Page 41 of How to Say I Do
This, as unbearable and excruciating as it was, was better than what I knew was coming. It was better to leave things as they were. A dream. A mirage.
I’d leaped, and I’d soared, but this was the crash. I always, always crashed.
I couldn’t be with Wyatt.
My stomach hurled. I had nothing left, but dry heaves wracked me until I was limp, and I laid panting on the rubber floor with my eyes clenched shut and my hand over my mouth, trying to hold back my sobs. Icouldn’tbe with him, but—
I wasn’t sure I could be without him, either.
My first stop in New York was a mobile phone store. After a week with no cell phone surgically attached to my palm, being in that cramped shop felt like I was a dry drunk staring at a wall of free booze.
One brand-new cell phone, one cloud backup, and one call to my carrier later, and I was back in business. It had been underwhelmingly easy. Could anyone fling their phones into the trash and recover so seamlessly? I’d wanted, drunkenly, to make a statement: goodbye, cruel life. With high-speed Wi-Fi and a solid cloud backup, that life was staring me in the face like I’d never tossed it into a baby’s diaper. There were the photos I didn’t want to look at. There were the last eighteen months of my life, arm in arm with Jenna.
I swept everything into the trash, then hit Delete. At least that hadn’t been hard.
The E train rumbled and roared and screeched its way toward Midtown, and I emptied my mind for the ride. I should have been thinking ahead, planning for what would happen when I got off. Or, if I wasn’t ready to go there yet, then I should have been thinking about work. A socialite climbing the Instagram ranks had turned a billion views into a Gucci partnership, and her perfume launch was tonight at Manhattan’s current “it” night club. My work email—which I’d taken one look at and closed—was awash in day-of prep work.Just checking, is this— And are we— Confirmed, Ryan Gosling, Harry Styles, and Arianna Grande 2nite! Individual red carpet walks for each with ten minute exclusivity, so we need— Triple-check the champagne, let’s not have a repeat of the fucking debacle of 2021, okay?
I rested my forehead against the cold metal of the train’s handlebar. Every alphabet letter of hepatitis was probably leaping from the pole into my pores, but I couldn’t summon the energy to be disgusted. Instead, my thumb played with my sea-turtles ring, spinning it around and around like the little guys were swimming.
Jenna and I had lived together for a year. Before that, she’d been doing the up-and-coming model thing, sharing a Garment District apartment with a gaggle of models and their enormous sample-sized wardrobes, makeup trolleys, and hair products, until her superstardom landed her a fantastic Chelsea loft. I’d been holding down an Upper West Side one-bedroom that was old and cramped, but had a classic pre-war New York spirit that was hard to find for less than four grand a month. I’d invited her to move in with me. She’d countered and told me to move in with her.
Look up Manhattan lux in the dictionary, and you’ll find Jenna’s building. Edgy New York opulence, aggressive energy efficiency. The doorman, Igor, was a big, boisterous, laugh-a-minute guy from a perpetually heinous war-torn corner of the world, somewhere complicated and horrendous enough that becoming the head doorman for Manhattan’s wealthiest elites was, comparatively, a cakewalk.
Igor was my friend—or so I thought. He used to meet me after my morning runs with an oat-milk cappuccino and a paper. I would slip him tickets to concerts and boxing matches and Rangers and Knicks games at Madison Square Garden. For his mother’s birthday, I handed him reservations to a restaurant downtown so packed with bookings, they were only taking names on their waitlist for two years from now. I thought, if there was someone in the city who would commiserate with me, who would grip my shoulder and pull me in for a bracing back-slap, it would be Igor.
Wrong.
I certainly didn’tlooklike I belonged in the neighborhood anymore, with my resort-branded t-shirt and my board shorts and my plastic flip-flops, but the athleisure fad had been in for a solid six years. Not that that’s what I was doing, or trying to pull off. The point was, I stuck out like an escaped zoo animal, trotting up the block with my eyes locked on my former building’s door. Igor had plenty of time to spot me.
He made the casual stop before the awning, drawing me away from the carpeted entrance and up against the bricks, well away from the people—my old neighbors—who belonged.
“Mr. Bettancourt.” Had he gained twenty pounds? He’d never looked so huge. “I’m afraid you no longer live here, sir.” There wasn’t a sparkle of friendliness in his eyes, not even a twinkle of reminiscence for all those shared mornings and oat-milk cappuccinos and Knicks tickets.
So that’s how it was going to go. I didn’t have the energy to care. “Look, I don’t live here, but my stuff does. I need to get my things.”
“Your belongings have been taken care of.”
“Takencareof? What does that mean?”
Something chirped in Igor’s earpiece. He held up a finger to me, the universal signal of ‘someone more important is talking,’ and then his expression turned dark and mean. He invited me to step another six feet back from the door with the open palm of his hand. I went.
Seconds later, a trio of blacked-out SUVs roared to the curb, tricked out in all the high-end luxuries. Igor glided his way to the middle SUV, where two bulky, armed escorts had formed a phalanx around the opening door. Someone important was arriving, but I couldn’t think of anyone who lived there who warranted that kind of entrance. Sure, the residents were all one-percent types—myself excluded—but who was—
And then I sawhim: Derrick Kane, three-time Grammy award-winning hip-hop superstar, current chart destroyer, triple-diamond record holder, number-one “It” man in the world. He was decked from head to toe in Saint Laurent, but he kept it understated, with jeans just baggy enough and just distressed enough, and a hoodie just casual enough, to suggest he was far too cool to worry about fashion.
Derrick Kane fist bumped with Igor’s deputies as they swept open the doors for him. Igor followed a half-step behind, escorting a knock-out woman who’d followed Kane from the back of the SUV. She walked slower, precise with her movements, used to the timing of a runway. Her hair shook like a platinum curtain as she pushed her Chanel sunglasses up her forehead—
Jesus, Jenna. That was Jenna.
It all clicked into place.
Six months ago, I’d managed a pre-release listening party for Derrick Kane’s new album, the one that went double-diamond less than a day after its drop. I’d swung for the moon with everything. I wanted him to have the party of the millennium, something he’d remember for the rest of his life, and I’d succeeded. That had been the event of theyear, and my boss, Harrison, had pulled me into his office afterward at four a.m. to pop a $3,000 bottle of Dom Pérignon. “Keep it up, Noël,” Harrison had said. “It’s all taking shape. You’re fucking gold.”
The number-one single on that double-diamond album? The current radio hit, the one that I’d heard at JFK and on the subway and in every fucking store in the city? The one I had built his listening party around?
“Secret Lover.”
Let me into your secret places and special spaces, girl, and let me touch your soul and show you how you are meant to be adored. I want you for life, so let go of your other man and reach for me, baby. Because I belong to you, and you belong to your heart, and I know that your heart beats for me. I got a secret right now, girl, but I don’t want you to be a secret for long.
