Lies and Weddings(78)
Everything about the place looked so familiar to Eden. The hanging plants in the window across the courtyard, the rice cooker with the flower pattern on the side, the pair of wicker chairs on the balcony. But this was not any home she had ever lived in. As she wandered around the dimly lit space, she realized it looked just like the flat from one of her favorite films, Norwegian Wood. Rufus walked into the living room holding a small birthday cake, his face glowing like a Botticelli in the flickering candlelight. He put the cake down on a yellow lap tray with chrome legs. “Why are you wearing that? It’s obscenely tight on you,” she said with a little laugh, pointing at his graphic patterned polyester shirt. She began undoing the buttons on his shirt until it was completely off, took one of the candles from the cake, and dripped wax down his chest. Rufus flinched for a moment but then held still as the wax trickled down his linea alba, the line that ran down the middle of his torso. “Feels ticklish,” Rufus murmured softly. She stared into his hazel green eyes for a moment, then she leaned in and began to trace the line of wax with her tongue. It tasted like salted caramel. She felt her face getting warmer as she ran her tongue on his bare skin all the way down, down, down to the waistline of his low-slung jeans. Her face was getting so hot she felt as though the candle wax was burning into her skin.
Eden awoke with a start, opening her eyes and squinting immediately against the beam of sunlight coming through the window and landing directly on her face. She was lying on the edge of the biggest and plushest bed she had ever slept in. Where in the world was she? Oh yes, Beverly Hills. It was all coming back to her now, through the fog of her hangover. After being picked up at Van Nuys by Freddy and Daniela (Sinai Akiba/El Rodeo/Beverly Hills High/Vassar/FIDM), Eden was whisked directly to dinner at Nobu Malibu, where they were joined by Daniela’s fiancé, Lior (Collège Fran?ais de Tel-Aviv Marc Chagall/Institut auf dem Rosenberg/Stanford/INSEAD), and Banks (Maggy Haves/Westlake Elementary/Crossroads/Pepperdine), Freddy’s best friend since sixth grade. After they devoured too much black cod with miso, yellowtail sashimi with jalape?o, soft-shell crab rolls, and sake, Banks had invited everyone for more drinks at the Fleur Room, which Eden was informed was the hottest nightspot of the moment, after which a bleary-eyed Eden was taken back to Freddy’s house and finally allowed to go to sleep.
Eden rolled out of bed with a reluctant groan and stumbled into the bathroom, realizing in the clarity of morning that the space was five times the size of her bedroom in Greshamsbury. Recessed lights behind the floating mirrored wall automatically came on, casting a flattering peachy glow on her face, and she couldn’t help but notice the deliciously heated Portoro marble floors on her bare feet. Beyond the carved marble sink was a claw-footed copper bathtub and a glassed-in shower big enough to fit a whole rugby team.
Eden sat down for a moment on the curved sofa in front of the window, trying to imagine the sort of life where she could take long baths in that gorgeous copper tub, lounge in one of the many fluffy Frette bathrobes hanging on silver hooks against the wall, and devour a few of the macarons in the glass candy dish so temptingly placed right beside the sofa on a little golden stand. She lay back on the sofa, trying to make sense of the dream she had just awoken from. It was fading fast, but she was perplexed by the snippets she could remember. Why on earth was she dreaming of licking candle wax off Rufus’s chest? Obviously Rufus was on her mind, and she reached for her phone. Still no text from him, not a peep in days. And the Signal app automatically deleted all the previous texts after twenty-four hours, so it was almost as though their text conversations never existed. Feeling a bit forlorn, Eden reached into the candy dish for one of the macarons, only to discover that it was made of ceramic.
“Bloody hell,” Eden cursed to herself as she put the macaron back onto its deceptively tempting dish. She rose from the sofa, splashed some water onto her face, and ran her fingers through her hair. After freshening up, Eden tiptoed down the sweeping staircase that curved below a magnificent domed rotunda, which was dominated by an impressionistic portrait of a beautiful dark-haired woman in a pink ball gown and rococo furniture of the type usually found at Versailles. Although Freddy had warned her last night as they pulled up to the gates of the pseudo-Italianate mansion that the house was “full-on Persian palace” and said, “You’ll have to excuse the décor, I had nothing to do with it,” Eden found herself quietly impressed by how elegant and intimate the house felt in spite of its ornate furnishings.
No one seemed to be around, and after wandering through a series of reception rooms filled with gilded furniture redolent of the old world, she stumbled upon the huge kitchen, where a woman in her fifties was unfolding sheets of thick paper napkins—the kind found in the washrooms of expensive hotels—from an industrial-size box and placing them in dozens of meticulously neat piles on the marble countertop.[*1]
“Morning, ma’am. I’m Sonia. Freddy and Dani are out on the terrace having breakfast,” she said, gesturing to another doorway. “What would you like to drink?”
“Some coffee?”
“You want cappuccino, espresso, macchiato?”
“Can you make a latte?”
“Of course. You want oat milk, almond milk, rice milk, soy milk, hemp milk?”
“Uh…do you have milk…from a cow?”
“Yes. Whole milk, half-and-half, two percent, skim, or lactose free?”