“Forget it,” he said, and gathered his own belongings. “I’ll go.”

“Back to Jersey? At this time of night?”

“I could use the night air,” he said, and walked out without even saying good-bye.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Danny Masters

H
E WOULD’VE SCRIPTED
 
the breakup with Charlene differently, Danny thought the morning after she left.

The other breakups had been far more histrionic—shouting matches and hurling non-life-threatening objects at each other or the walls, insisting that this was
 
it
, they were done, finito, kaput,adios, be-sure-to-let-the-door-hit-you-in-the-ass-on-your-way-out. It had occurred to him after the factthat Charlene probably thought that’s why he’d taken her to the Hamptons to begin with—and hell, thatwould’ve pissed him off if he were in her shoes. And yet Danny saw the lack of dramatic effect as a signthat this one would stick.

He scripted the scene in his imagination as he would have wanted it to happen, could see thecamera angles and points of view. But no matter how many times he mentally revised the dialogue, it hadall the makings of a bad Lifetime Movie. Perhaps Ken had been right all along and romance wasn’t histhing. Still, the bad Lifetime version was better than the way the breakup had actually happened. In hisimagined breakup, he didn’t care that the writing was bad or the dialogue was forced and phony, that hadit  been actually filmed, audiences would be demanding he return his Oscar. In his imagined breakup, thebreakup he would’ve preferred, there was nothing but tranquility. It took place on a beach at sunset, forstarters. The sunset was overly symbolic and cliché, of course, yet hopeful; the sun would rise in themorning. Charlene was casting stones in the ocean, symbolic of letting go, tossing out the bad with thegood rather than an angry assault. Letting go of hostility, resentment. Perhaps he should join her, skippingstones. The ending was consensual, final, satisfying. Closure. Roll credits. What’s on next?

He was sick of confrontation, both in reality and in his writing.

Danny stayed in the Hamptons for one more day. He spent most of it driving around town and looking atproperties, walking the beach, meeting whoever else happened to be in town for lunch or dinner—anything to stay out of the house—and then flew back to LA, finishing Sunny’s first book on the plane andbeginning the second one. He liked her writing style, the rhythm of the words and the crafting of eachsentence, so deliberate and thoughtful. The plot was fun yet unpredictable, a combination of detailedhistory with tongue-in-cheek humor. Characters were quirky yet likable; antagonists were cunning andslippery. Like him, she had a flair for dialogue, and he could easily see this story on a wide screen, shoton location. He was casting roles in his mind as he read, trying out different actors for different scenes.