“Are you trying to say it’s too late to turn back?”
He laughed, kissed me. “It’s definitely too late to turn back.” His hand had found its way to my knee beneath the table. “Jane and Alistair are giving me dirty looks from across the room.”
“Are they?”
Hayes inclined his head to the ballroom floor, where, sureenough, his managers, a commanding couple, were in conversation with some record people but clearly staring daggers in our direction. Hayes put on one of his megawatt smiles and waved. “Hello, Jane and Alistair, I know I’m going against your boy band playbook by consorting with someone completely age inappropriate in a public setting and we’re going to lose a bunch of young fans in the Bible Belt. Sorry.”
I laughed, grabbing his waving hand. “Stop that.”
“Do you think they can read my lips?”
“I think they can read your cheeky attitude.”
He turned to me then. “I like you.”
“I know you do.”
“Thank you for coming. It really meant a lot to me that you were here.” He smiled slowly, his hand reaching to stroke the side of my face. “I more than like you. You know that, right? I’m not going to say it right now… but I do.”
We sat there for a bit, disappearing in each other.
I spoke first. “I’m really proud of you…”
“For putting on a suit and showing up?”
“For all of this. None of this would have happened if it weren’t for you, and your idea.”
He squeezed my hand and smiled. “It might have been a wee selfish on my part. Plus, it’s not exactly rocket science, is it?”
“It’s art. And it makes people happy. And that’s a very good thing. We have this problem in our culture. We take art that appeals to women—film, books, music—and we undervalue it. We assume it can’t be high art. Especially if it’s not dark and tortured and wailing. And it follows that much of that art is created by other women, and so we undervalue them as well. We wrap it up in a pretty pink package and resist calling it art.”
Hayes was quiet, processing.
“That’s part of why I do what I do… to push back on that, to combat it. And that’s why you should be a little more proud of whatyoudo…”
I could see him searching for a response. The start of a smile playing over his lips. “Remind me again. How did I find you?”
“My ex-husband bought you in an auction.”
He laughed, his head angling back. His jaw. “We probably should thank him then.”
“We probably should… Let’s go back to the hotel. We can thank him properly there.”
“Yes.” He smiled. “Let’s.”
anguilla
They were eloping. Daniel and Eva. They’d made plans to do it in Maui the week after Christmas. Evidently Daniel liked his women pregnant in Hawaii. At least he’d had the decency to choose a different island.
He’d informed me the Saturday after we returned from New York. Straight, no chaser. “It’s going to be a tiny ceremony, and I’d like Isabelle to be there.”
“Of course,” I said, attempting to hide all emotion.
We were in the kitchen. He, standing with his arms across his chest, looking ever awkward. His eyes roaming the space, theunfamiliar postcards and photos tacked to the fridge. This was no longer his home.
“She says she had a great time in New York…”
“She did.”
