Super in the City (26 page)

Yeah, that should work.

Still undecided, I flung open the door and found Hayden standing there barefoot, shirtsleeves rolled up, freckled arms braced on the doorframe, waiting for me. His mouth was exactly where mine needed to be, and it seemed easiest to postpone any further decisions until after I’d kissed him.

Hayden’s kisses contradicted his arrogance and selfishness. His kisses caressed, lingered, explored. They were thoughtful and patient and generous. He bit gently at my lips, then let his tongue take a slow tour of my mouth, while the rest of me quivered helplessly. I let him lead us to my bed and pulled him on top of me, grabbing his hips, grabbing at another chance, blissfully succumbing to bad judgment. He felt better in my arms than I’d remembered, warmer and more
solid, and my whole body nearly wept with the release of years of squelched desire.

Hayden started working his way under my shirt, letting his fingers trail up and down my belly, until I was nothing more than a sack of goose bumps. I groaned softly as he released the clasp of my bra. The only thing that mattered at that moment was having his hands reach my breasts, but he was going to make me wait. I persuaded my own hands to leave his firm, round butt and go hunting for even better territory. Just as I was poised to release his straining zipper, the phone rang.

“Let it go,” he murmured, planting a line of kisses from my waist to my chest. I grabbed his head and pulled him up to me so that I could taste his mouth again. The phone stopped ringing and I relaxed, letting my fingers work their way back down to his jeans.

“I’ve missed you,” he whispered. “I’ve missed your skin and your hair and your ass and your gorgeous gray eyes.”

He called them blue in his breakup letter, I thought as the phone started up again.

“Damn it!” I yelled. I lunged across him and grabbed it off the cradle.

“Zephyr, he bought me hemorrhoid cream.”

I panted into the phone, the wires of my addled brain completely crossed.

“Zeph, are you okay? It’s Mercedes.”

“I… what? Hemorrhoid cream?” Hayden rolled me back on the pillow and started tracing the outline of my ribs with his tongue. I suppressed a groan.

“Dover,” Mercedes said. “I was in agony after the concert on Saturday night—your parents started the standing O; they’re so sweet, even if they are bizarre—and we were already at my place and he went around the corner to the all- night
Duane Reade and bought me Preparation H. Zephyr, I’m in love. I totally get it. I get the fuss. I love him.”

This was the closest I’d ever heard Mercedes come to raving. In fact, for her, this
was
raving. I pushed Hayden off me, holding up a finger.

“One second,” I whispered.

“Is that Gregory?” Mercedes asked.

“No, just a delivery guy.” Hayden climbed back on me and started tracing his finger around the top of my jeans. I choked back my lust and wondered if there was any good way to hang up on my friend.

“Mercedes,” I croaked with as much false enthusiasm as I could summon, “I want all the details, but I want them in person. Phone isn’t good enough. Tomorrow, right? You, me, Lucy, okay?” I hoped I sounded persuasive.

“Both his parents died when he was ten. He was raised by his sister,” Mercedes said dreamily.

“Merce, the whole world knows that,” I said as Hayden bent over and darted his tongue in and out of my belly button.

The intercom buzzed, which at least permitted me to groan out loud.

“I’ll get it,” Hayden drawled. I covered the phone up as fast as I could and glared at him.

“Zeph, who’s with you?” Mercedes demanded. Hayden jumped off me and headed for the intercom, smirking at me.

“Don’t you dare answer that,” I hissed, jumping off the bed. He put one finger on the lever and I had to take my hand off the phone to bat it away.

“Hayden, cut it out!”

“Hayden’s there?
Hayden?”
Mercedes shrieked through the phone. “Zephyr, goddamn it, don’t make me come over there. I’ll wring his scrawny little dick. I swear to God! And then I’ll fucking kill you.
Kill
you. Do you hear me?”

Hearing Mercedes curse—and with Tag- like vigor—stopped me in my tracks. Hayden abruptly removed his teasing finger. For the first time since I’d known him, he actually looked something other than completely confident.

“Who
is
that?” he said, a worried frown creasing his brow.

“Yes?” I shouted into the intercom, choosing to ignore him and Mercedes.

“It’s me.” Gregory’s sweet, cracking voice wound its way up the wires, into my apartment, and through my heart.

Fuck.
Fuckfuck fuck.

“Zephyr,” Mercedes said threateningly.

I opened my eyes and found Hayden crossing his arms and smiling, looking immensely entertained. The threat of de-dicking had passed.

“I have to go. I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said to Mercedes, then added, “I’m not doing anything stupid.”

“Yes, you are,” she said with resignation.

“Yes, I am,” I agreed, and hung up. The intercom buzzed again, a giant angry wasp.

“Coming!” I let go of the lever and looked at Hayden, wishing I could vaporize him or at least stuff him in a closet.

“You were about to,” he growled, putting both his hands around my waist.

“Stay right here,” I instructed, hoping to strike a tone both menacing and seductive.

I bounded down the stairs, trying to rehook my bra and figure out how to get Gregory to leave as fast as the physical world would permit, while also being receptive to any olive branches he might be proffering.

I flung open the door and found not only Gregory standing there, but also Freddy Givitch with his gray face and a woman who was a dead ringer for Sandra Oh. For a second, I wondered whether in some perversely roundabout way to win me
back, Gregory had conjured up a hot Asian woman for Darren Schwartz.

“The apartment,” Freddy muttered to my feet. “She’s interested.” Sandra Oh’s clone smiled tightly from above her perfectly tailored suit, indicating that we had already wasted too much of her time on introductions. She gave a little shake of her black mane and looked behind me up the stairs. I stood aside and gestured for them to go in.

“I can answer any questions you might have …” I said to their receding backs in a tardy effort to appear professional. At least I was still wearing my responsible, impartial juror’s outfit.

I turned back to Gregory and said nothing, not trusting my voice. The pain of his rejection on that very stoop just two days earlier made it hard for me to do more than glance at him every few seconds, like a Tourettic mouse.

“Zephyr,” he said, spreading his arms pleadingly. My throat tightened. “I need to explain something to you. Can I come up? Can we talk inside?” I wanted to throw my arms around him, nuzzle his neck, and feel his palms press into my back, but instead I had to shake my head.

Gregory looked stricken.

“Zephyr,” Hayden crooned from somewhere above us, “I’m wai-aiting!”

I ran both hands through my hair, pulling at it as if I could trigger a trapdoor to fall through. My breathing grew shallow and I realized that, for the second time that day, I was at risk of passing out. Then my eyelid started twitching, the way it had when Tag and I got caught at the St. Regis. I had to get Gregory out of here.

“Who was that?” Gregory asked.

“The broker,” I gulped.

“Him?” Gregory said doubtfully.

I looked up and there was Freddy following Sandra down
the stairs, with something vaguely related to a smile plastered on his face.

“I’ll take it,” she said breezily, waving her hand in the general vicinity of the building and starting down the stoop.

“It’s not ready to be rented,” Gregory said suddenly.

I looked at him, surprised. Sandra froze on the step, one gym- toned calf in mid-plunge. She turned her head slowly and fixed Freddy with a deadly glare.

“Make it ready,” she intoned.

Perhaps there was more to consider in a potential tenant than the size of her Marc Jacobs purse.

“Who is this guy?” Freddy muttered in Gregory’s direction, as Sandra marched toward the corner in full taxi- hail stance.

“Yeah, Zephyr, who are these guys?” Hayden cheerfully padded down the stairs and leaned against the wall of the vestibule, nursing another beer.

Gregory looked back and forth between Hayden’s shoeless feet and mine, then turned to me, betrayal flashing in his eyes.

“It’s not ready to be rented,” he repeated slowly, but of course what he meant was, You whore.

“Zephyr?” Freddy whined.

“There are still some things that need to be fixed,” Gregory said pointedly to me.

The staircase. Was he holding on to the chance that we could have another escapade within its rosy confines? Did I mean that much to him? Did he mean as much to me as four thousand dollars a month?

“Anyone want a beer?” Hayden offered.

“Oh my God!” I exploded. “Hayden, you have to leave. Now.”

Hayden didn’t budge.

“Freddy, the apartment
is
ready to rent,” I said, looking at Gregory. It was a stupid staircase, and whatever runty relationship Gregory and I might have been starting was already over.
He was sullen, judgmental, unpredictable, interfering, and unsocialized. I’d wall over the door or solder it shut, and if Sandra Oh or some variation of her rented the place and asked about it, I’d tell them it was a relic from another age, that it went nowhere. Not unlike my life at that moment, which felt as if it might actually be moving backward.

“It’s ready,” I said firmly “When does she want to move in?”

Gregory roughly cupped the back of his neck with both hands and pulled, as though he was displacing a desire to strangle me.

“Is this your boyfriend?” Hayden asked nonchalantly, slugging back the rest of his lager.

Freddy looked up, possibly for the first time in his life.

“Not you. Him.” Hayden gestured to Gregory with his bottle.

“No,” Gregory spat. “I’m just the exterminator.”

Without giving me another glance, Gregory turned and left. I braced myself against the smooth oak door. How could I be dumped by the same man twice in the space of two days? And how could it hurt just as much? Wasn’t there some law of physics that prevailed here?

“The exterminator?” Freddy said, his gaze having returned to its comfort zone near my knees. “Is there a pest problem in this building?”

“Yeah,” I said, looking at Hayden, who smiled and did a Charlie Chaplin eyebrow dance.

“Fix it,” Freddy muttered, and galumphed down the steps to the street.

Wordlessly, Hayden slipped past me, letting his chest graze mine, and locked the door behind Freddy. He took my hands and pulled me to him.

“Hey, you,” he whispered, his lips fluttering against my ear.

“What’s my name?” I couldn’t resist whispering back to him.

He leaned back and regarded me with amused confusion.

“What?”

I shook my head and looked into his green eyes. I waited for my lust to overpower me again, but all I could think of was Gregory. Gregory on the front steps, licking custard off his fingers. Gregory’s sweet breath on my cheek in the dark of Roxana’s closet. Gregory teaching me more about myself in an hour than Hayden could in a lifetime.

I squeezed Hayden’s hands, willing myself to go back upstairs and pick up where we left off. The Zephyr of the past two years demanded it. God knows I
wanted
to keep wanting Hayden. Gregory was gone—again—and here was the man I’d been obsessing about, offering himself to me.

Hayden started up the stairs, pulling me behind him. I walked slowly up the steps, counting them while I hashed it out with the devil homunculus.

I came to my decision with two steps left to go.

“Hayden,” I said, stopping short.

He turned and looked at me, giving me a soft smile.

“That
was
your boyfriend, wasn’t it?” he said almost wistfully, exhibiting more insight in that one question than he had in nearly five months of dating. I wavered.

“I don’t know what he is,” I told Hayden apologetically, feeling like I was jumping off a cliff, “but he’s … he’s on my mind,” I finished lamely.

“So should I go?” He encircled my wrist with his thumb and forefinger. My knees almost buckled, but I clenched my jaw and nodded.

He nodded back, with a hint of self- pity, and dropped my wrist. I sucked in my breath. Oh, God, I was never going to see
him again. I’d been given my second chance and I was chucking it away, as if I were a rich woman tossing pennies. It took all my willpower not to push him inside the apartment and tell him I was just kidding. I studied him hard. This was it.

“Okay just gotta get my shoes,” he said, suddenly jovial again. He winked at me and pushed open the apartment door.

I shook my head, pitying him. Poor deluded guy. This is really it, Hayden, I told both of us silently. It’s Over.

I watched him slip his shoes on and sling his red Manhattan Portage over his shoulder.

“See you in court tomorrow!” He kissed me on the nose and bounced down the stairs.

H
E READ MY BOOK, ZEPHY? REALLY?
”

I lay on my parents’ couch that night with one arm flung over my eyes, slumped against my father. It had started to rain right after Hayden left, and the sound of the water splattering on the skylight perfectly matched the drowning sensation I’d labored under all day.

My dad was supposed to be giving me a neck rub, but he couldn’t resist tugging at my ears as he thought aloud.

“Ow! Dad, no ears.”

“Sorry. What did he say? Did he like it?” my dad persisted, pulling at one lobe again.

“Daddy, ow, I don’t
know.
He was out to get me. He used it as a weapon against me.” I knew I was being melodramatic, but I didn’t care. My heart was broken and my dad only cared about what some over- zealous defense lawyer thought of his book.

“What do you think of Anne?” he said, referring to Langley the blond prosecutor. “She’s a superstar. Did you like her? What did she ask you?”

“Dad,” I muttered somewhere toward my armpit. “This is why I’m never going to get picked for a jury. Stop asking!”