Beautiful Stranger (14 page)

They made their way to the red balcony at the base of the tower and rested their hands on the railing. The Hudson River stretched out in front of them, the air coming off the water just cool enough for Logan to offer his coat, a gesture Anna gratefully accepted. Although the lighthouse was out of commission, the ambient light from the George Washington Bridge made the ripples in the water shine and wave.

“Once the bridge was built, they were going to tear down the lighthouse,” Anna recalled. “But children wrote to the government and got it saved.”

“Because of the book,” Logan added. “The little red lighthouse feels small and insignificant, and the great gray bridge tells the lighthouse how much it’s needed to guide ships along the river—”

“‘Because even if you are small, boys and girls,’” Anna began, quoting the man who read the book to them every year, “‘you’re still—’”

“‘Very important,’” Logan finished with her.

They ascended to the top of the lighthouse now, looking out at the Hudson River, and up at the great gray bridge. A full moon brought out the water’s purple hue; the rumble of traffic on the bridge overhead was like distant summer thunder.

“I love that you brought me here,” Anna said softly.

“Full disclosure—I considered and rejected about a hundred first-date options before coming up with Wo Hop and this. I have this bad habit of overthinking things. …”

Anna chuckled. “Me too. It’s like I have this running loop in my head, second-guessing myself, analyzing everything—”

“Until you just want to scream,” Logan concluded.

“Exactly. It’s exactly like that.”

They were the only ones on the red deck, gazing out at the water in companionable silence. Anna felt Logan put a light hand on her back. If felt normal, natural. But she couldn’t help thinking how a friendly touch could lead to a significant touch, how the touch could lead to a soft kiss and then a different kind of kiss. She stiffened.

“What?” he asked softly.

“Do you want to hear my mental loop, or should I cut to the chase?” Anna asked ruefully.

“Oh, give me the loop. It will make me feel so much better about my own.”

Anna hesitated. It was not in her nature to discuss her personal life. Back in New York, she’d been the only girl not to have a blog on MySpace. Other girls would call their friends and gossip endlessly about their latest crushes, but Anna was not one of those girls. There had been a few good lessons in the
This Is How We Do Things
Big Book. The chapter called “Public Is Public and Private Is Private” had always been one of her favorites. Besides, her friend Cyn had done enough oversharing for both of them; Anna had never minded being on the listening end.

“Well, first there’s a loop running about us. This … date, I guess.”

“What about it?”

“I wasn’t planning for it to be a date,” she admitted.

“It’s not a date. Or maybe it is. Or maybe we can figure that out later.” He reached down and picked up a pebble, then dropped it over the side of the lighthouse. It was so far down to the cold waters of the Hudson that Anna didn’t even hear it hit the water. “We can decide when we find that pebble again. How’s that?”

“Sounds good to me.”

“But somehow, I don’t think that’s the only loop,” Logan prompted. He leaned back against the circular windows of the lighthouse. “And I’m not in any hurry.”

She knew he was right. But to tell him about Ben now felt … odd. Her instinct was to change the subject. But then she realized: that was exactly what her mother would do. Anna decided to do the opposite.

“It goes something like this: I had a boyfriend in Los Angeles. A serious boyfriend. We had so many ups and downs and misunderstandings that I never felt sure of anything, and—”

She stopped abruptly, lest she get into oversharing territory that even her newfound resolve wouldn’t allow her to stomach. “Anyway, he broke up with me two days ago; it’s what prompted this trip to New York. And here I am with you, having a really great time. But the last thing I want to do is to pretend he—Ben—isn’t still in my heart and on my mind and … I’ll stop there.” She took a deep breath. “Did I utterly confuse you?”

Logan shook his head lightly. He didn’t look at all stressed or upset by her confession. “Not at all. What you just said made me think about my former girlfriend, actually. She just finished her freshman year at Haverford. We broke up at the start of the summer. It was just one of those things. I’m not so sure I’m over her, either.”

This made Anna sigh with relief. Though she couldn’t help wondering about Logan’s former girlfriend. What did she look like? Where was she from? How long had they been together? How was the—

No. She was not going there.

“So, then you
do
understand—”

“And that’s why we’ll leave it at that for now. Okay?”

“Okay,” Anna agreed. Though she was pleased, in some small way, that he didn’t have a girlfriend.

Happily, Logan changed the subject. “Are you planning on going to that thing at the Yale Club the night after next?”

Anna nodded. “That’s one of the reasons I came home. How do you know about it?”

“Ivy League planning. Yale, Harvard, Brown, and Dartmouth are all on the same nights, at their respective clubs. Want to go out someplace afterward? We could compare war stories. I’d ask you to bring Sam, but I just think she’d be totally bored.”

“You’re right. She would be. And I’d love to.”

Logan smiled. “You know, I remember one other thing about you and me and this lighthouse.”

Anna thought she remembered too. But she wasn’t sure if he had the same memory, until he leaned over and kissed her … on the right cheek.

“I did
that
.” A slow smile of remembrance crossed his face. “It took all my nerve. I thought maybe you’d punch me or stomp on my foot or run crying to Mrs. Posner.”

“But I didn’t run to the teacher,” Anna recalled. “I did
this
.”

She leaned forward and kissed him back. Not on the cheek.

A Hetero Guy in Fashion

“W
ow. This is … this is amazing.”

Cammie smiled knowingly as sixteen-year-old Champagne Jones gazed around the enormous downtown loft space a block from the Staples Center that the fashion designer Martin Rittenhouse had transformed into one of the most exclusive clothing design ateliers on the West Coast. Rittenhouse was a rising young designer, with an uncanny knack for creating clothes in a variety of genres, from high fashion to sportswear. His designs had been featured a couple of weeks before at an L.A. County Museum of Art show to benefit the New Visions organization, a foundation that assisted at-risk teenagers in the Los Angeles area.

Cammie, Anna, and Champagne had modeled in that show as part of some volunteer work they’d done. Champagne was one of the girls in the New Visions program, and her tale of a married-divorced-remarried-redivorced family structure sounded like that of lots of families Cammie knew. But two things were different about Champagne. One was that with her combination of classic, platinum blond, high-cheekboned beauty and darling, emerald-eyed, unpretentious sweetness, even Anna paled in comparison. The other thing was that Champagne was poor. Not middle-class. Not even lower-middle-class poor. Poor-poor. Cammie knew it wasn’t politically correct to even think in these terms, but facts were facts. If she was going to help Champagne in any way, the first thing that had to be done was to face facts.

Though Champagne was a good student, she had one goal in life, which she’d been all too eager to share with Cammie: She wanted to be a model. She certainly had the looks and the body type—long, coltlike legs and a lithe, slender body. What she didn’t have was height. Five-foot six did not a model make. Oh sure, Cammie had taught her how to do the necessary straight-line model walk in three-inch heels. The problem was that the five-foot-ten models were also wearing three-inch heels, meaning that stilettos still gave Champagne no advantage in the modeling world.

Cammie wasn’t sure why she wanted to help Champagne as much as she did;
altruism
was not a word usually associated with her. There was just something about the girl. Yes, she was smart. And yes, she was disadvantaged. But there were plenty of smart and disadvantaged girls in Los Angeles. Cammie had sparked to something else. Maybe it was the hunger in her eyes to
be
somebody, to be the best. That kind of hunger was something that Cammie understood. Didn’t she feel the need to be the hottest, most stylish girl in any room? And didn’t she usually succeed? There was a certain validation in that; that the world understood how special you really were.

It wasn’t that Cammie had ever pined for a future as a model’s manager, yet she had become one for Champagne. That she’d managed to get Martin Rittenhouse to create a new line of petite fashions for which her first client would be the print model was quite satisfying. It hadn’t occurred via any conventional route: it had taken Rittenhouse making a criminal mistake and Cammie essentially blackmailing him. But outsmarting the designer was another kind of validation for Cammie. She was definitely her father’s daughter.

She’d brought Champagne here on a dual-pronged mission. One—see how the new clothing line was coming along. Two—manipulate Rittenhouse into using his contacts to ensure that the guest list for the Bye, Bye Love opening would be star-studded with the highest-profile fashionistas.

There was a simple Los Angeles club calculus. Fashion designers brought their models. Models—as much as celebrities, maybe even more—brought paparazzi and hot, well-heeled guys. Cammie had the celebrity thing covered, both through herself and Sam. But a dozen big-name designers and at least as many big-name models would be better than an insurance policy. With the right DJ spinning the right music plus the right people in a new and utterly unique club, she and Ben couldn’t fail.

“So, what do all these people do?” Champagne asked Cammie. They stood just inside the entrance of Ritten-house’s third-floor-loft atelier. Directly in front of them, dozens of seamstresses worked furiously at a long line of sewing machines. Further back were other workers.

Cammie didn’t really feel like explaining. They were already a half-hour behind the schedule she’d mentally set for this little outing, because when she went to pick Champagne up, the girl had on a short, tight denim skirt and a cheap hot pink tank top, cosmetics spackled on her face, and her hair back-combed to make her look taller. She was trying to look “hot,” she explained.

Cammie had her scrub her face and put on the outfit she had purchased for her: casual Ralph Lauren black linen capris and a simple but well-fitted white T-shirt—and brushed the hairspray out of her hair. Real models, Cammie had advised, never wore makeup when making rounds. They dressed simply and let their natural beauty and shape shine. Trying too hard, she had told the enraptured girl, was the modeling kiss of death. Champagne hung on every word and swore never to make the same mistake again.

Now Cammie looked around; the loft space was a crowded, almost frenetic environment, with Eric Clapton’s
Timepieces
pounding over the sound system and Rittenhouse’s crew busy with their assigned jobs. She pointed to the left. “It’s organized chaos, I know. Over there are the fabric-cutters. Behind them are the sewers. He has measuring blocks and three-way mirrors in the center, and an area marked off like a fashion catwalk down the middle. Over to the right are his storage racks, and an office for paperwork.”

“Cammie! Champagne! Welcome to the center of everything!”

Martin’s familiar voice boomed out as he bounded across the glossy parquet floor to them. Cammie hadn’t seen him since the fashion show, and he looked very much as she remembered. Martin was a metrosexual’s metrosexual, built correctly for his medium height, with thick, glossy black hair, and not a thread misplaced or a wrinkle noticeable on the black Kim Jones rib-panel crew shirt and Zegna trousers that he wore. With him was a young man in his early twenties whom Cammie immediately nicknamed in her mind Mini-Martin. He was a younger, shorter, but no less meticulously put together version of Martin. They were even wearing variations on the exact same outfit.

“This is my nephew Seth,” Martin introduced Mini-Martin. “He’s here from Texas for a couple of weeks to learn the business from the inside.”

“I go to FIT in New York. I love clothes. Always did. Must be in the gene pool.” He smiled at Champagne and it was definitely a hetero grin, because Cammie simply knew these things. Hmmm. A hetero guy in fashion. The way Seth was beaming at Champagne gave Cammie the perfect opening, since she was to be alone with Martin for ten or fifteen minutes.

“So Martin,” she began, “have you got any roughs of the new petite line?”

“I just finished one yesterday.” Martin flashed pearly white veneers. “Seth helped. I’m very proud of him for his contributions.”

“Mini—uh, Seth, why don’t you give Champagne a tour and then have her try on the prototype,” Cammie suggested. “I’d love to see it.”

“And I suspect Seth would love to show it to her. Off you go, you two. See you on the runway. Champagne, what music would you like?”

“Excuse me?” The young girl was uncomprehending, but clearly exhilarated by the surroundings.

“The runway down the center of my loft. You’re going to model the new dress. What music would you like? We have everything on Rhapsody piped through.”

“Wow,” Champagne breathed. “How about … Rush? Quiet Riot? Ozzy?”

Cammie saw Martin try to cover his wince, then rally. “Quiet Riot it is. Seth, pull it up on the Bose deck and bring me the remote.”

“You got it, Uncle Martin. Come on, Champagne, I’ll give the tour, and then show you
our
creation.”

Mini-Martin boldly extended the crook of his elbow, and Champagne just as boldly took it. Even before they’d sauntered off, Rittenhouse’s nephew had begun a spiel about the inner workings of the fashion design business. Cammie could see that Champagne was hanging on every word.

“Cute,” Martin observed. “He’s a good kid, my nephew. Talented, too. So I understand that you’re branching out into the world of nightclubs. Fashion model management isn’t enough for you?”