“It’s stupid.”
She shrugged and kept packing. What she didn’t want to tell Lyne was that at that moment, she would have used just about any excuse to get away from him, his schedule, and his damn “relaxing” weekend in the Bahamas.
“Do you want to know what your problem is, Lyne?” she asked. “You’re so afraid of intimacy that you have to schedule every minute of your life. You can’t even sit down and have a conversation like a normal person.”
“I’m afraid of intimacy?” he asked, outraged. “You’re the one who’s running away to some stupid meeting in Paris.”
Now it was her turn to be furious. She turned on him, her face flushed and her heart beating rapidly in her chest. “It’s not a ‘stupid meeting,’ okay? It’s my business. Just because I don’t make a billion dollars a year doesn’t mean that my business isn’t just as important as yours.” And she’d screamed this last bit so loudly that her throat closed up in protest.
“Jesus!” he said, taken aback. “Take it easy, kiddo. Take my plane to JFK if you want. It’s only about a four-hour round-trip. If you leave now, we can still get the wheels up at five . . .”
There it was again, she thought, irrationally, his schedule. “Don’t you get it?” she demanded, throwing a pair of underpants onto the floor in a fury. This dramatic gesture didn’t have quite the hoped-for impact, especially as the underpants merely fluttered to the floor and then just lay there, like a discarded tissue. “I don’t need your plane . . .”
“Suit yourself.” He shrugged and walked out of the room, the way he always did when things didn’t go his way.
When the taxi arrived to take her to the tiny airport, he’d already moved on to his next activity—snorkeling. And once again, standing on the tarmac in the sun, waiting for the rattly single-engine, five-passenger plane she’d managed to charter to Islip Airport on Long Island, she wished that she had been able to take Lyne up on his offer. But she just couldn’t. The charter cost $3,000, and then there was a $200 taxi ride to JFK, which got her there just in time to catch the six p.m. flight to Paris, for another $3,000. All together, that meeting in Paris had cost her close to $8,000, but it was worth it, especially after she came back and, running into Lyne at Michael’s again, said casually, “Well, it looks like B et C is going to make a huge offer for my company,” and he had nearly choked on his lamb chop . . .
The memory made her smile, and leaning forward to look in a mirror in the Sotheby’s viewing area, she turned her head from side to side, enjoying the way the diamond earclips caught the light. Maybe she should buy herself a little something to celebrate. Maybe these . . .
Her phone rang. “So,” Lyne said, as if picking up where he’d left off several minutes before, “I’m stuck in Washington for the night. Why don’t you hop on the plane and come down here for dinner?”
She sighed. “Lyne, I’m busy.”
“Doing what?”
“Living my life.”
“So you’re not going to come to Washington for dinner.”
“No.”
“Okay. Bye,” he said, and hung up.
Nico suddenly appeared, damp, disheveled, and breathless, her cheeks reddened as if she’d been running. “I’m sorry I’m late,” she said. “I had something—”
“It’s okay. I’ve just been looking,” Victory said.
“Lyne?” Nico asked, taking in the cell phone that was still in Victory’s hand and her annoyed expression.
Victory shrugged and rolled her eyes. “He wanted me to fly down to Washington tonight to have dinner with him. I said no. I think it’s kind of hookerish, don’t you, being flown on some guy’s private jet just to have dinner with him?”
“Is it?” Nico asked. “I don’t know. I like those earrings.”
“They’re twenty-two thousand dollars,” Victory whispered, and handed the ear clips back to Ms. Smith.
They moved down the cases to the blue diamond, property of a gentleman. “I’m going to try that on,” Nico said suddenly.
“But you can’t afford—”
“You never know, Vic. We might be able to someday,” she said with confidence. She removed her fur coat and Ms. Smith came forward to unlock the case.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Ms. Smith said, removing the diamond from its stand. She held it up, suspended from a fine platinum chain. “Are you buying it for yourself?” she asked. “Or thinking of it as a present? From your husband, perhaps . . . ?
“God no,” Nico said quickly. And then she blushed. “My husband could never . . .”
Victory stared. She’d known Nico for years, but had no idea she had such a passion for jewelry. But she supposed you could learn new things about your friends every day.
“My husband doesn’t care about . . . jewelry,” Nico said, lifting up the back of her hair so that Ms. Smith could fasten the diamond around her neck.