“Yes,” I said, and I’m sure it came out all breathy sounding.
We saw the movie the next day, and it was the kind where you long for the hero and heroine to kiss, and when they do, near the final frame, you feel this tingling in your body, and you want to be kissed too. I stole a glance at Bryan only to find he was stealing a glance at me.
“Hi,” he whispered in that voice he’d used when he talked about Paris.
“Hi.”
He reached a hand towards me, slowly, his eyes on me the whole time, as if he were asking if it was okay. I nodded a yes. He ran his fingers through my dark brown hair, then his mouth met mine, and we kissed until the credits rolled, slow and sweet kisses. His lips were the softest I’d ever felt, and his kisses were of the epic kind, the kind that made you believe that movie kisses weren’t just for actors or for stories, that they could be for you, and they could go on and on, like a slow and sexy love song that melted you from the inside out.
When he pulled away, he leaned his forehead against mine. “Kat, I’ve wanted to do that since I first met you in the driveway the other day.”
“You have?”
“Yes. You were so pretty, and then you were everything else.”
My heart skipped ten thousand beats. He was a movie kiss, he was the name above the title. He was the one you wanted the heroine to wind up with so badly that your heart ached for her when they weren’t together, then soared when they finally were.
“I think you’re pretty cool too,” I said.
“But we probably shouldn’t tell Nate. You know, since I’m his buddy and you’re his little sister. Not to mention the age thing.”
“Yeah, you’re right.”
So it was our summer secret.
Chapter Five
I’d deliberately resisted Internet stalking Bryan for the last few years. Sure, I knew his company was a generous supporter of the NYU business school and had endowed a new wing of the library last year. I also knew he’d started Made Here four years ago and had grown it quite nicely. But that was because I read business news, and you couldn’t miss his success story. Timing was everything and he’d capitalized at just the right moment with his product line. But more so, he knew the mood of the country shifted and that people wanted American-made goods, so he retrofitted former lugnut factories for cufflink manufacturing and then led the rapid growth along with his business partner. I hadn’t dug any deeper in the last few years. Nor had I tracked him on Facebook or hunted out anything else in recent months. The less I knew about him, the better off I was.
Besides, I’d had a boyfriend through most of college, Michael Preston. We were together for three years. Three tumultuous years. Michael was an actor at NYU and I first met him after a performance of A Streetcar Named Desire. He played Brando’s character and he was breathtaking on stage, all raw emotion and power and want. But that intensity he brought to the stage he brought to the relationship too in the form of rabid jealousy and insecurity. One evening our junior year, he showed up at my dorm, banged on the door, and collapsed on the floor in a heap. “I didn’t get the part,” he moaned. He’d been at a callback for the role of the youngest son in Long Day’s Journey Into Night.
“I’m so sorry, Michael,” I said and pet his hair.
He propped himself up on an elbow. “You don’t love me enough.”
“I do love you,” I told him.
“Then marry me. Marry me now. Let’s have a secret marriage. Prove you love me by marrying me.”
I was twenty. Even if I wanted to get married, I wasn’t going to do it secretly. But he looked at me so seriously, and with also something like anger in his eyes. I laughed nervously.
“You don’t love me enough,” he repeated.
Love me enough. What did that even mean? Maybe he was right. Maybe I didn’t love him enough. All I knew was when he showed up drunk at three in the morning the next night, it didn’t feel like love. It felt like stalking. He kept appearing in the middle of the night. Sometimes, I let him in just to shut him up so I could fall back asleep. He’d lie in bed with me and wake me up at three, four, five in the morning by poking his finger in my ear. “Stay up all night with me. To prove you love me.”
I couldn’t prove I loved him enough, nor did I want to, and given the unexpected and unwanted late-night visits, I was even more grateful when I was accepted into a study abroad program for my senior year. I had to get away from him, but I also wanted to be in France.
I took off for the city of lights and lived there for my senior year of school, immersing myself in the language, the food, and most of all the artisanal jewelry. My days were filled with cobblestoned streets and stone corridors of universities older than the United States, and my nights were rich with lamplights and a winding river and the occasional kiss with a young Frenchman. Once I returned to New York and started business school, there was even less room to think of Bryan.
Now, it was finally time to follow his Internet trail. But only because I needed to be armed with information so I could make my case in front of my professor. So I did the thing I hadn’t done for years. I sought out information about Bryan online. The very first result shocked me.
Made Here Business Partner Ousted by Board Following Affair
The link was to an article in a New York newspaper from a few months ago. I checked out the photo of Bryan’s ex-business partner, a standard sort of average-looking guy. As I read the article, several lines stood out. “At the board’s insistence, Kramer Wilco has stepped down as co-chief executive of Made Here, the high-flying manufacturing startup that’s been earning tidy profits in the last several quarters. Wilco admitted to being involved with an intern at the Made Here factory outside of Philadelphia. When it was discovered the intern was seventeen and a senior in high school, the board made it clear he needed to go. Wilco started Made Here with his business partner Bryan Leighton four years ago. Leighton did not return calls for comment, but a spokesperson said he will run the company solo now.”
I slumped back in my chair. I’d had no idea his firm had been touched by this sort of scandal. Was Bryan the one who discovered the affair? How had he handled it? Was he cool and clinical? Or pissed off and fuming like I would be? I Googled Wilco next and clicked on an interview he’d done with a business news channel a year ago after Made Here inked a new deal with a large retailer.
“What’s the biggest challenge your company faces in the quarter ahead?” the reporter asked at the end of the piece.