Brown-Eyed Girl (Travis Family #4)(19)

We had been introduced by mutual friends at a cocktail party held in the outdoor sculpture garden at the Met. We had been instantly comfortable with each other, so naturally in tune that our friends had laughingly accused us of already knowing each other. We’d both been twenty-one at the time, full of ambition and energy, both of us having just moved from other places, me from Dallas, Brian from Boston.

It had been the happiest time of my life, that first year in New York, a city that had infused me with the perpetual feeling that something great, or at least interesting, was just around the corner. Having been accustomed to the lazy, sunstruck pace of Texas, where the heat forced everyone to ration their energy, I had been galvanized by Manhattan’s cool autumn vitality. You belong here, the city seemed to say, with the honking of canary-colored taxicabs and the screeching and grinding of construction equipment, the sounds of street musicians and bars and rattling subways… all of it meant that I was in a place where things were happening.

It had been easy to find friends, a group of women who filled their spare time with volunteer work, clubs, lessons in things like foreign languages, dancing, tennis. The Manhattanite’s passion for self-improvement had been contagious – soon I’d found myself signing up for clubs and lessons, trying to make every minute of the day purposeful.

In retrospect, I had to wonder how much of my falling in love with New York had been the adjuvant to falling in love with Brian. Had I met Brian in another place, I wasn’t certain that we would have lasted as long as we had. He had been a good lover, considerate in bed, but his Wall Street job had entailed sixteen-hour workdays and preoccupations with things such as the upcoming nonfarm payroll numbers or what was happening on Bloomberg at one a.m. It had made him perpetually tired and distracted. He had used alcohol to relieve the stress, and that hadn’t exactly helped our love life. But even at the beginning of our relationship, I had never experienced anything with Brian that even remotely resembled what had happened last night.

I had been like an entirely different person with Joe. But I wasn’t ready to be someone new – I’d grown too accustomed to being the woman Brian Palomer had jilted at the altar. If I let go of that identity, I wasn’t sure what would happen. I was afraid to imagine the possibilities. All I knew was that no man would ever hurt me the way Brian had, and I was the only one who could protect myself from that.

Later that night, as I sat in bed reading, my cell phone rang and vibrated on the nightstand.

I stopped breathing as I saw Joe’s caller ID.

My God. He’d meant it when he’d said he would call.

My heart throbbed against a painful tightness, as if it had been wrapped in a million rubber bands. Covering my ears with my hands, closing my eyes, I didn’t respond to the insistent ringtone. I waited it out. I couldn’t talk to him – I wouldn’t know what in the hell to say. I knew him in the most intimate way possible, yet I didn’t know him at all.

As wildly pleasurable as it had been to sleep with Joe, I didn’t want it to happen again. I didn’t have to have a reason, did I? No. I didn’t owe him any explanations. I didn’t even have to explain it to myself.

The phone went silent. The tiny screen flashed a message that a voice mail had been left.

Ignore it, I told myself. I picked up the book I’d been reading and focused blindly on a page. After a couple of minutes, I realized that I’d read the same page three times without comprehending a word.

Exasperated, I tossed the book aside and grabbed the phone.

My toes curled beneath the covers as I heard his message, that unhurried drawl seeming to sink inside me and dissolve like hot sugar. “Avery, it’s Joe. I wanted to find out how your drive back to Houston was.” A pause. “I thought about you all day. Give me a call when you feel like it. Or I’ll try you again later.” Another pause. “Talk to you soon.”

Blood heat had turned my cheeks red and prickly. I set the phone back on the nightstand.

The adult thing, I reflected, would be to call him back, talk to him in a calm and reasonable manner, and tell him that I wasn’t interested in seeing him again. It’s just not going to click for me, I could say.

But I wasn’t going to do that. I was going to ignore Joe until he went away, because the thought of talking to him made me break out in a nervous sweat.

The phone rang again, and I stared at it in disbelief. Was he calling again? This was going to get annoying, fast. As I looked at the caller ID, however, I saw that it was my best friend from New York, Jasmine, who was the fashion director of a major women’s magazine. She was a friend and a mentor, a woman of forty who seemed to do everything well and was never afraid to be opinionated. And her opinions were usually right.

Style was religion to Jasmine. She had the rare gift of translating street trends, shopping blogs, Internet chatter, and cultural influence into a clear-eyed assessment of what was happening in fashion and what was coming around the corner. From her friends, Jasmine demanded and gave absolute loyalty, friendship being the only thing she valued nearly as much as style. She had tried to stop me from leaving New York, promising to use her connections to secure me a job as a special fashion correspondent for a local entertainment show or possibly doing a retail collaboration with some bridal designer who wanted to tap into a more affordable market.

I had appreciated Jasmine’s efforts to help, but I had refused. I’d felt defeated and tired, and I’d needed a break from fashion. Most of all, I had wanted to live with my newfound sister and form a relationship with her. I had wanted to have someone in my life whom I was related to. And part of me had liked the way Sofia looked up to me – I’d needed that. Jasmine hadn’t necessarily understood, but she had relented and backed off, after telling me that someday she would find a way to lure me back to New York.