My Favorite Mistake Read online

  I knew he was going to keep hounding me until I complied, so I sat up and drank. Then I rolled over onto my stomach, tugged the hemline of my silk chemise down, and propped my face up on my hands. “Hey. You want to know a secret?”

  He looked guarded, a man with one hand on the fire extinguisher and one hand on the emergency brake. “Probably not.”

  “Remember those tattoos we got in high school? I still have mine.” I yanked down the low-cut back of my dress to expose the masterpiece in question, a little red heart overlaid with a black capital F.

  He glanced at it, then studied the wall behind my head as if committing the wallpaper print to memory. “Of course you still have it. Where did you expect it to go?”

  “I could have had it removed,” I pointed out. “Body mutilation is so last millennium. Lots of people had their tattoos lasered off. But I didn’t.”

  He nodded. “Good to know.”

  I pressed my cheek against the comforter. I could smell the alcohol on my own breath. “Do you still have yours?”

  He seemed to be counting the floorboards. “Yeah.”

  I bounced into a sitting position. “Let’s see.”

  “You want to see it?” He looked skeptical, but began untucking the gray T-shirt from his khakis. “Why do you want to see it?”

  “Because every time I wear a midriff-baring top or try on clothes in a communal dressing room, someone asks what the F is for in the heart, and I have to go through this long explanation. I just want to make sure the other half is still around.” I folded my legs, dropped my hands on my knees, and waited.

  But he had gotten derailed earlier in my story. “How often do you wear midriff-baring tops?”

  I shook my head and braced myself against the ensuing dizziness. “That’s not the point of the story.”

  “They have communal changing rooms for women?” He seemed fascinated by this prospect.

  My patience ran out. “Shut up and take it off, baby.” I tugged at the hem of his shirt and he acquiesced, slowly pulling the shirt over his head.

  I tried not to stare. Our encounter last night had been a breathless, blazing dance in the dark, but now I had an opportunity to really ogle him. And the view from here was pretty damn good.

  There it was, bold and clear against his back. The thin black circle with a lowercase f inside. The trademark f, we’d called it. The anarchy f.

  “That still looks fabulous.” I leaned over and bestowed a loud, wet kiss on our trademark.

  He froze for a moment, then pulled away and stood up. “Okay, that’s enough of that.”

  Foiled again. He was backing toward the bathroom, and I sat back and sighed. Didn’t even make a token effort not to stare. “Why?”

  He held out yet another glass of cold tap water, then leaned against the wall and folded his arms over his bare chest. “Because you’re in no condition for any of this. I thought you were passing out?”

  “No. That was a vicious rumor.” I drank the water and tucked my bare feet under the pillows. “I’m so glad you still have the tattoo.”

  Now he was smiling back at me. “Why?”

  “Because of Brunelleschi,” I said earnestly.

  He sat down next to me and wrested the empty glass out of my hand. “God, I can’t wait till you sober up. What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Well, you see…” I said. And that was when I threw up.

  17

  The damp washcloth felt cool and comforting against my forehead. Sadly, I had no such panacea for my ego.

  My stomach had settled down and my head no longer felt like it was in danger of floating away in a sea of red wine. But my body was sweaty and shaky under the steady hand Flynn had placed on my back. I tipped my head forward, hiding my face with my hair.

  He rubbed my back. “Feeling better?”

  I nodded and swallowed, grimacing against the sharp, acidic aftertaste in my throat. “Never let me order red wine again.”

  “Here, drink this.”

  I sipped the water he offered and waited. Sipped again. He was still rubbing my back, not trying to get me to look at him. Which was good, because I didn’t want to see the disgust in his face before I hurled myself out the nearest window.

  “Faith?” He waited. “How you doing?”

  I coughed feebly. “Sorry about this. They didn’t do such a good job with me at finishing school.”

  “No need to apologize. We will never speak about this night again. Now. You were saying?”

  I groped for a tissue and blew my nose. “About what?”

  “About some Italian guy?”

  I started to laugh. “Patrick Flynn, you are so honest-to-God nice. It’s unnatural. Why? Why do you have to be nice to me?”

  He arched an eyebrow. “You want me to be mean to you?”

  I chewed my lip, thinking this over. And then, obviously still T-rashed, I gestured expansively at the mess we’d made of the bedroom. “If you just gave up on me, at least I wouldn’t like you so much. I realize it’s very high-maintenance of me to ask, but it’s the least you can do, really.”

  He caught one of my hands between both of his. “You are, no question, the most impossible woman I have ever known.” He pulled me back against him, and we reclined in a jumble of pillows and quilts and low lamplight.

  “You were saying,” he prompted. “About the Italian guy.”

  I relaxed into him, my head on his chest. I was saying, I was saying…

  “Oh, yeah. I was going to tell you this thing about when I was in Florence. But it might be irrelevant.”

  “Why start worrying about that now?”

  “Why, indeed? Well, while I was working in Florence, I heard this story about the city cathedral.” I closed my eyes and tried to marshal a linear thought process. “Actually, this story is right up your alley. It involves architecture and building foundations.”

  “Do not start with me,” he warned.

  “Seriously. Back in the day, early fifteenth century or so, they decided to build this huge cathedral in Florence.” I paused to see if I still had an audience. “I promise this has a point. They wanted their new cathedral to be better than Siena’s, because the two cities were having this big rivalry. Cats and dogs. USC and UCLA.”

  “Got it.”

  “So they drew up the plans for this elaborate church that made Siena’s cathedral look like a Popsicle-stick birdhouse, and they decided to build this huge dome over the main altar.”

  “Mm-hmm.” He was absently stroking the side of my neck.

  “Which was all fine and dandy, except that the base for the dome was a big octagon, and the diameter was something like a hundred and fifty feet,” I explained, pausing to hiccup. “And no one had ever built a dome that big before. No one even had any idea how they might build one. But they just went ahead and started construction anyway.”

  “Just like that.”

  “Just like that.” I hiccuped again. “They went ahead and started building the rest of the church and figured that, sooner or later, they’d find a solution to the dome problem. But then they finished the base, and they were up a creek without a paddle.” I lapsed into sleepy silence.

  “Because…” he prompted.

  “Oh.” I blinked. “Because they still had no clue what to do about the dome. A dome made of stone would crush the base, and anyway, they couldn’t figure out how they’d support it during the construction process. And of course, by this time, they were the the punchline of every joke in Siena.”

  “Of course.”

  I yawned and stretched against him. “And then Filippo Brunelleschi waltzed in and saved everyone’s ass. He’d been studying old-school architecture with Donatello down in Rome. And he realized right away that the typical dome wouldn’t work on this church. So he designed this system of arched ribs to support the stone they were building with. And then, toward the top of the dome, when stone got too heavy, he started putting bricks in this herringbone pattern. So the dome wa
s supporting itself, instead of just crushing the base.”

  “Genius,” Flynn said. “And the point you promised earlier in this gripping tale…?”

  I yawned again. “Well, now the cathedral is the most famous building in Florence. And it’s only there because those city planners had the moxie to go ahead and start without knowing how to finish. They figured that, this being a church and all, God would provide when the time was right. And He did—in the form of Brunelleschi, who, by all accounts, was kind of a diva.”

  “High maintenance, you’d say?”

  “Very.” I could feel the first faint stirrings of tomorrow’s hangover pounding at the base of my skull. “And after you called me in Florence, every time I walked by that cathedral, I thought of you.”

  “I see,” he said, not sounding like he saw at all.

  “You are my arched, brick herringbone dome,” I declared dramatically. “I don’t really have a plan, I don’t know how to build a good foundation or whatever it is you think we need, but we can figure something out. So that’s my story. And it even involves architecture and good foundations. You happy?”

  “I’m interested.”

  This was not the show of unbridled enthusiasm I’d been hoping for. “But…?”

  “But my opinion of this morning remains the same.”

  A door slammed shut inside me. While I tried to pull away from him, he held me, gently but firmly, where I was.

  “I know your opinion of this morning remains the same,” I fumed. “It’s not enough if I apologize, or if I try to clean up my act, or turn one-handed cartwheels down the hall. You are determined to stick to your plan. I would expect nothing less. I am not trying to change your opinion of this morning.”

  “Yeah, you are,” he said in that mild Midwestern tone.

  “And how dare you assume that I would want to change your mind, anyway? You kicked me to the curb, and now you’re like, circling the block to make sure I’m still out there, all sad and lonely like a lost little kitten.”

  “You paint quite a picture.” I could hear the smile in his voice.

  “Let me assure you, I am not going to just sit out on the curb, trying to grab onto the tailpipe for another ride. How dare you?”

  “I don’t,” he said. “Let’s get some sleep.”

  “Fine.” I resumed my struggles, and this time he let me go. I rolled over to the edge of the bed, keeping my back to him.

  He turned off the lamp, plunging us into darkness. My eyes were wide open.

  “Good night, Geary.” His voice reached out like a caress through the night.

  “Didn’t we just talk about this? Quit being so damn nice to me.”

  “I’m trying.”

  “Try harder.” I writhed around, attempting to get comfortable on the small strip of bedsheet I’d allotted myself. Unfortunately, my calves and feet were mired in the blankets directly over the patch of mattress left damp from cleaning up after the Brunelleschi Incident.

  “Hey!” I whispered, still buzzed, half hoping that Flynn was already asleep. “My side of the mattress is wet.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “It’s really cold. And gross.”

  A long pause. And then, thick and hushed through the dark: “There’s room on my side. You can scoot over if you want to.”

  I scooted. But I did not fling myself into his arms, preferring to pretend that I still had a modicum of pride left. We lay there, side by side, separated by approximately two molecules of space and a widening gulf of wills.

  I wondered how long it would take him to drop off to sleep so I could get up, throw up again, and start battling with my usual insomnia.

  “What?” he whispered through the dark.

  “What what?” I whispered back.

  “I can hear you thinking,” he said. “It’s distracting. Knock it off.”

  “I’m not thinking,” I lied.

  “Yeah, you are. You’re going existential over there. Don’t deny it. It’s like trying to fall asleep with Friedrich Nietzsche having a breakdown three inches away.” He paused. “What’s on your mind?”

  I sighed. “You really want to know?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay. What would you say is your worst flaw?” I asked.

  He started to laugh. “Is this a job interview?”

  “You asked what’s on my mind, I’m telling you. What’s your worst flaw?”

  “What’s your worst flaw?”

  “I asked you first.”

  “Okay.” He paused for a minute. “Stubbornness, I guess.”

  “Stubbornness. That’s a good one.” I nodded.

  “Okay. Now yours.”

  “Well…” God, I was tired. All that alcohol, on top of the nausea-induced electrolyte imbalance, suddenly hit me like a ton of bricks. Worst flaw. Pick a card, any card. I decided to start small. “Other than my weakness for wine and the inability to be quiet when other people want to sleep, I’d have to say…” I trailed off into the first wispy fogs of sleep.

  “You’d have to say?” prompted a voice in the distance.

  “I’d have to say commitment problems.”

  I woke up at 4:45 A.M. on the dot. The glowing green digits on the alarm clock were the only things visible through the darkness. I’d slept for roughly ninety minutes. Felt like fifteen. I flipped over and curled into the sheet, which is when my bare foot brushed against Flynn’s leg.

  I froze, and my rational mind reached for the sky. Last night’s events came back in bits and pieces.

  Commitment problems?

  Oh. My. God.

  I had sucker-punched myself once again.

  There was no way around it. I had squandered the last vestige of my reputation as the smart, responsible member of the Geary family. Compared to me, Skye was ready for a Supreme Court nomination.

  But the bigger issue here was the one sleeping next to me. If memory served, and I was horribly certain that it did, this man had wrung me out, cleaned me up, tucked me in, and listened to all my disjointed gibberish. For the past few weeks, I’d tried so hard to convince him that I’d blossomed in California, that I’d figured life out, that I’d improved with age.

  But now he knew the awful truth: I was just the same as I’d been at eighteen—needy, erratic, and unable to accept defeat graciously.

  The chances that he would wake up this morning and decide that I was the perfect woman and his only chance for happiness seemed exceedingly slim. He admitted it himself: he was stubborn and unforgiving. He was never going to trust me again.

  Like it’s so difficult to fall in love with someone who has sex with you, refuses to marry you, leaves you, comes back ten years later and then pukes on you, yells at you, and sends you off to the land of nod with tales of commitment problems. Whatever.

  It was just like I’d told Skye: the Faith and Flynn Reunion Tour was not gonna happen. And there was only one way to avoid further humiliation.

  I bolted.

  It took me five minutes to get a taxi and another twenty to get to the airport. Looking like Little Orphan Annie with a ferocious hangover, I approached the woman at the Northwest ticket counter.

  “I need a ticket for the first flight to LAX, please.” I dug through my purse and unearthed my wallet. “I will give you money. Credit cards. Unprecedented quantities of frequent flier miles.”

  Just as I was about to offer up my firstborn child, I realized two things. One, all my stuff was still at Skye’s apartment and the Soap ‘n’ Suds Laundromat. Two, my car was still parked in front of the Roof Rat. And three, I couldn’t do this. I simply could not hop a jet plane and spend the four-hour flight back to Los Angeles imagining Flynn waking up without me.

  This wasn’t a matter of free will. I simply could not spend another day feeling like I’d felt when I left him the first time. I wasn’t the woman he wanted me to be—hell, I wasn’t the woman I wanted me to be—but I couldn’t keep running away.

  Fuck a duck.

  �
�Never mind. There’s been a slight change of plans,” I told the ticket agent. “Where can I get a cab?”

  The sunny morning was already starting to steam into stifling humidity. I checked my watch: 6:08 A.M. With any luck, he was still asleep.

  But if I had learned anything from my recent adventures in Lindbrook, it was that luck was not on my side these days. I had to be my own backup. I needed an alibi. So. What possible reason might one have for traipsing out into the wild blue yonder at the crack of dawn?

  “I’m back, and I brought breakfast,” I announced, flinging a brown paper bag on the bedside table and setting down two Styrofoam coffee cups.

  “You what?” Flynn asked. He stretched under the white sheets, looking tired and disoriented. Excellent.

  I opened the blinds halfway, flooding the room with light. The varnished hardwood floor looked like a war-torn Bloomingdale’s, with lingerie, mismatched shoes and rumpled T-shirts everywhere.

  When we got disheveled, we got disheveled.

  I handed him a bagel and one of the coffee cups, trying desperately to avoid eye contact.

  “Here. Coffee. You still take it black?”

  “Yeah. Thanks.” He sat up and took the cup from me. “Where’d you go this morning?”

  I smiled as glibly as possible. “I told you. I’m your personal ambassador to Starbucks. Mmmm, bagels!”

  He gave me a long, piercing look. “Well, if you want to discuss it, let me know.”

  “Discuss what?” I fled into the bathroom to collect my toiletries and my composure.

  He didn’t answer.

  I was dreading the ride back to Lindbrook, envisioning a nightmarish, hour-long dissection of my infamous commitment problems, interspersed with interrogations about my early-morning whereabouts.

  But these fears proved unfounded. While driving to Lindbrook, he refused to even look at me, preferring to stare stonily at the road, bitter and seething through the morning after.

  Well, at least this time I was dealing with him instead of a toked-out bass player.