The One That I Want (28 page)

“I’m not sure what you heard about me today or what was said to you,” I told her, “but I want you to know that nothing bad has happened. That sometimes media people don’t tell the whole truth because they want to be popular and have others pay attention to them.”

“I know,” she said quietly. “Not just media people do that.”

Out of the mouths of babes.

I fought back a groan. “What did the other kids say to you today, sweetheart?”

“Just that you were Dane Tyler’s girlfriend, and that you weren’t very smart to go out with a jerk like him. Shannon and Ms. Watkins told them to hold their tongues or their parents would get called.”

“Did anyone say anything else to you after that?”

“No. Some kids have looked at me kinda funny,” she admitted. “But they did that before.”

My heart clenched up at the thought of anyone trying to hurt my little girl. She’d already been through so damn much.

I tried to keep the sound of tears out of my voice. “Well, they’re probably just jealous of you. You’re such an amazing kid.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “But it doesn’t matter. My
real
friends said they thought it was cool that you were going out with a movie star. And I know that you’re not dumb and that he’s not a bad guy. I mean, I
met
him. And he was nice to me. He helped me.”

“That’s right, Analise. He did. Dane wanted you to do well on your skit, and you did beautifully.”

“Yeah,” she said, and I could hear her pride in just that one word. “I’m okay,” she repeated before she handed the phone back to the camp director, and this time I could gauge her meaning better. She was still my Analise. She was still the sensitive kind of kid who worried about life changes and other people gossiping about her and the unnerving unpredictability of the future.

But, as I’d also discovered about myself, she could keep this latest blow in perspective. She knew there had already been much bigger calamities and much harder adversities…and she’d managed to live through them. She’d be able to live through this one, too.

~*~

The afternoon and early evening entertainment shows were nothing compared to the ones at night. The all-male hosts of “late-nite comedy” showed no self-restraint whatsoever when it came to using material from my life for their opening monologues.

“Hey, guys, is it just Dane Tyler and me who think so, or are widows getting younger and hotter all the time?” said that balding asshole Gregory Carrington.

I’d never liked his brand of humor much. Now, I felt justified in despising him forevermore.

“I mean, you hit forty and a whole new demographic opens up,” he added with an idiotic laugh. The live audience smirked and snickered right along with him as he riffed on the aging actor/merry widow theme before finally moving on to another victim.

I curled into a ball of mortification on my bed, just imagining my parents watching that clip. And I realized that Dane’s family had been forced to tolerate this kind of crap for over twenty years. His mom and his brother must have felt as powerless and humiliated as I did. Time and time again. Not to mention how it must have affected Dane himself.

To make the night even
more
fun, right after that segment aired, I got an email from my boss, Principal Jack Richardson at Mirabelle Harbor Junior High.

“Sorry to bother you during vacation, Julia, but could you please give me a call at home tomorrow?” Jack wrote. “Personally, I know better than to believe what the tabloids print, but you and I may need to work together to do a little PR damage control before the new school year starts. I got a number of messages from ‘concerned’ parents today…”

Terrific
.

At least Jack wasn’t calling for my immediate resignation, although I was sure there were parents of incoming seventh and eighth graders who’d be proclaiming in hushed whispers to anyone who’d listen that I was “morally unfit” to be teaching their innocent children this fall.

And sometime after two a.m. I finally gave up my internal fight and just called Dane’s cell phone.

“Hey,” he whispered when he answered, his voice raspy.

“Did I wake you?”

He sort of laughed. “Not even close to sleep.”

“Where are you? Still in Illinois?”

“I don’t want to say, Julia. For your sake. Just in case someone’s listening in or tapping my phone or hacking my emails or whatever. I don’t want to involve you in this mess anymore.”

“I’m already pretty deeply involved. I’m the ‘Merry Widow’ after all.”

“Fuck them.”

“Yeah, well.” I swallowed. What I could say? “How, um, are Cat and Marissa taking the news?”

“Okay and rather badly, respectively,” he replied. “You don’t want to know the details, and I shouldn’t talk about it on this line anyway. Just in case.”

“I understand that. But we are friends, Dane. If you need to—”

“We’re
friends
, huh?”

“Yes,” I said. But, of course, a part of me knew we were more than that, too. Whether or not we should be.

Dane let me marinate in those unspoken words for a long while before he said, “It doesn’t matter anyway, though, does it? You’re still convinced that what I feel isn’t ‘real,’ right? That it’s just a fantasy?”

“I wouldn’t claim these past two days were
fantasy
-like,” I said, trying to lighten the mood, but I knew what he was trying to say. And he knew I was purposely pretending to misconstrue his question.

He sighed heavily.

“What’s that sigh mean?” I asked.

“Just too much carbon dioxide in my lungs,” he murmured, mimicking my words from Thursday afternoon. From just before we made love for the first time.

I held the phone in silence, remembering.

He cleared his throat. “Truth is, I know you’re entitled to run away from me, especially after all of this media shrapnel was fired at you. I have no right to try to hold onto you. But make no mistake, you
are
running. This tabloid shit is an excuse—a very convenient and very understandable excuse—but all the same, I know it’s not the entire reason. And I can’t blame you, but I’d hoped for better for us.”

After having had the thin layer of hard-won peace ripped away from my life this weekend, I just couldn’t see any other alternative but to let go of whatever this thing with him was.

“I’m so sorry, Dane,” I whispered. “The price…the risk to my daughter and to me…it’s just too high.”

Maybe I’d expected him to argue back, or at least keep talking to me for a while longer, but he didn’t. He must have guessed that I wasn’t changing my mind.

After a lengthy pause, he just said softly, “Understood. You’ve dealt with a lot and, unfortunately, my presence in your life isn’t doing you any good. I wish it weren’t true, but I know the best thing I can do for you, Julia, is to say goodbye.” And he hung up.

Chapter Nineteen

Four and a half days later, on the last day of July, Shar called for an emergency meeting of the Quest group.

It had been a hellacious week, with media people calling and stopping by uninvited, speculating about me and my relationship with Dane in their print and digital publications. But I couldn’t give them much, even if I wanted to. There wasn’t anything to say—he was gone. And I thought, under the circumstances, that I’d been working through the ordeal reasonably well.

My best friend, however, felt otherwise.

“You’ve been trying your best to sort through everything that’s happened, Julia, I know,” she told me gently. “But this situation is creating a major life change for you. A huge disruption after you’ve already had a serious life trauma. You’re smart and you’re grounded, but you can’t be expected to think clearly when your world is so messed up.”

I tried to shrug this off. “It’s so comforting to know that no one has very high expectations of me. Really takes the pressure off.”

She squeezed me in a side hug. “Given everything you’ve had to endure since December, I think you have the mental and emotional fortitude of a saint, girlfriend. But some of the things you’ve been telling me this week have me worried. You need a broader perspective than just what I can give you. And that’s where other friends come in. Other people that I feel confident you can trust.”

She sent me a significant look, and I knew why. One of the most common refrains of our conversations over the past few days was how hard it was to know who I could confide in. Who wouldn’t betray me or gossip about me. That fear had made my already very private world even more insular.

“While you’ve been dealing with the press this week,” Shar said, “I’ve been doing a little investigative reporting of my own, and a few people you know have helped.” She led me to her car. “C’mon. We need to get you over to Elsie’s house for a little gathering with just the inner circle of the Quest crowd. A few of us have some interesting information to share with you.”

~*~

When we arrived, Elsie had a teapot filled with steaming Earl Grey waiting on the table for us, a platter of lemon bars, and a room with carefully closed blinds and dim lighting.

She hugged me. “You won’t have to worry about
anyone
pestering you here. And anything that’s said in this room will stay here. I promise.”

“Thanks, Elsie,” I whispered.

Then, to Shar, she said, “The others are on their way.”

The “others,” in this case, included Vicky, who slipped in the door a few minutes later; Nia and Olivia, who came together (neither were members of the Quest group, of course, but they were women Shar obviously felt confident confiding in); and to my utter surprise, Rosemary, who was Elsie’s longtime friend, although I’d always think of her as Dane’s stage manager at the Knightsbridge.

I glanced sharply at Shar. Was this really a good idea?

In response to my silent question, she nodded and mouthed, “Trust me.”

Once we were all gathered together and had gotten comfortable in Elsie’s living room, I had to admit that I felt surrounded by a cocoon of pure friendship. Every single woman present, Rosemary included, radiated a vibe of acceptance and helpfulness. Shar most of all.

Which was why I was a little surprised by her conversation opener.

“Remember the hockey movie Dane was in with that redheaded actress—”

“Amy Coleridge,” I supplied.

“That’s the one,” Shar said. “They were the main characters in
Center Ice Draw
. He was an up-and-coming local hockey player and she wasn’t really a fan of the sport, until she met him. Then he got that big pro contract. She thought he’d be too busy for her and he thought his lifestyle would be holding her back from her own dreams. You know the story, right?”

“Right,” I said. I knew the plots to ALL of Dane’s movies, a fact that my best friend was more than aware of…which made me suspicious.

“So, they broke up,” Shar continued, “but it really wasn’t about the contract or the temporary separation that would cause. It was all about them both being afraid to face their fears. Each of them really wanted to be with the other one but they were scared to go after the relationship.”

All of the women in the room were nodding in unison.

I narrowed my eyes at Shar. “So? Stuff like that happens in movies. It’s called dramatic conflict.”

“I know, I know,” she said. “But the point is that the characters made a mistake and, eventually, they realized it. The only thing that was keeping them apart was fear, and once they finally admitted that, they could figure out a way to move forward. He was all worried about wrecking her life, and she used the fact that he was becoming famous as an excuse to avoid him. But it wasn’t the fame that was the problem, it was the fear that he was one of the few people in the world who had the power to break her heart.” Shar crossed her arms and gazed steadily at me. “Sound familiar?”

I crossed my arms, too, and cleared my throat. “Amy Coleridge’s character didn’t have a ten-year-old child to consider. Someone whose life would get swallowed up by the hockey player’s fame.” I shook my head. “I’m telling you, it’s not that I’m afraid of dating anyone ever again, it’s just that it should probably be someone…
normal
. A guy from the area. Like, maybe, my college boyfriend, Ben—”

Vicky shot me a dubious glance.

“—or somebody like Kristopher.”

Elsie’s eyebrows shot up and she actually scowled at me.

“I don’t mean him specifically,” I said. “He’s been acting strange and getting on my nerves. I just mean somebody
like
him. You know, like Bill from the Quest group.”

Shar squinted at me. “Were you ever remotely attracted to Bill?”

“Well, no,” I had to admit. “But he’s nice and lives in the area and is normal—”

“I’m not sure any guy is actually normal,” Nia interjected. She glanced between Shar and Olivia and blushed. “Please don’t get me wrong, Chance is an amazing man. But just because he isn’t internationally famous doesn’t mean it was easier for us to find a middle ground than when I was dating a well-known CEO.”

“Which CEO?” Olivia asked.

“Oh—Grant Jordan,” Nia said.

“Of the Jordan-Luccio Corporation?” Rosemary asked, looking impressed.