The Boyfriend

by Abigail Barnette

  “Not like...the plans you had for the guy who caused the accident, right?” I whispered, suddenly in dire need of a drink.

  “Good lord, no!” he barked. “Sophie, how could you think such a thing?”

  Well, maybe because you were willing to hire in a hitman in a time of deep distress. Was what I did not say. But the night he’d tearfully confessed that he’d looked for a way to end the life of the man who’d caused the accident that had claimed Emma and Michael had been one of the truly scariest nights of my life. Neil would never think of such a thing in his right mind but if we lost Olivia, his mind would never be right again.

  “I’m sorry. I’m just thinking of how desperate we would be and…well, it isn’t as though you’ve never mentioned it before.” I wished I had never even asked. “I don’t think you’re a bad person, Neil. I just know how important Olivia is to you, and that you’d protect her to your last breath.”

  “Killing her grandparents wouldn’t exactly be a protective measure,” he said dryly. “I don’t care for Laurence. The sooner Valerie realizes he’s not good for her—“

  I had to nip that line of reasoning right in the bud. The wedding ring on her finger had pretty much canceled any chance they would split up soon.

  “Maybe instead of micromanaging Valerie’s love life, you could talk to her directly. Tell her that you’re open to hearing her concerns.” I paused. “She doesn’t like to be dictated to, though. You’re not going to get far passing down edicts from on high.”

  “Is that really what you think of me?”

  We turned a corner into the familiar hallway to our bedroom. Honestly, sometimes I thought it would be easier to confine myself specifically to this area of the house just so I wouldn’t get hopelessly lost. Which I still did, on occasion.

  “It’s not what I think of you. It’s kind of just...how you are. And not in a bad way,” I hurried to add. “It’s what’s made you so successful in life. But Valerie is one of the very few people who isn’t awed by you. And you do have a tendency to forget that where she’s concerned.”

  We reached the doors and Neil pulled one handle, gazing down at me with a reluctant quirk of his mouth. “And you’re one of those very few people, I assume?”

  “Sometimes.” I couldn’t confidently state that I never felt a little intimidated by him, still. Despite how much we’d been through together, it seemed as though I learned something new about him every day.

  “Sometimes what?” El-Mudad asked when we entered. He’d been reclining with his Kindle in the cushioned nook in the wall. It was like a window seat minus the window, and I loved to curl up on the light blue velvet cushions when I had time to lounge around.

  That had not been this trip.

  He sat up in one smooth motion, unfolding his long legs and wincing as though they’d been asleep.

  “Sophie is sometimes not in awe of me,” Neil said, clearly eager to move on from our bleak conversation. “I’m a bit insulted, really.”

  We could discuss the Laurence problem at the other time. I didn’t want to spend our last moments together until the New Year bickering. “If you’d be more impressive, maybe I would be more awed.”

  “Well, I’m in awe of you,” El-Mudad promised solemnly. He took Neil’s head in his hands and rose up on the balls of his bare feet to kiss Neil’s forehead. “And I’ll miss you.”

  “We’ll all be together again on the fourth,” I reminded them. “I mean, unless someone forgets to send the plane for us...”

  “We don’t need your plane.” El-Mudad stepped back from Neil and gave me a puzzled look. “We have mine.”

  “Oh, that’s right.” It was really strange to think about that. “I’m perfectly happy to check out El-Mudad’s jet. It’ll be the second private plane I’ve been on.”

  “Only the second?” El-Mudad looked horrified at the idea.

  I bristled slightly. The fact that I hadn’t grown up mega-rich wasn’t new information, so it irked me when they seemed to forget it. “You know, apart from the jet my mom drove me to public school in every day.”

  For his part, El-Mudad actually looked apologetic. “I promise you’ll get sick of private planes within the year.”

  “That...is debatable,” Neil said, clearing his throat. “We may not be traveling for a while.”

  “Oh?” El-Mudad’s eyebrows rose. “Is something wrong?”

  I could fill him in later. “You know, with Olivia starting preschool and everything. And then, there’s my mom’s wedding.”

  “And helping her find a house so she can get the hell out of ours,” Neil added, and when I gave him a warning glare, he revised, “Not that I don’t love having her.”

  “Well, I’m just as happy staying home as I am in running all over the world,” El-Mudad said. “Besides, there are plenty of interesting things to do in New York. Neil, you belong to the Black Iris Club, don’t you?”

  “I’ve never even heard of it.” Neil sounded taken aback at the idea of a club he hadn’t been invited to join.

  “Oh, it’s fantastic. We’ll talk all about it when we get back. But for now...” He offered me his arm. “I believe my girlfriend and I have a trip to Venice. And you have your...sad male-bonding exercise.”

  Neil took the ribbing in the good nature with which it had been intended. “Yes, I’ll shuffle off to the old man sanctuary to be with my sad old man fraternity. Truly, though, have a lovely time. And...don’t let anything happen to Sophie?”

  “What’s going to happen to me?” I asked, offended, at the same time El-Mudad answered, “Of course, I won’t. Don’t be absurd.”

  Neil held up his open hands defensively. “I’m protective! It’s in my nature.”

  I hopped up on my toes to give him a peck on the lips. “It is. And I love you for it. Most of the time.”

  He took one of my arms to guide it around his neck, and I eagerly lifted the other one as he lowered his mouth to mine for a proper goodbye that curled my toes. He gave El-Mudad a similarly passionate send-off, then we reluctantly left him behind.

  The moment he was out of our sight, the weirdness of being alone with El-Mudad hit me. It wasn’t a feeling of discomfort or unfamiliarity but an ingrained belief that by being with someone who wasn’t my husband, I was doing something wrong. I supposed I would have to get over that. Neil wasn’t glued to my hip.

  Thank god, because I really needed to be able to vent about our issue with Laurence.

  When El-Mudad and I were safely in the backseat of one of the Maybachs, I turned to him and said, “We have a huge issue.”

  “You and I?” he asked, with the expression of a game show contestant who just realized he couldn’t answer the million dollar question.

  I shook my head and put my hand on his on the center console to reassure him. “No. Not me and you. Me and you and Neil and Laurence and probably Valerie, if it comes down to it.”

  “Go on,” he urged.

  “So, when we were downstairs saying goodbye to Olivia—“

  “How did she take it, by the way?” El-Mudad broke in. “I’m sorry to interrupt. I was just concerned that seeing you again, then leaving with them, she might be unhappy.”

  “She was,” I confirmed. “And that’s what started the whole mess. Laurence made some crack about how we’re apparently always abandoning her.”

  “He said that?” El-Mudad asked in total disbelief.

  “No, no, he didn’t put it that way. But it was implied.” If he’d actually used the word “abandoned” Neil might have lost that even-tempered, non-violent streak he had going. “And he expressed concern about how our ‘lifestyle’ might affect Olivia.”

  “Does Valerie know about us?” El-Mudad’s dark brows drew together in a thoughtful frown. Knowing him, he revisited every moment of our holiday in his mind, looking for a place where he’d slipped up.

  “I don’t think she does. And honestly, I don’t know if she would even care. It kills me to say anything nice about her, b
ut she’s not an intolerant person.” Then again, a lot of super tolerant people just did not “get” polyamory. “We don’t even know if that’s what Laurence was talking about, or if he has a bug up his ass over the fact that Neil is retired and we’re kind of all over the place all the time.”

  “You’re not all over the place all the time,” El-Mudad protested. “My god, you barely leave the house most days.”

  “That’s when you’re there,” I pointed out. “And that’s because of all the fucking. We do travel. It’s not like it’s every single week or something. And it’s almost always because we’re visiting family or going somewhere for a good reason. I haven’t even gotten a chance to take Olivia to Disney World yet.”

  “She’s your ward, you should be able to take her to every Disneyland in the world,” El-Mudad insisted.

  I snorted. “Ward. That sounds like Jane Eyre times or something.”

  He considered for long, silent moment. “I don’t want to ever do anything that would imperil the relationship between Neil and his granddaughter. Or Neil and yourself. Sophie, if it comes down to it–“

  “It won’t,” I stated firmly. “I don’t believe Valerie would hurt Olivia like that.”

  “Perhaps you should tell her about this altercation. She should know what kind of man she’s married.” He didn’t sound like he’d like Laurence very much to begin with. I wondered if something had happened at the Christmas party, or after, that would cause El-Mudad to make such a remark.

  “She still hasn’t told Neil?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “No, he has no idea. We have to deal with that when we’re back in the states.”

  “Why should he even care?” El-Mudad demanded of no one in particular. “Their relationship was over years ago.”

  “For him it was. For her? Not so much.” I wouldn’t rehash all of that ugliness at the start of our vacation. We’d have more than enough chance when we got back to New York. “But let’s not get hung up on it now.”

  El-Mudad’s mouth bent into a fond smirk. “You sound so much like him.”

  “I know. Sometimes I hear Neil’s words coming out of my mouth. It reminds me that I need to spend time with other humans,” I joked.

  El-Mudad’s jet waited for us at the airport, gassed up and ready to go. It was pretty nice, I supposed, as far as planes went. I only had one to compare it to, and I didn’t have much time to check it out while we were onboard. There was too much turbulence and we weren’t in the air for long. I was just glad Neil had opted to go to Iceland, instead; he hated flying and he would have been completely freaked out by the number of sudden drops.

  “You’re pale as a ghost,” El-Mudad said with a sympathetic laugh as we climbed down the jetway.

  “I just had my life flash before my eyes about sixteen times in the last half hour,” I reminded him. “And I’m motion sick as all get out.”

  “What does that mean, ‘as all get out’? Getting off the plane?” he asked, slipping his arm around my waist as we walked to the sedan on the tarmac.

  Sometimes, I forgot that English was his third language. “It’s an idiom common to people of my economic origins. It means, ‘as fuck.’”

  He laughed at that and motioned the chauffeur aside so he could open the door for me himself.

  I used to hate it when men held doors for me, but I spent a lot more money on my manicures now.

  The car took us from the runway at Marco Polo airport to a water taxi stand. Venice was only accessible by water, and the path from the airport to the city was marked out with sea-weathered wooden pylons. A mist hung over the water; I could only see the outline of the city, shadowy and indistinct like a painting.

  “Come on,” El-Mudad told me, gesturing past the commercial taxis and waterbuses. A man in a sleek speedboat waited for us.

  A speedboat with my husband’s initials on the back. Of course.

  El-Mudad called out in Italian to the man in the boat—because of course, he spoke that, too—and stepped back as the chauffeur handed our bags off to the...captain? Pilot? I had no idea what one called a person who drove a speedboat instead of a car.

  “Sophie, give me your hand.” El-Mudad steadied me as I stepped down into the craft. Though we’d bundled up in anticipation of the temperature, I was still shocked at just how cold it was; I’d imagined Venice as a city of endless summer.

  “Are there life jackets?” I asked, casting my gaze doubtfully around the craft.

  “We don’t need life jackets. Everyone in Venice can swim,” the captain said with a wide grin. He wore a knit cap pulled low on his forehead, covering the tips of his ears, and his puffy coat zipped to his chin. His accent was so thick that by the time I understood his joke, he was already reassuring me, “No, no, no. You don’t have to worry. I have lived in Venice all of my life. I have only drowned two people.”

  I really hoped that was a joke, too. El-Mudad laughed at it, anyway. We sat down and the captain pulled a short canopy over our heads. It was claustrophobic and coffin-like.

  “You’re trembling,” El-Mudad said softly beside my ear. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m just not a huge fan of boats.” If I’d said that back home, where fishing and tubing and kayaking were beloved summer activities, I would have gotten...well, the same kind of look the Venetian boat driver gave me at that moment.

  At least, El-Mudad was sympathetic. “Do not fear, my love. I won’t let anything happen to you.”

  “You’ll swim me through this cold ass water to shore?” I teased, but my feeling of dread increased when the engine roared to life. We drifted away from the dock and my stomach pitched.

  “Hold on,” the captain called back to us. “I drive a little crazy.”

  I shot a wide-eyed look at El-Mudad, but it was too late. The driver hit the throttle and the boat shot forward. When I’d been little—before I’d had a concept of my own mortality—I’d loved going fast across a placid lake. There was just something about the hull of a boat slicing through the glassy reflection of an upside-down sky.

  That was not remotely fucking like what the ride into Venice was. The water, already choppy, was made rougher by the wakes from other craft. We seemed to hang suspended in mid-air from one wave to the next, landing hard enough to make my teeth chatter. I seriously doubted the craft—or we—would survive. After what seemed like an eternity of harrowing near-death moments, we abruptly slowed. The engine noise died down enough for El-Mudad to ask the captain something in Italian, to which the captain quickly agreed. El-Mudad ducked out from beneath the canopy and folded it down, and I got my first real glimpse of Venice.

  My charmed life had brought me the opportunity to see so many amazing sights, but nothing would ever take the place of the towers and domes rising above the terracotta tiled roofs of the city. The traffic increased as we drew closer, the water buses like whales beside our sleek, unstable shark, schools of smaller boats keeping closer to the docks.

  “Oh my god, it’s a gondola!” I shouted, thrusting my arm to point.

  El-Mudad chuckled. “Yes, I see that. If you like them so much, you’ve come to the right place.”

  I gave him a playful shove. “Hey, Mr. Jaded Traveler. I’m a small town girl. I never thought I’d see Venice. Like, Venice in Las Vegas was a far-off dream, even.”

  The captain looked back at me. “I’ve been to that hotel! I gave the gondoliers some advice.”

  “You’ve lived in Venice your whole life...and you went to Las Vegas and stayed at the Venetian?” Okay, that was pretty charming.

  He shook his head. “No, no, of course not. We went into the Venetian. We stayed at your President’s hotel.”

  Ugh.

  “If you had stayed in his hotel, you would not have voted for him,” the man concluded with distaste.

  “Believe me, I didn’t.”

  Just as I was about to apologize on behalf of my nation, we made a slow turn off the lagoon and into a canal.

  “This is t
he Grand Canal,” El-Mudad explained. “The famous one.”

  I took out my phone and clicked pictures like mad. “I can’t believe I’m really here. I can’t believe this place is real.”

  The captain deftly navigated the smaller waterway, practically in idle the whole time. The canal was as busy as Midtown traffic back home, but none of the drivers seemed as frazzled. Maybe they were too cold to scream at each other.

  “I want to come back in the summer,” I announced, the plans already firmly set in my mind. Fuck Laurence and his opinions about how we should live our lives. Olivia would be enchanted by—

  I thought of taking Olivia on this boat, racing across all that terrifying water and immediately changed my mind.

  The captain did his best to talk me out of it, too. “You don’t want to come here in the summer. Come in the spring or the autumn. Summer is too hot, too crowded. All the tourists come.”

  “We’re tourists,” El-Mudad reminded him dryly.

  “You’re guests of Mr. Elwood,” the captain corrected El-Mudad. “You’re not going to walk down around in your sandals with socks and the...” He made a gesture to his middle to indicate a fanny pack.

  “Oh, you’re right, I’m definitely not going to wear one of those,” I promised.

  We pulled up beside a building with an entrance that looked very much like a hotel or apartment building in any city, with the exception of the fact that the small stoop was nearly water level.

  “When the tide comes, this will be underwater,” the captain warned. “So be sure when you leave, you go before the flooding. Unless you don’t mind getting your luggage wet.”

  A uniformed bellman came forward and took our bags as the captain unceremoniously hefted them out. Then, he handed us a small cell phone.

  “This is a direct line to me,” he explained. “I do not work for Mr. Elwood full-time, but this is his phone. If it rings—“

  He made the universe motion for “off like a shot.” Though, I wasn’t sure how that would translate into Italian.

  “Understood,” El-Mudad promised, pocketing the phone before stepping out of the boat to help me up.