Page 4 of Old Flames

Grim was how Jules felt most of the time. It didn’t help that she’d hardly slept the night before. She’d dreamed of her mother warning of some imminent danger. Jules was three, reaching to touch the bright circle of a hot stovetop. She was five, racing across the street to catch a ball. In a blink, she was ten and taking a pair of sharp scissors to her favorite jeans. At fifteen, she was falling in love with a “troubled” kid. Be careful, baby girl! However, her mother was long dead, and Jules was under no obligation to heed her warning. Her therapist had said as much. These recurring dreams were nothing more than the echo of heartache. The sooner she came to terms with that, the better. In the morning, Jules rolled out of bed and, instead of locking herself away with her laptop, she decided to let the world in and throw a party.

“Stay,” she told Bobby at the end of the night.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said. However, Jules could tell he was disappointed that she’d beaten him to the punch. She’d taken away his bragging rights. He couldn’t boast about winning her over.

Bobby waited while she saw her guests to the door and thanked them for the gifts. Vicky left her with a wink. Jules ushered her out the door with a promise to text her a rating of Bobby’s performance. She later found him in the kitchen, cigarette in hand, blowing a line of smoke out the window. She switched off the overhead light, stepped out of her heels and peeled off her dress.

“Ready?” she asked.

Great scenes of seduction with food and candles and toys and feathers belonged in books. Bobby would be gone in an hour, and she would climb alone into bed with the last of the wine and the TV remote. In the morning, she’d send a performance evaluation to her best friend per custom.

Bobby grinned at her lustfully. She returned the favor. Let the fun and games begin.

They tumbled onto the couch and had very standard, very uninspired sex. He might not describe it like that, but Jules would. She’d expected more from a musician. That was her problem, really: expecting more. He was doing what he could. She was the problem. She’d avoided men all last year, hoping for some clarity that never came. All those months of imposed celibacy only for it to end like this? Either way, she’d chosen this adventure and would see it to the end.

With some focus, determination, and good old-fashioned hard work, Jules climaxed. Panting, pumping, Bobby asked for one more minute and then another, swearing up and down that he was almost there. She wanted to reassure him, tell him to take all the time he needed. After all, she was nothing if not a gracious host, but her throat was dry and tight. Her eyes watered. Smoke curled into her nostrils. When she finally understood the imminent danger, panic took hold and paralyzed her lungs.

Her life had gone up in flames and while it happened, she’d been too busy coaxing an orgasm from an idiot.

Her mother had tried to warn her.

2

Later, Jules would look back at the kitchen fire incident and wonder if it was a sign, a not-so-subtle warning that she could never put down roots or have anything as precious as a home. She packed her bags, left her apartment in the capable hands of a trusted contractor, and booked a suite at a nearby hotel where she lived her Nabokov fantasies. Lolita had funded a comfortable life at a grand Swiss hotel for the author and his wife. Jules couldn’t fault him, but her best friend, Vicky, who had a shrewd business mind, absolutely could.

“Why not stay with me?” Vicky had insisted. “Neither one of us has Nabokov money.”

“Is that really true?” Jules asked, eyeing her friend who, at twenty-one, was handed a Nabokov-sized trust.

Eventually, Vicky got her way. After a couple weeks at the hotel, Jules moved into her guest bedroom.

Jules and Vicky had met in college, freshman year. They forged an alliance and somehow kept it going through graduate school by getting into the same MFA program. And yet they couldn’t be more different. Victoria Paraíso was the rare native New Yorker, several generations over, and she was rich. Her grandmother, the formidable Maria Paraíso, had made the family fortune. Paraíso Cocina was a canned foods company focused on Puerto Rican cuisine, started in a low-rent commercial kitchen in Queens. Decades later, it was snatched up by a food conglomerate for millions. Victoria Paraíso with her wavy brown hair, sparkling brown eyes, NYC accent and attitude, and Puerto Rican pride, was a bone fide heiress.

Jules did not come from money. Her mother had never earned a dime above minimum wage, and Jules had lived most of her adult life one notch above the poverty line. Remaining criminally underemployed allowed her to pick up and travel on a whim. What was the point of being a freethinking artist if you weren’t free? One Christmas, Vicky’s parents urged her to “get a leg up” on the property ladder, suggesting her mother would have wanted her to settle down. Clearly, that turned out not to be the case.

None of that mattered now. There was nothing a little sunshine couldn’t fix.

Priority Boarding Flight AJ65 to Miami Florida.

Jules and Vicky stuffed their luggage in the overhead compartment and flopped into their seats. They were long overdue for a girls’ trip, and the lecture series in a resort town had offered the perfect, tax-deductible, opportunity.

“This is going to be fun,” Vicky said.

“Great,” Jules said. “Because this is the only girls’ trip you’re getting out of me. Enjoy it!”

Kitchen renovations, even tiny ones, were pricey.

Vicky laughed an evil laugh. “We’ll destroy Duval Street!”

Jules was on board. “They’ll never invite us back.”

Vicky squealed. “I can’t wait to bake on a beach!”

“Key West isn’t known for its beaches, babes,” Jules said.

“Don’t care!” Vicky declared. “I’m not leaving Florida without tan lines.”

When Jules had first mentioned the lecture series to her friend, back in November, Vicky had offered her a puzzled look. “Why does that sound familiar?”