Chapter 22
Lily didn’t waste too much time worrying about what Dorian Khan was thinking.
The following week, she and Nicola were off on the next part of their adventure: a weekend in Las Vegas, a day at the Grand Canyon, three nights in Palm Springs.
Their break was not quite as wild as Nicola wanted it to be, but they still managed to spend a lot of money, laugh a lot, eat a lot, drink a lot, and take way too many photos.
Their return to the guesthouse in Beverly Hills felt like a new beginning.
Having been away and come back again, they were filled with comfort and confidence at the sight of their very own curved, palm-lined street.
They were no longer tourists. They belonged here.
There was no more exclaiming over squirrels or the pool deck or Pablo mowing the lawn or the strange ongoing absence of Charlotte’s husband, Javier.
This was just their life now. As promised by Charlotte, Wilson continued to keep his distance.
Any invitations were texted directly to Nicola with an aggrieved air of cool formality, which she found hilarious.
Would they like to attend a screening of a new movie at the end of the week?
And a press junket for the opening of a different movie tomorrow?
Nicola was thrilled at the idea of lurking near real celebrities giving real interviews to real journalists in a fancy hotel.
Lily politely declined and sought out an art museum instead.
Lily was happy to discover that on a weekday afternoon the sprawling maze of galleries was practically deserted.
So she was a little surprised when someone came and stood right next to her to admire an intricate eighteenth-century oil painting and quite shocked when she turned to discover that that person was Dorian Khan.
David the bodyguard was lurking behind a sculpture of Cupid.
“What are you doing here?” asked Lily.
“I always come here.”
“Always?”
“Often.”
“So I could have come anytime and I still would have run into you?”
“Quite possibly.”
“Aha. You were at the junket today,” she guessed.
“No, at the office actually. I saw Nicola without you and wondered if you’d gotten lost.”
“I’m not lost. The Impressionists, however …” Lily had no trouble finding the museum but once inside had been unable to find anything.
“I know, this place is a labyrinth.”
“Did you seriously come all the way here to be my guide? I could just ask her.” She pointed at an octogenarian gallery attendant.
“I think she’s asleep.”
Lily had to smile and felt the coolness between them fade. But all the same, it was a bit weird for Dorian to turn up like this, with his security detail in tow.
“I was planning to come this week anyway,” he assured her. “And I always go to the Monet first,” he added.
“This is not a Monet. So who’s lost now?”
She accepted his help on the condition that he didn’t try to explain history or art to her, to which he agreed as long as she didn’t either. They each solemnly accepted that they were equally knowledgeable.
“Is that what you’re going to study? Art?” Dorian asked.
“No. Maybe. I don’t know. I love art, but I love science too. And history and literature. I guess I haven’t found what I want to do with my life yet.”
“Or it hasn’t found you.”
They wandered to the Impressionists, then onward through the Cubists and Modernists.
Conversation remained superficial and fairly easy as long as they talked about the paintings.
If Lily asked or volunteered anything too personal, he would freeze up suddenly and change the subject.
Not that Lily cared too much either way.
She was merely being polite; she didn’t really know what he was doing.
Showing off, presumably, in some rather twisted reverse psychology way that maybe was common among celebrities.
Maybe he just wanted to come across as cultured as well as rich.
“There’s a bookstore downtown you might like,” he suggested casually. “It’s all secondhand books, great range, very quirky design.”
“I’ll have to check it out.”
“Franklin’s picking something up for me there tomorrow; he could take you if you like.”
“Sure.” Lily wondered at the ease with which he made an offer on Franklin’s behalf. “If he’s okay with that.”
“Of course he is,” Dorian returned, as though Lily had somehow questioned something as basic as the color of the sky.
Aha, Lily realized. Franklin is staff first, friend second, and his preferences are no more relevant than those of bodyguard David.
They had wound up in a courtyard next to a charming water feature surrounded by café tables.
The scent of freshly baked bread and coffee filled the air.
Lily was thirsty and hungry and her legs were tired.
Would it be rude to say goodbye and then stay?
Considering Dorian had just very pointedly not asked her on a date?
And if he had, she would have refused. Would it seem like she was asking him on a date if she suggested lunch?
And where would David sit? Lily was just at the point of announcing she was going to sit down, to hell with the consequences, when Dorian abruptly announced his departure, thanked her for her time, and left.
Nicola agreed the whole interaction was rather odd but was in no mood to go over it in detail.
The junket had been extraordinary, she said, and as Lily was still a little unclear on what a junket actually was, Nicola felt the need to explain its intricacies in great detail.
Lily eventually came to understand it as a kind of party for journalists at which producers trick them into being nice to their actors.
Nicola bubbled with importance as she explained it all.
The cherry-on-top of her revelations was that she had actually been chosen to welcome members of the press in the lobby because she was hanging around being so friendly and everyone loved her accent.
She had to go back tomorrow and she urged Lily to please come.
“Thank you, it sounds amazing and I’m sure you’re doing a fabulous job, but I would only be in your way. Anyway, I’m going to a bookstore downtown.”
“Dorian asked you on a date?”
“Most definitely not. I’m going with Franklin.”
“Aha! He’s road testing you on his assistant!”
“Not so much. He’s taking credit for showing me a cool spot without actually taking me there.”
Franklin picked Lily up in a sexy convertible.
“This old thing? She’s a hot mess and I love her,” he said. “Probably won’t even get us there, but trust me, if she breaks down, everyone stops to help push.”
Lily felt unselfconsciously happy as they cruised the streets from Beverly Hills to downtown Los Angeles. Franklin laughed easily, like Casey, and Lily wondered at Dorian’s apparent preference for people with a sense of humor when he so clearly didn’t have one himself.
The bookstore was every bit as quirky as Dorian had promised.
Laid out across the ground floor and mezzanine of an old department store, the space was a maze of staircases, shapes, sculptures, and shelves, all made from or jam-packed with books.
Wandering through its galleries and corners afforded an ever-changing vista of literature that filled Lily with joy, while everywhere around them young tourists busily snapped and posted selfies.
Lily found herself constantly dodging other people’s photo ops.
“Ah,” she said. “Is that why Dorian didn’t come? Too many cameras?”
“Yes,” admitted Franklin. “He only ever comes here when the place is closed. He doesn’t like being recognized in public. It can get very ugly very quickly.”
“It’s hard to imagine.”
“He manages it well. But it’s hard work and he’s lucky he’s had the time and the intelligence to work through it. Can you imagine how exhausting it is to feel watched and judged all the time? By people who think they know you?”
Lily remembered how at the observatory and the art museum Dorian had steered away from people and was always looking over his shoulder. She thought of all the moments she’d been part of a crowd at a museum or landmark or show and she felt sorry for Dorian that he couldn’t experience that.
“That kind of fame is dangerous,” Franklin added.
“What do you mean? Are the fans really a threat?”
“They can be. But it’s not just that. Imagine a world where no one ever says no to you.
Where you can have whatever you want, do whatever you want.
Pretty soon the normal limits you put on yourself start to disappear.
When you’re constantly surrounded by people who adore you, who want to impress you, who will quite literally do anything for you, it’s easy to believe that you are more important than everyone else. ”
“Yes, I can see how that could happen.” Lily thought of Stacy Black and her empty rooms and Dorian’s standoffishness and the offhand way he’d delegated Franklin to take Lily out. She was a little surprised that Franklin thought him so very down-to-earth.
“But Casey Brandon seems to have escaped that trap,” she commented.
“Ah yes—Casey Brandon. Perfect example. If it weren’t for Dorian helping him out, he would have been cheated out of most of his money and spent the rest on parties and cars.”
“So Dorian taught him to save?”
“There’s nothing sexy about good financial management but you’ve got to think about it in this town.
But it’s not just that. Casey’s so naive, he doesn’t know when people just latch onto him for fame and prestige.
Dorian’s been part of that world a lot longer, he can recognize it sooner.
He’s always rescuing Casey from entanglements. ”
“Really?”
“Just recently, in Australia—some local fangirl at Pippi got a bit infatuated. Dorian had to step in. You were there; you probably know who it was.”
Lily felt her cheeks flame.
“I have some idea,” she said, trying to keep the emotion out of her voice. “And what did Dorian save Casey from exactly?”
“Heartbreak. At best.”
“And at worst?”
“Stalking. Blackmail, exposure, slander, extortion. Not to say it definitely would have happened in this case.”
“No.”
“But it might have.”
“And Dorian picks it beforehand, huh?”
“He’s a really good judge of character.”
Lily fumed inside but said nothing. She was convinced Dorian had been talking about Juliet.
Her cousin. The sweetest, nicest girl on earth—not to mention someone with a very comfortable background, thank you very much.
For Dorian to think her capable of using Casey for her own advantage was so outrageous, it would have been funny if it weren’t so hurtful. And wrong.
“Casey needs someone like Dorian. The whole journey into sudden fame and wealth—it does something to you,” Franklin went on.
Lily couldn’t help but agree. She reached out for the nearest available book, which happened to be an atlas.
“Interesting. You go on ahead,” she said to Franklin. “I’m going to take a closer look at this one. Meet you back downstairs?”
She collapsed into a convenient armchair and stared unseeingly at the atlas, aghast at Dorian’s cruelty.
This wasn’t unthinking, casual disregard for Casey and Juliet’s relationship.
Dorian had intervened in a way that was deliberate and calculated.
He said he rescued Casey and then bragged about it to Franklin.
How could Dorian be so horribly judgmental?
Of poor Juliet? When she was injured? He probably thought she hurt her ankle on purpose. Impossible.
But the more Lily dwelled on it, the less surprised she was.
She was angry with herself for not seeing it before.
As Franklin had said, fame does something to people.
It cuts them off from the rest of the world, inflates their sense of importance, and makes them suspicious and cruel.
She thought back to what Alex King had told her, about the terrible way Dorian had treated him.
The whole world of privilege and excess made Dorian think more of himself and less of everyone else.
It was abominable. She felt it in his coldness toward her.
And now here was Franklin praising him as a great friend because he was able to convince Casey of something that wasn’t even true.
He had projected his own fears onto Juliet.
She wasn’t grasping for fame or approval, but Dorian couldn’t understand that because in his world, that’s how everyone was and he was never wrong.
Ha. Lily knew better. How she wished she could fling her contempt for him right in his face.