JULY 20
8:02 p.m.
Dandie’s Lion Restaurant, Manhattan, ladies’ room (the attendant just asked if I have a UTI)
Although he does know his cars. Dixon, that is, not Daddy. Hell. There’s Angela. More later.
JOURNAL OF DIXON AINSLEY
21 July
12:55 a.m.
New York City
I’m at a loss as to where to start about the evening’s events. I’d prefer never to remember some of them, but that’s cowardice speaking, so I will ignore my desire to heavily edit the happenings. I can do that when I publish the diary, after all.
Let us begin with a full retelling of the evening.
Paulie invited me to dinner with her after I explained about how I dislike people invading my personal space. At first, I was taken aback—how could she interpret a simple apology as an expressed desire to date her? I like her, despite the fact that she herself stated that she wants to get laid by one of the non-U.S. racers, but I’m determined not to let that color my opinion of her. After all, Rupert is already working his way through any and all American women who are willing, so why shouldn’t Paulie do the same? Perhaps Alice has more matchmaking skills than I previously thought.
I’m going to have to delete the above paragraph from a finished book. Not only do I sound self-righteously priggish, but it makes Paulie sound like a trollop of the worst color, and she’s anything but. I speak, of course, with the hindsight of the dinner behind me, which I understand isn’t at all allowable in narrative retelling.
Right. I shall have to deletethatparagraph as well. Where was I?
I met Paulie in the lobby of the hotel. She looked quite nice in a red dress that was, perhaps, a shade too short, considering it showed off a lot of those long, long legs of hers, but I suppose she is free to wear what she likes. Come to think of it, it had a low neckline that more or less demanded that everyone admire her breasts. Surely she had to be aware of just how much breast she was exposing? Is that the way they dress in the States? I admit I didn’t have the opportunity to look at how other women were dressed, what with Paulie’s breasts sitting right there, gleaming at me in the subdued lighting of the restaurant, not to mention the occasional flashes of leg that were quite distracting.
But I’m jumping ahead of myself.
“Hi,” Paulie said by way of greeting in the lobby of the hotel. “You look nice.”
“Thank you. I wasn’t prepared for a black-tie event, so I hope a simple suit would suffice.”
“More than suffice,” she said, smiling broadly. The admiration in her eyes was more than a little warming. “You look like James Bond.”
“I assure you that I have no skills that would qualify me for that persona. I’m a simple estate manager. That dress is quite...”
“Fun? It is, isn’t it?” She did a little twirl that showed off even more leg. Heat pooled in my groin, an effect that I ignored. The last thing I needed was an untoward erection.
“You have the funniest look on your face,” she said, frowning a little. “Are you in pain?”
“Not yet, but I will be if you keep spinning around,” I muttered.
She stared at me in surprise a second, looked down at her dress, then back up to me with a slightly opened mouth. It took her a second before she reached out andwhapped me on the arm. “You’re flirting with me again! Golly, Dixon! Is this a record for you?”
“I don’t know why you interpret having definite personal boundaries with disliking women or, rather, not being interested in women, but I can assure you that the truth is far from that. I like women just fine. I met and proposed to a woman twelve years ago. She died of brain cancer four months before our wedding.”
I hadn’t meant to blurt all of that out, especially not standing in the middle of a busy hotel lobby, but out it came, and I had the dissatisfaction of seeing her playful expression turn to one of embarrassment.
Dammit, I’d done it again. I was the world’s biggest ass.
“I’m sorry,” I said with a sigh at my inability to speak without making a fool of myself. “I didn’t mean to snap at you like that when you were simply teasing me.”
“You didn’t really snap so much as put me in my place,” she said after a moment’s thought. “Can I put my hand on your arm?”
“What? Yes.”
“Good.” She put her hand on my lower arm, giving it a gentle squeeze. “I’m sorry about your fiancée, Dixon. I didn’t know that you were grieving, or I wouldn’t have poked fun about you flirting. Wait. Was it a flirt? Oh god, it wasn’t, was it? I totally misinterpreted it? Argh! I could just die of embarrassment!”
