He took her to Montreal, because he was fearful of being alone with her, and what he might say in the cabin full of memories. Brynn had spent very little time there in Vermont, but he still caught sight of her out of the corner of his eye, complaining that the cabin had no central air conditioning, or saying that she hated the antlers on the chandelier.
Tori, by comparison, loved everything. She thought the charter plane, which was nothing fancy, was the “cutest thing ever,” and she talked to the pilot for nearly an hour, asking question after question.
She had a fascination with how things worked, and what other people were thinking. Smith would simply stare at strangers, trying to guess at their personalities by their behavior, but Tori would just come right out and ask.
“Do you love being a pilot?” she asked the man.
He grinned and said he did, which surprised Smith, but not Tori.
On the plane, he'd noticed how the lighting made his face look sallow and old, but Tori looked luminous. He decided he wasn't good enough for her, and then she complained of nausea from the flight, and the ghost of Brynn had appeared once more.
Would his ex-wife ever be gone from his mind?
The first night in Montreal, after Tori had staged her little one-woman show in the restaurant (Smith had enjoyed her performance, but he knew not to laugh and encourage such a thing—the same as not snickering when a baby swears, lest you want to positively reinforce such behavior) he'd walked the city streets, alone with his thoughts.
Before the sun came up again, he'd changed his mind a hundred times. Tori was perfect for him. A perfect storm. A gorgeous disaster.
He tried to push her away, tried to tarnish her in his mind. The whole business with bringing her ex-boyfriend in for group sex had been a tactic he'd learned from his women reader fans on Facebook.
The Garbage Icing tactic.
The trick was to take something you really craved, such as a cupcake, and imagine that the chocolate sprinkles on top were dirt, and that the pastry had been rolled around in the garbage.
He thought seeing another man ha**ng s*x with Tori would help him break the habit, but the outcome was the exact opposite. She made eye contact with Smith while everything was happening, and he felt her looking into his soul. The other man in the room could have been an inanimate object. She wanted him, and he wanted her just as badly.
He changed his mind for the six-hundredth time.
He bought her a necklace, but chickened out of giving it to her.
On the final day of the contract, he was going to tell Tori everything she wanted to know about what had happened with his ex-wife. As the details came out, though, she seemed less and less keen to know. He cut out the part about Brynn pulling a gun on him and chucking it at the back of the head, because who would believe such a thing?
When the story came out, it sounded much worse than he'd expected, the words hanging in the air like a chemical burn. Tori's face grew more pale, her body language rigid.
Smith disappeared down a wormhole where time was no longer linear, and he was experiencing moments out of time, with Brynn. The memory became visceral, the back of his head stinging from where the gun had hit him. He saw the door of Brynn's new apartment opening, and her and that long-haired ass**le. He wanted to hit the man in his bearded face, but he'd struck the lamp instead.
He couldn't blame Tori for leaving. Not one bit.
She was young and smart, and she could do so much better than him.
Alone in the penthouse at the Hotel Le St. James, he wandered from room to room, calling her name softly, like a prayer. He lay on her bed, smelling her shampoo on the pillow, and her absence fell down around him like hail.
He pulled out his phone and made the call he'd been avoiding.
“I'm ready to come back,” he said.
The woman on the other line said, “It's about time.”
Part 7: Proof
Tori
Summer turned to fall, and by October, I was working an administrative job at a notary office, which was slightly less glamorous than working for a billionaire. Day after day, I'd answer phone calls, send emails, file away papers, and nobody would slam me against a desk and slip their hands into my panties. Not once did anyone corner me in the supply room and ask for a blow job. There were no charter planes, no fancy penthouse suites, and no shopping trips to upscale department stores.
And I was just fine.
Some of my girlfriends stared at me with sad faces, as though I was a charity case—the girl who'd glimpsed luxury, but then had it cruelly snatched away.
I'd reconnected with some of my pre-college friends, and we slipped into a regular routine of partying on the weekend and texting each other all week about how broke and horny we were.
The necklace was hidden at the back of the freezer, under some frozen Lean Cuisine, because I had nowhere to wear it, and no idea how to trade it in for cash. The guy at our one pawn shop in town would probably have had a heart attack if I'd plopped that thing down on the counter.
Smith had promised something like a co-author credit to me, but I assumed that offer had evaporated when I'd run out like a coward while he went for a walk.
The second week of December, a package showed up at my home. I was living with my mother, having given up my little bit of independence back in August, when I'd done a little math and decided the shame of admitting I still lived with my mother was absolutely nothing compared to the money I'd be saving on rent. I was lucky the two of us got along so well, or so all my friends told me.
My mother opened the package before I got home from work.
I gave her heck.
“It had my name on the address label!” she cried, and indeed it did.
I had to pry the contents out of her hands, because she'd already read a third of something that looked like a novel, but had all sorts of “Proof” and “Galley” stickers all over it.
I said, “This is the novel I typed the first draft of.” Holding a physical version of what Smith had created, with my help, gave me a chill.
While my mother squawked about wanting to finish the chapter before I took the galley copy hostage, I scanned through the opening pages. Smith had changed around a few of the sentences, but the book started off the way I remembered. As I got into the story, I fell into a sort of trance, the way one usually does when reading a book, but this time I could feel Smith's physical presence.
Had he handled the book? I sniffed it, searching for some trace of his scent, but I smelled only fresh paper and ink.
“No fair, you already read it,” my mother said.
“Yeah? How bad do you want it?” I giggled and ran up the stairs.
“Tori!” she wailed as she came running after me. “Let me at least read it over your shoulder!”