Chapter 6 #3
“Oh, yeah. I was gonna be a movie star. Everyone always thinks it’s such a geeky thing, but most big actors started in theater classes,” he says matter-of-factly, and Paige just cannot picture it. She finds she’s staring with her mouth slightly open.
“What?” he counters with a smile.
“No, that’s...that’s great. I...” She finds herself at a loss. She has only ever seen him playing golf and pickup basketball and cheersing with cans of beer like a big buffoon the times he’s been over watching a game with Grant.
“I was in Annie in high school,” she says, for lack of anything else coming to mind.
“Were you, now?” he says. “What role?”
“Not exactly a role. I got to sit backstage for two hours every night and then walk across stage with a mop bucket during the ‘Hard-Knock Life’ number,” she says. “Kinda deterred me from the craft after that.” He laughs at this.
“So what happened to your acting career?” she asks, moving a little closer.
“Y’know, you try to major in the arts in college and then realize you’ll never actually have a career and you’ve shamed your parents, so you change your major to something responsible like business and computer science.
” He raises his drink and his eyebrows at this, and she thinks she hears a note of bitterness behind his words.
“Right. Well, you’ve done well for yourself, so...”
He quickly raises his beer to clink bottles at this sentiment, the hundredth clink of the night, she thinks.
“And you. You own a restaurant,” he says.
“Past tense. I gave that up,” she adds, and his face makes that shape people’s faces always make when they remember her son and the way her life crumbled in the wake of his death.
“Same, though,” she adds before the mood takes a turn.
“I was on the business side, the entrepreneur. Grant was the creative, the chef,” she says, kicking herself yet again for bringing up a spouse.
Finn doesn’t seem to notice, and they move on to talk about meaningless things: who would play them in the movie of their lives, why there are no good contractors for bathroom renos, and what’s with Janie Nowak a block over who hoards cats, but they laugh far more than she expected, and there are many moments that she forgets why she’s there and simply enjoys the company of this increasingly and surprisingly charming man.
Then she remembers herself and feels a flush of shame redden her face.
An actor, she thinks, after he excuses himself to the bathroom. Makes sense. She watches him sway slightly as he returns to the table.
“Let me give you a ride home,” she suggests, knowing that Zach drove him to the pub and he planned on Ubering home.
“Oh, that’s okay. I don’t want to put you out,” he says.
“We live on the same block.” She smiles. “And yes, I’m okay to drive,” she adds. He makes a messy Well, okay, then gesture with the flick of his elbows and then steadies himself against the table to get his bearings.
A small woman with a missing front tooth and an ironic Say No to Drugs T-shirt makes her rounds from table to table, holding a five-gallon bucket of single roses wrapped in plastic.
“A rose for your rose?” she repeats to every guy she walks up to.
Most wave her off. One guy in a tank top and a hipster beard buys one for his tiny girlfriend with an impossibly small waist and purple hair.
When he goes in for a hug, his exposed armpit hair envelops the woman, and Paige suppresses a gag when she sees a dangling knot of white deodorant hanging from it, right beside the girl’s face.
Her staring is interrupted when a crinkly plastic object appears in front of her face. Startled, she whacks at it.
“Jeez,” Finn says, pulling back the rose he was presenting her.
“Sorry, Sorry! I—You startled me. What’s this?”
“It has always been my belief,” he says, hand to heart, “that you never turn down a two-dollar rose from a vendor when there is a beautiful lady present.” He hands it to her, and she takes it but can’t hold back her laugh at the obnoxiousness of it all.
She’s suddenly a junior in college again at a stinky bar dealing with drunk men who think they’re charming.
She wonders how many of these roses wilted on her dashboard after nights out at the bar in those days.
“What?” he asks.
“No, nothing. Thank you. That’s super nice of you.” Shit, she is letting the real Paige slip into the character Paige, and she’s gonna blow it. “Really,” she adds.
As they drive and he flips through channels and sings along to a Goo Goo Dolls song from the ’90s, his arm brushes her thigh. He lets it linger there a moment. Then, as if noticing her for the first time he says, “You look really nice tonight.” She gives an involuntary little laugh, and then...
“Um, thanks.” Usually she’d say Shut up and punch him in the arm, as she is uncomfortable with compliments.
Also, he could just be offering this kindness because he just realized it’s been a long time since anyone has seen her out of a housecoat and yelling at UPS guys and newsboys.
It probably wasn’t a flirt. She hasn’t been as good at this as she thought.
“So do you,” she adds, painfully. She feels him staring at her as she pulls into her dark driveway in the back of the house.
“What?” she asks, shifting into Park and looking back at him, smiling.
“Eh, nothing. You’re a hot chick is all. Happy looks good on you, Paige Moretti,” he says and then clicks to release his seat belt and moves to open his door. She suddenly panics because she’s about to lose this opportunity, so she moves her hand to his inner thigh.
“You don’t have to go yet, if you don’t want,” she says, shocking herself. He seems completely shocked, too. His eyes widen, and then he starts laughing. Laughing! Fucking laughing, which really pisses her off.
“What?” she says, defensively.
“No, nothing, it’s just... You’re...”
“A hot chick,” she says, trying to joke, pulling him to her and kissing him. He kisses her back, passionately, and they grope one another across the console until he abruptly stops it and, to her horror, laughs again.
“Whoa. Okay, maybe you had a few more than you thought and we should have taken a cab,” he says. She is perfectly sober and exceedingly annoyed.
“I’m not drunk.” She starts to kiss him again, and he allows it for just a moment before pulling away and adjusting his shirt. He flips down the mirror on the back of the visor in front of him and checks his face for lipstick marks. Something he is practiced at, no doubt.
“You’re my wife’s best friend. This—I don’t know what we were thinking. This can’t happen.”
“Who’s gonna tell her?” Paige asks.
“Daymmn,” he responds and the frat-boy language coming from a fortysomething, accomplished man sounds ridiculous. She tries not to let her annoyance show.
“Well, it’s not safe. She’d find out,” he says.
A slip, Paige thinks. It seemed so easy for him to almost admit he’d do it if Paige were someone else—someone not too close to home.
“I mean, not that I would, anyway,” he adds quickly. “I know you and Grant are, you know, separated, and I guess that makes you single, but...”
Before she lets him say any other stupid thing, she cuts him off by slipping down the spaghetti straps of her cami and letting them drop, pulling down the front of the shirt and exposing her breasts.
“Oh, my God,” he says, exaggeratedly, squeezing his eyes closed and then open. “What are you trying to do to me?”
“Offer’s open is all,” she says, pulling her top back up quickly and gesturing him permission to go, keeping a modicum of integrity at least by being the one to dismiss him, but he decides to talk.
“Paige,” he says, softly, “I think you’re...” Then he stops. Holy shit. Is he about to reject her and give her a shitty I think you’re really...whatever speech?
“You’re amazing, but I think you’re just lonely right now and you’d really regret this,” he says self-righteously. She doesn’t know if her mouth is gaping open at the shock of this, as he opens the passenger door and gives a little wave before walking across the street to his house.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” she says out loud after he’s gone—the sudden silence of the radio and car creating a ringing in her ears. He slept with a prostitute wearing giant hoop earrings and animal print, and he rejected her?
She put herself on the line, she bought new makeup and suffered through a pub full of complete Neanderthals—she gave up all dignity, and she made sure she looked smoking hot doing it, and this is what he does?
Oh, no, Finn Holmon. This is not how this will go. She will not take no for an answer.