Talking to Hutton over the past week had kept her spirits up, but at this moment, she started to think the whole thing was a bad idea. He’d admitted over the phone that his professional ambitions were priority A1; he’d already proved to her that the only thing he was interested in was getting ahead, and, worst of all, he’d used her to do it. It didn’t matter how many times he apologized.
I’ve tried so goddamn hard, she thought, her mouth suddenly dry. She’d spent her whole summer getting dressed, being viewed, taking criticism about her body and her choices and her background, about her facial expressions. She’d powered her way through hundreds of conversations with strangers, forcing them to listen to her ideas about labor when really all she was doing was encouraging them with her very presence to worship at the altar of consumerism. She’d sacrificed her very personhood in the last two months, becoming nothing but a show pony in the process of trying to save her reputation from that train wreck of a week in July.
And the worst part was that all of it had happened because of how she felt the first time she met him, that she needed to prove to him she had more substance than he thought she did. To force him to pay attention to her, she’d playacted being a detective and wound up staining her own life with indelible ink. It had all been so stupid, and it was all her own fault, and she probably wouldn’t even get the guy in the end.
Cat checked her phone one more time.
Nothing.
She absentmindedly circled her left wrist with her thumb and forefinger, measuring the size of her rapidly reducing arms. Cat hadn’t intended to get so thin, but each pound washed away in a cascade she couldn’t stop, a tide beyond her control. She took a fat book out of her handbag—The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil—and sank into it gratefully, letting the words wash over her while the alcohol washed through her.
The waitress reappeared and asked if she wanted anything to eat. Without looking up, Cat shook her head and raised her now-empty glass for a refill, but instead of taking it from her, someone reached out and grabbed Cat’s wrist with a set of huge, bony fingers.
“What the—?” Cat muttered as she looked up—and found Grant Bonner grinning down at her. She couldn’t help but smile back. The Bonners were the closest thing Cat had to family in this country, and she hadn’t seen Grant since he’d bailed them out of jail eight weeks earlier. He was a real, honest-to-goodness friend—even if he was nine years her junior and basically her opposite. Tall and lanky, with close-cropped hair, a clean-shaven face, and dark green eyes, his clothing was boyish and boring; he wore a nondescript gray suit and a striped banker’s tie, the knot loosened and the jacket thrown over his arm. It was refreshing as hell.
“Hi,” she said happily. “You’re a sight for sore eyes.”
“Can I join you?” he asked.
She scooted over on her bench and made room for him next to her, while he thanked the waitress and ordered two more beers. “What are you doing here?”
He held up his cellphone. “I think you’ve forgotten that there’s a map devoted to your every move.”
“You’re stalking me?” she asked, arching an eyebrow.
“Not really,” he said. “I was around the corner watching the baseball game at my buddy’s house.”
“And then you stalked me.”
“To be fair, it was a very convenient stalk, but I’ve been meaning to call you. I got an offer to work out of the Brussels office.”
“Really?”
“It’s a back-and-forth job between here and there. Technically it’s a promotion.”
“Do you have a choice?” she asked. Their beers arrived.
He laughed. “Probably not.”
“Then I think you should take it. Brussels is fun. It’s not very big, but the two million people who live there come from all over the world…it’s sophisticated, really, in its own way. Cheers.”
They toasted glasses a little harder than she’d intended, and foam spilled over the cold glass onto the wooden table.
“Do you get to choose where you live?”
“I don’t think so. It’ll probably be a charmless corporate apartment.”
“You have to go to my parents’ house for dinner. And my mother will take you riding in the bois.”
“The bois?”
“It’s a bluebell forest. You’ll like it.”
“You want me to ride a horse through a bluebell forest? Cat, I was in a fraternity at Emory.”
“Then it’ll be the brony fantasy you’ve been longing for.”
He laughed. “How are you?”
“I’m…honestly, I’m tired. We’ve been doing a lot. Fashion Week is almost over, then I get two weeks off. I’m just trying to make it through until then.”
“If you ever need a chaperone, just say the word. I’m a very good date. Your life looks pretty fun from the outside these days.”
Cat snorted. “From the inside, it sucks. Ugh, I’m so sick of myself. Actually can we talk about something else?” She scanned the room. “Want to play Scrabble?” she asked, pointing to a stack of board games on a bookshelf near the small outdoor bar.
“Sure,” he said, walking over to grab the game. “But you’re going to be sorry you asked that.”
They spent the next hour playing Scrabble, and joking, and laughing, big, real laughs, and it was the most fun Cat had in ages. She built a real humdinger on the triple-word square, but wordsmith Grant won with 455 points. While they played, she forgot about work, forgot about Hutton, forgot about how she looked. Grant ordered fries and burgers for them both; she wolfed the food down without even thinking.
She forgot about Mania, too.
The next morning, the first thoughts to run through Margot Villiers’s mind were wholly negative.
The October issue was a mess.
They’d be lucky to sell a global million on newsstands next week, nothing compared to the seventeen million issues they’d moved last month. October’s biggest problem was that its photo shoots had been totally reimagined by Lou, who had fashioned Judy and the Technicolor Housecoat into a fun-looking but rather soulless story; just another dumb spread of models jumping up and down, pretending to look happy. Nothing to write home about. And Dotty for It, the shoot set at the Scoria Vale sanatorium, wound up making a mockery of mental illness. Lou followed Cat’s notes to the letter, but in the end, it lacked the gravity that it had originally been pitched with; the photographer hadn’t used the right lenses, and the prism effect looked badly photoshopped.
Irritation built up with every moment Margot spent thinking about it. The record-setting sales of their September issue hadn’t been enough; they still needed to sell another fifteen million issues before the end of the year, or RAGE would change according to whatever George Cooper Jr. had in mind. RAGE stood on the precipice of real and total failure, and Margot with it. George Jr. had laughed at her pivot toward sustainability, actually, physically laughed in her face.
“That’s the most expensive thing you’ve ever said,” he’d scoffed.
“It’ll make us money,” she’d replied.