When we walk inside the brownstone the three of us used to share, my mom tells me she has a surprise for me. She covers my eyes and walks me to the foyer.
“Ta-da!”
And Joe, my sleek, sexy, silver fixed-gear bike, is waiting there, glistening and gleaming, the broken chain fixed.
“I picked him up this evening for you. And I went ahead and got the works. A full tune-up.” She presses the handlebar brakes. “See! I even had them tune the brakes too. And shine the frame.”
“He looks awesome.” I run my palm over the frame and it feels like steel silk. I give her a kiss on the cheek. “You’re the best, Mom.”
“Anything for you, my darling.”
This is why I can never hate her. This is why my hate is reserved only for them—her lovers. Never for my mom, who I love like crazy.
I head for the fridge, for my postgame ritual of a cold Diet Coke. I crack open a can, savoring that first sip. It’s then that she turns her phone back on. It starts buzzing instantly. The messages must have piled up. I hear her call her agent back, and my face flushes momentarily when she says his name. Hayes. That’s what everyone else calls him. Everyone but me.
I imagine Hayes in the office being all agenty and business sexy in his colorful shirts, the red, the purple, the dark navy blue, and most of all I picture the way they fit his tall, strong, sturdy frame so well.
“I was quite productive today and wrote three smoking-hot scenes for the upcoming story arc,” she says to him. Lords and Ladies is the top-rated nighttime soap opera she birthed several years ago and still pens to this day for TV’s hottest premium network LGO. As the showrunner for Lords and Ladies, she created it, she controls it, and she writes the smoking-hot scenes. Sure, she has a whole staff of writers at her beck and call over at LGO’s West Fifty-Seventh Street studios, but the story line is hers, the intrigue, the affairs, and the double crosses are all courtesy of the mind of Jewel Stanza. It’s a pen name, shortened from her married name.
I stare out the kitchen window, this time hearing bits and pieces of his sexy, strong voice on the other end of the conversation. The voice I want to keep just for myself. Only he belongs to so many people. He belongs to her, and to his clients, and to the business, and to everyone who wants a piece of him.
Most of all, he belongs to the eight years that separate us.
“Let’s have you over for dinner and we’ll chat about the scenes then,” she says casually to him, as if this is a mere suggestion. But it’s not optional to disobey. “We’ll invite the usual suspects.” She rattles off the names of LGO’s chief publicist and her husband, the studio’s international distribution head, and the show’s head writer and his wife. “And Warren, of course. I’ll call Warren and we’ll make it a party.”
She ends the call and turns to me. “Could you do me a huge favor? I need you to read three scenes. I know you usually read before bed, but I really need your feedback. I’m terribly nervous. Especially because of the”—she stops to sketch air quotes—“content.”
She waits for my reaction. She wants me to be eager to read the scenes with content in them, like I’ve just won a prize, an advance early screening of what any Lords and Ladies fan craves the most. My mom, the woman who single-handedly brought back the power of the nighttime soap to TV, who rejuvenated a once-dormant media form with her twists and turns on Victorian Englishmen and -women and their machinations over life and love—is known for her weekly cliffhangers, her shocking reveals, and the show’s wicked-hot sex scenes. This—the show’s rep for causing hotness under the collar—pleases my mom the most.
The last thing I want to do is read the scenes her own sex life inspired. But I know where telling the truth leads to. It leads to splits and splinters and a fifty-fifty life.
“Of course. I’ll read right now.”
It’s just easier.
After I shower and scrub off the remnants of the lacrosse game, I pull on my favorite skinny jeans and a fitted T-shirt, then lace up my Converse sneakers. As usual, I wear my charms necklace. I position it just so—he won’t be able to miss it if I see him. I want him to know I wear it all the time, that he’s with me, next to my heart, even when I can’t be near him.
I send a silent wish to the universe that he arrives early. That I’ll catch a glimpse of him. A smile, a twinkle in his eye, a look just for me.
I grab the script pages my mom left on my pillow, close my eyes so I can’t see a single word, and move each page behind the next. When I’ve counted to fifteen I open my eyes, confirm I’m back to the start and that the pages look read, and head downstairs.
“The scenes are just totally absolutely splendiferously amazing, Mom,” I say loudly, as I slap the pages on the counter, then open the fridge and crack open another Diet Coke and take a big gulp.
“Tell me everything.” She nods to the pages in my hand as she wields a fat blade and chops carrots into fine slices. She’s changed too, her bleacher-wear cast aside for a low-cut magenta blouse, the color so blazingly rich she looks like royalty. She’s paired her top with trim black slacks and four-inch black leather pumps. “What did you think about the scene? About what Gerard does to Pauline in the stables? Tell me what you liked.”
No. God no. There is nothing at all I can tell you about what Gerard does to Pauline in the stables. Especially not when I heard what Warren did to you the other night, which was surely the inspiration for the characters’ romp in the stables, and I had to play the soundtrack to 42nd Street the rest of the night to drown out the sounds.