Rich People Problems-Kwan 2017 (WWT)

At that moment, four bodyguards dressed in civilian clothes suddenly grabbed him by
the legs, yanked him off the car, and body tackled him onto the ground.
“Oh fuck!” Scheherazade started giggling. She ran out the door, down four flights of
stairs, and out the front door. “Get off him!” she told the security guards that were now
standing over Carlton.
“Miss Shang, are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure! He’s fine. He’s with me,” Scheherazade insisted.
The beefiest guard reluctantly released his knee from Carlton’s back, and when Carlton
got off the ground, Scheherazade saw that the left side of his face was all cut up from the
asphalt.
“Oh no. Come upstairs—let’s get some disinfectant on that,” Scheherazade said. As they
entered her building and rode up in the ornate wrought-iron elevator, she looked him
over again.
“What did you think you were doing?”
“That was my wildly romantic gesture!”
Scheherazade frowned. “That was supposed to be romantic?”
“I was doing my best John Cusack impersonation.”
“Who?”
“You know, Say Anything.”
“Say what?”
“You haven’t seen the movie, have you?” Carlton said, suddenly crestfallen.
“No, but you did look cute standing on top of that car,” Scheherazade said, pulling him
in for a kiss.
···
At the other end of Paris, Charlie was walking back to the Hotel George V after a very
frustrating dinner with Astrid’s old friend Grégoire L’Herme-Pierre. Grégoire had been
more charming than usual, and Charlie suspected that he knew far more about Astrid’s
whereabouts than he let on. She had been in Paris for probably three days, Grégoire
surmised, and then she was gone. No, she hadn’t seemed distraught—I just assumed she
was making her usual semiannual trip to the city for her couture fittings.
Over the past two weeks, Charlie had crisscrossed the globe frantically searching for
Astrid. Mad with worry, he had started in Singapore, then Paris and London, going to all
their familiar haunts and speaking with all her friends. He then headed down to Venice to
see if she was hiding out in her friend Domiella Finzi-Contini’s palazzo, but Domi, like so
many of Astrid’s friends, remained as silent as the Sphinx. I haven’t heard a peep from
Astrid, but then I’ve been in Ferrara for the past month. We always spend the winter in
Ferrara. No, I didn’t hear about the scandal at all.
Now he was back in Paris, trying to retrace her steps, trying to understand how she
could have abandoned her entire life, and how her family didn’t seem to care that she had