Forever With Him Page 4

  I nodded, because I understood that he needed to feel like there was a possibility of us seeing each other in order to commit to the film, which I knew was what he wanted. Of course I would try to make that happen. I wanted to be with him. It was worth some redeye flights and a little schedule juggling. “Of course. Sure, I’ll come out,” I said, having no idea how I was going to do it. I knew I’d be returning to a full in-box and a lot of small fires no one had put out in my absence. The last thing I could do was take more time off. But I had to give Chris the affirmation he wanted. He seemed unable to move forward without it. “I just need to look at my calendar when I get back to work,” I said.

  FYI, the calendar is going to say “no way in hell.”

  Chris seemed relieved. Finally, the sad, guilty look was swept from his face. All I had to do was convince him his life didn’t have to change in order to be with me.

  The reality was that his life hadn’t changed. After one night back in LA, during which we’d fallen asleep on the couch despite trying to enjoy our last few hours together, he’d flown back to New York on a private jet.

  The next morning, a medical assistant was ferried to the production offices where Chris was meeting with the director to take a cheek swab from him in order to test for paternity. His ex-girlfriend would need a blood test, which so far, she’d refused to get. Once she did, results could be finalized within two to five days. Chris would feel better once he had all the information. So would I.

  So instead of spending the majority of the next six months in LA, he’d be spending the next three months in New York and Ireland, with the time after that up in the air.

  “You’re so great,” he told me. I could see his appreciation for bending to allow for his schedule.

  But I wasn’t really bending. In fact, a part of me had known his offer to move to LA was too good to be true. It was a whim, borne out of his sadness about our vacation fling coming to an end. It wasn’t real.

  I’d have to see how I felt about starting a relationship from a distance. I had no idea if it would work, but I knew I had to try, because watching him leave this time made me sadder than when I’d said goodbye in France. That time, I’d thought it was goodbye forever.

  Why was I sadder when it was only goodbye for a while? Maybe because it hurt more to want him and know he couldn’t be with me for months.

  Chris called when he landed to tell me he missed me and to reiterate how grateful he was that I was so understanding of his career. He’d made plans to meet the director the next day over lunch.

  He called me again later, after getting coffee from a place on Thompson Street and had chatted with the baristas there because he was that guy, always friendly and open even though he was famous. A few people pretended to take selfies but were actually snapping pictures of him from a distance, he said. He told me he could tell when people were doing it, but it didn’t bother him. Without me raising hell at the gall of people who intruded on his every movement, he took the selfies and rolled with the trappings of fame like he always did.

  It was almost as if he’d never left New York… Almost like we’d never met.

  Chapter Four

  Nikki

  Things were a little different when I returned to work post-vacay. For one thing, I saw my office anew, which was always a good thing. The physical office was designed like a tech campus, with a big, open space in the center, containing a shuffleboard table, a well-stocked kitchen and chairs, and couches arranged into seating areas to encourage idea sharing. I remembered how much I liked working there, if for no other reason than the snack jars of M&M’s and pretzels and the dizzying selection of refrigerated drinks.

  I also liked the intensity of the work, which kept my mind sharp and challenged me to think of new solutions to problems my publicity clients had. And I liked my colleagues. At least, I’d liked them before my two weeks away.

  On my first day back, I felt a palpable shift in energy when I walked into the conference room for our Monday briefing. I expected to feel a little out of sync with everyone because I’d been out of the loop for two weeks, but I’d underestimated the Chris factor. It turned out that everyone knew we were seeing each other, and that fact had unleashed some sort of fervor among my colleagues.

  I should have been prepared for it. I worked at a public relations firm, after all. Business depended on knowing news and gossip, so of course, everyone at my firm already knew about my time on the red carpet in Cannes with Chris. Still, I figured that after a couple of questions about how we met or what we did in France, the conversation would shift to the regular Monday work imperatives.

  It didn’t.

  “So he approached you?” asked Jemma, a junior publicist who’d been at the firm for a little under a year. Until then, she’d barely acknowledged we worked for the same company, even though I outranked her, and I’d tried to be friendly on several occasions. Jemma was a cool girl who liked other cool girls—which, until Chris, I was not. Suddenly, she was making plans for us to “grab lunch later.”

  “Um, sure,” I said, watching her finger-comb her blond lob and adjust the tortoiseshell frames of her hipster glasses so they perched higher on her nose. I could actually see her lash extensions brushing against the glass when she blinked. It looked uncomfortable. Maybe I could ask her about them at lunch.

  Sure, that’s why she wants to have lunch with you. To talk about eyelashes.

  As if to prove my point, she stared at the ceiling, as though Chris’s face had suddenly appeared there. “I just need to know. What’s he really like? Is he, like, super nice? He seems super nice but with an edge, you know?” she asked the room. “It’s like he has this image of the damaged superhero with the complicated past, but you can tell he actually calls his mom once a week. Have you met his mom? Is she stunning and youthful but without having any work done?” She was no longer talking to me but instead running her theories past everyone in our group. I stared at her and hoped she would keep talking so I didn’t have to.

  Those dreams were short-lived, because James, whose accounts included some of the biggest celebrities the firm had as clients, entered the conference room at the tail end of Jemma’s diatribe and joined in with his own questions. “Oh, good. We’re still talking about this. Is the real Chris Conley an asshole? I hear he’s hard to work with and kind of a diva.”

  It went on like that for the better part of a half hour. I felt like an unenlightened pacifist who’d inadvertently showed up at a tactical shooting range with a powder puff as my defense.

  I didn’t want to gossip about “the real Chris Conley” and satisfy the idle curiosity of my coworkers, who were acting like breathless superfans instead of responsible purveyors of public relations solutions. Okay, maybe I should have been a little less grandiose about the importance of what was, in essence, spin control designed to make bad situations look better. Maybe none of us was actually a responsible purveyor of anything, and I needed to join the fangirl club, because that was the business we were in.

  I looked at our boss, Ben Dwyer, hoping to catch his eye in apology for derailing the meeting, but he was reading something on his phone, seemingly oblivious to the chaos around him. He had a habit of seeming detached and uninvolved, but I knew for a fact that he heard every word that was spoken and enjoyed pretending to be a fly on the wall.

  Eventually, the chatter died down after I’d promised enough lunches and “gab sessions” with colleagues to satisfy their curiosity and implied that they would get more dirt later if only they’d shut up for the time being.

  Dwyer had seemed oblivious to the kerfuffle and continued our meeting, only to corner me as we all headed back to our desks and let me know that if I were to convince Chris Conley to sign on as a client with our firm, it would “definitely be a coup” for the firm and—hint, hint—my career.

  But I didn’t plan on sullying our nascent relationship with a hard sell to switch PR firms, so I nodded as though I understood why it was the obvious win
-win outcome to get Chris as a client.

  Of course, I knew any public relations firm would like to have a megawatt star for a client. What I didn’t know was whether switching firms would benefit Chris in any way. He seemed perfectly happy with the team he was using, so switching would be a favor to me. I wasn’t prepared to ask him for that kind of favor, at least not yet.

  It wasn’t that I wasn’t ambitious. Clearly, bringing in big clients would lead to a promotion and more clout, higher pay, and a better title at the firm. I wasn’t sure I wanted that.

  As I walked back to my desk, I paid a little more attention than usual to the chatter of voices around me, all talking to clients and reassuring them that we understood the mission and knew how to strategize for their best interests.

  I normally liked my job well enough, but after Chris’s baby mama scare, I saw it in a slightly less rosy light. I could imagine his public relations team scrambling to put a better spin on the truth, and it made me feel disingenuous about doing the same for my clients.

  My job didn’t delight me with inspiring daily moments and mind-bending challenges, but I liked it and was good at it. It had never bothered me much before that I hadn’t zeroed in on one career passion. I was a Renaissance woman with many interests, I told myself. How could I be expected to commit to a single path and make it my career? Maybe I wasn’t the kind of person who could do that.

  But maybe I was. It just wasn’t this job.

  That thought continued to haunt me. So much so that I wanted to talk it through with Annie, my best friend, when she was in town later that week for a meeting with an expert witness she needed for an upcoming trial.

  Annie had always been my sounding board, from the time we were college roommates through the bad boyfriend years, the bad hair years, and at every career crossroads. She’d once insistently argued her case for why I needed to give country music a chance—because it’s epically sad but it tells a story—but she also respected that I wasn’t going to get a tattoo just because she wanted company when she had the final daisies put on her flower sleeve.

  I loved her like the sister I wished I had when, as an only child, I wrote different girls’ names on my clothes and pretended they were hand-me-downs from my cool older siblings. Annie made me laugh harder than anyone, often just as I’d taken a sip of something that was sure to come out my nose. I never learned to wait until she stopped talking before I drank. Probably never would.

  The timing of her visit couldn’t have been better. With Chris back in New York and the jet lag wearing off, I was ready for a night out. And she already knew most of the details about Chris and how we met, so we were free to talk about other things. Or so I thought.

  At least she started with the pretense of talking about other things. “You want me to be honest?” she asked. We were in her room at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, where she was unpacking her overnight bag, putting everything into drawers, and hanging her dress and blazer in the closet.

  “You’re only here for one night. I can’t believe you’re unpacking.”

  “I don’t want my dress wrinkled for tomorrow. And not everyone likes to live out of a duffel bag like they’re at camp.”

  “I don’t travel like that anymore. I have a roller bag now. And yes, in answer to your question, of course I want you to be honest. Always.” I sat in a club chair next to the window, overlooking a view of the mountains to the north of Beverly Hills. I knew Annie had chosen the hotel for the view, even though she was only staying one night. When she first moved to San Francisco, she bragged that on any four-mile run she took, she could get up a hill that would afford a sweeping view of the San Francisco Bay.

  I was impressed she could jog four miles uphill. I liked running as long as the road was flat, which was why the beach bike path was the only place I ever jogged.

  She continued emptying her bag, and I looked out the window and waited for her to be honest about some part of my life that I probably thought was fine before her scrutiny.

  “I never understood why you took the job at the PR firm.”

  “I took it because there was a learning curve and it involves a lot of writing.”

  “And on the daily, are you happy there?”

  “Happy enough. I don’t hate it.”

  “Ugh. I hate it for you. I’ve never heard a person less passionate about work.”

  Annie was nothing if not direct, and suddenly I wasn’t in the mood to have my life choices ripped apart.

  “Okay, maybe honesty’s overrated.”

  “Too late. Horse has left the barn.” I was pretty sure she was mixing metaphors, but why quibble?

  “So put the horse back in. I changed my mind. I don’t want to talk about work.”

  “Okay, let’s talk about your sexy, hot boyfriend.”

  “I don’t want to talk about that either.” I’d just gotten my heart to a place of détente, where it wasn’t rioting on me every second, asking for a dose of Chris. I had it bad for him, and I was doing my best to push those feelings down to a manageable place so I could get through each day without sulking.

  “So what do you want to talk about?”

  “How about the paleo diet?”

  “Are you on the paleo diet?”

  “No, but maybe I want to be.”

  She shook her head. “You love carbs too much. You’d cave after a day.” Then she patted her stomach and looked sideways at herself in the mirror to see if any errant bulges appeared where they shouldn’t. Like the mere mention of carbs might have caused her to gain five pounds. She’d always been worried about her weight, something she attributed to having Eastern European genes.

  “Someday, when my swinging bubba arms take out an eye, you’ll see I was telling the truth,” she once told me. Right now, with the miles she ran to keep fit and the long hours she spent at work, there was no excess anything swinging anywhere.

  “Are carbs not allowed on the paleo diet?” I asked. Maybe I should have proposed a better topic.

  “No, they’re not. So since you’re trying so hard to avoid talking about work, let’s start there. Why haven’t you quit?” With her usual fastidiousness, she used a travel steamer to take a couple faint wrinkles out of her dress before closing it in the closet.

  The truth was, I’d thought long and hard about quitting in the couple months leading up to my vacation. Part of what I hoped to figure out by walking through Europe was whether there was something I was dying to do instead. But I’d come to decide that my job was fine for now. “Because I still enjoy it. My job involves a lot of writing, which I’m good at, and it’s not hard, and I basically like the people.”

  “You basically like them. Exactly.” She pointed at me as if she’d just distilled whiskey from a pile of wheat. She also like to point at the jury during her trials. “Your answer tells me everything I need to know about why you should quit.”

  “Does it tell you how I’ll pay my bills if I quit? Or what job I should do instead?”

  She shook her head and walked toward the door, signaling me to follow. “I’m done unpacking. Let’s go upstairs. There’s a rooftop restaurant with a grain bowl that’s supposed to be delish.” Annie was a foodie, so it didn’t surprise me that she knew more about a hotel restaurant in LA than I did. She barely waited for me to extract my body from the chair before she left the room.

  “We’re eating a grain bowl? I thought we were getting drinks.”

  “Relax. We’re getting whatever you want, as long as you tell me everything.” It felt like a deal with the devil, but I followed her to the elevator.

  When we exited the elevator, I felt a light breeze and the feeling of being on vacation without leaving my home city. Something about being at a hotel, especially a swanky one with a great view and drinks that cost more than my pants, took me away from the everyday and allowed me to relax more than if I was sitting on my couch at home. I started thinking maybe she’d forget to outline her grand design for my future if I up and quit my job, som
ething I was highly unlikely to do, given that I was risk averse and not unhappy with my job.

  Annie insisted on paying for the drinks, which did not bode well for me and the planned interrogation. “Cheers,” she said. “Now, let’s talk about finding you a better job.” The devil never got waylaid from a plan.

  “Are you really gonna make me do this? Why can’t we talk about your job and what your expert witness had to say?”

  “Because he said ordinary expert-witness things and therefore will make a perfectly good expert witness. I probably didn’t need to come in person to find that out, but I wanted to visit you, so I boondoggled down here.”

  “And I love you for that, but I don’t need you dissecting my work life and telling me to scrap my job just for sport.”

  She took a sip of her drink, something with gin, bitters, and a nasturtium floating on the top. Sipping was difficult with the large flower in the way, so she chucked it onto a napkin and sat back in her chair to take a real sip. I stared at my wine, watching the condensation collect on the outside of the glass under the hot afternoon sun. I could never out-argue Annie. She was a litigator, for crying out loud. No one had a chance against her debating skills, and least of all me, when all I wanted was to talk about the weather, and she was encouraging me to make a major life change. I sighed, readying myself for the onslaught of challenging questions that would make me question my motivations and reason for being.

  Instead, she changed her tack. “I’m not telling you to scrap your job. I’m just planting a seed. So maybe it will grow, eventually, into a tree that will fall on your place of business and you’ll have to flee the building.”

  “Fine. I’m fine with the seed. But here’s the thing: I may not be the kind of person who’s passionate about a job. I have other things in life that I’m passionate about. Maybe my job just needs to be good enough to allow me to do those other things.” The sun felt nice against my face, and since I’d forestalled the discussion about work, I resumed my faux mini-vacation and looked out at the view over the hills.