21 Stolen Kisses Page 20

  He shakes his head. She pours more in her own glass, then sits down on the arm of her couch. She kicks one leg back and forth, showing off the red-soled leather high heels she’s wearing.

  My dad remains standing. I stay near him. Maybe because I’m on his side. Maybe because I’ve always been on his side.

  “Do you know why I left you, Jewel?”

  She scoffs, so loud and deep you’d think she patented the technique. “Really? You came uptown to rehash the greatest thing that ever happened to me?”

  “Because you cheated on me.”

  I expect her to be shocked. I expect her jaw to drop.

  Instead, she fires right back. “Newsflash. I know.”

  “Many times. And then you did it with my business partner.”

  “That wasn’t cheating,” she says after a hearty swallow of her wine. “You and I weren’t married then.”

  I think my mother might have no soul. How can she be so callous?

  “You don’t think it’s just the slightest bit wrong—wrong meaning immoral, inappropriate, slimy—to sleep with my business partner?”

  “If I had been married to you at the time, yes, then you’d have me on that one.” She speaks clinically, as if she’s evaluating a business offer. “But seeing as we’re not, I’d have to say the bigger bone to pick lies with Jay.”

  “Who’s suing me now,” my dad adds quickly.

  “That’s why I say never have a business partner. Those situations can be so messy. Speaking of messy situations, it would seem our darling daughter is involving herself in areas she ought to stay out of,” my mother says, and peers archly over at me.

  Forget the detente of the shopping trip. Whatever my mother swept under the rug the other day is being swept right back out. I’ve stepped over a line, and Jewel intends to let me know what happens to people who cross her.

  “Perhaps you’d like to tell me why you’ve been mailing letters to certain women I’d rather not hear from again?”

  “Like who?” I ask, in a small voice because I don’t know how to play this.

  “That Steigler woman for starters. She’s calling me again.” My mom shakes her head. “She’s so annoying. She just can’t leave me alone.”

  She’s so annoying?

  My insides burn, and with that offhand dismissal, words that underscore how she has no notion at all of the collateral damage she’s caused, no sense of how her choices were a tsunami in other people’s lives because she only saw her own life, I finally know what to say. I straighten my spine. I muster my courage. “You made me lie to Mrs. Steigler. You made me cover up for you. And then she begged me to make you stop.”

  My father cocks his head to the side. “You make our daughter lie about your affairs?”

  My mother gazes haughtily out the window. “Kennedy has always loved helping me.”

  “You are a sick woman,” my father says, his eyes narrowing.

  My mother doesn’t respond to him. She turns to me. “Darling, I know all children want their parents to be together. And for that, I am sorry. I know divorce is an awful thing for a child to go through, but to send letters to these random women and sign my name—”

  I cut her off, slicing my hand through the air. “This is so not even remotely about you guys getting divorced. Whatever! You’re divorced. Fine. I’m talking about the lies and cover ups and the way you asked me to be part of it all, Mom. Don’t you get that that’s messed up?”

  I want to jump and scream. I want to run around like a leprechaun on fire. Maybe then she’d notice the fire, the way it hurts, the way I didn’t want to be lit up like that my whole life.

  “I think there are better ways to draw attention to your hurt, Kennedy, than this strange letter act you’re engaging in. Why don’t we just talk about it?” she continues in a schoolteacher tone that inflames me.

  “As if that would work,” I shout.

  “What is this letter thing you keep talking about?” my father asks, interrupting.

  I explain quickly about the letters I sent, and the reaction they’ve, evidently, elicited. I return to my mom. “They’re not random women,” I point out. “You had me lie to them. You made me lie to Catey’s mom and to Mrs. Steigler and to Mrs. Lipshitz, who, incidentally, is a very nice woman. And to Bailey. And now to Amanda. It never ends, Mom. It never ever ends,” I say, and I feel like I’m trying to tear down bricks with my bare hands, peeling away at the mortar with my fingernails. But I’m hardly making a dent.

  “Darling, you act as if I have a drug problem. Or a drinking problem, God forbid, like poor Hayes’s mother. Do you realize she died young? She was only forty-six. She basically drank herself to death. That’s a real problem.” She shakes her head, like the memory of his mother’s final days is too much to bear. “I went to her memorial service. It was so sad to see a beautiful life cut short like that.”

  I turn to my father, waiting for him, expecting him to pounce on this opening and say something about Noah Hayes and me. He keeps his mouth shut, very purposefully, pressing his lips together. He nods at me, and in this small gesture I know he’s not going to tell her, that she doesn’t need to know, and that he is on my side. I want to thank him again. To hug him again.

  I look back at my mom, calling on my reserves. This is my chance to tell her my truth. To speak from my heart about everything that hurts. “What you did is not nothing. I hated lying for you and I hated lying to dad and I hated lying to my friends. And now you’re after Amanda’s dad. Please just leave him alone,” I say as my voice breaks, and I cover my face with my hands. I’m going to cry again, because I’m so sick of this, so tired of her, and I want to have one friendship she can’t touch.

  She walks over to me, wraps her arms around me, like my dad did earlier. This is it, this is the moment when she says she’s sorry, when she apologizes for all she’s done. She is going to join me in crying, she is going to admit she’s messed up, she’s going to promise to change.

  “You’ve always been so deeply affected by things, my dear,” she says, and I pull her close, because she’s my mom, and I hate her, but I love her. She has taken care of me, and she has loved me, and done right by me, and now she is doing what she’s supposed to be doing, she’s being a mom. She pets my hair, and I feel safe again, and I know she cares more about me than she does about them. “But truly, really and truly, I assure you, there is nothing going on with your friend’s father.”

  I yank myself away from her and smash my palms against my cheeks to wipe away the tears. “You are lying.” I push my hands in my hair and tug tightly against my scalp. “God! How can Noah stand to work with you?”

  When my mom arches an expertly plucked raven-colored eyebrow, I realize I’ve made a fatal mistake.

  “Noah?”

  “Hayes, I mean,” but I played my hand, and I can’t backpedal into bluffing. My face is flaming red, and I can’t look at anything but my shoes.

  “Why would you call him Noah?” she asks, curiosity dripping from her tone.

  “I meant Hayes,” I mumble.

  “But yet, you said Noah. Nobody calls him Noah. He is Hayes to everyone, including me. I didn’t think you even knew his first name.”

  I say nothing.

  “It’s curious,” she says, and returns to her cranberry couch, sinks down into it, her power position, swirling her wineglass. “Because, I’ve noticed that Noah seems a bit distracted these last few days. I wonder if it could be”—she waves a hand through the air, then laughs—“but that’s silly. He wouldn’t do that. You wouldn’t do that. I trust you’d know better. Am I right, Kennedy?”

  My dad places his hands on my shoulders. “Good night, Jewel. We’re leaving.”

  “Oh no you’re not. You crashed my party. And now, I find out our daughter calls my agent—my best friend—Noah. I don’t think anyone is leaving. I think we’re all sitting down and having a chat about this.” She pats the spot on the couch next to her, and I want to smack her, I want to slash
her like I did to the Keeland Prep defender on the field, to ram my elbow into her gut and make her double over, tripping in her stupid red-soled shoes.

  “Let it go, Jewel,” my father says. “Let it go. So she slipped up. So she called him Noah. I call him Noah. She spends half her time with me. I’m sure it rubbed off on her.”

  “There’s only one way to know for sure how you’ve rubbed off on her, Eric,” my mother says as she reaches for her phone and stabs her fingers against the keypad.

  She waits while it rings. He must answer quickly, because she’s now saying “Noah” into the phone, drawing it out like it’s ten or twenty syllables, and she’s savoring every one.

  I don’t hear his end of the conversation. I don’t have to.

  Because the next thing she says is, “I’ve met your new girlfriend and she’s quite lovely. I have the feeling though that I’ve known her for a long time.”

  Noah

  I’ve been preparing for this moment for more than a year. Anticipating it on every level. But even as it arrives, I’m knocked in the stomach and I deserve what’s coming because I certainly don’t deserve Jewel’s loyalty. I’ve violated her trust. I’ve taken something that wasn’t mine to touch. I’ve lied to my most valuable client, and to my friend.

  I drop down on the couch in my apartment, and listen to every word of her tirade. I let every single syllable hit me hard. In the heart. In the chest. In the head. Knowing I don’t have the right to recuse myself from her anger.

  “We are through,” she says, and hangs up.

  I’m not surprised at all. I’m not surprised in the least. Still, my body is empty. But it’s nothing—this hollow feeling—compared to picturing what Kennedy is going through. I can only imagine the kind of fresh hell Jewel Stanza must be raining down on her, fire and brimstone laced with arsenic.

  I could call Jonathan and give him the news. I could call Tremaine and try to lock him up. I do none of those things. I call Kennedy. Over and over. It rings and rings. She never answers.

  Frustration and worry eats away at me, but I know better than to just show up at her house. Neither one of her parents want to see me. Hell, I hardly know if she does either.

  I grab my phone, hunt through photos, and finally find one that seems fitting. An image of a lightning strike across the sky, forming a jagged, neon heart. I’m about to hit Send when I see the photographer left an inscription on the image. “Love is like a lightning strike to the heart. It can kill you or make you burn more brightly.”

  The inscription makes me stop. I don’t want this to end. I don’t want to suggest endings. I only want beginnings with her. Over and over. I can’t let her be the one that got away.

  I find something sweeter. A cherry with a stem that curves into the top of a heart.

  I send, hoping I can do this small thing to make her life less bitter right now.

  But in the back of my mind, and far into the dark corners of my own heart, I have this sinking feeling that this is the end.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Kennedy

  We order Chinese food at my dad’s house. The choice is deliberate; pizza would feel too much like déjà vu, even though there is something very been-there-done-that about tonight. Though this showdown with my mom also hurts in a fresh new way.

  She’s dug a new hole inside me, cratered me in another place.

  But my dad hasn’t. He’s here. He stood by me.

  The eggplant tofu arrives and I dive into it with the chopsticks. My dad tackles the chicken with broccoli. We both fold ourselves onto the cushy couch, and in between bites I say thank you for the thousandth time. My phone is off. I can’t bear to talk to anyone right now.

  “Thank you for not telling her,” I say, and it means everything to me that my dad didn’t tell her. It says everything I have always believed about him.

  He holds up his hands. “Well, my not telling her didn’t do much good. I suppose in the end, the truth seems to want to get out.”

  “I guess I have to agree with that.”

  “And since we’re talking about the truth now, I need to tell you the truth and it’s a truth I didn’t realize until tonight,” he begins, his expression as serious as his tone. “And it’s that I let you down. I had no idea how deeply affected you were by your mother, and that was stupid of me. I should have looked harder, talked to you more. But more than that, I shouldn’t have been so focused on self-preservation when I split up with her. I should have been more focused on you. I should have told her then, three years ago, that I knew what she’d done. But I was hurt, and I was selfish, and I only protected myself. I didn’t protect you from her.”

  “It’s not your fault.”

  He holds up a hand. “There are things that are my fault. I should have been honest with her three years ago. Then you might not have had to carry the burden of her choices. I am so sorry I left you alone to deal with all that. Your mother and I made a mess of our marriage. It was not for you to clean up, and I am sorry you had to.”

  His voice breaks, and he reaches for me now and hugs me, and this is all I ever wanted from either of them. An honest admission.

  “It’s okay, Dad,” I say, and then I pull away first.

  He forages into his chicken, then looks at me, clearing his throat. “But, Kennedy, just because I wasn’t going to tell your mother doesn’t mean I approve of your relationship with Noah.”

  My stomach nosedives.

  “I don’t want you going out with him. I don’t think it’s right.” His voice is soft, but clear.

  I put my carton down. I’m not hungry anymore. But I’m also not afraid. The truth is out. There are no more lies between father and daughter, or mother and daughter. I started my relationship with Noah from a shroud of secrecy, I built it on a bed of the clandestine, but now everything is unveiled.

  I shake my head. “Dad, I already broke up with him once for you.”

  He narrows his eyes. “You broke up with him once to protect a secret,” he says, nailing me with the truth.

  “Fine. But it’s not a secret anymore, and I’m not going to break up with him for you. Even if I never told you I was with him, the fact remains, I broke up with him for you. So I wouldn’t hurt you. I’m not going to end it simply because you don’t want me to date an older man,” I say, feeling strong, and perhaps that’s because I stood up to my mom. Perhaps that gave me the courage to stand by this choice.

  He heaves a defeated sigh, but tries again. “I would like you to make the right choice here, Kennedy.”

  “I know. But the choices I make have to be for me. And I want you to love me even if you disagree with me.”

  In a second, he reaches for me, wraps his arms around me, and hugs me. “I will always love you.”

  Later, when I turn my phone back on I find a cherry with a heart-shaped stem. Instantly, a lump rises in my throat and tears rain down my cheeks.

  *

  The next day plays out in slow motion, in a painful, molasses slog through classes, until finally I have an hour between the end of school and the time I have to arrive at our final lacrosse game of the season. I unlock my bike and race to Lincoln Center, since it’s close to both of us. He’s standing in a quiet corner by Juilliard. Waiting for me.

  There are no words. Only a crashing together. His lips meet mine, and we kiss in a mad frenzy, desperate, oh so desperate, to erase the last twenty-four hours, to unwind back to our safe cocoon. We are a tangle of lips and teeth. A chorus of sighs and gasps. I wrap my arms around him tighter, and he grasps my back.

  We can’t get close enough.

  When at last we separate, he breathes out hard, rest his chin atop my head, and whispers, “Thank God.”

  His worry is only for me, none of it for himself. “Do you still have a job?” I ask.

  He laughs lightly and we sit down on a stone bench. “Yes. I still have a job.”

  “You’re still working with my mom?” There’s no way. My mother would never abide by
the kind of deception he’s practiced. She is the only one who is allowed to deceive.

  “No. She fired me last night. But that doesn’t mean I lost my job. K, I have other clients. I have other clients who do just fine as well. I’m not going to pretend it isn’t a blow, but the reality is when you’re an agent you have to operate under the assumption that clients come and go. You can’t put all your eggs in that basket.”

  “Oh.” I’m surprised, and I feel strangely defeated. I mean, this is a good thing for him. But it also makes me wonder why we had to be so secretive in the first place if losing her as a client wasn’t that big a deal. Then again, that’s not the real reason we were a secret.

  Eight years was the real reason.

  He looks over at the doors to the Vivian Beaumont Theater; there’s a big poster promoting a revival of La Cage Aux Folles that’s opening soon there. In my mind, I can hear our favorite song from the show, “The Best of Times.” But it feels wrong to play the music in my head right now, the words about living and loving as hard as you know how. We did love hard. It worked, but it also didn’t.

  “I’m sorry you lost an important client,” I say softly, doing my best to separate her from me. Their relationship was important to him. Her departure has to hurt.

  He grasps my hand. “I’m not gonna lie though, K. I like your mom. She’s been a good friend. A great friend. I’m going to miss her like hell. She’s been good to me, and I don’t just mean financially.”

  I shift away from him, my antennae up. “You don’t mean…?”

  He shakes his head quickly. “No, I don’t mean like that. We were never involved, obviously. I wouldn’t do that. But she took a chance on me. She helped me build my career. Everything I am today is because your mom placed a bet on me when I was no one. I was just in college, only an intern at an agency when we started working together. And what did I do years later? I lied to her. She trusted me and I deceived her,” he says, shaking his head, disgusted with himself. But he sounds heartbroken too. I should feel sympathy, but I can’t muster any good feelings for my mom right now, not after seeing how cold she could be, how easily she could face off against my father like a gladiator in an arena. I keep my mouth shut and listen.