Love in Reality: A Contemporary Romance (The Blackjack Quartet) (34 page)

He dialed the number and thought fast what story he could use. When Kesha answered, he said, “Hi, Key. Look, Marcy’s given me a boatload of crap to handle, but I’m bogged down with guilt about the way Libby Pembroke got treated.”

“Whaddya mean?”

“Marcy completely stiffed her, and really, she didn’t have to stick around for the interview or let us get the twin here from Alaska,” he said.

“Yeah, so?”

“So are they staying in L.A. for a while? Do you know? I want—” Then he had it. “I want to make sure she gets a huge basket of flowers—you know, so she doesn’t badmouth the company when she gets home.”

“Well, you had better hurry. I booked her on a red-eye to Philly. I don’t think they’re staying over.”

“Ah, right.” Rand swallowed his disappointment. Then he tried a new tack. “Hey, did you organize a car company to meet her at the Philadelphia end?”

“No. Marcy didn’t tell me to,” Kesha said.

“Yeah, well, you know how Marcy is—when she calms down, she’ll be mad at us for not having done it.”

“Okay, I’ll get—”

“No, no, that’s okay. I know a great company and I have it on speed dial.” With his trips to Philly in the spring, that almost sounded plausible. “All I need to know is which flight you booked her on.”

“Okay, I’ll send you the confirmation details.”

A minute later, he had the information.

He dialed Libby’s cell, but got voicemail. “Hi. I’m sorry about today. I should have figured something out. Call me. We have to talk. I miss you. Okay?” He recited his cell number and his number at home. “I am sorry, really.”

Then he texted Debbie that he was leaving the studio—if Marcy looked for him, he was at the emergency room.
Tell hr I 8 some bad clams
, he typed. Marcy was deathly afraid of shellfish. She would not want to know the details.

He bought a ticket on the same flight as Libby. He was hazy on whether he needed to be on the plane, but he knew he had to be airside before it boarded.

* * *

He was sitting near the gate when he saw Libby trudging along the concourse.

“Hi,” he said as he fell into step with her.

She stopped dead. Her face was white with fatigue. She didn’t look happy to see him.

Rand rushed to fill the silence. “I know. I left it awfully late. I’m sorry. I’ve done so many things wrong with you. Can we talk?”

She shook her head, but it was a gesture of exhaustion, as though she was too tired to argue with him. He led her over to a group of seats by another gate. It was the closest he could get to privacy at LAX.

“Do you need a water, anything?” he asked.

“No. I’m—just say what you need to say, all right?” She gazed over his shoulder. She wouldn’t even make eye contact.

Lord, where to start? “Okay, about last night. I should have called you, I get that. I knew you wanted to talk, but I…I don’t know, I guess I wasn’t ready. And there was a lot of work to do.”

“I feel certain Marcy’s assigned you a lot more work to do now. In fact, isn’t that your phone vibrating?” she said.

Damn, it was. He turned it off. “I deserved that. Yes, I could—and should—have turned off my phone last night and gone to the hotel to see you. I wanted to.”

She faced him. “So why didn’t you?”

“I don’t know.” As Rand predicted, admitting that didn’t help. He’d wanted to be with her, but at the same time, he’d been relieved he couldn’t get away from the studio.

She looked away. “Anyway, that’s not the problem. I get it—I threw you a huge curveball yesterday—you were entitled to handle it any way you wanted,” she said.

“So what are you mad about?”

She sighed. “Why didn’t you tell me about your dad?”

“What didn’t I tell you? We don’t get along, I don’t see my parents much, I was an only child, he’s in the business. What did I leave out?”

“That he’s Alan Jennings. He is not some senior VP for development with a studio or a network. He’s like Judd Apatow or Aaron Spelling or someone.
I’ve
even heard of him. I would say it was a relevant fact.”

“Relevant how? He’s my father, but I’ve never taken anything from him. He’s never gotten me a job on his productions or asked someone to do me a favor,” Rand said.

She looked at him hard. “He’s your father. They’re your parents. I don’t know why you’re mad at them. I just know you never talked about them, and when the subject came around to your childhood or your family, you let me believe they were barely more significant than—oh, I don’t know!”

“I don’t mention him. People jump to conclusions about him, or about me, or about my power to get them something through my dad. It’s just easier not to bring it up.”

“So I’m in the class of people you need to guard against,” she said.

“No, of course not. It’s a habit, that’s all.”

“Right. I see that,” she told him. “Here’s what you’re not seeing. I lied to you about my name because I’d gotten into a crazy situation, and I thought I was protecting you and your job. But I would have told you—I longed to tell you the truth every time we were together. It was—” she broke off. “I wanted you to know
me
. Libby. That your dad is Alan Jennings is part of who you are, no matter how you feel about him. You didn’t want me to know that part of you. And I don’t think that ever, once, bothered you.”

She stood up and grabbed the carry-on’s handle.

Rand sat there, still and stunned. He couldn’t deny what she said. It was true. He just didn’t know what it said about him, or what it meant to her.

The gate for Libby’s flight was getting busy with pre-boarding. She glanced over at the airline staff lining people up.

He stood up. He didn’t want to let her go. “Stay with me. Or let me go with you. I have a ticket,” he said, holding up his boarding pass.

She looked down at her feet. “No. That’s not a good idea.”

“What do you want from me, Libby? I don’t want it to end this way.”

They weren’t quite facing each other. She started to move toward her gate. He was losing her.

She shouldered her bag and faced him again. “I love you. I do. I wish that was a magic talisman to ward off all the realities of life, but I don’t think it is. You—through no fault of your own—know precious little about me or my life. Frankly, there’s a lot I don’t know about my life, like where I’ll be working after graduation. I’m committed to Philadelphia for a while. Your life is here. Even if everything else were perfect between us, long-distance relationships are hard to pull off. And we don’t have the time to try.”

She reached up to kiss him gently. “I’m sorry I lied to you and I’m sorry I can’t make this work.” Then her voice turned fierce. “I will never be sorry about this summer. Never.”

She started to walk away. He lunged for her, hauling her back into his arms for a torrid kiss. Everything he felt for her went into that embrace. Passion, love, respect, desperation, even his confusion. The only thing missing, he realized as he pulled back, was an answer.

Libby stared at him sadly, then kissed his cheek and turned away.

She left him to join the line at the gate. His face was damp with her tears, and now with his own.

Rand went straight home from the airport. Out of habit, he checked his voicemail for messages—his mother calling to say hi, and Phil, asking what the hell was up with the twins business, which was all over the Internet.

Marcy’s doing, presumably. Drumming up viewership for the tell-all show on Sunday.

Phil’s voice sounded kind of hyper. “Did you know your girl had a twin sister? Why didn’t you tell me? Which one are you interested in, by the way? I know this sounds tacky, but if you want the law student, can you introduce me to the other one? The real Lissa, as it were? Yeah, so call me.”

Rand erased both messages, and refused to check his hand-held. As far as Marcy was concerned, he was puking in an ER somewhere. He pulled a beer and went out on his balcony. His view faced west and the sunset that night was being projected in Technicolor—turquoise, salmon, pale pink, even chartreuse green. He watched it darken, as the blues thickened and pushed the rest of the rainbow out of sight. The light-to-dark show took an hour.

When it was over, Rand went inside and called his mother. “Hi, Mom,” he said. His voice sounded odd.

“Sweetheart, we heard you got sick. Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I’m okay. It was nothing. Mom, let me ask you something. What do you and Dad want from me?”

“We don’t want anything from you, Rand. Why would you think that?”

He rubbed his forehead. “Maybe I didn’t say that right. What do you and Dad—what do you want
for
me? What do you hope you’ll see me do?”

“Rand, honey, I think you must still be ill. Are you lying down? I can come over, you know.”

“Mom, it’s okay. I’m not that sick—just had something bad to eat.” He pushed the magazines on his coffee table into a loose pile. “Seriously, I want to know. What am I supposed to do with my life?”

She hesitated, then he heard her hold a hand over the phone and talk to his father.

“He says he wants to know what we expect from him. Here, you talk to him.”

Oh, great, just what he needed. Then Rand shrugged. How much worse could his dad make it compared to Libby leaving?

“Rand?” his father said.

“Yeah, Dad.”

“What are you trying to get your mother to say?”

“I don’t know. I don’t have any answers. I thought I did. I thought I was doing what you wanted me to be doing. I—” He stopped. Something occurred to him, and he tried to explain. “I met someone last spring. She lives in Philadelphia. She’s smart and complicated and, I don’t know…”

His dad didn’t say anything.

Rand sighed and tried again. “She gave me the idea for my screenplay. You remember,
The Devil Wears Prada
meets
Gaslight
?”

His father laughed. “I love that logline. Saul’s called me—twice—asking about it.”

Rand bit his lips tight shut, then sighed. “Yeah, I didn’t tell you I ran into him. Sorry.”

“Can I read it?”

Rand frowned. “I, uh, I don’t know.”

“Is it finished?”

“C’mon, Dad, is a screenplay ever ‘finished’?”

His dad sighed like he knew how crazy writers were. “Okay, is it complete?”

“I have to write Act Three.”

“What closes Act Two?”

“The love interest goes back to Philly.”

“Ah, the black moment. How does the protagonist react?”

Rand shook his head at the irony. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Probably both. “He calls his parents,” he said wryly.

Long pause. Then Alan said, “Fair enough. So why are you asking about our expectations for you?”

When his father asked about his thoughts and motives, Rand used to suspect that the answers would end in some TV script. Not this time. His dad sounded sincere and even—was that a note of interest in his voice?

Rand tried to marshal his thoughts. “I’m stuck because of you. I took this job because you disapprove of reality TV, but then I refuse to quit because you’d think me irresponsible. I start the screenplay that tweaks the conventions of reality TV—you know, how it’s more fiction than truth?—only to discover it could hurt some people. Real people. People I care about.” He took a deep breath. “Big surprise—I’m stuck no matter what I do.”

“Rand, I don’t see what this has to do with your mother or me.”

“Not Mom. Just you. While I can convince myself I don’t want or need your approval, my fear remains that you’ll disapprove of me no matter what I choose to do.”

“Wow.” His dad cleared his throat, something he did when he was thinking. Rand had seen an entire room of network suits stop talking at that sound and wait for what Alan Jennings was going to say next. Finally, his dad told him, “You’re more talented than I am. Did I ever tell you that?”

Absurd. Rand laughed bitterly. “No, Dad. I’m pretty sure I’d remember if you had.”

His father didn’t seem amused. “Well, you are. I saw your student film at The Other Venice Film Festival. I was blown away. I didn’t know what to say to you, probably in the same way I wouldn’t have known what to say to Frank Capra or Billy Wilder. I don’t have that kind of talent.”

“C’mon, you’re being silly—I’m not that good.”

“Well,” his father said acidly. “We may never find out.”

Rand bristled. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You’re not making movies. That’s the part I don’t understand. You have talent, you have opportunity, so what’s stopping you?”

“I don’t know. Probably the same thing that stops me from quitting my job.”

“You mean me.”

Rand felt foolish admitting it, but… “Yeah.”

“Randall Eliot Jennings, I hereby release you from any obligation you think you have to please me or make me proud of you or even to give a shit what I think. Go live your life.”

For the second time that day, Rand could feel moisture on his cheeks. “Why haven’t you ever said that to me before?”

Alan laughed. “I can think of two reasons. I thought you
were
living your life. It never occurred to me that you weren’t. It’s not like you’re hanging around, asking my opinion on your life or career choices. The other reason is simple—you can’t tell someone to stop caring what you think of them. They have to stop that nonsense on their own.”

“I don’t get it,” Rand said.

“Look at it this way. If you really care what I think, you’ll stop caring what I think. See the problem?”

“Dad?”

“Yes?”

“I hate it when you’re right.”

“I know. I hated my dad for the same reason.”

“Look, I have to finish the season with Marcy, but I’ll think about all this, okay?”

“Sure.”

“And tell Mom I’ll be there on Sunday for brunch.”

“She’d like that.”

“I love you, Dad.”

“I love you too, Buddy.”

* * *

Rand barely had time to think about his conversation with his father, let alone make plans for the future, given the demands of closing out the season. He got home late at night, slept badly, dosed himself with espresso shots and got back to the studio. Ten days later, he was strung out on caffeine and denial.