WENDY MARKHAM

is a pseudonym for New York Times bestselling, award-winning novelist Wendy Corsi Staub. She has written more than fifty fiction and nonfiction books for adults and teenagers in various genres—including contemporary and historical romance, suspense, mystery, television and movie tie-in and biography. A small-town girl at heart, she was born and raised in western New York on the shores of Lake Erie and in the middle of the notorious snowbelt. By third grade, she was set on becoming a published author; a few years later, a school trip to Manhattan convinced her that she had to live there someday. At twenty-one, she moved by herself to New York City and worked as an office temp, freelance copywriter, advertising account coordinator and book editor, before selling her first novel, which went on to win a Romance Writers of America RITA® Award. Slightly Single was one of Waldenbooks’ Best Books of 2002. Very happily married with two children, Wendy writes full-time and lives in a cozy old house in suburban New York, proving that childhood dreams really can come true.

To my beloved husband and our two beautiful children.

And, in gratitude, to “Will,”

without whom this book wouldn’t have been possible—

and without whom I have lived happily ever after.

Slightly Single
Wendy Markham

www.millsandboon.co.uk

This book wouldn’t exist if it weren't for my old and new friends at Silhouette, whose encouragement and enthusiasm made the writing and editorial process a pleasure. With warmest gratitude to everyone who played a role, especially Joan, Karen, Cristine, Margaret and Tara! I would also like to add sincere thanks to my agent, Laura Blake Peterson, for her constant support. And, of course, I must fondly acknowledge all the fabulous city gals who crossed my path during my own Slightly Single era, always there to share margaritas, cigarettes, dance floors and wee-hour cabs to the boroughs. Cheers to all, wherever you’ve landed!!!

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

One

Here’s how my life will turn out: I’ll marry Will. He’ll become a big stage star and I’ll give up my advertising career to stay home with our children. We’ll stay in New York rather than going South or West (because I desperately have to have all four seasons), and someday we’ll turn into the kind of senior citizens you see sharing the same side of the booth at Friendly’s. Not that I’ve ever seen a Friendly’s in Manhattan, or that Will and I have ever sat on the same side of any booth in any restaurant, ever.

Will, after all, needs his space.

In restaurants.

In general.

I, on the other hand, need no space.

Which is exactly what I tell my friend Kate, in response to her infuriatingly serene “Everyone needs space,” over Tall Skim Caramel Macchiatos at Starbucks.

“I need no space,” I tell Kate, who rolls her fake aquamarine pupils toward her dyed-blond hairline. Kate grew up in the Deep South, where it’s apparently best to be a skinny blue-eyed blonde. Actually, speaking as a well-padded brown-eyed brunette New Yorker, it’s probably best to be a skinny blue-eyed blonde any place.

“Yes, you do need space, Trace,” Kate insists, with only a hint of the antebellum drawl she’s worked so hard to lose. “Believe me, you so wouldn’t want Will in your face every second of every day.”

Okay, the thing about that is…

I so would.

Do I seem pathetic? I do, don’t I? So I’d better not admit the truth to Kate, who has already declared that she’s worried about me. She thinks my relationship with Will is one-sided.

“No,” I lie, “not every second of every day. But that doesn’t mean I want him blowing out of here for summer stock in the Adirondacks for three months without me.”

“Well, I don’t think you have a choice. I mean, it’s not like you can tag along.”

At that, I focus on my beverage, attempting to stir the sweetened foam into the darker liquid below. It refuses to harmonize, clinging in wispy clumps to the wooden stirrer like the cottony clusters of mealy bugs on my sickly philodendron at home.

“Tracey,” Kate says in a warning voice, clearly on to me.

“What?” All innocence, I toy with my yellow plastic Bic cigarette lighter, flicking it on and off, wishing for the good old days when you could smoke anywhere you damn pleased.

“You’re not thinking of tagging along with Will this summer.”

“Why aren’t I?”

“Mostly because—hello-o?—you’re not an actress. You already have a career, remember?”

Oh, yes. The career. My entry-level job at Blaire Barnett advertising, where thanks to a glorified title and my tendency to pounce on new ventures before thorough investigation, I didn’t realize I was a mere administrative assistant until a few weeks after I started, when my boss sent me a plant for Secretary’s Day.

That would be the aforementioned insect-infested philodendron. Like my position at the agency, it seemed so promising that first day, all shiny-leaved and cellophane-and-ribbon-bedecked, with a card that read, Dear Traci (note the misspelling), Thanks for all you do. Best, Jake. I got it home, made it cozy on my lone windowsill…and, a week later, the mealy bugs moved in for the kill.

“I could quit,” I tell Kate, still toying with my lighter.

“Smoking?”

“Good lord, no. My job.” I toss the lighter on the table.

Mental note: Stop for more cigarettes on the way to meet Will.

“That’s what I was afraid of.” Kate, a refreshingly nonmilitant nonsmoker, smirks. Sips. Says, “So you’ll just quit your job after less than two months—”

“More than two months—”

“More than two months,” she concedes, “and—what? Follow Will to wherever he’s going to be? What will you do there?”

“Build sets? Waitress at some coffee shop? I don’t know, Kate. I haven’t thought it through yet. All I know is that I can’t stand the thought of spending the entire summer in this hellhole of a city without Will.”

“Does Will know this?”

There is nothing ambiguous about her question, yet I stall. “Does Will know what?”

“That you’re thinking of coming with him?”

“No,” I admit.

“When is he leaving?”

“In a few weeks.”

“Maybe he’ll change his mind between now and then.”

“No. He says he needs a break from the city.”

She raises an eyebrow in a way that hints at her suspicion: that the city is not all Will is trying to escape. If she says it, I will tell her she’s wrong.

But I won’t be sure about that.

And that’s the real reason I want to go away with Will this summer. Because ever since we got together three years ago, in college, our relationship has been about as stable as an Isuzu Trooper at eighty mph on a hairpin curve. In the rain. And wind.

When we met we were both juniors. Will had just transferred from a well-known Midwestern university to our upstate SUNY college. He had great disdain for the conservative, all-American mind-set that infused not just the school he’d left, but the family he was stuck with.

I could relate. Maybe that’s what first drew me to him. The tiny western New York college town I had grown up in bore striking similarities to the Midwest Will was fleeing.

There was the accent—the flat, wrinkle-nosed a that gives apple three syllables (ay-a-pple) whether you’re in the Chicago area or upstate New York.

There was my Roman Catholic religion, shared by every last person in my life but my friend Tamar Goldstein, the lone Jewish girl at Brookside High, who got to stay home while the rest of us went to school on the mysterious High Holy Days in October.

There was my sprawling extended Italian family, with its smothering traditions in which everyone was expected to participate: nine-thirty mass on Sundays, followed by coffee and cannoli at my maternal grandmother’s house and then spaghetti at noon at my paternal grandmother’s house. This is how every Sunday of my life began, and I continue to bear the scars aka cellulite everlasting.

Will is Protestant—his ancestors were from England and Scotland. He has no discernible accent; he has no cellulite. In his parents’ house, spaghetti sauce comes from a jar.

But he, like I, longed to escape the stranglehold of small-town life and had wanted to live in New York City for as long as he could remember. The difference was, he saw the State University of New York at Brookside as a giant leap toward his goal. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that Brookside might as well be in Iowa. He figured it out by himself eventually, and ultimately skipped graduation in order to get the hell out of town as soon as possible.

When we met that first semester of junior year, he had a girlfriend back home in Des Moines, and I was living at home three miles from campus, with my parents. Our coming together was a gradual thing, and the blame for that lies squarely with Will. In retrospect, I see that he was alternately torn between cheating on his girlfriend and dumping her—and me as well—in favor of screwing around.

He used to talk about her freely to me, in a maddeningly casual way that suggested he and I were friends. If I ever popped by his apartment unannounced and he was talking to her on the phone, he’d make no attempt to hang up and would tell me casually, when he finally did, “Oh, that was Helene.” I figured that if he considered us more than friends (his word) who made out whenever we got drunk and ran into each other in a bar, he’d be a lot more furtive about his girlfriend.

So her name was Helene, and, naturally, I pictured her svelte and exotic.

Then Will went home for Christmas break and entrusted me with the keys to his apartment so I could water his plants. Yes, he had plants. Not marijuana plants, which were frequently grown in the frat houses near campus. Not a token cactus or one of those robust rubbery snake plants that you can pretty much shove into a closet and not water for a year and still keep thriving.

No, Will had regular house plants, the kind that needed sunlight and water and fertilizer.

Anyway, this key-entrusting episode was before we were sleeping together but after he’d gone for my bra clasp enough times for me to invest in something suitably flimsy. My usual was an industrial-strength closure with four hooks and eyes on an elasticized strip the width of duct tape.

I was dazzled that he trusted me not just with the plants he’d bought at the local Wal-Mart garden shop in September, but with the entire contents of the apartment he shared with two roommates. Didn’t he suspect that I would spend hours going through the plastic milk crates he kept in his closet, reading letters from Helene and searching for photos of her?

I don’t know—maybe he did suspect. Maybe he wanted me to snoop. The photos weren’t hard to find. They were tucked in the front cover of one of those cloth-bound blank books, along with a note from Helene that read: Use this as a journal while you’re away so that one day we can read it together and I’ll feel like I was there with you.

I gloated when I saw that the book was blank.

Not nearly as much as I gloated when I at last laid eyes upon the enigmatic Helene in a photo. I had known she was blond, a fact Will had mentioned more than once. And okay, I’ll give her the hair. It was long and shiny and parted in the middle. But other than that, she was ordinary—even more round-faced than I was and wearing red plaid Bermudas that did nothing for her hips and even less for her thighs. She wore them with a red polo shirt, tucked in.

I have never in my life worn a shirt tucked in, but if I were so-inclined, I sure as hell wouldn’t tuck it into red plaid Bermudas.

I stopped worrying about Helene when I saw that snapshot.

Sure enough, when Will returned from break to find his plants thriving, his plastic milk crates apparently undisturbed, and the plate of homemade cream-cheese brownies I’d left on his kitchen table, he informed me that he and Helene had broken up on New Year’s Eve. I, in my not-just-friends-but-not-quite-more role, wasn’t sure how to respond to that news. I remember ultimately acting sympathetic toward Will, and inwardly slapping myself a high five because I had won. I had beaten out Helene. The shadowy hometown girlfriend had been eliminated from the competition.

A shallow, short-lived victory, because I soon discovered that I had a long way to go. Even now, three years later, the finish line eludes me.

Kate asks, “Don’t you think you should tell Will you’re quitting your job and going with him?”

“I didn’t say I was definitely doing it. I just said that I wanted to.”

Dammit. Kate’s looking at me like I’ve just told her that I may or may not mow down everyone in this Starbucks with a sawed-off shotgun.

“I have to go now,” I decide abruptly, picking up my white paper cup and my giant black shoulder bag.

“Me, too,” Kate says, picking up her white paper cup and her giant black shoulder bag. “I’ll walk you over to the subway.”

Great.

One crosstown block and one uptown block of Kate’s attempts to sell me on the many glorious pros of summer in the city. Laughable, because I’ve already spent enough steamy, putrid-smelling urban August days to last me a lifetime.

I’ll have lived here a year Memorial Day, having spent the first few months sharing a Queens sublet with a total stranger courtesy of a Village Voice classified. Her name was Mercedes, and the few times I saw her in passing, she looked stoned. Turned out she slept all day while I was out temping, and was out all night doing God knows what—I tried to ask, but she was evasive. We both moved out on Labor Day when the actor who had sublet us the apartment returned from summer stock. I never saw her again, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she shows up on an episode of COPS someday, vigorously denying something.

Thanks to my summer in a relatively affordable borough, I scraped together enough money to land a studio of my very own in Manhattan, in the East Village. Way east. Like, almost as far east as you can go and not be on the FDR Drive or in the river. The apartment has that kind of grimy and depressing thing going on. Like the Kramdens’ place in those Honeymooners reruns on Nick At Nite, it seems to exist only in grainy black-and-white, no matter how I try to jazz it up. Not that I’m trying so hard.

Kate—whom I met temping on my third day in New York and who lives in a brownstone floor-thru in the heart of the West Village, courtesy of her wealthy parents back in Mobile—thinks I should splurge on a bright-colored cover for my futon. I tell her that I’m broke, which is always true, yet in reality I don’t want to spend any money on my place.

Here’s why: because if I make it more like a home, then there will be a permanence about it—a sense that I’m there to stay. And I don’t want to stay alone in a drab East Village flat.

I want to live with Will.

Soon.

And forever.

“And just think,” Kate is saying. “Shakespeare in the Park.”

I shrug. “Maybe Will will do Shakespeare in summer stock.”

“You think?”

I shrug. Probably more like Little Shop of Horrors. Carousel, maybe.

“Italian ices from sidewalk vendors,” she pontificates. “Weekends in the Hamptons.”

I snort at that.

“I’ve got a half-share,” she points out. “You can visit me.”

She goes on about summer, which is hard to envision on this gray May Saturday morning, cool and drizzly.

This stretch of lower Broadway is teeming with multi-pierced NYU types, stroller-pushing families, packs of suburban teenagers and the ubiquitous sales-flyer-thrusters.

Kate and I dump our empty cups into an overflowing trash can on the corner of Eighth and Broadway. I leave her admiring a pair of hundred-dollar fluorescent coral-colored mules in the window of a boutique and descend into the depths of the subway.

On the uptown-bound side I wait for the N train, standing away from the track with my back almost against the wall, yet not touching it because you never know what kind of filth is just waiting to rub off on your Old Navy Performance Fleece pullover. My eye is peeled on a scruffy guy who’s pacing back and forth along the edge of the platform. First clue that he’s not all there: It’s forty degrees out and he’s shirtless, wearing shorts and ripped rubber flip-flops. He’s muttering to himself, something about lice—or maybe it’s lights—and I’m not the only one giving him a wide berth.

Every once in a while you hear about some innocent New Yorker getting shoved in front of an oncoming train. My friend Raphael was actually on the platform when it happened once, but the pushee rolled off the track in the nick of time. The pusher looked like a regular businessman, Raphael said. He was wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase. Turned out when the police searched him that the briefcase was full of live rodents. The significance of this escapes me, other than proving that you just never know who you’re dealing with in a crowd of strangers in the city, and it’s best to keep your back to the wall.

Which I do.

Finally, the telltale rumble just before a light appears at the end of the tunnel. As the N train roars into the station, I move cautiously forward, positioning myself in advance exactly where the door will open, something that’s possible only after several months of riding the same train every day.

The car is packed and too warm and smells of sweat and Chinese take-out. Hip hop music blares from the headphones of the guy next to me as I stand holding on to a germy center pole. As we lurch forward and the lights flicker, I keep my balance, thinking about Will, wondering whether he’ll be awake when I get to the studio apartment he shares with Nerissa, whom he met on an audition last fall. He likes to sleep past noon on Saturdays.

Does it bother me that he lives with another woman?

I want to say of course not.

But the reality is that I wouldn’t mind if Nerissa got pushed in front of an oncoming N train tomorrow. She’s lithe and beautiful, an English dancer in an off-Broadway show that opened a few months ago. She sleeps on a futon behind a tall folding screen from Ikea, and Will on his full-size bed…and never the twain shall meet.

Yes, I truly believe this. I force myself to believe it, because Nerissa has a boyfriend, a Scottish pro golfer named Broderick, and Will has me. Yet I’ve seen the way he looks at her when she drifts around wearing drawstring cotton pants over her dancer’s leotard, with no hips to speak of and high, taut braless breasts.

I am all flesh, by comparison to Nerissa or not; all hips and thighs and buttocks. As I said, my bras are not wispy scraps of lace and underwire and skinny straps; my undergarments are not what you would readily call panties, a term that brings to mind slender sorority girls with Neiman Marcus charges. Sturdy, no-nonsense cotton underwear is necessary to keep my natural jiggle and sag from jiggling and sagging to an unfortunate extreme.

Will adores real lingerie, the kind that undoubtedly fills the top drawer of Nerissa’s tall Pottery Barn bureau. This, I know about Will, because once, during our senior year of college, when we had been officially dating for a few months and I knew we were about to become lovers, he bought me a teddy. It was a champagne-colored satin-and-lace getup from Christian Dior, two sizes two small—which I didn’t know whether to take as a compliment or a hint.

Every time I wore it, I put on a bra and underpants underneath. The bra because not wearing one would be obscene with my figure; the underpants because every time I moved, the teddy’s crotch unsnapped because I was too tall or too wide for it, or, sadly, both. Finally, I replaced the snaps with a hook-and-eye combo. I had learned sewing in Brookside Middle School home ec, though back then never dreamed that I would use my skills for something so illicit as replacing the crotch snaps on a sexy undergarment presented by a man with whom I would have sex before marriage.

Anyway, it was hard to tell whether Will was ever truly turned on by the sight of me in that crotch-doctored teddy with my thick duct-tape-like bra straps peeking out at the shoulders and my sensible cotton Hanes riding lower on my lumpy thighs than the french-cut teddy. I like to think that he found me irresistible, but in retrospect, I’m not certain that’s the case.

When we made love for the first time in college, it was after drinking two bottles of red wine in the apartment he shared with two gay theater guys who were out rehearsing for the campus production of Guys and Dolls, for which Will wasn’t cast. For that oversight he blamed Geoff Jefferson, the hetero-phobic (according to Will) theater professor. We drank wine and he verbally trashed Geoff Jefferson and we drank more wine and then we had sex on the nearest bed we stumbled to, which belonged to his roommate André. That’s where I lost my virginity, on six-hundred-thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets imported from Italy, staring over Will’s sweaty shoulder at a poster of Marilyn Monroe on a subway grate with her skirt blowing up around her.

Speaking of the subway, I get off at Times Square and emerge onto the bordering-on-garish family-friendly street filled with oversize theme eateries and warehouse chain stores where there were once peep shows, topless bars and porno flicks. Shoulder to shoulder with immigrants with complexions of various hues, overweight tourists with diagonal purse straps and a class trip group collectively gaping at the MTV studio across Broadway, I walk north and west: two short uptown blocks and two long crosstown blocks.

I buy my Salem Lights and a copy of today’s Post from the familiar newsstand on the corner, where the Pakistani proprietor sometimes greets me like an old acquaintance and sometimes appears not to recognize me at all. It’s unnerving.

Today, he gives me a big grin. We’re long-lost friends again.

“Hello!” he pretty much shouts, as is his way. “How you today?”

I grin back. “Not bad. How about you?”

He shakes his head at the misty sky. “This weather. Too cold. Too gray.”

I nod. I do trite conversation very well. “Seems like summer’s never going to come.” See?

“Oh, it’s coming,” he says with the conviction of a waiter at Smith & Wollensky vouching for the prime rib. “Then when it gets here, you complain.”

I wonder whether he’s employing the collective you, or if I’m supposed to take it as a sign that I’ll be miserable this summer, not just because the city is so goddamned hot from June through September, but because Will won’t be in it with me.

Two

Will’s studio apartment is on the twenty-sixth floor of a high-rise doorman building with a marble lobby and three elevators. It’s the closest thing to what my small-town upstate self used to imagine was a typical New York City dwelling. The building, I mean. The apartment is pretty much a letdown. But aren’t they all?

Growing up in Brookside, I watched a lot of TV. Mainly sitcoms, and in most of them, the setting was New York. Thus I was weaned on Monica and Rachel’s sprawling two-bedroom with oversize windows and a terrace-like fire escape, and the Huxtables’ elaborate Brooklyn Heights brownstone with an actual yard and Jerry Seinfeld’s spacious West Side one-bedroom complete with wacky neighbor.

Ha.

My place, you already know about.

Will’s place, I’ll describe as little more than a fairly large square room with square office-building-like plate glass windows along one end, and at the other, a separate kitchen the size of the stairway landing in my parents’ Queen Anne Victorian. His bed is by the windows; Nerissa’s futon and dresser are behind the aforementioned folding screen near the kitchen. In between are a semi-tacky black leather couch Will bought from the previous tenant whose fiancée wouldn’t let him bring it to the marriage, Will’s workout equipment and a bookshelf crammed with CDs, scripts, Playbills and a few actual books, mostly paperback classics he couldn’t sell back to the college bookstore after two semesters of American Lit.

Having buzzed me in, you’d think Will would be waiting with the door propped open, or at least somewhere near it. But I have to knock twice, and when he finally opens it, he’s rumpled and yawning, obviously having just rolled out of bed.

He looks fabulous anyway. At least, he does to me.

Kate once announced, after two stiff bourbons at the Royalton, that she thinks there’s something vaguely faggy about Will, and that she’s not the least bit attracted to him. This disturbed me profoundly for reasons I can’t quite grasp. Ever since, there are times when I look at Will and find myself searching for signs of latent homosexuality, half-expecting him to mince or sashay or toss a lusty leer at James, his strapping, too-beautiful-to-be-straight doorman. So far he never has, and I don’t know what it is about him that Kate sees as effeminate. She doesn’t even know about the plants in college, which, by the way, are still thriving years later on his windowsill.

Maybe it’s just the musical theater thing—so many actors are gay, and she can’t shake the stereotype because she’s from the Deep South. Or do I blame too many of her hangups on that?

In any case, as far as I’m concerned, Will is masculinity personified. Think Noel from Felicity meets Ben from Felicity and that’s pretty much Will. He’s six-foot-one and clean-shaven, with a well-defined jaw and a cleft in his chin. He has thick dark-brown hair that has looked incredibly good with sideburns, or shaggy past his earlobes or close-cropped, as it is now. His not-quite-blue, not-quite-gray eyes are the precise color of my favorite J. Crew sweater, described as Smoke in the catalogue. He works out all the time, meaning he’s lean and muscular. He frequently wears black turtlenecks, and he always wears cologne.

Where I come from, cologne, like jewelry, is worn only by Italian men—including my dad and brothers—or by Jason Miller, the local hairdresser of ambiguous sexual orientation. Okay, ambiguous only to my mother, who has speculated on more than one occasion how strange it is that such a sweet, handsome man isn’t married yet. My mother also assumes without question that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, that O.J. is looking for the real killers and that all my adult life I’ve been going to weekly Sunday mass and Saturday confession.

In any case, maybe the cologne thing triggered Kate’s comment about Will being faggy.

Even now, first thing in the morning—at least, what is considered first thing in the morning on Will’s schedule and might be the brunching hour on anyone else’s—he smells great and looks incredibly appealing in a rumpled, sexy way. Somehow, there is no morning breath; there is no Bed Head.

“Did I wake you?” I ask, tiptoeing to kiss his cheek, which is barely covered with stubble.

“It’s okay.” He yawns and pads to the kitchen area, where he fills a glass from the Poland Spring cooler that’s jammed into the corner between the stove and fridge.

“How was last night?”

“Exhausting. A bunch of dowdy East Side dowagers and their philandering husbands. A martini bar and beef carpaccio, even though carpaccio’s been over for years.”

“What about martinis?”

“With this crowd they’re always in.”

I should mention that Will works for Eat Drink Or Be Married, a Manhattan caterer. He makes excellent money waitering at private events like weddings and charity dinners. Most of the guests are high profile, and sometimes he’s privy to great celebrity dirt, which I find fascinating.

“Listen, Trace, I know we’re supposed to go to your friend’s party tonight, but I have to work.”

“What?” Stabbing disappointment. “But we’ve been planning this for weeks! It’s Raphael’s thirtieth birthday.”

I have to wait for Will to drain the full glass of water, something he does eight times a day, before he says, “I know, and I had asked Milos to let me have off tonight, but he got into a bind. Jason fell at the rink yesterday and twisted his ankle.”

Jason, one of the other waiters, happens to be Jason Kenyon, the former Olympic figure skater. I’m not that big on following sports, but even I’ve heard of him—I think he got a bronze medal a few years ago in Japan. Now he’s trying to make it as an actor here in New York, and he must be as broke as anyone else, because he’s willing to wear a Nehru jacket while lugging monstrous trays around and clearing away rich people’s plates. Not that it isn’t worth it. They make twenty bucks an hour, plus tips.

“Can’t Milos find somebody else to fill in?” I ask.

“He doesn’t want just anyone. It’s a big celebrity wedding out in the Hamptons, and he only wants a certain quality of waiter there.”

“Flattering for you, but where does that leave me?”

Will puts his glass in the sink, then leans over and kisses my cheek. “Sorry, Trace.”

I pout, then ask, “Which celebrity?”

“I can’t say.”

“You can’t say?” I gape at him—or rather, his back, since he’s retreated to the other side of the room. I follow him. “Not even to me?”

“I’m sworn to absolute secrecy,” he says blandly, removing his long-sleeved thermal T-shirt and tossing it into a nearby laundry basket. “You’ll know tomorrow, though. It’ll be in all the papers.”

“So tell me now. I’m dying to know.”

“I can’t. Look, I don’t even know exactly where the wedding is going to be held. They don’t want anyone calling the press with the details. I’m supposed to give a code word to the car service driver who picks me up at the train station, and then he’ll take me there. That’s how undercover this whole thing is.”

Pissed off at this whole ridiculous secret agent scene, I say, “Christ, Will, what do you think I’m going to do, tip off Page Six?”

He laughs, taking off his flannel boxers. “You’ll know tomorrow.”

“Along with the rest of the world,” I grumble, watching him reach for the laundry basket again.

Unlike me, he’s extremely comfortable naked. I could never walk around without clothes in front of anyone, even Will. Especially not Will. I’d be too conscious of him watching my thighs doing their Jell-O dance and my boobs swinging somewhere around my belly button. Then again, even if I had a perfect body, I don’t think I could ever parade around nude.

Although everyone says that changes when you have a baby. According to my sister Mary Beth, who’s had two, giving birth pretty much entails lying spread-eagled in some room with total strangers regularly coming along to stick their hands into your crotch up to their elbows. She says you don’t even care who sees you naked after that. It must be true, because Mary Beth just joined a health club and started getting massages and taking steams. This from a girl whose mother had to write her a permanent excuse to get out of showers after fifth-grade gym because she was so traumatized by public nudity.

Naturally, I was traumatized about it, too. But by the time I hit fifth grade, my mother had already gone through my three brothers, who were so wanton that they would pull down their pants in front of me and my friends, bend over and fart for fun. So when I tried working the modesty angle for the gym shower excuse, my mother was in no mood to coddle. “You don’t want to take a shower in front of everyone? Get over it!” was pretty much her attitude with me.

“Anyway, I really need the money,” Will informs me. “I’m leaving in a few weeks, and I won’t be making much over the summer.”

“I thought they pay you.”

“They do, but it’s a fraction of what I get with Milos. I’m going to take a shower.” Will heads for the bathroom. “Then we’ll go out and get breakfast.”

“Lunch,” I amend, pulling out a cigarette and my lighter.

“Whatever. Hey, you know what? Could you not smoke in here?”

I pause with the butt midway to my mouth. “Why not?”

“It bothers Nerissa. She says her clothes smell like smoke whenever you’ve been here.”

“Oh.” I slowly put the cigarette back into the pack, trying to think of something to say to that.

I don’t have to. He closes the door behind him.

No more smoking at Will’s place?

Dismayed at this turn of events, I drift over to the couch and sit, grabbing a magazine from the pile on the floor. Entertainment Weekly. Will subscribes. I flip through it absently, stewing. It’s not that Nerissa doesn’t have a right to not smell like secondhand smoke. I understand where she’s coming from. But I feel vaguely unsettled and, I guess, embarrassed. Like I have this dirty, disgusting habit that’s infringing on other people’s lives.

Which I suppose is the truth, but Will never seemed to mind me smoking at his place before. Sometimes he even bums cigarettes from me when we’re out, and he says that if he weren’t a vocalist, he would definitely be a smoker.

There’s a part of me—granted, an irrational part—that wonders why Will didn’t stick up for me to his roommate. He could have told Nerissa that I can smoke in their apartment if I want to, and that she’ll just have to deal. After all, he moved in first. His name is on the lease, not hers. The more aggravated I get thinking about it, the more I want a cigarette.

I’m not one of those girls who started smoking behind the bleachers in junior high, or grew up in a smoker household. In my family, only my sister’s soon-to-be-ex-husband Vinnie and my grandfather smoke butts, and my grandfather’s had lung cancer for almost a year.

You’d think that would scare me into quitting, but the man is in his late eighties. I figure I’ll quit in a few years, when I’m married and ready to get pregnant, because I don’t think it’s fair to expose a fetus to all the potential damages of tar and nicotine. But until then, my smoking is not bothering anyone.

Except, of course, Nerissa.

I had my first cigarette my sophomore year of college. My friend Sofia had recently started smoking to lose weight, and she claimed it worked. Of course, by our junior year she ended up in the Cleveland Clinic with a severe eating disorder, so the ciggy habit was the least of her problems. Not the best role model for me, but I thought she looked cool smoking, and as always, I was willing to try anything—except cutting back on food or exercising more—to lose weight.

What I wouldn’t give to be thin, I think, gazing down at a two-page spread of Hollywood starlets at the Cannes Film Festival. Big boobs, teeny waists, no hips, no thighs. I don’t get it. I mean, in my world, big boobs are a given. I come from a long line of women with racks. If you think I’m stacked, you should see my grandmother on my mother’s side. She still wears this 1940s-style bullet bra, and you can see her coming from blocks away. She takes pride in what she coyly refers to as her “figure.”

Not me. My figure, I could do without. I’d gladly swap everything between my ribs and clavicle for a flat chest if it came with the ten-year-old boy body I so covet—the one that supposedly went out of style with the waif models years ago. Yeah, right. As if Rubenesque is ever really going to be back in vogue.

I listen to Will in the shower. He’s singing some Rogers and Hammerstein type song. He has a great voice, in my opinion. Sometimes I wish he would just scrap the whole Broadway scene and make a pop record. But he doesn’t want to do that. His dream is to make it big on stage.

So far, he’s only done a couple of off-off-Broadway musicals—one a revival of some obscure show, the other an original written by this guy he met in acting class. Both of them closed within a few weeks.

That’s why this summer stock thing could be really good for him.

I just can’t help wishing he were a little more wistful about leaving me behind. Or that he’d ask me to come with him, rather than making me wait for the right time to suggest it myself.

I haven’t really thought it through yet—what I’d do if I actually did go along. I mean, I know I wouldn’t be able to live with Will, who’s staying in the cast house. But how hard would it be to find a small room to rent for the summer in some dinky little town almost an hour north of Albany? And there must be jobs there, because it gets touristy in the summer. I’m definitely not fussy. I could waitress, or baby-sit.

I know what you’re thinking, but look, I love the thought of not having to take the subway to a nine-to-five job in the hot, smelly city where I answer somebody else’s phone and make copies all day. It would be so freeing to do something else for a while.

As for the advertising career…well, I could always find another agency job in the fall. Or something else. After all, it’s not like I have my heart set on becoming a big-time copywriter. It just seemed like something I could do with my English degree.

Other than teach.

My parents think I should teach. They think it’s the perfect job for women. My mother was a teacher before she married my father. My Aunt Tanya still is a teacher at the middle school back home. My sister was a teacher before, during and after her marriage to my ex-brother-in-law Vinnie, who came home one day last year and told Mary Beth he didn’t love her anymore.

She was really broken up about it—they have a couple of kids, so I know it’s a big deal—but if you ask me, she’s better off without him. He was always flirting with other women—especially after Mary Beth gained a permanent twenty pounds with each of her pregnancies.

Maybe not so permanent. She’s trying to take the weight off now. Hence, the health club. She doesn’t teach anymore. She lost her job about a week before Vinnie dumped her. She was devastated about the job, but that didn’t stop old Vinnie from kicking her when she was down. Shows you what a special guy he is.

The running water and the singing come to an abrupt halt, and moments later Will opens the bathroom door. Mist swirls around him as he comes out with a towel wrapped around his waist.

I find myself wondering if he does that when Nerissa’s here. I guess it wouldn’t surprise me, because he’s so casual about nudity. Plus, like I said, she has a boyfriend, and he has me, so it’s not like anything could happen between them. They’re just roommates. Right?

Right?

“What are you doing?” he asks.

“Reading Entertainment Weekly.”

“No, I mean, you were staring at me funny. Like something’s bothering you.”

“I was?” Damn. I just shrug.

He does, too, and towels off.

I pretend to be fascinated by an article offering an update on the whereabouts of former Road Rules castmates.

Now is not the time to bring up the summer stock thing. Maybe over lunch.

Or maybe I should just drop the whole idea.

I mean, following Will to summer stock—that seems kind of desperate, doesn’t it? Like I’m afraid that if he leaves New York, I’ll lose him. Like I have to go along to keep an eye on him, and make sure he doesn’t cheat on me.

But the thing is, there’s a good chance that that’s pretty much true.

Because maybe, in the back of my mind, I suspect that Will has cheated on me. It’s nothing he’s ever said or done, just a feeling I sometimes have. It comes and goes, so it could just be paranoia on my part. As Raphael always says, I’m not exactly the self-esteem queen.

I watch Will get dressed in jeans, a thick navy sweatshirt and sneakers. He combs his hair back into place after he pulls the shirt over his head, and turns to me.

“Ready?”

I nod and toss my magazine aside, grabbing my fleece pullover and black bag once again.

As we head out the door of his apartment, I reach for Will’s hand. He’s not big on affection—he says his family is on the cold side. Since my parents pretty much go around hugging everyone who crosses their path, I tend to stray into touchy-feely more often than I probably should. But Will is used to me by now, and gives my fingers a quick squeeze before releasing them to press the button for the elevator—something he could have done with his free hand, but maybe I’m just looking for reasons to be irked.

The truth is, I want Will to be as crazy about me as I am about him. Which I sometimes think he is—he just doesn’t know how to show it.

For example, there was a time, a few years ago, when he used to call me dear.

Ew.

You know what I mean? With him it was dear, instead of hon, or sweetie, or babe or any of the usual boyfriend-girlfriend pet names. Maybe he had good intentions, but it just bugged me, because it seemed like something an aging spinster schoolteacher would call a prize pupil. Yes, dear, you may go to the girls’ room, but be sure to come right back for the social studies quiz.

There was nothing remotely affectionate or romantic about it, and it just felt forced. I cringed every time he did it, especially when we were in public, and I wanted desperately to ask him to stop. Finally he did, on his own. Maybe he realized I never called him dear in return, or maybe it felt as unnatural to him as it sounded to me.

Naturally, as soon as he stopped, I missed it. At least it was something.

I wish he’d come up with some other endearment to call me, but I don’t know how to bring it up. I can’t just pop out with, “You know what would make me happy? If you called me Bunchkins or Sugar.”

Which actually wouldn’t make me happy, either. In fact, gag.

But you know what I mean. I just long for more, I guess, than we have. And now, with Will leaving, I feel this urgency, this need to establish our relationship more completely.

I suppose three years of going out is pretty established.

But I’m ready for more. I can’t help it.

When Will needed a roommate and placed an ad in the Voice, I was stung. I had hoped that maybe he’d consider us moving in together. In fact, I had finally worked up all my nerve to broach the subject with him one night after much input from Kate and Raphael—but before I could open my mouth, he told me about finding Nerissa.

So let’s take a step back and assess the situation as it now stands.

One gorgeous, buff, commitment-phobic actor blowing out of town.

One overweight, insecure, commitment-obsessed secretary left behind.

I just don’t have a good feeling about this.

But that doesn’t stop me from ordering the bacon cheeseburger with onion rings at the coffee shop around the corner from Will’s building.

And it doesn’t give me the courage to ask him if I can go with him.

Three

Raphael has a sprawling birthday party every year.

He always throws it for himself, and he always holds it at his apartment in the meat-packing district. A Manhattan Realtor or an optimist or a blind moron might call it a loft in a converted warehouse, but basically, there’s nothing converted about the place. It still looks and feels like a warehouse—a cavernous, dank, virtually windowless, virtually unfurnished place that not even Martha Stewart, armed with a glue gun and yards of chintz and rolls of Persian carpet, could transform into anything remotely homey.

But it’s a large dwelling, and in Manhattan, large dwellings are notoriously hard to come by. Raphael makes good use of his; he always invites everyone he ever met to his birthday parties, and he tells them to bring everyone they ever met.

According to Kate, who’s known Raphael a year longer than I have and has therefore been to his birthday parties before, the crowd is typically comprised of incredibly gorgeous, hip, fashionable gay males and their incredibly gorgeous, hip, fashionable straight female friends.

This year, because it’s a milestone birthday for Raphael, the crowd is expected to be even larger than usual, and also more gorgeous, more hip and more fashionable than usual.

Raphael told me that there’s always a theme.

Last year, it was a jungle theme. Buff men in loincloths and animal prints.

The year before that, it was a beach party. Buff men in Speedos.

This year, it’s an island theme.

Spot the trend? Raphael’s motifs are designed to allow for minimal clothing—not to mention maximum alcohol consumption by way of fun, fruity drinks.

This year, he’s rented fake palm trees. He wanted to have blazing tiki torches, but I talked him out of that one. His friend Thomas, who is a set designer for Broadway shows, created this shimmering blue waterfall and lagoon out of some kind of slippery fabric. Frozen cocktails are being served in fake plastic coconut cups.

I arrive almost two hours late, with Kate in tow. She’s the reason we’re tardy. She went to a salon to have her lip waxed shortly before the party was supposed to start, and we had to wait for the blotchy red swelling to go down.

Now, as we walk into Raphael’s jamming party, she tugs my arm and asks, “Are you sure I look all right?”

Actually, she doesn’t. In keeping with the island theme, she has what looks like a Hawaiian Punch mustache above her upper lip, despite her futile attempts to cover the welt with pancake makeup. The lighting in her apartment was so dim that I didn’t realize how much it shows until we were on the subway.

“You look fine,” I lie.

She cups a hand at her ear. “What did you say?”

“You look fine,” I shout, to be heard above the blasting Jimmy Buffet tune and the din of voices. “I just can’t believe you waited until just before the party to get your lip waxed. Why didn’t you do it earlier in the day, or yesterday? You know you always have a bad reaction to the wax.”

“I didn’t realize my mustache had come back in until tonight,” Kate shouts back. “I mean, what did you want me to do, show up here with five o’clock shadow? I can’t believe you didn’t tell me I had stubble when we were together this morning.”

“I didn’t notice, Kate. Guess I was too wrapped up in my own trauma.”

“How bad do I look?” She takes a few steps toward the television set and strains to catch a glimpse of herself reflected in the darkened screen.

“Tracey!” Raphael materializes with a shriek, umbrella-bedecked frozen strawberry daiquiri in hand, and gives me a big kiss.

He’s a beautiful man, with jet-black hair, mocha-colored skin and the longest eyelashes I’ve ever seen. People sometimes mistake him for Ricky Martin, and he invariably goes along with it, signing autographs and waxing nostalgic about the good old days with Menudo.

“Happy Birthday, honeybunch,” I say, squeezing him.

“You didn’t dress up, Tracey!”

“I didn’t?” I feign horror and look down, as though expecting to find myself naked. “Don’t scare me like that, Raphael.”

He swats my arm. “I mean you didn’t dress in keeping with the theme.”

“What did you expect me to wear? A bikini? Trust me, Raphael, it’s better this way,” I say, motioning at my black turtleneck beneath a black blazer, worn with trendy black pants I splurged on in French Connection. Hopefully, the monochromatic effect is more slimming than funereal. “Great outfit on you, though.”

“You like?” He does a runway twirl, modeling his tropical print shirt, short shorts and Italian leather boots. “You don’t think it’s too gay, Tracey?”

In case you haven’t noticed, Raphael is a frequent name-user. He likes to think of it as his conversational trademark.

“Since when are you worried about being too gay, Raphael?”

“Since I saw the man Alexander and Joseph brought with them. Tracey, he’s delicious, and incredibly understated. You’d never suspect he’s a homo like the rest of us.” He motions over his shoulder at the reasonably good-looking, straight-looking man deep in conversation with Alexander and Joseph, who tonight are wearing matching sarongs with their matching gold wedding bands.

“The rest of us? Speak for yourself,” I tell Raphael, and add, eyeing the guy’s not-in-keeping-with-the-theme blue crewneck sweater and jeans, “Anyway, maybe he’s not a homo.”

“Oh, please. Kate!” Raphael screams her name as she rejoins us. He grabs her and plants a big kiss on her—his standard greeting—then steps back, tilts his head and frowns, wiping at her upper lip with his thumb. “Sorry, I slobbered my daquiri on your face.”

“Oh, hell.” In her accent, which is suddenly full-blown, it comes out hay-ell. “That’s not daquiri, Raphael. Tracey!” She turns on me, asking darkly, “It does not look okay, does it? It’s still all raw and red, isn’t it?”

I hedge. “It’s not that bad.”

“It’s not that bad? Raphael thinks it’s slobbered daquiri!” Kate rushes off to the bathroom.

In response to Raphael’s questioning glance, I explain, “Lip wax.”

He nods knowingly, and says, in his barely there Latin accent, “Poor thing. And with her complexion…From peaches and cream to peaches and blood. Tracey, lip wax kills.”

“I wouldn’t know. I’m a bleach gal myself.”

“Trust me. Wax kills.”

“Trust you?”

“I’m serious, Tracey.” His eyes are big and solemn.

There are two basic Raphael moods: Giddy Enthusiasm, and Earnest Concern. He is not currently sporting the facial expressions that accompany Giddy Enthusiasm.

“You wax your lip?” I ask incredulously.

“Tracey, I don’t do it.” He winces and shudders. “I have Cristoforo do it for me.” Cristoforo would be his stylist and erstwhile lover who has since taken up with a well-known, supposedly straight soap opera actor who shall remain nameless.

“Cristoforo waxes your lip,” I repeat, not sure whether to be bemused or amused.

“Not just my lip. My whole face. Believe me, Tracey, it’s better than shaving every day.”

“I believe you, Raphael. So that’s how you keep that boyish look.”

“You know it. Let’s go mingle with Alexander and Joseph,” Raphael suggests, promptly bouncing back to Giddy Enthusiasm as he links his arm through mine.

We make our way across the room to where they’re standing. Along the way, I snag a daquiri from the tray of a passing waiter who’s all rippling muscles and washboard abs, practically naked save for a tiny thong.

“You hired waiters?” I ask Raphael, who shakes his head.

“Tracey! That’s Jones,” he says. “You’ve met him before.”

“Jones? Just Jones?”

“Just Jones.”

“I don’t remember him.”

“Yes, you do.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Of course you do, Tracey. He’s the dancer. The one from Long Island? The one with the tutu fetish?”

Raphael has this annoying habit of insisting that you know people or have been places when you have no idea what he’s talking about. It happens all the time. I used to argue with him.

Now I just shrug and go along, pretending to know Jones.

Note that Raphael’s crowd, like the pop music industry, has more than its share of mono-monikered folks. Jones and Cristoforo. Cher and Madonna.

I don’t know what to make of this, but it seems significant. I’m about to point it out to Raphael when he goes on with his explanation.

“Jones is going to be doing a chorus part in a summer stock production of Hello, Dolly in Texas, of all godforsaken places, so I told him to grab a tray and pretend he’s rehearsing for the show. I thought he’d wear a tux, something classic with tails, but, Tracey, you know Jones and his infernal need to display his physique.”

Like I said, I don’t know Jones or his infernal need to display his physique, but I pretend to, rolling my eyes along with Raphael. Still, I have to ask, because I don’t get the connection: “Hello, Dolly?”

“Yes, yes, yes, you know—the Harmonia Gardens scene with the dancing waiters.”

I do know, but before I can tell Raphael, he rushes on, assuming I’m clueless, “You know, the dance contest and the stairway and ‘so nice to have you back where you belong.’ Shh, shh, we’re almost there,” Raphael says impatiently, wildly waving his hand at me as though I’m the one who won’t shut up.

“Almost there” means that we’re almost standing in front of Alexander, Joseph and the object of Raphael’s latest crush. Maybe it’s just that he’s positioned beside two of the most flamboyant men in the room, but he seems awfully low-key and—well, normal. Too normal for Raphael’s taste.

“Aruba…Jamaica…ooh, I want to take him…Tracey, isn’t he adorable?” Raphael gushes in my ear against the opening bars of the song “Kokomo,” which is blasting over the sound system.

“He’s pretty cute,” I agree. “But not adorable.”

He looks aghast. “Tracey! How can you say that? He’s definitely adorable.”

I reassess.

The guy has short brown hair—just plain old short brown hair, rather than one of Cristoforo’s statement-making “styles” or tints that are so popular with this crowd. He has brown eyes, and a nice nose, a nice mouth—the kind of guy you’d expect to find teaching sixth grade, or pushing a toddler in a shopping cart, or raking some suburban lawn. The kind of guy you’d expect to find pretty much anywhere other than here.

But here he is, an average Joe in a crowd of outrageous Josephs and Alexanders and Joneses—which is, I suspect, precisely the reason Raphael is so attracted to him.

“Joseph!” Raphael cries, moving forward. “I love the sarong! Yours, too, Alexander! And you…whoever you are, I love the sweater. Banana Republic?”

“I’m not sure,” the guy says, wrinkling his nose a little.

He is pretty adorable. And I see that his eyes, which I assumed from a few feet away were brown, are actually greenish. He looks Irish.

Raphael is momentarily taken aback at his idol’s lack of label awareness, but he recovers swiftly. “We’ve never met,” he says, thrusting his hand forward. “I’m Raphael Santiago—the birthday boy. And this is my friend Tracey Spadolini.”

“I’m Buckley O’Hanlon. Nice meeting you, Raphael. Hey, Tracey.”

“Hey,” I say, noticing a bowl of tortilla chips on a nearby overturned cardboard box serving as a table. I’m starving. I skipped dinner, feeling guilty about that massive diner lunch with Will.

I take a step closer and dive in, scarfing a couple of chips while Raphael manages to work into his next few sentences the fact that he’s available now that he and his lover Anthony have broken up, that he works out at least five mornings a week and that he recently went to Paris on business. Until last August, he was an office temp. Now he’s an assistant style editor for She magazine.

The job isn’t as glamorous as you might think. Plus, the Paris trip was last September. But Raphael manages to make it sound as though he just blew into town on the Concorde with Anna Wintour.

“What do you do, Buckley?” Raphael asks.

“I’m a freelance copywriter.”

“A writer? You’re a writer! Buckley, what do you write?”

“Copy,” Buckley says with a faint grin. “Trust me, it’s not that exciting.”

“Buckley is writing the copy for our new brochure. That’s how we met,” Alexander says, taking out a pack of cigarettes. He hands one to Joseph before putting one between his own lips. Raphael, a notorious butt-moocher, snags one out of the pack before Alexander puts it away.

I reach into the pocket of my blazer and take out my Salem Lights. Alexander clicks a lighter four times, and we all puff away.

Buckley shakes his head. “Guess I’m the only nonsmoker left in New York.”

“Oh, I’m going to quit tomorrow,” Raphael announces.

“Since when?” Joseph asks.

“Since I turned thirty. Joseph, I want to live to see forty. That’s not going to happen with a three-pack-aday habit.”

“Oh, please,” Alexander says, and he and Joseph shake their heads and roll their eyes. They know Raphael well enough, as I do, to realize he’s full of crap. Still, Raphael is trying to impress Buckley, and I think we owe it to him to play along. Or at least to change the subject. Which I do.

“So what’s up with your new brochure?” I ask Alexander and Joseph.

Naturally, they jump right into that one. They love talking about their business—a gourmet boutique on Bleeker Street that specializes in organic preserves. They recently decided to design a Web site and add mail-order.

“If all goes as well as we expect,” Joseph says, clasping his hands over his ribs in anticipation, “we’re going to start looking at houses in Bucks County in the fall.”

“That’s great.” I glance at Raphael.

He looks envious. I’m not surprised. That’s the big thing in their crowd—for longtime lovers to buy a house in rural Pennsylvania, then spend years renovating and decorating and furnishing it.

I have to admit, even I’m jealous of Alexander and Joseph as I watch them exchange delighted glances, hauntingly similar to the expression I remember my sister Mary Beth sharing with Vinnie back when they were newly married and had just announced that they were expecting their first child.

I want to be in that kind of relationship.

Not the Mary Beth-Vinnie kind that ends in misery and divorce. The Alexander and Joseph kind, where anyone—except maybe Dr. Laura and the Reverend Jerry Falwell—can see that these two souls belong together.

According to Raphael, Alexander and Joseph, who must be in their mid-thirties, have shared a rent-controlled one-bedroom apartment in Chelsea for ages, since before Chelsea became overly ridden with celebrities and suburban-style superstores. Alexander is a tall, bearded, Ivy-league-educated African-American from a white-collar Westchester family, and Joseph is a short, community college-educated Italian from a blue-collar Staten Island family, but at this point they share so many mannerisms and inflections that sometimes I actually think they look alike.

Jones passes by and hands out fresh daiquiris all around. This batch is even rummier than the last, but it goes down just as easily and I’m feeling a little buzzed. Buzzed enough to find it necessary to either chain smoke or devour the entire bowl of tortilla chips.

I opt for smoking, lighting a new cigarette from the ember of the first.

“So what do you write besides brochures, Buckley?” Raphael asks coyly.

Usually, he does coy pretty well, but it’s not working tonight. At least, not on this guy, who doesn’t seem interested in Raphael. Or maybe he’s just oblivious—although how he can overlook Raphael’s breathless flirtation is beyond me.

The only other option is that he’s straight. But somehow, I doubt that. I have to wonder—as a trio of newly arrived drag queens sporting grass skirts and coconut shell brassieres wander by—would a straight, reasonably adorable guy be at a party like this? In New York?

No way.

“I write jacket copy for books,” Buckley says with a shrug.

“You’re kidding! Buckley, that’s wonderful!” Raphael screeches, as though Buckley just told him he’s landed a walk-on on Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

“Trust me, it’s really not that interesting,” Buckley says, looking a little sheepish.

“What kind of books?” I ask.

“Everything. Suspense, romance, self-help, gay fiction, cookbooks—you name it.”

“Gay fiction? Have I read anything you’ve written, Buckley?” Raphael asks, bubbly as a Brookside cheerleader doing high kicks at halftime.

“I just write the cover copy,” Buckley points out again, squirming a little.

“I always remember cover copy. It’s why I buy the book,” Raphael tells him.

Kate joins us, toying with a strand of long blond hair. She’s got it stretched across her upper lip, futilely trying to hide the blotchiness.

After Raphael introduces her to Buckley, she pulls me aside and says she has to leave.

“I don’t blame you.” I glimpse the slash of angry pink skin above the painstakingly applied pink lipstick that matches her pink tropical print sundress. “It looks like it’s getting worse.”

“You think?” she drawls sarcastically. “I look like I’ve been mauled. I can’t believe you let me out of the house like this, Tracey.”

I can’t, either. But I didn’t want to show up solo at the party after Will backed out. I’ve always had this thing about going places alone. Even after all this time living in New York, I’m still not over it. It’s one thing to live alone and ride the subway alone and shop alone, but I don’t think that I could ever go to a movie by myself, or a restaurant, or a party. The small-town girl in me persists in finding that vaguely pathetic.

What a lousy friend, huh? I don’t blame Kate for being pissed.

“Do you want me to come with you?” I offer half-heartedly.

“No, thanks,” Kate says.

“Are you pissed at me?”

“Nah.” She tries to grin, wincing when the inflamed upper lip crinkles painfully. “It’s not your fault I inherited sensitive skin. It’s the Delacroix genes. That’s what my mother always says.”

“Good luck, Kate,” I say sympathetically, giving her a hug. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

When I turn back to the group, the group has dissipated. Joseph and Alexander are nowhere to be seen, and Raphael is currently being transported around the room on the drag queens’ shoulders to a rousing chorus of “Jolly Good Fellow,” leaving only Buckley O’Hanlon standing there.

“You’ve been abandoned?” I ask him. I drain the slushy remainder of my daiquiri in one big gulp that leaves my throat aching from the freeze.

“Raphael is…” He motions with his head.

“Yeah, I see him,” I say, watching Raphael hop down from his lofty perch just in time to toss back a flaming shot somebody hands him. Yes, flaming. As in, on fire. People clap rhythmically, chanting, “Go, Go, Go, Go…”

Did I mention that Raphael’s parties are wild?

“And Alexander and Joseph went to the kitchen to put the finishing touches on the cake. They said it’s shaped like Puerto Rico, and there seems to have been some kind of mishap with Mayaguez.”

“What’s Mayaguez?”

“From what I gathered, it’s either a Puerto Rican city or an unruly houseboy.”

I laugh.

Buckley laughs.

Too bad he’s gay.

Then again, I have a boyfriend. Will. Will, who should be here right now.

Doesn’t he care that our days together are dwindling? Doesn’t he know that we should be spending these last precious moments together before he heads off to summer stock without me?

That is, if I don’t go along with him.

Which I still might do.

I pluck another daiquiri from Jones’s passing tray and ask Buckley, “Ever been to the Adirondacks?”

“Nope. Why?”

So I tell him why. I say that I’m thinking of spending the summer in a resort town up there and I’m wondering how hard it’ll be to find a job and a place to stay.

“Shouldn’t you have lined that up before you made your plans?” he asks reasonably.

“You know, that’s what I’ve always hated about you, Buckley,” I say, jabbing him in the chest with a finger. “You’re so damned practical.”

He looks taken aback, then sees that I’m kidding, and he laughs. “Sorry. But I keep telling you, Trace, you’ve got to have all your ducks in a row. You can’t just go around jumping into things headlong anymore. You’re a big girl now.”

“Buckley, Buckley, Buckley.” I heave a mock sigh. “What am I going to do with you? When are you going to lighten up and learn how to live a little?”

“You’re not the first person who’s asked me that,” he says ruefully, and I get the sense that he’s only semi-kidding now.

“Really?”

He shakes his head. “I just got out of a relationship with someone who thought I wasn’t impulsive enough. But let me tell you, I’m impulsive. Just tonight, when I was getting dressed to come here, I almost wore a beige sweater. At the last minute—I’m telling you, the very last minute before I walked out the door—I switched to the navy.”

I stagger backward. “Good God, man! How positively madcap of you!”

We both dissolve into laughter. I’m impressed by his deadpan skills. And he really is cute. He would be great for Raphael, who usually tends to go for self-absorbed pretty boys or eccentric artist types.

As we chat, I make sure to work in some of Raphael’s better qualities—how generous he is, and how funny, and how he knows more about pop culture than any other living human. I tell Buckley that Raphael has heard every new CD before the singles hit the airwaves; how he sees every Broadway show in previews; how he goes to every single movie that’s released, whether or not the critics trash it.

“He saw Flight of Fancy almost the second it came out, before all this hype,” I tell Buckley.

Flight of Fancy, of course, is the hugest blockbuster to hit the multiplex in ages, and it supposedly has a shocking Sixth Sense-like twist at the end. That was all I needed to hear. I can’t take suspense. No matter how hard I try to wait, I always end up reading the last pages of Mary Higgins Clark novels before I’m halfway through. I just have to know whodunit.

“Did Raphael tell you the twist before you saw it?” Buckley asks.

“No, he wouldn’t tell me! And I still haven’t seen it.”

“You’re kidding. I thought everyone had.”

“Not me. There’s no one left for me to go with.”

Like I said, Raphael went without me, and so did Kate, who went with a blind date, and so did all my friends at work. But the thing that really gets me is that Will went with a couple of people who work at the catering company one night a few weeks ago when a gig ended earlier than they’d expected. I was really irritated with him when he told me he’d seen that movie without me. He knew I wanted to go.

“So now what? You’re going to wait until it comes out on video?” Buckley asks.

“Yeah, and believe me, I can’t stand the suspense. I’m trying to get someone to go with me. But everyone I’ve asked says you can’t see it twice, because once you know the secret, it’s pointless.”

“That’s what I heard, too.”

I gape at him. “You haven’t seen it either?”

He shakes his head.

“Then you have to go with me!” I say, clutching his arm. “I can’t believe I’ve found someone who hasn’t seen it. I’m so psyched! We’re going. Okay?”

He shrugs. “Sure. When?”

“Tomorrow,” I say decisively. “I’ve been waiting almost a month to find out what the big twist is, and I’m not going to put it off any longer. This is great.”

Suddenly, the blasting Bob Marley tune goes silent. We turn and find Raphael standing next to the stereo, teetering a little. I wonder how many flaming shots he’s ingested.

“Everybody!” He claps his hands together. “It’s time for cake. Alexander and Joseph have really out-done themselves this year. So please, gather round and get ready to sing your hearts out!”

“He’s a little over the top, huh?” Buckley asks, as we push closer to the cake table.

“He’s the greatest guy I know,” I say fiercely, wishing that were enough to make Buckley fall madly in love with Raphael. But I can’t help noticing that he really doesn’t seem that interested in him.

After a rousing chorus of Happy Birthday to You—and three encores, coaxed by Raphael—the cake has been cut and devoured, Buckley drifts back over to Alexander and Joseph, and Raphael sidles up to me.

“You’ve got frosting smeared in your hair,” I say, wiping at it with a napkin.

“That’s not the only place I’ve ever had frosting smeared, Tracey,” he tells me with a wink. Only Raphael can wink and not look like somebody’s grandfather. “Listen, what’s up with my new man? Did you talk me up?”

“Definitely. I told him you’re the most amazing person I’ve ever met.”

“What did you find out about him?”

I sip a fresh daiquiri. They’re getting less slushy-sweet and more rummy as the night wears on, but at this point, nobody cares. “He said something about how he’s just come out of a relationship with a guy who thought he wasn’t spontaneous enough.”

“Tracey, I’m spontaneous enough for both of us.” Raphael casts a lustful glance at Buckley. “What else did he say?”

“Not much. But I’m going to see Flight of Fancy with him tomorrow afternoon. I’ll try to find out more then.”

“You finally found somebody to see it with? Tracey, I’m so happy for you!” Raphael slings an arm across my shoulder. “Will Will be jealous?”

“Why would he be jealous of a gay man? Anyway, Will is never jealous. He trusts me,” I tell him.

Silence.

“What?” I demand, catching a dubious look on Raphael’s face. “He’s never jealous. Really!”

“I believe you. And Tracey, I think you should ask yourself why,” Raphael says cryptically.

“What do you mean by that?” I ask, but somebody is already pulling him away to join a conga line.

Suddenly, I’m in no mood to conga.

I find myself wondering what Will is doing. I check my watch and decide he might be home by now. Maybe I can take a cab up to his place and spend the night with him.

But when I try calling his apartment, the machine picks up.

I don’t leave a message.

Four

Sunday morning.

Will is cranky.

It’s raining.

Will is most likely cranky because it’s raining and because it’s Sunday morning, but naturally, being me, I can’t help feeling like it’s somehow my fault. Ever since we met for breakfast at the coffee shop a few blocks from his apartment a half hour ago, I’ve been struggling to make conversation with him while he broods.

The thing is, he’s moody. I’ve always known that. Part of me is attracted to the temperamental artist in him. Part of me wants him to just cheer up, goddammit.

As the waitress pours more coffee into his cup and then mine, I ask him again about last night’s wedding. It turned out the big top-secret affair was the marriage of two major movie stars who left their spouses for each other in a big tabloid scandal last year. I’m dying to know the details, but so far, Will hasn’t been forthcoming.

“So what was the food like?” I ask him, taking three of those little creamers from the shallow white bowl in the middle of the table and peeling back the lids to dump them, one by one, into my coffee. I tear two sugar packets at once and pour them in, then stir.

“Shrimp bisque, grilled salmon, filet mignon, lobster mashed potatoes…nothing spectacular.” Will sips his own coffee. He takes it black. No sugar.

“What about the cake?”

“White chocolate raspberry.”

“Yum.” I swallow a hunk of rubbery western omelet smothered in ketchup and Tabasco and wish that it were white chocolate raspberry wedding cake.

I wish that I were a bride eating my white chocolate raspberry wedding cake.

No, I don’t.

I definitely want to be a bride, but when Will and I get married—okay, if Will and I get married—I’d love to have a fall wedding with a pumpkin cake and cream cheese frosting. I wonder what he’d think of that, but I don’t dare ask him.

“So, Will, do you want me to come back to your place after I go to the movies?”

I already told him—first thing—about Buckley and Flight of Fancy, and how I was hoping to play matchmaker for Buckley and Raphael.

I also gave him a blow-by-blow description of the party, right up to and including the part where Raphael lit a tiki torch he’d hidden in his closet—defying my warning—and carried it around the apartment until he accidentally set a drag queen’s synthetic teased hair on fire. Jones tried to save the day by throwing the shimmering blue fake water fabric over him to smother it, but it turned out that was even more flammable than the wig, and it, too, went up in flames. Luckily, some quick-thinking bystander doused the fire with water from the spray hose at the sink. I left shortly after that, telling Buckley I’d meet him at one in front of the Cineplex Odeon on Eighth Avenue, a few blocks up from Will’s apartment.

I was thinking that after we see the movie, I could walk over to Will’s and we could get take-out Chinese or something.

Okay, what I was really thinking is that we can have sex. It’s been almost a week since we spent the night together, and the last time—the last few times—have been pretty blah.

But Will dashes my hopes now, shaking his head. “Nah, I’ve got a lot to do after the gym. I’m packing boxes to ship up to the cast house so I don’t have to lug everything on Amtrak.”

I could help him pack boxes. But maybe that would be too depressing.

Unless I were going with him…

But I still can’t work up the nerve to ask him about it.

I try to think of something else to talk about.

We’re in a booth beside the window. Will is wearing a maroon hooded sweatshirt I really like. It’s from L.L. Bean, and he’s had it as long as I’ve known him, and it’s not the least bit raggy, unlike most of my knock-around wardrobe.

Over his shoulder, through the rain-splattered glass, I can see people hurrying by carrying umbrellas. I notice that it’s a purely gray landscape dotted with splashes of bright yellow: slickers and taxicabs. I want to point it out to Will, but he won’t appreciate the aesthetic in his mood.

I reach for the salt shaker and dump some on my hash browns before taking a bite.

“You really should watch the salt, Trace,” Will says.

“If it’s not salty enough, I can’t eat it,” I tell him with a shrug.

There’s nothing worse than bland, under-salted food. My grandparents are supposed to be on a low-salt diet, and you never tasted anything more vile than the no-salt-added tomato sauce they tried to serve everyone one Sunday a few years back. We all agreed that it was disgusting, and my grandmother immediately switched back to making her usual sauce. The doctor keeps scolding them about their blood pressure or whatever it is they’re both supposed to be watching, but I don’t blame them for cheating. I would, too.

“You’d get used to less after a while,” Will points out.

“Maybe, but I don’t want to. It’s not like my health is in any danger.” I’m never comfortable discussing my eating habits with Will. I guess I’m afraid he might bring up my weight. So far he never has, but it’s not as though I think he isn’t aware that I could stand to lose a few pounds.

Okay, thirty or forty pounds.

Luckily, he’s never acknowledged it.

And if my luck continues, he never will.

“There are worse vices than salt,” I point out to him, still feeling defensive. “Like…”

“Cigarettes?”

I grin. “Exactly. Okay, salt and cigs. So I have two vices. Look at the bright side. At least I’m not a junkie.”

He cracks a smile at that.

“Why don’t you have any vices?” I ask, watching him take a bite of his toast. Whole grain. Unbuttered. No jelly.

I half expect him to protest that he does have vices—not that I can think of any.

But he doesn’t. He just shrugs, smiling and chewing his boring toast, confidently vice-free.

“Listen…what if I came with you, Will?”

Who said that?

My God, did I say that?

Apparently I did, because Will has stopped chewing and is looking at me, confused. “Came with me where?”

What the hell was I thinking?

I wasn’t thinking. I just blurted it out somehow, and now I can’t take it back.

I frantically try to come up with something else to say. Something to add, something that would make sense…

What if I came with you…

What if I came with you…

What if I came with you……to the bathroom the next time you go?

No, there’s no way out of this.

Now that I’ve started, I have to finish.

I put down my fork, take a deep breath, then pick up my fork again, realizing that setting it down seemed too ceremonious, as though I’m about to make a major announcement.

I am, but I don’t want it to come across that way to Will.

That would only scare him off before he really has a chance to think about it.

I stab a hunk of green pepper-dotted egg and pop it into my mouth. It’s always easier to sound casual when you’re munching something. “What if I came with you this summer?”

So much for casual.

I sound like I’m being strangled, and he looks horrified.

“Come with me?” he echoes. “You can’t come with me!”

I attempt to swallow the sodden hunk of chewed-up egg and almost gag. “I don’t mean with you, with you,” I say quickly, to reassure him. “I just mean, what if I found a place to live in North Mannfield and got a job waitressing or something for the summer? Then we wouldn’t have to be apart for three months.”

“Tracey, we can’t be together this summer! I’m doing a different show every other week. I won’t have time to spend with you even if you’re two minutes away.”

I feel a lump in my throat, trying to rise past the soggy wad of pepper and egg making its way down. I can’t speak.

But that’s okay, because Will isn’t done yet. He’s put down his fork and is shaking his head. “I can’t believe you would spring something like this on me now. I mean, I thought we’d agreed that this summer stock thing is great for me. I have to do this for my career. You’ve known that all along, Tracey. Now you have a problem with it?”

I finally gulp down the egg and the lump. “I didn’t say I have a problem with it, Will. I just said I want to come with you.”

“But you know you can’t do that, right? Look, I know what this is. You’re just trying to make me feel guilty so that I’ll change my mind and stay here. And I—”

“I am not!”

There’s an uncomfortable pause.

“You honestly wanted to come with me?”

“Yes! Not with you, though…I just wanted to be near you.”

I feel a pathetic sense of abandonment and panic. I feel like a little girl whose Daddy is trying to dump her off at preschool against her will.

“But, Trace…” He’s at a loss for words. To his credit, he doesn’t mock me. Nor does he look angry anymore.

He looks…concerned.

I realize, with a sick churning in my stomach, that I’ve overstepped the line I’m always so careful not to cross with him.

I’ve gone and smothered Will, the Man Who Needs Space.

“Okay, well, I just thought I’d run it by you,” I say, trying to be nonchalant.

I pick up my coffee cup and notice that the cream has separated into clumps on top. Ugh. It must have been sour. I plunk the mug back into its saucer and fumble for some distraction, wishing there was something left on my plate besides the strawberry stem and orange rind from the garnish I already devoured.

I have nothing to eat.

Nothing to do.

Will says nothing.

Does nothing.

This is awful. I should never have brought it up.

Not like this.

I should have planned it more effectively.

I should have rehearsed what I was going to say, so that he wouldn’t be caught off guard. So that I wouldn’t seem like such a desperate cling-on.

But deep inside, I know that no matter when or how I approached him, he wouldn’t have thought my going to North Mannfield was a good idea.

So anyway, there it is.

It’s settled.

I’ll be spending the summer here in New York, without Will.

Five

“You ready?” Buckley asks, turning to me.

“Wait, the credits,” I say, still fixated on the screen.

“You want to see the credits?”

Will and I always stay for the credits. But this isn’t Will. And anyway, I’m eager to discuss the film with Buckley, so I say, “Never mind.”

“We can stay if you want to.”

“Nah, it’s no big deal.” I stand, clutching my almost-empty jumbo box of Snowcaps.

“Want any more popcorn?” Buckley asks, as we make our way up the aisle. “Or should I throw it away?”

“No, don’t throw it,” I say, reaching into the bucket and grabbing a handful. I love movie theater popcorn, especially with butter. Will never wants to get butter, because he says it isn’t really butter—it’s some kind of melted chemical-laden yellow lard. Not that he’d be willing to get butter even if it was butter, because butter is loaded with fat and calories.

Buckley ordered extra. He didn’t even consult me. Maybe he just assumed I was an extra-melted-lard kind of gal.

Whatever.

It’s a relief to be with someone like him after that disastrous breakfast with Will. When we parted ways in front of his gym, it was awkward. He said he’ll call me tonight, but I almost wish he wouldn’t. I’m afraid he’ll bring up the fact that I wanted to go with him. Or maybe I’m afraid that he won’t bring it up, and it will always be this huge, unspoken thing lying between us.

Meanwhile, here’s Buckley, shoving the popcorn tub at me again, encouraging me to take more.

“So what’d you think?” he asks, helping himself to another handful. “Did the big twist live up to your expectations?”

“I don’t know.” I mull it over. “I mean, it wasn’t Sixth Sense-shocking. It wasn’t Crying Game-shocking. I guess there was too much build-up.”

“That’s why I wasn’t really into seeing this movie.”

“You weren’t into seeing it?” I ask, stopping in the aisle. “But you came with me. You didn’t have to come with me. Oh, God, you kind of did. Look, I didn’t mean to drag you here.”

“You didn’t.”

“Oh, come on, Buckley. I pretty much ordered you to come with me. I guess I just assumed—”

“It’s okay,” he says quickly. “I didn’t mind. Everyone I know has seen it too, so I figured this was my only chance.”

“Too bad it didn’t live up to all the hype. I mean, I was surprised that the whole thing turned out to be a dream, but wasn’t it kind of a letdown?”

“I don’t know. It was kind of like that short story ‘Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.’ Ever read that?”

“Are you kidding? The Ambrose Bierce story? I was an English major. I must’ve read it a dozen times for lit and writing courses.”

“Me, too,” Buckley says. “I remember really loving that story when I read it the first time back in high school. I thought it was such an amazing twist, you know, that it was all just this stream-of-consciousness escape thing happening in the moment before he died. This was the same kind of thing. I liked it.”

“But you didn’t love it.”

He shrugs. “How about you?”

“I really wanted to love it. It’s been so long since I’ve seen a great movie. The last one I really loved was the one with Gwyneth Paltrow that came out at Christmas.”

Naturally, Will hated that movie. He thought it was poorly acted, sappily written and unrealistic.

“Oh, I loved that one too!” Buckley says, pulling on his pullover hooded khaki raincoat as we pause just inside the doors. “Man. It’s still pouring out.”

“What a crummy day. I’ll never get a cab.” I sigh, hunting through the pockets of my jeans for a subway token I thought I had.

“Want to go have a beer?”

“A beer? Now?” Surprised, I look up at him. Then I check my watch—as if it matters. As if there’s a cutoff time for beer on a rainy Sunday afternoon in Manhattan.

“Or…do you have to be someplace?”

“No!” I say too quickly. Because I really want that beer. It beats the hell out of taking the subway back to my lonely apartment while thinking of Will uptown, packing his boxes.

“Great. So let’s get a beer.”

I pull on my rain slicker. It’s one of those doofy shiny yellow touristy ones, and it makes me look as wide as a big old school bus from behind. I’d worry about that if I were with Will—in fact, I was doing just that earlier, when he and I left the restaurant—but naturally, I don’t have to worry with Buckley. That’s the nice thing about having gay guys as friends. You get male companionship without the female competitive PMS angle and without the whole messy sexual attraction issue.

“Where should we go?” Buckley asks.

“I know a good pub a block from here,” I tell him. “I spend a lot of time in this neighborhood.”

“So do I.”

“You do?”

“Actually, I live here.”

“Really? Where?”

“Fifty-fourth off Broadway.”

“No kidding.”

“You live here, too?”

“No, I live in the East Village.”

“Really? Then why’d you want to meet way up here?”

I don’t want to get into the whole Will thing, so I just say, “I had an errand to run up here earlier, so I thought it made sense. So do you have someplace you want to go? Since this is your neighborhood…”

“No, let’s try your place. I’m always up for something new. Hey, I’m spontaneous, remember?”

I grin at him, and note that he’s wearing another crewneck sweater with his jeans. “I see you went with the beige today.”

“What can I say? It was a beige kind of day. Apparently, you beg to differ. Do you always wear black?” he asks, eyeing my outfit.

Black jeans. A black long-sleeved tunic-jersey-type shirt that camouflages my thighs—or so I like to think.

“Always,” I tell him.

“Any particular reason?”

“It’s slimming,” I say promptly, and he grins.

“And here I thought you were trying to make some kind of political or artistic or spiritual statement.”

“Me? Nope, I’m just a full-figured gal trying to pass for a waif.”

We splash out into the rain and cross the street against the light. Two minutes later, we’re sitting on barstools at Frieda’s, this semi-cool dive Will and I come to sometimes. They have awesome potato skins with cheddar and bacon, a fact I mention to Buckley pretty much the moment we sit down.

“You want to order some?” he asks.

“After all that popcorn?”

“You’re too full?”

“See, Buckley, that’s the thing. I’m never full. I could eat all day long. I’m always up for some potato skins. Hence the flab.”

“Don’t be so hard on yourself, Tracey. It’s not like you’re obese.”

“You’re sweet.” Too bad he’s gay. “So tell me about your failed relationship.”

“Do I have to?”

“Nah. Not if you don’t want to. We can talk about something more upbeat. Like…where are you from?”

“Long Island.”

“You’re from Long Island?”

He nods. “Why do you look so surprised?”

“You just don’t have that Lo-awn Guyland thing going on. You know…the accent. You don’t have one.”

“You do,” he says with a grin. “Upstate, right?”

“How’d you know?”

“The flat a gives you away. You said ay-ack-sent. So where are you from?”

“You never heard of it. Brookside.”

“I’ve heard of it. There’s a state college there, right?”

“Right.”

“I thought about going there.”

“You’re kidding. Why?”

“Because it was as far away from Long Island as I could go and still be at a state school. My parents couldn’t afford private college tuition and I didn’t get any scholarships.”

“Really?”

“Why are you surprised?”

“Because…I don’t know. You just seem like the studious type.”

He grins. “Trust me, I wasn’t. With my grades, I barely made it into a state school.”

That really is surprising, for some reason. He just seems like the type of person who would do everything well. I like knowing he was just an average student, like I was. It doesn’t mean he isn’t smart, because I can tell that he is.

“So where’d you end up going to college?” I ask him.

“SUNY Stony Brook. I wound up staying on the island and living at home.”

“Why?”

I catch a fleeting glimpse of unexpected emotion in his expression. When he speaks, I understand why, but his face is carefully neutral. “My dad died the summer after I graduated from high school. I couldn’t go away and leave my mom and my sister and brother on their own. So I stayed home.” He says it like it’s no big deal, but I can tell that it is. Or was.

“I’m really sorry about your dad.”

“It was a long time ago.” He bends over and ties his shoe, his foot propped on the bottom rung of his barstool. I wonder if the lace was untied, or if he just needed a distraction.

“Yeah,” I say, “but that’s not something that goes away, is it?”

He straightens and looks me in the eye. “Not really. Sometimes it’s still hard when I let myself dwell on it. Which I usually don’t do.”

“I didn’t mean to bring it up.”

“You didn’t know. And anyway, it’s okay. I don’t mind talking about it.”

I don’t know what else to say, so I ask, “What happened? To your dad, I mean.”

“He had been having stomach pains, and when he finally went to the doctor, they found out it was pancreatic cancer. By the time they found it, it was too late—it had spread everywhere. They gave him six weeks. He died five weeks and five days later.”

“God.” I see tears in his eyes and feel a lump rising in my throat. Here I am, wanting to burst into tears for the loss of somebody I never even met—the father of this guy I barely know.

“I know. It was horrible,” Buckley says. He takes a deep breath, then sighs. “But like I said, it was a long time ago. My mom is finally getting over it. She even went out on a date a few weeks ago.”

“Her first date?”

“Yeah.”

I try to imagine my mother going on a date, and it’s all I can do not to shudder. But then, maybe Buckley’s mother isn’t a four-eleven, overweight, overly pious, stubborn Italian woman in doubleknit pants who doesn’t bleach her mustache as often as she should.

“Did that bother you?” I ask Buckley. “Your mother dating?”

“Nah. I hate that she’s alone. My sister just got married and my brother’s in the service now, so it would be good if she met someone else. I wouldn’t worry about her so much.”

What a guy. I find myself thinking that maybe he’s too nice for Raphael. Not that Raphael isn’t wonderful, but when it comes to romance, he can be sort of fickle. He’s broken more than a few hearts, and I can’t stand the thought of nice, sweet, noble Buckley getting his heart broken.

Which reminds me—Buckley’s ex. I wonder what happened there, but I couldn’t ask for details when he’d already shown a reluctance to talk about it. Just then, the waiter appears. He’s flamboyant and effeminate, and he’s practically drooling over Buckley as we order a couple of beers and the potato skins. The thing is, Buckley isn’t movie-star handsome. He’s nice looking enough, but something about him is even more appealing than his looks. Maybe it’s the warm expression in his crinkly Irish eyes, or his quick smile or his genuine Mr. Nice Guy attitude. Whatever it is, it’s not lost on the blatantly gay waiter, and it’s not lost on me.

Too bad he’s not straight.

It’s becoming my new mantra, I realize. If Buckley weren’t gay, and I didn’t have Will…

But if Buckley weren’t gay and I didn’t have Will, we probably wouldn’t be here together, and I sure as hell wouldn’t be ordering potato-cheddar-bacon skins or blabbing about my excess flab, which is what I do when I’m with Raphael or Kate.

Anyway, I doubt I’d be Buckley’s type.

Then again, it still amazes me, three years later, that I’m Will’s type. After all, he is movie-star handsome, and I’m no goddess. Luckily, relationships go deeper than looks. At least, ours does. Physical attraction was a huge part of why I was drawn to Will, but I think he was drawn to me because I was one of the few people who ever understood his dream of breaking out of a small midwestern town and making it in New York. That burning ambition to escape the mundane lives to which we were born was the thing we had in common, the thing that ultimately brought us together.

Now it seems to be driving us apart. Christ, Will is leaving me behind. Maybe not for good, but for now, and it hurts. It hurts enough that when the waiter leaves and Buckley looks at me again, he immediately asks, “What’s wrong, Tracey?”

I try to look cheerful. “Nothing. Why?”

“You’re down about something. I can tell.”

“I’m not surprised. I can never hide anything from you, Buckley. You always have known me better than I know myself,” I say in mock seriousness.

He laughs.

Then he says, “You know, it really does seem like we’ve known each other awhile.” I realize he’s not kidding around.

I also realize he’s right. It does seem like we’re old pals. And it would be great, having a friend like Buckley. A woman living alone in New York can never have too many guy friends.

“Yeah, we should do this again,” I say to Buckley as the waiter brings our beers. “I love seeing movies on rainy weekend afternoons.”

“So do I. Almost as much as I love beer and cheddar-and-bacon potato skins.”

“I’ll drink to that.”

“Cheers.” He lifts his bottle and clinks it against mine.

We smile at each other.

Can you see it coming?

Well, I sure as hell didn’t.

He leans over and kisses me.

Yup.

Buckley—nice, sweet, noble, gay Buckley, leans toward me and puts his mouth on mine in a completely heterosexual way.

I’m too stunned to do anything other than what comes naturally.

Meaning, I kiss him back.

It only lasts a few seconds, but that’s slo mo for what could have been a friendly kiss topping off a friendly toast to transform into a romantic kiss. The kind of kiss that’s tender and passionate but not sloppy or wet. The kind of kiss that you feel in the pit of your stomach, in that quivering place where the first hint of arousal always flickers.

Yes, I am aroused by this kiss. Aroused, and stunned, and confused.

Buckley stops kissing me—not because he senses anything wrong, though. He merely stops because he’s done. He pulls back and looks at me, wearing a little smile.

“But…” I just stare at him.

The smile fades. “I’m sorry.” He looks around.

We’re the only people in the place, aside from the bartender, who’s watching a Yankee game on the television over the bar, and the waiter, who’s retreated to the kitchen.

“Was that not all right?” Buckley wants to know. “Because I didn’t think. I just felt like doing it, so I did it.” He looks a little concerned, but not freaked out.

I’m freaked out. “But…”

“I’m sorry,” he says again, looking a shade less self-assured. “I didn’t mean to—”

“But you’re gay!” I tell him, plucking the right words from a maelstrom of thoughts.

He looks shocked. “I’m gay?”

At least, I thought they were the right words.

“Yes, you’re gay,” I say in the strident, high-pitched tone you’d use if you were arguing with a brunette who was trying to convince you she was blond.

“That’s news to me,” he says, clearly amused.

There he goes with that deadpan thing again. But this time it’s not funny.

“Cut it out, Buckley,” I say. “This is serious.”

“This is serious. Because I always thought I was straight. Maybe that’s why it didn’t work out with my girlfriend.”

He’s kidding again. At least about that last part. But maybe not about the rest.

Confused, I say, “I thought he was a boyfriend.”

“He was a girlfriend. She was a girlfriend.” He twirls his stool a little and leans his elbows back on the bar behind him. He looks relaxed. And definitely still amused.

I need to relax. I need a drink. I sip my beer.

“Tracey, I promise you I’m not gay.”

I gulp my beer.

“Why would I be on a date with you if I were gay?” he wants to know.

I sputter beer and some dribbles on my chin. I wipe it on my sleeve and echo, “A date?”

“Wait, you didn’t think this was a date?” he asks, brows furrowed. “I thought you asked me out.”

“Who am I, Sadie Hawkins? I asked you to go to the movies with me. Not as my date. I wanted you to date Raphael.”

“Who?” He looks around, then says, “Oh, Raphael. The guy from the party. You wanted me to date him?”

“Yes! You’re perfect for each other,” I say in true yenta fashion, though I suspect it’s a bit late for that now.

“Perfect for each other.” Buckley nods. “Except for the part about me not being gay.”

“Right.” I’m just aghast at this news, now that I’m positive he’s not teasing me.

I take another huge gulp of my beer, trying to digest the bombshell.

Physically, I’m still reeling from the kiss. I mean, he’s a great kisser. Great. And I realize how long it’s been since I’ve been kissed like that. Will and I never really kiss anymore. We just have sex—and like I said, even that doesn’t happen very often these days, and when it does, there’s no kissing involved and it’s blah.

Oh, hell. Will.

“I have a boyfriend,” I tell Buckley, plunking my beer bottle on the round paper coaster with a thud.

“You do? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because I didn’t think to. It didn’t occur to me that you thought we were on a date.”

A date.

It’s just so incredible how the whole situation could’ve blown right by me. I guess I was so distracted by what’s going on with Will that I wasn’t paying enough attention to what was going on with Buckley. Rather, to what Buckley thought was going on.

I’ve cheated on Will. Completely by accident, but still, it’s cheating. And right here in his own neighborhood, in a bar that we sometimes come to together. What if someone had seen me here with Buckley? Kissing Buckley?

Again, I scan the bar to make sure nobody’s here besides the bartender, who isn’t paying the least bit of attention to us. The place is definitely deserted.

So I wasn’t caught cheating.

Will never has to know.

Still, I’m mortified.

I look at Buckley. He doesn’t look mortified. He looks amused. And maybe a little disappointed.

“So you have a boyfriend?” he says. “For how long?”

For a second, I don’t get the question. For a second, I think that what he’s asking me is how much longer do I expect to have a boyfriend. I bristle, thinking he just assumes Will and I are going to break up after being separated this summer.

Then I remember that he doesn’t know about that. His true meaning sinks in, and I inform him, “I’ve been with Will for three years.”

“That long? So it’s serious, then.”

Naturally, I’m all, “Yeah. Absolutely. Very serious.”

Well, it is.

“You know what?” I hop off my stool. “I just remembered something I have to do.”

“Really?”

No. But I’m too humiliated to stay here with him any longer. Besides, that kiss really threw me.

Basically, what it did was turn me on, and I can’t go around being turned on by other men. I’m supposed to be with Will, and only Will.

I pull on my raincoat and fumble in my pocket for money. I throw a twenty on the bar.

“You’re really leaving? Just like that?”

“I just…I have to run. I can’t believe I forgot all about this thing….”

The thing being Will.

“Well, at least give me your number. We can still get together. I can always use another female pal.” He grabs a napkin and takes a pen out of his pocket.

Yes, he has a pen in his pocket. Dammit. How convenient for him.

“What’s the number?” he asks.

I rattle it off.

“Got it,” he says, scribbling it on the napkin.

No, he doesn’t. I just gave him my grandparents’ number with a Manhattan area code.

“Take this back,” he says, shoving the twenty at me. “This is on me. You’re not even going to get to eat any of the skins.”

“That’s okay. I’m not that hungry after all.”

He’s still holding the twenty in his outstretched hand, and I’m looking down at it like it’s some kind of bug.

“Take it,” he says.

“No, that’s okay. I can’t let you pay.”

“Why not? Really, I won’t think it’s a date if I pay,” he says with a grin.

That does it. I’m getting out of here.

He shoves the twenty into my pocket and I take off for the door, rushing out into the rain with my slicker open and my hood down.

I’m drenched before I get to the corner.

My first instinct is to rush right over to Will’s.

If I were in my right mind, I would stop, reconsider and go with my second instinct, which is to slink home on the subway, take a hot shower and crawl into bed—rather, futon.

Instead, I go with my first instinct.

In the lobby of Will’s building, I buzz his apartment.

Nerissa’s hollow voice comes over the intercom.

“It’s me,” I say. “Tracey.”

“Hi, Tracey,” says Miss Brit in her polished accent. “Will’s not here.”

He’s not?

But he’s supposed to be here. Packing.

Well, maybe she’s lying.

No, that doesn’t make sense.

Maybe he had to run out for more strapping tape or a new marker.

“Do you know where he is?” I ask her.

“No, I don’t. I just got back from rehearsal. I’ll tell him you stopped by.”

No offer to let me come up and wait for him, I notice. Well, the apartment is pretty minuscule, and she probably doesn’t feel like hanging out with me until Will comes back from wherever he is.

But still, I have a right to be there if I feel like waiting for him. More right than she does, since Will’s name is on the lease, I think irrationally.

“See you later, Tracey,” she says breezily. Her later comes out “light-ah,” heavy on the “t.” Tracey is “trice-ee.”

“Yeah. Cheerio.”

I stalk back out into the pouring rain.

Six

“You coming to lunch, Tracey?” Brenda asks in her thick Jersey accent, poking her long, curly, helmet-sprayed hair over the top of my cubicle.

“If you guys can wait two seconds for me to fax something to the client for Jake,” I tell her, not looking up from the fax cover sheet I’m filling out. “Otherwise go ahead without me and I’ll order take-out.”

“We’ll wait for you, hon,” Yvonne’s smoker’s rasp announces from the other side of my cube, just before I hear a telltale aerosol spurt as she sprays Binaca. She and my grandmother are the only two people I’ve ever seen use the stuff.

Then again, they’re probably about the same age, although Yvonne looks a lot younger. She’s tall and super-skinny with a raspberry-colored bouffant and matching lipstick, which she re-applies religiously after every post-cigarette Binaca burst. Yvonne’s claim to fame, other than being secretary to the big cheese, our Group Director Adrian Smedly, is that she was once a Rockette at Radio City Music Hall. She likes to tell stories about the old days, dropping names of celebrities I’ve mostly never heard of—people who were famous back in the fifties and sixties.

She’s what my father would call a real character, and she would take that as a compliment.

What should have been a quick fax job turns into a dragged-out ordeal. All I have to do is send Jake’s memo over to the client, McMurray-White, the famous packaged goods company that makes Blossom deodorant and Abate laxatives, among other indispensable products. But for some reason, the fax machine keeps beeping an irritating error code.

I hate office equipment. Whenever I go near the fax machine, the copier, or the laser printer, the damn things apparently sense my uneasiness and jam.

This is not a good day. Earlier, I scalded my hand using the coffeemaker in the kitchenette adjacent to the secretaries’ bay. And just now, on my way out of the ladies’ room, I slipped on a patch of wet tile and went down hard on my butt. You’d think the extra padding there would have cushioned my fall, but now it’s killing me.

Jake comes up behind me as I try to force-feed the memo into the slot for the fiftieth time.

“Having trouble, Tracey?”

I turn around to see him wearing a smirk. By now I know that it’s nothing personal. That’s Jake’s usual expression, unless the client is around. Really. No matter what the circumstances, Jake finds something to smirk about. If I tell him his wife is on the phone, he smirks. If I tell him the NBC rep canceled tomorrow’s presentation, he smirks. If I tell him a document is being messengered over from his broker, he smirks.

Let’s face it: he’s the kind of guy I’d consider an asshole if he weren’t my boss. He leers at women behind their backs, laughs whenever somebody does something clumsy and—I’m starting to think—cheats on his wife, Laurie. That really gets me. They’ve been married a little over a year, and I’ve never actually met her, but she’s really sweet whenever I talk to her on the phone. Sometimes when she calls, Jake makes a face, rolls his eyes, and tells me to say he’s in a meeting. I always feel guilty when I do that, because Laurie is so disappointed, and it’s like she doesn’t even suspect I’m lying.

Meanwhile, lately, no matter how busy he is, he always takes calls from a woman named Monique. Supposedly she’s a friend of his. If you ask me, married men shouldn’t have friends named Monique. And something tells me Laurie doesn’t know Monique exists.

“Can you see me when you’re done with that?” Jake says, as the fax machine starts beeping an error code again and latches on to the first sheet of the memo in a death grip.

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