Afterparty(65)
“But your Plan A is so promising. Music, champagne, over-the-topness. A live band I’ve actually heard of.”
“Probably I’m overdressed for Mel’s, too,” he says, standing up. “But I could change.”
“Don’t change. You clean up really well.”
Dylan shakes his head. “I’m so f*cked up right now. You look amazing. You’ll probably run off with a guy at Mel’s.”
He kicks at one of the pseudo-rocks, cast from a glasslike substance, lined up along his driveway.
I say, “It’s just, it’s Valentine’s Day, and we’re dressed up, and it’s a party. Do you really want to spend Valentine’s Day in a diner?”
He says, “When I’m back East and this is all a bad memory from my overprivileged youth, I’m never going to another one of these crap things.”
“We don’t have to go, but I thought you were inviting me somewhere you wanted to take me. Explaining how I’m feeling.”
He sits with his feet sticking out of the driver’s side door of his car, putting on socks. “I’ve been inviting you where I want to take you. I tried to get you to do whatever it takes to get sprung by your dad so we could go hear some real music downtown. But apparently it took this glitz fest.”
I wonder how many miles over the Atlantic Aiden has to be for Dylan to stop being so irritable.
“Shoot me,” I say, fastening my seat belt, in two-can-play-at-this mode, I-might-be-your-excessively-adoring-girlfriend-but-I’m-not-your-doormat mode. “I thought a party with Hell’s Gate playing would be fun.”
“Hell’s Gate is putrid.”
“I thought you liked this kind of thing.”
“Why would you think I like this? I hate this kind of party. I hate this.”
He waves at his house, or maybe at all of Beverly Hills, or at all of L.A. County. Hard to tell.
“Excuse me for not figuring it out, but there are pictures of you whooping it up at glitzfests all over the Internet.”
“Maybe you confused me with my brother, hallowed be his name. Ladies’ man. Asshole. Liar. Looks a lot like me, only taller. Likes the same girls. He really likes this over-the-top shit.”
We wind up to Mulholland. Dylan accelerates into a curve, and there’s L.A., lit up below the guardrail.
He says, “Yeah, you two could hit it off.”
“Excuse me?”
By this time, we’re parked in a turnout, my hands are over my ears, and Dylan is slouched behind the wheel.
He says, “I’m sorry. My fault. No excuse.”
We aren’t actually looking at each other.
I say, “Do you suddenly hate me?”
“I opposite of hate you. I tend to kick the cat when I feel like shit.”
“I get to be the cat?”
“Sorry. Bad week.”
“I know,” I say. “Sorry I pushed this party so hard. Seriously, let’s go back to your house and admire each other’s outfits.”
Dylan turns his head farther away from me. “So I can be the sulky dud boyfriend who screws up your Valentine’s Day and Jean-Luc can be the one who sends you the camellias? No.”
“Dylan, there were no camellias, all right?”
“You don’t have to make things up to make me feel better. Maybe I’m not cool like that.”
“Believe me, he wasn’t all that.”
“Give it up. He was the French god of cool.”
“He wasn’t what you think. I’m trying to be honest here. We should turn around and talk.”
Because this is it, I can feel it coming, I have to do this before we’re any deeper into this.
Just not in this car on the way to this party.
Dylan says, “So. What haven’t you told me about him?”
“Maybe let’s talk after the party if you don’t want to turn back. It’s already intense.”
He says, “Answer. The question.”
And here I am with my back to the wall. All right, pressed between a car door and a bucket seat. Seat-belted in and brushed with body glitter, no doubt shedding sparkles in the very spot where I am trapped.
My heart is beating too fast, and I’m so clammy that I’m sticking to the leather seat. We’re driving along Mulholland now, at the part where it gets curvy and narrow—we’re whipping around and it doesn’t feel as if there’s any choice.
If I don’t tell him, he’ll be with someone who isn’t actually me—someone he thinks is me, and looks, and sounds, and smells like me, but isn’t.
If I don’t tell him, I’ll hate myself with really good reason.
Even the most morally challenged person could tell what has to happen.
I say, “There is no Jean-Luc.”
“Don’t play with me, Emma.”
“No, literally. There’s no Jean-Luc.”
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
DYLAN SEEMS TO BE SWERVING off the road, but, in fact, we are turning into the circular driveway of a serious palace. We are on the threshold of what has to be the splashiest Valentine’s Day party in the history of the world, in a black suit and a perfect scarlet dress, yet I have just dragged us into the eye of another shitstorm.