“They abhor you,” I say with deliberate glee.
To my dismay, he barks out a laugh, looking pleased with himself.
“Good. Means I’m doing my job.” He turns to leave. “We are rivals after all, right?”
“Very right.” I follow him to the door, eager to shut it behind him.
At the last second, he turns before he reaches the door, and barely an inch separates us.
“You know,” he breathes the words. “Tonight it’s easy to forget we’re supposed to be enemies when you look like my friend from college. The one I used to study with in the laundromat.”
It’s one thing for him to bring up Bent, for us to argue about what he did or did not intend to happen that night. I’m not sure I’ll ever really know. It’s another thing for him to bring up our friendship. What I believed to be our friendship. That’s not fair.
“Goodbye, Jared,” I say, my tone sharpened to a fine point, eyes on my bare feet.
“You look the same,” he continues. I feel his eyes on my face but refuse to look up.
“I hope not.” I cross one foot over the other. “That dumpy girl had no clue.”
I laugh, some of my old self-consciousness rushing back, and glance up at him. I’m not prepared for the intensity on his face. It’s watchful. It’s frustrated. It’s something I can’t translate and in a language I don’t speak.
“I liked her,” he says, his voice a heated rasp. “She was smart and funny and honest and principled. She was . . . you were . . . one of the few people on that campus I could tolerate for more than an hour without wanting to saw my arm off.”
Then why?
The question rips through my defenses. Yes, it hurt to think he set me up with The Pride, that he would sleep with me as part of some prank or rite of passage I never understood. What hurt most was the uncertainty of what had been true, what had been real. If I’d misjudged every moment of our friendship. And if I hadn’t, then how could he do that to me?
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” I say woodenly.
“Ban, if you would just—”
“Eleven you said?” I cut in and school my face to look at him.
He runs a hand through his hair, disrupting it into a silky mess I remember too well. The way the strands clung to my fingers.
“We will have this out one day, Banner,” he says, his voice rough and impatient.
“Not today we won’t,” I lob back at him. “I don’t need a walk down memory lane, Jared. We have a job to do, and we’ll do it. No need to talk about the past. It’s dead and gone.”
“The past isn’t all gone,” he says, his voice suddenly softer. I’m unprepared for him to eliminate the protective space between us, for him to touch my face. He runs a finger over my nose. I jerk back, startled. “You still have the freckles.”
“What?” I rub my nose, wiping away his touch.
“You had seven freckles on your nose then,” he says, one side of his mouth canted up. “You still do.”
That’s the last mystifying thing he says before turning and walking up my short drive to the convertible sports car at the curb. I lean against the closed door for a minute, maybe more, reassembling my splintered composure. I don’t know what’s happening between us. My greatest defense against Jared has been my anger and bitterness over his treatment that night. When he denies it, when he makes me think it could have been real . . . that the fiery connection, the perfect give and take of our bodies, the closeness we shared before the sex and even more so after may have been real, my defenses flag. I can’t allow that to happen. If my armor slips, if I’m exposed. I don’t want to think of all the ways Jared could ruin my life.
14
Banner
The thing about flying in a helicopter is I’ve never flown in one. I was so preoccupied with Jared’s unexpected visit and all the ways I could maintain some distance, I forgot that I would probably be scared to death. I’m faced with that reality once we approach the helicopter, a giant bug-eyed insect with rapidly rotating wings. The helipad sits on top of a thirty-story building downtown, overlooking LA’s flat-topped Lego-like skyline. The Staples Center lies in one direction, the Sheraton in another. Those are the only buildings I distinguish. The rest are just a blur of glass and stone as I drag my feet toward the bullseye where the helicopter waits.
“Are those shoes slowing you down?” Jared yells over the noise of the spinning propellers.
“No,” I yell back, speeding up my steps in the black Balenciaga pumps I splurged on last year. “I’m fine.”
“Agreed,” Jared says, giving my appearance an appreciative quick scan.