Chapter 1 En Passant #3
I hesitate. There are all different ways to look at someone: pupils blown with desire, excitement clouding your better judgment, seeing without seeing.
Those are the kind of looks I’m used to.
But his eyes are stuck on my face, calmly and acutely curious about me and my answers and my sneaking around, and I don’t like it at all.
I know who he is. I once spent fifty dollars on a bootleg shirt with his face on it.
But why is he looking at me like he knows why I’m here?
Or maybe… well.
Maybe he’s looking because he wants to look at me.
I entertain this thought for one nanosecond.
His curious eyes. How his shoulders fill out that suit.
This is younger me’s ultimate fantasy: a Wattpad of an evening with Fausto Ferreira Sanchez.
Also known as Faust, the Pride of Portugal, Stark-Benzin Racing’s favorite, and one of the best Formula 1 drivers of all time.
Then the nanosecond is over, and I push the thought away so easily that I give myself chills. “You know what, I’m being so rude.” I suck in a breath through my fake smile. “I should go make sure I’ve said bye to him.”
I wait a moment. Here’s when my former hero hits me with the classic man-getting-left-at-a-party response: Oh no, don’t go, you’re so (insert adjective here).
Only, he doesn’t. Faust just looks at me, quiet and unreadable.
And I guess I read him… slightly wrong. Or I’ve been dismissed?
Noted as unattainable? I peek over my shoulder one more time as I head back inside—where I fully intend to hide until my car’s here, away from him and his twenty questions.
Faust has returned to his phone. Thumbs tapping, brow furrowed.
I don’t wait for him to notice me again.
I breeze back inside, heading to the nearest ladies’ room, through the little powder room with its vanity seating area and fire-hazard scented candles, toward the actual sinks.
God, I’m good. Who else could shut down a man they used to watch on TV?
And yeah, I don’t love how he looked at me, fascinated and foreboding and scary-hot, but I highly doubt that Faust’s heard of me, and really, my problem is having such an oddly specific type of—
I push open the actual bathroom door with a metal-handle-on-wallpaper thwack, and four startled heads snap up to stare at me, the harbinger of loud sounds.
“Oh,” I whisper. “Sorry.”
The ivory-gowned bridesmaids are gathered around what looks to be a woman crumpled on the tile.
No… a bride. The bride. Imogen Baldwin, I can assume, from her flower-studded blonde updo, white-knuckled bouquet, and long pearl-colored gown, a vision of Carolyn Bessette.
I’d seen her name on the hand-calligraphed wedding invitation Winston had texted me—Together with their families, Bernard Baudelaire and Imogen Baldwin joyfully request you to celebrate their marriage with a night of divine company and artful mingling—but this is the first I’m seeing her.
Since the cocktail hour had gone excruciatingly long. And it had seemed like the wedding wasn’t happening.
And…
“Oh no,” I say, too surprised to formulate a smarter sentence.
The bride takes one look at my startled face, then bursts into tears.
“He—didn’t—come,” Imogen Baldwin sobs into an embroidered hand towel, chest hitching between words.
“He said he only left those other women at the altar because he realized they were going to leave him first, but I told him I wouldn’t and I thought he believed me, and he promised me he would come. He promised.”
Well, I would hope so, I think. Or that’s what I would think, if my heart wasn’t breaking for her and this specific, horrible lie she’d believed enough to look so beautiful.
When someone shows you who they are…. Grandma always said, never fully finishing the thought.
She didn’t have to. “Imogen, you can’t blame yourself.
We all believed him!” one bridesmaid says, waving her hands around Imogen’s glitter-dusted shoulders, as if she could stop her from ruining her perfect makeup by Jedi-mindtricking her problems away.
“And it’s going to be okay. That’s the woman I was telling you about—Cat Cromwell.
The woman who helped me! She can fix this. ”
That’s when I register the person waving her hands around is Prestly.
She’s wearing so much more blush than when we video called, and it’s honestly really cute, but also oh.
Oh no. “I really can’t,” I start to explain, “Because I was just here and, God, I’m so sorry, but that Winston guy knows Bernard, so it’s a bit too—”
There’s a knock on the door, then an unmistakably male voice. Vaguely French, as a Baudelaire would be, and just a touch remorseful. “Imogen? Are you in there? Please, can you come out? I know you’re mad at me, and I should’ve been here sooner, but—it doesn’t feel right. Imogen… I can’t do this.”
The women grow quiet. A cold sweat slides down the back of my neck as they turn, one by one, to look at me. The bride is last. Her eyes are wide and glassy, expectant and furious and hopeful and in need of something from me. And that’s a look I can read very, very well.