Page 65 of The Cruiser
ChapterTwenty-Three
VANDANA
I can’t sleep.
Everything feels surreal.
The hypnotic view of the Mediterranean from my balcony, a fat moon spreading magical light on the current.
TQ’s latest update only reinforces the strange vibration thrumming inside me: Everything running smoothly.Without you two here, there’s less work to do!
And Vaughn emails, finally, from Africa. For a man worried about how many elephants would hold his attention, my inbox heaves with photos, each punctuated with a byline: This guy was huge! Lindsay loved the baby!Amazing, right? I scroll through pics of him happily posing with Lindsay and animals like he’s Ernest Hemingway bagging big game.
Who would have guessed?
I set my phone down on the patio table to listen to the waves lap the shore in a whisper. My face glows with heat, with awareness, all my senses sharpened.
And then there’s Morgan.
A man who stripped me bare, poked fun at me in the process, and left me reconsidering how any other specimens of the male species ever held my attention. The fireworks are real, not just between the sheets, but knowing his reputation makes it hard to synthesize. The fading fragments of right and wrong are still powerful enough to muddle my thoughts.
Now what?
I don’t know.
I couldn’t read him on the drive home tonight. He let me hold his hand, didn’t pull away, but his silence threw me off. Did it feel strange for him, kissing goodnight in the car, going separate ways? I felt like Cinderella rushing home before the spell wore off. Now I’m kicking myself, wondering if I should have invited him up. I didn’t feel the vibe though. He was unusually absent.
But maybe it’s him calling right now, saying he found my glass slipper. I rush for my phone, the scrambled number unfamiliar. His landline perhaps?
Just answer.
“Hello?”
“Darling. It’s your mother. Don’t hang up.”
My heart plummets. Leave it to her to be the absolute buzzkill. “Hi. What’s up?”
“I’m here with Elaine Gutenberg. You remember Elaine, right?”
The Jewess doyenne who promises to guard your secrets, then sells you out when someone else’s higher-priced secrets trump yours? Yes, I remember her. A fixer of sorts. In the elite OC circles my parents run in, she’s the one to turn to in time of need. The female version of the Godfather. Right down to the raspy, inflected voice.
“Hi, Elaine.”
“Vandana. Long time, no talk.”
“We’re all on speaker together,” Mom says. “I hope you aren’t offended, but I told Elaine about your … situation. She has ins where it matters.”
“Barring any full-scale cataclysmic events,” Elaine clarifies.
“And this isn’t cataclysmic, darling,” Mom assures me. “Not by any stretch. It’s manageable, wouldn’t you say, Elaine?”
“Mom,” I butt in. “People come out all the time now. This isn’t 1930’s Hollywood. And Derek isn’t famous, not in that way. No one will care.”
“But you know how dirty politics is. It’s bad enough your father’s Mercedes is two years old.”
I shake my head. Unbelievable. “Well, I hate to drop this on you, but the word’s already out.”
“What? So soon? How?” Her questions chirp out one after the other, and it dawns on me I never asked Stryker how he knew. He flew to Berlin yesterday for some rave and won’t surface until Thursday.
