Nick raised his eyebrows, then smiled.“I’m feeling pretty spiffy.” Then he chuckled, sipping his beer as he glanced inside the sliding glass doors.
I followed his gaze to Francesca, who was seated on the edge of the couch talking to one of Tom’s friends and wearing the shortest miniskirt I had ever seen. “You’d better steer clear, Nick.”
“What?” he replied, his eyes wide with innocence.“You’re kidding me, right? I wouldn’t touch that. She’s practically jailbait.”
I looked him in the eye, assessing. “She’s twenty-one. Hardly jailbait.”
“Twenty-one? Really?” he said hopefully. “Wow. She looks much younger than that.”
“Nick, she’s Tom’s daughter.”
“Sage, give me a little credit, would you?” he said, shaking his head and turning to Zoe for backup.
I could tell by the bemused frown on Zoe’s face she wasn’t going to be much help. She didn’t disappoint.
“Nick, if something happened to Bernadine, would you be throwing a party two weeks later?”
“It’s his annual bash,” I argued.
Zoe held up a hand to silence me, which was really annoying.
Nick seemed startled by the question, his dark brows furrowing as he considered it.
Considered it a bit too long for Zoe’s liking. “Well?” she said, brown eyes bulging.
“Okay, let me just ask, are me and Bernadine still, like, a couple?”
Zoe’s eyes widened ever farther. “You’re kidding me, right?”
“Well, if we’ve been broken up a while—”
“That’s it?” she said. “The relationship just ends and you forget about her as a human being? You don’t even care whether she lives or dies?”
“Zoe—” I began.
“This is not about Myles,” Zoe insisted, though the tears glistening in her eyes said otherwise.
“Zoe, listen,” I began again, softly this time.
But Zoe was in no mood to be coddled. “You know, maybe I’ll have that drink after all,” she said, then disappeared inside the sliding glass doors.
“Poor kid,” Nick said, watching after her.
I sighed. “I know it was tough seeing him out here, but she needs to let it go. It’s been three months.”
“Look at me and Bern. Six months later, and we’re still hanging on.”
I looked at him. “I thought you said you’d broken up?”
He rolled his eyes. “Yeah, right. I wouldn’t be surprised if I heard from her this weekend. The holidays always get her all emotional and shit.“
“It’s the Fourth of July, Nick. Not Christmas.”
“Yeah, well, for girls it’s all the same.”
I raised an eyebrow at him.
“Most girls,” he said with a wry smile. Then he looked at my glass, still half-empty. “C’mon, looks like you could use a refill. Or better yet, a shot.”
I could use something, I thought, my eye falling over the small crowd as I followed him inside. But as I looked around at the mostly middle-aged and predominantly married crowd, I was pretty sure I wouldn’t find it here.
Still, I accepted the shot Nick poured me once we got to the bar in the far corner of the living room.
“To a killer summer,” Nick said, clinking his beer bottle into my shot glass.
“Yeah, killer,” I said, looking around at the scattered crowd, hoping my prospects might get better.
My prospects didn’t get better, but they did get more familiar. Some of the garmento crowd that flocked to Fire Island showed up. There weren’t many of us out here, but we stuck together, and I was glad, too. At least I had some people I could relate to at this party. I was getting bored watching the marrieds flirt with spouses other than their own—inevitable, considering the amount of alcohol that was being consumed. It wasn’t like I had my friends to talk to. Nick dove right in, chatting away with anyone who would listen to his schemes, male or female, and Zoe had virtually disappeared. I decided not to resort to my habitual worrying about her. She was a big girl.
As was I, I thought, indulging myself in another shot at the behest of Stan Sackowitz, one of Tom’s big customers, who believed he might bring me back over to the retail side if he plied me with enough alcohol. “We could make beautiful music together, Sage,” Stan was saying as he clinked his glass into mine. “And a lot of money, too!”
I smiled, downed my shot obediently.“You know I’m very loyal to Tom, Stan.”
“Loyalty will get you nowhere!” he insisted, downing his own shot.“Think where you would have been had you stayed with The Bomb Boutique.”
“That’s right, Stan. That’s why I’m never going back to retail,” I said with a smile that I hoped ended this seemingly endless conversation. Not that I really minded. I had become a hot property in the leather business in a relatively short time. Mostly due to Tom’s faith in me. But also because I was damn good at what I did. Zoe always said I could sell indulgences to monks. And though I was never sure if she meant that in a good way, I knew that she was right.
So I talked the talk with Stan, and later with Viv, a buyer from Bloomingdale’s. The conversation inevitably turned to Maggie at some point, some whispered declaration about “the tragedy” and “poor Tom.” I suppose that’s what people say when deaths occur, but it all seemed so ridiculous somehow. As if their sympathetic murmurs tied them to the situation in some intimate way. Everyone wanted a piece of Maggie, it seemed, now that she was dead. “I worked with her to set up the billing for Bloomingdale’s,” said Viv. “Nice woman.”
I practically snorted. The only reason Edge would be hanging in Bloomingdale’s this fall was because I had convinced Viv that they needed a younger leather line on their racks. Maggie’s chief talent was handling the books. She was more a numbers cruncher than the creative talent she imagined herself to be. Not that anyone else realized that, seeing as she was at the helm of Edge.
