Ezra took this to mean that Gregory was still happily single, as he had nearly always been since he’d come out their senior year. Ezra never understood his rotating lineup of men, how it didn’t unnerve him not to have a steady partner, how Gregory seemed to delight in the chase. For Ezra, the chase was the most arduous, exhausting part. Give him the evenings in pajamas and Blockbuster rentals, give him morning breath and bed head, give him the assured companionship over dinner, the sharedNew York Timescrossword, the intimacy of being on a first-name basis with her parents.
“Have another,” Gregory said. “I suspect you’ll need it.”
Ezra tipped the bottle back and drank again, and this time, it burned a little less, felt a little better. “I don’t even have to see her,” he said. “I mean, I guess I have to see her, but I don’t have toseeher. It’s been ten years. Who said I have to care?”
Gregory cupped his shoulder and said, “My man,” and shook his head, like he was in on a secret that Ezra didn’t yet understand, and then he grabbed his scarf and his red pufferand also the two bottles of booze and said, “Let’s hit it. We have an hour at the hotel bar before we head to Burton.”
Ezra didn’t want to make a big scene about the ring in front of Gregory, who, he knew, would make it into an even bigger thing because Gregory was all about delighting in the dramatic. Until Ezra got on bended knee and slipped his grandmother’s ring on Mimi’s finger, he just wanted this for himself. He’d planned to put the ring in the hotel room safe, but that would draw attention to it, so instead, he reached for his coat where it was stuffed in the inside pocket and said, “Ok, just promise me one thing.”
And Gregory turned, with the door ajar, and said, “Anything.”
“Just don’t let me... I mean... Look, I don’t want to turn this into adrama.You know, with Frankie.”
“I got you,” Gregory said. “I’ll be the buffer.”
Ezra didn’t really know what exactly that meant. He envisioned Gregory rushing over to form a human wall between Frankie and him if ever they were in the same vicinity. But Gregory said it with such confidence, with such enthusiasm that he decided to trust him; he seemed to be an expert in making peace with exes, and when peace couldn’t be found, at exorcising their ghosts. Ezra had never exorcised a ghost in his life.
Ezra thought of Frankie again, of her ghost. He’d been off his anxiety medication for a few years now but always kept a solitary pill on hand. His break-in-case-of-emergency supply. His pulse was already racing at the news of her proximity, and he wondered if this weren’t a bit of an emergency.
“One sec,” he said to Gregory, then dipped into the bathroomand rooted around in his Dopp kit for his pill container: his multivitamins, his calcium, and a single Xanax. He stared into the mirror and resolved he was fine; he really could white-knuckle it out. But then Gregory said from around the corner, “You good, man?” And just to be sure that he reallywas good, he placed the pill on the back of his tongue and swallowed.
“All set,” Ezra said, emerging from the bathroom. Gregory held the hotel door open and flourished his arm as if he were an usher.
The Portland vodka was already making Ezra’s legs feel rubbery, and he held a hand up against the wall as they lolled down the hallway toward the elevator. Gregory jabbed the button, and the two of them glanced upward as the floor ticked downward.
“Don’t worry,” Gregory said again. “I got you.”
Ezra nodded perfunctorily because this seemed like the only reasonable reaction. Why did he care if he ran into his ex-girlfriend from a decade ago? Why was his heart thumping through his flannel shirt? Why was his mind racing a million miles an hour like it used to?
He waited for the Xanax to kick in. What sweet relief that would be.
The elevator number settled on THREE, and the gold doors whooshed open.
It took Ezra’s brain a good four seconds to get what he was looking at: a blonde staring at the floor, her Doc Martens tapping out a beat, her black down jacket zipped to the neck. He stepped forward as if magnetically drawn toward her, as if he couldn’t stop himself even when he’d spent the previous hour reminding himself of all the ways he’d need to do justthat. Then he felt Gregory’s hand reach over and grab his forearm, pulling him back, like the elevator was full or like they were bracing for impact.
By the time Frankie Harriman looked up from her Motorola and snapped it closed, the door was already easing shut. But there was just enough time—a few seconds that morphed into a decade—for Frankie to gasp and for Ezra to both recoil and retreat, and for each of them to vow to themselves that this would be the only time they’d be within spitting distance the rest of the weekend through.
SIXTEEN HOURSLATER
ONE
Frankie
Frankie awoke to a headache that felt akin to a leech sucking the blood straight from her spinal cord. The throbbing started low in her skull, right at the nape of her neck, and reverberated out with each heartbeat, each pulse, into every vein, every cerebral fold, every nerve. She squeezed her eyes closed, willing for sleep for one more moment, but the pain was unbearable, too much to allow for rest to settle back in. This, certainly, was one of a hundred hangovers she had endured, and yet this one felt different. Harrowing.
She allowed her eyes to flutter open and found herself staring at a white wall. To be sure, this was not the first wall she had woken in close proximity to, but certainly, she knew immediately that it wasn’t her own. She’d painted one of her bedroom walls a vibrant purple last year, and though all her friends in LA thought it was a littlemuch, Frankie had yet to grow weary of it, unlike so many other things in her life. (Really, she only had, like, three friends in LA, and mostly,those friendships were work friendships, but still. They really all did think she’d get sick of the purple wall.)
Frankie rolled to her back, emitted a groan, and noticed a heat emanating from beside her. The naked back of a man rose and fell next to her. This was also not a highly unusual experience for Frankie, who often took advice from Prince and partied like it was the end of the world, or at least the end of the century. Who could blame her: hot men and tequila went with her business.
This morning, however, Frankie narrowed her crusty eyes and took stock. The room was dim, the shades still pulled, and low light filtered in. The bed was small,verysmall. True, she occasionally woke up in a shabby studio with an aspiring drummer or the like (Frankie did prefer drummers, as they knew what to do with their hands; guitarists were pretty all right, too), but as adults, nearly everyone had at least a decent-sized bed. Sometimes, yes, there were futons involved. She rarely even bothered to give those aspirings her number. Futon-guys were fun, but they were not on Frankie’s long-term radar. Laila would argue that Frankie didn’t have long-term radar, while April would urge Frankie to find her long-term radar. “It’s very fulfilling once you do,” she’d once said, while Frankie made groaning noises over the phone that she hoped April could interpret three thousand miles away.
Frankie pushed up to her elbows and glanced around. The furnishings were... She tried to place them. The furnishings were familiar but only in a vague, back-of-her-mind way. They were utilitarian, basic, standard-issue beige wood. Frankie squinted, her brain running in the way that it sometimes did before she either had a brilliant epiphany or needed to take an Ativan.
This did not seem right. This did notfeelright, and if Frankie Harriman was good at anything, it was tapping into afeelingand riding that wave. That’s how she discovered Night Vixen in a dank club off Sunset and brought them from bickering post–high school naïfs to the A-lister girl band who currently had the number two record and five singles on the charts. No small thing for a girl band in the late ’90s, when— despite the success of, well, Frankie would just say it: ugh, the Spice Girls—girl bands still had to fight for both respect and airplay. It was how she’d navigated the boys’ club of her industry and landed onHollywood Reporter’s 30 Under 30 at twenty-eight: by tapping intofeelingsabout up-and-comers and massaging egos and wiping tears and sending ridiculously large bottles of champagne to front doors when a single got its first spin on 102.7 KISS FM.
This morning, with alarming and rapid acuity, Frankie realized that her feelings bleated,Something is not right.
Gingerly, she eased closer to the man beside her, craning her neck until she hovered just above his face.
