Reckless Hearts (12 page)

Jake heard the
knock on his bedroom door, he was just choosing to ignore it.

In the week since he'd put Arnold on the case, he hadn't heard back from the kid. As his anxiety and wounded pride tightened in his chest, he'd decided in desperation to put his limited researching tools to the task. He'd been holed up inside for hours with the lights off, searching every animation and video site he could think of, typing random search terms into Google just to see what would come up, obsessively refusing to believe that if Harlow was the person he claimed to be there could be no evidence at all of his existence.

“Jake? I'd really like it if you'd let me in, sweetie.”

Jake cringed when he heard the word
sweetie
. This was the third time his mom had tried his door tonight. He realized she was worried about how moody he'd been, but really,
sweetie
? He wasn't a five-year-old.

He shouted through the door, “I'm busy!”

Then he returned to his task. Who knew there were so many anime sites in the world? For the past hour he'd been rummaging around on a Japanese site with a name he couldn't pronounce. It seemed to specialize in videos of samurai and ronin. When he'd stumbled on it, his first thought was of that Sigur Rós thing Elena had shown him that day on the beach. Thinking maybe that he could find that video here, he'd been following link after link, not really sure where they would lead him since all the text was written in Japanese, which showed up as wingdings on his computer.

“It's almost ten thirty,” his mother called through the door. “If you're going to celebrate New Year's at all, you should think about getting ready.”

Wait, what was this? He'd clicked on a dark, brooding video, painted in watercolors. It didn't have a Sigur Rós sound track, but the visuals seemed pretty similar to what he remembered of the animation Elena had shown him. Could it . . . was it . . . ?

“Jake?”

“Give me one second!”

He cued up the animation again and studied it closely. Either the Japanese kid had stolen it from Harlow or Harlow had stolen it from the kid. Everything in him said that Harlow was the one doing the stealing. As the animation reached its end, he saw a small copyright symbol in the corner of the frame. 2002. That's when this was made. Harlow would have been four or five years old. He'd known it. Maybe, sure, he might really be the person he claimed to be, but he was definitely a fraud.
Bastard.

The question now was what to do with this valuable information. He'd have to be strategic. And sensitive to Elena's emotions. But he had to wonder, given the way she'd reacted when he told her he loved her, if his new knowledge would make any difference between them.

Anyway, he couldn't put his mom off forever. “All clear,” he called. “Mom? You can come in.”

His door slowly opened and his mom peeked her head into the room like she was checking for danger before entering.

“You okay?” she said, that steady calming look in her eyes. “I would have thought you'd be doing something with Elena tonight.”

Jake looked down at his keyboard. “Yeah, well,” he said. “Not this year.”

Her gaze remained steady, compassionate. She'd always been this way, letting him come to her with
his problems when he was ready, not pushing him, but registering, noticing when he was going through something.

“Cameron's put you on the guest list at StarFish,” she said. “You could go check it out. It might be fun.”

Jake made a face. He couldn't help it. He couldn't help but wonder when Cameron would want something in return for all the free things he kept throwing Jake's way.

His mom moved deeper into the room. She sat on the bed and folded her hands in her lap.

“I know it's hard,” she said.

“What's hard?”

“Getting used to all this.” She gestured around the room. “Cameron and his lifestyle and the things he can provide.”

Jake looked around the room, focusing on anything but her as he tried to understand what she wanted him to say in response to this. Then, maybe because he was already feeling raw because of Harlow, or maybe because of the pressure to blindly adore Cameron that he felt hovering in the house, or the spooky insinuations he'd picked up from Nathaniel, or all of this together, but Jake couldn't stop himself from defensively blurting out, “What does he want from me, anyway?”

“Nothing,” his mom said simply.

Jake couldn't give up his skepticism that easily. “Really?”

“Really. He wants you to feel welcome. He wants you to know he understands that loving me means loving you, too.”

“But does he love you?”

Jake's mom tipped her head inquisitively. She was cool, unflappable.

“Of course he does,” she said. “Why would you ever think that he doesn't?”

“It's just . . . Nathaniel—”

“Nathaniel's troubled,” his mom said, cutting him off. “You can't take the things Nathaniel says to heart.”

Jake tried not to let his concern show, but his mom noticed everything. She always had.

Changing tactics, she said, “You know, Cameron's spent years struggling with how to do what's best for Nathaniel. He constantly worries about him. Really, Jake. Give him a chance. He's more sensitive than he sometimes seems to be. He hides behind his charm and sometimes he can seem a little presumptuous, probably, but really he's kind. You'll see as he gets more comfortable with you and begins to let down his guard.”

She scrunched her eyes at him.

“Okay?” she said.

Jake tentatively nodded.

“It's New Year's Eve,” she said. “You should go have fun.”

“All right,” Jake said. “I'll go. But I'm doing this for you, not for Cameron.”

“That's fine,” she said. “These things take time.” She checked her watch. “You know, you can still get to StarFish in time for the countdown.”

Shutting the screen of his computer, Jake pulled on his hooded sweatshirt and slipped into his Cons. He decided he'd take the Rumbler, not the Mini. He wasn't ready yet to change his mind completely about Cameron.

He was pretty sure, also, that he wasn't going to be able to find the energy to enjoy himself. That would take an intervention from Elena, and since their sad conversation at Christmas, she'd stayed away from him. He understood why. If he were her he'd stay away from him, too.

Riding the elevator
back to the lobby, Elena and Harlow studied their reflections in the mirrored door.

Elena shined with the afterglow of their adventure on the roof. She adjusted her dress so it hung on her hips in the free-spirited way it was supposed to. She fidgeted with her hair, trying to get her curls to fall back into place and re-create the flapper style she'd worked so hard on before going out.

Harlow played with his collar and tugged at his pant leg.

They were conscious of the possibility of the doors opening at any moment and letting in strangers who might figure out what they'd just been up to on the roof.
They were aware of the camera hidden in the corner above them. They tried their best to act like nothing had happened. Two people waiting to exit and go on their way.

But they couldn't help glancing silently at each other in the mirror every few seconds and smirking, shooting knowing looks back and forth, giggling and then tearing their gazes away from each other, their expressions betraying the reckless glee they were feeling about having gotten away with such a crazy stunt.

As the elevator finally bounced to a halt on the lobby level, Harlow reached across the space between them and gave Elena's thumb one quick squeeze. She felt the intoxicating current of his desire shoot through her body one last time.

Then the doors opened and they stepped out into the throngs of party revelers and hotel patrons as though they were completely innocent, just a guy and a girl getting off an elevator.

“Where to now?” she asked.

She heard the answer she wanted him to give, “Anywhere. Everywhere,” bop through her head.

Instead, he glanced at his fancy massive watch and said, “It's almost midnight. We could go back into the club. Watch the clock tick down to—” He froze midsentence. “Fuck.”

His eyes narrowed and his body tensed up like he'd been struck by lightning. It took Elena a second to catch up with his change of mood. When she did, a spike of fear shot through her.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Nothing,” he said. But his body language said it very much was not nothing. He was making himself subtly smaller, ducking and shifting, eyes darting everywhere. His mischievous, wry half smile had been replaced with a tight-lipped anxiousness, a testy expression that frightened her just a little.

“Something's wrong. I can tell. What is it?” she said, trying not to panic, hoping he'd trust her and let her in.

When he just tensed his cheek and said nothing, peering out at her from someplace deep inside himself that seemed like a universe away, she pushed further.

“It's that guy, isn't it?” she said. “The one who texted you. What did you do to him?”

“He thinks I owe him money,” Harlow said, mumbling and swallowing his words. “Like, a lot of money.”

She glanced around at the people milling in the lobby—middle-aged couples in tuxedos, the crush of fashionistas spilling down the fan of stairs that led to entrance to the club—but they all just looked like variations on the elegant, rich partiers she'd seen earlier in the evening. She didn't know what or who she was looking
for. She imagined some seven-foot goon in a black suit, some massive man with fists like hammers. There was no one who looked like that hanging around the hotel.

“Where is he?” she asked, going up on her tiptoes.

When he didn't answer, she turned to look at him, to let him know that they were in it together.

And just as the New Year's bells started chiming and the cheer went up throughout the hotel lobby, she realized with a shock that he was gone.

As midnight approached,
Jake found himself slouched in one of the surprisingly hard overstuffed black leather club chairs in the lobby of StarFish. In his faded yellow zippered hoodie and T-shirt, he was beyond underdressed. Everyone else there had done themselves up in tuxes or festive, colorful linen suits.

He couldn't bring himself to climb the plush, carpeted steps and enter the club. Just the pounding of the bass, which he could hear from here, threatened to rob him of his soul.

He hated big see-and-be-seen places like this. They made him feel inadequate, forcing him to confront his loner tendencies and the gulf between himself and
the kind of shallow, money-obsessed person American commercial culture seemed to want him to be. And he couldn't help but wonder how many more of these sorts of parties he'd have to go to now that his mom was married to Cameron.

If Elena had been there with him, they could have had fun mocking the pretensions of, say, the pushy woman in the expensively tattered dress who kept stomping angrily back and forth from the club to the front door of the hotel so she could dig through her gargantuan purse for yet another Camel Light. But Elena wasn't here, and even if she were, she probably wouldn't want to sit in the corner being snarky with him—she'd be urging him to make the best of it, bopping her head, saying,
We don't have to join them. We can make our own party over here in the corner
.

Trying to make himself inconspicuous, Jake played with his phone, flipping through his songs, and pretended that he wasn't as lonely and heartbroken as he felt. When he heard the dinging of the hotel's piped-in New Year's bells and the shouts of “ten, nine, eight, seven, six” from the mob spilling out of the club, he felt himself slumping lower in his chair, like the countdown was hammering him into a hole. There just didn't seem to be much to celebrate this year.

The shouting in unison continued. “Five, four, three, two, Happy New Year!”

There was clapping. Cheering. Noisemakers churned. Confetti flew. Jake looked up to see couples kissing each other.

And then, as though the world existed just to mock him, he saw Elena across the room. She stood by herself near the edge of the black marble check-in desk, looking around the room like she was lost.

His heart leaped and a silly vision billowed in his brain of her having come to find him, to embrace him and tell him she'd made a mistake. And then his sank because, obviously, that wasn't going to happen. Unlike Jake, she'd dressed for the occasion. Her gauzy dress was bunched to one side so it hung diagonally over her hips. Her tan skin seemed to gleam beneath it. And she'd tamed her hair and folded it down against her head so that it curled provocatively above her ears.

He wondered if she'd seen him. He wasn't sure if he wanted her to. He faked like he was busy with his phone and studied her out of the corner of his eye.

Then when she did a double take, looked his way again and peered, it was too late. If she hadn't seen him before, she saw him now.

Though he didn't feel up to faking it tonight, there was nothing he could do but throw her a little embarrassed wave now that she knew he was there. Though he ached to be near her, he was afraid to actually talk to her tonight.

She pushed the curl of hair behind her ear and headed toward him. Even teetering slightly on her high heels as she maneuvered around the people blocking her way, she looked impossibly beautiful. Then, as she got closer, he noticed that there was something about the expression on her face—a kind of panic, maybe. A fear. Like she was as afraid of talking to him tonight as he was of talking to her.

Jake sat up straight and slipped his phone into his pocket.

“Hey,” he said, trying to hard to play it cool and act like nothing had changed between them. “What brings you to this fine establishment tonight?”

“Oh, I don't know,” she said, screwing her mouth into a forced smile. “I just stopped in to use the free bathroom, but then”—she gestured around the room—“I figured I'd stay for the twenty-dollars-a-glass champagne.” She was trying to break the awkwardness by making a joke—he'd seen her do it a hundred times with Nina—but he didn't have the energy to laugh along tonight.

As the seconds ticked by with neither of them saying anything, he could feel the pressure of her fumbling through her mind for what to say next.

“It's good to see you,” he said, to say something.

“Yeah,” she said, a touch of sadness seeping through her voice, “it's good to see you, too.”

Then they fell into another awkward silence. She
kept peering around the room. What was she searching for? And why did she have that spooked look in her eyes? Jake felt a pang of longing, of loss. There was a time, just last week, when he'd have known without having to ask what was wrong. Now he didn't feel like he had the right to ask.

Sitting down on the huge arm of his chair, she said, “Good to see you dressed up for the occasion.”

“I . . . yeah,” Jake said, tugging nervously on his sweatshirt's hood string.

He tried to smile at her, to let her know he appreciated her trying to be the same Elena as she'd always been. Though it hurt his heart, it also pleased him.

The problem was, what to say next? “How've you been?” he asked, finally.

“I've been . . . okay. I've been good, actually. Really good.” She peered over her shoulder again. “You?” she said, distractedly. She was being weirdly fidgety, anxious in a way that he could tell had nothing to do with him.

“I'm the same,” he said. “You came to this fancy party all alone?”

It took her a second to answer this one, but when she did, she said, “Is there something wrong with that?”

She glanced over her shoulder, searching again. Jake knew she was lying. That was what they'd come to—lying to each other to protect their feelings. He should never have told her he loved her.

“You're here alone, too, aren't you?” she said.

“Yeah, I guess. But I had to come. My mother demanded it. Cameron owns this hotel.”

She arched an eyebrow.

“You didn't know that? Yeah. It's all his.”

“Wow. I had no idea,” she said.

Then, neither of them knowing quite what was allowed and what wasn't, they fell into yet another awkward silence. Jake fought the urge to ask her how things were going with Harlow, to ask her if it was Harlow she kept looking around for. He didn't want to know. Well, actually, he desperately did want to know, but only if things were going poorly. One thing he knew for sure was that, whatever else happened in this conversation, he had to make sure not to mention Harlow's animation or what he'd discovered tonight. It would just piss her off. Even if she conceded that the thing was a fake, she'd think he was being a creep, Google-stalking Harlow and trying to shatter her happiness.

She peered over her shoulder again. She toyed with the silver pendant dangling from her neck, glancing around again every two seconds. And that spooked look in her eyes was still there.

“Everything okay?” he asked. He wanted to comfort her and he almost reached out to touch her forearm, but then he thought better of it. She'd misunderstand.

“Yeah.”

“You sure? You seem . . . I don't know—”

“I'm fine, Jake. I'm a big girl,” she said curtly. “Just thinking about maybe blowing this pop stand.”

“I could give you a ride home.”

“No. I'm cool.”

“You sure?”

“You know how I like to walk.”

“It's, like, six miles. You don't even like to go that far on your bike.”

She looked him in the eye and sighed. “Jake,” she said, half warning, half pitying. “You're really going to make me spell it out?”

He knew she was trying to protect him, but he couldn't help pushing one last time. “I'm just asking,” he said. “I mean, the Rumbler's right outside. Why not just let me drive you home?”

The sadness that passed across her face was almost unbearable to see. “You know why,” she said. “It wouldn't be a good idea.” She pointed toward the platinum-blond guy standing erect at the concierge station. “I'm going to get Peter over there to call me a cab.”

So that's how it is
, he thought. He felt like he'd just been slapped.

Then, weakly, he said, “Fine, whatever.”

He stood and stretched, trying and failing to brush off his disappointment.

“I guess, then, I'll, I don't know, see you around?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Happy New Year, Jake.” She stood there, awkwardly for a second, then said, “I'm sorry. I really am.”

But her being sorry didn't help at all. Jake got out of there as fast as he could and he couldn't help but think that it was funny in a completely not funny way how this night had so quickly gone from depressing to tragic.