“Nothing,” Rick said. “Having some trouble at the center with one of the guys.”
This was news to Kate. She echoed his response. “Nothing.”
Her father opened his mouth to say something, then snapped it closed. He looked at his wife and Kate could see something pass between them. “What’s the problem at the center? Thought things were going fine.”
Rick stared out the window, meeting no one’s gaze. “Nothing I can’t handle. Just got my thoughts tied up.”
Silence pressed down, interrupted only by the chirping of one of the machines hooked to Justus. Seconds ticked by, but it seemed like hours.
Finally, Vera waded into the tension. “Justus should be released the day after tomorrow. His regular physical therapist has been briefed and the doctor says they can find no significant damage from the last stroke.”
“That’s good,” Kate murmured.
“When will you come back?” Justus asked. She jerked her gaze to her father. His blue eyes pinned her against the striped wallpaper behind her.
“Well, I—” Kate paused.
“She’s not coming back.” Rick’s harsh words echoed in the small room. He’d turned to glare at the Mitchells. “She did what you asked. Stayed two weeks. The money is hers.”
Justus didn’t react.
At that instant, Kate wished for a natural disaster to sweep through and save her from the sheer hell of the moment, but the sunshine beaming in from the window declared it impossible. So she closed her eyes and tried to propel herself through space to Vegas. Or the Bermuda Triangle. Or anywhere other than here.
“I never said I wouldn’t come back.” She opened her eyes. “But I need some time. A lot has happened, stuff I haven’t even had time to process. I need a little space.”
Vera nodded. “I understand, Kate. What I think Justus is trying to say—” she patted his shoulder “—in a rather abrupt manner, is that we hope you will choose to be part of our lives…even if it’s in a small way.”
Kate pressed her lips together and nodded. Rick had spun toward the window and no longer looked at any of them. His muscles were bunched beneath his long-sleeved T-shirt, and her hands itched to soothe them, to ply the muscles beneath her fingers, make him calm and at peace. But she couldn’t. His anger at her would have to burn itself out. And that might take longer than a day. Or a week. Or a year. He might never get over his anger at her.
There would be no more tangled sheets with Rick. No more sweet kisses and wisecracks. What they’d shared was what she’d intended all along—something wonderful but temporary.
And it was time to go home to Vegas, to move forward.
She looked at her father. Her eyes softened. “I’ll be back, Justus. But this time, I’ll come on my own terms.”
He nodded.
Rick walked out.
Kate looked from Vera to Justus, at a loss for what to say about Rick’s behavior.
A nurse came in with a big bouquet of red roses. She nudged a box of tissues aside and set the vase on the bedside table. “There. Happy Valentine’s Day!”
The lush roses were in full bloom, beautifully signifying the day for love.
Irony sucked.
No balm for her heart.
And no more Chinese takeout for a while. Bluck.
Kate parked her rolling suitcase in the foyer and surveyed her domain.
White fluffy rug centered on slate floor. A Driade couch in fuschia, matching striped armchairs, funky George Kovac floor lamps and a glass sculpture made by her friend Billie filled the room. Very sleek, very modern, very designer.
And, oddly, not so welcoming.
Kate kicked off her flats and padded to the kitchen to remove the offending smell. Her answering machine blinked with messages, her one houseplant had died and she’d left a yogurt carton in the sink. Thank God she didn’t have a pet.
After setting things right, she grabbed her purse and looked for her cell. The check for fifty thousand dollars stared at her from the gaping opening of her bag.
She pulled it out, studying the tight signature of her father, looking at the zeroes following the five.
She’d gotten what she’d set out for…and more.
So why didn’t she feel victorious? Of course, she knew the answer. But she didn’t want to think about him. Couldn’t do that yet. Not when she felt so raw. And vulnerable.
She grabbed her phone, then stuck the check to her fridge with a magnet right beside the appointment for a dental cleaning she’d missed while in Texas. The check seemed to mock her, so she turned it over.
She punched out the numbers she’d dialed a million times. Jeremy answered on the second ring. “Let us make you Fantabulous.”
“Too late. I’m already there,” Kate said.
“Kate! You’re back already? Why didn’t you call? I would have picked you up, chickadee.”
She smiled even though it was hard. Her face felt tight. She was a patched piece of plaster, praying the cracks didn’t give way to crumbled dust. “I took a cab. Knew you were busy.”
“Well, get down here, girlfriend. I’ve got something to show you.” Jeremy sounded pretty cheerful, considering the last time she’d spoken with him Victor hadn’t been doing well.
“I’m gonna take it easy this afternoon. I’m pretty tired—you know how flying makes me.”
“How many pills did you pop? You’ve got your clothes on, don’t you?”
Kate laughed. “The cabdriver wouldn’t have picked me up if I hadn’t.”
“You’d be surprised,” he said. Laughter sounded in the background and she could hear Jay-Z playing. Singing about concrete jungles. Places so different from gentle rolling hills and open patios where people grew tomatoes in old whiskey barrels. “Okay, sugar, tomorrow it is. You’ve got two on the books.”
Kate frowned. Only two clients? Usually she was booked solid when she returned from a trip. But then again, business had been slow. She could sleep in, so it was all good. “See you then.”
She hung up and faced her empty apartment…and her wounded heart. Her place looked lonely. Sad. Empty.
The phone vibrated in her hand as Sade erupted. Her friend Trish.
“Hey, lady,” Kate said, tracing her finger over the dust on her glass table. She dropped into an acrylic chair shaped like a stiletto.
“Marshall’s guest deejaying tonight at the Ghost Bar. Wanna?” Trish sounded like she always did. Smooth as Scotch. Totally unruffled. Marshall Wainwright, aka DJ Rain, was her current flavor of the month.
“I don’t—” Maybe going with Trish would make her feel better. Get Kate back into her old vibe. She looked around the silent room. “Okay, sure.”
“You want me to swing by and pick you up? I’m not going home with Marsh. I’ve got a deposition at 9:00.”
Trish was an assistant district attorney for Carson County. She kicked serious butt in the courtroom, intimidating defendants like a hawk would a hapless mouse. She had an outstanding conviction record and was on the fast track to the top. She wouldn’t jeopardize a case even for the wickedly sweet Marshall Wainwright, who played a thug DJ but was really from the wealthy suburbs of Chicago.
“Okay, um, sure.” Kate glanced at the clock on her state-of-the-art stove she’d never used for anything other than boiling water for tea.
“You sound strange. What did they do to you down there in Texas?” Trish didn’t miss a thing. Not the slightest hesitation or inflection.
“They put me in cowboy boots and made me do the two-step,” she replied, trying to sound like her old self.
“Yeah. Whatever. I’ll be there at 9:00,” Trish said, sounding much more like she was saying, “I’ll interrogate you at 9:00.”
“Ciao,” Kate said, but the line was already dead.
She rose with a sigh and retrieved her luggage. A hot shower would melt away the travel stress and a little nap would rid her of the vestiges of the Xanax she’d taken in Dallas. She had a new baby-doll dress to wear tonight, not to mention a pair of Stuart Weitzman strappy sandals that made her legs look longer. Sure. She’d be back to her old self in no time.
She slipped off the dark glasses she wore to hide her swollen eyes and glanced in the mirror above her desk. Ouch. She looked like reheated oatmeal. Pasty, lumpy and unappetizing.
She couldn’t go out into the salon looking the way she did.
She grabbed the tackle box she kept her lures in. No plastic worms or bright wooden fish with hooks. No, this tackle box contained a palette of lip glosses, concealers, mascaras, sparkling eye shadow and various liners and brushes. These were the real lures in life.
While she tried to hide the damage done from a late night—too many beers and a crying jag—she berated herself for going out with Trish.
It had been miserable. She’d sat on a stool in a corner, swilling beer and watching happy people get their groove on. The whole time, all she could think about was how this used to make her happy, and how it now seemed so stupid.
People pumped their hands in the air to the beat of the music, shot neon-colored liquor from test tubes and prattled about their Facebook status and how much they’d lost doing P90X. Thirty-something men wearing too much cologne roved in packs and behaved like a bunch of frat boys on spring break. Women her age, wearing cheap clothes that barely contained their store-bought boobs, tottered on heels that were too high and actually invited the wolf pack to sample the wares.
She’d spent the whole night drinking and wondering if her life had always been this way.
But she knew the answer deep down inside.
Vegas hadn’t changed. The club scene hadn’t changed. She had.
That hacked her off so much that she’d drunk too much. One Newcastle after another flew through her hands until she could see two Trish’s when her friend finally came to tug her to the dance floor. But Kate wouldn’t go.
And that pissed her off
even
more. She was supposed to get her groove back, put Rick behind her and move forward. Instead, she’d sat like a lonely sourpuss, warding off gelled-up dudes with a get-away-from-me death stare. She’d felt like a bitter, washed-up old maid. And in her beer-soaked mind, all she wanted was the man she’d left behind.
For this—thumping music, lukewarm beer and an empty bed.
She was a dumb-ass.
Jeremy stuck his head in the office, jarring her from her sad-sack memory. “Hey, you. What’s going—”
He paused when she turned around. His waxed and perfectly tinted eyebrows crinkled. “Jeez, doll. Have you been crying?”
“No.” Her response was too quick.
Jeremy moved inside the office and draped an arm over her shoulder. “They made you do line dances down there, didn’t they? It’s okay. We can get you some therapy.”
Kate smiled. She had to. Jeremy was one of her best friends. “No. No line dances.”
He dropped a kiss on her head. “Then why’s my Katiebug so sad?”
Just him calling her
Katie
made tears spring into her eyes.
“Oh, God. Did they make you wear Wranglers? Because Wrangler butts drive me nuts, but not on women.” He was trying to make her smile again. But this time she couldn’t. She actually felt her chin wobble.
“I fell in love,” she said.
Jeremy clutched his chest and fell into the chair holding the bag of towels. He yelped, hopped up, tossed the bag, then swooned again. Then he pulled her onto his lap and wrapped his arms around her. “That’s great, Katiebug. Really great.”
She laid her head on his shoulder. “No, it’s not. It’s impossible.”
“Why?”
“Because my life is here. I have everything here. How can I be in a relationship that’s a thousand miles away?” She wiped her cheeks so she wouldn’t get Jeremy’s Oxford shirt damp.
“Hey,” he said, shifting her so he could look at her. “I want to show you something.”
He patted her back, indicating she had to get off his lap. She stood and he walked to their none-too-tidy desk and pulled an envelope from under the blotter. He handed her the letter.
She read it and then looked up at him and repeated the same word she’d said to him over a similar letter a little over a month ago. “How?”
“My father gave me the money my grandmother had left me. Money he’d hidden. It was over seventy-five thousand dollars.”
“Oh, my God!” Kate lowered the letter. Her mouth fell open as she looked at her friend. She was absolutely shocked. And he beamed at her, like a proud schoolboy. “Your father
talked
to you?”
“Better than that, knowing you were facing your past gave me the courage to face mine. I invited my father to lunch, and though he’s no card-carrying member of PFLAG yet, he’s offered to start therapy with me.” He turned his hands over and shrugged. “It’s a start.”
She hurried around the desk and enveloped her friend in a hug. “I’m so happy for you. I can’t believe it!”
He wrapped her in his thin arms. “I can’t, either, but I’m happy about it. And the salon is okay. Better than okay.”
Kate untangled herself from her friend and looked at the letter she’d dropped on the desk. No more bankruptcy. No more IRS threats. Fantabulous would stay fantabulous.
“I still can’t believe it. I didn’t even have to go to Texas after all.” Her heart beat as though she’d ran a race. Why? She wasn’t sure. She stared at a picture of her wearing a wig and sparkly dress. Jeremy had taken it on New Year’s Eve before they’d gotten the first IRS letter. She looked happy.
The room fell silent for a moment.
She looked at her friend. He stared at her measuringly. “Maybe you did have to go, hon.”
She sank into the chair they’d vacated moments before.
Jeremy fell into the desk chair and folded his hands on the desk like a high-school counselor. “Maybe all this was meant to be. A way for me to reconcile with my father. A way for you to face the past you’ve been running from all these years.”
Kate stared at a dust bunny huddled in a corner. “Maybe.”
“You said you fell in love, but you’ve changed more than that. I can see it in your eyes. The way you hold yourself. You seem vulnerable and, I don’t know, deeper.”
She shrugged. “I went through a lot of shit down there. A lot of stuff I needed to go through, I guess, but it changed me. I don’t feel the same.”
He nodded. “Let me tell you something, my dear friend. I’m learning that life is too damned short to waste time on things that don’t matter. You know?”
Victor’s cheerful face flashed into her mind. Jeremy likely didn’t have much time left with his partner. No time to waste. “I get you, Jer, but I can’t pursue something that’s not right for me. My life is here. In Vegas. I can’t throw everything I’ve worked so hard for out the window like it’s nothing. It means something to me.”
“Sure it does.” He nodded, picking up her glass paperweight. The one Nellie had sent her. “But, you see, Victor is my life. I’d choose him over my career, my house, my car, anything. I’d throw everything aside if I could have him forever.”
Kate lifted her head and met his eyes. She could see he meant what he said. What could she say to something like that?
He continued. “If I could go back in time, I’d toss out all those wasted years of clubbing, buying designer clothes, vacationing in St. Barts—all that stuff I thought was important—just to hurry up and get to the part where I had him in my life. He’s made me so much more than I ever expected. And the thought of not having him with me makes me so ill that I can barely get out of bed in the morning. No way would I ever let anything stand between us.”
She looked away because she didn’t want to see his pain, didn’t want to witness his grief. She was afraid she might find herself in his eyes. Knew she’d already found herself in his words. “I don’t know. I don’t know what to do. The salon—”
“Is a place. It’s not a person, Kate.”
“But it’s mine. It’s what I worked for. What I dreamed about.”
He shrugged. “Then, darling, you’ve got to decide if it’s enough.”
He shoved the rolling chair back and rose. On his way out of the office, he gave her a sympathetic pat on the shoulder. But he didn’t say anything other than, “By the way, Mandy wanted to know if she could buy into the business. She’s brought in more new customers in the past two weeks than we’ve had in three months. Feels like destiny knocking, doesn’t it?”
And he left.
Kate pressed her hands to her eyes and rubbed. God, she wished she could wipe away her thoughts. Her head pounded from her hangover, her thoughts whirled faster than the bike spokes at the Tour de France and her heart plain ached. Her throat clogged with unshed tears.
Damn. She hated herself for being weak. For not being the Kate she was a month ago. For not being able to pull out the emotions rolling inside her, shove them in a box and hide them underneath her bed.
She opened her eyes and looked around her office. At the mosaic tile mirror she and Jeremy had attempted to recreate from a
Design Star
episode. At the bookcase she’d found on the side of the road the one time she’d managed to drag her friend Billie to a garage sale. At the mug that read I Fix $8 Haircuts she’d been given by a stylist before she moved to Rhode Island with an accountant she’d met at Cirque du Soleil. At the ratty plant in the window, the stacks of catalogs on the desk and the framed picture of her, Nellie, Billie and Trish taken the night Nellie had met Jack at Agave Blue, his former nightclub.
Her world had seemed so full.
She looked at the bag she’d dropped beside the chair next to her favorite catalogs—Neiman’s, Nordstrom’s and Saks. An awesome pair of bright pink Christian Louboutins seduced from the front cover of the Neiman Marcus spring collection.
She sighed and pulled the check her father had given her from the depths of her purse. She’d stuck it inside that morning, intending to head to the bank. She studied all those zeroes and thought of what they could buy.
She had to decide where her future lay.
Should she stay in Vegas?
Or should she carve out a new future in the piney woods of East Texas with Rick?
One way seemed smooth and safe.
The other very uncertain.
She was in the city of second chances. A city of risk takers. Of rebels. Of the brokenhearted.
But could Kate really roll the dice on her life?