suppose.” They squinted at each other, him in his suit, her in her mini skirt. “Can I give you a ride somewhere, Mirabelle?”
“Like where? Maybe the Vietnamese food truck by Freddie Roach’s?” She smiled.
“You’re funny. Right now, I’m afraid I have to run.” It would take him a while to drive home in rush hour. And Ashton commanded him under penalty of death not to be late. Riley and Gwen were coming over for dinner. They had announced they needed to talk to the men about their relationship status. Julian was forbidden to leave Ashton high and dry.
Mirabelle gave him her address, and Julian drove her home. She kept talking, telling him about the other auditions she had lined up, and how after New York she couldn’t get used to L.A. weather, always so sunny and mild, but her friend Zakiyyah took to L.A. like fish to water, but on the other hand had terrible taste in men (Julian was going to ask Mirabelle if she too had terrible taste in men but couldn’t find a spot to interject), always picking the worst guys, “like she’s sort of seeing this guy now named Trevor, and if his name isn’t bad enough, we went out the other night and he orders a Sloe Gin Fizz! I said to her, Z, your new boyfriend drinks Sloe Gin Fizzes? Does he wear flip flops, too? This is who’s going to be your rock in times of trouble? Is he going to put down his green drink before he sandal straps your assailant—”
Abruptly Mirabelle stopped talking.
Julian had been driving, catching the breath of her words, until there was nothing to catch. “Please continue,” he said. “I’m fascinated by Zakiyyah’s romantic travails.”
Mirabelle was staring at him with a peculiar expression. Like troubled disbelief. “Julian . . . why did you bring me here?”
Blinking, coming to, he looked around. “This isn’t where you live?”
“No, I told you, I live off East Hollywood, on Lyman.”
“Sorry,” he said, putting the car into reverse. “I must’ve misheard.”
“Julian, wait.” She reached over and touched the top of his hand. An electrical charge went through him. His fingers, gripping the gearshift stick in the middle of the console, twitched. “Why did you bring me here?”
He wasn’t sure where here was. The Hollywood Freeway was on the next block, but he’d never driven down this street before.
“I brought you to the wrong side of the 101,” he said. “Sorry.”
“That’s not what I mean. You brought me to Normandie Avenue. Why?”
He looked around. “I don’t know. You don’t live here?”
“No!”
“Weird.” He couldn’t get off the road fast enough.
“That’s not the weird part,” she said. “The weird part is that Z and I used to live here. You pulled up to our old house. The neighborhood was so bad, somebody was always getting whacked, so we moved.”
“See, so you did live there.” Julian didn’t wait for the light to change before he made a right on Melrose and sped away under the 101. If his hands were clenched any tighter around the wheel, one or the other would break. He tried to be casual but couldn’t turn his head into her flummoxed gaze. With tremendous effort he straightened his tense fingers, took one hand off the wheel—the left one—and drove on.
“I did live here,” Mirabelle said, “but how could you have known that?”
Julian could not explain it. “You must’ve given me the old address by mistake and not realized it.” But he didn’t remember her saying Normandie. She had said Lyman. He was sure of it. And she shook her head like she was sure of it, too.
Baffled, incredulous, she stared at him for a few more moments. Julian kept his eyes on the road. Something inside him started to hurt, and he didn’t know what it was.
They dropped it, because what else could they do? But the conversation, so delightfully free-flowing a minute earlier, ground to a halt.
It took him ten silent minutes to drive down East Hollywood. Lyman Place was sleepy and gum-lined. The girls were renting the top half of a small two-story blue stucco house, covered by overgrown foliage. “Well, here we are,” Julian said fake-brightly. “Is this the right place?”
“Yes,” she said. “Would you like to walk me to the door?”
Hers was a private entrance off to the side. On the upstairs patio bloomed some well-tended yellow petunias in two large plant pots. She pulled out her keys. “Do you want to come in for a minute? Z is