CHAPTER 1
LYRIC
Hey my Luxies, I’m doing a table-for-five thing at the exclusive, members-only Noho Room with my besties. Check out this salad! It looks like a pastry LOL. What are you doing tonight? I hope you love your life as much as I love mine! Crowne out!
#luxies #luxelife #lifestylesofInstagram #lyriccrowne #Lyricsluxies
“I’ll give you a thousand dollars to put that phone down.” Anton taps the table with three fingers. He’s wearing a silver bracelet. The top of his hand has a Ukrainian trident tattooed on it.
He didn’t have that in New York.
“I’m working,” I say, tapping out an Instagram post and then speeding it off into the cloud. Now I have no excuse to look at my screen, but I’m not taking orders from Anton, so I scroll around for funsies and pretend to ignore him.
“Is that what you call it?”
The muscles under Anton’s Issey Miyake black turtleneck have filled out in the last three years. They’re smacking Kelly silent. Once we’re out of here, the pent-up verbiage is going to come spilling out of her like a pot of rice that’s been on the burner too long.
Dinner’s been torture. I’m supposed to be talking to Laing about boosting his content, but before my drink even arrived, my worst-ex-ever decided to accept an invitation shouted at a traffic light. It’s been tense ever since.
“How about,” I say, still not looking up, “I’ll give you two thousand to tell us what you’ve been doing for a living.”
“Put it away and I’ll accept your two grand.”
That’s an offer I won’t refuse, and it’s not even the money. I put the phone, glass-down, onto the table and fold my hands over it. Jake’s trying to get the check. Colleen looks as if she wants to crawl under a rock. Liang and Kelly watch, rapt, as Anton takes a pause, appearing to chew on the inside of his mouth before wiping his lips with his pristine napkin.
The scruffy half-beard is new. The brown hair’s a little shorter and better cared-for. His voice is deeper and his skin’s lost that dewy, still-officially-in-his-twenties texture. He still pauses before he answers a question. Still as cocky as a man whose momma never told him no. Still the best-looking guy in a restaurant full of good-looking guys.
“Tell us, Anton, about your exciting life. In detail.”
“I’ve been working for the government.” He places the napkin on the table. That’s the answer. Six words that account for something like fourteen percent of the entire US population.
“So you’ve been… a garbage man?” I get a burst of laughter from Liang.
Anton and I are locked in a battle of stares. His eyes are a darker brown, but mine are prettier. He breaks first.
“I take Venmo,” he says.
Every girl in this room wants him. I’ve already seen two get sneaky selfies with him focused in the frame. He’s only paying attention to me because we had a thing years ago and I’ve spent the entire meal ignoring him.
“I’d have to pick up my phone to Venmo you a thousand dollars.”
“It was two thousand.” He holds up two fingers.
“You gave me half an answer.”
“Oh, shit…” Liang laughs so hard his face is red and tears smudge his mascara, but he’s not making a sound. This is how he gets when he’s tired.
Tucking each hand into the opposite elbow, Anton leans on the table, talking low as if there’s a secret he’s willing to tell in the Noho Room.
He leans into me, tapping the table. “If you didn’t have all your little accounts to tell you how to think and feel, who would you be?”
I mirror his posture. We’re locked in a stare that could drill a hole in a cinderblock wall.
“First off, I don’t have any little accounts. Second off, I’d think and feel like Lyric Crowne, thank you, so I’d be the same badass bitch you see right in front of you. Who would you be, Anton? If we weren’t stuck at the same light this afternoon? If Liang hadn’t recognized you in the car next to us? If he hadn’t invited you here, would you even exist? Or would you be just another LA asshole with lots of money and no job?”
That tight mouth loosens then tightens the other way when the control of his smirk goes out the window. I’m not satisfied though—frown defenestration notwithstanding—because I have his attention. The fact that I even want it is breaking my brain.
“You’re giving me the choice between invisibility and dinner?” he asks.
“Don’t be invisible,” Kelly says from the universe outside our stare. “That would be a crime.”
“Invisible would be an improvement,” Jake mutters, patting down the front of his pressed blue shirt.
Fuck this shit.
I take my gaze away and pick up my phone. Notifications. Comments on a week-old post from Cheetah Club, because Meta has no sense of time. Liang’s back-of-the limo shot, posted the day after, comes across my feed. I helped him filter the color so his lipstick matched his jacket.
“You’re getting love!” I show him my screen.
Liang’s makeup tips for men deserve a better following, and I’ll be damned if I’m not going to help him get it. He gave up on acting. I won’t let him give this up.
“That was all you,” he says.
“Not even.” I heart some of the comments.
“Well, they finally boosted it. Oh, look at—”
Anton takes my phone.
“Hey!” I try to grab it back. He holds it out of reach. I tamp down a raging fury that’s too big and hot for the Noho Room.
“What would happen if you didn’t have this?”
“I’d be as boring as you,” I say with my hand out. “Give. It.”
He holds it out on his palm, and when I take it, his thumb twitches and runs along the length of my pinkie. Besides the explosive line of sparking nerve endings, I don’t feel anything. Nothing at all. Not a shot of arousal to my core or a warm melting inside my thighs. I am a cold rock of resentment.
This is what I tell myself.
The check gets placed in front of Jake, who asked for it, and now stares at it as if it’s going to fly up his nose and suffocate him.
Anton picks it up before I can get it.
Fine. He can have this one. He owes me.
CHAPTER 2
LYRIC
I’m sorry.
This is unbearable.
I am weak without you.
I am useless with you.
That was his note. Four lines, like a broken, postmodern five-line poem he didn’t finish because he couldn’t find anything that rhymed with unbearable. I stood at the kitchen table of my SoHo apartment with the paper tilted toward the sunlight, trying to see the impression of what came next.
Was he choosing frailty or futility?
He wasn’t useless. Not to me. He had to know that.
I would have told him as much. Reassured him. Explained that once I didn’t feel cornered, I’d be able to think about everything with a clear head. But I got sent to voicemail over, and over, and over. That was his answer. He didn’t want reassurance or explanation. He wanted out.