Chapter 17 Jack
For our first public outing, Cynthie has suggested brunch with friends in LA.
This actually makes a lot of sense: it takes some of the pressure off the two of us, but I know it also means that she’ll have moral support.
It will be the first time she’s been seen in public for weeks, so every detail has to be carefully managed. There’s going to be plenty of scrutiny.
I tell myself that’s why I’m feeling nervous again when I pull up to the restaurant, which is a low-key little spot in Venice, not far from the beach. There are already a couple of photographers across the street, so they must know Cynthie is in there.
“Jack!” One of them has recognized me and is calling my name.
“Over here!” There’s a ripple of surprise and the cameras flash.
I lift a hand in casual greeting, smile, and make my way inside.
I guess that means part one of the day’s plan is complete—the paparazzi know we’re in the same place.
Chances are there’ll be more of them out here by the time we leave.
The hostess greets me with a professional smile and shows me to Cynthie’s table.
“No way!” I can’t help but exclaim, when I catch sight of the familiar faces. This, I hadn’t been expecting.
“Hey man!” Arjun leaps to his feet and comes around the table to pull me into a hug. We pat each other on the back with plenty of manly vigor. “It’s so good to see you.”
“You too,” I reply, meaning it. Arjun and I had pretty much lost touch after we finished filming A Lady of Quality , which isn’t unusual, but I’ve always felt a bit sad about it.
A few years ago we started following each other on social media and have exchanged the occasional message, which is how I know he’s now married to Patty.
The woman herself approaches me next, and while Arjun looks almost exactly the same, her bright red hair is dark now, shoulder-length with a wide gray streak at the front.
She’s added a few more tattoos to her arms, but despite the LA heat she’s still wearing black leather trousers.
It’s nice to see some things don’t change.
“Hi, gorgeous,” she says, pecking me on the cheek. “You’ve only improved with age.”
I laugh. “I was going to say the same about you, but I don’t want to flirt too hard in front of your husband.” I gesture to Arjun, who wraps his arm around Patty’s waist. “I can’t believe you pulled it off… Wasn’t this basically what you had written down in your dream journal?”
Patty laughs, and Arjun’s own smile widens. “I wore her down.”
“And you guys have a daughter, right?” I ask.
Arjun nods. “Priya. She’s seven and already plotting world domination.”
“And Arjun will be happy to show you a million pictures plus the fifteen physical photographs of her he carries at all times,” Patty puts in, “just in case—and I quote—his phone explodes and the cloud turns out to be the work of our robot overlords.”
“AI, man,” Arjun shakes his head. “It’s coming for us all.”
“And Liam.” I turn to the table, where Liam sits, affectionately rolling his eyes at Arjun. “I can’t believe it; the gang is really all here.”
Liam dimples at me. “Like any of us were going to miss this.” He gets up to give me a hug.
Hannah remains in her seat. “Nice to see you again, Jack,” she says, a touch cool, and I have the distinct impression she’s going to wait and see how this plays out before she decides if she’s actually happy I’m here. Which I guess is fair enough.
That just leaves Cynthie, who has been hovering to the side while I greeted everyone else.
The smile she gives me is rueful, as I take a step toward her and bend down to give her the agreed-upon kiss on the cheek—times have changed since we last did this, now anyone with a phone can be a reporter, and it’s important that we start selling ourselves as a couple.
“No awkward greetings,” Cynthie warned me when we spoke on the phone late last night, her voice curling softly through the darkness of my bedroom. “It’d be just my luck if the first photo of us that leaked was of us banging our foreheads together or doing some awkward high-five.”
“Ruling out my go-to moves, I see,” I replied.
“Let’s say you’ll lean in and kiss my right cheek. Just one kiss on one cheek.”
“Have I not mentioned that I go for the traditional Normandy greeting these days? I’m a minimum of four-cheek-kisses kind of guy now.”
I heard the quiver of laughter she tried to repress when she said sternly, “One kiss, right cheek.”
Now, my lips skim her right cheekbone, a light touch, the first time I’ve touched her in thirteen years.
My heart stutters and I can’t resist the temptation to lean into her.
Her perfume surrounds me, and it’s different now.
No longer the sweet citrus scent she used to wear, but something more grown up, more sultry, like dark, ripe berries.
She smells like incredibly sexy jam and I fight the urge to bury my face in her neck and inhale.
Good to know that my body is going to continue its tremendous freak-out every time we’re in the same room, and that our last meeting in the hotel was not the fluke caused by residual weird feelings that I’d hoped it was.
I step back from her, and there’s a flush to her skin that wasn’t there a second ago.
“Hey,” she says softly.
“Hey,” I reply.
She’s dressed casually in jeans, trainers, and a cropped white T-shirt that shows off a tiny sliver of her stomach.
A delicate gold chain glints around her neck, and my eyes linger on her clavicle.
I don’t know if being turned on by a woman’s bones is a low point, but it certainly feels like it.
Her hair is pulled up in a high ponytail, and she has sunglasses perched on top of her head.
I’d be willing to bet that despite how effortless she appears there was an entire council of war about her outfit.
As I slip into the seat next to hers at the table, it’s impossible not to notice the interest from other diners at the restaurant.
Even in LA, spotting a celebrity like Cynthie Taylor is a big enough deal for most people to shrug off their jaded indifference.
There are plenty of eyes turned in our direction, plenty of low conversations being had that are less subtle than their participants might imagine.
I even spy a couple of phones being held at weird angles, so it looks like photographs are already being snapped.
I wonder how long it will be before we pop up on DeuxMoi.
“So, Jack, how have you been?” Patty asks.
“Not too bad, thanks,” I reply. “Although I guess thirteen years gives us a lot of ground to cover.”
“I can’t believe it’s been thirteen years.” Arjun sounds dazed.
“Surely impossible,” Liam agrees. “When we are fresh-faced little babies.”
The waitress appears, and—establishing that everyone is starving—we order a good percentage of the menu. In no time at all she places an enormous cup of coffee in front of me, and I sigh, content.
Cynthie laughs and the sound is silvery and lovely. “Still a caffeine fiend, then?”
I grin. “It’s only got worse actually. Scott tries to limit me to five cups a day with middling success.”
“Scott?” Arjun perks up. “As in our Scott?”
“Yeah.” I nod. “I don’t know exactly how it happened, but after we finished filming, he just… never left.”
“That is the most Scott way possible to get a job,” Patty chuckles.
“You’ll have to bring him along next time,” Liam says. “It would be so nice to see him.”
“I’m sure he’d love that,” I reply. “He’s away at the moment—always takes a couple of weeks off to visit his family, when I wrap up filming on the series.”
“We’re big fans of Blood/Lust ,” Arjun says then, throwing his arm around the back of Patty’s chair.
“Oh?” I smile, pleased. “That’s really nice. It’s a lot of fun to make.”
“Not exactly the sort of thing I thought you’d end up doing,” Hannah puts in here.
I feel Cynthie stiffen beside me, but I shrug easily. “No. It’s not the sort of thing I thought I’d end up doing either, but then a lot can change in thirteen years. I really love it, and it seems to bring people a lot of joy.”
“That’s for sure,” Liam agrees. “My god, that whole arc last season with the cursed rings? The theories we were coming up with were wild . I still think Bas is going to turn out to be Constantine’s son, though I can’t quite work out how.”
“You watch it, too?” I ask.
“We all watch it together every week,” Liam replies easily, and then—along with everyone else—he freezes.
They’re all looking wide-eyed at the woman next to me, and I turn slowly to face Cynthie. She is glaring at Liam, but when she catches me looking, her expression quickly smooths out.
“You all watch it?” I ask.
It’s her turn to shrug. “I might have seen an episode or two.”
Arjun chokes on a laugh, and even Hannah is trying to hide her smile.
“Oh, really?” I say, delighted. “So you get together and watch it every week?”
“ They watch it every week,” Cynthie says sweetly. “I find it’s a good time to catch up on my puzzles.”
“Big puzzler, are you?”
She inclines her head seriously. “I mean, I don’t want to blow my own horn or anything, but I have got Wordle in one go… twice.”
“I’m more of a crossword guy.”
She scoffs. “You would be. I bet you even prefer the cryptic ones.”
“Of course, I’m not an animal.”
She laughs, and I do too, and then when I look back at the rest of the table it’s to find everyone staring at us in bewilderment.
“Well, this is certainly different ,” Patty says archly.
I glance over to Cynthie again, sorry to see that carefully blank expression has crept over her face. For a moment she looked the way I remember her—sparkling.
“I’m just going to use the restroom,” Cynthie says, abruptly getting to her feet. “I’ll be right back.”
There’s a moment of silence, and I shift in my seat.
“So—” I start, but Hannah cuts me off.
“We need to talk,” she says.
“Okay,” I agree, and then I wait as the four of them exchange lots of significant eye contact. Finally, Patty huffs an impatient sigh.
“We need to know your intentions,” she says.
“My intentions?” I assumed that Cynthie’s best friends would all be in on the plan, but maybe I was wrong. Maybe they also think we’re a couple? This could get complicated… fast.
“Obviously we know about the arrangement,” Hannah says briskly, and I exhale a sigh of relief, but then no one says anything more.
“In that case, I’m not totally sure I understand the question,” I reply, finally.
“Look.” Hannah crosses her arms, leaning over the table toward me.
“I was the one who told Cynthie this could be a good idea, and I still think that on balance it was the best option, but…” She trails off here, and bites her lip.
She looks uncertain. “Cyn has been through a really awful time,” she says quietly after a beat, and her face is suddenly bleak.
“I mean really fucking awful. And despite what you might have read, she did absolutely nothing to deserve it.”
“I never thought for a second that she did,” I interject, which earns me a slight softening of her expression.
“I’d like to get five minutes alone with that shithead,” Patty growls under her breath, and Arjun takes her hand, rubbing his thumb back and forth across her knuckles.
“Get in line.” Even gentle-hearted Liam looks like he’s ready to start cracking skulls.
“So maybe you can understand our concern,” Hannah presses on. “This might be the best plan we have right now, but you’re a wild card. And you and Cyn… didn’t exactly leave things on good terms.”
I wince. That’s the understatement of the century.
“I do get it,” I say, leaning back in my chair.
I want to choose my words carefully. I’ve been so worried about how this was going to work, about Cynthie’s animosity toward me and the complication of our history, but it’s clear that she’s hurting, perhaps more deeply than I realized.
This intervention makes me think I’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg.
“The last thing I’m interested in doing is upsetting Cynthie or making her life harder,” I say, finally.
“We both have our own reasons for going along with this plan, and for what it’s worth I’m not the same person I was thirteen years ago.
I doubt she is either. It’s been a long time and…
I want us to do better this time around. ”
That is definitely the truth. Looking back on everything that happened between us, I can see now that I made a lot of mistakes, the sort of mistakes a hotheaded twenty-four-year-old is bound to make, but that justification doesn’t necessarily make things easier.
Those mistakes sit between the two of us, dark and heavy, and now Cynthie and I have to find a way to deal with them.
“I know she’s been going through a lot,” I add. “My guess is she could use someone else who’s on her side. I’d like to be that for her, if she’ll let me.”
It’s a big if .
I clear my throat and take a sip of my coffee, trying not to flinch as the four of them stare at me like we’re in an extremely intense job interview.
Eventually, Hannah blinks. “Okay,” she says. “We’ll take you at your word. But I should warn you, if you hurt her—”
“We know ways to make you suffer,” Liam says sweetly.
“And how to get rid of the evidence.” Patty’s smile is like a knife.
“Welcome to the family!” Arjun beams.