Lovely You Read online

  “Sure, we can do this, too.” His hands rubbed the muscles of my back and I sighed. “I have to say, it didn’t look good when your brother walked in here. You in the transparent shirt, I mean.”

  I sat up a little. “Could you really see?”

  Nate’s eyes went down briefly to my breasts. “Everything. It was something.”

  I put my head back down, and closed my eyes. I wasn’t sure how to process that information. “Brooks thinks…” I stopped.

  “You two will work this out and his opinion of me doesn’t matter. People have thought a lot worse. I know the truth, and you do, and that’s enough.” He pressed my head into the curve of his neck.

  “You called me baby,” I told Nate.

  “Did I?” His hands stilled, then returned to rubbing my back. “I guess I did.”

  ∞

  When I walked into the office on Tuesday morning, late for me, my co-workers burst into applause.

  Pascale actually hugged me. I just stood stiffly, hoping she would let go. “Scarlett, amazing. Amazing!” she told me. “You’ve just gotten more attention for us in twenty-four hours than in the previous five years of our brand’s existence. Amazing!” she repeated, and hugged me harder. She was really strong from all that exercise she did.

  “Thanks,” I said when she finally released me. “I’m glad it worked out.” I was, and it was nice to be appreciated there, but I hadn’t fundamentally changed my opinion that I didn’t like this job. After accepting some congratulations, I went into my office and went to work, and after a while, everyone returned to their usual state of complaining about everything and forgot about Klere and her posts for us.

  I looked around my office and decided that today was part two of getting my life squared away. That was what Nate called it when I got my shit together about things. After we had cuddled on the couch for a while the day before, he made me eat some more of the fancy crackers I had bought before Joey had first arrived but neither of them had ever touched, and I did seem to feel even better with some bland food in my stomach. Nate had gone with me to return the rental car, then we dropped off my actual car at a garage where he had gotten an estimate while I’d been away. They were going to fix the damage to the body from the minor incidents I’d had, and also turn off all those lit-up symbols on the dashboard that were supposed to be warning me of stuff. We picked up my dry cleaning and brought it home. We got the mail again, which Nate seemed to feel was a daily chore, rather than the semi-annual one it was for me.

  By that point, I was feeling exhausted, so a run probably would have been a bad idea. We had gone up to the apartment to hang up all my dry-cleaned clothes and he looked around the crowded guest bedroom where I was supposed to be sleeping. He had mentioned it looked like a tornado had gone through it, but as someone who had grown up with earthquakes, it more reminded me of how things looked after a pretty big one. Stuff everywhere, scattered and fallen, a real mess.

  “I know, it needs a little work,” I had told Nate, and his eyebrow had arched at the word “little.” “I’ll clean it tomorrow.” We had eaten dinner when Joey got home, and then, with him watching us very carefully, had gone together back into that bedroom.

  “We’re sleeping, Scarlett,” Nate told me, when I started to get antsy and twitchy. “That’s all. Come lay down and go to sleep.” And again, I had, settled in his strong arms, feeling the beat of his heart against my back. When I had woken up, he was already in the kitchen talking to Joey and Pia. And I had slept the whole night. It felt like a new world when you had actually rested rather than watching dog agility contests, hurling, and kabaddi on TV until the sun came up.

  Getting my life squared away at work meant going through all the things I had meant to get to, the projects that were just not as important as the emergencies that Pascale kept piling on top of them. After lunch, which I ate, I came out and handed Javier an envelope.

  “Here.”

  He looked up from his short chair in his tiny work space. As befitting his status as the intern, Pascale had him sitting behind a desk that would have fit Daria’s daughter better than a fully-grown adult.

  “What is this?” he asked me, taking it gingerly.

  “You asked me to write you a recommendation for the graduate fashion management program at Alta California College.” I flicked the envelope. “There it is.”

  “Really?” He looked at it even more warily. “Um, is it, like, favorable?”

  “Did you think I would write you a mean recommendation?” Clearly, by the look on his face, he thought I might. “Well, I didn’t,” I told him. “I think you’ve done a good job here, and that’s what I wrote. They can call me and I’ll say the same thing.”

  Now he looked utterly shocked. I considered that I hadn’t ever said that to him before—maybe I hadn’t ever said that to anyone before. Javier got a huge, beaming smile on his face. “Thank you, Scarlett. That really means a lot to me, coming from you.” He held the envelope to his chest. “Thank you!”

  “You’re welcome,” I answered, a little gruffly. When I went back to my office, I saw him bolt over to his friend the receptionist, waving the envelope around. I went back to clearing my desk of all the things I had meant to be doing for weeks, months, longer.

  Nate had told me that he was coming by to pick me up, since I didn’t have my car, and we could walk home together. Which had meant me planning ahead and picking an outfit that went with the sneakers I had put at the bottom of my leather work tote, after I dumped out the expensive water bottle I never really drank from, anyway. I was on the phone when he walked in and I saw him talking to the receptionist. Then Javier drifted over, then a few more of our staff and even Pascale, until I could only see Nate’s head above the crowd because he was taller than everyone else.

  “No, no modeling,” he was saying when I came out. He was also grinning. “That thought never crossed my mind.”

  “I mean it, you really have quite the look,” Pascale said, and then she gave him quite the look of her own, eying every part of him like he was a slice of bread she was desperate to eat. It had been at least five years since a carb had crossed her lips. “Were you in the military?

  “I was,” Nate agreed, and there was a general, lovelorn sigh from my co-workers.

  “I can give you some names of agents if you’re interested in looking into it,” Pascale told him. “Maybe underwear or swimsuits.” She stared directly at his crotch and everyone else did too, including the receptionist who stood up from her chair to get a better view.

  Nate looked shocked and I stepped in. “Let’s go,” I said, and elbowed my way through my co-workers to block their view of his package. He put his arm around my waist and we walked out, as everyone at the reception desk whispered. I definitely heard the word “ass” more than once.

  “So that’s what it feels like to be ogled,” Nate commented when we got to the street.

  “You could model, if you wanted,” I told him. The people at my office hadn’t seen what was under his clothes; I hadn’t seen everything, but enough to know that what he had was truly spectacular. “Juliette, Lanie’s mom, was a very successful model before she started her cosmetics company. I used to do some print stuff when I was in high school and college, just for fun.”

  “Why do you do that?” he asked me.

  “What, model? I just said, for fun. I didn’t plan on making it my career.”

  “No, this,” he told me, putting his hands over his cheeks. “You cover your face when you talk about yourself.”

  I’d had no idea I did that but I knew immediately why I did. “I don’t know why. Weird habit, I guess.”

  “Uh huh.”

  I had that feeling again that he knew more about me than I had let on. We walked for a while as I thought about how to explain it. “Did you ever read the book The Picture of Dorian Gray?” I asked.

  “It’s not ringing any bells.”

  “I had to read it in high school. I mostly read it in high s
chool, parts, and the summaries online,” I corrected myself. “It’s about a guy who stays perfect looking on the outside but he has this picture in his attic or something that gets uglier and uglier as he does bad stuff. The painting shows the real guy, his true character.”

  “Ok.” Nate looked down at me. “And? Or are we just having a literary discussion?” He put his arm back around me, and squeezed my waist.

  “That’s what I think is happening to Bradley. Not with a painting in the attic, but with his actual face. He used to be really good looking—even I, who hated him pretty much instantly, could give him that. But now he looks so awful. Like the whole, terrible truth about him is starting to show for everyone to see.”

  “I think his face shows that he drinks too much,” Nate said. “Not some supernatural thing.”

  “Maybe,” I said, unconvinced. “But I think that happens. Like my old friend Simona, who I visited in Malibu. She used to be gorgeous in college. But now she looks like…” I thought. “A fossil. Like her face hardened. She’s definitely not as pretty as she used to be.”

  “Everybody gets older.”

  “No, it’s not just that,” I argued. “It’s showing. How she’s mean, how she treats other people badly. But my friend Daria, she just looks better than ever. She’s really tired, and she definitely needs a haircut and some serious highlights and I could help her with her clothes. But she looks like she glows from inside. She looks beautiful.”

  “You know what I think? I think you spend way, way too much time worrying about how things look. And if you think that you’re ugly inside, and it’s going to show on your face, you’re wrong. On both counts.” He stopped in the sidewalk and let go of my waist to cup my face in his hands.

  I thought he was going to kiss me, right there next to the playground in Franklin Square. Instead, he leaned his forehead down to mine and rested it there.

  I tried not to yank myself away. With him so close, looking into my eyes, it felt like he might be able to see everything. Finally, I couldn’t take it and pulled back.

  “Klere put something else up,” I said, as I started walking quickly away, and I launched into a description of what she had done. I heard Nate sigh as he followed me.

  “It sounds like you had a good day,” he said. “Joey did, too. Kiana called him and wants to come visit.”

  “Really? That’s great!” I thought. “Is this to get back together, or is it something else?” Maybe she just wanted to get laid. Or maybe it was just “absence makes the heart grow fonder” and after she spent some time with him, she would remember why they broke up.

  “I don’t think he cares why she’s coming,” Nate said. “He’s just so happy that he’ll be able to see her again. I thought that getting away from home, being somewhere new, it would help him to get over her. If anything, he’s crazier about her now than ever. He keeps saying that the more people he meets, the more he knows that there’s no one like Kiana.”

  “She’s lucky that he feels that way. She’ll be lucky if he can forgive her for leaving him.”

  “She put up with a lot of shit from him. He has some things to make up for, too. But I hope they can work it out. Or I hope he can use this as a way to finally move on. If I have to hear another story about the perfection of Kiana, I’m going to lose it. I’ll throw up like you did yesterday.”

  I held up my hand and shook my head. “No vomit remarks, please. It’s too soon. It may always be too soon.”

  Nate laughed and grabbed that hand. We walked the rest of the way back to my apartment just like that.

  Joey was, to say the least, extremely excited by the prospect of his ex-girlfriend’s visit. He started in on the perfection-of-Kiana stories with me too, and I saw what Nate meant about puking over them. No woman could have reached that ideal, except maybe Lanie, according to my brother. “I have an idea,” I announced, during a break in a saga about Kiana’s giving heart and thoughtful treatment of others, as evidenced by when she let someone with only two items hop ahead of her in line at the grocery store. “Let’s go out to celebrate.”

  “Celebrate Kiana coming, and celebrate you getting the job done with that naked girl,” Nate put in. He had been looking at Klere’s social media and had been unimpressed by the lack of clothing in some of the shots.

  “Also, celebrate how well Joey is doing with his new medicine and how cute Pia looks in her new collar,” I added, and her tail thumped. She looked great and she seemed to know it.

  “Does going out mean us wearing the clothes you brought?” Nate looked pained. He had thanked me for the new, spiffy stuff, but I knew he was happier in a t-shirt.

  “It does,” I told him. “Put on your dress blues, soldier.” I paused. “I’ve been reading up. Did that sound military?”

  Nate pushed my hair out of my face to touch my cheek. “It’s just like being back in the barracks. I think I’ll go try that tie.”

  I went into the guest bedroom and ran through the list of restaurants on my reservations app with availability for a party of three, plus one dog. I paused halfway down at one name and my heart beat a little. We could go there, to La Méprise. I had always liked it. I quickly booked a table before I could think too much more about it.

  “I made a reservation at a place in the Marina,” I called to Nate and Joey.

  “Is that the neighborhood near the Palace of Fine Arts?” Joey asked. “Pia, come here. Your collar is crooked.”

  “Yes,” I called back. “Near where I go to the gym. The restaurant is called La Méprise.” I swallowed and carefully put on another swipe of mascara. I had been there many, many times.

  Joey whistled when I came out and I whistled back at all three of them, impressed. “See? Isn’t it nice to dress up sometimes?” I prompted. Both guys said yes and thanks again, but I also saw them running their fingers under their collars. We all looked great, and just in case we saw anyone, we were ready.

  “This is really nice,” Joey said when we walked into the restaurant after the ride over. “We fit right in. You do know what looks good, Scar.”

  I shrugged and glanced around at the diners in the familiar room, but I didn’t see…

  “Right this way,” the host announced. He showed us to our table, Pia walking very sedately behind him and looking very solemn and elegant while I swiveled my head right and left, looking at the faces. We sat down and I continued to peruse the guests at the tables.

  “Scarlett.”

  I turned quickly to Nate. “Yes?”

  “What are you looking for?” He squinted at me. “You’re staring at everyone in the restaurant.”

  “I usually know people here,” I answered honestly. This was Mats’ favorite restaurant, only a block from his house, and he came here at least once a week. We had come here together all the time, to the point that I had the menu memorized. But I didn’t see him or any glimpse of his new fiancée, Missy, whom I knew I would recognize from studying all her social media pictures.

  Nate handed me the wine list. “You know this stuff better than we do. Pick.”

  I did, and then, just after I had ordered a bottle, Mats walked in with a fairly pretty girl, a little on the short side and with very ugly shoes. Yes! I bit back down the smile of satisfaction. Her outfit looked like something that Lanie would have worn, and that said a lot. I stared down at my menu, pretending to study it while I ran a hand through my dark hair. Mats had always loved my hair and I knew it looked great, much better than his fiancée with the bad bangs. I twirled a long lock around my finger, hoping Mats was watching. I decided to sneak a peek.

  Someone was definitely watching me, but it was Nate. I caught his eyes and then looked away, heat rising up in my cheeks. I dropped my hands to my lap, my hair falling forward over my face.

  “What is this about sweetbreads?” Joey mused. “Why would you have dessert bread for dinner?”

  “It’s not really bread, it’s offal,” I told him.

  “It’s awful? Too sugary for you?”
he asked.

  “Let’s cut the Stooges routine. It’s not bread at all, it’s organs. Glands,” Nate told him, and I burst out laughing at Joey’s face. Since I knew the menu backwards and forwards, I had already picked my salad, dressing on the side. Seeing Mats had reminded me that I had both eaten lunch and only walked a few miles that day, nothing real in terms of cardio. I would have to have the naked lettuce, as Joey called it.

  “Do you know him?”

  My head snapped up from where I had been pretending to study the menu again, but actually trying to look out of the corner of my eye at Mats’ table. Nate was staring across the restaurant, right to where the host had seated my former fiancée and the frumpy Missy. I glanced over briefly and Mats was staring back, before he turned pink and looked away.

  “Yes, I know him,” I said. “Joey, what did you decide on? A gland?”

  We had a nice dinner after that, and I managed not to look over at Mats and friend again. I had a great time, laughing and talking, especially with Nate. Mats could eat his fucking heart out. At the end of the meal, when I was holding Pia’s leash as we all walked out, she happened to go over towards their table. Since I tugged her that way.

  “Oh, Mats,” I said, pausing in utter surprise. I flipped my long hair and saw his fiancée’s eyes on it. “I didn’t see you there. You just kind of blend, you know? And who is this?” I smiled at her.

  “Missy,” Mats told me.

  “So nice to meet you, Prissy.”

  “Missy,” he corrected nervously. He stood, clutching his napkin. What a wienie.

  “Oh, my mistake! You must be the new girl. Mats and I don’t talk about you very much when we’re together,” I explained. Her lower lip trembled, visibly.

  “Missy…” Mats said, looking down at her, but then he stopped, and looked back at me. I moved my shoulders back, breasts out.

  “Prissy—I mean, Missy, I really enjoy your outfit,” I told her. “My job is in fashion, so I work with beautiful clothes and people who are very careful about their appearances.” I stopped and eyed her. “It’s really refreshing to see someone who just doesn’t care what she looks like. You’re kind of like a break for my eyes, after spending my day with so many gorgeous women, wearing such interesting, flattering things.” I smiled, hugely. “Anyway, great to see you again, Mats. And to meet your beauti—anyway, your date. I have to run.” I turned, triumphant, looking for Nate so I could point him out, and Joey too. Unfortunately, they had already left, but Mats had seen me eating with them. So I just waved, still smiling, and walked out, making sure to swing my hips a little so Mats could get a good view of my butt as well. I led Pia out to the front where I hoped that at least Nate and Joey had remembered to wait for me. They both needed some manners lessons, still.