Page 70 of Some Like It Hott

“It’s a terrible place to visit, but you might like to live there.”

The corner of her mouth turns up. “Said no one, ever.” She sighs, the almost smile vanishing. “I don’t think you really wish I lived in New York, either. We have—very different lives.”

“Yeah,” I say. “I work seventy-hour weeks and never have any fun, and you?—”

She laughs. “Work seventy-hour weeks that are all fun, all the time.”

“You wouldn’t want to leave this job.”

“I wouldn’t,” she says. “Not now that I know it’s what I really want to do.”

I brush her hair off her face, stroke a hand over the soft, sweet roundness of her cheek. “Besides. We’d never see each other. And you’d hate me after a while, for putting work first.”

Her eyes move over my face. “Kali did?”

“Kali did,” I affirm.

She thinks about it a second. “And you’d get bored of me.”

“I wouldn’t,” I insist.

“You say that now, but…” She frowns.

It’s my turn to read her unhappy history on her face. “Lloyd did,” I fill in.

“Lloyd did.” She sighs. “It’s okay. Some things are just meant to be—what they are. I think this is one of those things.”

“I could fly out sometimes. I have a jet.”

She rolls her eyes. “You have a fucking jet,” she says. “See, that right there? That’s why this couldn’t work. I mean, what would that be? You’d be my sugar daddy and I’d be your booty call, and?—”

“You deserve better?” I hazard.

Her face softens.

“You do, too,” she says.

We’re quiet again, taking each other in. Her hand reaches for mine between us and clutches, surprisingly tight.

“I don’t do this, you know,” she says.

“What?” I ask.

“Lloyd was…well, he was sort of right about me.”

“Lloyd was full of shit,” I say roughly.

“He was right about the fact that I don’t really do…serious.”

I think about what I know of her. All the people she touches, all the joy she brings.

“You’re good at being the life of the party,” I say because all of a sudden I can see what’s been right in front of my eyes all this time. “But it’s never your party. You have friends, but you don’t have?—”

“I don’t havepeople,” she says.

You have me,I want to say. I can feel the words on my tongue, their exact weight and heft and…consequence.

But she doesn’t, does she? We just talked through all the perfectly rational reasons I can’t stay here and she can’t come to New York. And at the bottom, there’s this fact: I can’t put my whole life in another person’s hands again.

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