Read Online Exposure by Mal Peet - Free Book Online

toward his daughter. She takes it and he leads her away.
    When she returns, Otello has gone. And so has her drink. She looks around the room, trying not to make it obvious. The crowd has thinned a bit, but nevertheless she cannot see him. Then Diego Mendosa catches her eye and with a tiny gesture of his head points her toward the terrace.
    There are several people out there, smoking, talking loudly, laughing, but Otello is alone at the far end. He has his back to her and is gazing at the stars. Her wineglass, now full again, is standing on the balustrade next to his hand.
    “It’s crap,” she says when she is close to him.
    He turns. “What is?”
    “My music. But it’s very high-quality crap. That’s what you were going to say, isn’t it? Or were you going to lie to me?” She picks the glass up and leans her back against the balustrade.
    “Uh, I was going to lie to you.”
    “Well, don’t. You don’t have to. I haven’t got any illusions about what I do. Any of it.”
    She drinks. He can think of nothing to say. These Brabantas disturb and baffle him.
    “So tell me,” she says now, “what are your plans? What do soccer superstars do between seasons? Apart from win the Copa América, of course.”
    “Well, training starts in a week, so I’m going to grab a vacation. Five days of doing nothing, just chilling out.”
    “Sounds good. And where are you doing all this nothing?”
    He glances away from her, and she reads the confusion in his face.
    “Oh, right. Top-secret location. Yeah, I suppose it would be. You don’t have to tell me. You shouldn’t tell me. It’s a well-known fact that I’m a notorious gossip.”
    “We’re going to the Bay Islands. Cypress, to be exact.”
    Well, she thinks, he trusts me, then. She also thinks, We? The word is huge in her head, but she pushes it aside. For the moment.
    What she says is, “Cypress? Oh, fantastic. It’s beautiful. Really. We shot the beach scenes for the ‘Take Me Up’ video there. You ever see that? Go on, you can lie if you like.”
    “Sure I saw it. The one with all the planes in it?”
    “No. That was a different one. You’re terrible at this, aren’t you?”
    “Looks like it.”
    “It does. I bet you’ll be staying at the Blue Horizon. Yeah? That’s a great place. It’s where I stayed when we were filming. You’ll love it. I can just imagine you there.”
    She is imagining him there.
    Otello, however, is not paying attention. She turns her head and sees Diego Mendosa standing in the doorway giving Otello a look which means Time to come back in here and say good-bye to Important People, Guest of Honor. She realizes that she and Otello are now alone on the terrace.
    “I think you need to go,” she says.
    “Yeah, I guess so.”
    The fact that they have made no further arrangements with each other looms between them.
    He says, “Look, I —”
    “No, let’s not do the cell-phone-number stuff. It won’t be necessary.”
    Why not? he thinks. Why the hell not?
    “It’s been great talking to you,” he manages to say, and holds out his hand.
    She ignores the hand and stands on tiptoe to kiss him on both cheeks. Then she kisses him full on the mouth. It is so wonderful that it seems to last about a year, a year in which the rest of the world goes missing.
    When the clocks go back to normal and the world returns, she says, “Who is ‘we’?”
    She knows the question is so crude that she might as well have stripped her clothes off and stood naked in front of him.
    “What?”
    “You said, ‘ We’re going to Cypress.’ I was wondering who ‘we’ is.”
    “Ah, right. ‘We’ is me and Diego and Michael.”
    “Michael?”
    “Michael Cass. He’s, well, he’s my . . . minder.”
    “Minder? As in bodyguard?”
    “I guess. He’s good at throwing paparazzi into the sea.”
    She nods approvingly. “That is a good skill to have.”
    Later, Desmerelda stands with her father at the front of the house while their guests wait for