Page 43 of How to Say I Do
Even though I’d known Harrison longer than anyone else in the company—I was the longest tenured of the crew, sticking around while others had moved on to big Midtown firms or fancy Mrs. degrees—I had no idea how old he was. He could have been thirty-eight or fifty-four, sporting the same head of distinguished silver-streaked hair he’d had the first day I’d started. His face was ageless, lined just the right way to evoke George Clooney in his prime.
He kept everything strictly business. He didn’t care to get involved in his employees’ personal lives, especially since there were often messy overlaps. More than a few coworkers had slept with not only each other, but each other’s exes and current flings and even clients. I’d been one of the more boring worker bees. Dating a new-to-New York model was sopasséof me. I couldn’t have been more cliché if I’d asked her to marry me. Wait—
Harrison asked about my thoughts on the Gucci party and then lobbed me a few easy questions about a handful of my other accounts. When he’d run out of ways to stall, he simply stared at me over his desk.
I stared back. I wasn’t going to speak first.
“Noël, I can only imagine how you’re feeling.”
There were a lot of ways to answer that. I said none.
“Look, we’ll get you back on track. This is unfortunate, but we’ll push through.” He spoke like my fiancée leaving me at the altar was a professional embarrassment, something the agency had to recover from. Which, I supposed was true, but I couldn’t force myself to feel bad about that. It wasn’t Harrison who had withered in front of all those wedding guests. And it wasn’t Harrison who had run to Mexico, and had met Wyatt, and—
Jesus, stop.
I nodded as he kept speaking, sounding out words in a gravely platitude that I’m sure was supposed to sound reassuring, if I’d heard any part of it. I was checked out, back on a faraway beach and trying not to remember the shade of Wyatt’s eyes when the sunlight hit them just so. I only faded back into the conversation when Harrison started talking about a new account he was personally assigning me.
“Elitehas signed us to handle their PR and event marketing for their fall Fashion Week kickoff party. Parties, to be accurate.” I squinted as he passed me an iPad. “These are going to be the events of the season.”
I swiped through the display.Elite, typically, had sent over their list of requirements that rivaled the complexity of the Bible. I’d need to pick apart the minutiae in fine-grain detail, ideally over a bottle of vodka. Or maybe wine. Texas wine.
For fuck’s sake,stop.
“I took a look at your calendar. You have a full book.”
“I do.” In fact, I had to wrap up this meeting because in twenty minutes, I needed to catch a cab uptown for a lunch meeting with the Bottega Veneta rep, and then I had to swing over to Central Park to make an appearance at an on-location movie shoot one of our up-and-coming starlets had a supporting role in. To round out the evening, there was a one-night art gallery exhibition featuring disadvantaged youths’ self-portraits taking place on the Upper East Side, a charity soirée that was the kind of champagne-and-sympathy event designed to land the gallery nicely in the society pages.
“You’re good for it all? You don’t want to take any time…” Harrison drifted off, the lilt of his voice implying that taking time off for something as trivial as your entire life blowing up was as understandable as moving to Poughkeepsie.
But for once, I agreed with him. The last thing I needed was time off. Time alone, time to think, time to remember. No thanks. Theverylast thing I wanted was to remember the sunshine and soft waves and Wyatt’s smile. I’d rather play Derrick Kane’s playlist on a loop, thank you very much.
“I’m good. I’ve got this.”
“That’s what I like to hear.” Harrison tapped the edge of his desk, his universal signal that his summons was concluded. “Like I said, we’ll get you back on track, Noël.”
“Thereyou are!”
Micah, one of the western hemisphere’s top makeup artists, so in demand he blithely said no to movie stars with less than two Oscars, looped his arm through mine as soon as I cleared the security cordon at the movie shoot in Central Park. “Oh myGod, I’ve been waiting for you forhours.”
Micah and I were sort-of friends, thanks mostly to proximity. We were in the same place at the same time often enough to talk at each other, share a cigarette, and gossip. Micah flourished in gossip, and he traded rumors and innuendos like jewels and spices on the Silk Road of pop culture.
He dragged me to his makeup trailer, parked as close to the shoot as he could get away with. “Everyone is melting today. Thisheat.” He rolled his eyes, as if the sun and the spring weather were personally offensive to him. “I am having to do touchups every other take.”
“How’s Priscilla?” My starlet, twenty-two going on sixteen, with the burgeoning coke addiction and slew of bad decisions to prove it.
“Oh, she’s fine. Little raw around the nostrils, but I touched that up.” He gave me a pointed look.
“I’ll speak to her manager. Again.”
Micah pursed his lips and arched his brows while I dug out my cell phone and fired off a text. Despite the heat, Micah was dressed head to toe in Hermès—skinny jeans, long-sleeve tee, and a neckerchief tied in a bouncy little knot—with his hair artfully mussed. He wore smudged kohl eyeliner that looked transported straight out of the nineties. I’d complained to him last season about why he was replicating the Kate Moss look, and he’d shot me a glare that could have melted platinum. He barked at me to get with the times. “The nineties arenow,” he’d snapped, and, that night, I saw four pairs of high-waist bell bottoms on the subway.
I was texting, and then I was fumbling, grabbing for my phone one-handed before it hit the concrete. Micah had wrenched my left hand up to his face and was staring at my finge—
No, he was staring at my sea-turtles ring.
“I thought maybe you’d slipped that Harry Winston on anyway, because,hello, who wouldn’t? But this ain’t that, honey.Cuu-ute, though. Fling in Mexico? I had one of those down in Florida when I was fifteen. A romantic spring love affair. We traded neon cord bracelets on the beach and swore to write to each other. I lost his address before I made it to the airport.” He sighed, faux woe, and then pushed out his bottom lip. “Spill.”
“It’s nothing.” I pulled my hand back and hid it in my pocket, rubbing my thumb over the golden sea turtles.
