Frenemies(18)

“The night is young,” Amy Lee said, sounding hopeful. She looked around. “I have to get some mandatory mingling in. Oscar thinks we need to expand our practice.” She grinned at me. “I’m assuming you’re not that interested in trolling for patients with me?”

“You’re assuming right,” I agreed. I made a shooing motion with my hand. “Go schmooze.”

“Oscar’s much better at it than I am,” Amy Lee said, getting to her feet and smoothing her dress. “He makes people want to come get a root canal. But strangely, he thinks we both have a responsibility to our livelihood.”

“Men are so crazy!” I commiserated, shaking my head. We grinned at each other.

“What are you going to do? Sit here, feeling blue?” She cracked herself up with that one. I ignored it.

“I’m avoiding my stalker,” I told her primly.

“Which we need to talk about.”

“After you drum up business,” I said, and shooed her away again, for good this time.

So far, I’d been doing a pretty good job of avoiding both Nate and Helen, both of whom I could see from across the room. (Helen, as it happened, was not wearing a gown that made her look like a gargantuan blueberry. She’d opted for a somewhat more flattering silver dress.) The fact that Nate’s eyes lit up when he saw me as if he’d never ripped my heart from my chest led me to conclude that he had no idea his girlfriend had called me not just eight times that night (yes, eight—and the other two were hang-ups, so draw your own conclusions), but a number of other times throughout the past two weeks.

Here’s what I’d pieced together from various answering machine messages and a few cell phone voice mails: Helen wanted to talk. She wanted to talk to me so badly, in fact, that she didn’t mind coming over all Fatal Attraction to do it. I knew Helen well enough to know that normally, her self-absorption prevented her from wanting to talk to anyone else. Much less needing to talk, as she’d repeatedly claimed. She could sit for hours and just sort of stare off into space, doing nothing. Not reading a book. Not daydreaming. Not thinking about anything. Just sitting there. It used to drive me up the wall when I would look up from my reading to find her just sitting, like an android someone turned off and left propped up on the cot across the room.

This was not someone who needed to talk to anyone, about anything. Which meant she had to have a reason.

I’d had some time to wonder what that reason might be, and I’d narrowed it down to two possible motivations. Either a) she was plain old batshit crazy or b) she felt guilty for her behavior. And the phrase “her behavior” could, in this case, encompass anything and everything, from flirting shamelessly with Nate at the Labor Day party with her boobs pressed up against his arm, to the actual theft of Nate to her intervention-speak at Henry’s house. She was guilty of so many sins, really, that it was impossible to pick just one she might feel guilty about.

If our interaction at Henry’s house had been a preview, however, I was planning to miss the show, thanks. I didn’t want to talk to Helen—I wanted to scream at her, and possibly resort to fisticuffs. Being all delicate and waifish wouldn’t help her if I went all Courtney Love on her ass.

The previous weekend there had been an unexpected gap in my social calendar, which had meant I got to spend the entirety of the weekend lounging around my apartment, catching up on my TiVo and meaning to clean. It had been nice to spend some time not contending with my failed relationships and the problem of Henry. It had been even nicer not making an ass of myself all around Boston. It was like a deep breath of a weekend.

And now that it was November, the holiday season was in full swing. I had one party or another to attend every single weekend for the remainder of the year, up to and including a huge New Year’s eve bash a friend of ours was throwing out on the Cape.

On the one hand, it was exciting to have a vital and energetic social schedule. On the other hand, I was going to have to deal with the post-traumatic stress of my breakup with Nate at almost every single one of those parties, and by post-traumatic stress I meant not just my emotions but Helen.

I was exhausted just thinking about it. I certainly didn’t need to discuss it with the person who caused it all.

Across the room, Helen let out one of her donkey laughs and then looked up. Our eyes met. Hers narrowed, and I felt a flush of panic.

Realizing that sitting still made me a big royal blue target, I jumped to my feet and headed out of the banquet room. I was looking around at the grandeur, should anyone ask—which meant, obviously, that I was hiding. I had exhausted the lobby after a few turns around the perimeter, had eyed every piece of Boston and/or Red Sox paraphernalia in the gift shop, and was resigning myself to reentering the party when the elevator directly in front of me opened.

Inside, Henry pushed a skinny brunette away from his body and looked up. Our eyes met.

The fact that he was evil made him hotter than the sum of his actual body parts, I thought in that brief, searing moment, like Sark on Alias. And maybe he wouldn’t even be quite so evil if he weren’t quite so delectable.

I would have to think about that. Later.

“Hello, Gus,” Henry said. It was the way he said my name that I objected to, I thought. As if it meant something else entirely in his language.

He stepped from the elevator, tugging the leggy brunette in his wake. She looked lazy and postcoital, not that you could tell that anything had gone on from the state of her sleek blowout, which remained perfect. Henry looked the way he always did: gorgeous. And, when looking at me, also secretly amused.