Famous (A Famous novel) Page 5

  When she opened her eyes, his lips were pressed together, his face pinched. “This…” He waved his hand back and forth in the space between them. “You being here…is not going to work.”

  Of course it wasn’t going to work, Emmy berated herself as Evan examined eggplants. She didn’t even need Maude to say I told you so. What on earth had possessed her to come here? To get on a plane and clap her hands over her ears like a kid chanting “La, la, la, I can’t hear you!” while Tony, ever loyal and unconditionally trailing in her wake, tried to talk sense into her? The shame that had flooded in when Evan smiled apologetically and said, “Let’s get the shopping done, then we’ll go home, and I’ll drive you wherever you like,” was not abating.

  Not even a little bit.

  Had she become so entitled, so indulged, that she thought she could swoop in and insert herself into Evan’s life with no notice, no permission, and no plan?

  Which left her…where? Where would she go? To Minneapolis, where her parents, though they would let her stay with them, would judge her every movement with a mixture of bewilderment and passive aggression? Jesse’s house in Toronto? She and her latest ex were supposed to be “friends.” After their very humiliating—and very public—breakup in Central Park, they’d calmed down and agreed to part amicably, and Claudia had seen to it that People reported as much. She should have known better than to think that she would ever be enough for Jesse Jamison, famous bad-boy rocker. The most humiliating part of the whole thing was that as usual, she’d been taking it more seriously than he had. “I didn’t realize we were exclusive,” he’d said, and honestly, he wasn’t wrong. Jesse’s manager had introduced them, they’d gone to a few industry events, and Emmy had jumped right to naming their future children. Jesse wasn’t a bad guy. He would take her in, but her pride would not allow it.

  She had nowhere to go.

  Well, that wasn’t strictly true. She could, of course, jet off to any number of secluded resorts, but she could never fully relax at any of them. Employees could tip off tabloids, and the other rich people at places like that always tried to ingratiate themselves. Just thinking about it was exhausting.

  She had only wanted to go somewhere normal for a while. Be normal for a while.

  But it was impossible. There was nowhere to go that would fit the bill.

  A hard truth hit her as surely as if she’d been standing before an audience throwing rotten eggplants at her: Emmy had created a life she didn’t want to live in.

  The sob came out so abruptly, so utterly unexpectedly, that she didn’t even recognize it as such at first. It was a ripping sensation, a strange episode of whiplash as the ground lurched beneath her while she remained in place.

  But then there was Evan, steadying her with his hands on her shoulders but also with his eyes as he bent over, putting his face level with hers. He didn’t say anything, didn’t press her to articulate what was wrong. Just searched her face, scanning like he was trying to read a barcode that, once accessed, would project all her secrets onto a screen only he could see.

  “I don’t cry,” she said, even as hot, traitorous tears streaked down her cheeks. She could only be grateful that her first barking sob hadn’t been followed by another, that her weeping hadn’t fully crossed the line from silently weak to audibly pathetic.

  “And yet you appear to be crying,” he said. He tugged on her sunglasses for the second time that afternoon, but this attempt was gentle. He was seeking permission.

  She let him take them off this time, let him lean even closer, let him look into her eyes with nothing between them to protect herself.

  But then, regrouping, she tried again. “I am not a person who cries. I have not cried for nine years.” Not since the night her parents kicked her out of the house, in fact.

  “And yet you appear to be crying,” he repeated, the sentence becoming a mantra in her head, working itself into her consciousness the way only the truth can. He took off her hat, too.

  Again, she let him. Stood there and wept, plastic and immobilized like a doll you pour water into in order to make it shed tears, while he watched her.

  Without breaking his gaze from hers, he let go of her shoulders and ran his fingers through her hair, dragging them across her scalp. The rough-gentle touch, the electric confluence of pressure and pleasure, gutted her. She couldn’t look at him anymore, so she looked up, but the sky was too blue, doubling the volume of the silent tears spilling unchecked out of her eyeballs. So she looked to the side, but there was only the unrelenting corn. The other way: a pyramid of eggplants.

  There was nowhere to rest her eyes.

  Not only did she have nowhere to go, she had nowhere to look. She couldn’t rest her body or her eyes.

  The next sob didn’t surprise her because she was coming undone.

  “Omigod!”

  Yes. It was going to happen now.

  “Are you Emerson Quinn?”

  Evan whirled like he was trying to find a heckler in a crowd.

  Then another voice, distinct from the first. “Emerson Quinn is over there, and she’s crying.”

  The wise, wicked fingers that had been burrowing into her scalp disappeared, and she bit back a wail. Those fingers had been the only thing anchoring her, the physical sensation keeping her self-aware enough to know that she was coming undone.

  Just before she surrendered to the madness, sank into the warm, familiar waters of yet another public humiliation, she heard his voice, from far away, like he was talking to her through a telephone made of soup cans and strings.

  “Nope, just my girlfriend, but everyone always mistakes her for Emerson Quinn.” He laughed. “But damn, if we had a dollar for every time someone said that, we’d probably be as rich as Emerson Quinn.”

  Then he shoved her hat back on her head and planted a palm on each of her cheeks.

  And kissed her.

  She was crying, and Evan Winslow was kissing her.

  Last time, on that rooftop in Miami, Evan’s kisses had been gentle, warm, careful even, and then he had pulled away and asked her how old she was.

  That control was nowhere in evidence now as his lips moved against hers, hungry and demanding, as if one of them was drowning—she wasn’t sure which—and needed the other for air.

  His mouth was possessive this time, even a little aggressive, as his tongue pressed against the seam of her lips.

  She opened them—what else could she do?—and sighed.

  As with her sob, the noise seemed to startle him, and he pulled away. She wanted to shout her protest.

  “Not crying,” he said, clearing his throat, straightening his glasses, and turning to smile at the teenager standing behind the tower of eggplants. “Just really, really allergic to pollen. Isn’t that right, sweetie?” he prompted, handing over her sunglasses. “Also not Emerson Quinn.” He grinned and shook his head at the girl. “What would Emerson Quinn be doing in Dane?”

  Then he leaned in, pecked Emmy’s nose with a short, staccato kiss.

  Before she could blink, it was over, and he was handing the girl two dollars and dropping a couple eggplants into a nylon shopping bag he produced from his pocket.

  “Wow,” said the girl, mouth agape from what Emmy suspected was watching the world’s most scorching kiss. “You look so much like her.”

  Blinking and a little bit breathless, Emmy put on her sunglasses and reset the “no crying” clock.

  Chapter Four

  “Professor Winslow!”

  Goddammit! They’d almost made it. Evan hopped off his bike and turned to see Kaylee Sanders walking up the path from the sidewalk to his porch.

  “Go inside,” he whispered to Emmy, who was already bounding up the steps, shielding her face.

  The screen door banged behind her as a beaming Kaylee approached. Smart, curious, and disciplined, Kaylee was one of his favorite students—she even helped him out at an arts program for high school kids that he ran at the community center—but it could be hard to
shake her once she’d cornered you.

  “Did you grade my exam yet?” she asked.

  “Not yet,” he lied. Kaylee was her own worst critic, and if he told her that she’d “only” gotten a ninety-two because she’d mixed up buon fresco and fresco secco, he would never hear the end of it. And right now he had to get inside and deal with the fact that Emmy NoLastName was actually some kind of famous person called Emerson Quinn.

  “I was thinking about what I’m going to do for my term paper,” Kaylee said, and Evan sighed, resigned to his fate, only half paying attention as his brain continued to churn in the background, going over and over the astonishing fact that there was, apparently, a mega-famous pop star in his living room.

  One that he needed to get out of his living room as soon as humanly possible. Because he wanted no part of fame, not even by association. None. He was allergic to it, in fact, having had more than enough exposure for a lifetime.

  “Everybody knows da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, right?” Kaylee went on. “So I was thinking maybe I could look into some of his lesser-known anatomical studies.”

  “That’s a great idea,” he said, unable to prevent himself from getting caught up in the enthusiasm so clearly evident on her face. “You might want to narrow it down, though, and focus on a subset of his anatomical work—his studies of the skull, for instance.”

  She nodded. “Maybe I could find another artist who drew skulls and look at both of them?”

  “Also a promising line of inquiry. Or if you want to do something comparative, you could look at a precursor to da Vinci and then compare to him.”

  “Like Pollaiuolo?”

  “Yes! Take a look at the musculature in Battle of Nudes and think about how it evolved to get to da Vinci.”

  God, he had to get tenure. As much as he could take or leave the majority of the students who ended up in his classes because they thought looking at pictures would be an easy way to fulfill liberal arts requirements, students like Kaylee reminded him how lucky he was. At his lowest point, after he’d moved away from Florida, when he was drowning in student debt, working two crappy jobs, and still being tracked down by reporters for “one year later” type features, he had never dared hope that he could still manage to make a career related to art.

  There was a little more chitchat before he could extricate himself. It was just as well, because it gave him a chance to collect himself, to prepare to go inside and kick Emmy-Emerson-Whoever-The-Hell-She-Was out of his life for good.

  When he did go back inside, Emmy was waiting. She’d taken a seat in the living room at the front of the house.

  She grinned, apparently totally recovered from her breakdown earlier, sprawling on a threadbare Windsor chair like she was queen of the place. “Wow, you are a geek, Professor Winslow.”

  He glanced at the open bay window she was seated next to—she must have overheard his conversation with Kaylee. Every window in the house was open, thanks to his broken AC. Her tank top was plastered to her skin, as his T-shirt was to his. You only had to be standing still in this heat to drown in sweat, but on top of that, they had busted it home on their bikes, heeding an unspoken agreement not to speak until they got back to his place. He forced his eyes up from her shirt. Her face was shiny, but instead of making her look bedraggled, she glowed.

  “I think that girl has a crush on you.”

  “Who?” It took him a moment to catch her meaning. “Kaylee? No.” Kaylee was a fellow art geek. A budding art geek.

  “You must have girls falling all over themselves to take your classes. I’ll admit that I was surprised about this whole college professor thing, but you’re clearly a natural at it, because—”

  “What the hell are you doing here, Emmy? Is that even your name? Was it ever?” He paused, taking in her widening eyes. He’d shocked her. Good. He’d shocked himself, too, with the harsh question and the piqued tone he’d delivered it in, but he found himself increasingly irritated that she wanted to talk about nonexistent juvenile crushes instead of the drama of the last hour—the drama she was responsible for dumping into his normally calm life. “You told me at the wedding that you were going to change it,” he reminded her, but then he wished he hadn’t. He didn’t need her to know that he remembered every last thing she’d said to him that night.

  She swung her legs, which had been extended onto an ottoman, down to the floor and sat up straight. “Emerson Quinn is my real name.” She spoke in a flat tone, nothing moving except her eyes as she watched him warily. If he felt a little twinge to have inspired the sudden guardedness in her, he shoved it aside. “Emerson was my mother’s maiden name, and my parents gave it to me as a first name. I went by Emmy when I was younger.” She swallowed. “I didn’t lie to you at the wedding, if that’s what you’re thinking. I was still Emmy then—that’s what everyone in Minnesota called me. And I was going to change my name when I got to L.A., but they told me not to. They said my real one was ‘catchy and pleasingly androgynous.’”

  If only it wasn’t so bloody hot. He could hardly think straight in this blast furnace of an afternoon. He ran a hand through his hair as if physical contact with his scalp might jumpstart his laggardly brain, and lowered himself to a chair opposite hers. “They?”

  She popped to her feet the moment his ass hit the seat, as if she’d been on the other side of a teeter-totter from him. “My managers. And to answer your other question, about what I’m doing here…” She trailed off, drawing a circle with her toe on the threadbare Persian carpet. But then she looked up to finish the thought. “I ran away.”

  “How does an adult woman run away from home?”

  “Not from home,” she said, almost sadly. “From everything. From my entire life.”

  That didn’t exactly clear things up. “And you came here because?”

  She stared at him, those intense blue eyes boring into his own for a long moment before she turned away. “You know what? I made a mistake. I’m sorry. I’ll go now.” She disappeared into the entryway, leaving behind a room heavy with the weight of her disappointment.

  The sound, a moment later, of her suitcase rolling over the floorboards made him want to scream. Why was it so hot?

  The screen door connecting the house to the porch banged behind her. He got up and peered out the window. The sight of her standing in the dim light of the covered porch, sweating, sunglasses perched on her tussled head and guitar slung over her thin shoulders, was like a slice through his chest. That was the problem with Emmy NoLastName or Emerson Quinn or whoever the hell she was: the pure, unadulterated image of her. It was like a drug, entering his bloodstream through a sharp, jagged puncture wound she made in his chest. The same jolting attraction that had come over him when he first saw her walking down the aisle all those years ago began barreling down on him again. One part of his mind snapped off from the rest and started trying to figure out what colors to mix to get the two tones of pink of her tank top—the regular bubblegum shade of the dry spots and the darker, earthier color of the blooms of wetness under her arms and breasts.

  Without even realizing it, he’d gotten up and followed her to the porch, and now they were standing staring at each other.

  She was fiddling with her phone. “I assume this town is too small for Uber? But if you could tell me the name of a local cab company, I’ll be out of your hair.” She pulled her sunglasses down and jammed her hat on her head, shuttering herself from the world, and from his gaze.

  “Where are you going to go?” He wasn’t sure why he cared. He was getting what he wanted, wasn’t he, which was her leaving?

  “To the airport,” she said.

  “And then?”

  After staring at him for a moment, she shrugged.

  She didn’t know. That’s what the shrug meant.

  Fuck. He was going to regret this. This went against every impulse he had. But he couldn’t help it. His right hand twitched. He wasn’t in charge anymore, apparently. Somehow there was a direct connection betwe
en his hand, grasping an imaginary brush, and his mouth, which inexplicably opened and said, “Hang on a second.”

  Disconcerted, Emmy let herself be led into the kitchen at the back of Evan’s house. Let herself be handed a tall, icy glass of lemonade.

  “Mrs. Johansen makes me a pitcher practically every day in the summer,” Evan said, sitting at the battered farmhouse table that filled the generous space at the back of the kitchen and was framed by windows that overlooked an overgrown yard.

  She nodded and, still standing, took a drink, the cold tartness sliding down her throat drawing her attention back to how amazingly hot it was. It also snapped her out of her daze. “I’m sorry I just descended on you. I don’t know what I was thinking. I’ll call a cab and—”

  “Sit.”

  When she didn’t, he nodded at the spot across from him, but she wasn’t sure she should obey. Tony had been right. Maude had been right. She didn’t belong here. Coming here had been a mistake, and instead of providing a haven, had served only to reinforce how alone she actually was.

  “Goddammit, Emmy. Sit down.”

  She sat. The sharp tone Evan had deployed a couple times since she’d arrived didn’t accord with her memory of him, with the image of him she had built up in her mind all these years.

  “Good. Now start at the beginning.”

  “The beginning?”

  “Yes. You ran away, but from what? You’re some kind of famous person, apparently. A musician?”

  She blew out a breath. “Have you really never heard of me? Of Emerson Quinn?”

  He furrowed his brow. “Maybe?” Then his nose scrunched up like he’d smelled something bad. “If I have, it’s only in a generic ‘famous person’ sort of way. It gets confusing. You know, like Taylor Lautner and Taylor Swift. Not sure who those girls are, exactly, but I know the names.”

  “Taylor Lautner is a man.”

  He smiled then, and it took some of the heat—the metaphorical heat, because it was still an oven in his house—out of their encounter. “I rest my case. So humor me and tell me who you are. What you are.”