The Queen of Hearts(73)
Lost in this reverie—it was somehow sad thinking of my friends as serious adults when they’d once been so cheerfully stupid—I realized I must have missed the call to be seated for dinner; the people around me had all dispersed. Okay: nothing awkward at all about standing by yourself pounding a bourbon and looking wistful.
I pivoted toward my table and smacked into someone, knocking my drink and spilling the remainder onto the front of my dress. I stifled a curse, and started to apologize.
“I cannot believe it,” the someone said, his voice instantly, achingly familiar. “You are still—literally—running into men?”
I looked first at his shoes—black, Italian, very nice—my eyes traveling reluctantly up; long legs, trim waist, NFL-quality shoulders encased in a crisp tuxedo, chalky white predatory smile set in a square jaw that made me want to touch it. Even the skin on his face—faintly golden, faintly stubbled, rent with laugh lines—was at once dear and also repellent, sweeping me up in a vortex of incompatible emotions. Maybe I could satisfy both desires by smacking him.
“Nick,” I said, feeling heat zoom into my face.
“Damn,” he said in a low voice. “Zadie. I got your e-mail.”
“Huh?” I said, and then realized what he meant: he had my e-mail address. He’d sent me a couple of e-mails after I’d ignored his ridiculous chocolate delivery, but I had marked these messages as junk mail, unread.
“I’ve been hoping you’d change your mind about meeting me,” he said, keeping his gaze steady on mine. “Did you enjoy the chocolate?”
“Yes,” I said evenly. This had to happen eventually, I told myself. Be polite. Be brief.
The way he looked at me was unsettling: a rapacious gaze, too familiar, still somehow electrifying after the passage of years. Some people seem to rearrange the air around them when they enter a room, subtly altering the atmosphere until it bends to their will; it was hard to resist having the focus of such a person beamed onto you. Call them charismatic, or compelling, but the end result was these people had the ability to draw you in.
Despite all that, and despite the undeniable, indefinable sexual pull toward him I’d always felt, I told myself to sprint for the nearest exit. I was older; my life had irrevocably changed. My younger self had thrived on intensity, but now I knew the bottomless, elementary pull of love for my husband and children. I should no longer want to be consumed by the sun when I could bask safely in the glow of the moon.
Nick was talking, probably sensing this conversation was going to be short-lived. He walked as he spoke, and I followed him. “It’s hard to believe,” he said, “that you are a married mother.”
“Well, believe it,” I said. “I have a million kids.”
“You’re still very beautiful,” he said, in a careful, benign tone.
Best to ignore this. “Do you?” I asked.
“Do I what?”
“Do you have children?”
He looked rueful. “I had a stepchild,” he said. “I didn’t see him much, though.”
“Did you want children of your own?” Why had I asked that?
“I didn’t think so,” he said, answering with surprising slowness. “I don’t know; maybe that was a mistake. Never thought I’d be a good father. But now that I’m alone . . .” He shrugged. “Look, Zadie, I don’t know how many chances I’ll have to say this, so I’d better seize the moment. I’ve thought about you a lot over the years. A lot more than you’d believe. From the perspective of someone who’s in his forties, I look back and wonder why I treated you the way I did. I was narcissistic. I was greedy; there are a lot of bad adjectives for me in that phase of life, and I seem to remember”—he smiled—“you applying most of them very creatively toward me there at the end. But”—serious again—“Zadie, I failed to realize how unusual it was, what we had.”
This was coming more than a decade too late. And it was inappropriate. Impossible not to listen to, however.
“So,” he said, bowing his gilded head, “for what it’s worth: I’m sorry.”
“Oh,” I breathed, flummoxed. But whatever response I would have given would forever remain a mystery, because at that moment, over the ringing of some kind of a dinner gong, a voice said, “There you are.”
I turned. It was Emma.
Chapter Thirty-one
CROSSING THE RUBICON
Emma, Present Day
The Arts Ball was off to a reasonable start, considering I hadn’t wanted to come. But an unfamiliar feeling had been sweeping through me since the conversation with the Packards this morning at the gym, and since my reverie about Graham after that. It took me a while to recognize it, since it had been such a long time since I’d felt anything positive.
It was exhilaration.
Long-dormant endorphins swirled in my brain, flooding me with an alertness I could hardly believe. I shouldn’t have allowed myself to hope, but I couldn’t help it; even a tiny relief from worry felt so enjoyable I surpassed hope and proceeded to actual pleasure.
I was having fun.
Maybe Boyd and Betsy would hear my side of things and reject me after all. Maybe the technical explanation of how this could happen, coupled with my vast and sincere contrition, would not be enough. Maybe even Zadie would not be able to persuade them. But even so, I was somewhat freed from the self-loathing and fear that had buried me for months. Just the idea that they’d listen to me—the idea that I could say I was sorry—was a relief.