Sundays at Tiffany's - James Patterson [77]
Forty-one WHAT WAS GOING ON WITH HIM? More to the point, what was going on with him and Jane? Hell if he knew. Michael got into the shower and turned the water to hot. He was going to see Jane today. He felt nervous and excited and happy and kind of filled with dread, all at the same time. It was the most emotion he’d ever experienced, and he felt kind of sick, actually. He stayed in the shower for a long time, then wrapped himself in a towel, wiped the fog from the mirror over the sink, and began to shave. Feeling as if he didn’t recognize the face in the mirror, he covered it with shaving cream and began swiping smooth tracks with one of those superefficient five-bladed razors. And then it happened. Something that had never happened to him before. The unthinkable. He cut himself shaving. First time ever. A dot of red puffed near his chin, then mixed with the shaving cream to form a patch of pink. He watched this phenomenon as if he were watching a miracle, like water suddenly gushing
Forty-two NORMALLY (IF YOU COULD SAY THAT), he had coffee and pastries with “friends” in the morning. But today he needed to see Jane again, to talk to her. At least one more time. So he took a long walk and ventured into the building where she worked, which had at first seemed like a good idea but now was starting to feel like a big mistake, one of a series. What was he doing here? What did he hope to accomplish? “Hello,” the woman at the reception desk of ViMar Productions said, startling him out of his fugue. “You must be an actor, right? Do you want to drop off your résumé?” Michael shook his head. “Why would you say that?” “Uh, have you ever looked in a mirror?” He was trying to decide what to say next when a scary image from the past came striding through the big red swinging doors behind the receptionist. It was Vivienne, and God, the woman was living testimony to the fine art of plastic surgery. How many tens of thousands of dollars had been spent to pull that skin into such ta
Forty-three IF I COULD TAKE one experience in my life and make it last forever, I’d choose the moment that I saw Michael waiting for me in the reception area of my mother’s office. Not seeing him at the St. Regis for the first time. Not walking up Fifth Avenue with him. Nope. It would be the moment at the office. Because that meant he was real. And it made everything else real: Yesterday at the St. Regis. Our museum field trip. The gardenia that he gave to me. It had all actually happened. Which probably meant there was a Santa Claus, an Easter Bunny, a George Clooney. “Let’s get far away from here,” I said to Michael. “Okay. Where would you like to go?” “Paris. Except I have to be back for a two o’clock meeting.” “Then Paris is probably out. Let’s grab a cab, see where it takes us.” Michael snapped his fingers . . . and a cab stopped for us. Interesting. “What was that?” I asked, my eyes wide. “Honestly, Jane, I don’t know. I’ve always been able to do it.” Ten minutes later we were wa
Forty-four IT DIDN’T MATTER what we did that day. We could have been digging ditches, and I would have been thrilled. But we did something much better than digging ditches: We Rollerbladed over the hills of northern Central Park, where the blacktop was smooth and the traffic was sparse. We flew