The smell of expensive perfume.
The click of a heel on tile.
I look up to see Susan Oglethorpe is standing in the doorway with an empty silver ice bucket of her own dangling from one manicured hand.
Oh, shit.
25
CASS
For a single, suspended moment, the four of us—that would be Susan, me, Matvei, and the ice machine, for those keeping score at him—exist together in a delicate balance. Like a little ecosystem in The Ice Room.
There’s the predator—Matvei, obviously.
There’s the prey—me, of course; that goes without saying.
The ice machine—innocent in all this, emotionless, merely the habitat we’ve adopted.
And now, a new invasive species has joined the party. Susan Oglethorpe.
The question we’re all wondering:What will she do next?
I’m paralyzed with fear. Matvei is also still, though I don’t think emotion of any kind has ever immobilized him. Susan has yet to make her move.
Then she blinks. Once. Twice. Slowly. Dangerously. Her eyes do a quick sweep of the incriminating evidence, from Matvei’s handstill half-buried in places it absolutely shouldn’t be, to my cheek smushed against the steel face of the ice machine, the cashmere robe slumped half-off my shoulder, the abandoned ice bucket on the floor.
I open my mouth with zero idea of what’s about to come out of it.Hi, Susan! Funny seeing you here! This isn’t what it looks like!
But even she isn’t that dim. Head in theToo Rich to CareClouds or not, there is just no way that she can’t put two and two together. Besides, I can’t even come up with a shameless lie like that right now. My brain is shorting out like a fridge on the fritz. A frantic, sparking buzz. Any second now, I’m going to melt down.
In the end, it doesn’t matter. Susan doesn’t give me the chance to panic.
She pivots on one Ferragamo heel, light as a ballerina, and strides right back out.
What now? Do I curse? Do I cry? Do I bury myself in the ice machine until I enter cryo sleep like Walt Disney?
“Hm.” Matvei is busy withdrawing his hand and reassembling my clothing for me. The robe gets pushed back up my shoulder, the knot adjusted, the lapels tugged closed. “That was interesting.”
“Interesting?” I hiss, spinning around. “Interesting?!That’s the word you’re going with?!”
“What word would you prefer?”
“Catastrophic! Apocalyptic! The end of my entire fucking life as I know it!”
“She didn’t say anything.”
“That’s worse! Matvei, that isso much worse. Susan Oglethorpe is a WASP. Do you know what a WASP does when she sees something? She files it away into a little manila folder labeledFuture Ammunitionand pulls it out at the most diabolical possible moment. Susan is friends witheverywife ofeverypartner at Raymond’s firm! By next week, the only thing anyone on the Upper East Side is going to be talking about is Cassandra Snyder’s hand-job buffet at The Crispin Hotel.”
He cups my face. His palms are warm, even now. “Dikarka,you have to breathe. If you don’t, you’ll pass out. Not that I mind giving you mouth-to-mouth, but I think you’d agree that the timing is less than ideal.”
I breathe. Well, it’s more of a snotty, teary sniffle, but oxygen goes in and carbon dioxide goes out, so we’ll say that counts.
“Good girl,” he says quietly. Then, in a thoroughly unbothered tone: “She won’t say anything.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do.” His thumb skims my cheekbone. “She has too much to lose. Bill makes her sign a new post-nuptial agreement every five years. She is not going to set foot near a single rumor that could even theoretically be redirected to cast a bad light on her own marriage.”
