“So now I really am going to give you a tour of my apartment,” Kirby said. “Can you believe we never got out of the kitchen? That’s pretty cool, huh?”
She looked up at him, staring at his face. He really was beautiful. His features were perfectly proportioned, but it was more than that. It was the tightness of youth. Some things couldn’t be fixed by the surgeon’s knife or the dermatologist’s needle, and that was skin tone and the firmness of the muscles, especially around the neck. Kirby’s neck was so smooth and the skin was like butter. Just looking at his neck was enough to turn her on again. That whole idea of women not being attracted to a man for his looks and youth was a complete lie . . .
She suddenly wondered if he did this with a lot of women. But she couldn’t ask him that, could she? She mustn’t seem insecure. She’d better take her cues from him.
“I’d love to see the rest of the apartment,” she said.
It wasn’t much, only a living room and a bedroom and a standard New York City bathroom, but the furniture was surprisingly nice. “I get an eighty percent discount at Ralph Lauren, so that’s pretty great,” he said. He sat down on the suede couch and she sat down next to him. His modeling book was on the table, and she automatically began flipping through it. There were photographs of Kirby’s face in advertisements for aftershave, Kirby sitting on a motorcycle for a leather company, Kirby in Venice, in Paris, in a cowboy hat somewhere in the West, maybe Montana. He put his hand over hers. “Don’t,” he said.
She looked at him, wishing she could fall into his eyes. They weren’t really brown, but a light tawny color, with flecks of gold. She wanted to connect with him.
“Why not?” she said. Her voice didn’t sound quite normal. Glancing down at a page in his modeling book (Kirby on a horse), she couldn’t believe what she’d just done with him. It was kind of a miracle. Who would have thought that she could still have sex like that, at her age, with a man who was so young and gorgeous?
“I hate modeling,” Kirby said. “I hate the way they treat me. Like a piece of meat, you know? They don’t, really, give a shit about me as a person.”
What would it be like to fall in love with Kirby Atwood, she wondered, staring at him with sympathetic horror. Thank God Kirby couldn’t hear her thoughts. “That’s terrible,” she said, finding his distress extremely touching. There was nothing more powerful, she thought, than discovering that the beautiful were just as vulnerable as everyone else. “But you’re so good at it.”
“Good how? There’s, like, nothing about it to be good at. They point the camera at me and tell me to look happy. Or strong. Or some other shit. But sometimes,” he said, jokingly touching her arm, “I give them something different, you know. I try to look thoughtful. Like I’m thinking something.”
“Show me that look now,” Nico said encouragingly.
Jesus, what was she doing? She had to get back to her office.
“Yeah?” Kirby said. He lowered his head, and then raised it, staring off into the middle distance. He held this pose for a few seconds. He looked slightly pensive, but other than that, his expression didn’t resemble much of anything. Oh dear, Nico thought.
“Did you get it?” he asked eagerly. “Could you tell that I was thinking?”
She didn’t want to be cruel. “Oh yes. That was great, Kirby.”
“Could you tell what I was thinking about?”
Nico smiled. He was so childlike, it was refreshing. “You tell me.”
“Sex!” Kirby exclaimed with a grin. “The sex we just had? Okay, you’re probably thinking that I should have looked really happy. But I tricked you, because I was thinking that I really hoped I’d be able to see you again, and I wasn’t sure if you’d want to.”
“Oh,” Nico said, tongue-tied. He kept throwing her off balance. She had never been good at emotional declarations, especially with men. “I do want to see you again. But Kirby,” she said, looking at her watch, “I really have to get back to my office.”
“Yeah, I better get going too. I’ve got shit to do too, you know?” They stood awkwardly for a moment, then Kirby leaned over and kissed her.
“That was really fun, huh?” he said.
“It was great,” she murmured, wishing she could tell him how wonderful it really was.
“Puppy!” he said, breaking away from her. The dog came trotting out of the bedroom. “Sit!” Kirby commanded. “Shake!” The dog held up its paw. Nico shook it.
* * *
WENDY HEALY SAT IN the back of the screening room on the forty-third floor of the Splatch-Verner building.
The screening room held fifty seats—dark leather, the size of club chairs—and was paneled in blond wood. There were cup holders in the armrests, and small wooden desks swung up from the right side of the seats for people who wanted to make notes. There were about twelve people in the room: Peter and Susan, the two executives who worked beneath her; Selden Rose, the head of the cable division with two of his executives; Cheryl and Sharline, the East and West Coast heads of publicity; the director and his girlfriend; and three of the actors in the film—Tanner Cole and Jenny Cadine, plus the “newcomer” Tony Cranley, a short, mousy-looking young man whom everyone was predicting was going to be a star, and who didn’t go anywhere without his publicist, Myra, a heavyset honey-colored blonde, who looked like everyone’s mother.
“Hi sweetie,” Myra said, kissing Wendy on the cheek after having settled Tony into a chair in the front row next to Tanner.
“Sit with us,” Sharline said to Myra.
“For a minute,” Myra said. She looked up at Tony, who was pretending to box Tanner around the ears.
“How’s it going?” Wendy asked, pushing on her glasses. She was slightly nervous, and her glasses kept slipping down her nose.