Chapter Six. Mackenzie
chapter six
MACKENZIE
“I had a crush on Tuxedo Mask as a kid and a bigger one on the Phantom as an adult. You’re going to need to watch me like a hawk around all these masked men tonight,” Hannah warns me, using the selfie mode on her phone to touch up her lipstick under the giant royal-blue and green feathered mask covering the rest of her face.
We’re a few blocks out from the historic building in FiDi that Twyla and Isla rented for their birthday masquerade, watching the historic churches and buildings of earlier versions of New York fly by from the back of Hannah’s hired car.
“I will be encouraging any and all shenanigans,” I say. “You work hard and you deserve to have a masked man in a cape rock your world.”
Hannah’s dating life hasn’t exactly been smooth, either.
The kind of success we had in Thunder Hearts is enough to bring out the insecurity in any potential partner, but becoming the face of a successful brand took that to another level.
The way Hannah put it, she had enough challenges with executing her vision for Hannah Says both as an Asian woman and a former popstar in lifestyle industries run by men who didn’t take her seriously.
But Hannah Says is her true love. She isn’t about to deal with stroking some guy’s ego while she’s building it, so she’s spared herself the trouble by swearing off dating until her forties.
But even if Hannah doesn’t plan to flirt with anyone here, the rules baked into this thing might be too sexy to avoid it.
First of all, you can’t tell anyone your name.
You can’t give anyone identifying information about yourself.
And you absolutely can’t take off your own mask before the stroke of midnight—unless someone else takes it off for you.
There are caveats to that, too. You can only ask to take off one person’s mask the whole night, and only if you agree to pay the price they set for you, capped at a thousand dollars.
All the proceeds from unmasking and other activities tonight go to the at-risk-youth music foundation that Twyla and Isla have been involved in for years.
Which is to say, any and all flirting tonight is for a good cause.
“Speaking of masked men—are you going to let America’s favorite bad boy take off yours?” Hannah asks.
Leave it to Sam Blaze to kill my party buzz before I’ve even arrived.
“Not if he knows what’s good for him.” I touch the short-cropped pale pink wig on my head, fashioned to match the magenta feathers on the mask that came with my invite.
My hair is too distinctive to go incognito, so I took an extra step to commit to the bit.
“Even if he’s on board with this duet nonsense, he’s not going to know me from Strawberry Shortcake. ”
“The way that man looks at you, I think he’d know you under a pile of bricks,” says Hannah.
I roll my eyes. “Ah, right. That old ‘star-crossed lovers’ smolder. Wonder if he’ll whip it out for old times’ sake.”
Old times that Isla is doing her best to convince me to relive, despite the lengths I’ve gone to get Sam out of my system.
“Ignore him for two years” lengths. Just short of “hire an exorcist to erase any thoughts of him from my brain” lengths.
And now here she is insisting that I don’t just let Sam back into my life, but inextricably tie him to it all over again.
It’s not that I don’t see her logic. It makes an infuriating amount of sense to launch us as a duet.
There’s the hype and the history. The palpable, ridiculous chemistry between us.
And the most damning piece of evidence of all: we wrote “Play You by Heart” in less than an hour and it topped more charts than any song either of us wrote in our entire careers.
“Speaking of star-crossed lovers, I noticed Seven never uploaded that last song of hers this week.”
Hannah has hinted a few times that she thinks Sam will be one of the subjects of a song, but I’ve always played coy. It’s not that I don’t trust her to know. I just think the less I talk about any of the men the songs are about, the easier it will be to forget them.
“I resent what that segue of yours is implying,” I say lightly.
“Please,” she says. “Your lyrics wax poetic about enough ‘embers’ and ‘burning’ to start a damn forest fire.”
Yikes. That was part of the gimmick, back in the day—the label and the media playing on our last names being Blaze and Waters. I didn’t mean to play into it, too, but I guess the lyrics of the last song snuck up on me the same way my feelings for Sam did.
The difference is I didn’t write them to stoke a flame. I wrote them to burn one out.
“Seven is just for me,” I hedge. “And I had—technical difficulties. I’ll post the last song next week.”
Hannah hums knowingly, but lets it go. I busy myself with patting another layer of foundation on my neck, just over the faded scar that runs horizontally at the base of my throat.
“You can hardly see it anymore,” says Hannah, tilting her head at it.
Two years ago, when I first had surgery to remove the growth in my thyroid, the scar looked Game of Thrones ghastly. Anytime I left the apartment it was with a strategic ascot, turtleneck, or scarf in tow. But these days it’s so faded I almost forget it’s there.
“Old habit,” I say. That, and you never know where the photographs from a Twyla and Isla bash will end up the next morning. The last thing I want is for someone to notice the scar in a weirdly lit image and start asking questions.
And if I have to start answering questions, it will lead to the inevitable one: Weren’t you worried the surgery might affect your voice?
Which, of course, I was. Especially when it did.
The car rolls to a stop outside a stately three-story building with large, round arches at the entrance and upper windows, tucked so neatly into the chaos of Manhattan that you might blink and miss it.
“If we see Sam, the code word is ‘Oh no, oh no, oh no.’”
Hannah laughs. “I’ll sweep you uptown to my loft. Maybe we’ll even run into my neighbor Grayson. Rumor has it the two of you were hitting it off at Lightning Strike.”
I feel a twinge of guilt. Grayson and I have plans to get dinner this week after his rain check, but I’ve been so busy worrying about Sam that I’ve barely thought about the date.
That will have to be my guiding light: there are nice, emotionally available men in New York if you squint, and after my bad luck I’m not going to take one for granted.
Hannah’s driver opens the door and it feels like we aren’t just stepping out of the car, but out of time.
Hannah is a vision in an emerald off-the-shoulder, deep-V-neck gown with sky-high bedazzled gem heels; she steps back on them to admire me in the magenta, backless gown with a pale-pink flowing tulle skirt she paired with my white boots, a style I dubbed “yeehaw Bridgerton .”
“Flawless,” she declares.
Two ushers come to take our phones from us to lock up for the night. Once we’re free of them, Hannah reaches out to squeeze my hand.
“For what it’s worth,” she says, “you could just say screw Sam, screw the label, and keep going as Seven. Maybe even go public with it one day.”
I smirk, imagining all the execs panic-dropping their Aperol Spritzes in their Hamptons rentals at that particular reveal. It would serve them right for leaving me on the hook for so long.
But Seven isn’t my new beginning. It’s a quiet ending—after this, she won’t have anything else to say. I won’t ever let my heart break over people who don’t deserve it again.
“Seven was just me messing around with my new voice,” I say. “And besides, people like her to be a secret. It’s easier to project on a shadow.”
She squeezes my hand once more before letting it go. “If you say so,” she says, leading us inside.
The interior of the building is even grander than the outside, moodily lit with high vaulted ceilings, a winding front staircase, and a massive ballroom on the first floor that showcases a glittering bar where a party is already in full swing.
Guests in ornate masks of all colors dance in spellbinding ballroom dresses and sharp suits to a string quartet playing covers of songs by Twyla’s and Isla’s clients.
Masked servers mill around holding appetizers and mini cocktails that gleam in the soft gold light.
It’s impossible to know what to look at, the people or the space.
We make our way through the clusters of bodies, thrilling at the anonymity of it all. Of being able to look wherever I want without it looking back. It feels like recording as Seven—the way being nobody frees me up to be anybody, without worrying about what a single person wants or expects.
I’m grinning ear to ear as Hannah grabs us both a dark, glittering shot that someone calls a Teeny Mystery Tini. When I knock it back it’s somehow rich, bitter, sweet, and briny all at the same time, and so strong that the zing! immediately hits my spine and starts trickling down.
“Yowza,” I say with a happy shudder. “Keep me away from Isla. A few of these and I won’t just agree to relaunch as a duet, but I’ll sign the contracts hanging from the chandelier.”
A teeny tini drops to the floor at our feet, splashing on my boot. I glance up into wide green eyes watering behind a bejeweled marigold mask. The eyes of one of my best friends, blinking at me in disbelief and hurt.
“Serena,” I gasp.
She stiffens. I wasn’t supposed to say her name. But nobody turns to look at us—at least, they don’t until I step in to hug her and she steps back abruptly enough to nearly knock a tray of drinks out of a server’s hands.
I try to steady her, but it’s Hannah’s hand she takes. The hurt is immediate, but I’m too thrown off to fully feel it.
“I thought you were adding two weeks on the tour,” I say.