No One Knows Us Here(48)

“What are you doing?” he said.

I didn’t know what to say to that.

“That’s not what I want,” he said. He was angry. Angry.

“Leo, I—I’m sorry.”

“That’s not what this is about.”

“I thought you wanted me to be your girlfriend, I thought—”

“That’s right,” he said. “A girlfriend. Not a slut.” He had his Mirror out. He tapped something into it. “Alejandro will be here in a few minutes.”

“What?”

“He’ll pick you up. Just wait on the sidewalk outside the building.”

I raised myself up on my elbows to look at Leo. He was all business. “But—”

“That way you don’t have to call a cab or take the bus.” Leo was standing over me now, offering me his hand and hoisting me to my feet. “Come on, you don’t want to keep him waiting.”

He ushered me out the door and into the elevator so fast I didn’t have time to retrieve my coat from the hallway, so I had to stand on the street corner wearing my good high-heeled shoes and the sweat suit.

A slut. He’d called me a slut. It would be insulting if it weren’t so baffling. He knew what I was doing, out on that date with Sebastian St. Doug. He knew who I was, right from the start.

It was still raining—cold, flat drops. I zipped up the sweatshirt and pulled the hood over my head, scanning the street for Alejandro. The black SUV pulled up a moment later.

I jumped in the passenger seat and pulled back my hood.

The car idled in the middle of the street. I whipped my head around to face Alejandro. “What?”

He was staring at me, his eyes growing wider by the second. His eyes traveled up and down the length of my body, from the shoes to my sweatshirt.

Then he laughed. His laugh came out loud and long, like a howl. He pounded the steering wheel. “Oh my god!” he screamed.

“You’re holding up traffic.”

Alejandro glanced up to check the rearview mirror. No one was waiting behind us.

“I’m sorry.” Alejandro wiped tears from his cheeks and sucked in a breath of air, as if trying to control himself. “I mean, what the hell, Rosemary?”

I set my jaw, tried to look angry. I wanted to command him to drive, drive me straight back to my apartment and never utter another word to anyone about this, ever. Instead I found myself almost cracking a smile. “Shut up.”

“So are you planning on explaining this?”

“Just drive, okay?”

Alejandro put his foot on the gas pedal and began navigating through the narrow downtown streets.

We were both silent for a minute. It was a tense silence, a silence begging to be filled. “It was a training exercise,” I said at last. “You know, because I’m going to be his personal assistant.”

“Uh-huh.”

“He wanted me to get in character. See what life is like as Leo Glass, you know? He probably made you wear this when you were training, right?” I turned to look at Alejandro, an innocent expression on my face, as if this were a perfectly reasonable explanation.

Alejandro only shook his head back and forth. He wasn’t laughing anymore, as if he were struck, suddenly, with the gravity of my predicament. I almost expected him to warn me then. Say something like, You need to get out. You need to change your name and skip town or, at the very least, file a restraining order. He left you on the sidewalk wearing a replica of his clothes. This has gone too far already, and it has barely even begun.

He didn’t say any of that, though. He said, “You couldn’t pay me to wear that.”



Leo called me the very next day, as if nothing out of the ordinary had occurred the night before. He said he had a few more of his mother’s recipes for us to re-create. We could start with her famous banana muffins and move on to her signature marinara sauce, handed down from some long-lost Italian foremother. The secret ingredient was nutmeg.





CHAPTER 16


It rained every day, on and on. Leaves fell from the trees and into the storm drains. The streets turned to raging rivers. Then everything froze into ice. Every day I read weather-related horror stories: Homeless man found dead behind a rhododendron bush under layers of blankets and frost. Two women fell to their deaths after abandoning their car on a frozen highway, setting off for home over the ice and tumbling off the overpass. A family of four drove the wrong way on a back road on Mount Hood. No one ever saw them again.

Inside my apartment, the radiators churned with hot water. I still had to crack my bedroom windows open every night, just to avoid roasting to death.

I was gone more often, spending time with Leo. “Getting to know each other,” as he put it. This meant cooking lessons. I had been getting into it. I spent my free time combing through cookbooks and reading recipe blogs. I made out lists of ingredients and, if I had nothing else to do (and, let’s face it, I usually didn’t), I would go all over town hunting something down. Pomegranate syrup. Tamarind paste. Fenugreek leaves.

Someone was probably keeping track of me as I traveled around town, by foot or train or car. This gave me a perverse form of satisfaction because I was doing exactly what I was supposed to be doing. If I visited a store with the Glasseye sticker on the window, I would linger extralong, wandering up and down the aisles. Angling my body so it would be sure to catch the features of my face.