The image of curling up on the couch with Caroline—she didn’t even need to change—was far too seductive. He resolutely quashed it. This was what she’d asked him for. He grabbed her hand and gave it a hard squeeze, hoping his palms weren’t sweating.
They pulled up to the curb in front of the gallery’s unassuming facade, and Adrian was glad for Tamsyn’s sake that there looked to be a good amount of traffic going inside for the month and the hour.
Caroline clutched her big coat around her for the dash to the door. Adrian hurried after her as best he could while holding the bottle of wine that he couldn’t really afford but owed Tamsyn for breaking the ice with his former gallerist.
Adrian took Caroline’s coat and his own to toss in a pile beneath a nearby counter, seizing the moment to identify the other people in attendance. Tamsyn, chatting near the entrance with an elderly couple he recognized as serious collectors. A few wealthy people bettercategorized as art groupies. A couple of men from his art school cohort. Also David and Vanessa, two of the remaining artists at Nora’s gallery, along with Vanessa’s wife, Jillian. His stomach plummeted, because these were the people he’d least wanted to see that evening.
Caroline had already drifted over to the painting nearest the front door. Adrian moved to stand next to her, catching Tamsyn’s attention as he went. She was a tall, Rubenesque woman with a careless fall of shoulder-length brown hair and rugged features. She stuck her head out of the edge of the group she was in and called his name.
“Did you bring my wine?” she demanded, hands on her hips. Adrian had truthfully told Caroline that she could wear whatever she wanted to an opening, because Tamsyn was in paint-splattered denim overalls over a chambray shirt with a red bow tie, her version of formalwear.
Adrian dutifully hefted the bottle of Bordeaux in the air as proof, then tapped Caroline on the back of the elbow to turn her around for introductions.
Tamsyn’s eyes widened as she took in his date and retrieved the wine bottle, tucking it protectively against her stomach. Tamsyn didn’t look great, now that Adrian saw her up close. It had been a while—Christ, a year, maybe?—but her face was drawn, with a couple of new lines around the corners of her eyes. She and Nora hadn’t gotten along, which was probably to Tamsyn’s credit, but that had cut down on the double-date opportunities.
Still, she was the only one who hadn’t been pretending to be happy for him when he was nominated for the Marcel Duchamp Prize at twenty-five, so he leaned in and kissed her cheek and told her how glad he was that she’d invited him, and that he’d brought his friend Caroline, who had also been looking forward to the opening.
“You and your pretty face and your pretty women,” Tamsyn said, shaking her head. “If I looked like you, I’d be in the Met by now, you know. And dating supermodels, apparently.”
Caroline grinned and blushed. “I just got a professional stylist for tonight,” she protested. “But you’re right, I should put a paper bag on him so that people can focus on his art.”
“Focus on my art, you mean,” Tamsyn said facetiously. “At least for tonight. Not all of us can rely on our looks to impress people.”
“You do just fine on both fronts,” Adrian said, taking it in the spirit it had been meant. “Where’s that travel-size supermodel of yours?” He’d always liked Camila, Tamsyn’s girlfriend, who barely came up to his chest but made big abstract sculptures out of construction debris.
Tamsyn tilted her head and gave him a pained look, and Adrian realized that he had stepped in it.
“Camila and I broke up six months ago.”
“I’m sorry,” he immediately blurted out, and he truly was very sorry to have brought it up. But then he repeated it, because he was sorrier that he hadn’t known, because he’d been absorbed by his own problems. And then he was sorrier still that it had happened at all, because the two of them had been together since before art school, and they had seemed very good together.
That made exactly zero relationships that he had personally seen last, including his own parents’ marriage. Of course, watching Tom and Rose get divorced had been like seeing the laws of physics rewritten, but it really did seem like nobody ever managed to stay together unless religion or economics forced them to.
“Don’t worry about it,” Tamsyn said, forced cheercovering the underlying weariness. “It’s not like we sent around notices. And, you know, she said she might stop by for this. We’re still friends.”
Her tone said that last statement was a lie, but Adrian was drafted into the deception, so he nodded and tried to look pleasant.
“Do you want me to go open that wine for you?”
“Jesus, if there was ever going to be a man for me, it would be you,” Tamsyn said gratefully. “Don’t leave it with the other stuff at the bar—I bought box wine from Target and poured it into the bottles so I’d look fancy.” She stepped away and, braced to perform again, waved at a new group of potential customers who were arriving out of the cold.
Caroline followed Adrian to the bar, picking up a paper cup of the cheap stuff while he hunted down a corkscrew. She took a sip that managed to hide how bad the wine had to taste. Her expression was bright as she took in the scene. She was so beautiful and sincere in her interest that the entire room seemed to dim around her.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
He paused his wrestling with the cork. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
“I don’t know. You just seem stressed.”
“Like I said, these aren’t very good parties.”
“It looks pretty good in comparison to the couple I’ve been to. Nobody at all is puking in the corner, and I haven’t stepped in any beer.”
Adrian got the cork out of the wine, poured a generous amount into a paper cup, and hid the bottle below the bar. He’d pass it off to Tamsyn the next time he was near her. Then he got his own cup of cheap wine to hold and pretend to drink.
He steeled himself to make earnest conversation aboutart with strangers, although he already wanted to leave. He’d said hello to Tamsyn, dropped off the wine, and he ought to get Caroline out of there before someone taught her it was gauche to admit she liked anything.
“Hey,” she said, squaring her shoulders to face him. “You’ll have one of these again, okay?”
