The Villa(10)
The cigarette sizzles as Lara drops it into the glass, and she reaches out, taking Mari’s hands. “At a villa, Mare. With”—she drops her voice, leaning so close that her forehead touches Mari’s—“Noel Gordon.”
Mari rears back at that, eyes going wide. “Wait, as in—”
“No, the Noel Gordon who works at the chip shop,” Lara says, laughing before she swats at Mari’s midsection. “Of course, ‘as in.’ As in Glasgow Noel Gordon. When She Goes Noel Gordon.”
When She Goes is Mari’s favorite album, one she actually had to buy a second copy of when fucking Hobbes scratched the first a few months back. She even had pictures of him up on her wall, when he was in his first group, the Rovers, back before he’d gone solo.
But now, Noel Gordon is famous. Properly famous, a rock star, an idol that Pierce respects and envies all at once.
“How do you even know him?” she asks Lara, and Lara giggles, turning in a little half circle as she flutters her eyelashes.
“Fate,” she says, popping the “t” sound in a way that makes Mari grit her teeth. “I was standing outside this pub in Soho, with Bonnie. You know Bonnie, right?”
Mari doesn’t, but she nods anyway because if she doesn’t, Lara will get distracted and launch into a half-hour soliloquy about her new best mate, Bonnie. Lara makes and loses friends with such speed that Mari rarely bothers to learn their names.
“Anyway, we were chatting and smoking, and then all of a sudden I hear this … voice ask, ‘Either of you lovely creatures happen to have a light?’ And I look up and it’s him. Bloody Noel Gordon, and he is so handsome, Mari. The pictures don’t even capture it, hand to god. And then we started talking, and he invited me to this party, and now he wants us to go to Italy with him.”
“Okay, but after one party, why would he—” Mari starts to say, but then she looks at Lara’s pink cheeks, the way her tongue is poking her cheek, and she understands.
“Of course,” she says, and she hates that she’s a little impressed. “You’re shagging him.”
“You can’t tell anyone,” Lara says immediately, but Mari knows she’s only saying it because she thinks it’s the thing to say when you’re having sex with a very famous married man. Knowing Lara, Mari is sure her stepsister would love nothing more than to march through Piccadilly with a sandwich board announcing the fact.
And what a coup for her stepsister. Mari may have her own musician—Pierce’s reputation is growing steadily in the bars and nightclubs of London, after all—but Noel Gordon is in a whole other stratosphere.
That’s probably why Lara slept with him in the first place.
Ever since Jane married Mari’s dad, when both girls were twelve, they’ve been locked in this unspoken competition. If Mari got good marks in school, Lara’s needed to be better. If Mari bought a new 45, Lara would have two the next day.
Mari hadn’t even been all that surprised that Lara had tagged along when they’d left England, and that she had stayed with them when they’d returned. Lara claimed it was because there was nowhere else for her to go, but Jane would’ve convinced Mari’s dad to take her back, Mari is sure of it. It was Mari who’d run off with the married man, Mari who had committed the unforgivable sin. Lara was just being a good sister.
It’s been on the tip of her tongue for months now to suggest this to Lara, but something keeps holding her back. Strange as it seems, given how often Lara irks her, Mari still wants someone else with her on this adventure, someone familiar. A person she can talk to who isn’t Pierce.
“Gotta say, Lara,” Mari says drily as she puts her beer on the counter, “if we spend a summer with him in Italy, I feel people will probably suss out what’s going on between you.”
Lara snorts, waving one hand. “People will think he invited us because he heard about Pierce’s music. Or maybe because of you. He’s very impressed with your mum and dad.”
Mari fights back that familiar, uncomfortable feeling whenever she hears someone gush about her parents. It’s not exactly pride, not exactly apprehension, just a strange brew of both. She admires them, too, of course, has idolized her mother her entire life, but she wonders about these people, people like Noel—hell, people like Pierce—who paint a picture of her parents that probably isn’t all that accurate. And she always worries when they meet her, are they thinking of her mother? Are they thinking about what Mari’s very existence took from the world?
But it doesn’t surprise her that Noel Gordon would be a fan. Her parents were rebels, after all. Not musicians, but writers, philosophers, bohemians. A rare marriage of intellectual equals, a love story of iconoclasts. And Mari’s mother dying early had only burnished the mythology. So tragic, so romantic, all of that tripe.
Of course, her father had not been all that unconventional in the end. When he’d learned his daughter was having an affair with a married man, a married man William had welcomed into his home and thought of as a friend, he’d been apoplectic, and she’d gotten the full “never darken my door again” kind of treatment. Running away had seemed like the only option.
But that’s all in the past now, and the future is this: spending the summer in Italy at a fancy villa with a bona fide rock star. Who could say no to that?