Dennis waited for a moment, then another. Then another. “Wait. Wait,” he erupted. “You almost did it? That’s all I get? You almost did it?” He looked completely outraged. Kyle would have felt sorry, but he had in fact noticed that Dennis had a growing boner, strategically disguised behind the mustard-colored throw pillow he held oh so casually against his thigh.
“Yeah, we almost did it,” Kyle admitted, abrupt. “And then she stopped it, and I went home, and worked things out with Van.”
“You ‘worked things out,’” Dennis sneered. Kyle, wavering on his feet, didn’t understand how this confession had gone so far awry. It didn’t matter. The spell cast by his own words had splintered. He felt the shame of all of it, doubly, yet again. Why had he said so much, so unwisely, after holding it so close for so long? The television was a blank. He was drunk. A fractured family of unhappy women waited for him to return, and create, for them, a misery.
That’s ridiculous, they love you, he told himself, as he had told himself so many times before. You are being ridiculous. Alison is a fantasy. She’s not a real person anymore. Van and the babies are real. They are waiting for you. They are love.
He had no way to determine, anymore, if what his brain told him was true.
seventeen
BY THE TIME Lars finally allowed himself to undress Alison, he was so obsessed with her body he had a vague urge to hurt it. The unfolding of her white back as he lifted the straps off her shoulders was exquisite. The dress, a simple black silk slip, dropped to the floor with an erotic grace as he turned her toward him. She wasn’t wearing underclothes.
He always made them wait. Actresses were as a breed too volatile; you couldn’t let them get the upper hand too early, as that would be the end of everything. But this one had not accepted his feigned indifference to her body with anything remotely resembling insecurity. She accepted his invitations to dinners and screenings with professional ease, and performed her duties as arm candy with the practiced charm of born royalty. She never intruded on his privacy. And then she disappeared. She literally just bolted—from Per Se, at a dinner which had cost him a thousand dollars a head—and then was utterly unreachable for two full weeks. He thought for a while that she was just fucking with him, and his interest cooled. He didn’t have the time or the energy for a difficult actress. But then she returned, just as quickly and inexplicably. She called and apologized for leaving so abruptly. She had had a family emergency in, of all places, Cincinnati. She was sweet and funny. She wanted to take him out, to make up for it. He had his assistant Josh arrange a date for the following week; she would join him at a business dinner. When she showed up at the restaurant, she was wearing the thinnest of thin dresses. Another check in the plus column.
They sat next to each other on the banquette, facing a couple of the countless suits he had to deal with from one studio or another. He was glad that she looked so hot, as that was what those clowns expected. As usual she ate next to nothing, again something those shitheads approved of; the guys from headquarters were always suspicious when they saw a woman eat. She was winning and witty, laughing at their slightly toosexual jokes, but never losing her poise. You could see the hint of her nipples underneath that black silk. He wanted to fuck her right there.
He waited through the drive back to his apartment and invited her up. While he turned her body toward him, she reached for his shirt. Conveniently, there was a condom in his back pocket, so they made love, for the first time, up against the door.
“Just like in The Godfather,” she whispered, laughing, as he entered her.
The following morning, when Lars woke to find her in his bed, he studied her naked body with the eye of a connoisseur. Was she a notable beauty? It wasn’t clear. She had certainly participated in behaviors which would increase that perception in the general public. Her hair had moved through a series of colors and cuts and extensions and curls, and had settled into a breathtakingly tousled brunette mop. Having gone back to starving herself since her return from Cincinnati, she was once again thin as a teenage tomboy with a glorious curve to her hips. As she turned and stretched, the hint of those green eyes lifted to him under the black smudge of mascara and eyeliner still more or less in place in spite of the vigorous night before.