Page 23 of Ache for You (Slow Burn 3)
I close my eyes and turn my face to the hot afternoon sun. I’d come out to the overgrown back gardens to be with the butterflies and the hummingbirds, hoping I could head off my pending mental breakdown with a quiet stroll, but the heat is as oppressive as my jet lag, and the hummingbirds are nowhere to be seen.
The WS must’ve boiled them in her cauldron.
“I’m surviving.” My sigh is heavy. “Actually, I think I’m in shock. It still doesn’t seem real. Any of it. Brad, the wedding, my father, my father’s secret wife . . . it all feels like a dream.”
“Nightmare, more like,” says Jenner with empathy.
“Enough about my problems.” I wave a hand in the air to dispel the somber mood. “How are you doing? What’s new in the modeling world?”
“You know, the usual: cocaine, bulimia, fake friends. I can hardly wait until I start to wrinkle so I can retire and do something meaningful with my life.”
I know for a fact that he doesn’t do drugs, have an eating disorder, or have fake friends. I’ve met all of them, and they’re almost as awesome as he is. The stereotypes about models are depressingly wrong. You’d think the beautiful people would be more fucked-up than the rest of us, but as far as I’ve seen, that’s not true. Jenner just enjoys pretending it is.
“You’re too pretty to wrinkle. You’ve only gotten better looking since I met you.”
He sighs as if his beauty is a terrible problem that’s been vexing him for years. “I know. Let’s talk about something else. Oh—tell me about all the gorgeous Italian men!”
Smiling, I walk deeper into the garden, meandering down the gravel path toward the stone fountain. After all these years in the elements, it’s still beautiful, and still one of my favorite things. It depicts Aphrodite and her lover, Ares, in a passionate embrace. It was my father’s wedding present to my mother. It’s been dry since the day she died, twenty-nine years ago.
“I’ve only met one gorgeous Italian, but that was in New York. But damn, he was a doozy.”
“I can hear the drool in your mouth, Poppins! Tell me everything!”
I give him a shortened version of the story, concentrating the details on what Euro Hunk looked like and what he wore, the two things I know are required. Jenner gasps and exclaims in all the right places, then asks excitedly when I’ll be seeing him again.
“I didn’t give him my real number, dummy.”
“Why on earth not?”
“Because, hello, I was just dumped at the altar! I’m not exactly in a man-loving mood!”
“Who said anything about loving? Have revenge sex with him, silly! Hell, have revenge sex with every Italian stud you meet! What better way to get Brad out of your system? Seriously, you’re swimming in an ocean of testosterone over there, darling, dip your vadge in that beautiful sea!”
I say drily, “I think the saying is ‘Dip your toe.’”
He scoffs. “Toe, vadge, whatever. Get it in there! Swim in it! Drown in it! Good God, if it were me, I’d be running naked through the streets!”
“Yeah, I’ve seen the pictures.”
His tone turns snippy. “Don’t be judgey, darling. It was my first show in Paris. I was seventeen.”
“Really? What’s your excuse for what happened last year at the Issey Miyake show in Tokyo?”
Jenner says innocently, “It was my first time in Japan!”
“I see. Remind me not to go with you anywhere you haven’t been before.”
“It’s not like you haven’t seen me nude.”
“The amount of people who haven’t seen you nude is a very small number, my friend.”
?
??Well,” he says airily, “one does what one can to spread beauty into the lives of the less fortunate.”
I laugh at that because I know he means it. “Have I told you lately that I love you?”
“You tell me alarmingly often, darling. For such a sharp, ball-busting businesswoman, you’re awfully mushy.”
