Текст книги "Sexy"
Автор книги: J. A. Huss
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Текущая страница: 16 (всего у книги 18 страниц)
Chapter Thirty-Four
Fletcher Novak.
My eyes meet Claudio’s just as Fletcher turns to walk out of the rehearsal room. My breath hitches in my chest and my stomach gets a sinking feeling that I haven’t felt in months.
I’ve done my best to put him behind me. Come to terms with the way I judged him. The way I hurt him. All the many, many mistakes I made with Fletcher Novak over the short time we were… friends.
Because that’s what he was to me. In every way. It’s just too bad I didn’t have the good sense to realize it when I had the chance.
I tuck away the urge to run after him and scream his name. Beg him to forgive me and all my preconceptions about who and what he is. It takes me several seconds. And by the time I look away from the door, the entire troupe has noticed.
Steve shoots me a sympathetic look, then clears his throat and grabs the attention of the dancers so I can recover.
“OK,” I say after that moment passes. “Let’s do it again, guys. From the top. We’ve got a show tonight, and we’re gonna blow this town away.”
They smile and joke, as they take their positions again. The music restarts and the lights come on, allowing me to make a dignified escape off the stage.
I slump down into the director’s chair set up offstage and watch eight months of work finally come together. They are as near perfect as we can get. They are all fit and handsome. All dancers. The music is original, and there is an artistic quality to the show that might set us apart from all the other male revue shows that have cropped up over the past few years.
It’s a long shot, I know that. The show Fletcher and Chandler put together before I took over the hotel was fun. It was very good too. And it did get a five-star review, although it was a moot point since Cole shut it down and ruined everything.
But that’s OK. It was a long process, regrouping and finding my stride. But I found it. And I’m proud of this show. I’m proud of the men who dance, the stagehands, the lighting guys. We even have a film crew to do promos for us along for the ride tonight.
It’s not the same show. It’s better. Because it’s mine.
Claudio appears again, making his way towards me. He sits down in his chair, next to Steve’s empty one, since he is dancing. The three of us are a team now, but even though I talk myself into feeling complete… I’m not.
The hole is still there.
I don’t bring up Fletcher, and Claudio is silent as we wait for the rehearsal to be over. Everyone gathers around for a few words of encouragement—the nerves are hard to keep at bay, and it’s my job to keep them all focused and positive. Until finally the rehearsal room goes quiet and it’s just Claudio and me left.
“He gave me this,” Claudio says, holding out a white plastic card. “Said you’d know what to do with it, and I quote, ‘if you were interested in talking.’”
I stare at the card and take it from Claudio’s outstretched hand. It says Windshore Estates on it, with a beautiful picture of the lake.
“Do you know what to do with it?” Claudio asks. “Because I sure don’t.”
I nod and turn the card over, studying it. “I think so.” I check my watch. It’s almost an hour up to the North Shore.
“Go,” Claudio says.
“What?” I look up, still thinking of Fletcher. He has been on my mind since the moment I laid eyes on him back at that first show last summer. Even though I knew him such a short time, he dominated my thoughts. The anger when he propositioned me. The rage after he turned my plot to fire him against me. I look back down at my shoes and smile just thinking about it. And then I remember the sex on the roof and feel flushed. I felt betrayed when he set Cole up with Katie, but then cared for when I found out who she was and what Fletcher was doing. Of course, I’ve found out a lot more about him since that last meeting with Katie.
It wasn’t hard. The fake Wikipedia entry is still there. But the name Rourke on those legal papers Katie sent started Claudio and I on a hunt to figure out who Fletcher Novak really is.
Claudio is waiting for me to work all this out and when I look back up one more time, he reaches for my hand and gives me a sad smile. “If you don’t try, you’ll never know. So just go, Tiffy. It might be your only chance.”
I give him a slight nod as I take in a deep breath. “He’s not going to care why, Claudio.” Claudio starts to protest, but I put a hand up to stop him. “I’m still gonna try,” I say. “And OK, he might still hate me afterward, but he might not. So I guess it’s better to know one way or the other than let it stay a mystery.”
Claudio leans in and hugs me. “Good luck, girlfriend. And don’t be late for your show. If he’s still a stubborn bastard, just keep your mind on the show. We’ve got opening night, babe. And those bitches in the new auditorium are going to scream so loud, Fletcher Novak will hear them from the other side of the lake.”
I chuckle into his shoulder, trying my best not to cry so he won’t complain about tears on his suit. “I promise to remember that.”
xoxoxoxoxoxoxo
The drive up the lake takes almost an hour. This time I know where I’m going and I’m not in a rage trying to follow his red car. So I enjoy it. That’s something I’ve been working on since my father died last summer. Live in the moment, Tiffy. Don’t waste any chances. Because you only get one life. One trip around the game board. One chance to win.
I pull up to the gatehouse where I lied to the guard all those months ago. It’s not the same guy, thank God. Mr. Silverman was very confused by my behavior that day, but he ended up blaming it on my father’s sickness and death.
The guard leans down, placing a hand on the top of my car hood, and says, “Good afternoon, ma’am. Can I help you?”
I grab the pass Fletcher gave Claudio to get me past the gate. “Fletcher Rourke invited me to the house and gave me this pass.”
The guard’s expression changes and a beaming smile comes forth. “Ah, I’m gonna miss him.” He backs away a few paces to push the button for the gate. “Go on in, ma’am,” he says, waving me through.
I drive slowly down the road running parallel to the lakeshore. Every now and then I get a peek at the brilliant blue water flanked on all sides by the majestic mountains. I see the driveway for Fletch’s house. There’s a sale sign attached to the gate with an Open House By Invitation Only banner running across it. When I pull up, the gate opens automatically and I drive forward until Fletcher’s red Camaro comes into view.
I park behind him and get out, dragging my fingertips along the white racing stripe on the hood as I walk up to the front steps. The door is not open, and it has one of those lock boxes on the handle so agents can show the place.
I ring the doorbell several times, but no one comes. I step back from the house and walk back to the driveway, trying to see the backyard. It tilts a little, goes uphill, so I walk a few steps along the stone pavers flanked on either side with brightly colored flower beds, and when I get to the top the view almost takes my breath away.
The thirteen-million-dollar house has an equally impressive backyard. The sand is clean and raked to perfection with the exception of one trail of footsteps and my eyes follow them to the apex of a short dune where I can barely make out a mess of blond hair flowing in the lake breeze peeking out over the top.
I slip my sneakers off and step into the warm sand, my toes digging in deep. It feels wonderful. I have not been on our beach this summer at all. Too busy getting the show in shape. Too busy trying to forget my mistakes last summer. The walk only takes half a minute, and then there I am. Staring down on his sitting frame, his knees tucked up to his chest, his forearms poking out of the rolled-up sleeves of a crisp white dress shirt. Untucked and open in the front so that the slight wind coming off the lake makes it flutter around his body like a sheet in the wind.
“It’s a tough sell,” he says, his back still to me. “Thirteen million dollars.” He turns his head slowly, giving me a sidelong glance over his shoulder. He eyes my tattered jeans first, then his gaze travels up to my white tank top. “Nice outfit.”
“I hear it’s the uniform.”
That gets a half-hearted chuckle out of him as he turns his attention back to the view. But it helps me relax. So I take a few more steps, crest the soft peak of the sand dune, and then slide a little as I descend and take a seat next to him. “Did you sell it?” I ask, my fingertips digging into the sand.
“Got an offer this morning.”
“Are you gonna take it?”
A shrug. “I guess.”
I nod. “I guess I would too. But it would be sad.”
He looks over at me. Another side glance, like he’s not interested in meeting my gaze. “She wasn’t my wife, you know.”
“I know, Fletcher. I know a lot more now than I did back then. I have investigators too.”
He picks up a twig and stabs it into the sand a few times. “She’s my brother’s ex. And Shelly is my niece.”
“You don’t have to explain,” I say. “I know.” He stays silent after that. Just staring out across the sapphire-colored water. I can’t see the south shore from here, but it’s a long view down the entire length of the lake. Breathtaking. “It must be hard to leave.”
“I’m still trying to figure that one out, ya know?” He turns his head again. This time he looks at me straight on. “My granddad was a pretty important golf-course designer back in his day.” Fletch takes a deep breath, looks away, like he’s wondering if he should talk about it or not, then decides he will, and continues. “He got this land before all the development. Back when it was still valuable, but not outrageously so. It was a partial payment for a course he consulted on. And before he died years ago, back when I was eighteen and Walker was nineteen, he was in a huge fight with my parents. Called them no-good lazy bums.” He stops to laugh. It’s real and comes with that smile I loved so much last summer.
“But he was right, I think. And that’s why he gave Walk and me the house. He wanted it to stay in the family and figured my parents would sell it off the first chance they got.” He squints in the sunshine and look over at me again. “They would’ve too.”
I nod. “It’s a lot of responsibility, I imagine.”
“I did my best, Tiff. I tell myself that, anyway. But I just can’t afford it. My granddad left Walk and me about five million each. But after Walker fucked up with Samantha, I bought him out. I spent every last cent getting the title to this place to keep my promise to my granddad and give her a home to live in. A base that Shelly could count on, just like I did when I was a kid.”
I want to take his hand as he works through this decision to sell his house and break his promise. But it’s not something I can make him feel better about. It’s just something he has to come to terms with.
“So it’s ironic, ya know?” He looks at me again, the wind tossing his blond hair in a mess of loose curls, his blue eyes shining in a slash of sunshine that cuts across his face. “I’ll be so rich if I take this offer, money will lose all meaning. Add in the deal I just made down in LA, and it barely makes sense to me.”
I sigh along with his frustration. “That’s how it works, right? The rich get richer and they don’t even have to try. Money makes money.”
“The taxes alone killed me. Every year I scrambled to pay them. Fifty thousand dollars in property taxes. That’s not even counting what it costs to maintain this place. The gardeners alone.” He shakes his head. “And I tried, OK? I tried to mow that fucking lawn. But it was an all-day job, and half the sod died, and then it just cost me more to hire people to come fix the shit I messed up.”
“I can relate. The cost of running that hotel made me throw up when I found out. And then I had to hire someone else to come do it for me, because every time I thought about it, I’d make myself sick. So yeah, I couldn’t win. And I can relate.”
He stares at me for a moment. “Am I doing the right thing, Tiffy? If I take this offer?”
I look out at the lake now, thinking about how I got here. Not here on the beach, but here, this moment in time. “It’s opening night tonight.”
“I know,” he says with a sigh. “I’ve been seeing the promos everywhere.”
“But it was a long road, and a lot of decisions to get to this night.” I smile at him and he smiles back. Not the big one that I love, but I’ll take what I can get right now. “My lawyers took all that info you had Katie gather and ran with it. They got the will overturned. Not just the executor thing that Cole tried to slip in, but the whole damn will. It was something of a miracle. The right judge, and all that.”
Fletcher raises his eyebrows.
“Yeah, I got all sixteen billion dollars.”
“That’s a quite a windfall.”
“Right?” I ask. “But it wasn’t right. Because my dad wanted me to have enough, but not too much. And sixteen billion is way too much. So I did what he asked and I parceled it out the way he intended. I kept the part I got as the executor. And I kept the hotel, obviously, since it was mine anyway. I decided I’ve been scared of taking chances for far too long. I was going to make a decision and stick with it. See it through to the end. See what I’m made of. And no, running a resort in Lake Tahoe was never how I saw my life when I was younger. I pictured a capable man taking care of me for the rest of my days, to be honest. So I adjusted my dream. Thought about what I wanted. And what I wanted was to be… capable of something. Anything, really. So I’m still here. And I’m staying.”
“I get it.” Fletcher looks down at the sand and starts running it through his fingers alongside of me. “I was out here last week. Just moping on the beach. And Shelly came out and sat next to me. She put her arm around me and looked up at my face with those wise eight-year-old eyes and said, ‘It doesn’t matter if you sell it, Uncle Fletch. We can always think about the beach in our heads and it will still be there.’”
“Very wise kid,” I say.
“She’s amazing. And she was right. So I put the house up for sale the next day, and one week later we had an offer on the table.” He stops playing with the sand and stares out across the lake. “I feel so much relief, Tiffy. It scares me. I should feel like a failure. I should feel like I let my granddad down by putting this house up for sale. But I don’t. I just feel relief. Like I’ve finally admitted I was on the wrong path and just accepting that fact is enough to make it right.”
“I’m glad.” I have so much more to say, but I’m just not sure how to start. So we sit there in silence for a few minutes, listening to the waves and watching jet skis off in the distance.
“I’m going to LA tonight.”
My heart wrenches in my chest. But what did I expect?
“How much do you really know about me?” He fills in the silence left hanging.
“Enough to know you weren’t who I thought you were.”
“Hmmm,” he grunts. “I was so pissed about that, you have no idea.”
I have nothing to say. So I say nothing.
“You never tried to know me, Tiffy. You never once tried to know me. You didn’t make any effort.”
“That’s not true,” I say, feeling a little defensive. “I looked you up on Wikipedia.”
It was a joke, but he doesn’t laugh. “You saw Fletcher the stripper. Fletcher the player. Fletcher the fuckup.”
“To be fair, Fletcher”—my anger gets the best of me—“those were the only parts you showed me.”
“Really? You sure about that?”
“You were a man-whore.”
“I told you you were special the first night we met.”
“That was after you propositioned me at the show.”
“You came there to fire me based on rumors.”
“Rumors that were partially true! And you outed yourself as the matchmaker, remember? I didn’t come up with that idea myself.”
He shrugs. “I was trying to help you. And I did help you.” He looks over at me, the anger in his heated stare apparent now. “You just never saw it.”
“You hurt me too, Fletcher. You set Cole up with Katie and never told me why. You let me find out on my own. You took me to a restaurant to practice—”
“You wanted all that, Tiffy. And I didn’t tell you about Cole because I didn’t have the evidence until after you broke into my hotel room and went through my private papers.”
I don’t reply. I’m angry again and I don’t want things to end like this.
“I saw you, ya know.”
“Saw me where?”
He shakes his head. “Not where, Tiffy. You’re so preoccupied with where and when. The only thing that matters is the how and the why.”
I sigh. We’re going in circles. “You lied to me, Fletcher. And sure, I was no one to you, so I guess you had that right. But you don’t get to judge me. Not when our whole relationship was based on the idea that you could change me.”
“Is that what you think?” he asks, laughing. “Well, try on this perspective for a minute, Miss Preston. I fell for you the minute I saw you out in the audience. I never wanted to change you, you wanted me to change you. I liked the clothes you wore. I liked the sexy you had back then. I liked everything about you, which is why I went out of my way to help you. It was Cole who needed the new and improved version, not me.”
I huff out a breath of air though my nose, the anger building inside me. “You don’t even know me, Fletcher.”
“Ditto, babe,” he snarls. “Ditto.”
I stand up and wipe the sand off my ass. “Well, I’m glad you’re good, Fletcher. And maybe one day we’ll be friends again. But I’m not going to sit here and let you tell me who I am. Not when you haven’t even asked one goddamned question about me. Not one, Fletcher. You were never interested.”
He stands too, grabbing me by the wrist. “So tell me, then. What makes you tick, Tiffy Preston? You figured me out. I had a debt I needed to pay, a family I dropped everything to take care of, a woman and a child who weren’t even my responsibility. I left college for them, you know. I put my whole life on hold to take care of my brother’s mistake. Scraping by doing this and that. Trying to pay the taxes on this monstrous house and put food on the table. Pay the babysitter while Samantha went to nursing school. And I did my best. Any way I could. I came up with dozens of ideas to get something rolling and that matchmaking business was all I had for years. And I was good at it. I helped those girls, Tiffy, Every single one of them. I changed the way they saw themselves.”
“So? What’s that got to do with me?” I regret those words and quickly amend them. “Us, I mean. Because even though what you’re doing to me right now isn’t fair, I’m still here. I’m still trying. But all you seem to want to do is blame me for this fucked-up position you’re in. Do you want the money to keep your house, Fletcher? I can give it to you if that’s what you need in order to understand I like you.”
“Fuck you,” he growls. “I was never interested in your money, Tiffy. You’re mixing me up with your dream man, Cole.”
I look away and shake my head. We are both silent again, perhaps choosing our next words carefully as we try to navigate a minefield of hurt and disappointment.
“Back when I first started the matchmaking thing it was sort of a joke. I had just quit school in my senior year to help Samantha with Shelly after she gave birth. She had some depression and I was a psych major. So I figured if I couldn’t finish my degree, I could at least help her out. And it became so clear that Samantha’s self-worth was tied up in Walker’s opinion of her that I started coaching her on how to feel sexy. Not how to be sexy, Tiffy. How to feel sexy. There’s a very big difference.”
I look him in the eye now, seeing a way forward, even if it is by way of a very crooked path.
“And after she started getting better, I began to notice more and more how people perceived me, and how that perception wove its way into my own opinion of myself. Sexy, to ninety-nine percent of the population, is only on the outside. So why not take advantage of that? Why not sell my brand of sexy and buy myself some time?”
“So you became a stripper. Don’t you think that’s a little self-defeating, Fletcher? On the one hand you’re lecturing Samantha and these other girls about valuing themselves for who they are on the inside, but at the same time you’re using your looks to make money.”
“It was an experiment, that’s it.”
I can tell he’s pissed off about my accusation, but screw it. He brought it all up. “So you wrote a screenplay about what it feels like to be an objectified man taking his clothes off to survive and you sold your story to a network. I’m happy for you, Fletcher. And I think you’re going places. Selling this house is probably going to set you on a path to success. And I wish you all the best. But I was raised by a prostitute, Fletcher. So excuse me if I didn’t have the highest regard for your path to redemption.”
His mouth gapes open for a second.
“Yeah, my mother sold herself to save me. And she got what she thought she wanted too. But she never loved my father. And once I came to terms with that, I started to doubt her love for me as well. It’s a shitty thing to be lied to under the pretense that it’s for your own good. And you did that to me too. Did you even like me? Or was I just another project? Was I just another girl you needed to fix to make yourself feel important and in control of your own destiny?”
“That’s not what it was,” he sneers.
“That’s because you and I see it from opposite sides, Fletcher. And you’re so goddamned sure that you walk on water, you can’t even be bothered to wonder if my point of view is even worthy of your consideration.”
