I assumed his family’s country home, somewhere in the Cotswolds, was not too different from this. And for a minute I deigned to imagine what that life would look like. A life with him. Weekends in the garden and corgis and sheep. Dinner parties in London during the Season. And then, just as quickly as I’d entertained it, I shook it off. What the hell was I thinking?
“Is this a trend?” he said. We’d been there for the better part of an hour, listening to the band’s music drift in from the Galerie. Standards mixed with watered-down contemporary pop, “Mack the Knife” and Pharrell’s “Happy.”
“Is what a trend?”
“This.” Hayes angled his head, gesturing subtly to the rest of the room. Among the clientele, there were no fewer than seven mixed-race couples. And five of them were comprised of sixty-something white men with forty-something Asian women.
“It’s kind of par for the course in California.”
“Thisexactage spread? It’s a little peculiar, no?”
I shrugged, sipping from my champagne cocktail. “Eva, Daniel’s girlfriend, is Asian. Half.” I had not made it a habit of discussing Eva. In all the months we’d been together, I’d mentioned her half a dozen times in passing.
He squeezed my hand. “Sorry. For bringing that up. Does it bother you?”
“It bothers me that she’s young.”
“How young?”
“Thirty.”
Hayes chuckled. “Thirty is not that young.”
“Shut up. It is.”
“Well, look at it this way: You’ve won, right? Because I’m considerably younger than that.”
I smiled at him. The thought had not crossed my mind. I’d never set out to get back at Daniel so much as I’d set out to get on with my life. It was not a competition. But that was part of the beauty of Hayes being twenty. That occasionally we saw the world completely differently, and at times it was refreshing.
“Hayes, you know when you’re forty, I’m going to be sixty, right?”
“I love it when you talk sexy,” he laughed.
“Just stating a fact.”
He took a sip of his drink then and leaned into me. “You understand that you’re going to be attractive well into your fifties.”
“Wellinto my fifties?” I laughed. “That old?”
“Yes.” He smiled. “Michelle Pfeiffer…”
“What about her?”
“In her fifties. Still fucking sexy. Julianne Moore, Monica Bellucci, Angela Bassett, Kim Basinger… Not saying they’re age appropriate for me. Just saying those women aren’t going to stop being sexy anytime soon.”
I sat there, drinking him in. His cheeks flushed, his hair standing on end. His young face in this very grown-up room. “You carry this list around in your head?”
He smiled. “Among other things.”
“Have you ever been in therapy?”
He laughed, loud. “No. Are you trying to tell me something? I’m surprisingly well-adjusted. Haveyouever been in therapy?”
“Yes.”
“Hmm…” He cocked his head. “Interesting…”
“How old is your mother, Hayes?”
