“Thanks. Wish me luck.”
“Good luck. Where are yo
u two going?”
“I don’t’ want to say.”
“Why not?”
“Tamarind. I know you have bad memories.”
“Just don’t go there with Kevin, you should be fine. The steak was excellent.”
“I may have to try that,” Marj said.
Britt went back to her apartment and applied her makeup with great care. She experimented with different earrings, with bracelet versus no bracelet. Soon it was time to go. She took a cab to Salamander and paid the exorbitant cover charge. The club was packed and the band had just started when she arrived. She ordered a lemon drop martini and sipped it, trying to make her way through the crush to get near the stage. Her ears rang from the volume, her chest felt the impact of the bass as they played. At the end of the song, she heard Jack’s voice say they were taking a break because there was a problem with the sound equipment.
As she reached the stage, he walked off to the side to get his bottle of water. A girl stepped up onstage and reached for him. At first, Britt thought it was a deranged groupie but he looped an arm easily around her hips and kissed her back. Britt managed to get back through the crowd and deposit her unfinished drink on the bar. She stumbled out onto the quiet pavement with tears in her eyes. He had kissed that girl like he’d done it a million times, like she was supposed to be there by his side. Britt found a cab and went home. She washed off all that makeup but she couldn’t pretend she was able to wash away all her expectations that had just been destroyed. Somehow she had thought that his text about the show was the first step on the way back to each other. She put on her pajamas and poured herself a glass of wine. Might as well get some work done, she thought ruefully.
She opened her laptop and started down the formidable stack of papers. She entered data and made corrections. About halfway down the pile, she encountered Jack’s insurance file. Shaking her head with nothing but regret—regret that he wasn’t hers, regret that she’d screwed everything up, regret even that she was going to have to enter data from a form with his handwriting all over it—she opened the file.
Instead of the insurance paperwork she expected, there were only two sheets of paper. One was a listing for an apartment in the city. She scanned the fact sheet. It had a roof garden, just like the one she’d picked out to share with Kevin before they broke up. The second one was a note written in his slanted scrawl. “Try once more, a real chance for us this time. A new place. A new start.” She let the paper flutter to the coffee table in surprise. A week and more ago he had given her this file and she’d avoided looking in it when all along this had been waiting for her. A declaration of intent, a real estate printout in a manila folder much like the one she’d been carrying the night they met. It was like he had handed her back her own dream in a crisp file folder. She wanted to cry. Instead she called and left a voicemail.
“Hi Jack, I need to go over some paperwork with you. Give me a call when you get the chance,” she said, a half smile on her face.
She hoped that he would listen to it, would answer her. When there was no immediate response, she fell to working again, convinced that when he heard the message he would call her, would speak to her and they could talk it out, figure out a way to be together. She had thought he was over her, but this folder seemed to prove otherwise. Slowly but surely, she plowed through more files, none of them nearly so exciting as Jack’s.
Chapter 18
She fell asleep on the couch surrounded by papers, her laptop sliding precariously off her lap. A knock at her door, insistent, woke her. She caught the laptop and set it on the table, tried to smooth her hair and looked out the peephole to see who would be there at two in the morning. Jack stood in her hall, for once not at ease but shifting his weight, stuffing his hands in his pockets and then taking them out again. She opened the door.
She smiled a little drowsily. “You got my message.”
“What message?”
“I left you a voice mail,” she said, puzzled as to why he was there.
“I’m not here because of some message. I’m here because I had hoped you’d show at Salamander tonight and you didn’t come. I wanted to know...if you’re that finished with me. The boys and I, we just got a recording contract at a bigger label. We were trying out our new songs on the crowd. It was a pretty big night for me and I wished you had been there.”
“I was there, Jack.”
“I looked for you,” he said, a little hurt in his voice.
She let him in and he waited while she stacked up her work and set it aside before he sat down.
“I was there. I stayed up until you had equipment trouble and kissed a girl,” she confessed. “Then I left. Don’t tell me it was your sister. You don’t have one.”
“I’m so sorry you had to watch that. It kind of just happened.”
“Who was it?”
“That was Miranda.”
“Oh, that explains it. Miranda,” she said a little hotly.
“Miranda and I have been out a couple of times. She came to my show. She kissed me and I kissed her back. So pretty much it’s exactly what it looked like.”
“I see.” Britt sank down onto the sofa, about two feet away from him, careful to leave plenty of space. “So, you have her. Why did you come here?”