Chapter 30 #2
Another day, I may come back to smash down this door and spew my rancor on anything or anyone that answers it. For now, I have to get out of here, to follow this undeservingly lovely path to my car. I just do.
Gabriella
The word sip was invented for martinis. You could guzzle beer, even wine, and live to tell about it. Martinis were lethal, the heroin of the drinking world. Thus, one sipped; one did not shoot up.
She calculated the calories, which even if she avoided the olive, which she couldn’t resist, were more than the tin of tuna fish and the tiny bit of toast she’d had for lunch.
She remembered something her grandmother had told her. “Your thoughts are your destiny.” Thoughts lead to action. Action leads to habits. Habits lead to destiny.
Gabriella’s thoughts were somewhere between this fat, glistening olive, the same color as her eyes, Alain once said, and the biggest Frostie and saltiest French fries in Orange County. Not much of a destiny there.
She didn’t see him enter the room, but she felt him. Instinct aside, Alain was never late and abhorred anyone who was. Gabriella lifted her glass, feeling vain, knowing that he watched her, as she watched the smooth olive through the glass, contemplating its contrasting smudge of pimento.
She wore a skirt Alain bought her right before the breakup, a series of bias-cut, floral-print panels that joined to form a handkerchief hemline.
The top was new, a sky-blue stretch halter with a keyhole neckline and narrow rows of smocking skimming her midriff.
Between the skirt and the smocking, only smooth skin.
And darned taut skin, thanks to her workouts with Christopher and the Killer Body nutrition plan.
It hit her like a jolt. She’d never felt this much in control of her life. She was alone, she was broke, but she was in charge and something close to happy, no longer the unsophisticated little Texas urchin rescued by the prince.
“Damn, you look lovely.”
She’d forgotten how she liked his voice, the passion with which he addressed everything from the marmalade on his toast to children at a school he was visiting. She steeled herself and looked up.
He was dressed so that no one would recognize him, and she could see Christopher’s guilty hand at work.
Light-toned pants and a matching zip-up jacket, trimmed in black, no tie.
His face was the same, though. The dirty-blond hair, like hers without the frizz, parted in the middle.
His eyes, the color of the ocean when it goes gray at twilight, revealed, as always, little of what he was thinking.
“Someone will recognize us,” she said, as much to cover her nervousness as anything else. “We shouldn’t have risked this.”
“Last I heard, you were still my wife.” Alain pulled out the chair across from her and sat. “We could always move to a booth, or to my room, for that matter.”
“I think I expressed myself to you on the phone yesterday.”
“You told me, as your grandmother would say, how the cow ate the cabbage.”
Hearing his accent wrap around her grandmother’s words both pleased and saddened her.
“I miss her.”
“She knows you’re okay. She lived long enough to see that you were going to be fine.”
Gabriella felt her hackles rise. “I was fine to begin with, Alain. I just fell in love with a man who betrayed me.”
She hoped for a reaction, an admission, a begging of forgiveness. Instead, she saw only his cold gray eyes of hostility.
“She’s waiting,” Alain said, and Gabriella realized why he’d suddenly shut down. She looked up to see who she was.
The waitress stood at the table, her slender hips hitched beneath a long black skirt. A server, waiting for an order. Gabriella had screwed up again.
“I’ll need a moment.”
She could swear she heard the waitress sigh. Before she was certain, the woman spoke, but not to her, of course.
“Could I get you anything?” Her glossy lips cracked into a smile.
“One of those.” Alain pointed at Gabriella’s glass. She decided to take a swallow. Not bad, a frenzied, flowery scent, before the cold teeth of booze bit into her.
As she clicked off to fill the order, Gabriella said, “She’s going to call someone. She recognized you, I’m sure of it.”
“All of this publicity has made you paranoid.” He leaned forward on the table. “I like that thing you’re doing with your hair now. Sixties, right?”
“It was Christopher’s idea. Hide a bad feature with a current trend.”
“Your hair’s wonderful. Why do you buy into that rubbish that everyone has to have a spiky little Tania Marie flip? What good did it do her?”
“Don’t put down Tania Marie. She’s sweet, actually.” Goodness, had she said that? Did she feel it? Indeed, she did.
“She doesn’t have a chance at the Killer Body job, does she?”
“I don’t know. Bobby Warren’s behavior isn’t easy to predict.
But the Killer Body job doesn’t matter anymore.
” Relief flooded his face, and he couldn’t control the smile that spread across it.
She felt cruel delivering the rest of the blow, but that was crazy.
She owed him the truth, and now. “I’m going to be taking over John Crosby’s show while he’s on vacation.
If it works out, I may get my own show without having to detour through Killer Body Land. ”
“And if you don’t?”
“I’ll keep trying. I have an agent who believes in me. I have John Crosby’s support. The more I think about it, I don’t believe Killer Body is for me.”
“I won’t quarrel with that.” Alain looked stunned, unaware that the drink had arrived and the server had departed.
Gabriella knew that astonished, bewildered feeling, had lived with it from the moment those photographs of her had hit the tabloids.
She hurt for Alain, but she knew what she had to do. She pulled out her chair and stood.
“I’ve dealt with my weight problems as honestly as I know how, but I don’t want to make a career out of them. I’m going to tell Bobby Warren that.”
Alain rose, too, ghostlike, his face pale and unsmiling. “It was my fault. I know that now. You never would have done what you did if I hadn’t gotten drunk and made an ass of myself with Judith.”
“True. But it was my fault, too. I had a very small life. You made it larger. Then it got too large, too out of control.”
“And now you don’t need me.”
A commotion from the front of the bar commenced as two men with microphones and a woman, wearing too much makeup and a suit the color of a hydrangea, entered the room.
She and Alain had been recognized, and now here came the media.
She could flee or meet them head-on. She didn’t have to think about which it would be.
“I don’t need anyone.” Gabriella crossed the small patch of carpet separating them and took his arm. “But I’ve never stopped wanting you.”