Falling Into You (15 page)

Sophia
had asked me to com
e out with Chris, right? I try
to remember exactly what she had said.
An old friend…interested in what he’s been up to…
That didn’t mean she wanted to date him, right?
Right?

Ok,
Hallie
, stop.

Why are you even thinking about any of this? It’s not like you’re on a date. You are his charity work for the day. He is only here because
Sophia
asked, and G
od knows what she promised him. Just take this for what it is, and have a nice day and a good time, like you’ve been having all morning, and then chalk it up to a good adventure.
He happens to be incredibly sexy and thoughtful and you have a million things in common
, that’s all, the other part of my brain yelled.

I mak
e a quick decision. Obviously, this
little New York tour
wasn’t a sign of his interest in me
, but it didn’t mean that I couldn’t have a perfect New York day
. I decide
irrevocably that
nothing he had said or would say to me would be shared with
Sophia
. I would just tell her that he was perfectly nice and that we had a good time and I wasn’t able to find anything out. Telling her
anything would be a betrayal of
this time with him.

“Are you ok?” Chris asks
, concern in his eyes. I had apparently stopped the story while I had been lost in thought.

“Sorry. Just remembered the booing of tens of thousands of fans. Bad memories.”

He laughs
. “At my first premiere, I was sitting next to this girl who kept telling her friend that the guying playing Evan was absolutely the worst actor that she had ever seen and that she couldn’t figure out why anyone thought he had any talent. I was laughing right along with her until I realized that she was talking about me.”

“You didn’t even realize that your cha
racter’s name was Evan?
 
I may need to retract my statement that you will become a movie star. I think goal number one is for you to start remembering your own name.”

We laugh for a minute and I’m putting butter on my toast as h
e
reaches
across the table to brush the hair out of my face. Every other sensation
goes
away and the only thing I
can
focus on
is
the touch of his fingertips on my face.
There it is again—the volts of electricity running up my body.

He looks
guilty for a minute
and then winks
at me. “We wouldn’t want you to get jam in your hair now. That would ruin our whole day.”

Oh. I was about to pull a classic
Hallie
by getting jam all over my face in front of the
most beautiful boy in the world
. I had already spilled a little bit of coffee on my pants—
I almost
never made
it through a meal without getting some sort of drink or food on my clothing or face.
Of course
he didn’t want to touch me.
He was just protecting me from the jam.
“I wouldn’t let a little thing like j
am stop me from
enjoying my first real day in
New York,” I say
, slightly deflated.

“Then, you’re already different from, oh, one hundred per
cent of the girls here
.
Jam would be considered a serious emergency worthy of a clothing change.”

“I think we established
my differences
last night when I was put in
social pariah territory,” I say
without thinking.

“
I happen to like social pariahs.” He
reaches
up again to brush my hair away
for the second time
.
While I’m pretty sure that the jam is gone now,
I wipe
my face with a napkin anyway.
“Sorry,” he says
, brushing his own hair away. “
Just wanted to make absolutely sure
.”

There’s a glob of jam on my lips and I try to pass it off like I meant for it to be there
. “
This could totally be the new lip gloss
.”
I wipe it away again. I am such a moron.

He smiles
at me, and it spread
s all the way
across his face. “
You’re the next lip gloss millionaire.”

There’s an uncomfortable silence for a minute. He’s definitely trying to figure out how to get rid of me, and he’s just too polite to say anything.

I’m not sure how to decipher his next words. “
Let’s get out of here.”

Chapter 10

CHRIS

I had wanted to touch her again from the first moment that I had stepped into the apartment. And
over omelets, coffee, and toast,
she had been laughing and the guarded look in her eyes was almost totally gone, and I just hadn’t been able to stop myself.

She looked at me like I was some kind of perv. I had passed it off as nothing more than trying to save her from the embarrassment of getting jam all over her face, but then she had laughed again, a bright, clear sound tha
t sounded like bells and mentioned something about being a social pariah
.
She was just so cute, so unselfconscious that I
did
it
again.
She
was
probably
thinking about whether she was going to have to use her pepper spray to get rid of me
.

Jesus, what was wrong with me? Even
Sophia
had never twisted me up in knots
lik
e this. I wanted to beat Sophia at her
own game, wanted to conquer the feeling of her skin next to mine that had haunted me for too long.
The feelings I had for her were tied up in envy and anger and lust and bitterness.
But the way I was feeling about
Hallie
was something else entirely.

I had never met anyone who was so comfortable in her own skin
, who made me feel like everything I had to say was meaningful and fascinating
. There was no pretense
to her
; it was like she had never thought about being anyone other than her most authentic self.
Being with her made me feel like maybe there was an authentic me hiding somewhere inside, too.

I thro
w some money
down on the table as she grabs
her coat.

“Look,” she starts
, hesitantly. “It’s been great, I me
an, last night and this morning. Y
ou probably saved me from talking to myself all day,
and that wouldn’t have been a pretty sight, but
I should be okay now and
I know you must be busy. I need to go to the museum anyways, to get a start on this art history project for next
semester
and…”

I cut her off. “I’ll come with you.”

She’s
startled. “What?”

“I don’t have too much going on today, so if you don’t mind, I’ll come with you. Where do you want to go? The Met? MoMA? The Cloisters?” I was personally hoping she would pick the Cloisters, because it would guarantee a long train ride, but any of them would work.

“Are you sure? You don’t have to do that or anything, I mean…”

She would come up with an excuse unless I cut her off again. “I want to.”

“Well, ok, then.” She stutters
slightly, stumbling over her words. “
I say, let’s go for MoMA. I like modern art as much as anyone else, I guess.”

Forty-five minutes later, after an intense debate over whether or the subway tunnels would collapse if enough zombies decided that they wanted to ride the train (she claimed yes; I countered with the fact that the subways basically contained
a
number of zombies on any given day), we were standing in front of a giant Cubist painting.

The museum is crowded with people, but we’ve managed to find a nearly empty room. The only other patrons are a white-haired couple holding hands and a few students sketching in the corner.

“I cou
ld totally paint that,” she says, after giving
the
atrocious orange and purple monstrosity
a long look.

“Ahhh…another talent.”

“Oh, no, I struggle with stick figures.
” She giggles. “Seriously, they’re a challenge for me.
But I mean, come on. This guy is practically painting stick figures anyway. If he added some little guys in the corner, someone would probably say that he’s making a statement about the crushing weight of modern life on the human psyche or something.”

“That’s a profound statement.” I glance at her out of the corner of my eye.

“Oh, I’m just getting warmed up. Everybody’s a critic, especially when they have zero talents of their own.”

“What about that one?” I
point
to a gigantic sculpture that seemed to contain nothing but a bunch of candy wrappers.

“
I think
that one is all you
.
” She looks back and forth between the sculpture and me, nodding her head.
“
You could make the next piece in the series. I think it would require the consumption of a ton
of candy,
though, whic
h would be the major challenge.” We walk closer to the sculpture, and she leans close to me, whispering.

“Uh oh. I just found a major problem with your new career. You know, in case the whole mov
i
e thing doesn’t work out.”

“What?”

“The entire sculpture is composed of
those wrappers come from that awful Halloween candy. You know, the brown taffy stuff t
hat is never stretchy? It’s the kind that’s always left in the bottom of the bag and you only eat it when you get really desperate and all the good stuff is gone?
Worst Halloween candy. Ever.
”

I laugh, because I do know
. S
he’s
right;
all of the wrappers
are
orange and black
, the tell-tale sign
. “Do you think he actually
ate
all of that candy?
”

“
No way! He just hunted through the garbage bins the day after Halloween.
If he did eat it, he would be dead.
”

I’m staring dubiously at the enormous pile of wrappers. “There’s no way I would even be able to unwrap all of that candy. It would take years.”

“
Sure, you would. You’d just spend all
day unwrapping
and you might have to enlist a few of your admirers to do some of the really dirty work, but it would get done
. I do think you’d have to avoid the revenge of the candy
blob
, though
.
I have no idea what kind of chemicals they have to put in that crap to make it taste that bad. It would probably cause some reaction at some point.
I was never very good with chemistry, but there’s probably some Frankenstein thing that would happen eventually. You know, evolution into a living, breathing, candy monster.
My money’s on the morphing of the candy into a
giant blob
that chases
you around your apartment.”

I laugh at the thought of a giant candy blob. Where did she come up with these things?

“Try that one,” I tell her, watching her face as we come to a neon-colored horse status.

“Well, that one…”

W
e spent another couple of hours
wandering around the museum. For each
piece of art
,
I beg her to tell a story and they get more insane as the minutes pass
. She bet
s
me a hundred dollars that the one in the corner was actually painted by a cat and that it expressed frustration over the fact that people always liked dogs better.

For
another one,
Hallie decided that
the artist had spilled cans of paint onto the canvas
because he was angry that he never sold any paintings. H
e decided to call the canvas “The Droppings of the Human Condition,” which caused a major uproar in the art world.
The artist’s reward was a lifetime of
fame and fortune in a profession dominated by poverty and struggle
.

Apparently, neither of us was much of a modern art person.
I turn
to her.