The Love Trap by Nicole French

32

It takes literally an entire day to prepare for an event like the Met Gala. I’m not talking about the planning. The entire committee did a full walk-through of the exhibit and party space the night before at about midnight, though the head curator and his installation team were still rearranging the exhibit according to Cora’s critiques. Approximately ninety-nine percent of the exhibit, however, was ready to go, including eight different exhibits featuring London-based designers from the seventies and eighties, the AV exhibit doing a room-sized broadcast of Clash concerts all night long (that had been my idea), and the massive reconstruction of the London Bridge in the Met’s entrance: made entirely out of flowers.

Lake and I also had a plan for me as a walking fashion exhibit, which required several people to execute. Today, I’d been confined to the apartment while a team of stylists primped every square inch of my body, starting with an exfoliation, scrub, waxing, and mani-pedi, and would eventually end with the smallest details of hair, eyes, even blush color done to perfection. It was like my wedding day, but times ten. We had approximately two hours before Freddy was due to work on my hair, followed by the makeup artist. And then, just before we left, Lake would fully sew me into my dress.

I sat at the kitchen island in leggings and a ripped Brooklyn t-shirt, flipping through the binder, mentally calculating whether all of the details I’d been given had been taken care of. I couldn’t find a single thing that needed follow up—and at any rate, I would be unavailable once Freddy began his work.

“Okay,” Eric said as he strode out of my studio, followed by Lake. “Jane?”

As Eric had less to do, Lake had wanted to double-check his fit first. She was possibly more nervous than I was about all of this—after all, this was a huge coup for her, dressing us both for fashion’s prom.

“What do you think?” Eric asked. He turned from side to side, modeling the tuxedo we’d designed to fit his long, lithe frame. His hair had been combed forward and ruffled in a way that made him look a bit younger than thirty-three, but otherwise he just looked classic, tall, with impossibly long legs—the perfect backdrop to my more dramatic look.

“Oh,” I said, not quite able to find my voice. Okay, he was more than a backdrop. The man positively shined.

And then he smiled, and just like it did every time, his entire face transformed. He strode to me and placed a lingering kiss on my cheek. “I’m glad you like it, pretty girl.”

At the sound of those words, I shuddered. If I had to be next to him looking like that all night, I had a feeling I was going to have a very hard time focusing on the exhibit.

“Go,” I said, waving him away. “You’re making my face turn red.”

The grin just widened. “I can see that.” Eric turned back to Lake and winked. “I think we’re a success.”

Lake nodded happily. “I agree. Okay, go change. I’ll steam this one last time and hang it in the studio for later.”

They left me to my binder, though I still couldn’t for the life of me register anything I was looking at. Not when every cell in my body was urging me to follow Eric into the bedroom to help him “undress.”

“Knock, knock!”

I looked up with surprise to find my best friend entering the apartment behind Tony and followed by…my mother. “Hey! Holy shit! What are you doing here?” I looked over her shoulder. “And Eomma too? Is Brandon coming up?”

“No, he’s home with the kids,” Skylar said. “We just wanted to come see you on your big day. Yu-na was especially eager to come.”

“Wow. Okay.” I hopped off my stool to embrace my friend and then exchange an awkward hug with my mother. “Hi, Eomma.” A thought occurred to me. “Oh, you guys…you weren’t expecting tickets, were you? I’m so sorry, but I really can’t—Anna has control over the entire guest list, and it was everything we could do just to—”

“Janey, relax,” Skylar cut in with a gentle hand on my shoulder. “We weren’t. Your mom just wanted to see you.”

“Ah…okay. But why now…” I trailed off as one of the other security team entered with four large suitcases. “Planning to stay a while?” Please, God, no. I winced guiltily at the first thought to cross my mind. I mean, I loved my mother. I should want her to be with me, shouldn’t I?

“No,” Yu-na said as she walked into the apartment. She had seen it before, when we got married, but not for a very long time. Now her interest was renewed. “I am going home. It is time. My flight is in three days from here. I wanted to see you first.”

There was really only one place my mother had ever referred to as home. Not that shithole in South Korea she had fled, pregnant with me. Chicago.

As in Illinois.

As in approximately a thousand miles away.

“Wait…what?” I croaked, taken straight back to February, when she had announced the same thing. “You’re moving? No. No, no, no, I forbid it.”

“Jane, you forget that I am the mother here,” she informed me. “Not you. Do you expect me to stay with your friend, this person I barely know, for the rest of my life? It has been three months. Too long.”

“But you’re there with Ji-yeon, aren’t you?” I asked. “I thought you two were having a ball.”

“Ji-yeon left a few weeks ago,” Skylar said, looking as if she would rather not tell me. “I told them both they are welcome to stay as long as they like, but they were adamant.”

I reared back at my mom. “And you didn’t think to tell me?”

“Why would I tell you?” my mother demanded. “You never call. You call your friend to check in on me! It’s like I don’t exist to you, like I don’t matter. You stick me in this place to get better, I see that, but now I am better, and I want to go home. So, I go.”

“You go?” I parroted her. “You just…go? What the hell is that? After everything we have been through in the last year, you’re just going to take off like nothing fucking happened?”

“How do you talk to your mother like that?” she shouted. “Do you see this, Skylar? You see how she treats me?”

Skylar just looked very much like she wanted to leave.

“Lord,” I snapped. “You just can’t help it, can you? Lay on the guilt, and make everything about you. Well, excuse me for wanting you to be safe!”

Lake came out of the studio looking uneasy at the sudden scene. Eric emerged from the bedroom and handed her the tux, then immediately crossed to me.

“Hey, Crosby,” he said with a kiss to Skylar’s cheek and another for my mother. “Yu-na. Good to see you.” He turned to me. “Jane. Breathe.”

“But—she—I—” I sputtered, waving my hands out at my mother. “She’s just…leaving! Just like that!”

“Whoa, teapot,” he said, gathering me close, rotating me around so I wasn’t watching my mother’s beady, basilisk eyes staring a baleful hole through me. “Cros, can you…” He gestured at something, and a second later, Skylar brought my shoes and a sweater.

“What—what the hell—” I couldn’t get out a full sentence, but somehow allowed Eric to help me into the wool and my ballet flats.

“Let’s go for a walk,” he said. “It’s a nice day. You can clear your head and then come back and talk.”

I allowed him to hold me tight until I had stopped spinning like a kitchen appliance. My mother just walked to the living room and chatted with Skylar and Lake as if she hadn’t tossed a grenade at me. Eventually, Eric turned us toward the trio.

“We’ll be back in a bit,” he said, waving at them all.

“Not too long, I hope,” Lake called out, looking visibly concerned. After all, we were running out of time.

“Just a few minutes,” Eric replied, already towing me toward the door. “We need to walk off our jitters.”

The idea of unflappable Eric ever suffering from something as inane as “jitters,” much less uttering the stupid word, had me giggling as we left. Much later I realized that he’d probably deployed it just to distract me.

It wasn’t until we’d made it into the park, which was basically an impressionist painting with all the mid-spring flowers.

“All right, Lefferts,” Eric said as we strode over the Seventh-Seventh Street arch and into the lush greenery. “We don’t have time for me to fuck it out of you. Talk. You need to.” He kept my hand in his, swinging it lightly as we walked, but his firm grip did not relax. “Why are you and your mother shrieking at each other like chickadees?”

“I…” I inhaled. “I don’t like it. Did you know she’s moving to Chicago? What the hell is that?”

“She wanted to go home three months ago, gorgeous. And you barely see her as it is. What difference does it make if she’s in Chicago instead of Boston?”

“Well, for one, at Skylar’s, someone can at least keep an eye on her.”

“Is she a five-year-old who might eat too much chocolate?”

I rolled my eyes. “You know what I mean.”

Eric sighed. “We can have someone do that in Chicago too. We can afford to hire an entire off-duty police force to follow her around if you want.”

I shook my head. “It’s not the same.”

Eric was quiet as we walked. “Can I be totally honest?”

“Okay, fine. What?”

He stopped. “Has it ever occurred to you that you don’t really like your mother, Jane?”

“That’s ridiculous. No one likes their mothers.”

He frowned. “That’s not true.”

“Do you like yours?”

“I don’t really know her well enough to like her. But when I do see her, we don’t fight like the two of you.” He shook his head. “I’ve never seen you and Yu-na exist in the same place without snapping at each other. Why do you think that is?”

I grimaced. “Because she’s so impossible?”

“Try again, Lefferts. It’s because you’re so much alike.”

I considered. My mother and I did have some obvious similarities. Both stubborn. Both outspoken. Both maybe too dogmatic about what we thought was right. If we were on the same side of a debate, we got along fine, but the reality was, we usually weren’t.

As a result, I had never been able to escape the niggling feeling that I had always been a disappointment to her. Especially this year. Especially with everything I had caused her.

“I know you feel guilty. I know you feel like she should be close. But if the two of you were really supposed to be in each other’s lives all the time, you would be. It’s as simple as that.” He brushed a piece of hair out of my face. “But I also know you feel guilty she’s been alone since your father died. And you feel guilty about what happened to her. But it wasn’t your fault, Jane. Neither of those things are your fault.”

It wasn’t until he said so that I knew in my heart of hearts that he was right. She probably knew it true, which was why she kept trying to leave. My mother and I should absolutely not live together.

And yet…how could I let her go?

“How?” I wondered quietly. “How do you know it won’t happen again if she is living there alone?”

“Well, to start, she won’t be alone. She’ll be in her old house, and she’ll have her own dedicated security detail until John Carson is caught. They’ll stay in the apartment below.”

“Her old…” It took me a second to understand what he meant. “You didn’t.”

Eric shrugged, unwilling to confirm my suspicion directly. The answer, however, was all over his face.

“You bought back my parents’ old house? The one in Evanston?”

Another shrug. “I did it a while ago, Jane. I figured you would want it back at some point. Your mother was taken when she was driving by it, wasn’t she?”

My jaw dropped. I had considered trying to buy the house a few times, but since it wasn’t actually for sale, it had never even occurred to me to make the owners an offer they couldn’t refuse. But that, of course, was exactly what Eric must have done. It was something you could do when you had unlimited funds. A whole paradigm of thinking I still hadn’t gotten used to.

“Well, you’ll definitely be on her good side now,” I said, shaking my head. “Jesus Christ, Eric. That’s insane.”

“I didn’t really do it for her.” He tipped up my chin, making me look at him, making me see the genuine love shining out of his silver eyes. “Like the air I breathe, right? It was your home, Jane. I see how sad you get whenever you talk about your dad. I know you feel like you lost that home over the last year, and not just because of Carol Lefferts’s passing. I figured, if I could do anything to give you some of that back, it would be this.”

A warm feeling bloomed in my chest, but I still couldn’t quite speak.

Eric rubbed a hand behind his neck. “Tell me I did the right thing.”

The warm feeling grew. “It’s more than the right thing.”

Eric smiled. “Good. Now, let’s go tell your mom. I have a feeling she is flying by way of New York because she has a few things to tell you too. You’re not the only one who’s been healing the past few months, gorgeous. Everyone needs a bit of catharsis, not just us.”