After about an hour, Nick paused the DVD and
stretched. Celeste massaged her neck. “Alec Guinness is awesome in this,” she said, stretching her arms over her head.
“Yeah. He’s so good. Have you ever seen Smiley’s People?”
Celeste shook her head. “When did that come out?”
“Well, it’s not a movie, it was a TV series based on John le Carré novels. Anyway, John le Carré said that after he saw Alec Guinness play Smiley, he couldn’t even write the character anymore without thinking of Alec Guinness.”
Normally, Celeste would’ve just assumed Nick was showing off. But he sounded so genuinely interested in what he was saying and in fact, he wasn’t even looking at her. He was picking a bit of popcorn out of his teeth.
“That’s really interesting,” she said slowly. All those years of flirting and Nick’s over-the-top snobitude, and here they were, having a real conversation—actually, their second in one day. Celeste almost looked around for hidden cameras, but it seemed like maybe she wasn’t being punk’d after all. He smiled right at her and for a minute, their eyes connected. His face seemed to fill up her field of vision, and for a moment she flashed back to their final drunken kiss at the end of last summer. Both of them laughing, almost spilling their beers, and then his arms around her waist and his mouth on hers. He’d tasted like mint and alcohol.
Celeste’s phone buzzed. She jumped and ripped her eyes away from Nick’s, clapping her hand on her pocket at the same time. “Oh, my phone!” she exclaimed a little too loudly.
“Yeah. You’d better answer it,” Nick replied. He stared at her for a second longer and then started stirring the leftover popcorn kernels in the bowl with his finger, looking oddly disappointed.
Celeste peeked at the screen and leaped to her feet, knocking her thighs into the coffee table when she saw Travis’s name.
“Whoa.” Nick reached out and steadied the soda
bottles. “What’s up?”
Beep. Travis had left a voice mail. Damn it. Now he was going to wonder where she was.
“Heh-heh.” Celeste laughed nervously. “Um, can I use your bathroom?”
“Sure,” Nick said. He clicked the TV on to Sports-Center. “But I hope it’s not just to freshen up. I like my girls kinda dirty.” He caught Celeste’s startled glance and laughed. “Joking.”
Celeste felt a little splash of irritation well up in her.
Here she’d been thinking how nice it was when he treated her like a person instead of a potential hookup, and now he’d regressed straight back to annoying and snobby.
“Don’t worry,” she snapped, heading toward the
bathroom. “You’ve never been worth the effort of freshening up.”
In the peach and pale green bathroom, which was
bigger than her entire bedroom at home, Celeste
perched on the closed toilet seat and dialed Travis.
“I’m sitting here on the golf course. It’s dark and there’s no one around,” he said as soon as he answered.
“And I’ve got two bottles of Stella. Where are you?”
Celeste glanced nervously at the door, thanking God for the millionth time that people couldn’t see through phones. “Um, out with Devon,” she said, trying to keep her voice low yet normal-sounding.
“Where are you guys? You didn’t tell me you were going out,” Travis said. “And why are you talking all muffled like that?”
“I’m not talking muffled.” Celeste raised her voice a tiny bit. “It was a last-minute thing. Devon came by with … Paul Simon tickets, so we went. I didn’t have time to call you.” She stared at a small spider making its way across the peach bath mat.
“Wait, you’re at a Paul Simon concert?” Travis asked incredulously. “Right now? Why’s Paul Simon playing Palm Springs? And why’s it so quiet?”
“He’s—um, it’s a small concert. A really small concert,”
Celeste stammered. “He’s only playing one night …
at his grandmother’s house.” What, Celeste? “It’s like an invitation-only thing, so there aren’t that many people here.” The spider had reached the sink pedestal and begun its journey up to the basin.
“Wait, so let me get this straight,” Travis said with irritating logic. Why couldn’t she have talked to him later in the evening, after he’d drunk those Stellas? “You’re at Paul Simon’s grandmother’s house in Palm Springs, listening to an invite-only concert. Is that right?”
“Right,” Celeste said desperately, eyeing the door.
She’d been in here way too long. Nick was going to think she had some serious intestinal issues. “Oh, whoops! They’re starting again. Gotta go. I’ll talk to you tomorrow, okay?” She clicked off.
Celeste opened the bathroom door and leaned
against the door frame for a minute. She felt like she needed a nap. A medal and then a nap, actually. Slowly, she made her way back down the hall toward the den, where she could still hear the TV blasting. But as she passed an open bedroom door, Celeste stopped. There, on the desk, she spotted a MacBook Air, one of those really light new laptops. The room was obviously Nick’s: T-shirts lay strewn over the chair and floor, and several pairs of sneakers were jumbled by the unmade bed.
Celeste stared in envy at the shiny white computer on the desk.
“Like my new baby?” Nick said from behind her.
Celeste jumped.
“Oh! Uh, yeah. I was just, um, lost,” she said hastily, backing away from the door. She felt like she’d been caught reading his diary.
He didn’t seem like he cared, though. He stepped into the room and patted the laptop tenderly. “I love this baby. I can do all my film editing on it practically.”
“I’ve had my eye on one of those too,” Celeste said, trying to swallow the envy in her voice. Of course he has exactly the laptop I’d want—he probably gets a new one every six months, she thought.
He glanced over at her quickly. “I got it at a computer store I worked at one Christmas break. It was a floor model and the manager gave me an amazing deal. I do actually work for things I want.”
Celeste felt her
