Rush Me by Allison Parr

Author:Allison Parr
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2013-03-26T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seventeen

There were two sides of New York. There was the beautiful city, the one showcased in films, the one compared to Paris and London, which people traveled from all over the world to see.

And there was the other New York, the angry city, which came out after a bad day at work or a fight with the family or a failure of any kind. That city was wet and dark and hard. There, tourists walked slower than snails and didn’t know how to angle their shoulders so they wouldn’t hit locals as we barged down the street. The buildings crowded out the sky, the weather was cold, the subways were packed and you’d always, always, just missed your train.

I lived in that city for a week after the gala. I turned ugly. I became the kind of person who cut in front of the gangs of people taking pictures of Macy’s windows. When a suburban dad cursed me out for ruining the video he was taking on his smartphone I spat: “This is a city people actually live in, not a tourist trap.”

That weekend, I scowled so hard and so long my face actually hurt. My shoulder ached from the amount of times I’d knocked into strangers on the street, refusing to move an inch if they weren’t going to accommodate me, too. I burned with energy, and used it to pound through Central Park, music blaring through my ears. Then I returned home and chowed through a full box of Pad Thai.

Eva watched all of this with a furrowed brow. The morning after the charity auction, she had begun to cheerfully grill me, only to be given a quick, “It didn’t go well.”

I didn’t want to talk about it.

Most of the time, I didn’t think about it either, but late at night I relieved the evening over and over, an endless loop of ways the conversation should have gone, things I should have said. I wouldn’t have freaked out. I wouldn’t have judged. I would have said, “That was great. Let’s go to Larry’s diner.”

On Thursday, I didn’t have a temping gig so I went into my internship instead. At first, I might as well have stayed home, because I was utterly non-effective. I kept stopping and staring at the wall, hot with shame as I remembered my behavior. My stomach clenched with humiliation and my face crumpled with hurt. Freak. In an effort to mindlessly distract myself, I pulled all the junk out of my inbox and started tossing half of it. I stopped when I found the gossip-rag on Alexander the Great, struck again by the professionalism. I flipped through it, reading up on ancient rumors. One suggested Alexander’s best friend was also his lover, and that when Hephaestion died, Alexander went mad with grief for a week.

I didn’t want to read that story.

Instead, I flipped to a “What-Not-To-Wear” section featuring five paintings of the conquering tyrant, where his outfits ranged from Macedonian armor to Persian robes to Renaissance pantaloons.

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