Etoile (The Mannequin Series) (23 page)

Thirty-two

“I'm sorry, but I'm waiting for someone,” Tyler said with a mischievous smile as Elodie set her black Proenza Schouler PS11 bag down in the seat across from him. “But you're more than welcome to keep me company until she gets here. It can be our little secret.”

“Oh, is that so?” Elodie asked innocently as she played along. A tiny smirk made its way onto her lips as she smoothed down the flippy skirt of her black sleeveless Etoile Isabel Marant mini dress and slipped into the chair.

“Yea, my wife,” Tyler moaned. “The old ball and chain. Really terrible temper, so we should be careful.”

The smirk turned into a scowl as Elodie unfolded her napkin onto her lap. Tyler grinned brightly at her and leaned forward across the table. “You're a lot prettier than her, you know,” he whispered as he lowered his Oliver Peoples sunglasses. “But don't tell her I told you that.”

She couldn't help but laugh at his lame jokes as the server came to take her drink order. Once she had texted him back the previous evening, Tyler had asked her to meet him for lunch the very next day. At Heddi's prodding, Elodie had agreed, and she now sat with him on the kitschy garden patio of some busy restaurant on Bowery, a safe distance away from where James was currently holed up in his office in Battery Park City.

“What time did you land?” Tyler asked as he leaned back in his chair and took a sip of his beer. Elodie cleared her throat as her eyes subconsciously drifted to his toned arms that were perfectly displayed by his thin white Alexander Wang tee shirt. Once again, he looked like he had just rolled out of bed, but handsomely so.

“Around four,” she answered hesitantly as the scene of James greeting her in the Arrival Hall replayed itself in her head. Despite the fact that she wasn't necessarily doing anything wrong by having an innocent lunch with Tyler, she couldn't help but feel guilty. Luckily, the server arrived right on time to save her from having to say any more.

“And how was your shoot?” he asked after she had taken their orders and walked away.

“I think it went well,” Elodie told him as she took a sip of her iced coffee and lit a cigarette. “I hope the shots turn out okay.”

“They'll be great,” Tyler said with a small smile as he grabbed for her pack of Marlboro Lights. “All of them are in love with you, by the way. Olivier wouldn't shut up about our pictures. I think you've replaced me as his new favorite.” He lit his cigarette before adding, “I missed you a lot, you know.”

Now that they were back in New York, she couldn't help but feel awkward as she sat across from him, as if their time in France had just been part of a dream. “Oh,” was all that she could manage as her cheeks grew hot underneath her giant Prada sunglasses.

“You're blushing,” he teased with a laugh. “You need to learn how to take a compliment.”

She gave him a weak smile before he abruptly dragged his chair closer to hers and reached for her free hand. “Hey,” he said quietly as she stiffened in surprise.

“Hi,” she squeaked back, unsure of how to react to his sudden ambush of publicly displayed affection. Without thinking, Elodie craned her neck in the other direction and puffed awkwardly on her cigarette.

Tyler gave a small snort of laughter as he let go of her hand and brushed the side of her cheek with his thumb. “You're the worst mistress ever,” he joked, unaware of how this eerily true statement tugged at her conscience. Elodie stifled back a cough as the server arrived to drop off their food.

“You're so weird,” Tyler said as he shook his head and laughed. He finished his beer and signaled to the server for another one before picking up his fork to attack the giant Cobb salad that lay before him. “What are your plans for today? Let's do something later.”

Elodie felt her shoulders tighten as she scraped the avocado off of her toast and took a tiny bite. “I... I have dinner plans with my booker,” she fibbed without looking up at him. In reality, she wasn't meeting with Adam until Friday and had actual plans to meet James for a late dinner that evening. As the lie escaped her lips, she could feel tiny beads of sweat form along her hairline, and it wasn't due to the warm weather. Maybe she wasn't cut out for this casual dating business after all, she thought as she took a long sip of her slowly melting coffee.

“Fair enough,” Tyler said nonchalantly with a shrug. “But don't get too busy for me now that you're all in demand.”

“I doubt that I will be,” she said truthfully. Despite the fact that gaining the favor of Olivier & Co. was huge for her career, the same could not be expected for other important people in the fashion industry. For models who weren't Tyler Peeters or Caroline Matheson, booking more than one lucrative campaign was akin to winning the lottery.

“Whatever,” he said as he thanked the hip girl who brought him his drink. The seemingly cooler-than-thou waitress let out a boorish giggle as she scampered back towards the bar. “Gain some confidence, kid.”

Elodie squirmed uncomfortably in her seat as his comment touched a nerve. What did he know about low self esteem? He had the rare ability to turn everyone's brains to mush. Of course, her reaction didn't go unnoticed and Tyler softened his voice as he added, “I'm just saying that I believe in you. I'm good at predicting this sort of thing, you know. Just wait.”

“Hopefully,” she replied with a tiny smile. As Elodie maneuvered a measly forkful of greens into her mouth, she could feel her teenaged heart pounding with confusion and giddiness. She still couldn't wrap her mind around how much her life had been turned upside down in the past few weeks, especially in terms of her relationship with Tyler. Of all the girls that Tyler Peeters could be spending his free time with, why was he constantly choosing to spend it with her?

She looked up from her plate of pushed around avocado mush to find him watching her with a smirk on his face. “What?” she asked self-consciously, imagining what his eyes were doing behind the dark lenses of his sunglasses.

“Nothing,” he said with the smile of a sneaky little boy. “Just trying to snap a mental picture before the wife arrives.”

After finishing up lunch with Tyler, he grabbed her hand and dragged her past all of the NYU buildings, finally arriving at Washington Square Park. Unlike the lavender fields of Provence, the tulips and flowering trees were all in full bloom, providing bursts of color everywhere she looked. The warm weather and lazy weekday afternoon timing meant that the place was crawling with students, housewives, street performers and delinquents.

“I love this park. It actually feels... real. Do you know what I mean?” Elodie asked in a dreamy voice as she gazed around her. Two NYU students, who had been reading their textbooks on the grass a few feet away, looked over at Tyler and whispered to each other in hushed tones, dissolving into giggles on their blanket. Uncomfortable with being watched, Elodie tried to yank her hand from Tyler's, only to have him tighten his grasp.

“Uh-huh,” he replied absentmindedly as he stood at the edge of a bench that was occupied by two young mothers in head-to-toe Lululemon outfits that matched their brightly-colored strollers. The two ladies, noticing someone staring at them, turned around huffily. When they saw Tyler looming over them, however, they tittered self-consciously while patting down their flyaways.

“There are plenty of free benches...” Elodie began as one of them cooed out, “We were just on our way out.” Elodie couldn't help but feel a tinge of annoyance as the shorter woman gave Tyler a flirty smile. Who did she think she was kidding? She had a baby with her!

Tyler seemed oblivious as he gave them a big smile and plopped down, dragging Elodie with him. “You know this bench is where I got scouted?” he mentioned in a nonchalant manner as he turned to face her. “This is where magic happened.”

“What do you mean?” she asked curiously. “I thought you are from Kentucky?”

“Yea, when I was in high school,” he retorted with a pretend sneer. “Back then, I was this lanky giant with terrible posture who filmed everything and annoyed the shit out of people with my camera. Then I miraculously got into NYU and studied Film at Tisch for a year until I got scouted right in this spot. Kelly saw me as I was filming my coked out roommate with a Flip Cam for a shitty last-minute project that I forgot to do. She approached me, I took a walking class and that was it. There's more to this devastatingly handsome face than meets the eye, you know.”

Elodie couldn't help but smile as she observed the cocky male model who sat before her. “You? Film” she asked with a small laugh. Even as she tried her best to picture it, she couldn't.

“Shutup,” he said, not even attempting to hide his proud smile. “I was good at it. Just not very good at going to class and turning in papers.”

“I always wanted to go to college,” she admitted. “You are lucky that you got to experience it at least a little bit.”

Tyler shook his head and ruffled her hair, much to her annoyance. “No way. College is a waste of time and money. Who knows, maybe I'll go back someday. But if we get to learn and do more shit this way, then why not?”

“Maybe,” Elodie replied, unable to wipe the smile off of her face. And as she spent the rest of the afternoon perched with him on that monumental bench, soaking in the sunshine while stealing kisses and chain smoking cigarettes, it never came to her attention that she had completely forgotten about James' existence.

Thirty-three

“I'm so sorry,” James blurted out as he walked quickly over to the table where Elodie was seated, deep into her third glass of Pinot Noir. “I tried to leave as quickly as I could, but the production guy left while we weren't looking and then the printer stopped working and then...”

“It is fine,” Elodie interrupted him with what she hoped was a warm smile. Seeing as how she was quite drunk from drinking on an empty stomach, she wasn't exactly sure what the expression she had plastered on her face looked like.

“You're the best,” James said with a big sigh of relief as he pecked her on the cheek and collapsed into his chair. “I was so worried that you might have given up on me and left.”

“Why would I leave?” Elodie asked, trying not to slur her words together. They had originally made plans to meet at 8 PM that evening at a trendy little restaurant around the corner from his office, but James had texted multiple times that he would be late. Not wanting to seem clingy or unreasonable, Elodie had merely sat and waited, indulging in one too many glasses of wine over the span of the hour-long wait. “You told me you were running late. Besides, your job is important.”

“Says who?” he asked while scrunching his face adorably. “Anyway, let's not talk about my job. I have to get back to the office after this, so I want at least a few minutes of escape.”

Elodie gave a small nod, observing James' sleepy face as he ordered a Coke and a 16 oz ribeye steak. With the huge bags he was carrying under his reddened eyes, he hardly resembled the fresh-faced man who had picked her up just the day before. After placing her own order, she looked back across the table to see him giving her a weak smile. Even after lack of sleep and an inhumane work schedule had taken their toll on him, he was still incredibly cute.

“You look so tired,” she couldn't help but comment with a worried look on her face. “We did not have to meet today, you know.”

James shook his head. “I know, but I wanted to make sure I saw you. I mean, I'm just happy that you even replied to me at all,” he said with a laugh as he rolled up his shirt sleeves. “I don't know why, but it felt like you couldn't wait to get away from me yesterday,” he added as a joke.

“Oh, no,” she mumbled as she fidgeted with the edge of her napkin. “I was feeling...er, not very well. Sorry about that again.”

“Why are you apologizing?” he asked with an incredulous smile. There were those perfect teeth again. “I'm just glad you're feeling better. Besides, I needed a break from eating sandwiches or Chinese food at my desk. But enough about my pathetic excuse for a day. How was yours?”

“Fine,” she answered before reaching for her glass nervously, thinking back on her rendezvous with Tyler. “Just fine. Nothing exciting.”

“Well, we can do something exciting together soon,” James said as he let out a long sigh. “We're presenting to this client on Friday morning, so I'm a free man after that.”

“I think Tatiana mentioned Daniel is having a birthday party on Friday night?”

James shut his eyes tightly and groaned. “That's right. I think they wanted to get a table,” he muttered with a pained look on his face. “Do you mind?”

“No, not at all,” she replied, trying to hide her disappointment.

“You're coming with me, right?” he asked with pleading eyes. “It would make it a hundred times more bearable if you would.”

“Of course,” she told him with a small smile. If they were going to have to sit in an obnoxious club amongst an even more obnoxious crowd, at least they would be enduring it together. When he flashed his boyish grin of thanks at her, she could feel her heartbeat thumping noisily in her ears.

“And once we get all of that over with and I finally get a good night's sleep, I'm going to take you out on a proper date,” James said with a slight shake of his head after the server had set their food down. “I mean, what is this?” he asked in a hushed tone as he motioned discreetly at the tables surrounding them.

Elodie stifled a giggle as she looked around the room at the sheer number of business dinners going on around them. Given the restaurant's location in the ghost town that was the Financial District, the scene was exactly as one would expect it. Bankers in suits made up 90% of the clientele, with only two other bankers' wives adding to the female population. Of course, both of the middle-aged women were dripping in Cartier diamonds and clothed head-to-toe in the latest from the St. John or Armani collections. Their sullen-faced husbands sat across from them dressed impeccably in custom-tailored suits, their status-symbol Rolexes fighting to draw attention away from their receding hairlines.

“I didn't forget about our museum day either,” James told her before taking a bite of his steak and shooting her a wink.

She couldn't help but smile as she chewed on a piece of her mahi-mahi, thinking of how lucky she was to have met someone like James. But at the same time, she felt an uneasiness fill her as she thought of Tyler. Deep inside, she wished that one of them would show her some ugly side to his personality so that she could just make an easy choice. She hated deceiving both of them and felt terrible about meeting one behind the other's back. It honestly just felt like a dangerous game, and she didn't want to play anymore.

“Elodie?” James asked, breaking up her distracted thoughts. He was looking at her expectantly for an answer, his tired eyelids drooping ever so slightly.

“Sorry, I must have dazed off,” she said with an embarrassed smile. Even though she knew that he couldn't read her mind and hadn't the slightest idea of what she was thinking about, she couldn't help but notice her pulse quicken.

“Is Sunday all right with you?” he asked with a big grin.

“Sorry?” she squeaked out.

“The museums?”

“Oh, yes,” Elodie replied, trying not to seem too eager. “Sunday's perfect.”