Free Killing Monica by Candace Bushnell Page A

should have known better. She should have understood the dangers of being so close with SondraBeth, and how the success of Monica would inevitably drive them apart. But she’d never suspected that a man—Doug Stone—would end up being the lever, inserting himself into their friendship like a wedge.
    And she certainly should have known better about Doug.
    But once again, when it came to romance, hope trumped common sense.
    Three years had passed since that raucous party at the Chateau Marmont where SondraBeth claimed Pandy had made out with Doug in a drunken moment that Pandy still couldn’t remember.
    During those three years, Doug had been proclaimed the next big thing. Named one of People magazine’s Sexiest Men Alive—which in turn landed him on the cover of Vanity Fair —he was now a genuine movie star. During a cold, blustery February, while Pandy was celebrating the success of another Monica book and the second Monica movie was in production, Doug Stone arrived in New York.
    Pandy was seated at one of the coveted front tables at Joules when Doug came in with a posse that included a director and a womanizing television star. They were shown to the next table. Doug recognized Pandy; it wasn’t long before one table joined the other and Pandy found herself next to Doug, reminiscing.
    They laughed about the crazy party in her suite at the Chateau. Pandy admitted that she didn’t remember kissing him, but would never forget how he’d ordered and eaten three breakfasts from room service. “I had the munchies,” he said, pulling her chair closer.
    He was even better-looking than she remembered.
    Thanks to his success, Doug had mastered a star’s ability to ingest the light in the room and reflect it outward, creating an irresistible magnetism. And yet he still maintained a semblance of what he must have been before he became an actor: the easygoing, beloved star quarterback of the high school football team, who assumed that life, having gone his way so far, would most likely continue on this track. Pandy wondered if his relaxed self-confidence came from knowing that he never had to work at attracting the opposite sex; never had to worry about being accepted or liked the way regular people did. His spectacular good looks granted him freedom from the concerns that most people deemed shallow but nevertheless had to deal with on a daily basis.
    They had an immediate and easy intimacy that Pandy suspected he had with any woman on whom he focused his attentions. Nevertheless, that night, fate conspired against reason when a terrific clap of thunder followed by torrential rains trapped them inside the club. Joules locked the doors, turned up the music, and out came the pot and cocaine. At some point in the next twenty-four hours, Doug went home with her. Despite his condition, he made love in a passionate and expert fashion that was almost too good to be true. Pandy suspected that his performance was just that—a performance—and one he probably couldn’t maintain.
    But he did maintain it, for the next ten days, anyway. Ten days in which they blissfully hung out in Pandy’s brand-new loft on Mercer Street, bought with her
Monica
earnings. It was mostly devoid of furniture, but that didn’t matter. They drank, had all kinds of sex, ordered takeout, watched bad movies, and had more sex.
    Conversation, Pandy had to admit, was minimal. Which was why she kept reminding herself that it was nothing more than a fling. But once again, as had happened so many times before, her entreaties to herself not to get too emotionally involved were useless against the power of her romantic fantasies. And so, unable to say no to what looked, smelled, and actually felt like love according to all those fairy tales, she allowed herself to fall in love with him—just a little bit, she cautioned herself, the same way most women promised themselves to have only one bite of chocolate.
    But Pandy was never good with the one-bite theory, and