chapter 10
CHRIS
Marcus is giving the entrance to the museum a dubious look.
“You sure about this, Jensen? You know I’m not a big fan of mingling with the commoners.”
“The elite members of the music industry aren’t exactly commoners, even by your lofty standards.”
“Oh, sure they are. Everyone wants to be in the movies. Especially the pop stars. Have you even been to a movie recently? Filled with pop stars.”
“I try to avoid that trash whenever possible. You know I don’t ever go to the movies. Not even my own premieres.”
“If you did, you would know that pop stars all want to be movie stars.” He groans. “Let’s get this over with, man. I hate this shit. In and out, like you promised.”
“Hopefully in and out, I said.”
I present the invitation to one of the security guards and he looks at us in surprise, but then he pulls aside the velvet rope without even checking the list. We’re immediately ushered into one of the main galleries, which is decked out in white orchids and a smattering of gold stars. It looks like a bad high school prom. But then again, Sam’s always been a fan of over-the-top.
I force myself to smile at a couple of adolescent girls wearing too-tight leopard print dresses and my eyes scan the room with a fair amount of trepidation. I don’t know why I’m so nervous about seeing Sam. I still see him occasionally at parties. Usually, we avoid each other, with the only acknowledgement that we had once been good friends consisting of an empty wave or the tilt of a glass.
It makes much more sense now that I know he and Hallie have stayed close, which was clearly a fact that he wanted to keep to himself. It also made my current task more difficult. I was going to have to do a lot of fast talking to get anything out of him, but I had to take the chance.
Out of the corner of my eye, I see a woman in a red dress making a beeline for us. She looks familiar, and I know I’ve seen her before, but I just can’t place the face. She looks angry. My immediate assumption is that we hooked up at some point and I conveniently forgot to call her. I take a step behind Marcus, as if he could provide some protection.
To my great amusement, I realize that her eyes are full of the kind of fury that only Marcus can initiate. It’s not me that she’s coming to see. She makes a full-out stop in front of him.
“It’s been a long time, Marcus.”
Her nose is tilted up, and she’s looking down on him with a mixture of rage and condescension. She’s easily six feet tall, and Marcus has to stand on his toes to put himself at eye level, which he promptly does. The grin starts to spread across his face.
“Eva. A long time since our little island getaway, a long time since you f*cked my brains out on the yacht, a long time since you whispered sweet nothings into my ear? Take your pick. That’s a lot of long times.”
“How about…a long time since you screwed me over on the Crossed deal? You stole my client right out from under my nose and left him dreaming about A-list movie stars and eight-figure advances. And then you promptly left him with nothing but a script sitting in a drawer somewhere, collecting dust. Oh, so you conveniently forgot that one? Typical.”
I try to sneak away, but she turns to me then. I cower under the rage of her stare.
“Mr. Jensen. How lovely to see you again.”
I have absolutely no idea who this woman is. However, we’ve apparently met before.
“It’s nice to see you again, too. How have you been?”
“Since you obviously don’t remember me, I’ll take pity on you and help you out. Eva Larson.”
Oh, shit.
“I’m Hallie Caldwell’s agent.”
Of course she is.
“It looks like you and Marcus made nice, then. I have to admit, I was happy to hear that I wasn’t going to have to deal with your pig shit agent on this deal. I was told the business break-up was permanent. Clearly, I was misinformed.”
“Hey, hey. Stop harassing my client, now, Ev. Your sources must not be as good as they used to be. A little bit of misinformation goes a long way.”
“Did you learn that from personal experience?” Her eyes narrow. “Furthermore, I have absolutely no desire to put my hands on your client. Unless, of course, I have to. If he continues to harass my client, I will personally kick his ass.”
Marcus’s hackles are raised, and I let him take over my defense. They’re just starting the first round of what appears to be a long battle, and I definitely don’t want to get into all of the ways that I plan on harassing Hallie. I start to slip away, but Eva’s watchful eyes pick up on my sideways movement towards the buffet before I manage to get more than a foot or two from the pair of them.
“Yes, Mr. Jensen, I am going to let you escape, but don’t let that make you think that we’re done here. We have unfinished business. However, you lucked out because Marcus and I also have unfinished business, and I don’t have any kind of guarantee that I’ll be seeing him again anytime soon. You, on the other hand…”
“I’ll look forward to it.”
I take her hand and kiss it. Marcus’s face has turned an alarming shade of red, which amuses me greatly. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him so angry. If my own unfinished business wasn’t a matter of serious urgency, I’d stay and watch the show. As I make my way through the crowd, I glance back. She’s gesticulating wildly into the air as he munches on a canapé, but there’s some serious anger behind his blasé expression. A match made in heaven.
I spin around to find a tray to put the little wooden stick that had held the bacon-wrapped scallop, but instead, I find Sam holding two glasses of champagne with a sardonic little smile on his face.
“Chris, I could say that I’m surprised to see you here, but I think we both know that would be a lie. Anyways, I asked them to let me know when you arrived. I wasn’t disappointed.” He offers a glass to me, and just as I start to shake my head, he adds, in a low tone, “It’s just grape juice, Jensen. Let’s get out of here, okay?”
I take the glass and give him a wary look. “This isn’t one of those ‘take him out into the alley and shoot him’ things, is it?”
“You’ve been in too many bad movies, old friend.”
His tone does nothing to convince me that this isn’t going to end in an alley. However, I do follow him up a stairway until we come to a stop in a room full of enormous canvases with naked men. There are a few sculptures scattered in the corners of the room, and my heart skips a beat when I see a familiar pile of orange and brown candy wrappers on the floor. Apparently, that guy was still making money. Hallie would have loved it.
“Time’s treated you well, Sam.”
His suit, obviously made on Savile Row, along with the flashy watch, tell me that maybe he’s doing a little bit better than just well, but I decide to leave that alone for now.
“It has. But then again, time tends to treat you well when you have a trust fund with a lot of zeroes, connections to some of the most powerful people in the world, a chair at a boardroom with your name on it, and a board of directors just waiting for you to finish up your wild ways and file into the same pattern as your old man.”
I concede his point with a nod. “We used to say that it was total hell to have the weight of great expectations on our shoulders. We wanted to make our own way in the world, to step out from our fathers’ shadows.”
“And yet, here we are, carbon copies of them. I’m running Evenstar and it’s just a matter of time before you step into the director’s chair.”
“I hope not.”
“We’ll see.” Sam shrugs his shoulders and gives me a small smile. “Let’s get this over with, Jensen. I have a room full of people waiting for me to give a speech so that they can cheer all of the great work I’ve done, and I’ve got a hunch that there’s somewhere else you would rather be, too. Aren’t you going to ask me how she is? Where she is?”
That’s exactly what I was going to ask him, but I’m not planning on giving him the satisfaction of knowing that he’s nailed it.
“Did you see her?”
He sighs. “Yes, I saw her.”
“Is she all right?”
“That depends on your definition of all right. And you’re assuming that I think you deserve to get that information, which I don’t.”
“Sam.”
“You know, obviously, I knew you were going to show up here. I’ve been thinking about what I was going to say to you all day. I pretty much covered every possible scenario. First, I thought about my own, more painful version, of your alley. And then, for a while, punching you in the face seemed like it might be the best idea. That would have been temporarily satisfying, but ultimately, not really good enough. I even thought about having your name removed from the guest list, but that wouldn’t have worked, either, because I wanted to look you in the eye, Jensen, to tell you what I really thought.”
“And that is?”
He starts to say something, but he abruptly changes his mind. “Ben was my best friend. Did you know that?”
I shake my head.
“Yeah. I didn’t think so. Do you want to know how I met Ben?”
I don’t, and I don’t really want to know.
He gives me a pointed look. “Normally, I would say that there’s no use dredging up painful memories, but I think you might just deserve a little bit of pain, so you’re going to listen to every word of this particular story.”
He has a point.
“It was probably what, five years ago? Imagine my surprise when a young and very beautiful Hallie Caldwell shows up on my doorstep in the raging August heat when she’s supposed to be in London with you. She wouldn’t say anything, and the only sign that something was wrong was the simple fact that she was too upset to go dancing with me. So, I asked. And she wouldn’t dare besmirch your name by saying a bad word about you. She tried to put a happy face on it, to say that she was just going back for her junior year and the two of you were figuring some things out, but nothing about it smelled right.”
What is he talking about? We had never talked about figuring things out. She said that she never wanted to see me again, that it was over, that she didn’t love me anymore. And I had said... “You need to get your own dreams, Hallie, instead of hanging around me like some stupid puppy dog. You need to figure out who you want to be in life, because I can tell you right now that I don’t need a nursemaid, or a mother, or another person trying to tell me how to live my life. You’ve spent enough time hanging on my coattails. I mean, really, don’t you think it’s time that you figured out how to have a life outside of me?”
F*cking photographic memory. I can even see the look on her face when I said those horrendous words, each of them hitting her like a ton of bricks. Why did she tell Sam that we were just trying to figure things out?
“So, she was obviously upset about something, but I barely got the chance to ask her about it before she ran off to Atlanta. It was pretty obvious that you had finally revealed your inner a*shole. Let me tell you, I was shocked.”
He doesn’t sound shocked. I open my mouth to try to defend myself, but he continues to talk, so I promptly close it again
“I needed to see if she was all right. It’s funny, how everyone who knows her is always running around, trying to figure out if she’s all right. There’s something about that girl. I don’t know, man. And the funniest thing about all of it is that she’s never really needed anyone to make sure she was all right. She would be better off if we would just all leave her alone. But again, there’s something about that girl, man.”
I tense. Maybe he and Hallie…
“Get your mind out of the gutter. I’m a happily married man. Hallie and I are friends. We’ll always be friends. There’s never been anything else. There will never be anything else.”
My body relaxes.
“That’s more than I can say for you and her. So, anyways, she leaves, my inner caveman takes over, and I need to see that she’s not wasting away in some f*cking dorm room somewhere, so I fly my ass to Atlanta. It’s worse than I ever could have possibly imagined. I mean, she’s a hot mess, all ratty hair and old sweatshirts and really bad poetry. I mean, Jesus Christ, she’s playing the Rent soundtrack on a loop. Of course, she’s still trying to say that nothing’s wrong and that she’ll be okay and that she just needs to make it to class. And all the while, she’s still getting straight As, because it’s just like Hallie to be crawling around like a little lost puppy while writing beautiful manifestos about Freud’s role in current psychiatric practice.”
I smile at that. Sam temporarily forgets that I’m the one he’s talking to and he actually smiles back before a frown crosses his face.
“I’ve never seen her like that, before or since. I could make her laugh and smile for a second or two, but then the smiles would disappear and she would go back to moping. She wasn’t even a shadow of herself. But then Ben showed up, and he kept prodding her, teasing her, making little jokes with her, and then she started smiling again for real. He was…” Sam clears his throat. “He was special. To her, to me, to everyone. The kind of special that doesn’t come around twice. He made her happy. She made him happy.”
It feels wrong to hate a dead man, but irrationally, I want to hit something. To be more specific, I want to hit Ben Ellison. “I’ll be there to pick up the pieces.” Of course he had been there.
Sam’s staring at one of the paintings on the wall and twirling the stem of the glass in his hand carelessly. He eventually turns to me with a wistful smile.
“Ben and I developed a little bromance, drinking beer and teasing Hallie and staying up all night to ponder the mysteries of the universe. We were young, but we weren’t, you know? Sometimes, it felt like we were a hundred years old, and everything since has just been aging backwards. I thought maybe life was going to be one long series of late-night conversations with a few bong hits sprinkled in to liven things up a bit.”
Sam’s poetic waxing about Ben Ellison isn’t improving my mood. He seems to sense my impatience, and he revels in it, in making me squirm.
“Ben managed to talk Hallie into transferring to his school in Ohio, and I was glad for it. Anyone could see where the two of them were heading, and I thought, finally, Hallie was going to find someone who wasn’t going to crush her heart into a million pieces. And I managed to find myself a best friend. I thought that the three of us would have a million more nights like that. And I guess we did, in a manner of speaking.”
He looks upward for a second. Yep, I’m a douchebag. I try to remove all thoughts of hitting a dead man, but they’re still there, taunting me.
“You probably know what happened next.” Sam peers at me for a minute. “At some point, he made a move, or she did, and their happily ever after started.”
“Is this entertaining you, Sam? Is this fun for you? What do you want me to say? Sorry? I f*cked up? I did. And I am f*cking sorry.”
He watches me closely as I stare at the candy wrappers in the corner. I reach down and pick a stray one up and twist it between my fingers.
“Ben was my f*cking best friend and he was a prince of the human race, a real goddamn American hero, even before the bus.”
“Clearly. And I’m an a*shole.”
“Maybe.” Sam looks at me contemplatively and shakes his head. “Jensen, I wasn’t going to tell you this, but I think you need to know. Even as I was standing up there with my best friend on his wedding day, waiting for my other best friend to come out all smiling and happy in a long, white dress, I thought that you were going to come and screw it all up for her. I was just waiting for the minister to say, ‘And if there’s anyone here who has just cause for why these two should not be wed.’ I really thought that you were going to show up on a white horse to steal her away. But you never came. And they got married and got themselves a little house and…”
He lets the sentence trail off, lost in thought.
“It sounds like they were the perfect couple,” I say, bitterly. “And we all know that I’m not the knight in shining armor type. Even if I had shown up, ready to make my objection, I would have ended up with egg on my face.”
“Come on, man.” Sam slams his glass down on one of the side tables in frustration. He gives me a long, cold stare. “Seriously?”
“Tell me, Sam. You’re standing there, telling me how happy they made each other, that Ben Ellison was the once-in-a-lifetime kind of guy. And you’re actually trying to tell me that you were worried that my drunk ass would have waltzed in there and f*cked everything up for the two of them? That’s bullshit, and we both know it. I’m the second choice for her now. It was probably always Ben that she was in love with. I’ve thought that for years. You have no idea how many times I’ve thought that.”
He doesn’t respond at first. I’m shaking with it, the old fear that I would never be good enough, that it wasn’t me that she actually wanted to be with.
Sam’s voice is cold, and full of certainty and anger. “I said that Ben was the kind of guy that doesn’t come around twice, and I meant it. I said that he was my best friend, and I meant it. I said that they were happy together, and I meant that, too. On paper, were they perfect for each other? Sure. But I never once saw her look at him the way she looked at you. It just wasn’t that kind of love between them, Chris. It was the comfortable kind, the sharing of socks kind, the making breakfast for each other in the morning, the shared history and memories kind of love that makes you grateful that someone can put up with you for so long.”
I take a breath.
“But it wasn’t the kind that wraps you up and spins you around and makes you want to scream and yell and never let go. I’ve had that, and I’m telling you right now that I would never be happy with anything else. I think you and Hallie had that, too. I don’t know if she was ever going to be truly happy with anything else.”
“What are you saying to me, Sam?”
“You never listen, do you? Hallie Caldwell was always going to be in love with you. Always. It doesn’t matter how perfect for each other she and Ben might have been. It doesn’t even matter that the two of you were always going to be a powder keg of wrong. What I’m saying to you is that you could have waltzed into her happy little home and busted it wide open. Yes, I think that. She would never have left him, not once they were married, but I think she was always going to be at least a little bit in love with you.”
“That’s just you, making things up. Seeing things that aren’t there.”
“No, I’m not. It’s what Hallie thinks, too.”
“She thinks that I should have come and ruined her marriage? No, Sam.”
“Not like that. I’m not explaining myself very well right now, am I?” He looks to me for confirmation, and I don’t give him the satisfaction of a response. “For some reason, she thinks Ben’s death was all her fault. It’s insane, of course, but she thinks it’s all some cosmic joke, that he knew that she was never going to love him the same way that she loved you, and that’s why she lost him, that’s why he was taken from her. She thinks that she didn’t deserve him or their life together.”
“What?”
“She thinks that she didn’t deserve him or their life together, and that’s why he was killed.” He speaks slowly and clearly, like he’s talking to a small child. “You can’t carry that kind of weight without letting it fall in on you, man.”
I look at Sam.
“So, what do I do now?”
“See, I thought you were just going to ask, ‘How do I find her?’ My response, before I started telling old stories, was that it was never the right question. Instead, you need to think about what you’re going to do when you do find her. And the answer to that is definitely not to f*ck her. Even I understand that people have needs, but sex isn’t going to solve anything here. There are other issues at play, ones that you know nothing about. It definitely isn’t my place to get into those right now, but you really need to trust me when I tell you that sex is not the answer. So, Chris, what are you going to say? What questions are you going to ask?”
“I need to know whether the crazy kind of love that lasts lifetimes and makes you want to rip all your hair out and crawl inside the other person’s skin and never let them go is worth fighting for. I know what I want. I just need to know what she wants.”
Sam takes in my words, and long moments pass. “She’ll be in Chicago next week, for the production meeting. The only thing that I’m asking of you is to think about it, to think about whether your latent desires are worth possibly destroying her for good. You also need to think about whether it’s worth possibly destroying yourself for good. Because I don’t know. I just don’t know. I think if anyone ever managed to figure out this whole love thing, they’d have to shun society and live alone on an uninhabitable mountaintop to keep the people from beating down the door. If you’ve heard of anyone who’s ever actually done that, it might be worth taking some uninhabitable mountaintop climbing lessons.”
That makes me laugh. “Uninhabitable mountain climbing lessons, huh?”
“It was the best analogy I could think of. I’m not the wordsmith. Ben was.”
“I’ll remember that.”
“See that you do.”
I extend my hand to Sam, and he shakes it tentatively.
“Thank you, Sam.”
“You’re welcome, Jensen. And if you let it slip to Hallie that I told you any of this, I will kill you. No alleys needed.”
I take one last glance at the pile of candy wrappers and nod my head at him before we make our way back to the main gallery. As we reach the bottom of the stairs, he turns to me and shakes his head.
“You’re a prick who doesn’t deserve a woman like that. You do know that, right?”
“Does any man ever really deserve a woman?”
I tilt my head towards a brown-skinned knockout wearing a silver dress who’s tapping her watch and giving Sam a death stare. They obviously belong to each other.
He takes a look at her and grins back at me.
“Fair enough, man. Fair enough.”
I see the way that Sam’s hand rests on the woman’s back as they move into the waiting crowd, and I try to ignore the familiar twinge of longing before turning to scan the room for Marcus. I find him and Eva tucked away in a corner. She’s gesturing with an animated expression on her face, and he’s matching her, waving his frenzied hands in the air. People have moved away to give them a little bubble of space in which to air their anger. I think about going over to rescue him, but I decide against it.
Even Marcus needs a good ass-kicking sometimes.