stiletto. I looked up at her, saw her face multiply and swirl like a Greek monster, and steadied myself with a palm flat against the hot concrete, the day’s heat reserved.
“I’m sorry?” I said to her.
I missed the part where she had transformed into my girlfriend who could whine and stomp and complain when we, as a couple, were lingering too long at the party. I missed the part where I was once again the irritating boyfriend who needed pushing and prodding. Yes, I was intoxicated, but I still think I would have remembered agreeing to enter back into a relationship with Anna Moore. You don’t sell your soul to the devil and forget about it, no matter how trashed you may be.
“I said, ‘let’s go’,” she repeated as if the problem was simply that I hadn’t heard her. “My feet hurt.”
She shifted foot to foot as I continued to stare up at her in confusion. I frowned and pinched the throbbing ache between my eyes.
“Sorry, Anna, love, but I’m failing to see what any of this has to do with me?” I said.
Anna’s eyes were in shadow, but that didn’t stop me from knowing the exact moment when they found mine, hungry and victorious.
“You’re coming with me,” she said simply, in the same curt tone one would say to a bag boy at the grocery store when you needed help loading your bags.
I laughed, slumping back against the column. “And people say you wouldn’t know humour if it bit you in that tight ass,” I chuckled, shaking my head. “Don’t make me laugh, darling. My face hurts too much.”
“We’re going to be very happy together,” Anna said, no longer requiring my assistance for her favourite type of conversation, the one-sided kind. “Now that you’ve gotten this out of your system.”
“I’m going to a bar,” I grumbled irritably.
Her perfume was starting to make my nose burn.
“In your state, you couldn’t find a bar if one got shoved into your smart-ass mouth,” Anna said.
I snorted. “We do have quite the time, don’t we?”
“I’m thinking a June wedding.”
“I’m thinking tequila.”
It started to rain. I chuckled at this, too. I hadn’t even known there were clouds. But of course there were fucking clouds.
Just then the doors opened once more and another couple left the Palais de Chaillot, once more arm in arm. This time I wasn’t regarded as a bum on the street. It wasn’t disgust in Delaney’s eyes. Nor was it pity. It was ambivalence. She’d noticed me halfway through a bit of laughter and she carried on with laughing with little more than a quick inhale of breath. She turned away from me quickly and descended to the street with that man from the stairs. I watched him hold his jacket over her as they raced through the now downpour. I watched him open the limo door as she squealed in the rain. I watched her smile up at him as he closed the door. I watched for one last glance back at me through the droplet-streaked window. I watched the red lights pull into traffic, a stream to carry her forever away. I watched till the world reverted to the way it had been, a world without Delaney Evans.
Anna herself had started down the stairs toward the open door of a sleek black town car, shining as if encrusted with blood diamonds in the rain. She didn’t bother covering her couture dress; the designer would send her a replacement tomorrow.
“Are you coming?” she called, not bothering to even look back at me over her shoulder.
With a groan of pain, I pushed myself to standing and stumbled after her.
Delaney
It was strange to walk into The White Room in heels instead of dingy white sneakers, in a slinky new dress I didn’t pay for instead of torn jeans I would change out of in the back stairwell, in the company of a billionaire instead of a hounding landlady’s angry voice in my ear as I begged her yet again for another week to get rent (or part of rent) into her mailbox. I’d worked at The White Room for months, but I’d never seen the red-carpeted entryway lined with mirrors. Perhaps that was a good thing.
Because if I’d seen my old reflection in that dim light, messy bun high atop my head, mascara smeared across my cheekbones from the night before, mouth smacking loudly with pink bubble gum, I might not have trusted that the elegant woman walking beside me was actually