chapter 3
HALLIE
I’m still shaking my hand free from the feel of him as I step into the brisk air. The tingle is traveling up my skin, filling my entire body with little currents of electricity. Eva calls out a final goodbye and some last-minute instructions as we part ways on the sidewalk outside of the building, but I don’t hear any of it. She’s probably already sent an e-mail with copious notes and endless rows of figures that I’ll never look at. She’ll take pity on me and take care of the details, as she always does. I’m sure of that, if nothing else.
My hotel is only a few blocks from FFG’s offices, but it’s an eternity before I reach my room. Even the elevator ride was interminable. There was a family, man and wife and a pair of perfectly matched little boys with enormous Statue of Liberty hats who were chattering away as I got on. I saw the look in the woman’s face as they shied away from me, probably scared that my twitching was a sign of some deadly disease. Or an impending zombie apocalypse. I’m scaring total strangers now. Awesome.
I mindlessly pace back and forth across the carpet. I’ve been trying desperately for a year to put the broken pieces of myself into something that resembled the person I had been, and one look at Chris Jensen was all it took for me to fall completely apart. What’s worse, I must have known that he would be there. Subconsciously, maybe I even wanted him to be.
I managed to stare at him for long enough to satisfy my sick curiosity. Of course, it wasn’t like I could escape Chris Jensen’s face entirely. In the five years since I had last seen him, he had become a bona fide movie star, his every move documented by the paparazzi. There was even a weekly column in one of the movie magazines solely dedicated to the trials and tribulations of whatever two-week relationship he was having with an up-and-coming starlet or supermodel or actress. I usually comforted myself with the delusional notion that the magazine pictures I surreptitiously looked at in the check-out aisle had been Photoshopped. It was practically my patriotic duty to examine him in the flesh, to make sure that the publishers weren’t perpetrating some sort of photo alteration scam.
If I had to guess, not a single one of those pictures had been Photoshopped. It should be a capital crime to be that handsome.
But if I was really being honest with myself (something I have tried desperately to avoid for a number of years now), the reasons that I stared far too long were much more personal. I wanted to find some trace of our old connection. Part of me had even hoped that he would start singing that line about pina coladas from the Jimmy Buffett song I loved, the one that always made me laugh when I was angry with him.
It had hurt unbearably to look at him. His face had honed into sharper planes and some of the youthful innocence had hardened into masculine strength, but he looked basically the same as the day that I met him, standing on that balcony and asking me for a light. Hah. I had wanted to find a social recluse, someone to help me escape from the loneliness of crowds. But Chris Jensen, in all of his glory, had appeared instead.
That memory begins playing a reel of a dozen other memories of him and me over the years we had been together. He’s flicking his fingertips over my hands and face and laughing with me in cafés and falling down on the ice and dancing on rooftops and brushing his lips against my temples and we’re making love on a beach in Spain while he whispers “I love you” into my hair.
It kills me that he looks almost exactly the same as he did at eighteen. I don’t even recognize myself when I look into the mirror now. But even if Chris Jensen had never become a movie star, even if his face wasn’t on billboards and television shows and grocery stores, I still would have known him in the middle of any crowded street. Of course I would. His face is imprinted on my brain.
Shoot. I ram my head against my hands over and over again, as if that could make the memories disappear. He shouldn’t have the power to affect me like this. I should have been prepared.
But neither the glossy photographs nor the memory reel in my head had prepared me for the way he dominated a room with his presence, the way the air changed when he stepped inside it, the way everyone around him became more alive. Time and distance had eaten away at the edges of my memories, and I had let his physical presence take me by surprise.
I hadn’t been the only one who was taken aback. He hadn’t known I was going to be there. I would bet my life on it, even if I make some minor adjustments for his prodigious acting skills.
I shouldn’t have been there.
When Eva had first mentioned the name of his company, I had thrown a fit.
“No,” I told her. “Not that one. Any one but that one.”
After days of pleading with me, she had finally said the only two words that would have gotten me to change my mind—creative control.
Ben would have wanted that.
Judging from the look on Chris’s face when I said the word wife, he didn’t know about Ben and me, either. It meant that he either didn’t know about it or he hadn’t made the connection. I wasn’t going to do it for him.
I’m about to give up my pacing and throw the heels out the window when I hear a relentless knock at the door. I would know that knock anywhere. When he had given in to the plea of my eyes at the meeting, I had the faintest glimmer of hope that he wouldn’t try to hunt me down. Maybe he had forgotten what we had been, once. Enough time had certainly passed. He hadn’t tried to contact me in five years, not even after…
The pounding is loud and insistent. I have two choices, really. I can curl up into my bed and pretend that none of it ever happened. Or I can go to the door and face him and do what I hadn’t done five years before.
The first choice is infinitely more appealing. However, he’s a man with unlimited resources and he’s always had a penchant for dramatic scenes, so the chances that I’m able to escape without ever having to see him again are slim to none. Just like the stupid meeting, it’s probably better to get it over with.
Maybe if I had looked away, if I had marched out the door the second I saw his face, Eva and millions of dollars and Ben’s wishes be damned, he wouldn’t be knocking at my door right now.
The little voice inside my head whispers an alternate truth: All of this was inevitable.
Him. Me.
Like ripping a bandage from a still-fresh wound, I open the door hastily. He nearly falls into my arms, but I take a giant step backwards and narrowly avoid disaster.
“Mr. Jensen.”
I try to echo Eva’s brusque tone from earlier. Maybe it’s possible that we can both pretend that this is nothing more than a business meeting.
“Hallie.”
Nope.
It’s been five years since I’ve heard him say my name and the sound of it on his tongue conjures a thousand memories that burn and tear at me.
His mouth curls into a tiny smile, and he looks up at me. There’s danger there, and something else that I can’t quite read.
“If you want to pretend like we don’t know each other, Hals, that’s fine.”
He leans an arm against the door and gives me a long look up and down. I have no words, but he has plenty of them. And even if he didn’t, the look in his eyes is crystal clear.
“I can be the stranger at the door and you can be the damsel in distress. It works for me, even though I seem to remember that you’re more of a tiger and not the girl in need of rescue. But people change. Sometimes, they even change their names. I get that.”
“Chris.” My voice is filled with censure, but my body betrays me. Unconsciously, I’ve been inching closer to him, so that we’re practically touching. I take another step back, putting as much space as I possibly can between the two of us.
There’s one major difference between the Chris Jensen I once knew and the Chris Jensen standing in front of me right now and I don’t know how I could have overlooked it earlier. The Chris I was hopelessly in love with was completely unaware of his power over women. Over me. It was an oddly endearing trait, especially given the thousands of screaming girls in those last six months we had been together.
This Chris Jensen is well aware of the way he’s affecting me. A man. No longer a boy. I search his face for some specter of the person I once knew, but I can’t find anything. I can’t quite figure out how that makes me feel, whether I’m relieved or disappointed or somewhere in between.
He doesn’t say anything. I don’t say anything. Years stretch between us, creating some semblance of distance. I’m grateful for it.
“Why did you marry him, Hallie?”
It’s the last question that I thought he would ask.
He definitely doesn’t know, then.
I’m not sure what kind of answer he wants from me. Does he want to hear about the two months that I spent in bed after London? The time when Ben came to Atlanta to kick my ass into shape? Or maybe he wants to hear about the fact that I’ve been trying (unsuccessfully) to avoid his face for years.
I’ve thought about his question an obscene number of times. There’s only one answer, really, that makes any kind of sense. And it’s the true one.
“I loved him.”
His face falls, just for an instant, but it’s enough for me to see that I was wrong, that the person that I loved is in there still. It breaks me down, but before the whole, terrible truth can come spilling from my lips, his façade returns. I close my mouth.
“I hope the two of you are very happy.”
He didn’t catch the past tense.
I don’t correct him.