Hot and Bothered Read online

  There wasn’t a cab to be seen, fortunately. In a city full of cabs, when you were trying to flee, you were almost guaranteed not to be able to hail one. In this case it worked in her favor.

  “Mark.”

  “Don’t bother.” His voice was icy, his posture rigid.

  “I’m sorry. I—” She couldn’t figure out the right words. Everything she could possibly say seemed so painfully inadequate. “I should have—”

  “You know what? I’m glad I know the truth. You’re ashamed of me. Better to know now than later.”

  That caught her off guard. “I’m not ashamed of you, Mark. I was going to tell her the truth.”

  “When? How long was it going to take you? How many other excuses and lies were going to come out of your mouth first?”

  The sick hurt swerved and became a little spark of anger. “I was trying to help you! I didn’t want everything you’d worked for to blow up in your face.”

  “Oh, really? Because that’s sure as hell not what it looked like. Look closely at yourself, Haven. Tell me the truth at least. Can you picture a scenario where you put your arm around me, rest your head on my shoulder, and say, ‘This is my boyfriend, Mark Webster? Burnout, has-been, drunk, brawler, scruffy unshaven guy with shit taste in clothes.’ Me.” He left the edge of the curb and paced as he spat out the words, his brisk, angry steps taking him close enough for her to reach out and touch his sleeve—if she’d wanted to, if he hadn’t been bristling with frustration and self-loathing.

  Every word he said pierced her, each one of those angry, self-abusing descriptors. Suddenly she realized how he saw himself, and by extension how he thought she saw him. How could he still believe that? How could he think that about her, about himself after what they had been through together? “God, Mark. Any other way you can tear yourself down? Because, man, you really do make that sound appealing.”

  “But that’s who I am, Haven. You don’t want the real me. The real me disgusts you. I think you might be more right than I wanted to admit that you only want me if I can be your—what was the example you used? Frankenstein’s monster?”

  “Pygmalion,” she said.

  He pointed an accusing finger at her. “You only want me if you can trot me out in public and I fit in just perfectly and the time is right and nothing is out of place.”

  It hit home, and yet she heard, under the all-too-accurate words, his terror. “Is that what you’re afraid of?”

  “Don’t make this about me. Don’t fucking make this about me and my fear. I’m not the only one who let all that public sex happen. You wanted to get caught. You’ve got all this stuff inside you that you keep hidden. You want people to know you but you won’t let anyone in, and if someone gets close enough to figure out who you really are, then you—”

  She watched, saw the moment the anger drained out of his face to be replaced with the hurt she’d seen in the ballroom.

  “Then you push him away.”

  She wanted to deny it, but there was too much in her head, too much in her heart. It had hurt him when he thought she was going to lie about their relationship in there, and she didn’t know how to undo her failure to claim him. How could she make it right? How could she take back pushing him away so she could make him believe she meant it?

  She had lied by omission because when push had come to shove, that’s what her instinct told her to do. She had denied him by failing to claim him when it really mattered. This was exactly what she’d told Elisa she feared.

  What the hell did she really want?

  Mark held a hand up, and she saw an empty cab coming up the street.

  He stepped to the curb and opened the door. “I don’t know what you’re scared of, but— Look, I want to be with you, but not like this. Not until you’re ready, until you know what you want.”

  And he stepped back and held the door wide for her.

  “Mark,” she began. But she didn’t know what she wanted or how to say it. She didn’t know how to not be scared and just tell him all the things she felt.

  “Go,” he said.

  “I—”

  “Go, or I will.”

  “Lady,” said the cab driver. “Get in the goddamned cab already. I don’t have all night.”

  “Mark,” she tried again, but he was already gone, his shoulders hunched as he headed up the street away from her.

  13

  “WHAT ARE YOU DOING?”

  “Eating Cheetos,” Haven said, shoving another big handful into her mouth.

  Elisa tilted her head to one side.

  “What?” Haven demanded.

  “I’ve never seen you eat Cheetos like that.”

  “I’ve never had my career and my sex life implode simultaneously in public before.”

  “Do you want another Water Lily?” Elisa got up from the couch and crossed to the kitchen area of Haven’s apartment, where the ingredients for the cocktails were arrayed on the counter.

  “Yes. Can you make the next one stronger?”

  “It’s all alcohol, baby. You just have to drink them faster. Or stop eating Cheetos so they absorb faster.”

  “Can’t,” said Haven.

  Elisa paused in the midst of squeezing a lemon and arched a brow. “Hav? Are you in love with him?”

  It was a question Haven had been desperately trying not to ask herself. She’d been drowning even the hint of that question in work, dealing with administrative issues that under other circumstances she would have happily procrastinated for years. Methodically calling, emailing and texting back reporters to tell them she was sorry but she had promised High Note an exclusive. Trying to figure out how, exactly, she was going to explain the events of Saturday night to Suellen. In short, she was doing anything to avoid the question that Elisa now posed.

  “No,” said Haven.

  Elisa set the lemon down and reached for the crème de violette. “Are you sure about that?”

  “Positive. It was just really good sex.”

  “I think you’re going to need to tell me a little bit about this really good sex.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “About the sex?”

  “About any of it.”

  After Mark had walked up the street last night, Haven had gotten out of the cab (much to the driver’s fury) and gone back into the fund-raiser. She had no choice, because nothing screamed scandal louder than running away. Reporters swarmed her when she returned, and she made herself smile at them like nothing was wrong. She pretended that she understood what had just happened to her and she’d planned it all to go this way.

  “Do you know the history between Pete Sovereign and Mark Webster?” a reporter demanded.

  “Let’s keep the focus on the kids,” Haven said. “Pete Sovereign and Mark Webster came here tonight to give children access to musical instruments. Whatever history is between them, they thought these kids were more important.”

  “What’s going on between you and Mark Webster?”

  “Anything you need to know about my working relationship with Mark Webster will be in the exclusive I’ve granted to Suellen Marvel at High Note.”

  “Is it just a working relationship?”

  “I’ll remind you again that we’re here for the kids,” Haven had said firmly. Coolly. Even if she’d been nowhere near cool inside. More like suffering from alternating flashes of hot shame and ice-cold fear.

  “Did you know Pete just made a public statement that he’s agreed to do the tour? Says he pities Mark because there’s nothing worse than a public breakup. Says that’s enough humiliation for one week.”

  She wasn’t surprised. Trust Pete to find a way to add another layer to Mark’s defeat.

  She’d stayed until the end of the fund-raiser, then taken a cab
home. She kicked her shoes off, stripped out of her dress, let down her hair, and went to bed with her makeup on. In the morning her pillow would be gritty and black with mascara, but she didn’t give a crap.

  She’d been numb at first, but as she started to warm up, as her body relaxed into sleep, she’d begun to cry. Tears flowed for the work she’d done to become the best of the best—all the clients she’d wooed, the image she’d made for herself, and all the people whose public personae were tied up with hers.

  She refused to shed a tear for Mark Webster and the way he’d kissed her and claimed her on the mezzanine. Not for what he’d made her want, how he’d made her forget herself and all the boundaries that kept her life neat and clean. And above all, not for the way he made her feel. Alive. Herself. Real.

  Elisa came over and set the pale purple drinks down on the coffee table. Haven picked hers up and took a long slug. She’d already had two and they weren’t working the way they needed to. “Get out the computer. Let’s look at your database.”

  “Haven. That’s not what you want.”

  “What does it matter what I want? It’s over with Mark. He made it more than clear.”

  “Have you tried getting in touch with him?”

  Not till you’re ready. Not till you know what you want.

  She kept hearing the way he’d described himself. Burnout, has-been, drunk, brawler, scruffy unshaven guy with shit taste in clothes. The way the world saw him, the way she’d seen him before she’d remade him. The way he believed she still saw him.

  What she saw when she pictured him was the tenderness on his face when she’d told him how hard it was for her to get naked without making everything just so first. He’d said he didn’t care if she was waxed or unwaxed, if her apartment was clean or dirty, he wanted her, and he wanted her to be comfortable.

  “Haven,” Elisa said patiently. “You are paying me a lot of money to fix your love life. A lot. And if you want that money not to be a total waste, I need to know what the hell is going on with Mark Webster. Aside from what the rags report, which is titillating and speculative but unsatisfying, I need you to tell me everything.”

  A tear ran down Haven’s face. A single tear, which she swatted back like a bug.

  “Oh, hon,” said Elisa, and she scooted over on the couch and put her arms around Haven. “You are in love with him.”

  It all came out, then, all poured out, the whole story unfolding from beginning to end in its shameful beauty and chaos.

  Charme, where Mark Webster had been his scruffy, combative self and Haven had not hated him nearly as much as she’d expected to.

  The barbershop and the department store, Mark’s unavoidable male beauty emerging from the layers of defense he’d piled over himself—the long hair, the shaggy almost beard, the awful clothes. And, as if it, too, had been hidden in there, his charm, the light in his eyes, the way he seemed to see through her—all the best of Mark rising to the surface.

  The night at Village Blues, when she’d seen what all of that charm and light could do. When she’d seen inside him. When he’d gotten inside her.

  The music lesson, when she’d understood how much he had to give to the world and she’d seen how deeply he cared about his father.

  Their meeting with Pete in her office and their explosive encounter after he left. The way she’d tried to reduce what happened between them, to make it manageable. To put it in a box and tie it up neatly with a ribbon so it wouldn’t break out and overwhelm her.

  “You did what?” Elisa asked.

  “It just happened,” Haven said.

  “Nothing just happens to you, Haven.”

  “This did.” Her eyes filled up again. Her heart filled up again. The pain she’d been trying to hold at bay by not thinking about him threatened to burst out, like water held back by an aging levy.

  Elisa was quiet so Haven went on with the story, and when she got to the dressing room in the department store, Elisa said, “No!”

  “Yes.”

  “You didn’t!”

  “I did. And it was so, so good.”

  Because there was no longer any point in denying it. She could see, from where she was, that it had only been a matter of time until everything she felt would overwhelm her, when she would have to pay the piper for what she had denied. Eventually she would have to admit to herself and to Elisa what she had probably known from the first time her eyes had met Mark’s in the barber shop mirror: that she loved him.

  “And then what?”

  “And then we went back to my apartment and had amazing sex. And then...and then I told him that we couldn’t be together in public.”

  “Why?” Elisa asked.

  “Because—”

  But she didn’t have the whole answer. She didn’t know how to answer.

  “Haven,” Elisa said. “It’s time for you to tell me about what happened with Porter Weir.”

  “I don’t see what that has to do with—”

  “Sweetheart. I don’t even know the story and I know it has everything to do with this.”

  “We just—we weren’t right for each other.”

  “I looked him up. Some people say he’s gonna be the next poet laureate. Serious guy, huh?”

  Haven’s chest got tight, the way it almost always did when she thought about Porter Weir. “Not my usual type.”

  “Your usual type isn’t your type, Haven.”

  “He was smart, deep, intellectual, angsty and emotional.”

  “And you were in love with him?”

  “I was. Not like—” She couldn’t quite say Mark’s name and she couldn’t quite link it together with that word, love. It hurt too much. But of course she didn’t have to say it, because this was Elisa, and Haven could feel the leading edge of what, exactly, Elisa knew. That knowledge was building along with tears in her throat, pounding in her chest, tightness all the way to her fingers and toes.

  “And then—?”

  “He broke up with me.”

  Elisa didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to. She was perched on the edge of the couch, waiting patiently as if she had all day to hear Haven admit what she had held back from herself.

  “He said that it didn’t matter what I did. He’d tried everything he could to get me to open up, and he said that he knew I’d tried, too, but it wasn’t something I could do. I’d spent too much time with surfaces. He said—”

  Her voice disintegrated, but she held the splintered bits together and managed to say it. “He said I was image all the way down.”

  Haven’s heart beat hard and her stomach clenched around the hollow space that she’d envisioned inside herself ever since Porter had said that.

  “Oh, hon,” said Elisa, so kindly, so gently. “And that’s what you’ve been so afraid of? That any guy who’s worth anything will think you’re image all the way down? Hav, you know that’s not the truth, don’t you, sweetheart?”

  Something rose like a tide in Haven’s chest, and her eyes welled with the held-back pressure.

  “You’re as real inside as that poet, hon. More real, because if anyone was a shallow asshole, he was.”

  Haven’s laugh was almost a whimper.

  “But Mark’s not like that guy, right?” It wasn’t quite a question the way Elisa said it, reassuring and even. “He already knows who you are and he hasn’t run away.”

  That was what it took to break her down. Haven cried gallons of sloppy tears that required almost a whole box of tissues, which Elisa dispensed one by one until Haven subsided to small, ugly hiccups.

  She looked at Elisa, who was sitting close, her face so sweetly sympathetic it made Haven want to start crying again.

  “He hasn’t run away,” Haven agreed. “I did that for him.”

  * * *


  “I WAS WONDERING when you’d show up here,” Elisa Henderson told Mark.

  “I looked you up on the internet.”

  “Glad to know my business is easy to find.” She smiled at him. She was a tall, slim woman with gingerbread-colored hair. She possessed an overwhelming air of competence and the most sympathetic look in her greenish eyes. She leaned across her wide desk toward him and set her elbows on the surface as if settling in for a long story.

  “Is this a conflict of interest?”

  “No,” said Elisa. “I often work with two halves of a couple. Sometimes two of my clients turn out to be perfect for each other, and it would be sheer foolishness not to get them together.”

  “But I’m not your client.”

  “Well,” said Elisa. “I usually spend at least fifteen or twenty minutes talking to someone on the phone before they agree to sign a client agreement with me, and not all those conversations turn into business—although most of them do. So let’s just pretend this is a phone call. You’ve got me for fifteen or twenty minutes.”

  “I don’t—I don’t even know why I’m here.”

  “Most people come because they want to find someone.”

  That made a peculiar, deep pain slide down inside his torso, as though he’d swallowed something too big for his body. “Do they ever come and say, ‘I found someone but it didn’t work out?’”

  Elisa nodded. “Sometimes. Then usually I say, ‘Are you sure you mean it didn’t work out? Are you sure you don’t mean it hasn’t worked out yet?’ Because most of the time, these things are a work in progress.”

  “I don’t think it can work out.”

  “Tell me why not,” Elisa said.

  “I’m not the right guy for her.”

  “She tell you that?”

  “Not in exactly those words, but yes—”

  “Tell me why you think you’re not the right guy for her.”

  “Just look at us,” said Mark. “You’ve got Haven on one hand, totally put together, totally on top of things, beautiful, sexy, polished, dressed up, made up, hair up...and then you’ve got me.”