Page 8 of Bad Words

Before I could move, he looked up, across the ballroom, and his eyes locked onto mine.

Chapter ThreeParker

It was her.

Selina Chan, in the flesh.

I stared up at the mezzanine as her eyes lasered down into me. She had one crimson-nailed hand curled over the rail and the other cradling a nearly empty champagne flute. Shadows the color of honey fell down the long lines of her throat, while a teaspoon of light pooled in the divot between her collarbones. Her hair was swept over one shoulder, a dark accent to her serious, delicate features.

Time distended. We might have looked at each other for a second or an hour.

Then the ghost of surprise vanished from her expression, and she looked away from me with a disdainful little turn of her head—and at that slight motion, such a powerful hatred pulsed through me that I felt as though my diaphragm had contracted.

Arthur nudged me. “Parker? What’s up?”

“Nothing,” I managed to say, but actually I felt like I was having a Joycean epiphany. For three years, I’d thought of Selina Chan as some force of nature, halfway between a celebrity and an omniscient literary god, but in reality, she was this: just some person, alone at a party in a well-cut jacket, who happened to have strong opinions.

What gave her the right to ruin people’s careers? Had she ever even tried to write a book?

What the fuck did she know?

Arthur was eyeing my expression warily. “Let’s get a drink, all right? The bar’s over there.”

“Right. Cool.” I followed at his elbow as usual, trying to appear normal. If Arthur found out Selina Chan was here, that’d be his night down the drain, too.

When Arthur left to check his coat, I knocked back the last of one old-fashioned and got another. No, I told myself, like I was my own disobedient dog. No, I wouldn’t approach her. I wouldn’t demand to know how she could have been more offended by High and Dry than by Christian Gatehead’s unreadable latest book. I was going to be a good little author who held his tongue and suffered in silence.

It was occurring to me that this second drink might have been a less than brilliant idea when Arthur returned. “Okay,” he said, rolling up his shirt sleeves. Arthur did pretty well with women already, being tall, but he’d read somewhere that women liked it when men rolled their sleeves to their elbows, and now he did so with an almost pathological consistency. “Sarah and Brady are here somewhere. Want to find them?”

“Sure, I just…” I scanned the crowd. Selina Chan could be leaving as we spoke, slithering back into her lair. I might never get this opportunity again.

I made up my mind. “Sorry, man, I need some air. The subway got me motion sick.”

“Oh, shit. Want me to—?”

“No, don’t worry! I’ll catch up with you guys.”

Outside, the cool air smelled of smoke, and a dozen people stirred on the sidewalk, cigarettes dangling from listless hands, drawing red shapes in the dusk. She wasn’t here. I retreated inside, moving faster. No sign in the ballroom or on the staircase to the mezzanine. If I’d blown this chance, I would seethe in bed for hours tonight. I’d wind up rereading her City profile for the hundredth time, hate-scrolling Google results for her name, looking for anything incriminating.

There was nothing to find, of course. She was too composed, too cryptic. She didn’t even deign to have social media like the rest of us sheep.

On the mezzanine level, a group of familiar-looking authors were draped over the balcony railing. Spotting me, one of them murmured to her friend, amusement playing around her mouth. I plowed deeper into the mezzanine. This was Chan’s fault, too. Thanks to her, I couldn’t meet anyone new in publishing without wondering if they thought I was some talentless avatar of privilege who’d never worked a day in his life.

I stalked down a deserted side hall and shouldered locked door after locked door. Then, suddenly, a door came open, revealing a long catwalk that spanned the back wall of the ballroom. At the far end, an exit stood ajar.

I crossed the catwalk, head low in the shadows of the columns. When I peered through the crack of the exit door I found, of all things, a small library. Rows of books leaned against each other in tall walnut bookcases, and above, paired chandeliers hung from the ornamental molding.

There, by one of the floor-to-ceiling windows, an empty champagne flute glinting on a table to her side, stood Selina Chan, her head angled down at her phone.

I pushed through the door. She looked up and saw me.

She grew still and alert, like a lioness hunched low in grasses. For several long, silent seconds we stared at each other.

Then she said, “I don’t think you want to do this.”

“Do what?”

She let the question hang, idiotic, in the air. We both knew why I was here.