Falling into Forever (Falling into You) (12 page)

“So unfair, Hallie. He is always telling me this.” She says it loudly enough so that I can hear her and Sam yanks the phone away from his ear to soften the blow. “Now, put Hallie back on the phone, love.”

Sam reluctantly hands the phone back to me
. I hear Marie trying to stifle a yawn.

“Is it finished? The deal? They will finally leave you alone?”

“More or less.”

“And they gave you money? Which studio? Someone Sam knows?”

I sigh. “FFG.”

She clucks her tongue before releasing a very slight sigh.
“Well, since I am well aware of who owns FFG, I can tell you now that this sounds like the beginning of a very long story, Hallie. And long stories and red wine go together like, how do you say, peanut butter and jelly?” She sounds decidedly French at the end of her sentence, and I laugh at her. “Bordeaux, I think. A very nice Bordeaux. You and Sam can raid my wine cellar. Tell him that for you, there is always an exception.”

“
Fair enough. But only for the first bottle. Then, we can dig into the cheap stuff.”

“And this is why you a
re my favorite. No, go, and drink lots of wine with my husband and laugh and try to be merry. There is a tomorrow waiting around the corner.”

Sam must have heard her, because both of us grin at the same time. Marie’s always scattering her grandmother’s slightly ridiculous expressions in all the wrong places. Still, I can’t deny that the sentiment is appealing.

“Love you, Marie.”

“I love you, too, Hallie. Call me when you get home and we can talk and giggle into the phone all night like teenagers. And tell my dear husband that if he drinks another one of my good bottles without you there, there will be hell to pay when I get home.”

“Yes, ma’am. Get some sleep.”

I hang up the phone and glance at Sam, who’s rolling his eyes in exasperation.

“
Let me guess. She recommended Bordeaux?”

“Yep.
Sure did.”

“
Bordeaux sounds like a grown up drink, and I am most certainly not a grown up. Not yet,” he says, tousling my hair affectionately. “I say we go straight for the tequila shots.”

I laugh. “Maybe later, Sam. Maybe later.”

“Well, we need to dig in to the wine, at the very least. I know you’re a total lightweight, but I would hate to risk Marie’s wrath when she returned home to find all of her bottles of Bordeaux lined neatly in a row. I know it’s a sacrifice, but we should at least drink one bottle.”

“You get the wine, I’ll get the glasses.”

“You’re a guest!” He’s mock-horrified.

“I think I stopped being a guest a long time ago
, even if I never make it to New York.”

He holds his hands up in surrender and disappears into the room behind the kitchen as
I reach into the cabinet and pull out two long-stemmed glasses. When he comes out, he opens the bottle in one deft movement and pours the thick red liquid into the bottom of my glass. Feeling slightly ridiculous, I swirl it around and around.

“What the hell are you doing, Ellison?”

“Um…” I’m desperately trying to remember the right words for it, from that terrible road-trip movie about wine snobs. “Letting it breathe?”

He gives me a long sideways look. “Seriously?”

“Screw you! I might be a secret wine aficionado.”

I take a long gulp
of the sticky liquid and almost spit it out. So, maybe not quite an aficionado. Sam merely laughs and beckons me back into the living room. There’s an old plaid chair in the corner, Marie’s only concession to Sam’s decorating prowess, and I plop onto it and throw my feet on the ottoman. The glass rests, heavy in my hand. I take another sip and there’s an immediate lightness in my head. I’ve never been a big drinker, but it’s been a hell of a day, and I can’t begrudge myself the little indulgence. I take another sip.

“Penny for your thoughts, Ellison.”

“Haven’t you ever heard of inflation?”

The look on Sam’s face tells me that he’s not letting
me off the hook. His next words, however, do buy me some time to think, which I desperately need.

“How long can you stay?”

“I have to leave tomorrow morning.”

“If you stay another day, you can see Marie. There’s a big party for Evenstar tomorrow. I know your favorite things in life are champagne and making small talk, so it should be right up your alley.”

“Oh, you know me so well. I’d rather go water-skiing with alligators than go to that party.”

“Figured it was worth a shot.”

“I’m glad you’ve kept that fighting spirit, Sam, now that you’re a big-shot music man.”

“Shut up, Hallie.”

“Gladly.”

We lapse into a comfortable silence. He knows me w
ell enough to realize that I need some time to think.

Sam and I became friends, real friends, the kind that don’t dre
ss everything up in fancy words and the kind that demand answers instead of asking for them, during the first summer that I spent in New York with Chris after we got back from Prague. Chris was shooting a cop movie in Brooklyn and was on set for what felt like endless hours every day. Of course, I didn’t know a soul in the city besides Sophia Pearce, and I would rather make friends with the Central Park pigeons than call her. Luckily for me, after a very long night in which we drank too much champagne at one of his parties, Sam and I found ourselves singing the “Star-Spangled Banner” and dancing a little Irish jig on his rooftop. I had found a summer soul mate.

The friendship was eventually cemented over a love of early 90s hip-hop (Jurassic 5
was a personal favorite of both of ours) and long days spent wandering around the city and long nights tearing up the dance floor. Despite his connections to Sampson and Sophia and all of the bad memories of my first trip to New York, the friendship had survived, probably because of Ben, who had been Sam’s real soul mate. Marie and I used to take bets on how long they would sit up and play video games when we went to Sam’s father’s beach house in North Carolina. She used to say that as long as they didn’t beat the game, they would still be hammering away on the controllers when we woke up. I usually went the conservative route and bet on 3 or 4 am. She always won.

It hadn’t all been sunshine and rainbows, of course.
After Ben died and I was released from the hospital, he and Marie spent two months with Grace and me, holed up in Ben’s father’s house on Lake Geneva in Wisconsin, and we had played endless rounds of Chutes and Ladders and Pretty Pretty Princess and Barbies. They had saved my life. My sanity. He and Marie had been married there, in our garden, because Sam hadn’t wanted to waste any more time. Or, as he asked me, who knew if there was time to waste?

The aimless playboy had also turned into something of a workaholic.
He had eventually given in and followed his father into the music business. To anyone who would bother to listen, he described his job as being little more than an overpaid nursemaid who had to follow a bunch of half-naked assholes around to make sure that they didn’t get caught doing drugs in foreign countries. In reality, he did something with promotion and marketing, at least until his father had retired a few months before, leaving Sam the apartment and a position as the head of the pop division of Evenstar Records. Even though Sam is always moaning about the lack of music in the music industry, I know he loves it.

Sam glances up again at the picture of Ben and Grace and
grins. “How’s my princess?”

“Obsessed with her Uncle Sam’s new band, 4Sure.”

“You really shouldn’t l
et her listen to that garbage. It will rot her brain.”

“I lost control of Grace when she turned two. She’s a monster.
She thinks the lead singer is, and I quote, ‘the most darling thing she’s ever seen.’ His name is Noel. I can tell you his favorite color, the name of his pet rabbit, and his ten deepest desires.”

Sam hoots, pumping his fist.
“She sure knows how to pick ‘em.”

“Oh, no. He’s a jerkface?”

“Wow. Wow, Ellison. Did you really just use the word jerkface right now? You’re what, twenty-six? I’m fairly certain that’s the first time I’ve heard that word used by anyone over the age of four. And I’ll bet my life that even your own daughter could come up with something better than that.”

I throw an embroidered cushion at him. “Jerkface.”

“I don’t even have a comeback prepared for that one. You…” He searches for a word and eventually gives up. “You win. But you better come prepared next time. I’ll have to ask the members of 4Sure for some juvenile insults to throw at you. However, in response to your earlier question, Noel’s not that bad. A spoiled, self-centered, annoying, preening, drama queen, but not as rough as some. At least he’s making me money. Maybe I’ll arrange a little birthday phone call for Miss Grace.”

“She’s al
ready impossibly spoiled, Sam.”

“She doesn’t have a spoiled bone in her body.”

“She will start to rot from her insides if the lead singer of 4sure calls her for her birthday! She’ll be the talk of preschool.”

The thought of that makes us both laugh
.

“Oh, no. We wouldn’t want that, now. She’ll develop a reputation.”

“Fine. You win. Have the whole band call her to sing happy birthday. I know you’ll do it anyways.”

“You’re damn right I will. Plus, you have no idea how much satisfaction I’m going to get out of telling the pretty boys that they need
to suck up to a four-year-old. Maybe they can even write her a special birthday song. Something about how Grace is their queen. It’s gotta be good, though. Humbling.”

He rubs his hands together, lost in thought, before realizing that he’s letting me off the hook.

“That’s neither here nor there. And you’re avoiding the subject.”

I lean back in the chair and meet Sam’s eyes.
“Let the interrogation begin. But I’m only answering five questions about Chris. It’s all I can do right now.”

“Seven?”

“Five.”

“
Five. You win, but it’s an empty victory since I was only banking on getting three out of you. First question—why did you have to pick his company, Hallie?”

I let out the bre
ath I’ve been holding. That one is easy. “You know that I’m only making this stupid movie because of Ben. As an extra bonus, maybe the vultures will leave me alone after I sit on a few couches. The FFG deal is the one Ben would have wanted.”

“He would have wanted you to take a deal with Jensen? I don’t think so.”

“He would have wanted creative control. FFG was the only company willing to do that, to make the movie on Ben’s terms. Or my terms. Or our terms. Whatever you want to call it. Okay. Enough. That’s your first question.”

“
You think that’s the end of it? That Chris will be happy to make Ben’s movie and that you can leave the cabin and move back to Michigan and no one will bother you or Grace?” Sam raises his eyes to the ceiling and clenches his fingers into a fist. “You’re one of the smartest people I know, Hallie, but you can be extraordinarily stupid. He’ll never leave you alone. Not now. Not ever.”

“
That’s question number two.”

“You’re a c
heater. Plus, you didn’t answer it.”

“
He’s left me alone for five years.”

“You changed your
name when you got married. You’ve practically been in hiding for the past five years. Maybe he couldn’t find you.”

“Come on, Sam. Do you really think that he couldn’t have found me if he wanted to?
He once flew a plane to Prague to get me some cookies for my birthday. And he’s infinitely richer and more powerful than he was at twenty.”

“Maybe he wasn’t ready to find you.”

“Or maybe he just didn’t want to. He’s a different person now. Maybe he’s just not interested in seeing me. Maybe he was never interested.”

“Nice logic, Hals.
He comes to beat down the door of your hotel room twice, and you two rekindle the old flame, which I don’t think ever really stopped burning, from his side, at least, and he’s just going to fly away and forget you ever existed? Sure. That’s a leap.”

“I never admitted that anything was rekindled, Sam.”

“You never said anything to the contrary, Hallie.”

We’re locked into a staring contest with each other.

“You’re impossible.” We both say it at the same time, and before I can open my mouth, he sneaks in a quick “Jinx.”

“Breakfast tomorrow is on you.”
Sam cackles and touches my arm. “Some things never change.”

I smile at him
sadly, and look up again, once more, to see Ben’s eyes watching carefully over us.

“And some things do.”

“That’s the shit, isn’t it?”

I take another sip of the wine and make a face at Sam.

“Tell me what happened, Hals. Just talk.”

He makes it sound so simple.