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I waited for Sam to go before I headed for Lacey’s, watched him wait for the elevator, get on, and leave. The moment he did, I rushed to her door. I raised my fist to knock, but hung back on the brink.WasI closed off with Lacey? Had I shut her out? I hadn’t been honest about how deep she’d cut me, mocking my acting for the world to hear. But that was over with too, all in the past. She wouldn’t do it again, so what did it matter?
I knocked, and at the same time, the door swung open. Lacey was beaming, radiant. Perfect.
“I thought I heard you out there. Were you yelling at someone?”
“My manager,” I said. “He… You look gorgeous.” I forgot about Sam as the light twinkled off her. His stern admonitions drifted away. Lacey looked like a fairy queen in real life, draped in layers of sheer silk and sparkling gems. Her hair shone like a river of sunshine and gold. But it was her smile that soothed the storm in my heart, so warm and open, not a hint of reserve. She wouldn’t smile like that if she didn’t trust me.
I held out my hand, and Lacey took it.
“Lead on,” she said, and I knew I was right. We’d had a rough start, but the future was ours. What need would we ever have to dwell on the past?
CHAPTER 16
LACEY
Some nights are too perfect to trap in your memory. They fly by in a blur and they’re gone forever, and when you look back on them, all you get is a feeling. Not a coherent sequence of events, but a series of snapshots through Vaseline filters, sweet and soft-focus, a rose-tinted glow.
My date with Eric was romance in a bottle. The essence of every love story ever told, fromPride and Prejudiceto my own heartfelt rom-coms. He’d ordered a horse and carriage to take us to dinner, hidden around the side door so the paparazzi wouldn’t catch us. The night was warm, but the ocean breeze was cool, and Eric gathered me to him at the first prick of gooseflesh. I felt good in his arms, warm and safe. Held tight andwanted, me and just me.
I don’t remember the name of the place we had dinner, but it was quiet and softly lit, down by the beach. I think we had seafood, or it might’ve been pasta, and Eric told stories that made me laugh till I cried. I’d never thought of him as funny, but that night he was. He talked about movies, his first speaking part. How the action coordinator mistook him for a stuntman, and he’d jumped off a building before the director caught on.
I choked on my rosé. “Didn’tyoucatch on?”
“I mean, I should have, but no. I did not.”
“Howdid you not?”
“I thought, I don’t know. They expanded my role? Sam did say he’d try and get me more lines.”
I made him laugh too, though how, I forget. I remember us giggling, and then we were dancing, under the stars on an open-air dance floor. He spun me and dipped me and I gazed into his eyes, and the warmth I saw there made my heart melt like butter.
We danced till my feet hurt and I slipped off my shoes and stockings, and we went for a walk down the moonlit beach. Eric waded into the glistening surf.
“Come in. It’s warm.”
“There’s jellyfish.”
“Not where I’m standing.”
I followed him in and we stood in the shallows, the waves breaking over our sandy bare feet. Eric looked up at the dark, starry sky.
“I wish I knew their names.”
“What, the stars?” I pointed at a bright one. “I think that’s Polaris, and…”
“What?”
I leaned against Eric, dizzy from looking up. “Mom got me a guidebook when I told her we’d be here. It says Hawaii’s the only state where you can see Polaris and the Southern Cross. But I don’t know which one that is, so I can’t point it out.”
We found a shaved ice stand; Eric got pineapple and I got lemon, but I liked his better and he liked mine. We traded treats and ate them on a long bench. Tourists strolled by us, and a handful of locals, and we watched them go and assigned them backstories.
“They’re newlyweds,” said Eric, nodding at an old couple. “They were sweethearts in high school but they moved apart for college, and they met again when she catered his eightieth birthday.”
“He’s lost his dog,” I said, about a kid on a skateboard. “But it ran home already. It’s waiting out front.”
We gave them all happy endings, even the ones who looked grumpy. By luck or by magic, nobody knew us, and we sat there for a long time after our shaved ice was gone. We didn’t want the night to end, and we didn’t let it. We explored, giddy and barefoot, and found a tiny night market. Eric bought me a bracelet and I bought him a pen. It was late when we found our way back to the Seaview, so late it was early, the sky gray with dawn. I followed Eric back to his suite.
“Let’s watch the sun rise,” he said.
