“Yes.” I had to think about that for a second. “I suppose the question here is how did they meet?”
“I would guess that all of the stalking just sort of resulted in them bumping into each other.” Zelda made that sound so reasonable! How was that even possible? “It’s vile and I cannot begin to imagine the kind of pathology involved in something like that, but I suppose it could happen.”
“Evidently,” I muttered. “Oh, for shit’s sake!”
“That is disgusting,” Zelda agreed.
Karl had managed to get Trinity’s legs open, not a real surprise or even difficult in my opinion. He now had her on the hood of the green car and was standing in between her thighs wildly gyrating his hips as though they were actually dry humping on the car. The raucous display finally drew the attention of the building rent-a-cops.
“Why don’t they do anything?” Zelda fumed. She reached for my desk phone. “I’m calling down there right now. This is obscene!”
“Yep. Like a trip over to one of the strip joints on the East Side,” I agreed.
My brain was spinning. I was basically watching my stalker ex try to make me jealous. That had to be what this was about. I could hear Zelda in the background snapping her words out to the people down in the security office. She demanded to know why they were just letting this happen. I figured someone had probably paid them to look the other way and now they were enjoying the show. I could think of half a dozen or more male acquaintances who would have done the same thing.
“Zelda,” I told her in a clipped voice. “Just leave it be. I’m not going home any time soon. I’ll just sleep in the office tonight. And if you’d like to avoid going to your vehicle and interrupting the lovebirds, I’d be happy to pay a taxi to come to the door and pick you up tonight and tomorrow morning.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Really?”
“Yeah. I feel like the more I fight this bullshit, the more they’re going to claim that it’s because I’m jealous and I can’t stand the thought of Trinity being with another man in front of me.” Yes. This totally sounded like crazy logic. If there was such a thing.
“Oh my goodness!” Zelda gasped. She put her hand over her mouth for a moment. “Do you really think…”
“The problem is,” I reminded my poor assistant, “they don’t think.” Yes. This was the problem entirely.
Chapter Sixteen
Lena
I had already worked my way through an entire basket full of garlic buttery breadsticks and was well on my way through most of my mushroom ravioli before my sister finally got her shit together enough to offer any of her trademark bossy advice. The restaurant somehow made me feel better. It was cool inside, but the place was filled with wonderful smells of garlic and onions and melted butter and the sort of scents that reminded me the whole world is not a horrible place.
Tino’s Italian Bistro is closer to Eleanor’s place than mine. But that’s because she lives in our parents’ old house in South City. The tiny brick building on a busy corner is surrounded by old-style brick houses with their crown molding and steeply pitched roofs. On the main thoroughfare each building has a first-floor shop and a second-floor apartment. Back in the old days the second-floor apartment were almost always occupied by the family that ran the first-floor business. This wasn’t the case anymore. It seemed like the apartments were rented out to students at one of the big universities these days, but the vibe hadn’t really changed.
There were tailors and dress shops and shoe stores and little boutiques. Drug stores occupied corners and there was a market that catered to the neighborhood. A cell phone store had gone in, of course, and there was a computer repair shop where a scissors sharpener had once been located. But in all that time Tino’s hadn’t changed. Not really. The awning was still scrawled with faded gold words and the doors still opened straight into the bar. The whole atmosphere was just perfect for a good conversation.
This was not going to be a good conversation.
“I realize that this entire situation has completely gone off the deep end,” Eleanor said to start.
I looked at her for a minute. Was I supposed to disagree? Because I wasn’t going to. We had left the deep end way behind a long time ago. We were all the way to the deepest crevasse in the ocean floor. The Pacific Shelf or whatever. That’s where we were. At the bottom of it anyway.
Eleanor cleared her throat. Evidently she’d expected me to keep up my end of the conversation. Well, I wasn’t going to. So she kept up both sides like she’s so capable of doing. “I’ve been thinking about it, though, and I feel like this isn’t a bad thing.”
Not a bad thing, huh?
“I think you should also consider trying to start up an intimate relationship with Damion Alvarez.” This had to be the way that Eleanor spoke to potential hires at her recruiting firm. “He’s good looking, well off, and he works hard. The man is purchasing a house in one of the most exclusive neighborhoods in the county and I think this is your opportunity to finally capitalize on something that Karl Kitson has done whether it was intentional or not.”
“Excuse me?” I really wanted to know if she was off her rocker. “You’re sounding about as lucid as Trinity Moberly.”
“Don’t be such a prude bitch.”
“Me?” I gaped at her and did not care that my mouth was packed full of garlic bread. “You’re the one who just referred to an intimate relationship as though it were a real estate contract!”
“It is,” Eleanor insisted.
I did not care that my lips were pouting right now. I glared at my sister and pulled out the one piece of ammunition that I almost never used. “Uh huh, and we’ve both seen how well this worked out for you.”
“Don’t you dare!” Eleanor snarled. Her expression went from placid to pissed in one second flat. “Don’t you bring that up! There is no comparison! I was nineteen! I didn’t know what I was doing and I was absolutely right to walk away from that relationship. It wasn’t any good. I’m much better off now and I’m happy. I would not have been happy if I had actually gone through with that—that—that…”
“You can’t even say it!” I didn’t care that our waiter was raising his eyebrow at us in no small amount of surprise. We came in here a lot and we were never loud or rude. I did lower my voice with respect for my sister. I was about to really lay on the embarrassment. “You sit there and you say it was better you didn’t go through with that! But you can’t say that the thing you ran away from was a freaking altar! And I think it would have been a lot better and said a lot more for you personally if you had managed to realize that before you got to that point. You know, before you walked out of the church and just left him standing there!”
“Shut. Up.” Eleanor ground her teeth together so fiercely that I actually heard her jaw creaking. “You’re being a total bitch and I don’t appreciate it. This is about you and not me. I was nineteen. You are twenty-nine.”
“Thanks for reminding me. I get so fuzzy on my actual age,” I muttered at her. Sometimes I wondered if Eleanor really didn’t get it that by reminding me that I was twenty-nine was just emphasizing the fact that she was thirty-four. That was a lot older than twenty-nine and she could pretend all she wanted, but she did not have her shit together as much as she thought.
“Look.” Eleanor was back to being Eleanor. “I’m just saying that Damion Alvarez is a really good man. He’s the sort of catch that the whole city would be jealous of. The guy is a millionaire several times over. He owns a company based here in the city so he isn’t going to want to move away—”
“Why is that bad?” I interrupted. “Why does it matter if someone might want to move away from the city? Seriously. I don’t think that’s a bad thing. Some days I think that it would be awesome to live in another city.”
Eleanor drew back as though I had just hit her across the face. “You must be joking. Leave St. Louis? Why? You were born here. This is your home. Your family is here.”
“You’r
e my family,” I said drily. “It’s not like we have a huge family compound somewhere that I’m tied to like someone from the hills.”
“Oh stop.” Eleanor waved at me and carefully sliced into a piece of eggplant parmesan. “You’re being absolutely ridiculous. Nobody leaves this city. It has everything you could ever want.”
“You’re out of your mind.” She was right though. The number of people who never actually moved more than twenty-five to fifty miles from the township or village where they’d been born was staggering. St. Louis had its own weird kind of gravity that way. “And I don’t want to talk about whether or not I’m staying here. I want to get my real estate license, get my own place, and run my own life. I do not want to be some kind of elbow trophy for the CEO of a nerds-for-hire firm!”
“He’s handsome too.”
“Like you actually care about that.” I pointed at her with yet another breadstick. I no longer cared to count how many I had eaten. “You are totally dried up. Did you know that? You talk to me like I’m some kind of weirdo, but when was the last time you had sex, Eleanor?”
The waiter’s eyes bugged out of his head. He did not approach our table. Maybe he was afraid we were going to ask him to volunteer to reset that number. Eleanor had a similar expression on her face. She looked like she’d eaten a sour piece of eggplant.
“Come on, Ellie poo.” I shot her a horrible little girl snarly look that I had not pulled out since childhood. “How long. Fess up. I will. I had sex last December with this guy I met at my office Christmas party who was not Upscale Bob.”
“You lie!” Eleanor shouted the words and then abruptly and then covered her mouth. The whole restaurant had gone briefly silent. They were staring at us and I couldn’t help it. I laughed. She was right of course. I was totally lying. Eleanor whispered her next words. “You had sex with Karl Kitson at his parents’ country club Christmas party. You told me. Remember?”
“Oh right.” I didn’t actually care. It wasn’t a huge secret. That jackass had told pretty much everyone in the city about it after all. “Well then, tell me about your last time.”
She stiffened in her seat and started very emphatically slicing her food into even tinier pieces. “I don’t have to tell you that.”
“Holy shit, you don’t remember!” I squeaked. It was true! I could see it on her face. My sister didn’t actually remember the last time she’d had sex. That was just sad. I actually felt sorry for her. “Eleanor, that’s what you should be focusing on. Okay? Just forget about my sex life and my romantic problems and focus on your own.”
“This isn’t about me,” Eleanor insisted. And then she waved her fork at me. It was an obnoxious habit that she had gotten from our father. I hated that. It made me feel ten again. Like I was going to have to admit to my father that I hadn’t gotten all A’s at school like his precious Eleanor. “This is about you,” Eleanor reminded me. “Because your ex and Damion’s ex are bumping uglies right now in your front yard. And I really think this needs to be addressed by you and Damion.”
“Bumping uglies?” I supplied. Then I snorted and rolled my eyes. “Eleanor. I’m not going to get into a relationship with Damion just because our exes are having hate sex in my yard. That’s they’re malfunction and not mine. I’m just trying to help poor Damion find a house. Once he closes on his property I’ll probably never hear from him again and if I’m lucky, Karl will just marry Trinity and all of this will be over.”
Eleanor looked upset. “And then you’ll lose out on your chance to marry the CEO of a huge recruiting firm, which would then allow you to feed me all this good insider information.”
“I would not do that!” I glared at my sister. “It’s insulting to think that you think I would! What’s wrong with you? Can’t you find out the information you want on your own?”
“It would be easier to get it from Damion Alvarez,” Eleanor groused. “He already knows. I know that he knows who the company is that’s about to go through a hostile takeover. It would be a lot better if he would just admit that it’s his.”
“I don’t get it.” My sister was losing her mind. Maybe she was starting to go through the change. She wasn’t thirty-five yet, but it happened early sometimes when women were dried up old crones. “One second you want me to latch onto him because he’s local and will stay local and is loaded.”
“Oh, he’ll stay local even when the office here closes,” Eleanor predicted smugly. “He’s from here. That’s just how it works.”
“You’re out of your mind,” I told her. I waved at the waiter and then pointed at the dessert cart.
“I’m out of my mind?” Eleanor’s gaze followed mine. “You’re ordering dessert? How in the world do you have room?”
“I want that lemoncello cake they have.” I did not want to hear another litany about my lack of self-control when it came to food. She didn’t see me doing my yoga like a maniac just a few hours ago at home. “That stuff is amazing.”
The waiter did not come back to the table until he had my cake in his hands. Maybe he was afraid of getting attacked if he could not provide sugar to distract us. You know, because we were desperately horny women. Is there such a thing? It seems like that would be like saying you were a unicorn. Right? But women do get horny. We get desperate. We just deal with it differently than men do. At least this is what I’ve gleaned over the years. Men whine and moan and commiserate. Women eat and bitch. That’s what we do.
“Are you sure you don’t want to order your own slice of this cake?” I asked my sister as I dug into mine. “Because I’m not sharing and if you try to take some I’m going to stab you in the eye.”
“Such violence!” Eleanor said snippily. “You’re always telling me you’re going to hit me or something. What is your deal?”
“I secretly want to kill you and bury your body in Mom and Dad’s back yard just to ruin that stupid forsythia bush he was so proud of.” The words slipped out before I could think better of them.
Eleanor was officially gaping at me. The waiter was snickering right along with the rest of the staff. Do we really come here that often? I couldn’t help but wonder if they heard this sort of thing from people all the time or if the two of us were just like a horrible talk show cast come to life.
“Okay, so I won’t really kill you,” I assured my sister. “But I do sometimes feel like I should. Because you’re just such a snooty woman and I sometimes wonder if you realize how judgmental you are. If I don’t want to date a guy, I’m not going to date him. And how rude is it to push myself on a guy who is already dealing with a woman he can’t get rid of? That’s sort of low, don’t you think?”
“Maybe you’re right.” Eleanor looked thoughtful. “You’re on the right track like this.”
“Excuse me?” I stuffed my mouth full of cake. Why are things always better with cake?
Eleanor waved impatiently at me. “You’re there for him in his time of need. You’re smoothing the way and being helpful but not pushy. He’ll fall for you in no time. You’re too irresistibly cute and just enough of a disaster that he won’t be able to help himself.”
“Did you just say I’m enough of a disaster to be irresistible?” If the cake hadn’t been so yummy I would have thrown it at her. As it was I was talking with my mouth full and being totally rude and I didn’t care. “You know what? You’re picking up the tab tonight. That comment was so over the top that I’m not paying a penny of my bill. You owe me for being such a rude big sister and that is that!”
Chapter Seventeen
Damion
Therapy. I’m never actually sure if this works or not. It’s seems conveniently subjective. As if therapists secretly keep their own scorecard of whether or not an intervention—I have been told this is the common phrase for this—whether or not an intervention works or fails miserably. There has to be some kind of evaluation process. Insurance companies pay for this stuff. They don’t usually shell out a hundred and twenty bucks per fifty-minute “therapeutic hou
r” if there aren’t provable or at least noticeable and recordable results.
“You look stressed.” Dr. Poole seemed to reconsider that statement as I plopped down on the brown leather sofa in his office. “Or rather you look more stressed than you normally do. Has something happened to increase that feeling of not having enough time that we’ve talked about in the past?”
Dr. Poole wasn’t a doctor. At least not the medical kind of prescribing doctor. He was a psychologist. A Psych D as they sometimes referred to themselves. Bernard Poole was in his fifties or sixties. I could never be sure because he had that nondescript salt and pepper hair that you often find in men of that age category. He was always dressed in the same kind of nondescript khaki pants and sweater no matter the weather or the temperature. He generally kept his office on the chilly side, which I appreciated. And for the most part he was a nice enough guy. The only reason I came to therapy was that I sometimes felt like I had stuff I just couldn’t say out loud to anyone. The kind of stuff that would earn you instant judgment from everyone in your life and put you on the fast track to ruin.
“I am stressed, Doc,” I told Poole. Then I took a deep breath because it was impossible not to feel just a little bit smug about the bomb I was about to drop in the middle of his office. If you have ever experienced something totally insane in your life, then you can understand this need to have someone else acknowledge for you that yes, this is absolutely insane. “See,” I began with just a touch of the melodramatic. “Here’s the thing. Last night, I discovered that my crazy stalker ex is now involved with a guy who is the crazy stalker ex of a woman that I met at a real estate office the other day.”
Wham!
Except my words did not pack the expected punch. Dr. Poole tilted his head to one side and gave me a look of confusion. He seemed to be acknowledging that I obviously needed him to be shocked. He just didn’t seem to grasp exactly why that was.
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