Page 5 of Only Lovers in the Building
Ben’s coffee revitalized her, propelled her into the day. Determined to start her pseudosabbatical right, Lily slipped on
a swimsuit and found her way to the pool. She spotted Noah sprawled on a lounge chair, wet hair slicked back. He called out
to her. “La belle Lily!”
“Well, hello!” she replied. “You weren’t kidding when you said you lived by the pool.”
“Is there a better way to start the day?” he asked.
“None that I know of.”
She tossed her tote onto a vacant chaise and stretched out next to him.
It was Friday, the start of the weekend.
And yet, while she slathered sunscreen on her legs, hordes of people commuted to work.
Back home, the early birds were flocking to the office.
The news of her departure would have already made the rounds.
They’d laugh and call her a flake. Gus would update his comedic material to better cover his involvement.
They’d fight for her office and the minifridge with her snacks.
In a few weeks, they’d forget all about her.
What did it matter? The morning air was fresh, the sun gentle.
A blue pool stretched out before her. Her former colleagues could congregate in cold confer ence rooms with coffee and doughnuts.
She was drinking in sunshine. They could go screw themselves.
Her phone rang.
Lily and Noah groaned in unison.
Lily scrambled to silence the offending thing. She’d made the mistake of taking her father’s call and had no intention of
repeating that mistake. Without reading the screen, she shut it off and shoved it into the tote. Out of sight, out of mind.
“ Désolée !” she apologized in his native French in the hopes of getting back in his good graces.
Noah shielded his eyes from the sun. “You speak a little French?”
“A little,” she admitted.
“Where’d you pick it up?” he asked.
She laughed. “I’ll never tell you about my slutty semester abroad.”
“Okay.” Noah turned away. “I won’t tell you about last night.”
Oh no! Anything but that! Other people’s love lives were her raison d’être, so to speak. Had Noah been stood up, after all?
If so, how did he take it? Did he need a hug? Her inquiring mind had to know.
“I’m bilingual,” she admitted. “My parents are from Haiti. Dad insisted we speak French in the house. He’s fussy like that.”
“Ah...” he said. “We have that in common.”
Lily had no idea what he was getting at. “Fussy dads?”
“No,” he said. “My dad is a mechanic. Not fussy at all.”
“Lucky you.”
“We haven’t spoken in years.”
“Oh. Sorry to hear that.”
“It’s nothing,” he said, although his tone hinted otherwise. “We’re both Caribbean.”
She eyed him skeptically. “Are we?”
“My parents are from Martinique. I grew up there.”
“Really? Here I thought you were raised in a Parisian sidewalk café.”
Noah smirked. “Because of my je ne sais quoi?”
“Exactly.”
“I work in fashion,” he explained. “Although, I did move to Paris when I was fifteen.”
“How did you end up here?” she asked.
“When you’re lost, all paths lead to Miami.”
He had a point there. “We’ve so much in common. Are we soulmates, you think?”
“I wouldn’t go that far,” Noah said. “How about kindred spirits?”
“I’ll take that.” Lily sat back on her chair’s bright yellow cushions and fired up her e-reader. “When I need a soulmate,
I read a book.”
“And how’s that going?” Noah asked. “Have they kissed yet?”
“They’ve done more than that.”
The Sweetest Lie was an instant New York Times bestseller and, by all accounts, the romance of the summer. Exes Max and Emma reunite at a mutual friend’s wedding in Malibu.
For reasons Lily had yet to discover, Emma resents Max for the way things ended.
“Details, please,” Noah said.
Lily tossed the e-reader aside. “I’m more interested in your love story. Come on. How did the date go?”
“He was an hour late.”
“He showed up?” So much for her catfish theory.
“Yes, but something is off with him.”
“Bad vibe?”
“Not exactly.”
“Go on! Tell me more.”
“Not without a drink,” he said. “Meet you on the rooftop later?”
She thought it over. If she agreed to meet with Noah for drinks, she’d encounter Ben.
He’d fix her a martini, and she’d want to kiss him.
Again. Although, she could run into him outside her door in the morning.
He’d make her coffee, and she’d want to kiss him.
So really, she risked nothing by meeting Noah later this evening.
“Okay, cool,” she said. “What time?”
Noah rolled up to his feet and slipped on a rumpled cotton shirt. “Oh, you know, happy hour.”
Lily watched him stroll off and enter the building. Her gaze then skimmed the lines of the narrow building up to its tiered
crown, a birthday cake with white icing and lemon-yellow piping. So cheery and quirky, nothing like her stern brick building
in New York. She let out a breath and relaxed. She could be happy here.
Lily finished the novel by noon. Afterwards, she waded into the pool to keep from drowning in a sea of conflicting emotions.
Max and Emma got their happy ending, but was it earned? She wasn’t convinced. Bobbing about on a pink raft, she applied analytic
skills honed at law school to deconstruct the deceptively simple narrative.
Max and Emma are exes. They dated for a few months straight out of college.
Max breaks Emma’s heart when, on a business trip, he wakes up married in Vegas.
The pair reunites in Malibu, at the wedding.
Max is divorced. A changed man, he’s determined to win Emma back.
Spoiler: he does.
It was more nuanced than that, obviously, but Lily was stuck on one point. All Max had to do to regain Emma’s trust was admit
to his mistake—in an emotionally fraught scene that brought Lily to tears, but still.
She climbed out of the pool and toweled off. Before heading out for lunch, she hopped on BookTap and crafted a quick book review.
@LegalLyon: 1/3 Chemistry eclipses common sense in The Sweetest Lie by Teresa Star. The only lie detected in this fiery romance is that
people change. They don’t.
@LegalLyon: 2/3 Max is two margaritas away from waking up married in Cancun.
@LegalLyon: 3/3 In the end, this book still gave me all the feels. The chemistry between Max and Emma was off the charts. 4 stars.
She added a couple of hashtags, #bookreview #romance, and posted the thread.
After lunch, a quick trip to the grocery store, and a nap that stretched out far too long, Lily woke up with a kink in her
neck and hair stuck to her cheek. Had she missed happy hour?
She reached for her phone to check the time and.
.. wow! BookTap alerts crowded the home screen.
Apparently, her short review of The Sweetest Lie had taken off.
Thrilled, she took the phone into the bathroom and scrolled through the comments as she went about the tedious
work of detangling her hair.
@RoséAllDayyyy: LMAO!!! Love your take on this! Please review Blurred Lines next! Highly overrated IMO
@TheTrilogyGoddess: Exactly! Our girl is 2 tequila shots away from heartbreak!
@BookBae89: Ha! 4 stars?!!! You can’t be serious. It was MID at best. 2.5 stars.
Two and a half stars? Rude! Lily was insulted on the author’s behalf. What of the whip-smart dialogue and sexy banter that had made her blush? What of
those lush descriptions of the California sunrise?
@Ben_Romero: You’re wrong. “Changing,” or evolving, is inherently human. Only those with limited insight into the complexities of the
human psyche would fail to acknowledge this.
That caught her attention. Very limited... what? She read it again and again. Each time, her annoyance spiked. Who was this
pretentious person? Were they calling her dumb? She noted the user’s blue check mark. This was a verified account, a BookTap
VIP. Curious, she tapped on the handle.
Benedicto Romero
Literary Translation
Current Read: Miami, by Joan Didion
All opinions are my own.
Lily stared at her phone. The thumbnail photo was blurry, yet there were those keen eyes staring back at her. Unless her neighbor
had a doppelg?nger with the exact same first name, she could only reasonably conclude that Benedicto, the literary translator,
and Ben, the bartender, were one and the same. Could it be?
She was about to find out.
Lily marched across the hall and knocked on Ben’s door. He was home, likely on the phone. She could hear him laughing. Irritated,
she knocked again. He yanked the door open and, surprised to see her, smiled. She didn’t reciprocate.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“I have enough insight to know when I’ve been insulted.”
He went silent, which infuriated her. She could kiss him or accuse him of libel—it didn’t matter.
He would keep his cool. Lily had no doubt that this quiet, focused man was a literary scholar in disguise.
She felt suddenly self-conscious, aware of what she must look like in the plushy robe stolen from the resort she’d fled the day before, clutching a hairbrush in one hand and a phone in the other. What must he think of her!
“Is it the coffee?” he asked. “You didn’t like it?”
“No!” she cried, appalled. “Why would you say that? Didn’t you get my note?”
She’d rinsed the mug and returned it with a note scribbled on a page ripped from her daily planner. It read Thanks for the love.
“I got it.” He was leaning against the doorway now, arms folded across his chest. “It was sweet.”
“If that’s the case, why are you trolling me?”
“Trolling you?” He considered her carefully. “I don’t understand. I would never insult or troll you. What are you talking
about?”
Trolling was a little strong, but she would not back down. “I’ll read the record to refresh your memory.”
“All right, then.” He mimicked her tone. “Go on.”
Lily tapped on the phone screen and read the comment aloud. Ben’s face registered his surprise. “I posted that a minute ago.”
“More like five minutes.”
“What does it have to do with you?” he asked. “I was disputing a point made in a book review.”
“That was my point you were disputing, my book review, my lack of insight into the complexities of the human psyche.”
“Was it?”
She held up her phone. He narrowed his eyes as he read the screen. “@LegalLyon... That’s you?” he asked.
“As if you didn’t know.”
“I didn’t,” he insisted. “I comment on book reviews all the time. It’s my thing.”
She scoffed. “You comment on random reviews? Even of books you haven’t read?”
Who was she to question him? Up until minutes ago, she’d thought he was a grad student, wrapping up an MFA or similar.
“No, never,” he said. “What would be the point of that?”
“You read The Sweetest Lie ?” Lily asked, incredulous. Back in New York, it wasn’t uncommon to spot a hot guy on the subway with his nose buried in a
book. Yet it was generally accepted among her friends that those men were posers or figments of their collective imagination.
Once they stepped off the train, these men disappeared, dissolved into the city, never to be seen again.
“It’s not my preferred genre,” he admitted. “But I’ll read anything that isn’t nailed down. I found it lying around my place,
read it, and kind of liked it. Your review was harsh. You’re essentially saying people can’t change.”
“They can, but they rarely do,” Lily retorted. “And what do you mean you found the book lying around your place?” She found
it hard to picture the hot bartender curled up with a romance novel.
“Someone left it behind.”
“Who?”
He stepped back and opened the door wider, giving her a glimpse into his apartment and of the woman, a raven-haired beauty
with coal eyes like his, lounging on his sectional sofa, feet propped up on the coffee table. She waved hello to Lily, smiling,
friendly.
Lily went up in flames.
“Believe me now?” Ben asked.
She nodded and, without another word, stepped away from his door. Moving slowly, oh so carefully, so as to not set the entire
building on fire, she retreated to her apartment to die, alone, in shame.