“You know, big feet, big hands . . .”
“Are you really asking me about Leo’s penis size?”
He’d shrugged and grinned at her again, and somehow she’d fallen for it. She’d shrugged back, and said, “Yep, all true.” And then she’d winked, winked. As much as she’d hated herself for it, she wanted to keep on being that person: loose and funny and lovable. The girl who can joke about her lovers and their dicks, and didn’t get hung up on little things like cheating fiancés who knock up their mistresses.
And for seven days that was who she’d been. Playful and light, blissed out on a permanent sex buzz that didn’t let up even when she’d come down with a urinary tract infection. For seven days it had been spaghetti out of a pot at midnight and long drives to estate sales in the middle of nowhere and ignored phone calls from her friends and family. Only the farmers market was off-limits, because Leo would have been there and how could she parade Grayson in front of him? Or worse, put him in a position where he might have to serve Grayson? Bag up his vegetables and count out his change? She couldn’t, and so the tomatoes in the sauce on their midnight spaghetti remained distressingly unheirloom, the off-season apples they ate while lying, legs entwined, in the backyard were dug out of a plastic bin at the local A&P.
Really, though, it wasn’t some sort of noble consideration for Leo’s feelings. It was more that she wasn’t ready to deny Grayson’s gravitational pull, to be knocked out of his orbit. A satellite, after all, can still look like a star.
But one phone call with her brother and sister was all it took to send Saina hurtling back down to earth. She couldn’t let them come here, battered and bruised, to find Grayson in her bed.
And her father.
She wasn’t even sure if he knew why they’d called the wedding off.
“Why you need to get marry already?” he’d asked, when she first told him about the engagement. “You still young. Is there a baby in there?”
And when the end had come, her father ranted about how he’d never liked Grayson, sent her peonies and a whole salted caramel chocolate cake, emailed Grayson’s parents and told them that he’d cover the lost deposits—how much did he now regret that oversize gesture?—told her to keep the ring and throw it out the window. But he’d never asked why. For all Saina knew, one of his friends had seen the Page Six item and told him about it. Maybe he thought that he was saving face for her by not mentioning the betrayal, just like he’d never mentioned the backlash to her last installation even though he and her stepmother had flown out for the opening and held court at the Hermès party, going drink for drink with her old sculpture professor and telling her gallery owner that she should be selling Saina’s work for more. He’d been a charming embarrassment and Saina had been glad when he’d packed up and flown back to Bel-Air after an obligatory Peking duck dinner.
That was it, then. She started up the stairs. Grayson had to leave. It wasn’t going to last anyway. She couldn’t keep him in hiding forever.
Just say it, she told herself. Just do it. It would be worse if she waited until the last minute, until right before her family got here.
“Hey, baby, we have to talk about something,” she said, pushing open the door to her bedroom.
Grayson sat naked and cross-legged on top of her comforter. He held his cell phone up to his left ear with his right hand and held out his left hand, index finger up, to shush her.
“Oh my little darling,” he said to the phone, “and I wasn’t there for you.” A pause. “Yes. Yes, yes, yes.”
Saina went cold.
“Grayson.”
He looked up, annoyed, and shook his head wildly, waving his finger. “Wait, how big? Nine pounds? Nine? Wow.”
And then something happened: Grayson got beatific.
She had heard of people looking like they were lit up from within, but this was the first time she’d seen it. With that “wow,” all his edges and wrinkles smoothed out and the air around him thrummed, like he’d found a note on some universal chord that she still couldn’t even hear, much less play.
“I’ll be there,” he said to the phone. “A few hours. Don’t do anything else yet, okay? Just wait for me, I’ll be there. Yes. You’re amazing.” And then whispering it again. “So amazing.”
He dropped the phone and looked at her.
“Saina, I know I’m an asshole and I bolted and then I lied to you and she never had a miscarriage, but I’m a dad! I have a son! And I know you’re going to hate me, and I’m going to have to fix that at some point, and we can probably never be together again, but I . . . I have to go. And that’s all I can say right now. Okay?”
She was choking on something. Or she would be choking if she were breathing. Was that right? Maybe it was the other way around.
“Not okay. No! I can’t believe you’re doing this to me again. How could you say that she’d lost the baby? Is that what you wanted to happen?”
“I thought I wanted you.”