“The next person who asks me that will get their balls handed to them. I’m not kidding,” I whispered back through clenched, caramel-coated teeth.

He backed off.

The movie started.

I watched the back of Jack’s head watch his movie.

Ten minutes in, after fussing about in his seat the entire time, he took off. Literally. As soon as Jack saw himself on the screen, he bailed.

I’d tentatively reached out with my fingertip to touch the back of his neck when I saw him begin to fidget. I was not the only one who fidgeted when nervous. Nick had slapped my hand down. He was well versed in Holly’s rules for the night.

For fuck’s sake. I’d had about enough.

When he stood to get up, I almost did too. As it was, I had to force myself to wait five whole minutes before I stole out of the theater. Nick tried to grab my arm to stop me, but I was the one slapping his hand now. I was going to follow my Brit.

I found him by the bar. He was not alone. Marcia had already found him, and they looked to be sharing a cocktail. They were laughing. He looked calmer already. She was calming him. I saw a rogue photographer draw close. I no longer cared.

I turned and walked swiftly toward the ladies room, the sounds of their mixed laughter following me.

The lighting in the bathroom would have worked equally well for interrogation. The bags under my eyes were highlighted nicely, as were my laugh lines, which were suddenly not as funny as they used to be. My faced look haggard, tired, and sad.

So sad.

As I looked in the mirror, I saw a different image than earlier in the evening. My skin that I’d thought looked tanned and glowy now looked streaky and orange. My hair that I’d thought looked curly and wavy now looked frizzy and obnoxious. My eyes were puffy from the cocktails and had begun to resemble the cabbages they’d surely turn into tomorrow. They always did.

My phone beeped. It was a text from Jack.

Gracie

Where are you?

George

I also had a text from earlier. I hadn’t heard it come through.

Grace

The Village Voice is raving about you!

New York misses you.

When are you coming home?

Michael

I smiled. It was the only thing that had made me smile in more than an hour. New York was a world away from where I was tonight. And New York was a world I understood. A world I was kind of rising to the top of, actually. Not this ridiculous charade. I smiled again, in spite of myself, and the door to the ladies room opened. It was Marcia.

“There you are. Jack’s looking for you,” she said, coming to stand next to me at the counter, under the same lighting.

Her skin was perfect. Her hair was perfect. Her face was smooth and unlined. She was a star. My smile faded. I belonged in some kind of dietary fiber commercial.

I turned to her. “Well, I saw him leave, so of course I went to follow him—you know, offer a little comfort to my one and only. But look at that, someone else beat me to the punch. I seemed a little unnecessary.” My voice was cutting and sarcastic.

“Grace, I didn’t follow him out there. I saw him out in the lobby and we just—”

I cut her off. “Enough. I’m too old for this crap. I don’t have the energy. Please tell Jack that I’m not feeling well, and I went home.” I managed to get the words out, the drunk tears starting to build. This was too much. I’d reached my limit. I was out of control, but I was suddenly wise enough to remove myself from the situation. I spun on my heel and made for the door.

“Grace?” she called after me.

My hand on the door, I turned wearily back toward her. She was still lovely.

“There’s something on your dress, on the back. It looks like, well, it looks like you sat in something,” she said, her face bright red.

I turned to look.

Fucking Milk Dud.

Right in the middle of my ass. It looked like I had a little turd stuck to me.

Of course you do.

You know when you just have one of those really shit days? When nothing works, when it just gets worse and worse, and you think you’re going to burst into tears over and over again? But you keep it together. You don’t know how you do it, but you maintain. Then you do something stupid like stub your toe or drop your coffee, and that’s the last straw. And you lose your f**king mind.

I saw it clearly now. This was not my world. This was never my world. Jack needed someone better suited for this life. And it was not me. I didn’t deserve someone as wonderful and amazing as Jack. It didn’t matter that I loved him more than anyone in my entire life.

The writing was on the wall, the Milk Duds were on the chair, and I sat smack dab in the middle of them. I sighed heavily, my shoulders hunching over.

“Please don’t take this personally, Marcia, because I can tell you are honestly a nice person. And I know Jack would never be friends with a jerk, so I know you’re not. But you strike me as the kind of girl who has never and would never sit on a motherfucking Milk Dud. And I really can’t be around that kind of girl right now. It was nice to meet you. Take care of him, please.” I left the ladies room.

I walked straight through the lobby, not even bothering to hide my ass and the remnants of the Dud. I kept my head down as I made my way to the street, and, forgetting about trying to find my limo, I went through the line of fans, crossed the street, and hailed a cab.

***

I went back to my house, took off my dress, and left it in a puddle on the kitchen floor. I threw my shoes at the wall. I stood under the shower for a solid hour while my phone rang and rang and rang on the bathroom counter. When I got out of the shower, I put it in the freezer without even checking messages, and I grabbed the Absolut.

I sat on a lawn chair on the patio, drinking icy vodka from an “I got Lei’d In Hawaii” shot glass shaped like a hula dancer.

After a while I heard a car pull up. I heard keys in the door. I heard loud footsteps clunking through the house, and I heard him yelling for me.

I didn’t answer.

I heard his voice getting closer and angrier. He finally came to the French doors on the patio and looked out into the darkness. He couldn’t see me, and he clicked on the floodlights.

They illuminated everything. My wet hair, the mascara all over, my vodka bottle. My tear-stained face. My defeated face. My resigned and determined face.

“What the fuck, Grace?” he asked, face angry.

We stared at each other across the patio.

I set the bottle down and stood to face him. I was shockingly sober, considering the amount of alcohol I’d consumed.

“Jack, first let me apologize for leaving you tonight. I had to get out of there—” I started.

He interrupted me. “Why the hell did you leave? What—” he began.

I held up my hand. “I’m not finished. Please let me say this. I’m sorry I left you tonight,” I began again, my voice very low and controlled.

He waited, then nodded for me to continue.

“This isn’t going to work, Jack,” I said, and I felt my body tense.

“What’s not going to work? What are you talking about?” He stepped out of the doorway and down onto the flagstone.

“This. Us. This isn’t going to work. We need to cut our losses now before either of us gets in any deeper.” I was amazed at the sound of my voice. I sounded so in control.

A better word for it would be dead. You sound dead.

I felt dead.

I watched Jack’s face as he received this information. It changed quickly.

“Are you kidding me with this shit? What the f**k is wrong with you, Grace?” he yelled. He actually yelled at me. He crossed the patio in three long strides and grabbed me by the arms. I flopped like a rag doll, lifeless.

“We should never have started this in the first place. We want totally different things, and we should stop this now. This has to stop,” I heard myself say. It was like I was underwater and could hear myself talking. The words were murky and thick. It didn’t even sound like me.

“You’re crazy, you know that? How in the world can you even think about ending things with me? You know we’re perfect together,” he said, his eyes pained now. He knew I was serious.

His eyes pierced my veil, and I began to feel some things. Hurt. Sickness. Panic. Anger.

“Don’t say that. I see perfection, but I don’t see it here. Do you know how I felt seeing you and her together tonight?” My voice began to rise.

“Oh, please, Grace. Is that what this is about? How many times can I tell you there’s nothing going on between Marcia and me?” His voice matched mine in intensity.

I ignored the way my stomach contracted when he said her name. “Oh, I believe you. I know you’re just friends. But that’s the kind of girl you should be with. A girl—not some geezery woman like me. And now that the press knows who I am, how old I am? They’ll f**king crucify me. We’ve been fooling ourselves to think this could work outside the little sex bubble we’ve been living in.”

He was quiet. He was so angry. I’d never seen him so angry. When he let go of my arms, I had little Jack-prints on my skin.

“I’ve never in my life seen someone deliberately run in the opposite direction of happiness more than you do,” he said, staring daggers into my eyes.

“What?”

“You heard me. You push it away as hard as you can. You and I know both know there’s no one on the planet better suited for you than me, no one better equipped to handle all your shit, and yet here you are. Throwing it away like you don’t care.”

“I do care! I love you! But this is wrong. I just know in my heart it’s wrong. You don’t need all my shit. It isn’t fair to you. That doesn’t mean I don’t love you, but this is just not the right time for us. You don’t realize how they’re going to scrutinize you for this,” I said, my voice beginning to crack.

“Would you please let me decide what I can and can’t handle? God damn, Grace. You act like you’re so difficult. Did you ever stop to think that I need you too? That you’re perfect for me? That you put up with my shit as well? You can’t just give me your love and then take it away without asking. It doesn’t work like that!” he snapped. He ran both hands through his hair, dragging them down and stopping with them on either side of his face.

I softened when I saw him look so sad, and he saw me weaken. He moved in fast.

He pressed his body into mine and kissed me hungrily, his hands finding their way inside my robe. I moaned in spite of myself, my body reacting the way it always did with his hands on me. It was not enough, though.

I pushed away.

His face looked broken.

I placed my own hands on either side of his face, cradling it. We both had tears now.

“When you’re a little older, you’ll see this more clearly,” I said, and he closed his eyes.

That did it. When he opened them, they were cold.

“Don’t you dare bring my age into this when you’re the one acting like a child,” he glowered.

That was what I needed. I backed away, closing my robe and my heart to him. “I need you to leave,” I said, my voice as cold as his eyes. I was back in control, and I was making the right choice.

“Don’t do this, Gracie,” he pleaded, voice softer now.

I turned away. I couldn’t look at him. “I have to. I need some time. I’ll call you when I can,” I said, effectively ending the conversation.

And us.

He walked away without another word.

I waited until I heard the car leave, and then I fell.

Apart.

Eventually I got off the ground and packed up my shit. I couldn’t look at our bed. Only two nights in it, and it was our bed. I got my phone out of the freezer. I barely saw the Post-it and the picture.

I went to Holly’s. She took me in, fed me ice cream and aspirin, and didn’t yell at me for ruining her client’s big night.

She put me on a plane back to New York the next day.

Broken.

What had I just done?

Chapter 14

It had been six days since I left L.A. Six days since I’d seen Jack. Six days since I’d talked to Jack. Six days since I broke both our hearts.

I was miserable. I literally did not know what to do.

Breakups are hard. Everyone knows that. I’d been through bad ones before. The first days are the worst. All you want to do is avoid reminders of the boy in question. But imagine you’ve just broken up with the new It Boy. Jack was the new Brit It Boy.

The day after the premiere the entertainment shows and online blogs had been full of pictures of me and Jack. I scrutinized the images of me solo on the red carpet—before the Milk Dud Incident. I looked better than I thought I would. Seeing myself without dirty martini glasses (which were evidently the fancy-girl’s beer goggles, but with a tragically opposite effect) certainly improved things. I still saw the flaws though. The curves that maybe shouldn’t be quite so curvy…the hair that was a little too frizzy.

They also reposted the pictures from last summer, including the one from our first date at Gladstone’s where I was pointing a shrimp. That one tugged at my heart a lot. That was the day he kissed me for the first time. They brought back pictures from our outings in Los Angeles last summer and this fall in New York. Now there was a name with them: Grace Sheridan, age thirty-three.

They knew Holly was my manager. They knew Jack was also her client. They knew approximately when he and I had met. They knew my age. They didn’t know much else. Holly had confirmed that I was, in fact, a client, as well as her friend. She denied the rumor that Jack and I had been dating, explaining simply that we were good friends and had gotten to know each other when I was staying with her last summer.