Perfect Fifths_ A Jessica Darling Novel - Megan McCafferty [6]
He looks totally different.
He looks happy.
He looks tortured.
He looks exactly the same.
He looks as hot as he ever did.
Oh, no, he looks hotter than ever.
It is with a palpable measure of disquietude that Jessica acknowledges that her dumbfounding full-body bender with Marcus has only served to confirm the last and most superficial of these hypotheticals.
Was he coming or going? Jessica can’t stop herself from wondering. If she had asked that single simple question, Marcus would have provided an answer. And this information—any information—would have piqued her curiosity and required her to ask more questions that she didn’t—doesn’t—have time to ask.
Jessica rushes up to Gate C-88. A lone Clear Sky representative named Sylvia is stationed alongside the velvet rope separating the terminal tunnel from the plane on the tarmac.
“I made it!” Jessica exclaims.
Sylvia pinches a heavy-lip-lined smirk. The jetway door, as Jessica can’t help but notice, is closed.
seven
The baby-faced college senior bounds out of the bathroom less than two minutes after he went in.
“Ready?” asks Natty.
Natty has been Marcus’s improbable best friend since they were randomly assigned as roommates during their first year at Princeton University. Despite their difference in ages (five years), roots (Jersey Shore suburbia versus Alabama antebellum), and modus operandi (get serious versus get seriously laid) they have lived with—or near—each other ever since. Natty knows Marcus in a way that is possible only when one is forced to share roughly 125 square feet of living space. Natty doesn’t like the implications of his friend’s stricken expression, one that puts an unusual strain on the peaceful facade for which Marcus has become known.
“Dude?” When his friend doesn’t answer, Natty sucker-punches him in the sternum just hard enough to get his attention. “It wasn’t her being called over the PA system, okay? It was someone else. So stop—”
“It was her,” Marcus interrupts, soothing circles into his chest with his fingertips, still not taking his attention off Gate C-88.
Natty laughs too loudly, too eagerly, in the vain attempt to get Marcus to see his own ridiculousness. “Do you seriously believe The Queen?”
The Queen. Marcus paid service to The Queen while in New Orleans for what Natty likes to call a “humanitarian vacation;” it evokes a certain Jolie-Pittesque selflessness that makes girls want to have sex with him. And it isn’t untrue—Marcus persuaded Natty to spend the useless reading period before final exams working to rebuild homes in the still-devastated parts of the city. Even though they put in long days of hammering, sawing, and standing around waiting for someone to tell them what to do, Marcus and Natty still had more than enough free time to devote their evenings and early mornings to living up to the city’s unofficial motto—laissez les bon temps rouler.
After a few years of volunteering in the city made famous for its sordid decadence, Marcus is no longer content to sit elbow-to-elbow with tourists in the French Quarter, the kind who consider it a hoot to order an arm’s-length cocktail called the Hurricane Katrina (citrus vodka, blue curaçao, spiced rum, Plymouth Gin, tequila, and apple vinegar, garnished with lime) dreamed up by the more mercenary—or wickedly funny, depending on your point of view—bartenders in town. And he never matched Natty’s enthusiasm for slipping dollar bills to the tittytassel-twirling pros at the sex palace promising more “N’awlins Bounce to the Ounce” (which, in turn, prompted their carnal rivals across the street to promote “MORE N’awlins Booty Meat by the Pound”). Even the novelty of the jazz clubs had worn off when Marcus noticed that he was nodding along with the lazy behind-the-beat rhythms of the city’s take