She had rehearsed the meeting that would never take place a million times in her mind. In all the scenarios, she is right and he is wrong. In all the scenarios, she is impeccable, she looks like old money, and she has a guy by her side. In all the scenarios, he has a girl by his side, too. A girl like him. The kind that wears very tight white jeans, heavy makeup, and a Louis Vuitton bag that could be real or could be fake. In all the scenarios, she acknowledges him slightly, like one would a servant. She goes on her way, and he looks at her longingly, knowing she was right and he is hopelessly wrong.
She expected the meeting would never take place, but of course, it does. And in it, she’s wrong and he’s right.
She’s sweaty and flushed and unappealing, straight out of a five-mile run, in for a quick stop at the supermarket, wearing over her spandex shorts loose sweatpants that make her butt look droopy. She sees him enter her aisle at the precise moment she’s plucking a box of tampons from the shelf. Their eyes meet briefly, his move on, and it occurs to her, for the first time, that he might not even remember her.
But as quickly as his eyes move on, they move back, and his mouth slowly, knowingly, curves into that sideways smile that reached her three nights ago.
“Gabriella,” he says simply. It’s not a greeting or a question, but a statement, and she knows, unequivocally, that she, too, has been a part of his waking days.
“Angel? Angel!” The voice interrupts the answer she’s unable to give, and the girl that steps onto the aisle with his name on her lips is beautiful in the way well-kept girls with straight blonde hair and fake breasts can be.
With her box of tampons and her ugly sweats Gabriella is utterly at a loss.
Only the arrival of Edgar, competent, commanding, practical, reminds her that she’s not a player in this contest. “It’s nice to see you, Angel,” she says demurely as she slides by him on her way to the register and out the door.
Later, many days later, he told her he’d had one of his bodyguards follow her home.
But that afternoon, he only sends the roses. Five dozen red roses that the doorman brings up through the back door with a card inside a sealed envelope.
“Some things are really more beautiful up close. Angel.”
“Who is this Angel?” Nini asks when she comes home that evening and sees the outrageous bouquet.
“Just a boy I met, Nini. At the party,” Gabriella says shortly.
“Do I know him?” presses Nini. She always presses.
“I don’t know,” says Gabriella, deliberately evasive.
“I need to know who he is for you to go out with him,” says Nini, who thinks every stranger is a possible kidnapper.
Gabriella doesn’t remind Nini that she’s twenty-one years old and can go out with whomever she pleases. In this house, that wouldn’t fly. And if Nini knew who Angel’s father was… Well, Gabriella truly can’t imagine what the reaction could be.
“Nini, I met him at the party,” she reiterates simply. “With Juan Carlos. Juan Carlos knows him.”
That night, she lies on her bed and looks at the roses, which she’s insisted on placing in her room. No one has ever sent her five dozen roses before, and the extravagance of the gesture thrills her.
She turns on the light in her room and looks at the card once more. Some things are really more beautiful up close, it reads in bold, block letters, and she knows that he wrote it himself, that he can get anyone to do anything for him, but that this, he’s done alone.