Page 80 of Cruel Lies

I want, so badly, to call someone.

Am I overthinking this? Is the dress too much? Is it not enough? Do I stand next to him or a little apart? What do I say when someone asks how we know each other? What do I do with my hands?

These are best-friend questions. But the zip-dressing person I'd ask them to is gone. So I keep the questions to myself and I start trying to live a life that doesn't require that I know all the answers in advance.

I sit back down on the edge of the bed, careful of the dress, and I let myself feel that pang of absence for a minute. The missing person. The Paula-shaped hole where a friend should be.

Then I pick up my phone one more time.

I don't call anyone. There's no one to call. But I open my texts and I look at Ronan's name at the top, and the last thing in the thread is this morning's message, the same one he sends every day.

You're beautiful, Calista Meadows.

I don't feel like I believe it. Not the way he keeps insisting I soon will. But I've got a dress on that fits, and hair that's done, and my mother's earrings, and a car coming in five minutes, and no mirror to stand in front of and pick myself apart in.

So I'm just going to have to trust that everything will be okay.

I stand up. I smooth the front of the dress with both hands and pat my hair to make sure it feels right.

"You've got this, Cali," I tell myself.

It's not the same, coming from me. But it's something.

So with that, I head downstairs, through the front door, and out into the night.

22

CALI

The car is black and quiet, like all his cars are. The driver doesn't say much. He just tells me his name is Paolo and that Mr. Akov is waiting.

I spend the whole ride not looking out the window. I look at my hands. I look at my phone. I check the little photo of myself again, and then I turn it off because looking at it too long makes the old voice want to wake up.

We pull up to a building in Midtown with a red carpet running out the front and lights everywhere. There are a lot of people. Many of them are guests in their glitz-and-glammiest. Lots of the others have cameras with flash bulbs going off every nanosecond.

Paolo opens my door before I can figure out how to operate the Space Age handle.

And then Ronan is there.

He's standing at the bottom of the steps in a black tuxedo. It fits him the way everything fits him, like the fabric knows betterthan to be anything but perfect. His hair is combed back. His eyes catch the light and do that shimmery, half-gray, half-blue thing they love to do.

He holds out his hand.

I take it and let him help me out of the car. My heels wobble on the carpet for a second and his hand tightens, steadying me, and then I'm standing in front of him.

He doesn't say anything for a moment. He just looks at me. "You look like a woman who zipped her own dress," he remarks.

That is not what I expected.

I gawk at him. "How do you?—"

"Your shoulder," he says. He reaches out and, very lightly, touches the top of my right shoulder through the fabric. "You're holding it like it's sore. You reached behind you at a bad angle. You did it alone."

I will never not be amazed by this man's powers of observation. "I did," I admit. "We might need to go straight from here to a chiropractor."

He laughs as his hand comes back to mine. "As if I'd ever let anyone else put their hands on you." And then, because he can't help himself, he leans in a little closer, close enough that I can smell the sandalwood aroma of his cologne, and says, "You are beautiful, Calista Meadows. That's today's dose. In person this time."

I feel my face go hot. "You already texted it this morning."