Chapter 7 Mistakes Were Made
Mistakes Were Made
Coming here had been a mistake.
What had Jack been thinking? As they wound their way up a hill peppered with palm trees in Blair’s pink car, eventually pulling into a driveway, passing through a gate, and parking in front of a white stucco Spanish-style house, Jack had to admit that he hadn’t been thinking.
“Shall we go around back to the pool house first?” Blair asked.
“All right.”
What else could he say?
They got out of the car, and Blair muttered something under her breath. Before he could work out what it was, she called, “Hello, Mrs. Afonso!” and started waving like she was trying to flag down a passing semi.
Despite the obvious wealth of the neighborhood, Blair’s house was actually not far from the house next door. They both had gates protecting them from the street, but inside, the properties were separated by a hedge. Peeking over that hedge was a very old and seemingly very displeased woman.
“I brought your garbage can in this morning,” the woman said sourly. “Or at least as far as I could, given your fortress.”
“Thank you so much.” Blair paused. Jack could feel the uncertainty radiating off her. “I’ve been meaning to tell you that I recently rewatched one of your husband’s films, New York Waltz. When I was in high school, I—”
The head disappeared abruptly.
The muttering returned as Blair led him around the side of the house, the opposite side from the old woman.
“That was your problematic neighbor?” He immediately regretted asking. The answer was clearly yes, and now he would be in receipt of a monologue on the details.
“I’m not sure how I’m supposed to get the garbage bin in ‘in a timely fashion’”—he could hear the air quotes—“when I’m not here.
I was in the office today, and I went from there to the airport.
Was I supposed to come home just to take my garbage bin in?
” She made a vague sound of frustration.
“Anyway, yes, that’s the neighbor. I’m trying to crack her, but she hates me for reasons that remain unclear. ”
They’d reached a gate at the side of the house.
There was an electronic keypad mounted on it.
“This gate connects the front and back yards, so this is how you’d get from the pool house out to the world.
The code is four-two-one-one-seven-nine-five,” she said.
“Of course, you’re always welcome to come through the main house, but this way you can come and go as you please. ”
You can come and go as you please. As if he were a teenager she was magnanimously granting freedom of movement?
He could understand why the neighbor wasn’t the president of the Blair Kellermoon fan club.
He was feeling very grumpy, even for him. He wasn’t sure why. Yes, a lot of what he had encountered since he’d landed was annoying. The pink car, the fact that Blair lived behind a gate high on a hill like a princess in a fairy tale.
None of it should have been surprising, though. He had known he was coming to California. He had made his peace with that, even if the reality of California was… pastel and sweaty.
It was Blair. She was the mistake he had made.
Blair in real life was more strident than he’d expected.
Going back over their weeks of texting he could see that what he had thought of as witty banter had in fact been stridency.
Witty stridency, but stridency nevertheless.
She was prescriptive. Defensive. If he had wondered, these recent weeks, if he’d been too hasty in declining the Books with Blair offer, he stood reassured that he’d made the right choice.
After bending down to enter the code into the gate, she stood abruptly, and her hair swished around and slapped against his face.
The stridency of her personality was at odds with her physicality.
She looked like a stereotype of a California girl.
She was thin, and she had long blond hair that fell over her shoulders in waves when it wasn’t being lashed against his face and sparkling hazel eyes that leaned green.
The only deviation from form was a pointy chin and sharp cheekbones that made her look like the Wicked Witch of the West had been adopted by a nice family from the San Fernando Valley and subjected to a regimen of skin bleaching.
She wore white wide-legged jeans that had raw edges at the bottom.
Her feet, clad in flat silver sandals, looked comically small emerging from her voluminous pant legs.
Her toenails were painted a sunny yellow, which caused him to look at her fingers, but they were, in a bit of a plot twist, bare.
Maybe that made sense. Blair was a lot of things, but dumb wasn’t one of them, and she would know that it would be hard for people to take her seriously as a producer with canary-yellow fingernails.
On top, she wore a sweater. A light one, some kind of loosely woven ballet-pink number, but it was a sweater. It had to be eighty-five degrees.
She smelled like California, too, like oranges more specifically.
Perhaps it was her shampoo; the aroma had nearly overwhelmed him when she’d been shaking her hair in his face.
He couldn’t even say it was a complex citrus scent.
It contained no hint of spice to cut the cloying sweetness of straight-up orange.
It was as if she’d taken a bath in a vat of Tropicana.
Except it had probably been organic, hand-pressed juice from oranges picked by workers with access to wellness modules designed to distract them from the fact that they didn’t make enough money to afford health insurance.
“Do this gate and the big one at the driveway have the same code?” he asked, just for something to say.
He’d already forgotten the code she’d rattled off.
He wasn’t going to need it, because he wasn’t going to stay, not beyond tonight.
Jack would admit he had made mistakes in his life, but the nice thing about this particular one was that it was easily reversible.
All he had to do was lose Blair, then he could book a flight home for tomorrow.
“Nope!” she said cheerily as she led the way through the gate. “I’ll send you both codes. I hope you’re good with numbers. Both gates are alarmed. If you mess up three times, a call is placed to the security company. What are you going to do about a car?”
Nothing. Because he was going home. “I hadn’t thought about it.”
She circled back and checked that the gate was locked, pulling on it several times. “You need a car in LA. I only have one.”
“One I couldn’t help but notice is pink.”
“It is.”
“Hmm.”
“What is your point?”
“I don’t think they roll off the assembly line like that.”
“They do not. It was my postdivorce rebellion. Reggie—that’s my ex-husband—is a major car guy. If I had bought a Mercedes and had it painted pink while we were married, he would have had a heart attack.”
“So you did it to gall him?”
Jack wasn’t sure why he cared.
He didn’t care.
“I don’t think so. I did it because I wanted a pink car.
I mean, why do they make fourteen shades of gray but they don’t make pink?
” She smirked, and there was something strangely compelling about it, a dimple-bracketed look that contained equal parts knowing and mischief.
“OK, I did it ninety-five percent because I wanted a pink car and five percent to gall my ex-husband. He has eight cars, or he did last time I knew the count. That seems a lot more irresponsible in the automotive department than painting your car pink.”
“I can’t disagree there.” He wanted to, for some reason, but her logic was sound.
“Do you drive?” she asked.
“Yep. An old Volkswagen.” Which was currently parked in the lot of his mom’s building, the subletter of Jack’s condo having required the use of his parking spot.
“I might be able to get Reggie to lend you a car.”
“Is that a good idea? What if I crash it?”
“Don’t tempt me.” She shot him another of those maddeningly compelling smirks as she came to a stop in the middle of the backyard. “Here we are. Main house. Pool house.” She pointed at each as she spoke.
The pool house at the back of the property was a miniature version of the main house, clad as it was in the same white stucco and red Spanish-tiled roof.
There was a pool between the two structures, and it gave him pause.
Its color wasn’t quite as saturated as the color of the pool he’d gotten a flash of when she’d invited him to come here, but it was close.
It was surrounded by a patio of dark flagstone.
He looked around to see if the lounge chair from his image was here, too.
Yes. It was one of four lined up near the pool house.
There was a dining table on the other side, closer to the main house.
It was uncanny. He’d always experienced his flashes as an outside observer. He’d never been inside one.
He conducted a second scan, looking for something to reassure him that he wasn’t clairvoyant but just had a good imagination.
There: the yard contained a third structure, a house much smaller than the pool house.
It looked like a Spanish version of the Santa Claus house at the mall. That had not been in his vision.
The whole affair—the buildings, the pool, the patio—was surrounded by palm trees and other lush plants that looked foreign to his Midwestern eyes. Some of them were laden with fruit—he recognized lemons and avocados and olives.
“This door is a little finicky,” Blair said, producing a key and wiggling it in the lock of an arched wooden door. “Which is funny because the pool, and the pool house, were put in fifty years after the main house.”
The main house. She kept saying that. The very concept of a main house and an ancillary building, forget two ancillary buildings, was an indication that he did not belong here.
“What’s that?” He pointed at the Santa house.
“Changing area, bathroom. There’s a shower, too. And on the far side of it, we keep pool floaties. We call it the shed.”