Back in Black (23 page)

“No problem, Sam,” Anna told her. “It's odd, but it was just a silly show.”

“Uh, this might be the point where you want to leave,” Sam suggested.

Anna's stomach began to clench, because Sam could only mean there was worse ahead. She watched intently as Drake the hypnotist had Adam step forward. She sneaked a quick look at the couple snuggled together on the floor and then one at Sam. The couple looked fine. But Sam was blanching.

The next thirty seconds of the video made it clear why.

“Cammie, you're my girlfriend, but sometimes I'm really attracted to other girls.”

“Adam, I'm really into you, but you're too nice. Guys who are nice bore me.”

Oh. My. God.

Anna saw Cammie jerk out of Adam's arms and twist around so she could see him, eyes wide with shock and hurt.

“Cammie, I don't even remember …” Adam began to apologize.

“Fuck you!” She stomped over to the glass doors leading outside, pulled one open, and slammed out into the night.

“Cammie, wait!” Adam jumped up and went after her.

Next Parker was on the recording, confessing his true feelings for Kendall. Anna was surprised. Kendall hadn't struck her as much except drunk. Not that she was judging. Strong feelings could develop quickly; look at her and Ben Birnbaum. Sometimes the right person entered your life not with a whimper but with a bang.

A moment later, she saw herself beckoned forward by Drake.

“Turn the damn thing off,” Sam declared as he grabbed for the remote. Brock tossed it to her. Meanwhile, Anna's heart thudded in her chest. What had she said or done that had Sam so upset?

“Leave it,” she insisted as she watched herself step forward on the screen. “I have to know what happened.”

She watched herself summon Scott. “Scott, I've wanted to have sex with you ever since the first moment I saw you.”

Brock snapped off the TV, and Anna wanted to die. In fact, she wanted the Berber rug to part, then the gray slate beneath it, and then the foundation of the house. That way, she could just plummet into the middle of the earth and never have to face Cyn.

She immediately forced herself to look at her friend. “Cyn, I—”

“Don't, Anna,” Cyn cut her off. “Just fucking spare me, okay?”

Cyn stood up, too. But instead of following Cammie outside, she went into the corridor that led to the virtual reality games room. Anna felt like she'd stepped into a virtual reality of her own. A
horrible
one, where the truth had not set her or her friends free but where it had inflicted awful pain. The worst part of it was, she wasn't an observer. She was a full participant and in a big way, she was responsible.

Secret Knock

B
rock suggested that maybe some food would be a good idea. But no one got up to follow him to the buffet table. Having heard Parker's “confession” about her—how truly into her he was—Kendall called a taxi and went someplace with Parker where there was a bed and room service. Scott asked where the bathroom was. Adam and Cammie had not yet returned from outside. Only Anna and Sam were left.

Anna put another birch log on the fire and then sat down again on the carpet. Her heart was
pounding
. In fact, she couldn't remember a more mortifying episode from her life. But having been raised on the metaphoric
This Is How We Do Things
Big Book (East Coast WASP edition), she knew that sangfroid was everything. What was that quote from Kipling? If you could meet the twin imposters of triumph and disaster with the same face, you would always keep your head while others were losing theirs?

Right. Far more easily said than done.

“You know, Sam, I could have happily lived out my life without ever having seen that tape.” She swallowed hard.

“I tried to warn you.”

Sparks flew up from the log as it ignited. Anna felt like she wanted to go up the chimney with them. “So, what to do now?”

“Go back to that town in Mexico and do about fifty shots of that souped-up mescal?” Sam joked. “That kinda took us out of reality for a while.”

“I'm serious.”

“Well, I
know
you're not asking me. When it comes to relationships, I'm not exactly the oracle.”

“How could I have done that?” Anna rubbed her temples hard, as if the motion could wipe away the last fifteen minutes of her life. “God, I'm a terrible person!”

“Yeah, you suck,” Sam cheered sarcastically

“I'm serious, Sam. I have no idea what I'm supposed to do. Do I find Cyn and apologize, or do I go talk to Scott or … God, how could I have
done
that?”

Sam twirled a lock of her hair. “The truth is supposed to set you free. Right?”

“Oh, very helpful,” Anna groaned.

“Look, everyone lies, Anna. Especially in Hollywood. It's like, you tell the truth if it suits you and you don't if it suits you better. Kiss-kiss, hug-hug, honey, baby, sweetheart, stab 'em in the back if you don't need 'em anymore.” Sam took off one black pump and rubbed her instep. “Dee and Cammie have been my best friends since, like, forever. I don't tell them jack. They don't even know that Adam and I made out at the New Year's Eve party.”

Anna's perfectly arched brows rose. “You did?”

“That's not the point,” Sam folded her arms.

“There
is
no point!” Anna groaned. “Cyn is going to hate me.”

“There
is
a point. It's a friendship, Anna, not a confessional.” Sam stood, got the fireplace poker, and pushed a couple of logs around. “Besides, Cyn is supposed to be a wild woman, right? She'll understand.”

“Hey. Anna?”

Anna turned—Scott stood behind her, looking perfectly comfortable, as if this whole thing wasn't bothering him at all. The most mortifying moment of her life, and his voice was as even as if he were reading the telephone directory. Her heart started to pound again. Dammit. What to say, what to say?

She settled for hi, but wouldn't make eye contact with him, much as her good breeding told her how impolite that was.

“I think maybe we oughta talk,” he suggested.

“Sure.”

“Pick your poison,” he said easily. “Here? Outside? Video poker?”

“Video poker works for me,” Anna decided, rising from the couch. Stiff upper lip—she was not about to give away how totally humiliated she felt.

“I'll just sit here and contemplate how I can use this material in a future award-winning film,” Sam cracked, waggling her index finger at Anna.

Great. Terrific. Now she was fodder for the future of American cinema. She had a horrible flash of the Academy Awards sometime around 2020, with Sam accepting the award for Best Original Screenplay.
Hypnosis
was the title of the picture. And Sam was giving her acceptance speech, saying how the movie had been inspired by something that had happened to her when she was in high school, when her friends had all come to Las Vegas and—

Stop it,
Anna commanded her own mind.
Just stop it.
She tried to remain cool as she followed Scott to the video poker area.

He slid onto a leather stool and patted the one next to him. Anna idly scanned the poker machine in front of her, just for something to do. At the Palms, they took coins or bills to begin operating them. Here at Brock's house, all it took was the press of a button. Scott began playing on his machine, so Anna did the same. The machine pretty much told her which cards to hold, so the exercise wasn't exactly absorbing. She pretended it was, though, because she was dreading whatever it was Scott was about to say to her. Cyn was somewhere in this strange mansion alone, and Anna was sitting here with Cyn's boyfriend—the boyfriend whose bones she'd wanted to jump since forever. Now they both knew it. Everyone who had been at that damn hypnosis show knew it.

“Royal flush!” Scott crowed as his machine came up all hearts: ten, jack, queen, king, ace. “Sweet. How come it never happens when I'm playing for money?”

Anna didn't give a rat's ass about his royal flush. She hadn't joined Scott to make inane conversation about gambling. If he wasn't going to get to the point, she was. She gulped hard and forced herself to swivel her stool in his direction. “About what happened …”

“Uh-huh?”

Uh-huh?
Evidently he wasn't going to make this any easier.

“Look, Scott, I can't deny I said what I said. But I would never … I'm not …” She was at a loss for words.

“I have to admit, hearing you say what you said—it was hot,” Scott confided. An easy grin spread across his face.

Anna had no idea how to respond. Hot was not what she'd been going for. She gulped. The truth was, she had no idea what she'd been going for. She'd been hypnotized. Out of control. A condition to which she was thoroughly unaccustomed.

“Truth is …” Scott continued, and his grin grew even wider. He stretched his arms overhead so thoroughly that Anna could see the muscles ripple in his forearms. “There's something I think you need to know.”

Here it comes, Anna thought. He's going to tell me that he and Cyn are having problems. That he's attracted to me, too, and—

“Truth is, I'm just not all that attracted to you.”

Anna felt the color rush to her face. “You—what?”

Scott hit the video poker game again and two pairs came up—aces and jacks. “I admit, I flirted with you a little at the pool. No big thing, right?”

“Uh …” Coherent words were simply not coming out of Anna's mouth.

“I hope you know it didn't mean anything,” Scott continued, hitting the button to get a new card. It came up an ace. “Full house. There's no justice, huh?” He turned back to Anna, gesturing toward the video machine. “That was just a game, like this is a game, you know what I'm saying? But you knew that, right?”

“Right,” Anna nodded, lying through her teeth. She hadn't known it; she'd felt pretty confident it had been about more than a little flirting, and when her friend Cyn had shown up, she hoped that her blush hadn't been too obvious.

“I'm never opposed to harmless flirting,” Scott added with a rueful shrug. “As long as both people know what's going on. And I'm a writer. Or at least I want to be. Writers need to have experiences. So sometimes I'll do things not because I want to but because I need the experience or want the experience. You know what I mean? I hope you didn't take it the wrong way, now that I heard what you said.”

“Of course,” Anna replied smoothly, though she didn't feel smooth at all. “I can … understand that. It didn't mean anything to me, either.”

She thought back on those moments by the side of the pool. Had that been harmless flirting? If so, she was pretty sure Scott had been taking it to a level beyond harmless. Now here he was, backpedaling furiously, making it look like she was the one who'd misunderstood. A maneuver worthy of a Hollywood mogul. What was it that Sam had said about lying being par for the course? And what was all this about writers needing experiences? Had Tolstoy and Emily Dickinson used the same reasoning that Scott was? Anna had recently read biographies of both writers. If they had, it was news to her.

“Actually, I'm not sure you're telling me the truth,” Scott opined. “I mean, you might not admit it right now, but you were hoping at the pool that I'd give you my room key. Right?”

“Wrong,” Anna responded pointedly, crossing her legs as she spoke. “Besides, that was then. Not now.”

He smiled and glanced at his watch. “Then was about eleven hours ago. Anyway, just so I'm clear: I don't feel that way about you. Never did.”

“Yes,” Anna managed. “I got your point.”

“Okay, cool.” Scott nodded. “I mean, I admit I was kind of curious about you. Or I've gotten curious about you. You seem so much more laid back here than you seemed back in New York.”

Oh, really? Anna sat up a little straighter, like the ballet dancer she'd been before she'd given her life up to play inane West Coast mind games. She slumped a little. Who was she kidding? Before the inane West Coast mind games, it had been inane East Coast mind games. Whatever kind of mind games they were, she wasn't interested in playing them with this guy. She might be more laid back than she'd been when she left New York, but she thought she was also at least a bit smarter.

“Scott, face facts. You didn't know me then. You don't know me now.”

He nodded affably. “Point well taken. Of course, you didn't really know me, either. If you had, you'd have known that you're not really my type. Or maybe you didn't pay that much attention.”

Anna began to feel angry, and she liked that feeling much better than the embarrassment and humiliation that had previously flooded her. “Shouldn't you also point out that you supposedly have a girlfriend? A girl-friend who's my best friend?”

“Well, yeah, that too,” Scott agreed. “But even if I wasn't with Cyn, I don't think we'd be hooking up.”

Anna stood. “You know what? You just taught me something.”

Scott stood too. “Yeah? What's that?”

“It's possible to be attracted to a guy who doesn't care about anyone else's feelings but his own. And who you thought was a lot cooler than he is.”

Scott put a hand to his heart. “A little harmless flirting and she says I don't care about her feelings. I bet you're used to guys being all over you, right? If you're interested, they're interested?”

Right
.

“Wrong,” she lied. “That isn't the issue. Not that it matters anymore. Are we done?”

Without waiting for an answer, Anna walked away. Her hands felt clammy and her breathing was shallow. Most of all, she was angry at herself—angry for letting herself be taken in by her own illusion of a guy instead of by the guy himself. But right now, that didn't matter. She knew exactly what she had to do next. She was going to do it, too, no matter how much it hurt.

Cammie found a redwood swing at the edge of the expansive backyard that overlooked the shimmering city below. The night was warm—she sat there, knees to her chin, arms wrapped around her legs, gazing first down at Las Vegas, with its many boulevards of broken dreams, and then up at the impossibly starry night. Cammie felt suspended between two places and two versions of herself—the self that Adam loved, and the bitch who kept spewing to the surface, again and again. It was the bitch's fault that Adam was still attracted to “other girls.” It had to be. It just hurt so much.