The Dirty Book Club(5)

“The Dirty Book Club,” Marjorie said, with a credit-where-credit-is-due nod to Gloria. Then she lit four Lucky Strikes, sealed the pact, and began reading The Housewife’s Handbook on Selective Promiscuity; starting a fifty-four-year tradition that would save them all.





Fear of Flying





CHAPTER


Two


New York City, New York

Present Day: Thursday, March 31

Half Moon

M. J. STARK opened her Sub-Zero: a fridge named as much for its self-contained cooling system as the amount of food she kept inside. She reached for the bottle of prosecco and began the 3,500-square-foot trek across her hardwood floors, shuffling in fuzzy socks past barren bookshelves and a neon No Regrets sign that had never been turned on.

Poor prosecco, M.J. thought as she curled into the corner of the sectional and muted Project Runway. Light, sexy, and full of sparkle, this effervescent wine didn’t come all the way from Italy to be lit by the glare of a flat-screen TV or chugged by a woebegone woman wearing a bleach-spotted hoodie and some ex-boyfriend’s silk boxers. It was meant for glitter-dusted models during Fashion Week. Boating on the Mediterranean. Giggling girlfriends and their summery perfumes.

But Fortune’s wheel didn’t give a shit what prosecco was meant for. It spun when it wanted to spin and stopped where it wanted to stop. And prosecco would have to deal with the outcome just like everyone else.

And so, with a cynical smirk, M.J. lifted her ill-fated companion to the heavens and drank. Charging the alcohol to haul away her pain like a wounded soldier from the battlefield—hands under armpits, heels scraping along the dirt—until its agonizing cries were no longer heard.

Then, the jiggling sound of someone tampering with her locks. Holding her breath, M.J. strained to listen above her jackhammering heart.

Logic pointed to the neighbors in #5F who were constantly jamming turquoise envelopes under her door filled with offers to purchase her apartment. Though M.J. refused to sell, their persistence made a case for buying stock in Kate Spade stationery.

“Hello?” M.J. called, her voice strained and small.

Then, click.

The lock turned. The door creaked open. And then an abrupt jolt. The chain.

Hands shaking, vision coned, M.J. palmed the cushions for her phone. 9-1-1, she thought, as if Siri could read her mind and make the call.

“The police are on their way!” she managed.

“It’s me,” called a familiar male voice.

Dan?

M.J. kicked off her socks, hurried to unlatch the chain, and then clung to her boyfriend’s firm torso. A log in a torrent of raging white water.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” she asked. His T-shirt carried the stale smell of economy class. She kept clinging anyway.

“I didn’t think you should be alone tonight.”

“So . . . what? You just hopped on a plane?”

“It was more like a dash,” he half smiled, with a superhero’s attempt at modesty. “But yes.”

“I look like a homeless undergrad. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“You would have told me not to come.”

He was right. “What if I wasn’t home?”

“I’d have gone to your office.”

“What if I was out with friends?” she tried, though they both knew there weren’t any friends, not anymore.

Dan, glimpsing the half-empty bottle of prosecco on the coffee table, gave her a lucky-guess shrug, then presented her with her usual box of See’s butterscotch lollypops. He knew better than to ask why she wasn’t tearing off the foil wrapper the way she normally did.

Taking his hand, M.J. guided him to the couch. Adrenaline made it hard for her to stand still and reacquaint herself with his California tan and the gold bursts in his hazel eyes. That, and the awkwardness that always seemed to spritz a mist of shyness onto their reunions. It was one of the drawbacks of their long-distance relationship. Eight months of daily conversations, weekend visits, a carpal tunnel’s worth of texts, and, still, that feeling of always having to start over was impossible to shake. But it was worth it. He was worth it.

Tonight, though, the mist was thicker than usual. Coagulated by Dan’s surprise visit and M.J.’s assertion that this night, above all others, was to be endured alone. Even if she had been appropriately waxed and plucked, she couldn’t swing the primal, make-up-for-lost-time sex he was used to. She could barely eke out a genuine smile. But she had to do something. Because when a tanned thirty-four-year-old general practitioner on the verge of opening his own medical practice spontaneously flies across the country to be with his pasty, probably anemic, workaholic girlfriend on the third anniversary of her family’s death, she should, at the very least, unzip her hoodie and show some cleavage.

“Is that the journal?” he asked, indicating the leather-bound notebook on the cushion beside her.

M.J. nodded, feeling the heated pinch of mobilizing tears. Like the prosecco, that journal was meant for better things; story ideas, half-baked characters, and the musings of a thirty-one-year-old aspiring author. She bought it back when she was a copywriter at City magazine, barely making rent on her studio apartment in Hell’s Kitchen and sleeping with guys who wore silk boxers, back when everything was how it should have been. When M.J.’s handwriting was fat and happy and she was still using pens.