Party Girl_ A Novel - Anna David [7]
“Oh, Amelia, I’m down on my knees, I’m begging you please to come home,” I sing. God, it feels good to let loose. Adam smiles uncomfortably but I don’t care about that or about the legions of people in karaoke bars who have accused me of being tone deaf. Singing this song is the first thing that’s felt okay this whole night, besides those lemon drops. I continue to sing for the rest of the car ride, imagining Mystery Perfect Man who seems to resemble Jude Law but who isn’t a famous movie star and never slept with the nanny or was married but is just begging me please to come home to him while he’s down on his—
“Amelia.” Adam is sort of shaking me awake. “Amelia.” I open my eyes.
“Whoa,” I say. “I was singing.”
“You were, but you were also kind of sleeping. It was, to be honest, strangely adorable.” Even though he’s grinning in a I’m-laughing-with-not-at-you kind of way, I’m so humiliated that I’d rather be under the car than in it. Adam clears his throat.
“This is where you live, right?” As my eyes focus on him, I notice that he looks quite anxious. “Are you okay?” he asks.
I smile brightly, defensively. “Never better.” I open the driver’s side door. “Thanks for the ride.”
“You’re welcome.”
I step out of the car and onto the sidewalk, almost tripping myself in my Miu Miu pumps as I add, “Even though it was completely unnecessary.” I make a mental note not to wear these shoes out at night anymore.
Adam smiles and starts the car. As I watch him drive away, I marvel at what an asshole I can be sometimes. Of course the ride was necessary. I was a wobbly, dizzy, drunken mess. I’m so focused on beating myself up over being such an asshole that it doesn’t occur to me to wonder how Adam even knew where I lived.
4
I’m in Brian’s office, griping about how I pitched something to New York that they ignored, but then came up with on their own two weeks later and assigned to someone else.
“I deserved that assignment,” I say. People always get on my case for complaining—my mom tells me that my first sentence was actually “It’s not fair”—but I’ve never been good at letting things go.
Brian looks both exasperated and slightly bemused. “Shut the door,” he says.
I get up, close the door, and sit down in his fold-out guest chair, moving a stack of still-wrapped CDs to the floor to make room.
“So, why don’t you tell me what’s really going on with you,” Brian says, smiling for the first time since I’ve come into his office.
Brian has taken this sort of paternal-mentor role with me since I first started, and while my relationship with him is far less complicated than the one I have with my real-life father, I’m never quite sure what Brian wants from me. Other writers tell me that I’m his favorite, but I also feel like he’s harder on me than he is on anyone else. Every time I come back from an interview, he peppers me with, “Did you ask them what time of day they were born? And what they excelled in when they were little? And their favorite color?” On and on until he stumbles upon something, usually quite early on in the questioning, that I’ve failed to ask, after which he proceeds to lecture me about how I have to remember to ask everything because I might not be able to get whoever it is on the phone again. But he also takes an inordinate interest in my personal life—something I invite. I’ve always been a somewhat compulsive confessionalist—known to confide my life’s most intimate details to perfect strangers—and Brian seems to like this about me. I tell Brian about most of what I get up to, but the stories sometimes have to be edited slightly. If my life is NC-17 or R, Brian gets the version that’s been specifically edited for in-flight entertainment.