not home from work yet.”
He shook his head. “I can’t. I’m already late.”
“For a very important date?” She smiled, but there was tension in her previously carefree grin, a new puzzled concentrated intensity. “Are you sure? I can make you something to eat. I’m not the best cook, but I can . . .”
“I really can’t. Thanks, though.”
They stood awkwardly.
“You said to always end on a joke,” she said.
“Okay, let’s hear it.”
“What do you call a pile of kittens?” She paused. “A meowntain!”
When he laughed, she extended her hand. “Well, nice to meet you, Julian Cruz.”
And he, without thinking, brought her soft hand to his lips and kissed it. Afterward he became even more awkward.
“They teach you that in boxing school?” she said breathily.
He couldn’t return her warm liquid gaze. He stumbled back on the steps.
“You sure you don’t want to come in?”
“Another time perhaps,” Julian said.
“Okay, when?” Mirabelle said. “Or were you just being polite?”
38
Hollywood Hills
“I DON’T WANT TO SPEAK TO YOU,” ASHTON SAID WHEN Julian ran into the house at nearly eight.
“Traffic was a motherfucker. Sorry.” He threw down his keys on Ashton’s front hall table, right below the Bob Marley poster.
“Pick those up. You can throw the keys around at your own place. The girls will be here in ten minutes, and you’ve left me to do fucking everything. You didn’t even set the table. I had to do it.” The table was set out on the pool patio.
“Sorry, man. I’ll make it up to you.”
“What am I, Gwen?” Ashton said. “You’re going to make it up to me? Buy me flowers, take me to dinner?” They stood. The smoke from the grill wafted inside the house. It smelled good. Ashton loved to grill.
On the way to his own house, Julian sank into a chair by the blue pool. Ashton had turned on the LED lights, lighting up the palms and the ficus trees in shimmering aqua.
“Dude, are you insane?” Ashton stood over him. “They’ll be here any minute. What’s the matter with you? Go get changed.”
“I will. I need a minute.”
“Time for sitting is over. You had a whole lengthy car ride from wherever you were to sit. No more sitting.”
“Ashton, five minutes, and then I’m yours. Five.”
“Fuck, Jules.”
“Five minutes without you speaking.”
After five minutes, Julian got up, his body like concrete.
The traffic was bad on Benedict Canyon. It was a bitch driving up the mountains at rush hour. Gwen and Riley were running late, too. But the girls being late gave the men a chance to calm down. Julian changed, got the music ready, made an extra large pitcher of margaritas. He and Ashton opened two beers, sat by the pool and chatted about the Fox meeting, the inventory at the store, about Buster “The Executioner” Barkley’s fight coming up in Vegas next month, and about Riley.
“Last Sunday she told me I wasn’t meeting her emotional needs,” Ashton said. “She said that after three years I was still nothing but potential.”
“So, like a parent–teacher conference?”
Ashton laughed. “I said, Riles, I’ve been the same the whole time you’ve known me. She said that was one hundred percent her problem with me. I never changed.”
“Did you ask her why she went out with you in the first place if she wanted you to change?”
“I did! She said she went out with me because she had hoped I would. She said I was too wild. Like I was an untrained poodle or something. I’m not wild!”
“Sometimes you are.”
“You’re not helping. Don’t say that in front of her. Call me domesticated and house-broken. Next time you buy coconut water at Whole Foods, talk to her, put in a good word for me. I really don’t want to have another fight. I’m beat.”
“Me, too.”
“You too what? You love fighting.”
Julian took a breath. “I think I met a girl,” he said.
Ashton downed his beer, laughed, and sat up straight. “Which part are you not sure about? Whether or not you met her, or whether or not she is a girl?”
“Oh, she is most definitely a girl.”
“Really? Dude!” Ashton grinned. “What did she look like?”
Julian was quiet a moment. “Bliss,” he said.
“Dude!”
The doorbell rang. Gwen and Riley were here.
“Whose idea was it to build a place on Mulholland?” Riley said, striding into Ashton’s house, holding what looked like a bakery box. Despite the long ride, she looked as effortlessly creaseless as ever. “It took us an hour and a half to go eleven miles.”
“Definitely Julian’s,” Ashton said, cheerfully throwing his friend under