Мэг Кэбот – Insatiable (страница 9)
And then meanwhile there were girls like Yalena, being preyed upon by scumbags like her boyfriend, Gerald, about whom the cops could do exactly nothing. …
But these people existed.
And they lived right in her building. Right next door to her, in fact.
Meena resolutely hit Delete, then opened a new document and began to write.
Chapter Nine
Lucien Antonescu did not like to fly commercially, but not, perhaps, for the same reasons other people might dislike it. He had no control issues—other than his concerns about controlling his own rage—and of course no fear of death. The idea of a fiery or otherwise painful end did not trouble him in any way.
He was, however, disturbed by the way the airlines packed their customers into the metal tubes they were currently calling “planes,” then expected them to sit in those impossibly small, cramped excuses for “seats” for so many hours on end, with no exercise or fresh air.
So it had been some time since Lucien Antonescu had been on an airplane he himself did not own (his personal Learjet was ideal for most trips but not powerful enough for nonstop transatlantic flight). When asked to speak at an overseas conference or tour for one of his books, Lucien tended simply to decline. He wasn’t fond of publicity in any case …
But today Lucien was flying first class. The seats there were designed as individual compartments, so that other passengers seated in front of, behind, or beside him were not visible.
At a certain point during the flight, the attractive and very pleasant stewardess—they were called flight attendants now, he reminded himself—presented him with a menu from which he was asked to choose from a dizzying selection of food choices and wines, including some quite decent Italian Barolos. …
Later, after the pilot turned out the lights, the flight attendant asked him if he’d like her to make his bed for him. He accepted, purely out of curiosity. What bed? His wide and spacious seat, it transpired, automatically folded out into a reasonably sized (though not for him, being several inches over six feet tall) bed, all at the touch of a button.
The lovely flight attendant then produced a padded mattress from yet another hidden recess, real sheets that she “tucked in,” a duvet, and a pillow, which she fluffed.
She then handed him a cloth bag containing a large pair of designer pajamas, a toothbrush and paste, and an eye mask.
Finally, she wished him good night with a smile. He smiled back, not because he had any intention of changing into the pajamas or of going to sleep, but because he found the entire procedure—and her—so utterly charming.
His smile made her blush. She was divorced from an unscrupulous man who had been cheating on her throughout their eight-year marriage and was supporting their toddler on her own. She wished only that her ex-husband would pay his child support on time and visit their daughter once in a while. She did not tell Lucien these things … but then, she did not have to. He knew them because he could not be around people without their secret thoughts intruding upon his own. It was something to which he’d grown accustomed over the years, something that he occasionally enjoyed. It made him feel human again.
Almost.
She excused herself to see to another passenger, a corpulent businessman seated across the spacious aisle, in 6J. The passenger in seat 6J could not seem to stop complaining: His pillow was not soft enough, his pajamas were not large enough, his toothbrush bristles were too stiff, and his champagne glass was not filled quickly enough.
Based on Lucien’s observations, the man in 6J was pressing the call button approximately every four to five minutes, annoying both the flight attendant and the lady in the seat in front of him, who raised her sleeping mask and peeked out from her darkened compartment to see what all the commotion was about. She had an important meeting in the morning and needed to get her rest.
Lucien rose while the flight attendant slipped back to the galley to fetch the businessman another pillow. Then he stepped across the aisle to pay a visit to 6J.
“What do
When the flight attendant came back, she was surprised to find the passenger in 6J appearing alarmingly pale and in such a deep sleep, he seemed almost to be comatose. She threw a quick, questioning glance around the cabin, meeting Lucien’s gaze, for he was standing, reaching for a book he’d left in the overhead bin.
“Tired out from all that champagne, I expect,” Lucien said to her. “Not used to so much alcohol at such a high altitude.” He gave her a wink.
The flight attendant hesitated, then, as if transfixed by Lucien’s grin, smiled shyly back and offered him the extra pillow.
“Why, thank you,” he said.
Later, as he strolled along the darkened aisles while the jet hurtled through the night sky toward New York, listening to the breathing of the unconscious passengers and sampling their dreams, Lucien looked down at their bare, vulnerable throats as they dozed and thought that really, someone should do something to make airline travel more enjoyable for everyone, not just the privileged few in first class.
Chapter Ten
Meena stabbed the Up button, then looked around furtively. She was tired after her long day and hoped one thing—just this one little thing—would go her way.
And that was slipping onto the elevator of the building in which she lived without running into her neighbor Mary Lou, so that she could take the eleven-story ride to their floor in restful silence.
Meena’s building—910 Park Avenue—was elegant, with a doorman guarding its shiny brass doors, a marble lobby, a crystal chandelier, and an underground garage with parking spaces for which residents could pay an additional $500 per month (though Meena would have preferred to put that money toward a certain Marc Jacobs jewel-encrusted dragon tote … if she could have afforded an extra $500 a month, which she couldn’t).
But her apartment didn’t exactly live up to the building’s elegance: it needed repainting badly; the moldings along the ceilings were crumbling; the parquet floor needed sanding; the antique fireplaces didn’t work; and the French doors leading to the minuscule balcony that looked out over her neighbor Mary Lou’s terrace (which was practically the size of Meena’s whole apartment) stuck. And she was running out of closet space.
The important thing was, it was hers—or at least it would be, when she finally paid David back for his share of the down payment. They’d been fortunate to have bought when the market was at rock bottom and the previous owners had been divorcing and desperate to sell … and just as a small inheritance from Meena’s great-aunt Wilhelmina, for whom she’d been named (her mother had spelled it Meena for fear that her teachers and classmates might forever mispronounce her name “Myna”), finally came through.
Though David was long gone, Meena never pictured her apartment as a place to which she could bring back a date. But when she’d seen Shoshona leaving the office with a good-looking guy (whom she now realized had to have been the infamous Stefan Dominic; Meena had only managed to catch a glimpse of the back of his dark head before the two of them had disappeared onto the elevator for after-work drinks), she’d felt a twinge of envy.
Meena couldn’t even remember the last time she’d been on a date … unless she counted the first—and last—time she’d let Mary Lou set her up with a guy, someone from her husband’s office … the one whom Meena had felt compelled to inform over calamari when they’d met at a trendy restaurant downtown that he needed to have his cholesterol checked, or he was going to have a heart attack before the age of thirty-five.
Needless to say, he’d never called for a second date.
But hopefully he
And yet she persevered in praying for the one thing that never, ever seemed to come true.
With the frequency of their encounters, Meena might as well have been dating her neighbor.
Every morning, poof! Mary Lou appeared, just as Meena pushed the Down button. Same thing each evening.
It was uncanny.
And every single time, any hope of having a civilized commute was shot.
Because then Meena was forced to listen to Mary Lou wax enthusiastic about whatever new guy she’d met whom she was convinced would be just perfect for Meena or whatever incredible story line idea she’d thought up the night before for
Or,
Except that there was no guy from Meena’s office whom she was seeing (except Paul, platonically; he’d been happily married with three kids for twenty-five years), and the countess had never, not even once, come up with a single usable story line for her favorite character, Victoria Worthington Stone.