23. Erika
— ? —
Erika
The literacy charity auction was Tessa’s idea.
“Donate ‘lunch with E.C. Hart,’” she said two weeks ago over coffee. “It’s great publicity, the cause is legitimate, and you get to write it off. Win-win-win.”
I agreed because I love literacy programs and because Tessa has never steered me wrong, and I figured some nice retired couple would bid a few thousand dollars and I’d spend an afternoon discussing romance novels over salad at a restaurant of their choosing. I did not expect this.
The ballroom is packed, chandeliers glittering overhead, everyone dressed in their finest and clutching numbered paddles, and there are cameras along the back wall the way there are cameras everywhere I go now, and I’ve stopped pretending I don’t see them.
Tessa finds me near the entrance, stunning in red silk and a predatory smile.
“There you are.” She air-kisses my cheek. “You look gorgeous. Very authorly.”
“I look terrified.”
“Same thing, in this business.” She steers me toward the bar. “Come on. I want to show you the silent auction items before the main event starts. Someone donated a week in Tuscany, and I’m absolutely going to win it.”
We make our way through the crowd, and I’m nodding at people I vaguely recognize from publishing events when I spot him, Dean, across the room, paddle in hand, raising his champagne glass in a little salute when he catches my eye.
I smile back, and then my gaze drifts to the other side of the ballroom and my stomach drops.
Kai, also with a paddle, also looking directly at me.
“Oh no,” I breathe.
Tessa follows my gaze. “Oh yes.” Her grin is wicked. “This is going to be fun.”
“This is going to be a disaster.”
“Potato, potahto.” She pats my arm. “Try to look like you’re enjoying yourself. The photographers are already circling.”
I try. I stand where she puts me and hold my glass at the angle she taught me and smile at a lens I can’t see, and the whole time I can feel both of them, one on each side of the room, like standing between two open windows in winter.
I don’t look at Dean because looking at Dean is easy. I don’t look at Kai because it isn’t.
The auctioneer takes the stage, a silver-haired man with a voice that could sell sand in the desert, and begins working through the early items, a signed first edition for twelve thousand, a dinner with a famous chef for twenty, a walk-on role in a TV show for thirty-five, and I stand near the bar and drink my champagne too fast and try not to look at either side of the room, and fail, and try again.
It’s a strange thing, knowing where two men are standing without turning my head.
It’s a stranger thing that I only care where one of them is.
Then he reaches my lot.
“And now, ladies and gentlemen, one of our most anticipated items of the evening. Lunch with bestselling author E.C. Hart, whose debut novel has taken the literary world by storm.”
The spotlight swings toward me, and I try to smile and probably look like I’m having a medical emergency.
“We’ll open the bidding at five thousand dollars.”
Dean’s paddle goes up immediately, and he doesn’t even look at the auctioneer when he does it, he looks at me, grinning, and I think, oh, he’s going to make this fun, and for about four seconds I think that’s what tonight is going to be.
“Five thousand.”
“Ten thousand.” Kai’s voice carries across the room with practiced ease.
The crowd murmurs, and the woman at the next table leans toward her companion and whispers behind her hand.
“Fifteen.” Dean, still smiling.
“Twenty-five.” Kai, not smiling at all.
“Thirty thousand.” Dean winks at me across the room.
“Fifty.”
The auctioneer’s eyebrows climb. “Fifty thousand dollars to the gentleman on the left. Do I hear fifty-five?”
Phones are coming out now, screens lighting up around the room, people recording and texting, people realizing they’re witnessing a thing that will be all over the internet by morning.
“Seventy-five.” Dean’s grin has sharpened into a competitor’s.
“One hundred thousand dollars.”
The room gasps, and I choke on my champagne, and Tessa’s hand lands between my shoulder blades and stays there, and I don’t know if she’s steadying me or holding me in place so I don’t run.
“One hundred thousand,” the auctioneer repeats, his voice slightly strangled. “To Mr. Channing. Do I hear one-ten?”
I’m standing frozen at the edge of the crowd, watching two men bid on lunch with me like I’m a prize horse at auction, and I don’t know how to arrange my face.
Embarrassment wars with fury and a third thing I don’t want to name, warm and dangerous, that flickers every time Kai’s paddle goes up.
He isn’t looking at the auctioneer. He isn’t looking at Dean.
He’s looking at me, every single time, like the number is just the noise he has to make to keep looking.
“One-fifty,” Dean calls.
“Two hundred thousand.”
Somewhere around here the room stops being a room.
It’s a sound, a single held breath with a heartbeat under it, and the auctioneer has stopped saying do I hear because he can’t keep up, and I’ve stopped being embarrassed because embarrassment needs a self and I don’t seem to have one, just a body standing very still while two men decide what I’m worth in front of everyone I’ve ever wanted to impress.
That’s the ugly part. The other part, the part under it, is that only one of them is bidding on me.
The other one is bidding on his own life.
“Two-fifty.”
“Five hundred thousand dollars.”
The room explodes, people on their feet, the auctioneer fanning himself with his program, and the woman next to me grabs my arm and says, “Is that your ex-husband?” and I can’t form words to answer her, because he isn’t, not yet, and I don’t have a word for what he is.
Dean looks at Kai, then at me, then at the desperate set of Kai’s jaw and the white-knuckled grip on his paddle, and he sets his paddle down.
“Sold!” the auctioneer screams, and he actually says the word twice, like he doesn’t believe it either. “To Mr. Channing, for five hundred thousand dollars!”
The applause is deafening, and I stand there surrounded by clapping strangers, watching Kai across the room, and his eyes haven’t left mine. Then he raises his voice.
“I’d like to match the winning bid as an additional donation. In honor of E.C. Hart, who taught me what love stories cost.”
A million dollars. He just donated a million dollars to a literacy charity in my name, and the applause doubles, and someone near me is crying, and the auctioneer looks like he might faint, and I need to get out of here.
I push through the crowd toward the bar, toward the one corner of the room without a spotlight in it, and order a drink I don’t taste with hands that won’t stop shaking, and around me I can hear the whispers, the speculation, the barely contained glee of people witnessing drama that isn’t theirs.
A woman I’ve never met touches my elbow and says “You lucky thing” like I’ve won a raffle, and I smile at her because I have nothing else to do with my face, and she moves on, and I stand there and understand that a room full of strangers just watched a man tell me he’d pay anything, and I’m the only one in the room who knows what that costs him, and it isn’t the money.
Tessa materializes at my other elbow. She doesn’t say anything. She just puts a second glass in front of me and stands there, which is her version of a hug.
“Don’t,” I say.
“I didn’t say a word.”
“You were about to.”
“I was about to say that in twenty years of doing this I have never once seen a man bid a million dollars on a salad. But fine. I’ll keep it to myself.” She sips her drink. “You’re shaking.”
“I’m aware.”
“Good. Means you’re paying attention.” And she leaves me to it, which is the kindest thing she could do.
Dean finds me ten minutes later.
“Well,” he says, signaling for two drinks. “That was something.”
“I’m so sorry. I had no idea he would…”
“Don’t apologize.” He accepts the drinks from the bartender and hands one to me. “That man just spent a million dollars to have lunch with you. I think we’re past the point of polite competition.”
“Dean…”
“Listen.” He turns to face me fully, and his expression is kind. Genuinely kind, without any of the flirtation I’ve come to expect. “The movie happens regardless of this. We’ll work together, and I hope we stay friends. But I’m not going to keep bidding against a man who looks at you like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like you’re the only reason he’s still breathing.” Dean sips his drink. “I’ve been divorced. I know what regret looks like, and that man is up to his neck in it.”
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with that.”
“You don’t have to do anything. That’s the beauty of it.” He squeezes my shoulder. “Figure out what you want, Erika. Not what’s easy. Not what makes sense. What you actually want. And then do that.”
He starts to turn away, then pauses.
“For the record,” he adds with a grin, “I would have gone to seven-fifty. But I draw the line at losing to a man who’s clearly willing to bankrupt himself for a sandwich.”
I laugh despite everything, and he winks and disappears into the crowd, and I watch him go and feel a small clean sadness about it, the sadness of a door closing on a room you never went into and now never will, and I’m surprised how small it is, and I’m not surprised at all.
Kai finds me a few minutes later, approaching slowly, like I might bolt if he moves too fast, and he stops a full arm’s length away, and I notice that, and I notice that I noticed.
“That was insane,” I say before he can speak. “A million dollars, Kai. For a lunch.”
“It’s for literacy.” His mouth quirks. “Very important cause.”
“You’re impossible.”
“I’m determined. There’s a difference.”
“A million dollars, Kai.”
“It’s a lot of books for a lot of kids.” He shrugs, and it isn’t a bit. “And I get to have lunch with you. I’ve had worse deals.”
We stand there, the noise of the party swirling around us, and I wait for him to push, to reach for me, to say the thing that would ruin it, and he doesn’t.
He just stands there being looked at by a ballroom and looking at me, and I think about how he’s spent the last two months filling seats I didn’t ask him to fill, showing up to rooms I didn’t invite him to, and how it’s a strange penance, to be present so relentlessly for a woman who keeps leaving.
“Sunday,” I hear myself say. “The lunch. Don’t be late this time.”
His whole face changes, the tension draining out of his shoulders and hope taking its place, and it’s terrible to look at, how little it takes.
“I won’t,” he says. “I promise.”
I turn and walk away before I can say anything else stupid, my heart pounding against my ribs, and I make it as far as the coat check before it lands on me.
I just invited my almost-ex-husband to the lunch he bought for half a million dollars.
I said don’t be late like the last time he was late I didn’t leave him over it, like it’s a joke we have now, like it’s ours. What the hell am I doing?