Page 131 of I Dreamt That You Loved Me

The call went to Gabriel’s answering machine. I deflated then doubled over laughing at his outgoing message, delivered in an exaggerated Brooklyn accent.

He sounded like Joe Pesci inGoodfellas.

“You’ve reached Papa Luigi’s Pizzeria. If your name doesn’t begin with a C and end with an O, we’re out of pepperoni, sauce, mozzarella, and dough so fuck off. If your namedoesbegin with a C and end with an O, come and collect your pizza. For you, we’re open 24 hours. Rain or shine, hurricane or Armageddon, we’re at your humble service. You know what to do. Leave a message after the beep.”

Beep.

“Hey, it’s me. My name begins with a C and ends with an O. I can pick up my pizza on Monday.” I rolled my eyes at myself. “If that works for you,” I added.

I threw the phone down and took deep breaths. I was shaking with adrenaline.

By the time midnight rolled around, I was convinced that he’d changed his mind. It was a Saturday night. For all I knew, he had an active social life with plenty of women to choose from.

Maybe he was with some lithe and limber swimsuit model right now, feeding her grapes and sucking the juice off her lips. Maybe they were skinny-dipping in the moonlight, her long legs wrapped around his waist as he drove into her…

I punched my pillow and flopped onto my back.

Why did I let him torture me like this? Just the thought of him with someone else drove me insane. Still. After all these years. Which really pissed me off.

My phone rang at half past midnight. Four hours after I’d left a message. Not that I was counting.

“Did I wake you?”

“No, I was awake.” Who could sleep with all these visions of him with another woman playing on a loop in my head? I sat up and leaned against the headboard but didn’t turn on the lights. It felt more intimate this way, talking to him in the dark. Just his voice at the end of the line. “So…you came to London.”

“Sean told you?”

“Mmhmm. What happened with the paparazzi?”

“Nothing,” he said, his tone clipped like he had no intention of discussing this. “Let’s talk about your trip to Montauk. I can come into the city and pick you up?—"

“On your motorcycle?”

“No. I have a car.”

“I’ll take the Hampton Jitney. It’s quicker and a lot easier for both of us,” I said, getting all the logistics out of the way so we could focus on more important issues. “So what happened with the paparazzi?” I prodded, then added, “If we want to get to know each other, we have to be honest.”

He was quiet for a minute then audibly sighed. “Fine. When Ian found out it was my 30thbirthday, he threw a party at some club in Kensington or Soho…not sure where it was, but it was one of those asshole places with velvet ropes and bottle service and everyone snorting cocaine in the bathroom. There were these two girls in the club who wouldn’t leave me alone. They were all over me. One of them literally fell into my lap. Maybe that’s the dream for some guys, I don’t know…but I wanted nothing to do with any of that.”

I knew exactly what kind of club he was talking about. The private clubs frequented by London “It” girls and rock stars and city traders with money to burn, where celebrity DJs flew in from Ibiza and cranked up the volume on the house music.

Gabriel had never wanted anything to do with that kind of scene. When I was on tour with him, we’d skip those parties in favor of shabby diners and dive bars off the beaten path.

Whenever girls would come up to him, offering him everything under the sun—their bodies, their firstborn, sex with no strings, their hand in marriage—he’d firmly tell them that he wasn’t interested.

One time he told a girl, who was far too young to throw herself at a man, to love herself more and to demand respectfrom the boys who asked her out in the future. He never objectified women and had expected the same in return, but that wasn’t always the case.

Gabriel was by no means a choirboy when he was on the road. He drank too much, occasionally dabbled in drugs for “the experience,” was often impulsive and sometimes reckless (like the times he climbed the scaffolding on stage, and I was scared he’d fall and break his neck), but he was always honest to a fault, so I’d never doubted his word.

“When I left, one of the girls followed me out,” he continued. “The paparazzi were waiting outside. All the flashes were going off, and they were jostling us, just being really aggressive. So I put my arm around the girl to protect her. They were shouting all these questions at me like they had any right to an answer.

“One of them mentioned you. Something like,How does Cleo feel about you moving on with…whatever that model’s name was.” He exhaled loudly. “And I was just so fucking fed up. I shouldered past him. Held out my arm to keep him out of my face. I was just trying to get into the SUV, but the guy chased after me, shouting that I broke his camera…”

The story made total sense now. I knew he would never have gotten violent unless he’d been provoked or was trying to protect someone. And even then, it wasn’t like he’d punched the guy. “Those vultures.”

“Yeah. I’m glad you were away. I’m glad you never saw those photos in the tabloids. I worried, no,obsessed,over it for the entire flight back to New York. I didn’t want to do anything to mess up your career and I didn’t want you to think that was the kind of bullshit I was doing while we were apart.”

While he was celebrating his 30th, I was celebrating my 28thbirthday in Paris. It was a spur-of-the-moment trip. Annika and I stayed with one of her dancer friends in Montmartre for a week, and then I took the train to Provence and stayed withNathalie, an artist I met in Bali. We worked in her studio, finalizing our pieces for an art exhibition in a chateau in Aix-en-Provence.