Card Sharks (23 page)

Marianne put her face in her hands. His look. That wound completely exposed in his expression—that was the first time she'd ever seen the real.
Oh, shit. It's really too late.

And it shouldn't have been a surprise. Being real simply came too late for most people. You usually couldn't save what had come before, what had been the catalyst for the lesson. You could only make sure that you didn't let this same mistake happen in the next relationship. Oh, there would be mistakes. Other mistakes, new mistakes. But not this mistake. And this was the mistake that would sever the relationship between Marianne and Donny for good.

They would never be the same. And now all that was left was for her to realize that she had had a good thing she didn't even know she had. And she was one Elvis wedding chapel too late. It wasn't just Marianne. They'd both done it. Done it to each other and to themselves. And he was one proposal too late. And what she was realizing sitting here, ready to throw up at the table, was that Donny had just realized it, too. That look. That look on his face. He knew what she knew. And they both knew it was over.

B
ijoux could not stop crying. Good old Donny held her while she wailed and snotted and cried all over his cute Vegas shirt. He looked like he wanted to cry, too.

“Bij, I'm a guy. You're going to have to explain it to me. I don't understand why you're so upset. Is it because Marianne's married and you aren't?”

“No. Everything she wants falls into her lap without her even trying. She doesn't even know how lucky she is. I'm really, really, really, really upset. I'm just really upset. You know? I'm really . . .” She looked around the room, her fists clenched, trying to put into words what she was feeling. “Really . . . upset. I can't even explain how horrifyingly just completely, totally, awesomely upset I am. I'm just so—”

“Upset.”

“Yes!” She scrunched up her face, not wanting to admit it. Not wanting to admit it, but this was Donny, and he was the person after Marianne whom she could say anything to, and in this case, he was the only one she could say anything to. But
she couldn't quite say this one thing. “I hope I don't have that horrible feeling you sometimes get after you've revealed something very personal to somebody else and instead of feeling relieved, you feel like you've just exposed the fact that you're kind of a loser, and what was said is just forever ‘out there,' and what's between you is never the same again.”

Donny unfurled a length of toilet paper from the roll he'd set on the nightstand and pressed the wad gently against Bijoux's face to soak up the tears.

Bijoux sniffed and looked up at him. “I wish I loved you, Donny. Wouldn't that be perfect? You're such a pain in the ass, but every once in a while, you just show you know women.”

“If I knew women, Marianne would still be with me.”

Bijoux looked away, but Donny brought her back to face him with his hand on her chin. “Don't be mad at her,” he said. “You guys have been friends forever. Get through whatever the hell this is.”

“
You're
mad at her.”

He thought about that. “Okay, go ahead and be mad at her.” He frowned. “Funny. It's not like she really did anything.”

“I'm going to be honest with you. It's like here we are, side by side. She's a fucking tax accountant; I'm an heiress. Granted, an heiress who's not going to be inheriting anything, but still, it's a nice, juicy occupation. And if you take a guy and have him come up to us as we're standing there side by side, who do you think they're really going to be talking to? Who are they going to be looking at? She's got this unbelievable charisma; she's got it all. You know what, Donny?”

“What?”

“I'm hideously, horribly, grossly, unbelievably, totally jealous of my very best friend.” Bijoux rested her chin in her palm. “She's so lucky.”

He held her by the shoulder, at arm's length, and locked eyes. “You think she's lucky?”

“Yes!” Bijoux said in that voice that meant,
obviously.

“She just married a guy she doesn't even know. She's on the verge of derailing her life from everything she's worked on for the last decade.”

Bijoux thought about that. “Including you.”

“Including me. Granted, I completely fucked up my end of the bargain. I mean, we clearly would have gone on like we were forever . . . except for the part where I assumed we'd stop acting like idiots and admit we couldn't live without each other.” He shrugged. “That's just not the way it went.”

“I just wish . . .”

“What?” Donny asked.

“Don't laugh.”

“Do I look like I find any of this even remotely funny?”

“No.”

“Well?”

“I wish I'd been the one who accidentally married Peter Graham.”

Donny looked terminally confused.

“What a great mistake it would have been for me.”

“I don't understand you at all, Bij. He's not what you've been looking for. Not at all. He's kind of . . . kind of . . . not rich.”

“That's why it would have been a great mistake. Do you know what he said to me? He said, ‘I don't really think it's money you're looking for.' What do you think about that? Everybody knows it's money I'm looking for. Everybody knows.”

Donny sat back, slumping back against the pillow, and slowly nodded as he crossed his arms over his chest. “You know
what I think? I think that different people are charismatic to different people. Have you ever been sitting on a bus or in a coffee shop or whatever and just been drawn to someone? Not necessarily because they've got a rockin' bod or big tits or whatever. Maybe it's not even someone of the opposite gender. But there was just something about them, an energy that made you curious about them or wish the world were the kind of place where strangers really walked up to one another. You ever just see a person and say to yourself, ‘They've got that . . . thing.' That thing. It's a kind of chemistry, but you haven't even talked to them. So it's not really a chemistry; it's just a thing.”

“Yeah?” Bijoux said dubiously.

“You've got it.”

“I don't understand.”

“You've got it, too. That thing. For different people. Maybe for people who can't quite bring themselves to walk up to you.”

“I don't know.”

“You shine, kid. Sometimes it just might not feel like it because you're always standing in somebody else's shadow.” He stood up, rubbing his eyes. “Now. I'm going to run down to the business center and check my e-mail. I'll be right back. You clean yourself up and we'll go down there and represent. Everything is going to be fine. Okay?”

Bijoux jumped up and gave Donny a monster hug. “Okay.”

The moment she was alone in the room, Bijoux got out her purse and upended the whole thing, then took everything out of her wallet and stared at her credit cards.
Well, who am I really, then?
She looked in the mirror and suddenly had a violent urge to rip her extensions out of her head.

She went to the closet, slammed the door open, and stared at the two sets of clothing. And instead of choosing from her own loud side, she rifled through Marianne's things
and picked out a charcoal-gray pencil skirt and the yellow cashmere sweater. She added a sexy white-and-gray lacy camisole and some low Sabrina heels, which were like walking in tennis shoes compared to the stilettos she was used to. Then she went into the bathroom and wiped some of her makeup off. When she was finished, there was a superstylish, sort of kittenish, fresh Bijoux staring back at her in the mirror.

The image was like a relief; for the first time in a long time Bijoux felt comfortable with what she saw.

She sat down to wait for Donny, but someone knocked on the door. She opened the door and found Peter on the other side and she felt like she'd just been slapped. “Marianne's probably looking for you,” she blurted.

“Can I come in?”

She stepped away from the door and Peter came in and sat down on the end of the bed. With furrowed brow he stroked at the stubble on his chin, the picture of rumpled woefulness.

Bijoux could have played nice. She could have comforted him. She could have done a lot of things, but she just folded her arms across her chest and waited. It would have been different if she actually thought it was love at first sight between him and Marianne, but she knew better than that.

As if he could read her mind, Peter finally just sighed deeply, looked up at her and said, “I have no idea why I took it so far. I'm an idiot.”

The old Bijoux would have just told him that everything would be okay. But Bijoux was tired of saying things she didn't mean and pretending at things she didn't feel. So, she leaned over, grabbed a pillow, and slammed it into the side of Peter's body. “You
are
an idiot! You may be super-good-looking, but
you're just as messed up as the rest of us. What the hell were you thinking?”

Peter defended himself from the blows and grabbed on to the free side of the pillow. “Bij . . .” he said in a calming sort of tone. The kind that just made Bijoux more hysterical. If he so much as told her ‘to relax' she was going to lose it.

“You need to relax.”

“Oooh!” She wrenched the pillow away and slammed him in the side again. “That's it! Out! I'm not this desperate!” Her index finger pointing straight up in the air, she marched to the door and opened it. “Out, I say! It's not like you're anybody's white knight!”

“Did you think I was?” he asked, obviously surprised.

She bent her elbow to get more leverage so she could heave the pillow at his face, then suddenly lowered her arm. “Kind of,” she admitted. “I'm not exactly sure why.”

“Close the door. Please. Just close the door and let's talk.”

Bijoux thought about it and decided that at least some sort of explanation would be nice. She let the door fall closed and came back and sat down next to him.

He laughed softly and said, “So now you know.”

“Know what?”

“Well, you've always had your suspicions. I'm a shit disturber. Like you said. I can't help it. If I didn't stir up trouble in other people I'd bore myself to death.”

She glared at him. “You don't get away with that, you know. At some point, you're going to have to realize that you're just as fake as I ever was.”

“I don't know why I took it so far. I mean, I like Marianne, but she and I don't make any sense, not the way you and I make sense. I guess that it was opportunity. Everything seemed larger than life for a moment. I got caught up in the
excitement.” He shrugged. “Sometimes you just want to feel like you're living a bigger life than you really are. Obviously, I can't become something I'm not just by doing one spontaneous thing in a night. The funny thing is that Marianne really is that kind of girl. She just did the spontaneous thing with the wrong guy.”

Bijoux still didn't find it funny and she knew Donny didn't either. And probably what they both wanted to know was how far it went. “Well, let's have it. Did you . . .”

“No!'

“Oh!” She wasn't sure why she was surprised, but she was. It sort of went with the territory. Well, if they were going to have an attack of honesty, here, she might as well take advantage of it. “Did you want to?”

He looked up at the ceiling with a frown. “I'm not quite sure how to answer that. Admittedly, I woke up with my pants around my knees, but I don't know that it had much to do with anything other than an inability to remove my clothes for more comfortable sleeping while drunk off my ass with my shoes still on.” He looked her square in the eye. “I'm glad I didn't.”

Bijoux studied her fingernails. It was all very interesting, of course, but it was that one bit stuck in the middle that had her attention. “How do you and I make sense?”

Peter started, as if he realized what he'd said. “I'm just saying that we have a lot in common. And we understand each other.”

With a disdainful sniff, she said, “I'm not so sure I understand you.”

“I think in the big picture, you do,” he said. “Here's the thing. I'm saying I made a mistake. I'm saying that I'm sorry about it, especially if it's made things between three longtime friends pretty rocky. And I'm saying that if I could start this
whole thing over again, there wouldn't be any me and Marianne, and there certainly wouldn't be any me marrying any Marianne . . . screw it, here's what I'm asking . . .”

Bijoux suppressed a smile; it was nice to see a boy struggling over her.

“. . . I'm asking, can we at least be friends? We can see where it goes from there, but can we at least be friends?”

She couldn't help herself; she smiled for real. She thought about Peter coming around for her at Caesar's and at the craps tables and how he'd just sort of accepted what she was about. He did understand her. And you couldn't put a price on having someone in your corner who really accepted you for who you were.

“Bijoux? Do I have any sort of chance here?”

“Well, I really couldn't say,” she teased. “These things take time.”

“Okay, okay. I'll take that answer. I can appreciate that. And in the interest of full disclosure, there's something else I need you to know. So that everything's out in the—”

The unlatched door swung open and Donny walked in. “Hey, you leave her alone,” he yelled as he reached down and pulled Bijoux off the bed.

Peter jumped up and the two men faced each other.

Donny's eyes narrowed. “Um, Bij. Are you going to be okay if I talk to Petey here for a second?”

She nodded and stepped away, a small thrill in the pit of her stomach as the two men squared off.

“It's Pete. Or Peter.”

“Okay, Petey.”

They stared at each other in silence. Finally, Peter said, “Why don't you tell me what's bothering you.”