The Other Traitor Read Free Page B

She rubbed gloss on her lips with her pinkie. “Getting a head start on the big celebration?”
    “Not exactly. Can we talk?”
    “My class is in twenty minutes,” she said.
    Lil Wayne’s voice pounded in the small room.
    “Aww, come here, big boy. Let me give you a birthday hug.” Sephora pulled him toward her, swung her back against his chest in a spooning position, then crisscrossed his long arms around her breasts so that both their reflections were framed in the mirror. Her face was fresh and pink-cheeked, her green eyes sparkly. He, on the other hand, looked like he’d been dragged in from a shipwreck. Short black hair plastered to his skull like a swimming cap. His face a collage of pasty white skin, five o’clock shadow, and dark smudges around his sunken blue eyes.
    “Lovely,” he said in a flat voice. “An award-winning couple.”
    “You’ll feel better after you take a hot shower.”
    “Can you skip your exercise class? I really need to talk to you.”
    She dropped his hands and rubbed an invisible imperfection on her cheek that she must have noticed in the mirror. “We can talk when I get back. Should be around eight. We’re having dinner with Brent and Camilla at eight-thirty at a new restaurant in the Meatpacking District. I know you don’t want a big fuss over your birthday, but after that we’re meeting up with the rest of our friends at the Gansevoort bar.”
    Her friends, she meant. “I’d rather we just stay home and order in a pizza or something.”
    She cocked her head and frowned, as though he was speaking in a foreign language. “A pizza? For your birthday?”
    “Or sushi. Whatever you want. I’ve got a lot on my mind.”
    She checked her watch. “I have to go.” She started across the room toward the dresser.
    “I quit.”
    She stopped and looked at him.
    “I quit my job.”
    “What are you talking about?”
    “I’ve been miserable there with all the bureaucracy and bullshit.” He went over to the sliding glass door and watched the snow piling up on their balcony. The hibachi they’d bought and never used was almost completely buried. “This was never what I wanted to do with my life.”
    “So you have something else lined up?”
    He turned back toward her and shook his head.
    She scowled and played with a strand of apricot hair. “I know some people at Pfizer and Merck. I’m sure they’d love to hire a brilliant guy like you. MD from Cornell, PhD in biophysics from MIT. Top of his class at both. Two years in new-product development.” She seemed to be warming to her subject, but she’d always had a knack as a recruiter.
    “I’m leaving the corporate world.”
    She glanced at her watch again. “I can live without the suspense. Where are you going? Some startup? Back to the academic world?”
    “I’m not sure. I haven’t gotten that far. Maybe I’ll take up painting again.”
    She squeezed her eyes closed like she’d gotten a sudden headache pain, then opened them. “Painting? What, houses?”
    He’d been stupid to hope she’d understand.
    “Jesus, Julian. You’re working for one of the top pharmaceutical companies in the world developing products that will change the health and well-being of the world.”
    “I’m making a goddamn face cream. I think the world can do without one more of those.”
    She opened a dresser drawer, pulled out a black silk scarf, then slammed the drawer. “I just don’t know where you get off quitting your job without even discussing it with me.”
    “I’m sorry. I would have talked it over with you first, but it just happened. I was sitting in my office filling out yet another useless report and I thought, ‘What the hell am I doing here?’ So I went in to give two weeks’ notice. They told me thanks very much, but company policy was for me to leave today. So I left.”
    Sephora wrapped the scarf around her neck. He followed her to the living room where she grabbed her fur coat from the front closet.
    “And what