Reunion Read Online Free Page B

way she handled most of the other details of Blue’s life. Saint Marcy, Blue often called her, and Marcy would say, “Ha! Not after the life
I’ve
led.”
    It was all talk, though, had always been all talk with her. The worst Marcy had done was what they were all doing that year they’d shared the dilapidated house. Taking on new names—Blue had tried out Skye, after the heroine of a book she’d read, but became Bubble when her belly began to round—inventing themselves, dabbling with drugs, with sex (though she’d quit both when her periods quit) … and while some people might consider them hell-bound for their behaviors, Blue wasn’t convinced. She and Marcy and their various housemates had beenyoung, rudderless, sure of their invincibility and the idea that they had so much time ahead of them that they could waste it freely, using homemade bongs and listening to Prince. So much time that even the biggest of mistakes would sooner or later melt away and be forgotten, like tonight’s snow after tomorrow’s sun.
    The apartment was newly decorated in what Blue thought of as Twenty-first Century Lodge style. Though the work was completed weeks ago, the scent of fresh paint and new wool rugs persisted, in a pleasant, low-key way. The place looked marvelous, all warm woods and natural stone and leafy plants throughout the wide-open space. Marvelous and unused. Marvelous and bereft. An
Architectural Digest
spread, after the magazine’s crew had gone.
    In her bathroom she pulled off the elastic that bound her hair.
Highlighted chestnut
, her stylist called the color,
with hints of honey and cinnamon
, as if her head were a pastry. “Wholesome” was the word the media often used to describe her, suggesting that somehow her nut-honey-cinnamon hair and her long-legged tomboyish build explained her success. They’d changed their tune a bit when she made it onto the
Forbes
list. Now she was wholesome and driven, wholesome and savvy, wholesome and well connected and well dressed.
    Style
and
substance, how surprising, how unusual!
    A woman who made her living on TV did not, strictly speaking, have to be attractive to succeed, but if she wasn’t, the media loved to say so. Hence the hour she’d just spent at the gym, an hour for which she paid a ridiculous amount of money in order to get exclusive time with Jeremy. An effective hour, though, repeated five times each week (up from the three that used to do the trick); she was in top physical form. If while doing stretches, crunches, leg lifts, she sometimes thought of Jeremy’s sculpted body making better use of hers, where was the harm in that?
    Her bathroom’s new wallpaper, an amber grass-textured weave, kept bringing to mind a Hemingway story—not one of the novels they would be promoting on the show next week, but another, about Mt. Kilimanjaro and a couple waiting for rescue at a nearby camp. The shortstory, a tale of regret, had been a favorite of Mitch Forrester’s … and Mitch had been a favorite of hers.
    As she washed her face she recalled Mitch reading her the story one evening, early in their short-lived relationship. He’d been pensive—something to do with his ex-wife and the difficulty he was having in getting to see his son. “There are only so many chances to get things right,” he’d said, but she hadn’t understood very well at the time. She’d been barely nineteen, sure that life was a broad and endless series of chances. After all, didn’t they live in the land of opportunity, where success in business, in life, in love, was no accident of birth but could be
made?
Wasn’t Mitch in charge of his own destiny? What was there to regret at his age, twenty-seven? He could have a new wife.
(Her.)
He could have new children.
(Hers.)
For two promising months she had done a very effective job of ignoring anything that contradicted her vision, and then he’d set her straight. And then … then, he’d set her free.
    Less easy to ignore, these days,