“Thanks,” Tamsyn muttered.
Caroline paused with her hand on the doorknob. Hermind had already grabbed on to the distraction of someone else who wasn’t having a good time at the party anymore.
“Um, why are you upset, if you don’t mind me asking? Your show seems to be going really well.”
If someone had been rude to the artist at her own opening, perhaps Caroline could exit the party by way of dragging someone into the street to brawl. She hadn’t ever been in a real fight, but her serves clocked over one hundred miles per hour, so she thought she could do some damage if it were called for. She felt like hitting something. Preferably Vanessa, but that was unlikely to change the woman’s ideas about her.
“As if those three hyenas your boyfriend hangs out with aren’t right outside this door, ripping apart my opening,” Tamsyn scoffed.
Caroline firmed her jaw. “They don’t seem very friendly.” It was the strongest statement she felt comfortable making about Adrian’s friends.
“They get to you too?”
Caroline nodded.
Tamsyn silently offered the wine bottle to Caroline. The unexpectedly kind gesture made the tears in her eyes well up again. Crap, she was going to undo all Tom’s hard work at making her pretty. Caroline took a swig from the bottle, winced, and passed it back.
“Should we go, like, fight?” she asked, trying again to focus on someone else’s predicament. Adrian had to like Tamsyn more than the three other artists. Maybe they were fair game. “I really like your paintings. I’ll do it. I bet I can take Jillian, at least.”
Tamsyn barked out a short laugh. “David’s the ripe target. Get him in the nuts just once and he’d shit his nepo baby diaper.”
“What did they say to you?” Caroline demanded.
“Nothing directly. And I don’t fucking care what they think. Vanessa inherited half a food-additives company, and David’s grandpa is in the fucking MoMA. They don’t even have to worry about selling paintings, but it still pisses them off that I’m going to sell out this show? Maybe I’d turn out a bunch of unmarketable, masturbatory odes to existential anguish if I didn’t have to worry about rent, but we’ll never know, will we?”
“Want me to throw them out?”
Tamsyn chuckled grimly. “No. I’m actually just hiding here because my ex showed up with a date.”
“Oh,” Caroline said sympathetically. The way the other woman had described her breakup, it still seemed pretty raw. Tamsyn twisted the corner of her mouth and tipped the bottle back again.
Caroline considered the other woman’s unhappy posture. “Did you talk to her? Maybe it’s not what you think. I mean, I’m the date with someone’s ex, and it’s really not...” She wasn’t making sense. “You should talk to her.”
“It ought to be what I think. We’d been together since we were seventeen. We broke up to try dating other people.”
“Oh,” Caroline said again. That didn’t seem like a good reason to break up with someone she really liked, but what did Caroline know, since she had never dated anyone she really liked besides Adrian? “Are you? Dating other people?”
“No, I’m fucking not. Turns out I don’t really know how to.” Tamsyn gripped her hair in her hands, looking skyward.
“I get that,” Caroline said glumly, retrieving the bottle and having another swig. Red wine was growing on her. “I don’t know how to either.” She’d been broken up with by guys she hadn’t even realized she was supposedly dating, which was a lot easier to handle than the time she found outshewasn’tdating someone she thought was her boyfriend. In that respect, paying Adrian to go on a specified number of dates with her a week was much easier to manage.
“You seem to be doing just fine.”
“I’m not. That’s what they got wrong. I’m not really dating Adrian.”
Tamsyn made a surprised noise. “You could have fooled me. You’re here with him. Your tits look great in that dress. It’s not a date?”
“What’s wrong with my dress?” Caroline demanded, looking down at herself. “Vanessa said the same thing.”
“Nothing’s wrong with your dress,” Tamsyn said appreciatively. “And don’t worry about Vanessa. I’ve been watching her make a series of increasingly desperate passes at Adrian ever since they met. She’s just salty that he didn’t come weep in her bony bosom when he broke up with Nora.”
“Isn’t shemarried?” Caroline understood these people less and less.
“Pretty sure she’d throw in Jill as part of the package if she thought it would help her seal the deal.”
Caroline grunted in dismay even as part of her worried that open-marriage threesomes were part of the standard landscape of Adrian’s sex life. She’d have to do alotof reading if that were the case. Tamsyn waved the concern away.
“Don’t worry. Your boyfriend seems to have an allergy to infidelity, which is one of his more charming traits.”
