Friends with Benefits (2 page)

Afterward, they'd gone for coffee and then breakfast. It had all felt so natural—who knew that talking to a supermodel could be so easy? Maybe it was because it turned out that Tom had grown up on a farm outside Lake Mills, Iowa, just 145 miles from La Crosse. In fact, he'd actually been to La Crosse— to Kiley's school, for God's sake!—for a high school theater competition.

As for his big break into the modeling business, he'd only been discovered the previous year. An agent from New York had been scanning the midway at the Iowa State Fair, looking for fresh faces. That agent brought him to New York; he became a superstar almost overnight. When Tom recounted to Kiley how a year before he'd been getting up at four-thirty with his father and kid brother to milk the cows, his eyes shone with wonder at the impossibility of it all. The glitz and glamour of Hollywood were nearly as new to him as they were to Kiley.

That night had ended with a sunrise breakfast at The Standard on Sunset Boulevard. Afterward, Tom walked Kiley to her car, a classic 1967 platinum Mustang convertible—hers to drive as long as she worked for Platinum. Kiley had been nervous, wondering if he'd kiss her. She definitely wanted him to, even raised her face to his, hoping he'd get the hint. But he'd just given her a friendly hug and casually said he'd call her when he got back from his cross-country press junket to promote
The
Ten.
That junket was supposed to last ten days, so—

Bong. Bong. Bong.

Kiley's state-of-the-art Nokia cell phone—bestowed by Platinum so that she could reach Kiley at any time—rang with its characteristic chimes of London's Big Ben clock. Kiley picked up, thinking it was Lydia. It wasn't.

“Hello?”

“Kiley, hey, it's Tom.”

Tom. It was Tom.
The
Tom. She willed her heart to stop pin-wheeling and tried to sound casual. “Hey. Welcome home. How are you?”

“Whipped,” he said. “I talked up the movie to so many reporters in so many cities, I didn't know where I was half the time.”

“Wow!” Kiley exclaimed, realizing she couldn't think of one single cute or funny thing to say. “So . . . you're back now, huh?”

“Yeah, got in last night.”

Last night? He'd gotten back last night and was calling her the next morning? She'd known he had to be back in town to model in FAB, the yearly L.A. fashion extravaganza, but still, to call her so quickly? Oh my God, that was fantastic.

“I'm still so crapped out, I'm going to crash for a while,” he continued. “But I thought maybe you'd like to go to a party with me tonight. I know it's not much notice—”

“Oh no!” Kiley interrupted eagerly. “I mean yes, I can go. And it's okay. About the no notice, I mean.”

Shut up,
she told herself.
Just stop babbling.
Now.

“Great. It's out in Malibu. So I'll pick you up around eight, okay?”

“Sure, great, fine!”

Then Kiley had a moment of panic. What if he didn't remember where she lived? “My address is—”

“Platinum's mansion,” Tom put in. “I bought a Hollywood star map when I first came to town, even went on one of those bus tours of the stars' homes—don't let it get around.”

They said goodbye and hung up. Kiley lay on her bed, replaying the conversation in her mind. Had that really just happened? Had gorgeous, famous model Tom Chappelle actually just called her and invited her on a
date
?

Kiley sat up quickly. Wait. Maybe it wasn't a date. Maybe it was a kick-back-with-a-bud kind of thing. Kiley remembered the friendly hug that had ended their all-night gabfest only too well. She grabbed her backpack. She'd run the whole thing by Esme and Lydia; they'd help her figure it out. Meanwhile, she sent up a quick prayer:

Dear God, please don't let him think of me as a friend, which is the
kiss of death. But if he does think of me as a friend? Help me find a
way to change his mind.

2

Lydia Chandler

Clad in her burnt orange Delfina nylon-spandex print bikini, Lydia stretched out on her chaise longue at the Brentwood Hills Country Club. Then she reached into her Trina Turk beaded raffia bag with bamboo handles and took out a dog-eared book. Both bikini and bag had been borrowed from her aunt Kat. Borrowed, as in: intended to return. As Lydia saw it, so long as she put said things back where she'd found them, Thou Shalt Not Steal did not apply.

The book was borrowed too. She'd found it in her aunt's closet, buried under a neat pile of T-shirts. And she did what anyone raised in the Amazon basin would do when faced with something curious. She investigated.

The book cover featured a heaving bosom–type young woman whose globe-shaped breasts were semi-clad in a lacy push-up bra, and who sat on the lap of a naked guy with rippling muscles. Lydia couldn't actually tell if the guy was
totally
naked; unfortunately, the photo ended at their waistlines. The woman faced him, her head thrown back as if she was in the throes of a very passionate moment.

The title:
Secrets of the Kama Sutra.
Talk about your must-borrow.

From the women's magazines that had been air-dropped to her and her parents, Lydia knew that the
Kama Sutra
had something to do with certain ways of having sex that supposedly led to overwhelming pleasure. Articles in
Jane
and
Cosmo
such as “Tantric Sex: Make Him Yours Forever” had taught her that much. Lydia wasn't particularly interested in making any guy hers forever, but the notion of overwhelming pleasure interested her a lot. Here she was, nearly seventeen years old, with pale blond hair choppy from the makeshift haircuts her mother had given her in Amazonia, startling green eyes, skinny but curvy figure, and an allover tan. Guys were sniffing around her all the time, letting her know how hot she was.

As she lay back on her chaise, she admitted to herself that “all the time” was a bit of an exaggeration. Said attention had only been ongoing for the past two and a half weeks, since she'd moved from the rain forest to her aunt's guesthouse in Beverly Hills to care for her aunt's two children. Back in the Amazon, local guys had found her a pathetic excuse for a female, being much too pale, and unwilling to pierce her lower lip with a stick.

Lydia hadn't always lived in South America. She'd been born the pampered princess of wealthy Texas parents. She should have lived happily ever after, moving into her teen years with a walk-in closet full of designer outfits, and boyfriends who picked her up in Porsches and Ferraris and Jensen Interceptors. That was exactly what would have happened if her damn parents hadn't developed their damn saints-on-earth complex. Her surgeon father had a heart attack at age thirty-seven, which had somehow led to a spiritual epiphany and their subsequent move to the Amazon basin. There, he worked as a medical missionary whose only mission was to improve the health of native Amarakaire tribesmen. Lydia's mother was his assistant. Princess Lydia, then age eight, was shit out of luck.

When the lifeline had come from Aunt Kat—a job offer for Lydia to be the nanny to her young cousins—Lydia had said yes faster than a giant Amazon leech could suck the life from a peacock bass.

During all those years in Ama-land, Lydia had held on to her sanity by begging and pleading for American fashion magazines from every do-gooder doctor about to come to the bush. Most obliged, packing two or three into their knapsacks. Hence, her entire knowledge of sex, pop culture, and
life
came from devouring Cosmo and Glamour, Vogue and InStyle.

But the truly sad thing was that Lydia, a hands-on girl, had zero hands-on experience. As in: still a virgin. Oh, the humanity! It was one of the reasons she'd pounced on
Secrets of the
Kama Sutra.
She'd found her perfect first-time partner-in-crime. His name was Billy Martin; she'd met him at a nightclub in Los Feliz. Lydia had taken one look at Billy, who bore a decided resemblance to Tom Welling (she'd torn a shirtless photo of Welling out of
Star
magazine the year before and stuck it to the mud-caked wall over her straw-mat bed), and knew he'd be the one. He was also nice, funny, smart, and interesting, not to mention straight (though Lydia had misjudged that one at the outset). His parents were State Department Foreign Service officers, so he even had some sense of what it was like to be American and still feel like a foreigner.

But that first hands-on experience hadn't happened yet. It was all because of their damn schedules. Billy had just finished his freshman year at the Los Angeles Art Institute, where he was studying film and scenic design. For the summer, he had an internship with Eduardo L. Parsons, production designer of many famous films and TV shows. Parsons had been hired to design all the sets for the upcoming Los Angeles Fashion Bash (known as FAB); Billy seemed to be doing most of the grunt work. FAB opened in two days. If it had been any further away, Lydia was sure she'd be the oldest living virgin in Beverly Hills.

Where were her friends? Lydia peered around. The pool deck was crowded, but she didn't see Kiley or Esme. In fact, there were two pools at the Brentwood Hills Country Club, one of the three or four top clubs in Los Angeles. One of the pools was for families with children, one was for adults only. A breezeway connected the two of them. There were also tennis courts, lawn bowling, a gym to rival any in the city, two restaurants plus an outdoor dining pavilion, and an eighteen-hole championship golf course that had hosted both men's and women's tour events. If you had to ask how much the membership fee was, you couldn't afford it. If you didn't know several members, you'd have no chance of joining. Kat and Anya had been members ever since both were seeded tennis players. Now that Lydia was their employee, she had members' privileges too.

As she flipped open the
Kama Sutra
book, a thought struck her. Her aunt Kat was gay. She'd been living with Anya Kuriakova, the former tennis star and now famous coach, for years. Their children, Martina and Jimmy, had been the product of artificial insemination. So what the hell was Kat doing with a book about heterosexual—

“I could show you how to do that,” a male voice offered.

Lydia raised her oversized white Chanel sunglasses (thank you, Aunt Kat's closet) and peered at the drop-dead-gorgeous blond guy in sky blue surfer Jams who had just crouched by her chaise longue.

“Scott. I distinctly remember tellin' you that I'm not interested anymore,” she said with a trace of her childhood Texas drawl.

“You could have changed your mind.”

Lydia sighed. Scott Lyman was one of the country club life-guards, and a former Olympic swimmer in the backstroke. She'd had a very brief flirtation with him, and considered the possibility that he might be the man to do the deed—in other words,
her
—but soon how luscious his butt looked in surfer Jams lost out to how vacuous he sounded every time he opened his mouth.

“See, Scott, the thing is, when we met I was perfectly willing to settle for eye candy—that would be you.”

“Awesome,” he breathed hopefully.

“But I met someone else,” Lydia explained. “He's just about as perfect of a male physical specimen as you are. Plus, turns out what's between his ears is bigger than what's between his legs.”

Scott gave her a knowing look. “Bummer. Some girls say that size isn't everything, but that's bull. Let me show you what a
real
man can do.”

God, he was just so
dense.
She cocked her head across the pool. “That redhead in the white bikini over there was just checking out your ass.”

“Yeah?” Scott craned his head around.

“Go get lucky,” Lydia encouraged him with a little wave of her fingers, and he took the hint, heading for potentially more fertile hunting grounds. Good thing. Lydia didn't want to get downright rude on the boy. If he pestered her enough . . . well, it didn't pay to get her angry, either. She'd befriended a particularly powerful shaman back in the Amazon who had herbs and potions that purportedly could make a person do or not do just about anything. While Lydia had arrived from Brazil with only a battered backpack containing a change or two of clothing, she had brought a collection of vials containing her native arsenal.

Lydia went back to studying the
Kama Sutra
chart.

Dang. That girl had to be a gymnast.

3

Esme Castaneda

As she had been every morning for the past two weeks, Esme Castaneda was struck again by the beauty and luxury that surrounded her in her guesthouse. She lay on a Duxiana bed, between the palest of pink satin sheets, under a rose and white quilt that had been handmade in Appalachia. Priceless Egyptian tapestry rugs were scattered over the burnished wooden floors. The furniture was antique, white, with hand-painted details. She'd slept with the window open; the scent of oranges from the trees outside wafted through the air. It was quiet. So quiet. It struck her anew every morning when she woke up. This was really where she lived now, fifteen miles and a few light-years from her real home in Echo Park, a Latino neighborhood—a
barrio,
really. Her parents, many people she loved, were there. But also grinding poverty. Drug addicts desperate for a fix. Gangs that murdered each other just because they needed a group to hate.

Two weeks ago Esme had been hired on a probationary basis as nanny to the Goldhagen children. Steven Goldhagen was perhaps the most successful producer in television history. Men like Aaron Spelling, Dick Wolf, and David Kelley spoke of him with reverence. Steven and his wife, Diane, were also legendary for their charitable commitments. Each of them served on the board of their synagogue and many philanthropic organizations. For Diane, charity was practically a full-time job.

To make their complicated lives even more complicated, Diane had recently returned from a visit to Cali, Colombia, with a set of twins—two beautiful, dark-eyed girls so identical you could only tell them apart by the tiny heart-shaped beauty mark on one's cheek. They spoke no English, and neither Diane nor Steven spoke Spanish. That was why they hired Esme, daughter of their groundskeeper and their maid, and installed her in this gorgeous guesthouse on their gated Bel Air estate.

If the job worked out, Esme would attend Bel Air High School in the fall. Bel Air High, where the kids would be rich and white, with the confident air of those born to privilege. Probably the biggest thing the kids at Bel Air High had to worry about was whether Mommy and Daddy were taking them to ski in Switzerland for spring break or scuba diving in the Red Sea. There were no guns or knives, no gang wars, no outdated textbooks, no teachers forced to spend the majority of the time just trying to keep the peace.

Esme, nearly a straight-A student, had mixed feelings about the prospect. If she went to a good high school—no, a
great
high school—what might she accomplish? What scholarships might be available to her for college? The Goldhagens had opened the door to all possibilities, and invited Esme to waltz through. So why did she resent them so much?

She gazed at the still-crumpled pillow beside her, and then raised it to her face. It still smelled like him. Like Jonathan. Jonathan Goldhagen, Steve's son from a previous marriage. Jonathan was a young actor who'd already made his first feature film, a low-budget indie, well reviewed if barely seen. He was almost six feet tall, with short brown hair, startling blue eyes, and the rangy build of a tennis player. It was quite a contrast with Esme, who stood five feet four on a good day, and her raven hair, lush curves, and ochre skin. For the last week, almost every night, Jonathan had crept down the stone path from the mansion and made insane love to her in this very bed. When she awoke in the morning, he was always gone.

She put the pillow over her face, trying to block out how horrible it all was. Her mother had warned her not to get involved with the Goldhagens' son. If she knew the truth, Mama would be furious. Worse than that, Esme would bring shame on the family. Esme was already ashamed enough. That was why she hadn't even told her two new friends, Kiley and Lydia. They thought that after the night she'd hung out with Jonathan at the launch party for the premiere of the movie
The Ten
at the Santa Monica Pier, they'd gone back to being just friends, because she already had a boyfriend back in the Echo, Junior.

At first Esme had simply been too reserved to tell them. Much as she liked Lydia and Kiley, Esme wasn't a girl who chattered about her private life. Still, these two new friends were special. When Esme had really needed them to help her deal with the two
cholos
who had kicked Jonathan's ass, they'd both come through for her. But they were still Anglos. She'd never had Anglo friends before.

Besides, if she had told them, they'd want to know what she'd done about her
real
boyfriend. Junior was a few years older, a
veterano
who'd gotten out of the gang life. All the gang members respected him because he was a paramedic, and he'd come to them when they lay bleeding in the street after the latest gang war, when the L.A. cops would play deaf and dumb to
cholos
dying in the road, choking on their own blood.

Not long ago she'd told Junior the truth, that she wasn't sleeping with Jonathan. Only now that truth had turned into a lie, and she hadn't exactly filled him in on the status change. If he knew . . . She didn't even like to think about it. Junior didn't believe in beating on his lady. But that didn't mean some of his homies wouldn't do it for him. It had happened before.

The only person who knew the truth about Esme and Jonathan was Esme's best friend, Jorge Valdez. He was one of the Latin Kings, a group of guys who fought for the rights and prosperity of Latinos. He wrote rap lyrics that were actually uplifting. The
cholos
dissed him for it, called him a
chiquita linda
— a pretty girl. Jorge was man enough to take it. He was skinny, but strong, definitely straight, and very smart.

Esme's mother would faint from happiness if Esme married Jorge one day. But Esme didn't see Jorge like that. Their friendship meant too much to her. She knew what every girl knew— your boyfriend couldn't also be your best friend.

When she had told Jorge about Jonathan, his reaction had been characteristically blunt. “Do you have a death wish?”

Did she? She had no idea. Jorge's advice was to cut both guys loose. Junior, because he was going to live and die in the
barrio;
he wasn't good enough or smart enough for Esme. Jonathan, because their differences would always make their relationship unbalanced; Jonathan would have all the power. Look at what would happen if they got caught. Diane had made it clear that Esme couldn't have male guests at the guesthouse. She'd lose her job. What would happen to Jonathan? He'd lose a few hours' sleep. Maybe. Who would suffer more? Jorge was sure that Jonathan considered Esme nothing more than a friend with benefits; probably the kind of benefits he'd never before enjoyed with an exotic Latina girl from a poor neighborhood. “Forbidden fruit,” Jorge had termed it.

Every night, Jonathan came to her late and left her early, and they never talked about it. Night after night, their lust continued. What kind of girl allowed herself to be used like that? What the hell was she doing?

Yet Esme couldn't seem to stop herself. She needed Jonathan the way flowers needed rain and babies needed milk. She hungered for him. No matter how many times they had sex, the hunger only grew worse. She was disgusted with herself. It wasn't like she was his girlfriend, like they went on dinner dates, or hung out with his rich show business friends at the Derby or one of the cool clubs in Mar Vista. He claimed to have broken up with his old girlfriend, Mackenzie. Esme had met her; Mackenzie and Jonathan had been playing tennis together on the Goldhagens' private court when Esme first set foot on the property. She was everything a girl named Mackenzie should be: tall, blond, skinny, and rich. What if Jonathan was lying to Mackenzie the same way she was lying to Junior?

Esme threw back the quilt and padded through the hall to the living room, where the cuckoo clock she'd fixed herself squawked the hour—ten o'clock. Out the window she could see the tennis court with its vine-covered fence, like something out of
The Great Gatsby.
Beyond the court was the magnificent mansion of natural wood and soaring windows, surrounded by pools that reflected the beautiful flowers and shrubs her very own father nurtured and cultivated.

Oh no.

Coming down the path from that tennis court, at that very minute, was Diane Goldhagen. She wore a baby blue Juicy Couture warm-up suit, her blond hair tied back in a girlish ponytail. She didn't look happy at all.

Esme's mind raced, her heart pounding; she quickly pulled on an old gray robe—she'd been in her panties and a T-shirt— and prepared herself for the worst. She already had the scenario in her mind's eye. Jonathan had come back to the house before dawn. Diane had been waiting for him. She'd asked him where he had been. He'd told her the truth. She'd said fine, and he'd gone up to bed. Now she was on her way to Esme's to tell her that it wasn't fine at all, and Esme had maybe twenty minutes to get her brown ass off the Goldhagen property.

Esme opened the door on the first knock. “Good morning, Diane,” she said, trying to cover her anxiety.

“Hi.” Diane's voice was flat. “I know it's Sunday, but I've got a lot on my mind. Can we talk for a minute or two?”

“Of course.”

Diane motioned for Esme to follow her, then led the way to a stone bench outside Esme's guesthouse. It was just below a date palm tree already heavy with fruit, near the paved area where a basketball hoop hung. Diane idly plucked a date from the tree and then motioned for Esme to sit down.

Esme did, with a sinking feeling in her stomach. She mentally rehearsed a plea as to why Diane should fire only her, and not let this affect her parents, who really, really needed their jobs.

“FAB starts in two days, Esme. I'm about ready to crack. We're cohosting the final charity ball on the
Queen Mary
ocean liner—it's docked in Long Beach permanently, you know—and Lateesha Nudsley, the party planner—she's a distant relative of Princess Caroline—has been driving me absolutely batty for the last week. Look, I'm using some of her ridiculous British expressions.”

Esme was barely listening. Relief coursed through her arteries and out her pores. Diane's impromptu visit wasn't about her being fired after all. She knew full well that it could have been.

“Anyway,” Diane went on, “the party always had a strict color scheme. Lateesha had wanted it to be black and white, but Diddy recently gave a black and white party at Mar-a-Lago down in Palm Beach and Lateesha decided black and white would be derivative, so she decided on seafoam. It's right on the invite, ‘All guests must wear seafoam, aquamarine, some shade of blue,' et cetera. Can you imagine twelve hundred people in seafoam? I got a call late last night from Fred Segal himself. There are no more dresses in those colors!”

“Can you maybe have some sent in from New York?” Esme ventured.

“I did, I did,” Diane reported. “But all these guests are calling in a panic, worried that they have nothing to wear. Did you see the actresses from
Desperate Housewives
on
Letterman
last night, joking about it?”

“No,” Esme said.

Diane waved a hand. “Anyway, I've pretty much decided to can the color scheme; I just don't think it's going to work out and it's my own fault.”

Esme nodded, careful to keep her expression neutral. Now that she knew Diane hadn't learned about her secret relationship with Jonathan, she was back to judging her boss's bizarre lifestyle. Did she actually think that seafoam dresses and actresses on
Letterman
and relatives of Princess whoever were important? How shallow could any one rich woman be?

“I'm sorry, I'm blathering on like an idiot,” Diane apologized. “Ignore me; I get like this every year before FAB.” She smiled and folded her hands in her lap. “Anyway, I need to tell you about tomorrow. The twins are going to be in Emily Steele's World Culture Kids fashion show. She's an amazing designer. Anyway, my girls will need some training in how to walk the runway, all that. They need to be at their agent's at one. You'll have them ready?”

“Certainly,” Esme promised as she tried to digest the fact that the twins had an agent.

“Great.” Diane seemed genuinely relieved. “I'm so excited about this—we've never done a children's designer before. Her influence this year is Japanese. Last year was Colombian. Isn't that ironic?”

“Ironic” wasn't necessarily the word that first came to Esme's mind. She knew Emily Steele's clothes—the twins' closets were filled with her outfits, at four hundred dollars a pop. If Diane hadn't adopted Easton and Weston (whose names had been changed the moment they arrived on American soil), they might well have grown up to be the dirt-cheap labor who would hand-embroider some future Emily Steele collection. That wasn't ironic. That was sad.

Diane left; Esme went back inside to shower, realizing just how close she'd come to disaster. As she stepped into the steaming hot water, she thought that maybe God had just sent her a wake-up call: she had to end things with Jonathan.

The only question was whether or not she'd be smart enough to answer it.