Entry-Level Mistress (15 page)

The word girlfriend lingered in the air and I savored it with surprised pleasure. Daniel’s lack of comment was almost a tacit acknowledgment.

“You’re quite a fighter,” Daniel murmured when we were alone. “I had no idea.”

“I wasn’t fighting,” I corrected him. “I just didn’t hide.” I was proud of myself for that. It made me feel good. And it contrasted greatly with all the other parts of my life that
were
hidden. After all, I was likely going to have to come clean to my father next week. “Thank you for dinner,” I added softly as I watched Daniel sign the check.

“You’re more than welcome,” he returned and then stood. I stood as well, half tipsy on wine, delicious food and the unreality of this night, so out of time and space from my usual days. He took my hand and, safe in that warm connection, I followed him outside.

“Are you sure you want to go tomorrow?”

The night air had picked up a stronger breeze, and I wrapped my arms around myself, shivering.

“Why not? You can introduce me to all your fabulous friends. Weren’t you going to find me another job?” I shot him a teasing glance. “I’m good with my hands … ”

He grabbed those hands and pulled me toward him. I sucked in my breath at his expression. “Emily—”

“Emily Anderson!”

I looked up sharply at my name sounded by a female voice. Daniel shifted, pulled me tight against his side, his arm around my waist. A tall, willowy woman with slim hips and glossy, long black hair that swung with each step, strode toward us, effortless in her high-heeled sandals.

“I haven’t seen you in forever, not since … ” the woman trailed off. Lila Lee, the name came to mind, and I started to place her, to remember the eleven-year-old version of this woman who had trained beside me at the stables. Lila was looking at Daniel, whom she clearly recognized.

“Lila, right?”

“I’ll get the car.” I heard the quiet words before Daniel stepped away. I looked after him for a moment but then turned my attention back.

“Yes!” The woman was smiling brightly, as if happy to be remembered as well. “What have you been up to? We’re the same age, right? I just graduated Stanford. Going to Cornell Med in the fall. Really, it’s so good to see you!”

The onslaught of words overwhelmed me but I returned the smile. The night felt overly warm, and my chest tight.

“I just finished school also.”

“Oh, you know, I’m keeping you,” Lila exclaimed, glancing at the street where Daniel waited by the car. “I’m so sorry, but we should catch up. How long will you be here? Or, I’m in Manhattan now, so next time you’re there?”

“Yes, I’d love to catch up.” We exchanged numbers and then Lila grabbed me in a hug.

“Really, we
have
to talk. I always wondered where you went.”

As I climbed into the waiting car, I swallowed back the bittersweet emotion. I hadn’t realized until then how much I’d denied my childhood once I’d moved to Arizona, tried so hard for so many years to not have anyone know I was the daughter of
that
Mark Anderson. But Lila was someone who remembered the good stuff.

I had told Daniel that I wasn’t hiding. Now, I wondered what life would be like if I never did and never had.

•  •  •

The next day, he took me sailing. I had missed this. Forgotten the enjoyment of it in my youth. There was this other way of being, this intense way that Daniel lived and it made every situation feel
more
. Not a single breath was wasted. After he’d set our course, and the boat simply moved, smoothly, I crawled over to him, rested in his arms. The salt air, the warmth, lulled me into thinking that life was perfect. That this moment could be always.

Out of the stillness, he lifted his hand, ran his fingers along the v-shaped neckline of my blouse, grazing the swell of my breast over my demi-bra.

“I’ve always wanted a life of action, an intense urban experience that inspires me,” I said, my words slow, rolling with the motion of the boat on the water, “that makes me feel as if I’m in the thick of things.”

“Yet you’re choosing to go off into some isolated forest,” he pointed out. He molded his hand over my breast and despite the pleasure of his touch, I looked at that place as if it weren’t my body he held.

“Only for five months.”

His hand moved again, lifted, and he continued his stroking, searching motion. I sighed, feeling my desire build, collect in all the places where he touched, in all the places I knew he would soon touch.

“What will you do after that?”

“Move to Manhattan, most likely,” I said, not nearly as interested in the conversation I had begun as I was in the fact that he was lifting the hem of my shirt, baring my stomach to the warmth of his hand and the sun. “But what I was going to say, was that right now, I like this pace. I like
this
.”

“I think you like being my girlfriend,” he teased. But his words were the antithesis of teasing. They made me all scared and tense because he couldn’t possibly be giving the idea any weight. Even with some of my clothes in his dresser on Charles Street. Even though we’d shared a bed the greater portion of the last month. I’d just tried to end this crazy amorphous thing we had, but now I was here with him and he was calling me his girlfriend. Was this a goodbye weekend or a prelude to something more? How could there possibly be more between us?

“Right. About that … girlfriend?” I said it lightly, matching his tone, as if I were amused by the very idea.

“Is that the label you prefer?”

Girlfriend. Mistress. Lover. I ran through all the terms, all their connotations, weight and meaning. Lover was the only one that allowed us to be free, that allowed this strange relationship we had to exist without conflict. There was no future for us. The word lover accepted that.

“Not really,” I said softly. “But I don’t care all that much what people think.”

“People
will
think, will ask questions,” he reminded me. “Especially tonight.”

Of course, like Gretchen, people would be curious about anything Daniel Hartmann did, anyone with whom he was involved. They would ask questions about his relationship. That made me want to ask Daniel those same questions. To ask myself them. Because I wasn’t sure what we were doing. I knew I was supposed to put those kinds of thoughts aside. Just as we had put the past aside. I was supposed to let this be a weekend away, apart, where we simply enjoyed each other’s company. But I was enjoying his company too much.

“One moment,” he said softly and I moved to let him get up. He moved cautiously but efficiently around the boat. Trimming the sails? I struggled to remember the vocabulary of sailing even as I admired the lean length of his legs, his bare ankles between khakis and boat shoes. Studying his body gave me a pleasure similar to creating a new piece of art. I could lose myself in him.

Quicksand.

Leanna’s advice had been to seize it all, to let it be what it needed to be, to not put any false limits on the relationship because I was moving to upstate New York in August. The idea that this thing between us might be something more than a fling was terrifying.

But it couldn’t be more. Even if I wanted it to … once my father found out … Once I told him.

Yet, what if? For an instant possibility blossomed in my mind. A high society life of two successful people, a private life of passion and intensity. Built on confusion, opacity. Lies.

Daniel lowered himself back down beside me. I wrapped my arms and legs around him, refusing to think. The only thing that mattered was right now: the wind in my hair, the sound of the waves, and the feel of his skin against mine.

The estate stretched along several acres of beach. At the gate, a security guard asked for names, and then waved us through. Laughter, conversation, and the hum of engines filled a large cobblestone courtyard where a valet station teemed with cars, guests and staff in red vests. We crossed the white marble threshold into a foyer larger than a living room. This mansion had been built to meld with the beach and the large living room/ballroom—I wasn’t entirely certain what to call it—opened out onto the dark night, lit up by tiki torches. I felt as if I were walking through a resortwear issue of
Vogue
. The furniture was long and low, Italian modern and organized into mini spaces. Cater-waiters in their white shirts, black vests and pants crisscrossed the room with silver trays of appetizers.

Was I the heroine of
Cinderella
… or
Pretty Woman
? I hated the way I thought sometimes. Why did I always have to put a label on everything, try to fit my life into predefined little slots? It was the stupidest tendency because, at the same time, I had always gravitated toward doing things my own way, toward not giving in to everyone’s expectations.

Yet, there were patterns to life. That was simply a truth, one that I had recognized at a young age, had grasped onto as a steadying force even as my world spun around me. There was chaos and then there were patterns, and even chaos was part of a grander plan.

This moment, this weekend in the middle of this strange summer, was chaos. My feelings for Daniel—chaos.

But the pattern? The grander plan?

“Daniel!” A leggy, breezy blonde in a nearly diaphanous layer of turquoise cotton approached us, her hands outstretched. Daniel let her take his as they exchanged cheek-to-cheek air kisses. “When Gretchen told me you were coming, I hardly believed it. But then Adele had her housekeeper confirm.”

“Should you really be admitting the lengths you go to for information, Stacia?” Daniel chided with a laugh, pulling away. “But here, let me introduce you to—”

“Ah, the sculptress!” Stacia exclaimed, reaching for my hands. “Gretchen warned me that Daniel would have a date.” I noticed that these words were said for Daniel’s benefit as Stacia was glancing at him flirtatiously out of the corners of her eyes.

“Such a pleasure to meet you, Stacia,” I said, stepping back from the kisses. “I’m Emily. You have a lovely home.”

Stacia laughed. “Yes, well, that’s why I am trying to keep it. Maybe Daniel can convince my soon–to-be ex-husband to stop being a cheapskate on top of a philandering ass. Anyway, I’m so glad you’re here.”

“Hartmann!” A forty-something man, hair thinning at the top, in a brushed silk Hawaiian shirt and linen pants strode over to us, the liquid in his cocktail glass sloshing a bit. Another man in a suit, slightly younger, with another willowy blonde on his arm, came over as well. Before I was introduced, Stacia pulled me aside for a moment.

Leaning close, she whispered, “I don’t know if you realize darling, but there are a number of Hartmann’s exes here tonight. You seem like a sweet girl, so if you want to avoid the bitchfest—”

“Thank you, Stacia,” I murmured. I knew what the “mean girls” high school game looked like, and if reality television was anything to go by, I was sure the Hamptons social scene was simply a fractal expansion of that world—which meant this seemingly kind advice likely had ulterior motives.

After Stacia was gone, Daniel raised his eyebrows at the private tête-à-tête, but then slid me elegantly into the conversation.

Hawaiian Shirt Man was Anthony Blake, a Wall Street financier, and the couple comprised French businessman Claude de Turenne and his American wife, Dagney, Manhattan socialite.

There were dozens of people like that, rich but not anyone whose name I might recognize, and then there were the others who I recognized not only by name but also by having seen their images hundreds of times in my life.

Such as Fitzi, the diminutive pop fashion artist who was unmistakable with his yellow mohawk and his neon plaid shirt.

As I wandered through the crowd while Daniel talked to a business colleague, I spotted other celebrities, both A-list and minor.

And there were people whose names held near mythic status for me, such as Edward Ainsley, the sculptor-turned-museum curator whose exhibitions were near works of art themselves.

“I was a Barrows Farm alum myself,” he said shortly after we’d been introduced. The name of the art colony had instantly melted his impassive façade, and his face relaxed into genial fond remembrance of those days.

When Daniel rejoined me, his arm sliding around me as if he thought he needed to stake his territory, Ainsley’s facade went back up, and I found that moment revealing.

Then Gordon Fillmore joined us, and I knew his name from the bookstore shelves. He’d won the Booker Prize. Had a reputation for being morose, for getting kicked off of airplanes after drunkenly harassing the flight attendants or other passengers. He seemed well on his way to drunk this night as well. He didn’t know Daniel but he recognized him, mentioned that Daniel had good taste in women, and then eyed me. Ainsley made an attempt to bring the conversation back around to the previous topic by explaining that Fillmore had also been at Barrows Farm, where he had first met Ainsley.

“Ahh, Barrows,” Fillmore said with a wink at Daniel. “You know these art colonies, more like orgies.”

I didn’t know what to say to that but Daniel apparently decided nothing needed to be said. At his disparaging silence, the other man’s jocular amusement faded, his expression turning morose in a way that put me on edge. Apparently this unnerved Ainsley as well because he put an arm around Fillmore and whispered something in his ear as he guided the man away.