Falling into Forever (Falling into You) (13 page)

I could laugh it off and clink my glass against his and talk about music and movies and dancing and Grace’s latest adventures until the night melts into the morning, after dodging a few more questions about Chris, of course.

But i
t’s been so long since I’ve talked to someone about something real, since I’ve let words come out of my mouth in the hope that I’d say something true. For months, words hurt when I said them aloud, so much so that monosyllables became my primary mode of communication, even with my precocious and beautiful and wonderful little girl, who deserved more, so much more. I poured my heart into transforming Ben’s words into something that he would have been proud to call his own, but the way words form themselves on paper is so very different from the way they sound, tumbling out in rounded edges and musical notes.

Sam pats his hand over the spot next to him on
the couch and I slide into it. In looking up into his familiar face, I feel strong enough to start with one word, and then another. In halting, screeching starts and stops, I start to speak, about Ben and Chris and Grace and fear and loneliness and sorrow.

Of all the things that I thought I had forgotten how to do, laughing and smiling and dancing and playing, I think I missed talking most. It is, in itself,
a kind of healing.

CHRIS

Marcus is giving the entrance to the museum a dubious look.

“You sure about this, Jensen? You know I’m not a big fan of mingling with the commoners.”

“The elite members of the music industry aren’t exactly commoners, even by your lofty standards.”

“Oh, sure they are. Everyone wants to be in the movies. Especially the pop stars. Have you even been to a movie recently?
Filled with pop stars.”

“I t
ry to avoid that trash whenever possible. You know I don’t ever go to the movies. Not even my own premieres.”

“If you did, you would know that
pop stars all want to be movie stars.” He groans. “Let’s get this over with, man. I hate this shit. In and out, like you promised.”

“Hopefully in and out, I said.”

I present the invitation to one of the security guards and he looks at us in surprise, but then he pulls aside the velvet rope without even checking the list. We’re immediately ushered into one of the main galleries, which is decked out in white orchids and a smattering of gold stars. It looks like a bad high school prom. But then again, Sam’s always been a fan of over-the-top.

I force myself to smile at a couple of adolescent girls wearing too-tight leopard print
dresses and my eyes scan the room with a fair amount of trepidation. I don’t know why I’m so nervous about seeing Sam. I still see him occasionally at parties. Usually, we avoid each other, with the only acknowledgement that we had once been good friends consisting of an empty wave or the tilt of a glass.

It makes much more sense now that I know
he and Hallie have stayed close, which was clearly a fact that he wanted to keep to himself. It also made my current task more difficult. I was going to have to do a lot of fast talking to get anything out of him, but I had to take the chance.

Out of the corner of my eye, I see a woman in a red dress making a beeline for us. She looks familiar, and I know I’ve seen her before, but I just can’t place the face. She looks angry
. My immediate assumption is that we hooked up at some point and I conveniently forgot to call her. I take a step behind Marcus, as if he could provide some protection.

To my great amusement, I realize that
her eyes are full of the kind of fury that only Marcus can initiate. It’s not me that she’s coming to see. She makes a full-out stop in front of him.

“It’s been a long time, Marcus.
”

Her nose is tilted up, and she’s looking down on him with a mix
ture of rage and condescension. She’s easily six feet tall, and Marcus has to stand on his toes to put himself at eye level, which he promptly does. The grin starts to spread across his face.

“Eva. A long time since
our little island getaway, a long time since you fucked my brains out on the yacht, a long time since you whispered sweet nothings into my ear? Take your pick. That’s a lot of long times.”

“How about…a long time since you
screwed me over on the
Crossed
deal? You stole my client right out from under my nose and left him dreaming about A-list movie stars and eight-figure advances. And then you promptly left him with nothing but a script sitting in a drawer somewhere, collecting dust. Oh, so you conveniently forgot that one? Typical.”

I try to sneak away, but she turns to me then
. I cower under the rage of her stare.

“Mr. Jensen. How lovely to see you again.”

I have absolutely no idea who this woman is. However, we’ve apparently met before.

“It’s nice to see you again, too. How have you been?”

“Since you obviously don’t remember me, I’ll take pity on you and help you out. Eva Larson.”

Oh, shit.

“I’m Hallie Caldwell’s agent.”

Of course she is.

“It looks like you and Marcus made nice, then. I have to admit, I was happy to hear that I wasn’t going to have to deal with your pig shit agent on this deal. I was told the business break-up was permanent. Clearly, I was misinformed.”

“Hey, hey. Stop harassing my client, now, Ev.
Your sources must not be as good as they used to be. A little bit of misinformation goes a long way.”

“
Did you learn that from personal experience?” Her eyes narrow. “Furthermore, I have absolutely no desire to put my hands on your client. Unless, of course, I have to. If he continues to harass my client, I will personally kick his ass.”

Marcus’s hackles are raised, and I let him take over my defense.
They’re just starting the first round of what appears to be a long battle, and I definitely don’t want to get into all of the ways that I plan on harassing Hallie. I start to slip away, but Eva’s watchful eyes pick up on my sideways movement towards the buffet before I manage to get more than a foot or two from the pair of them.

“
Yes, Mr. Jensen, I am going to let you escape, but don’t let that make you think that we’re done here. We have unfinished business. However, you lucked out because Marcus and I also have unfinished business, and I don’t have any kind of guarantee that I’ll be seeing him again anytime soon. You, on the other hand…”

“I’ll look forward to it.”

I take her hand and kiss it. Marcus’s face has turned an alarming shade of red, which amuses me greatly. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him so angry. If my own unfinished business wasn’t a matter of serious urgency, I’d stay and watch the show. As I make my way through the crowd, I glance back. She’s gesticulating wildly into the air as he munches on a canapé, but there’s some serious anger behind his blasé expression. A match made in heaven.

I spin around to find a tray to put the little wooden stick that
had held the bacon-wrapped scallop, but instead, I find Sam holding two glasses of champagne with a sardonic little smile on his face.

“
Chris, I could say that I’m surprised to see you here, but I think we both know that would be a lie. Anyways, I asked them to let me know when you arrived. I wasn’t disappointed.” He offers a glass to me, and just as I start to shake my head, he adds, in a low tone, “It’s just grape juice, Jensen. Let’s get out of here, okay?”

I take the glass
and give him a wary look. “This isn’t one of those ‘take him out into the alley and shoot him’ things, is it?”

“You’ve been in too many bad movies, old friend.”

His tone does nothing to convince me that this isn’t going to end in an alley. However, I do follow him up a stairway until we come to a stop in a room full of enormous canvases with naked men. There are a few sculptures scattered in the corners of the room, and my heart skips a beat when I see a familiar pile of orange and brown candy wrappers on the floor. Apparently, that guy was still making money. Hallie would have loved it.

“Time’s treated you well, Sam.”

His suit, obviously made on Savile Row, along with the flashy watch, tell me that maybe he’s doing a little bit better than just well, but I decide to leave that alone for now.

“It has.
But then again, time tends to treat you well when you have a trust fund with a lot of zeroes, connections to some of the most powerful people in the world, a chair at a boardroom with your name on it, and a board of directors just waiting for you to finish up your wild ways and file into the same pattern as your old man.”

I concede
his point with a nod. “We used to say that it was total hell to have the weight of great expectations on our shoulders. We wanted to make our own way in the world, to step out from our fathers’ shadows.”

“And yet, here we are, carbon copies
of them. I’m running Evenstar and it’s just a matter of time before you step into the director’s chair.”

“I hope not.”

“We’ll see.” Sam shrugs his shoulders and gives me a small smile. “Let’s get this over with, Jensen. I have a room full of people waiting for me to give a speech so that they can cheer all of the great work I’ve done, and I’ve got a hunch that there’s somewhere else you would rather be, too. Aren’t you going to ask me how she is? Where she is?”

That’s exactly what I was going to ask him, but I’m not planning on giving him the satisfaction
of knowing that he’s nailed it.

“Did you see her?”

He sighs. “Yes, I saw her.”

“Is she all right?”

“That depends on your definition of all right. And you’re assuming that I think you deserve to get that information, which I don’t.”

“Sam.”

“You know, obviously, I knew you were going to show up here. I’ve been thinking about what I was going to say to you all day. I pretty much covered every possible scenario. First, I thought about my own, more painful version, of your alley. And then, for a while, punching you in the face seemed like it might be the best idea. That would have been temporarily satisfying, but ultimately, not really good enough. I even thought about having your name removed from the guest list, but that wouldn’t have worked, either, because I wanted to look you in the eye, Jensen, to tell you what I really thought.”

“And that is?”

He starts to say something, but he abruptly changes his mind. “Ben was my best friend. Did you know that?”

I shake my head
.

“Yeah. I didn’t think so.
Do you want to know how I met Ben?”

I don’t,
and I don’t really want to know.

He gives me a pointed look. “Normally, I would say that there’s no use dredging up painful memories, but I think you might just deserve a little bit of pain, so you’re going to listen to
every word of this particular story.”

He has a point.

“It was probably what, five years ago? Imagine my surprise when a young and very beautiful Hallie Caldwell shows up on my doorstep in the raging August heat when she’s supposed to be in London with you. She wouldn’t say anything, and the only sign that something was wrong was the simple fact that she was too upset to go dancing with me. So, I asked. And she wouldn’t dare besmirch your name by saying a bad word about you. She tried to put a happy face on it, to say that she was just going back for her junior year and the two of you were figuring some things out, but nothing about it smelled right.”

What is he talking about? We had never talked about figuring things out. She said that she never wanted to see me again, that it was over, that she didn’t love me anymore. And I had said...
“You need to get your own dreams, Hallie, instead of hanging around me like some stupid puppy dog. You need to figure out who you want to be in life, because I can tell you right now that I don’t need a nursemaid, or a mother, or another person trying to tell me how to live my life. You’ve spent enough time hanging on my coattails. I mean, really, don’t you think it’s time that you figured out how to have a life outside of me?”

Fucking photographic memory. I can even see the look on her face when I said those
horrendous words, each of them hitting her like a ton of bricks. Why did she tell Sam that we were just trying to figure things out?

“So, s
he was obviously upset about something, but I barely got the chance to ask her about it before she ran off to Atlanta. It was pretty obvious that you had finally revealed your inner asshole. Let me tell you, I was shocked.”

He doesn’t sound shocked. I open my mouth to try to defend myself, but he continues to talk, so I promptly close it again

“I needed to see if she was all right. It’s funny, how everyone who knows her is always running around, trying to figure out if she’s all right. There’s something about that girl. I don’t know, man. And the funniest thing about all of it is that she’s never really needed anyone to make sure she was all right. She would be better off if we would just all leave her alone. But again, there’s something about that girl, man.”