Chapter Six
There were daisies on the bedspread. Not just any daisies either. Pink and turquoise technicolor daisies stitched together in some elaborate pattern of fabric scraps. Someone had clearly spent a great deal of time putting together this particular Lisa Frank nightmare of a quilt.
There were daisies on the bedspread and Ethan could hardly look at her. Jackson still hadn’t returned any of her calls, she was staying with a man who didn’t trust her, and that morning Superfan had run an article comparing photos of the two women in the Bora Bora photos with a photo of Hannah in rehearsal for Bridget Jones’ Musical, their beachy waves versus Hannah’s messy ponytail, their bikini bodies compared to her upper arm jiggle.
Ethan pushed past Hannah into the guest room and swept the quilt off the bed, folding it with quick, efficient movements. “Sorry. Julie’s been napping in here when she comes to visit. It's her favorite.”
He retrieved a plain pale blue quilt from a shelf in the closet, sliding the daisy bedspread into its place.
Hannah shoved her rising panic into a box in the corner of her mind. How many times could she do that before it refused to be tucked neatly away? Would it be like those science experiments kids did in elementary school where the baking soda and vinegar bubbled over, sliding down papier maché volcano walls and spilling onto the floor?
“Who’s Julie?”
she asked, forcing her thoughts away from vinegar-scented explosions.
“My granddaughter.”
He spread the more subdued quilt on the bed and shot her a look, as though gauging her reaction. “Something else you didn’t know about me.”
“You’re the youngest grandfather I’ve ever met.”
Hannah rolled her suitcase into the corner of the room and chanced a glance in his direction.
Why is this so awkward?
Because he doesn’t trust you anymore.
“That’s what happens when you have a kid while you’re still in high school.”
“High school?”
She clamped her lips shut to prevent another outburst.
“Stephanie and I were sixteen when Tessa was born.”
Ethan gathered the stuffed animals from the top of the dresser until his arms were overflowing with plush creatures of every type and color.
A blue dinosaur made of some kind of fuzzy yarn fell to his feet and Hannah bent to retrieve it, handing it back to him. “That must have been hard.”
“It was a long time ago.”
She held his eyes until he blew out a breath, shaking his head. “Yeah, it was hard.”
She wanted to ask him so much more, to start the slow excavation of the mystery that was Ethan Hart, but he clearly didn’t want to talk about it. At least, not with her.
And who’s fault is that? You’re the one who turned him down. You’re the one who kept secrets.
She took a step back, giving him room to complete his tidying up as the stuffed animals were also deposited in the closet. She sat on the bed, stepping out of her heels and crossing one ankle over the opposite knee so she could massage her sore arches. Heels for a travel day had not been her best idea.
“Please tell Julie thank you for letting me take over her room for a few days,” she said.
“It’s good for her to learn to share. Girl’s spoiled rotten,”
he said affectionately.
“I’m sure you had no part in that at all.”
His eyes locked on the movement of her fingers over her foot and some of the coldness in his gaze melted away, replaced by something softer, something she couldn’t quite define.
After a few moments, he looked away, clearing his throat. “Look, Hannah, while you’re here, maybe it would be best if we pretended like there’s no history between us.”
She shouldn’t have been disappointed, but she couldn’t help the sinking feeling in her stomach. “If that’s what you want.”
“I think it’ll be easier. For everyone.”
She nodded. “Okay.”
He looked away, scrubbing a hand over the back of his neck. “I’m meeting my friends for dinner in about a half hour. You—”
“I’ll be fine.”
“—are welcome to join us.”
He frowned, as though he thoroughly disapproved of her offer not to intrude on his dinner plans with his friends.
“That’s alright. You don’t have to do that. I’ll just order a pizza.”
“The Pizza Stone’s closed this week. Every second week of March the owners go on vacation and shut down.”
“Then I’ll order from somewhere else.”
“Or you could come to dinner with us. Unless you don’t want to come.”
“You’re already doing so much for me. And what if there are photographers there?”
“In Aster Bay?”
He snorted. “Not likely. Even if there were, I promised Daemon I’d look after you.”
He leaned against the wall opposite her, arching an eyebrow, like he was daring her to turn him down again.
Right. The only reason he was doing this was as a favor to their mutual friend.
“It’s nothing fancy, if that’s what you’re worried about,”
he continued. “We get together every Monday night at a local bar and eat too much fried food, have a few drinks, and make complete asses of ourselves losing at bar trivia. If you come, we’ll have enough people for two full teams. Double our chances of embarrassing ourselves.”
“Double your chances of winning, you mean.”
“We never win.”
Hannah got to her feet, sliding back on her heels. “You’ve never had me on your team before.”
His lip twitched. Not quite a smile, but she considered it a victory all the same. “We leave in fifteen minutes.”
∞∞∞
The bar was crowded for a Monday night. People in Aster Bay took their bar trivia very seriously, it seemed. Ethan’s friends were already there when they arrived and he made quick work of introducing her to everyone. She was grateful to see Tessa at the table, her smile light and open as she invited Hannah to take a seat next to her.
On the other side of Tessa sat her husband, Jamie, who looked so much like his brother it was uncanny. Then came Gavin, with an open, curious smile and shaggy hair, and his wife, Kyla, a pretty blonde with a heart-shaped face. Next to Kyla was Sabrina, a tall redhead in a fitted dress, and her suit-wearing husband, Baz, who seemed to have a permanent scowl except when his eyes fell on his wife.
“Tonight’s the night we win. I can feel it,”
Gavin said, grinning, as he grabbed another mozzarella stick from the platter in the center of the table.
Ethan hadn’t been kidding about the fried food and Hannah had to take a moment to breathe, to remind herself there was no moral high ground for abstaining from foods that had been cooked in oil. Depriving herself of mozzarella sticks and Texmex eggrolls and some kind of buffalo chicken wonton thing that smelled amazing wasn’t going to solve her problems.
Or make the press stop picking apart five-year-old photographs of her, sweaty from dance rehearsals.
And yet, the little voice in the back of her head—so much quieter now than it had been for the last decade and a half—still whispered that she shouldn’t eat anything. She should down a glass of ice cold water before she took even a bite, suck on the lemon wedge that came with said water, slowly chew on the celery stick shoved to the edge of the platter. Then Superfan wouldn’t be able to compare her cellulite against the swimsuit models’ toned asses and concave thighs.
No. You do not have to starve to be in control. You can eat the buffalo chicken thing.
Hannah made a mental note to schedule a phone appointment with her therapist in the morning and carefully placed one of each appetizer on the plate in front of her. No one stared in shock at the fat girl daring to eat fried food. No one stood on their stool and shouted about her inability to control herself. No one even noticed. Despite nearly a year of being in recovery, she still marveled at the complete lack of attention others paid to her eating, as though they weren’t all silently calculating the calorie count of every plate of food in sight.
Not that she did that anymore, but she’d done it often enough over the last fifteen years that sometimes the numbers flitted through her brain unbidden, especially in times of stress.
Like having every inch of her body analyzed in the media for people’s entertainment.
Her therapist had assured her the constant internal chatter about food would stop in time, but Hannah found that hard to believe. Though her therapist had been right about the other things that stopped—the exhausting need to plan every meal, snack, and beverage in advance; the incessant staticky noise in her brain; the uncontrollable cravings for Oreos.
“Hannah?”
She looked up into the kind face of the tall redhead—Sabrina, was it?—who had clearly said her name more than once. Hannah set down her half-eaten wonton and folded her hands in her lap.
You are in control.
“I’m sorry, what did you say?”
“How are you liking Aster Bay so far?”
Sabrina asked.
“This is all I’ve seen of it aside from the vineyard,”
Hannah answered, “but it looked beautiful on the drive in.”
“You have to come with us tomorrow,”
Kyla, the blonde, said with a wide smile. "We’re taking a painting class in the park. Girl’s day out.”
“That’s so kind of you to offer, but I’m sure there are things I should be doing tomorrow other than intruding on your plans,”
Hannah said.
"Like what?”
Ethan asked.
She opened her mouth but nothing came out. He was right. She didn’t have anything to do. She’d left her entire life behind in New York. She could hide from the paparazzi at a painting class as easily as she could in Ethan’s guest room. It’s not like they were around every corner in Rhode Island like they’d been in New York.
“I should probably make some phone calls,”
she said lamely.
Tessa would hear no argument. “Whoever it is, call them after. I promise to get you back to Dad’s after lunch. Jo is watching Julie until two o’clock and I intend to enjoy every last minute of my morning off.”
“Besides, the park has surprisingly good cell reception,”
Sabrina added.
“That settles it. We’ll pick you up at seven-thirty,”
Kyla said.
Hannah hesitated. These women were so kind, so welcoming. It wouldn’t be the worst thing to have some friends while she was in town, especially with Ethan so on edge around her.
“I don’t know how to paint,”
Hannah protested half-heartedly.
“That’s why you take a class,”
Sabrina said.
At the front of the room, someone rang a bell and announced a three-minute warning until the start of the trivia competition.
“That’s our cue,”
Tessa said, scooping up the platter from the middle of the table despite the men’s protests. “Come on, ladies. Let’s show them how it’s done.”
Tessa, Kyla, and Sabrina moved to an adjacent table, each digging into the platter with renewed interest.
Ethan leaned closer and dropped his voice so only she could hear. “You can play on our team if you’d rather, but Tessa will never let you live it down if you don’t join them.”
“Hannah!”
Kyla called as if on cue, waving to Hannah with a mozzarella stick in her hand.
Ethan hung his head and laughed as Hannah’s cheeks heated. “I guess I better...”
She indicated the other table as she got to her feet.
“Get your cute butt over here!”
Tessa added.
Hannah huffed out an embarrassed laugh, heat rushing to her cheeks. “Why is everyone obsessed with talking about my butt today?”
she muttered, recalling the unflattering photo that had run on Encores.com earlier in the day.
“It’s a good butt,”
Ethan said. Her eyes darted up to his, the embarrassed flush of her skin turning into something else entirely. His eyes scanned over her. “Great actually.”
The words were flattering, but there was something beneath them, an acerbic edge undercutting the compliment.
“You might be the only one who thinks so,”
she said. “Well, you and your daughter, apparently.”
Ethan’s eyes traced her face, lingering on her lips for a fraction of a second too long, before the corner of his mouth quirked up, barely even a smile, but the edges of his eyes crinkled at the corner and she had to ball her hands into fists to keep from smoothing them with her fingers. She knew that smirk, and the deliciously filthy things that usually followed it. A tingle of anticipation danced across her skin.
In her bag, her phone rang, the obnoxious factory ringtone too loud in the overcrowded bar. She dug for the sound, finally retrieving the phone just in time to see Jackson’s name flash across her screen before the ringing stopped. Ethan’s eyes, glued to the screen in her hand, had gone cold again, his expression blank.
“I should—”
She held up the phone lamely and ducked away from the table, slipping out the door and into the parking lot as she hit the button to call Jackson back.
“Hannah Banana!”
His warm laughter filled her ears. “Have you seen this insanity?”
She leaned against the brick fa?ade of the bar, resting her head back and tracing the path of an airplane as it streaked across the night sky. “Jackson, what did you do?”
“I know I fucked up,”
he said, his tone suddenly conciliatory despite the lingering laughter. “It was supposed to be a private beach. No photogs allowed. I didn’t even know they’d gotten the shots until they showed up on the internet.”
Something shattered in the background on the other end of the phone, a chorus of laughter and teasing, Jackson’s chuckle making it clear he was only half paying attention to their conversation.
“Where are you?”
“Crashing with a buddy in Mykonos. You’d love it here, Banana. The clubs are open all night. Best DJs in the world.”
Hannah closed her eyes, sighing. “Should you really be clubbing right now?”
“Hell yeah, I should. You should be too. Gotta be business as usual until everyone moves on.”
Because clubbing all night was business as usual for Jackson Hayes. Yet another reminder that the version of him she’d known while they were on Broadway together had only been a curated glimpse of his life.
“They surrounded my apartment building,”
she said. “They took pictures of me through my window. From my fire escape.”
The background noise on the other end dimmed, as though he had stepped outside. “Yeah, I heard. I’m sorry about that, Hannah. I really am. Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.”
If she said it enough times, would it be true? “I left the City for a bit.”
“Good idea. You should come to Mykonos!”
“Jackson, I can’t—”
“We could have so much fun! We could even leak some photos for the press to throw them off the trail. What do you think? Want to put on a show?”
“Jackson, no,”
Hannah said, unable to hold back her exasperation. “I don’t want to go to Mykonos. I don’t want to plant even more lies in the press. I just want everything to go back to normal.”
“It will,”
he insisted. “Hang in there with me for a little bit longer until the premiere.”
“You’re kidding. No one will believe we’re still together. They have photos of you with two other women.”
“Three, actually,”
he said, and she could almost picture the abashed look, the ‘aw shucks’ boyishness that had kept him in his fans’ good graces for all these years despite his reputation.
“We have to put out a statement. Micah thinks—”
“I know. He told my people all about what he thinks. What about what we think?”
She took a slow breath in through her nose and out through her mouth, watched as the airplane disappeared behind a bank of clouds. “I agree with him. I’m sorry, Jackson. I know I said I’d stick it out until the premiere, but this—”
She broke off, swallowing the bile rising in her throat. “I’ll pay you back for my treatment. It might take me some time, but—”
“I don’t want your money, Banana.”
He sighed, the noise around him swelling again. “It’s fine. I’ll tell my people to work on a statement with your guy. We can say we broke up before I went to Bora Bora.”
“Thank you.”
“No sweat.”
The line went dead and she allowed herself three more slow breaths before she went back inside. The trivia game was already underway, but when she re-entered the bar, her steps stuttered. Ethan Hart was staring at her, his blue eyes narrowed and cold, his jaw working, as though he’d stared at the door the entire time she’d been gone, willing her return. She met his gaze, searched his face, and, as she watched, all emotion slipped away again. Like he was wiping a chalkboard clean. How did he keep doing that?
She made her way across the bar, past him to the table with the other women who greeted her with a chorus of her name. But when she glanced back, he was still watching her.