Page 34 of Hot Mess
I’d heard about Daniella’s wild night at a ski resort with a rock star, right after it happened. I wasn’t there, but she’d told me about it as soon as she got home from that trip. And I knew who Ashley Player was.
I mean, I’d heard of him, vaguely. I’d heard of his band, the Penny Pushers. But that was about it. I wasn’t even sure what he looked like.
After Dani told me she’d met him—and made out with him—I Googled the shit out of him, like any sister would.
Well, I Googled him once. But then his picture came up and he was so… yummy… I may have Googled him again. You know, just to look at him, a few times or a thousand. Like I couldn’t quite trust what I was seeing.
Like if I just kept clicking, I’d eventually find a photo of him that was unappealing.
Kind of like I was doing right now.
Once again, a fruitless search.
Ashley Player was, as it turned out, beautiful from every imaginable angle. And now I’d verified that fact, in person.
Not only that… There was justsomethingabout him.
Something you couldn’t quite see in all the photos. Something I’d only felt in his presence. In that look he gave me.
Yes, he thought I was Daniella. But if I looked past that—and I did—there was something utterly fascinating about him.
Maybe it was that broken thing I’d thought I’d glimpsed behind his eyes.
Maybe it was just how vulnerable and mixed up he’d seemed. All drunk and stumbly.
But, no. It was more than that.
I couldn’t stop thinking about him, and it wasn’t just because he was gorgeous. Or because he was successful. I knew those things about him before, and I’d barely given him a second thought over the years. I’d been curious, of course, four years ago, when Dani said she met him. But that was all. It was a normal, healthy amount of curiosity. My sister told me the crazy story, I Googled him, I saw pictures of him. I was hit with a pang ofYou-lucky-bitchenvy.
Then I really didn’t think about it again.
Over the years, I’d pretty much forgotten.
But then I ran into him the other night in the rain and he looked me in the eyes… and now I couldn’t let it go… Whatever it was I’d felt when he looked at me.
I wanted to feel it again.
Why thehelldid my sister get to meet him first?
She said she didn’t evenlikehim.
So. Unfair.
… And there I went, caring again.
About someone I didn’t even know, because I thought I’d felt something I couldn’t even explain when his eyes met mine.
Lust, I told myself.You felt lust. It’s a normal thing to feel. Now let it go already.
I clicked away to my desktop and opened the project I’d been working on yesterday. I was pulling together a proposal for a potential client who was looking to redecorate her home after a divorce. Kind of my bread and butter, unfortunately.
There were now several of us—both decorators and registered interior designers—at Voilà Interiors, but my employer, my aunt Madeleine, had developed a habit of sticking me with the divorcees. Especially if they were over sixty.
For one thing, she was protective of me, and sometimes she got weird about me going into mens’ homes alone. She was also overly fond of saying that newly divorced women needed a touch of the “sugar and spice and everything nice”—her words—that I brought into their homes and their lives.
While that assessment was eye-rolling, it was true that the over-sixty set always seemed to take to me. I preferred to attribute that to the fact that I brought them delicacies from my aunt Mireille’s bakery, but in truth, I knew I was good at my job.
Ever since my first Barbie DreamHouse, I’d had a talent for decorating interior spaces to fit the people who inhabited them; first my Barbie doll, now my clients. Honestly, I was never really into Barbie, but her DreamHouse? Yes, please.
