Blush - Jamie Brenner Page 0,37

the question—and she definitely wanted to kick her father and brother for putting her in this position in the first place. She believed what she told Asher: the Arguetas had a right to know what was going on. And yet her respect for her father simply ran too deep for her to go rogue on this. Mateo looked her in the eye, and she glanced away.

“Um, my father doesn’t really loop me in on business decisions.”

Maybe it was time for that to change.

Nineteen

Sadie couldn’t put the book down, and she kinda hated herself for it.

Reading Lace in the library surrounded by so many other, more worthy reading options—including “Notes on ‘Camp’” sitting on the table just waiting to be explored in her nonexistent thesis—made her focus on the trashy novel all the more shameful.

On a flawless summer day, she was huddled indoors, racing through six hundred pages of outrageous drama and even more outrageous sex.

If she had any intellectual integrity, she would have stopped reading at the prelude, a graphic scene of a thirteen-year-old-girl getting an illegal abortion at the hands of an indifferent doctor. But then the book jumped ahead a few decades to four successful women—Maxine, Judy, Pagan, and Kate—who had been summoned to the Pierre Hotel. They’d been called to meet with an international film star named Lili, who Maxine thought of as “that gold-digging slut.” Maxine, in her forties, had already had a face-lift, justifying that it was sensible to have it done when you were still young so that nobody noticed. Now, there’s some life advice, Sadie thought. Judy, at least, had some more useful words of wisdom: the idea that you became an adult when you stopped caring about what other people thought about you and instead started caring about what you thought of them.

The four women were old friends from a Swiss boarding school. When they were all assembled for the surprise reunion, Lili appeared and said: “Which one of you bitches is my mother?”

Sadie had to admit: that was an opening. And the writing was serviceable, even if its primary service was detailing the women’s glamorous and privileged lives.

The book flashed back for long sections of the characters as teens at their boarding school. The pages were filled with “flesh throbbing” and various scenarios of consensual and nonconsensual sex. Just when Sadie thought she’d had enough, that it was an insult to her intelligence to be reading the book even as a guilty pleasure, one of the characters would do or say something that made her rethink the book. For example, despite the retro gender roles, Maxine called out the sexual double standard, noting that it was accepted that a boy could get carried away by passion but it was always the girl’s responsibility to set the sexual limit. Why was it her job to control his lust?

Right on, sister, Sadie thought.

What had her grandmother thought of all this? Her friends? She’d resisted the urge to delve further into the book club journal because she didn’t want any spoilers. But as soon as she was finished with the novel she was going back to the journal.

She could see the appeal of book clubs for the first time; she’d never understood the point before—maybe because her need for group intellectual discussion was fulfilled by her classes. But now? Now she would have loved to hash out this crazy story with someone. Like Holden. If they were still together, they probably could have gotten off together over some of the sex scenes.

“I thought I’d find you here,” Leah said, surprising her from the doorway. “I could use some company.”

Sadie tried to hide Lace under her laptop, but she was too slow. Leah grabbed it.

“Are you reading this?”

“No,” Sadie said quickly. “I just found it on the shelf.” Well, searched it out and found it. But no need to go into all of that.

Her mother examined the cover. “My god. I think this is the original edition. I remember this book.”

“You read it?”

Her mother smiled. “I wasn’t supposed to. But Gran used to have a book club. She and her friends would get all dressed up and sip wine on the veranda—it all seemed very glamorous to me at the time. My parents had lots of parties, but this was different. It was exclusive, and certainly exclusionary to me.”

Sadie couldn’t help but glance up at the stairs. Should she tell her mother about the book club journal? Did she already know about it?

“Anyway, the book