The day before our first big scene together, the one where TGND and Charlie (Connor’s character’s name) kiss for the first time, Connor showed up at my place. I was already totally crushing on him, and I was in full freak-out mode about our upcoming scene together. I was still living with my parents, but they were gone for the weekend, trusting that our cook and housekeeper were enough to keep me out of trouble. Which they were, back then . . .
The doorbell rang and there he was standing on my front porch, looking adorable and sheepish and confident all at once.
“How do you know where I live?” I stammered out, my teeth chattering with a sudden chill.
“You’re adorable, you know that?”
He came inside and plopped onto the living-room couch, making himself at home. He pulled the pages of his sides out of his back pocket and dropped them onto the coffee table.
“I thought we might rehearse,” he said.
I sat down next to him. “Oh?”
“Mmm-hmm” He leaned in close.
“What’s to rehearse?” I asked, trying to be casual, though my palms were sweaty. “It’s only a kiss.”
He leaned in even closer and I could feel his breath on my lips. “I don’t know about you, but I’d prefer our first kiss to be just between you and me.”
With Katie working on her end, I decide to tackle the first item on my list, which is to go see Olivia. I need her on board before I can be sure my plan is going to work. Okay, nothing’s going to make me sure of that, but I need to see her anyway.
Olivia lives a couple of miles away from me, and I’m not too worried about the press following me there, as there’s nothing odd—to them—in me going to see her.
They think they know everything there is to know about me.
They don’t know shit.
Not yet, anyway.
If Olivia’s surprised to see me, she manages to hide it. She looks thin and terrible, and there’s nothing pregnancy-glowy about her. There is, however, the barest hint of a bump pushing out her T-shirt, which I take in with a sick heart.
“So, it’s true?” I ask, my eyes on her stomach.
“Yes.”
“And you’re keeping it?”
“Yes. I told Chris. He left.”
I’m sorry, I think reflexively. But I’m not, so I don’t say it.
“You must think I’m a terrible person,” she says.
“I’m thinking all kinds of things.”
“I didn’t mean for it to happen.”
“Why does everyone always say that?”
“Maybe because it’s true.”
“So how did it happen, then?”
She shakes her head, but I know she’ll tell me. She loves gossip, even if it involves herself.
She makes us some tea, and we sit at her kitchen table. Eventually she starts speaking.
“He’d just left rehab, you know, when you and Danny got engaged. You weren’t taking his calls—no one even knew he’d been in rehab—and he asked me to meet him. To talk. He sounded so sincere. You know how he can . . . could . . . be.”
“I know.”
“We met at a restaurant out of town. I had to drive for an hour to get there. He was keeping a low profile, he said. Trying to change his patterns. He was drinking soda water, and we ate really good homemade pasta, and we talked for the first time in, like, forever. We were friends too, you forget that, but all that time I was with Henry, we spent a lot of time together. You know how Connor didn’t like to be alone.”
“Uh-huh.”
“We were always hanging out together when Henry was living in his pool house. And sometimes when we both couldn’t sleep, we’d run into each other in the kitchen and we’d end up talking.”
“Over milk and cookies?”
“Yeah, sort of.”
“I can’t believe what I’m hearing.”
“What?”
“You slept with him back then too, didn’t you?”
“No! I swear to you, Amber. I didn’t. It was only that one time, one stupid time. And he was talking about you the whole night. It didn’t have anything to do with me really.”
“Except, you’re the one who’s pregnant.”
“I know that, okay?”
“What were you thinking, though, honestly?”
She leans back and rests her hands on her stomach. An ache flows through me. Because even though I don’t want a baby now, today, no way, I used to fantasize about having one, one day, with him. What the two of us together would produce. What silly name we’d choose.
“I wasn’t, obviously,” she says. “But when he stopped talking about you and we started talking about the past, the times when you weren’t around, I don’t know, something about it, his focus, was on me for once. It was . . . seductive. But I could also tell he really wanted a drink, so when he asked me to stay with him, I did.”
Of course she did. Because, like Henry said at the funeral, no one said no to Connor when he asked you for something. He was like kryptonite to reason.
“Okay, enough. I’ve already heard too much.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Right. You said. Christ, your pregnancy news is going to be bigger than Kate Middleton’s.”
She blanches. “I know I don’t have a right to ask, but will you promise not to tell anyone? Not right away. I need . . . I need this to be secret for a little while longer.”
A spasm of pity flows through me, but I squash it.
Because I’m the one who needs her right now, and pity isn’t going to get me what I want.
“Actually, what I need, Olivia, is for this not to be secret right now.”