1: In Which She Gets the Low-Down on a Hook-Up
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“So,” Evan Winters began as he helped me out his car, “are you going to invite me in for coffee?”
It was nearing midnight and, to be honest, I was glad that our Friday night “date” was finally, finally over. My lowly apartment building had never looked so inviting.
“Coffee?” I arched a brow. “Unless you're masochistic or planning on pulling an all-nighter for some reason, coffee is the last thing you should be drinking at this hour.”
Bright light was spilling across the complex’s parking lot, which was how I was able to see the absolutely comical look of bewilderment on Evan’s pretty-boy face.
“Um, then how about tea?” he amended, latching on to my arm and tugging me toward the lobby of the building.
I jerked away from him, forgoing niceties. “I hate tea. Look, Evan –”
“Juice, then? Soda? Water?”
“I know that coffee is code for sex, so cut the crap.” I sighed resignedly before pulling out the big guns. “You're a nice guy so I’ll be honest here. I don’t know what Savita’s told you but…my ex runs with the Russian mob. He thinks he still has some kind of warped claim to me which is why the last guy who took me out…” Trailing off, I made a show of looking justifiably traumatised. “Well, let’s just say the poor man blinks once for yes and twice for no these days.”
Evan adjusted his collar, puppy-dog eyes wide. “I, uh, see. Well, I’ll be on my way and I, um, hope you have a nice life. I mean, night. ’Bye, Ophelia.”
Scrambling back to his Mercedes, he tripped and fell, cursing audibly.
“Are you OK?” I called out, stifling a laugh.
“I’m fine!” he yelled back, getting to his feet and diving back into the confines of his car. Seconds later, tyres screeched as he got the hell out of Dodge.
“Pussy,” I muttered, turning on my heel and striding into the building.
They usually were. It didn’t matter if it was the Russian mob, the Italian mafia or a Mexican cartel – the end result of my story time was the same: My dates running faster than Usain Bolt on steroids from my imaginary dangerous ex.
My phone rang once I was ensconced in the elevator. I considered ignoring it until it became crystal clear that Savita was not going to give up.
“If it isn’t Miss Matchmaker herself,” I chirped.
“Did you tell Evan the mob story?” Savita exclaimed in my ear. “The poor guy just threatened to kill me. At midnight, no less! How’d you make someone as unassuming as Evan turn menacing?”
“It’s not my fault he’s a gullible idiot. Sadly, all the guys you try to hook me up with barely have two brain cells to rub together.”
“All the men I send your way are intelligent, make good money and are fairly good-looking,” Sav countered, heaving a sigh. “Don’t you want to be happy, O?”
I felt a momentary flash of anger and quickly quelled it. Sav Patel was my best and most trusted friend in the world. We’d known each other since we were six but now that we were twenty-four, I sometimes wondered what my life would’ve been like without her meddling in my private affairs. Like my love life, for example. Married to her high school sweetheart and an old friend of ours, Ryan Michaels, Sav had taken it upon herself to hook me up with the entire population of bachelors in Florida.
“You know I do,” I replied solemnly, stepping out the elevator and marching to my apartment door. “I want what my parents have. But not now. You know about my plan.”
I could picture Savita rolling her almond-shaped, hazel eyes as she snorted. “Oh, right – The Plan. Get a fulfilling job. Get your own house. Blow your nose and take a shit every two days. Get married at thirty. Did I miss something?”
I laughed, unlocking my door and pushing it open. “You're ridiculous but yeah, you get the gist. I’ll meet the guy of my dreams when I’m good and ready and not before.” Envelopes littered the entranceway, obviously pushed under the door. My brow furrowed. “Dammit, I told this man not to push things under my door. That’s why mailboxes were invented.”
“The super?” I’d totally forgotten Sav was still on the phone. “You're still beefing with the old guy?”
I collected the stack of letters and placed them on my coffee table. “We’re not beefing,” I lied. Edgar Fenwick, the building’s superintendent, and I had a short history of butting heads. He was intrusive and I was apparently condescending. “He deliberately does things to annoy me. That’s it.”
“Get over it. The guy’s, like, ninety. So Ryan has this colleague that I –”
“No way,” I interjected, quickly shutting that shit down. “No more. Evan was the last straw.”
“What was so wrong with Evan?”
I chewed my lower lip. Good question. What was so wrong with Evan? He was smart and didn’t think the Rosetta stone was a piece of jewellery. As an accountant, he was good with numbers yet didn’t show off about it. He wasn’t the handsomest guy but then again, I wasn’t superficial. Anymore. Still, he had a nice face and white teeth and maybe if he hadn’t asked for coffee, I would’ve considered going out with him again.
Who was I kidding?
“He didn’t excite me,” I confessed, idly picking up a thin envelope I knew contained my electricity bill. I was no longer a naïve teenager that believed in true love and boys like Mikhail Alvonich but surely a man had to at least make my heart race and nether regions throb.
A long silence met me from the other end of my phone before Savita offered tentatively, “I didn’t know that that was what you were looking for.”
“I’m not looking for excitement,” I emphasised, throwing the envelope back down and picking up another. “Jeez, Sav, this isn’t When Harry Met Sally.”
“And we’re back to Miss Cynical. I wondered when she’d make her reappearance.” She paused. “Well, Ryan has this friend who’s been in prison. Tax evasion, but that’s still exciting, right?”
“Not that kind of excitement. I’m not interested in Wesley Snipes.” I absentmindedly turned the cream-coloured envelope over and nearly bit my tongue. “Crap.”
“What? What is it?”
Ominously staring back at me was the Alvonich royal seal – a red circle with the black outline of a fox in the centre. Just that image brought back the memory of the first and only time I’d ever set foot in Ruslavia, ever set foot in the royal palace.
It had happened years ago yet it felt like only a day had passed since I’d had my first and only orgasm at the hands of my love interest’s uncle. Reliving the shame, I recalled how I’d made some lousy excuse about being summoned to join my parents in Corfu for Christmas. My friends – Mickey included – had seen me to the airport and I hadn’t been to Ruslavia since, although I’d had plenty of invitations.
Just the idea of seeing Nikolai again made me ill. Something more had happened that night, something I didn’t want to analyse too much: He’d ruined me for other men.
The sad thing was that while it was a powerful sexual awakening for me, it was nothing more than a sleepy roll in the dark with a warm body for him. Desperate to feel wanted, I’d thrown myself at the Nikolai and didn’t even have the good fortune of being able to say that I had no idea of who he was.
Mikhail had mentioned his uncle thousands of times before so I knew he’d been twenty-six when he’d given me the best sex of my life. Mikhail’s father, the current king, was twenty years older than Nikolai and had practically raised him after their father, the previous monarch, passed away.
Eight years older than me, Nikolai should have known better. How could I ever look Mikhail in the eye knowing that I’d slept with his uncle? It was…wrong, which was why I hadn’t seen my friend in almost six years.
What does he want? I thought, holding the envelope away from me like it was herpes in a package. Despite the distance and years, Mickey and I were still friends and I knew that I could call him whenever. I knew Mikhail’s father was alive and well – even remarried – therefore Mikhail wasn’t up for the throne anytime soon. Whatever was in the envelope was so important that he couldn’t pick up the phone and call me.
Maybe it’s him.
“Ophelia? You there?”
“Can I call you back, Sav?” I asked in a rushed breath, and without waiting, I cut the call. Inhaling deeply, I ripped the envelope open. And laughed.
Mikhail Alvonich III was getting married to Inga Antonova in a month’s time. Two first-class plane tickets were included with my invitation.
***
“So let me get this straight, gorgeous. You're asking me to be your date?”
I rolled my eyes, grateful that he couldn’t see me over the phone. “Yes, Dad. Will you be my plus-one?”
He laughed, the deep, comforting sound a painful reminder that I hadn’t seen him in months. “Sweetheart, what makes you think I want to spend a week with stuck-up royals in a frozen wasteland?”
I was glad he wasn’t asking me why someone my age couldn’t get a date that wasn’t related to me.
“Dad,” I chided, “Mikhail’s my friend. I thought you liked him.”
“The kid’s all right with me but his father? That’s another story.”
I didn’t push my father to elaborate; I already knew exactly why he didn’t have particularly warm and fuzzy feelings for King Mikhail II. The king was a blatant chauvinist and, as a result, female literacy in Ruslavia was shockingly low. There were no mixed gender schools but the ratio of boys-only schools to girls-only was a disgusting four-to-one. Dad had been meaning to get the network he worked for to push for an interview with the king, but up to now, no dice.
“If you don’t want to come, I’ll go alone,” I muttered, standing in my kitchen. “But you know what happens to single women at weddings, right? It’s a total meat market.”
“Fine,” Dad growled. “I’ll go. But don’t blame me if I tell him exactly what I think.”
“Dad.” He was more than capable of going up to Mikhail’s father and telling him what he thought of him. “His son’s getting married. You're going to be civil or I’m going to tell Rory.”
“Uh-huh. I’m shaking in my size twelve Converse.”
I laughed, a wave of homesickness washing over me. “Tell her I say hi, OK?”
“Will do, gorgeous.”
While I made myself breakfast, our conversation turned to my work, a topic that we never really discussed without either of us raising our voices.
“I heard Chasing Ghosts was cancelled,” Dad started, his voice way too casual for my liking.
“That’s correct,” I said, matching his casual tone. And instead of staying for the ‘Damn, We’ve Been Cancelled’ party at the studio last night, I was out on a stupid, pointless date.
“Ophelia, when are you going to –”
“Dad, we’re not having this conversation,” I cut in, plopping onto a bar stool at the breakfast bar. “My agent’s working on securing something for me in the near future. I’ll just treat this as a sabbatical.”
“Don’t interrupt me when I’m speaking sense,” he retorted, and I could practically see the familiar vein in his forehead throbbing. “Half the time you were half-naked on that poor fucking excuse of a soap opera and what were they paying you? Peanuts, Ophelia. Little, microscopic peanuts.” He sighed, filling the following silence. “I’m sorry for cursing, sweetheart. I just worry about you. Your mother worries about you.”
I didn’t say a word despite how my father was exaggerating, especially about the “half-naked” part. Wearing a bikini on a beach could hardly be considered stripping. The truth was that I wasn’t so beat up about my TV series – not soap opera – getting cancelled after just one season. I didn’t blame HBO, or the scriptwriters, or my co-stars, or even the viewers for not…well, viewing. Chasing Ghosts, a show that revolved around three female ghost hunters trying to live normal lives, was destined to fail from episode one.
I blamed myself for chasing a ghost of a dream I’d had since I was a kid – being Devin Shaw. I’d thought that being a thespian like he was would make him proud. So it was a huge shock to find out that my acting made him as happy as a corpse.
“Fee, angel, talk to me,” Dad was saying into my phone.
Shaking my head, I snapped out of my daze. “You and Rory have nothing to worry about. Dropping out of college was my choice. I’ll live with the consequences.”
“I’ll wire you some money to –”
“Dad, stop. I’m not going to let you give me a financial piggyback through life. I’m a big girl.”
“You know you could always work for me. I mean, with me,” he amended.
As much as the thought appealed to me, my father’s current documentary, The Murdered Countries, did not need another Shaw in the closing credits. Nepotism wasn’t something I supported.
“Thanks, but I’ll be OK. I wish you’d stop worrying. You'll give yourself grey hairs.”
He chuckled. “I have one grey hair for every year you and your brother grow older. These silver babies don’t faze me anymore.”
“You're silly and I’m hanging up now,” I told him, laughing. His salt-and-pepper hair only made him look distinguished, disguising the big kid that he was.
“Talk soon, gorgeous. Love you.”
“Love you more, Daddy.”
Afterwards, I shot my brother a hurried text message and forced myself to eat a bowl of cornflakes. TV shows were cancelled all the time. It wasn’t exactly the end of the road for me but if it was, I could always go back to law school. With two years at my father’s alma mater, NYU, under my belt, I had some kind of back-up plan. Returning to Manhattan with my tail between my legs wasn’t the worst thing that could happen; starving to death was.
“So melodramatic, O,” I scolded myself. I still had a portion of the “little, microscopic peanuts” in my savings account.
Hopping off the stool, I went to the refrigerator and swiped the business card that had been stuck there for months now. If my dad had been angry about my acting, he’d be absolutely livid to know that I was now considering Marigold Black, Regent Modelling Agency’s offer.
Your birth mother was a model, he’d told me once when I was sixteen after a talent scout had approached me at the mall. You don’t want to go down that path, gorgeous.
A loud knock at the door stopped me from ripping Marigold Black’s card in half. I shoved it in the back pocket of my cut-off shorts and went to answer it, wondering if Savita had decided to come over for an early morning heart-to-heart.
But of course, it was a man.
One of Sav’s horde of bachelors, I guessed from looking at the bouquet of daisies in his outstretched hand.
“Wow. Ophelia Shaw?”
Blonde, tall and clean-shaven. Kind blue eyes. Nicely-pressed cotton shirt and jeans. Didn’t look like a serial killer. Then again, serial killers rarely looked like serial killers and Sav knew a lot of guys. Who knew what they did in their spare time? She certainly didn’t.
“Don’t you think nine o’clock is a little too early for flirtations?” I asked dryly, accepting the flowers.
“Sav gave me your address,” he explained, reddening. “I’m Steve. You know, the guy who spent a few months in jail for tax evasion? Do you want to grab breakfast? Or...coffee?”