Page 18 of The Moon & His Tides
Maybe a different man could have, but I was too hot-blooded to scorn a chance at sex and intimacy even though I knew in my bones it would all end in tragedy.
How could it not?
“I’m out, lads,” I called to Johnny and Ben, who sat on our sunken, creaky green couch playingCall of Dutyon the television.
“See ya, mate,” they said in unison without looking away from the set.
“Won’t be back,” I reminded them as my hand closed around the doorknob. “I told you last week I was moving out.”
“Right-o.” Ben nodded, his tongue tucked between his teeth as he jammed his thumb repeatedly at the controller. “Break a leg!”
They weren’t listening, but then they never did when they were fixed on a video game. I gave up, knowing that Russ would probably have a roommate in to take my place within a fortnight. He was the only semi-organized lad of the lot of them, an administrator at Finborough Theatre who collected strays like an old lady with cats. He’d taken one look at me the day I pulled up to the theatre to begin rehearsals forBury the Deadafter being scouted for it at a theatre house in Rome and asked me if I needed a place to crash. He was the one true friend I’d take away from my days in this flat.
“All right,” I said to no one as I opened the door and stepped into the hall. From outside the apartment, I peered in one last time, breathing deep the stale scent of ramen that permeated the walls from the take-out place downstairs, counting the discarded beer bottles on the kitchen table from last night’s gaff about town. “Goodbye,” I whispered, allowing myself to feel nostalgic and oddly bereft that this chapter of my life was drawing to such an unceremonious close.
When I closed the door on the apartment, though, I didn’t look back.
I walked down the four stories to the street, dodging a biking deliveryman outside the ramen place, and set off along the wind-swept, sleeting streets toward the other side of the train tracks.
If I hadany doubts before, they were multiplied tenfold when I arrived at the Meyers’s elite address in Chelsea. Their gorgeous yellow stone mansion was a hive of frenetic activity, the top door and basement entrance open to admit streams of people going in and out. A smartly dressed man with shoulders like a linebacker checked me in before he let me through the gate, but I was surprised he was able to keep track of everyone in the chaos.
“Scusi,” I said when a small ginger-haired woman carrying a truly enormous display of flowers bumped into me on our way to the stairs. “Can I give you a hand with that?”
Her smile was weak with relief. “I promise I go to the gym, but these flowers must weigh about forty pounds.”
I laughed as I slung my duffel crosswise over my shoulder and assumed her load. It wasn’t bad, but then, I was six foot four and built like a giant compared to her tiny form.
She glared at me, fisting her hands on her hips. “Well, you don’t have to make it look too easy.”
I shot her a wink. “Lead the way. I’d be helpless without you.”
She shook her head at me, and I had the sense she was used to men much more handsome and charming than myself.
“I’m Chaucer Williams,” she offered as she pushed the open door even wider to allow me entry. “And before you start, yes, it’s a tragic name for a girl, and yes, my mother is a literature professor at Oxford, and she wrote her dissertation on Chaucer when she was pregnant with me. Let’s just call her cruel error a result of crazy pregnancy brain, shall we?”
“‘The greatest scholars are not usually the wisest people,’” I quoted.
She blinked wide brown eyes at me as we paused in the foyer. “I’m sorry, did you actually just quote Chaucer to me?”
“Overdone?”
“No, not at all. I mean, not with this crowd.” She waved her hand around the chaos happening in the Meyers’s home, the beautiful clutch of people collected around a coffee table through the open archway to the right and a striking man wearing a muscle shirt and pink stiletto heels even though it was winter assembling what looked like a champagne tower in a room to the left. “They can quote anything from the silver screen, but most wouldn’t read a book, even if they were the lead in its adaptation.”
“Ooof, I sense you don’t have a lot of love for actors.”
Chaucer shrugged, but her grin was impish as she moved again to lead me deeper into the house. “You work for them long enough, the fascination tarnishes.”
“Mmm,” I hummed, noncommittal, as we moved down a panelled cream hall with towering ceilings into a large kitchen at the back right of the house.
It was all done in variations of white, but everything was textured and complicated, from the pink veins in the massive marble island to the paint strokes on the plaster walls that saved it from being austere and instead became warm and vibrant. A man and woman bustled in the space, the clear directors for the three young people diligently assembling a collection of finger foods for platters laid out on a palatial wood dining table at the back of the room near a wall of windows.
“What’s going on?” I asked my guide as she directed me to leave the flowers on a credenza already filled with them.
“Oh, honey, clearly you’re new to the team. Adam and Savannah host parties the way some people attend church. It’s a monthly occurrence, if not biweekly.” She frowned at me. “Who did you say you were again?”
“I didn’t,” I started to introduce myself when a heavy hand dropped to my shoulder, startling me so badly I stepped back into the person who’d touched me.
This resulted in my back pressed tight to the torso of a man tall enough to lean forward and whisper, “Careful,” in my ear as he steadied me with another hand at my hip.
