Can't Stand the Heat - Louisa Edwards [12]
Grant spoke up. “I don’t get it. All that for one day of Miranda Wake sitting around the Market kitchen? Doesn’t sound so exciting or buzzworthy to me.”
“Of course not. A single day would be pointless. A true publicity happening like this one builds over time.”
“How much time?” Adam felt slippery cold sweat break out on his palms.
“We were thinking a month. To start with.”
Adam’s jaw dropped. But while he may have been struck momentarily dumb, Frankie suffered no such affliction.
“I think I speak for everyone here when I say: bollocks to that.”
FOUR
Jess Wake had a dream. It was a pretty simple one, as these things go.
He wanted to be normal. Like everybody else, for once, instead of the weird kid who lived with his sister. The orphan. The shutterbug. The nerd.
He deliberately didn’t think about some of the nastier names he’d been called. There was no point tormenting himself over what couldn’t be changed—he was never going to be normal. That’s why it was a dream, not a goal.
His goal was to try and find his way through the confusing mess of lies and half-truths he’d told his sister over the years in hopes that she wouldn’t notice how completely not normal he was. To get to some kind of honest place where he could feel okay about himself again. Or, really, for the first time.
So here he was, in New York, the city he’d longed to live in ever since he was a little kid, socked away in the boonies upstate. He’d left Brandewine, shaken the dust of that craphole off his shoes, and he was ready for a new start.
The morning sun illuminated everything so clearly. The quality of the light had changed, from bright spring to hazy summer, and Jess wished he’d brought his camera out with him.
But no, this was a specific errand, he reminded himself. A good-houseguest errand, to make sure his sister knew how much he appreciated being allowed to stay.
More than that, being welcomed. With open arms and no questions asked.
At least, not out loud. Not yet. But he could feel them lurking in the shadows of the apartment, ready to pounce and claw, and he’d had to get out, just for a little while.
Jess shivered in the brisk breeze, hugging his packages close to his chest, and turned his feet toward home.
Miranda blinked her eyes open and immediately squeezed them shut again. Why was it so bright? Her tiny Upper East Side apartment only had a single window facing the street, and that was in the living room. The other window in the glorified closet masquerading as a second bedroom looked directly onto another apartment building’s brick exterior. So how could her bedroom suddenly have developed a glare?
After the first abortive motion of the day caused pain and suffering of the don’t-turn-that-way-or-your-head-will-fall-off variety, Miranda stayed carefully still and reviewed her options.
One: she could lie on her back in this bed for the rest of her life. That sounded all right, at first. Until the insistent need to visit the bathroom poked its way into her consciousness. Scrap that.
Two: she could get up, but keep her eyes closed and try to make it to the bathroom blind. This had several advantages: minimization of the head-falling-off effect, as well as the satisfaction of the increasingly urgent demands of her bladder. On the other hand, she couldn’t remember if she’d followed her usual nightly ritual of putting away every garment and accessory before bed last night. In most bedrooms, that probably wouldn’t matter, but in Miranda’s, where there was barely space for one person to turn sideways and scuttle between the wall and the bed to get to the bathroom, any debris on the floor could spell potential disaster. Especially for someone with her eyes shut, and her head in danger of defecting from her shoulders at the slightest provocation.
Miranda was fairly certain that tripping and smacking her head into the wall, bedstead, or doorframe would hurt exponentially more than opening her eyes enough to see where she was going.
Simple, really, when you looked at the cost/benefit ratio, she reflected.