'Til Death Do Us Part (31 page)

I’d taken off my faux fur-lined jeans jacket at the airport and bunched it under my arm, and now I stripped off my pants and sweater and underwear. After peeling back the white cotton duvet, I flopped on the bed naked, allowing the Miami heat to seep into my pores. A smile formed on my lips as I lay there, listening to the distant pounding of the surf. Then, to my surprise, I started to cry. I realized that what I was feeling was pure and utter relief.

I let myself bawl for a few minutes, long enough to soothe my frayed edges but not so long that my eyelids would swell up to the size of Idaho potatoes. I took a quick shower and put on a pair of black capris, black sandals, and this cute little white halter top with black buttons up the front. It was high enough to hide the black-and-blue mark on my chest.

It was now two o’clock, and that meant I had five hours to kill before I met up with Chris. I decided I would use the time to simply relax on the beach, walk, and think a little. I was tempted to take my composition notebook with me, but I felt it might be better to allow my brain to idle for a while and generate some revelation on its own. The only thing I stuffed in my tote bag was the novel I was reading. Before I left my room, I left a message for Chris on his cell, confirming my arrival—as promised. I also left a message for my brother Cameron, asking if I could pick his brain.

First stop would have to be lunch, though. Other than a bag of plane pretzels, which had tasted like compressed sawdust, I’d had nothing to eat since six that morning. I found a table out on the terrace of the hotel, where a scattering of late diners still lolled about. I ordered a lobster Caesar with a glass of white wine so deliciously icy that my lips nearly jumped back in surprise. Maybe I could just move here for a few months, I thought. And leave all my troubles up north.

As I drank a cappuccino, I could feel the beach beckoning just a stone’s throw away. I paid the bill and headed down there. Sandals in hand, I began to walk, letting the warm sand run through my toes. The sight of the ocean and the sound of the waves hitting the beach and then pulling back brought to mind those trips I’d taken, some as a kid with my family to Cape Cod and others, as a travel writer, to more far-flung places—Costa Rica, the Côte d’Azur, the Amalfi coast. After twenty minutes in one direction, I turned around and came back. I found a lounge chair near the hotel, dragged it under a palm tree, and read. It was only a few minutes before I drifted off into a deep sleep.

By the time I woke up to the sound of the breeze swishing in the top of palm trees, it was five. I was sticky with sweat and slightly dizzy from sleeping in the heat.

Back in my room, I showered and drank half a bottle of water, then took time getting ready. I’d brought a sundress with me, but the evening was turning cool, so I opted instead for white slacks, a white, peasanty top that fell off my shoulders, and a pair of brown sandals. As I was swiping on lip gloss, I realized that some of the Zen state I’d been feeling had started to evaporate. I was getting nervous about having dinner with someone I barely knew, about whether this Kyle dude would show up, and about whether he’d tell me something that would make the whole trip worthwhile. By the time I left the hotel for the Shore Club, I was practically buzzing with trepidation.

Sometimes you meet a person and then see him or her again and you’re startled by how your brain took such a lousy picture. That wasn’t the case with Chris. He was sitting at a table waiting for me and looked exactly as I remembered him. That gorgeous face with the full lips and cleft in his chin. His light brown hair was cut short on the sides but spiked up and tousled a little in front like summer grass, and his eyebrows were one shade darker, adding to the charm of his face. He was wearing a pale green polo shirt that matched his eyes. It also accentuated something I hadn’t noticed when he’d been in his waiter’s tux the day of the wedding. He had two Chinese characters tattooed on his arm.

“Hey,” he said, standing to greet me. He kissed me on the cheek, and as he did I rested my hands on his upper arms. They felt as hard as the side of a steer. “You’re letting your hair grow.”

“Yeah,” I acknowledged. “Though it’s in that kind of awkward stage now—not quite long enough to put up. Thanks for ordering the nice weather, by the way.”

“I hear it’s been a bitch up north. I found out this afternoon that I have to fly up there for an audition next week, and I’m not looking forward to it.”

“For something good?” I asked as we both sat down, me in the chair next to him since the spot across from him hadn’t been set.

“Could be,” he said, and smiled, a sort of half smile he did by pulling over the left side of his mouth. “It’s a soap. I’ve already done some under-fives for them, and now they’re considering me for a bigger role. It would be great to finally get out of this modeling thing. It’s been such a catch-22. It bores me to tears, but it pays pretty well, and I’d rather be doing this than waiting tables or tending bar.”

“Has acting been your goal all along?”

“Definitely. I majored in theater and came straight to New York. I’d never once thought about modeling, but a guy I did a showcase with suggested it as a roundabout way of getting into television commercials. It’s nearly impossible to get an agent for that stuff, and you just have to try everything you can think of. In the last couple of months, I actually managed to back into a few commercials that way—you know, I did the print ad and then next thing you know they’re considering me for the TV campaign. And now it looks like I might finally have an agent. In fact, I’m thinking that after my audition, I may not even come back down again.”

“Where do you stay when you’re down here?” I asked. As soon as I’d said it, I worried that it sounded as if I wanted to get a handle on what his digs were like, in case I might want to head back there later.

“I bunk down in an apartment with a bunch of other guys,” he said. “It’s just a crash pad, really, in a building with a zillion other models. They’re nice enough, but I swear I’ve never seen a group of people so obsessed with their looks. These guys actually bring weights to photo shoots and then pump up right before they go on set. Sometimes I think it’s a miracle I get cast in anything.”

He took his eyes off me in search of a waiter and flagged one down with just a lift of his chin. There was something mature and sophisticated about him that seemed incongruous with his barely-off-campus looks. When the waiter arrived I ordered a glass of rosé, which seemed fitting for the place and the night. Chris, I noticed, had already ordered a drink that looked like vodka on the rocks. Apparently he wasn’t worried about carb face.

“So tell me more about your situation,” he said after I’d ordered my wine. “It sounds like a real nightmare.”

“It is—and it’s gotten even more complicated since I spoke to you.” I fleshed out what I’d shared with him earlier and described some of the facts I’d learned in the last day. I also told him about my dispiriting last encounter with the Greenwich police.

“It sounds like you’re in some kind of Hitchcock movie,” he said, shaking his head.

“I know. I keep circling around the truth but never know what it is. That’s why I was desperate to talk to this guy Kyle. You got the feeling he really did see something?”

“Let’s put it this way—I don’t know if he
saw
something, but he definitely
knows
something. I could tell just by looking at him. Speaking of Kyle, why don’t we order and then I’ll swing by the bar, which is his usual haunt. We agreed on nine, but he’s the type who’d come an hour early, not find us there, and then just split.”

The waiter arrived with my wine, and we ordered dinner. Then Chris excused himself and stood up. I saw for the first time that he was in light khaki pants and sandals. I watched him go, a confident but easy stride, the mark of someone who’d always known he was hunky but hadn’t really cared all that much. If Landon were sitting right next to me, I knew just what he’d say: “That might be the greatest ass I’ve ever seen.”

The night had grown slightly cooler, and I draped the pashmina I’d brought around my shoulders. While I waited I sipped my wine and listened to the sound of the ocean crashing against the beach. Jack drifted into my thoughts. We had talked about heading somewhere warm like this in March or April—maybe to the Yucatán. A sense of foreboding came over me out of the blue, but I had no idea why.

The waiter appeared at my right elbow, with our plates lined up on the inside of his forearm. He looked at me with a quizzical expression, silently querying me if it was okay to set them down.

“He’ll be right back,” I said.

Chris had been gone longer than I realized, and I glanced back at the hotel, scanning the area. There was no sign of him. I felt a tiny swell of panic. Was this just one more part of the Hitchcockian movie? I suddenly wondered. Was Chris not coming back? Would the next scene be me frantically searching the Sky Bar for Chris and for Kyle? I lowered my head into my hand and tried to slow my breath.

“Sorry.”

It was Chris appearing out of nowhere behind me. He slid into his seat and dropped his napkin back in his lap.

“It’s pretty spread out in there, and after I took a sweep around, some guy tells me he thought he saw Kyle earlier. So I did another sweep. I see this guy again, and then he tells me he remembers that he saw Kyle someplace else instead. The good news is that Kyle told this bozo that he’s headed over here later.”

“Terrific,” I said, and took another sip of wine. I couldn’t believe how rattled I’d been.

Chris ordered a glass of wine, and I had another. Over the next half hour we ate and talked. His father, he told me, was an engineer, and he had spent some of his early life in the Middle East and Asia. Maybe all the moving around and the subsequent sense of displacement were what had prevented his ego from becoming inflated. I realized as we spoke that our dinner was seeming dangerously close to a date. Chris was easy to talk to and even easier to look at. I knew I should bring up Jack, but there was no right minute to do it without it seeming as if I’d dropped a sixteen-pound ham on the table.

I was relieved when he suggested we skip coffee and head for the bar. He fought me for the check, but I insisted, saying that he was the one helping me in a bind.

The Sky Bar was nearly packed when we arrived, and the feeling was electric. People talking and shouting amid the exotic decor—sheer white curtains, climbing plants, Moroccan hanging lanterns.

I ordered a sparkling water, and so did Chris. We stood against the bar and talked some more—about his days studying theater, my writing career. All the while, Chris let his eyes roam the room. At one point we glanced simultaneously at our watches, and I saw to my shock that it was nine-twenty. I felt a wave of panic again. Chris told me to hang by the bar while he took another sweep around the room. I stared into the crowd. The place was loaded with lots of guys who all could have been models, some white, some black, some Latin. Chris returned five minutes later, shaking his head.

“Look, don’t worry yet,” he said. “Just as he could have been an hour early, he could be an hour late.”

We waited a few more minutes, Chris’s eyes always on the crowd and me foolishly scanning, too, though I had utterly no idea what Kyle looked like.

“I don’t believe it,” Chris said out of the blue.

“What?”

“He’s lying ten feet away from us—on that daybed.”

There was a bunch of daybeds in the bar, places to enjoy your buzz or ram your tongue down the throat of someone you’d met ten minutes earlier. I followed Chris’s eyes to one directly ahead of us, where a guy and two girls lounged against half a dozen large pillows in bright, exotic fabrics. Though I must have laid eyes on Kyle at some point at the reception, he was totally unfamiliar to me.

Taking my hand, Chris led me over there. Kyle didn’t spot him until we were right in front. He smiled without bothering to get up.

“Hey, man,” Kyle said, grasping Chris’s arm in one of those full-forearm shakes. His sandy-colored hair was longish, parted in the middle, and looped up from a slight widow’s peak to fall in waves on either side of his face. He had narrow eyes, and his upper lip curled up toward his nose in the hint of a scowl. I realized after a second that he wasn’t forming an expression—his features were naturally set that way. Kyle had come out of the womb looking like a bad boy.

“This is Bailey,” Chris said. “The girl I said was coming down here.”

He looked momentarily stupefied and then nodded. “Oh yeah. How ya doin’?”

“Great. It’s so nice to meet you,” I said. “Have you got a second to talk?”

He sighed and shrugged his shoulders. The two girls, whose boobs were spilling out of their tops, just lay there sullenly, not saying a word.

“Can I buy you a drink?” I asked, remembering Adam’s advice.

“I’m cool,” he said, eyeing me up and down. He was probably thinking I was too ancient to speak to. “So, Chris, I got that big catalog job. The Italian one. I’m so stoked, dude.”