Beautiful Stranger

night, for like an hour! Where did you go?”
    My face heated, and I cleared my throat, furrowing my brow as if I had to work to remember. “Oh, I just felt a little overwhelmed. I, uh, went for a walk around the grounds.”
    “Damn,” she breathed. “I was hoping you ran into a hot caterer and got banged on a table.”
    A hoarse cough burst out, and my entire throat was suddenly so dry that I couldn’t stop coughing.
    Chloe stood and got me a cup of water from the cooler in the reception area, returning with a knowing grin. “You are so busted. You always start coughing when you’re freaking out.”
    “I’m fine.”
    “Lies. Lying liar who lies all the lies. Tell me.”
    I absolutely refused to look at her. Something about Chloe’s dark brown eyes and patient smile directed right at me made me spill everything. “There is nothing to tell.”
    “Sara, when you disappeared, you came back after being gone for an hour and looked . . .” She tucked a long lock of brown hair behind her ear to reveal a devilish smile. “You know how you looked. Freshly fucked.”
    I cut a box open and pulled out a stack of design magazines, handing them to her. “And it’s too crazy to explain.”
    “Are you kidding me? You’re talking to the woman who had sex with her boss in the eighteenth-floor stairwell.”
    My head shot up and a laugh burst out. I drank some more water to keep the cough at bay. “Holy crap, Chloe. I didn’t know that detail.” I considered this a little more. “God, good thing I never used the stairs. Gross. That would have been super awkward.”
    “We were ridiculous. Nothing could be crazier than that.” She shrugged and turned her nonjudgmental face on me. “Or, could there be? You tell me.”
    “Okay,” I said, leaning back against her couch. “The guy I met at the bar last week? The hot one?”
    “Yeah?”
    “He was there on Friday.”
    Her eyes narrowed, and I could see her gears cranking. “At the fund-raiser?”
    “Yeah. He found me outside the restroom,” I lied and looked out the window so she wouldn’t see it in my eyes. “We hooked up. I guess that’s why I looked . . . er, rumpled.”
    “When you say hooked up you mean . . . ?”
    “Yeah. In an empty ballroom.” I looked up and met her eyes. “On a table.”
    She let out a loud whoop and clapped her hands. “Look at you, you wild thing.”
    It was so like something Max would say to me, but delivered so differently, that for a moment it rendered me a little speechless. It was disorienting to ache for him like this, to wonder what he was doing, and whether he was presently looking at pictures of me spread out beneath him.
    “Seriously, Sara, I knew you had it in you,” she added.
    “The thing is, I don’t really want another relationship. And even if I did, I get the impression he isn’t really like that.” I stopped before spilling too much. If I alluded any more to Max’s reputation on Page Six, Chloe would absolutely know who I meant.
    She hummed, listening, as she sorted through a stack of journals.
    “But he’s fun, Chloe. And you know how things were with Andy.”
    She stopped sorting, but toyed with the corner of a page. “Well, that’s the thing, Sare. I don’t really. I mean, come on; in the three years you and I have known each other, I only had dinner with you guys maybe five times. I learned more about him from the papers than I did from any stories you told me. You hardly ever talked about him! I always just ended up with the sense that he was using your family’s reputation to appear well connected and . . . wholesome.”
    I felt guilt and embarrassment settle in my chest like a lead weight. “I know,” I said, inhaling and letting it out again slowly. It was one thing to imagine how people saw me, another to hear it straight out. “I always worried that if I said anything about him to someone, it would be misconstrued, and somehow break his public strategy. Plus, we weren’t like you and Bennett. We didn’t have a lot of fun together by the time I met you. Andy was a phony and an epic jerk and it took me a really long time to see that. This thing on Friday was just fun.”
    Chloe looked up. “Hey, it’s fine. I knew it was something like that.” She turned back to another box. “So this is good then, he’s not like Andy.”
    “Yeah.”
    “So you mean he’s into you.”
    “At least physically, which is fine for me right now.”
    “So what’s the problem? It sounds like the