Frenemies(51)
Georgia had been out of her mind when she left for Scranton that Monday morning. She was emotionally unprepared to deal with a week in some city she wasn’t sure she could find on a map. She was furious with Amy Lee, hurt that I had kept secrets from her, and all of that piled on top of the humiliating breakup with Jared.
“If you can even call it that,” Georgia sniffed, “which I’m not sure you can, because that presupposes a ‘relationship’ and I’m not sure that mess qualified.”
Neither did I, but it wasn’t my place to say anything.
“Don’t give me that look,” Georgia said. “I’m the one who has to actually feel the way I do when I get crazy over inappropriate men. I knew Jared was another in a long line of complete *s. Believe me, I knew.”
“Back to Chris Starling?” I suggested. Diplomatically.
They had been taking depositions in Scranton, which, Georgia admitted, showed Chris Starling to his best advantage. He always unsettled the people he was deposing. It was the way he looked at people. As if he already knew their secrets and was personally disappointed in them when they failed to divulge those secrets when he asked.
Opposing counsel this time around was some hotshot type, all sleek with flashing white teeth Georgia just knew he’d like to sink into her jugular. Literally and figuratively.
“So basically he was the Jared type,” I said.
“His clone, in fact,” Georgia agreed. “Obviously, I was smitten.”
“And now I’m confused. I thought this was a Chris Starling story.”
“Just listen.”
Georgia had locked eyes with Mr. Jugular, and they’d arranged to meet for illicit cocktails, all in secret, of course, since they were opposing counsel and had to maintain the appearance of propriety. Which, it turned out, suited Mr. Jugular just fine because while he’d certainly be up for whatever Georgia might have in mind—particularly in the bedroom, he made clear with his hand on her thigh—he needed to keep things extra quiet because he was, after all, engaged.
“Yuck,” I said.
“Tell me about it,” Georgia said.
Because he hadn’t even confessed it—he’d just announced it. He evidently thought it would either be a turn-on for Georgia, or incidental information to file away in case Georgia got any ideas. At no point did it occur to Mr. Jugular that, upon hearing the news, Georgia might not sleep with him.
Which had really been the slap in the face.
“At what point did I become so obvious and easy that guys stopped trying to deceive me into bed with them?” she asked me. “At what point did I start wearing that sign around my neck?”
She had sat there for a long moment with Mr. Jugular’s hand on her thigh. She was in a cheesy hotel bar in Scranton, Pennsylvania. It was a Monday night. And though the setting wasn’t necessarily auspicious, Georgia felt her life shift right there and then.
“I can’t even begin to stress how very much I’d like to tell you that it was like something out of a movie,” she said now, “with a stirring song playing in the background and that light of battle in my eyes, but it was actually really quiet. There was Muzak. And this f*cking guy. This engaged guy. And I realized that this was what my life was, who I was. This pathetic woman in a hotel bar, about to willingly sleep with some sleazy guy who couldn’t even be bothered to conceal the fact that he had a fiancée.” She shook her head. “That’s how little he cared about me. And I could see with perfect clarity that it started right there and then. I could take this guy up to my room and we could have sex, it might even be good sex, and I could keep having sex with guys like him, and soon enough they’d be married guys. Guys with wives and kids. Guys with houses and whole other lives. Guys who wouldn’t even bother to pretend at having a relationship with me. That would be who I was, and it all started right there in that bar with that guy.”
She sat there for a moment, and I tried to read her expression, but she looked about as remote as I’d ever seen her.
“What did you do?” I whispered.
She looked up and met my gaze.
“It kills me that you have to ask,” she said.
“I didn’t mean—”
“Of course you didn’t. Because how would you know?” She took a deep breath. “I got up and left. I wasn’t even mean about it. I just said I had an earlier morning than I’d originally thought. And then I went up to my hotel room and sat on the ugly orange bedspread and cried. For about twelve hours.”
“Oh, Georgia.”
“It was fine,” she said. “I’m fine. And it was kind of interesting to just … feel what I was feeling. I didn’t have you or Amy Lee to call. There was nothing particularly dramatic about it. It was just me, and the person I was this close to becoming.”
“Wow,” I said.
One unfortunate side effect of choosing to reinvent herself while taking depositions in Scranton, Pennsylvania, was that Georgia had to face the catalyst for her reinvention across the table in the morning. In the way of men like Mr. Jugular since the dawn of time, he took sexual rejection badly. He used Georgia for target practice enough that at lunch, Chris Starling actually sat her down for a talk.
“He was in rare form,” Georgia said. “Even for him. He took me to Burger King and while I was trying to enjoy my hamburger he looked up and said, ‘This morning is, of course, why you can’t sleep with opposing counsel.’?” She imitated Chris Starling’s dry tone perfectly.