Crowne of Lies

by Reiss, CD

  “I’m your home now.”

  Fuck. The way her face fell made me feel like the one who’d fucked up, but Colton was a dead weight on my attention. I had thirty seconds or less to avoid him.

  I took my wife’s hand and pulled her into me, guiding her out with an arm around her shoulder. We didn’t speak until I’d closed the suite door behind her.

  “I had your things sent up.” I pointed at the bag left by the entrance.

  “Thank you.”

  “Ella,” I said in a tone that set up a reasonable discussion between reasonable adults.

  “I’ll stay up here. You can go back down if you want.”

  “No.” I jerked my tie open, and she stood in the center of the suite’s living room with her molten silver ball gown and makeup designed for a party. “I don’t want.”

  She passed me to get her bag then walked through the bedroom to disappear into the bathroom. I watched her shadow move across the light under the door, then I sat on a chair by the bed. King-sized mattress. More comfortable than the hood of a car.

  God, what had I done?

  I should be fucking her on that bed or not at all.

  She stepped into the dimly-lit room, arms crossed over her pajama top, sock feet set apart. She’d made a choice—whatever it was—and was sticking to it. I stood up and crossed my arms, because she didn’t get to make all the decisions.

  “No,” she said.

  “Did I ask a question?”

  “No divorce,” she said. “I promised my father I wouldn’t abandon his name. And I’m aware he’s dead. So don’t say it. But the bottom line is, Papillion doesn’t belong to me. I can’t put a single butterfly on a single shoe on my own. The only way I have to honor his request is to keep my job and fight for his name.”

  This woman had the business sense of a bent spoon. Fuzzy goals. No strategy. Tactics that included indefinite, undefined expenditures.

  “Great plan,” I said. “If by ‘great,’ I meant ‘nonexistent,’ which I did.”

  Immediately, I was sorry I’d snapped at her and shut her out, but the only other option was letting her in, and that would make it all worse.

  “Are you taking the couch or am I?” she asked.

  “I will,” I said, and went into the bathroom. The mirror had a little TV set into it, so a guy could watch the morning news while he shaved and avoid looking at himself altogether.

  14

  ELLA

  In the suite’s living room, I sat on a couch with my back straight and my hands in my lap. The exterior walls overlooked the landscape, and the interior walls were decorated with original art. The cushions were plush and luxurious.

  I felt like a tourist, but this was my life now.

  Logan and I were nothing more than business partners, but the feelings I wasn’t supposed to have were hurt by his insensitivity. He owed me nothing. Not trust in my judgment. Not respect for my decisions or love for the people I cared about.

  And I owed him nothing. He was from another universe, where the law was a friend and a judge would work on a Saturday just because he’d asked. He and I had been born on the same planet, but I’d been kicked off early enough to know it wasn’t the only one in the solar system.

  I couldn’t bridge the space between our worlds.

  Logan came out of the bathroom in sweatpants. Bare feet. No shirt.

  I’d spread my legs for him before seeing the full glory of his body.

  “There’s breakfast tomorrow with everyone,” he said. “We’ll brief beforehand.”

  I wanted to say more, but I had no idea what I wanted to tell him.

  “Look,” he said, ready to start some speech he’d obviously prepared in the bathroom. As beautiful and strong as his shoulders were, they seemed unable to handle his burden. “About what happened in the gara—”

  “I want valid things, Logan Crowne,” I said. “I need this deal. So don’t try to divorce me because they’re not your things.”

  He seemed so vulnerable in his half-naked state that I had to not only steel myself against a desire to touch him, but also a deeper need to reassure him that everything would be all right. Unable to bear standing that close to him, I went to the door.

  “I keep my promises,” he said, telling himself a story he needed to believe. That he was a trustworthy and loyal man whose word was a contract. I wanted to believe it too, but our contract was built on known lies and unknowable truths.

  “You will,” I said. “You’ll keep every last one of them.”

  Before he could answer, I walked into the bedroom, not looking back until my hand was on the doorknob, taking one last glance at physical perfection partnered with emotional shortfall.

  I closed the door between us, ending my wedding day.

  * * *

  As I lay in bed with the faraway party humming along, I couldn’t hear Logan on the other side of the wall. The house was probably soundproofed and too new for creaky floorboards, but I felt him pacing as if the vows we’d taken connected us by more than a signature.

  Of course he was worried. His mother had questioned our marriage, and she was absolutely right to do so. We’d anticipated that, yet the reality of those questions right after we had sex had probably caught him off guard. He was competent, but he was also human.

  I didn’t think I’d be able to sleep, but I did for a few hours, waking after three in the morning to the music of crickets and the chatter of night birds. The party must have ended.

  Wide awake, I slid out of bed in my sweatshirt and plaid flannel sleep pants to look into the darkness of the canyon. A deep balcony connected the living area and the bedroom, and at a metal table sat Logan Crowne with his face lit blue by his open laptop. He scrolled, banged at the keys, marked a notebook, and scrolled and banged some more. He’d put on a hoodie against the early morning chill, but his feet were bare in his slippers.

  After putting on shoes, I dug around my bag, found what I was looking for, and went outside. “Hey.”

  “Good morning.” He hit the enter key before looking at me. “There’s night staff if you want anything.”

  “I’m good. Here.” I held out the fuzzy Christmas socks I’d packed. “These are poly chenille. Warmest ever.”

  He took them as if he wasn’t quite sure what I wanted him to do with them.

  “They’re one size fits all.” I pointed at his feet. “And they’re clean. So.”

  “Santa socks?”

  “Yep.” I sat down. “Biggest lie ever told for the two biggest lie-tellers ever.”

  He chuckled and kicked off his slippers.

  “So, working late?” I asked.

  “It’s seven at night in Beijing.” He pulled the socks over his feet, stretching the jolly fat man’s smile. “And they never go home if there’s a fire to put out.”

  “Is there a fire?”

  “There’s always a fire.” He pushed his feet back into his slippers. “These really are warm. Thank you.” He closed the laptop and leaned back.

  “You’re close to your family,” I said.

  “Not all of them, but in general, yes.”

  “I was with my parents, but… you’ve met the family I have now. It’s not the same, obviously. I tried for a while, when I was a kid, but I got tired of being laughed at.” I cleared my throat, forcing away the memory of any specific, painful incident. There were too many and they were all unbearable. “Anyway, I don’t think I realized how much it would hurt you to lie to them.”

  “Are you talking about feelings, Ella?”

  “Are we not supposed to do that, Logan?”

  He smiled, looked into the darkness for a moment, before rubbing away an invisible blemish on his laptop. “Let’s talk about facts.” He pushed back to a slouch, lacing his hands over his stomach. “Did you ever wonder why I was at Wildwood? I mean, progressive school. Wall-to-wall music nerds. Art three times a week. Kids missing half the year because they were starring in some Marvel movie. Did that ever strike
you as weird?”

  “No. There were plenty of math kids.”

  “Sure. Nadia Goodman was in quant lab, adding corollaries to chaos theory, but that’s not me. I’m not a creative breakthrough guy. Look at me, and tell me what the fuck I was doing there?”

  In the silence, I looked at him in his blue hoodie and my Santa socks. His cheeks were shadowed with the first growth of beard. He was always clean-shaven in school. Always standing straight when everyone else was liquid. Running the entrepreneur society. Playing club lacrosse because we had no team. Dating a girl too ambitious for his traditional values.

  “Why then?” I asked. “You could have gone anywhere.”

  “Right.” He shifted in his seat in preparation, then back. “I could have.”

  “What happened?”

  “Once upon a time, in the hilly part of Beverly Hills, there lived a boy,” he started. I laughed, and he smiled before he continued. “Our neighbors moved, and the new owners gutted the place down to the studs. The entire property was a construction site. We—Byron and I—could see it over the fence from our rooms. It was pretty tempting, especially on weekends. All those piles of dirt to climb, the digging machines just sitting there. And we figured, why not? Just check it out. Who were we hurting?”

  He took a sip of his water and flipped a glass over to pour me some even though I hadn’t asked.

  “Byron inspected the foundation like a damn city planner. I scaled the house frame to get to the third story they were adding. I could see all the way to the ocean. I felt like I was on top of the world. Anything I could see was mine. The whole city. So I drew a sight line from the horizon to the house. Thank God I did.”

  I didn’t interrupt the pause he took.

  “The pool was empty. Just the tiles and a balled up painting sheet over a puddle of tar. Everything was so orderly except for that—the tar and unfolded sheet—so I looked again. It was Lyric, just lying there. She was the sheet. The puddle was blood.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “Yeah. I never yelled Byron’s name so loud. She had a concussion. Didn’t remember shit. Otherwise, she was okay, but my father asked what the fuck—and my dad doesn’t drop a ‘fuck’ unless he’s really pissed off. He asked us what the fuck happened?”

  “He couldn’t have blamed you,” I said.

  “I’ll never know. Because I lied. Like that.” He snapped his fingers. “Obviously she followed us, but I said I saw her crawling through a space in the fence from my window, so I grabbed Byron and went over there. My brother backed me up, but he wasn’t happy about it. I made him a liar too.”

  “Logan,” I said, “you were a kid.”

  “If I hadn’t seen her from the third floor, we would have gone home and left her on the bottom of that pool. She was two, for Chrissakes, and man, I loved that baby. Mom brought her home and I swaddled her and played with her and held her all the time. Then I almost killed her and lied about it because I thought…” He rubbed his eyes. “God, this is so ridiculous.” He dropped his hands onto the arms of the chair. “I’ve never told anyone this, and now that it’s about to come out of my mouth, I want to laugh at myself.”

  I drank a bit of water to hide my surprise, and he paused. Maybe to collect his thoughts, or to change his mind. He barely knew me, yet he trusted me with a story he’d kept to himself all these years. I wouldn’t dare break the spell to ask what this had to do with which school he wound up at.

  “It was Christmas break,” he said. “Sixth grade. I don’t know what that was like for you, applying to middle school?”

  “I was at Wildwood from first grade.”

  “Right. So you skipped it. It’s essays, interviews, events. Like college. A lot of pressure, but not a problem. I had it under control. Harvard-Westlake and one backup. I forget which because it didn’t matter. But when Dad asked what happened with Lyric, I just… all I could think was that if Harvard-Westlake knew I almost killed my sister, I was sunk. I’d lose control of the whole thing. So I lied. And it was fine. Right? Byron had my back. Lyric was okay. Nothing to see here.”

  He shifted to the edge of his seat and put his elbows on the table. I leaned into him, because here was the crux of the story.

  “But it was all a lie. My essay was about ethical business practice and I was a liar. I couldn’t do it. I rewrote it about some generic bullshit and fucked up my applications so bad they didn’t even waitlist me. I wouldn’t let my parents step in and write a check. Nothing. Exactly what a liar deserves.” He leaned back again. “My matriculation counselor found out Wildwood was under-enrolled. Didn’t get enough qualifying applicants. So I applied to make Mom happy. Tried to fuck that up too. I wrote the essay in iambic pentameter and they loved it.” He spread his arms, facing his palms up to the sky. “Here we are.”

  Here we were, under a clear sky, with the hum of the pool filter and the squeak of crickets accompanying a story he’d never told another soul. I didn’t know what response he was expecting or what he needed to hear. I couldn’t tell if he wanted me to soothe him, cheerlead his choices, or if he wanted me to bolster his low opinion of himself.

  “So why lie about this then?” I asked. “About us?”

  “Because I’m pissed my father put me in this situation. There’s nothing like anger to make you feel like you’re right to do wrong.”

  The observation wasn’t directed at me or my decision to take him up on his offer, but I felt it like a knife to the heart. I’d been angry for years, and I’d used that rage to justify marrying him.

  The moral high ground was narrow and slippery.

  “We can get an annulment,” I said, letting my heart speak before my brain sorted out the consequences.

  “And then what? For you?”

  “I’ll still be my father’s daughter. Still holding down the fort from the base.”

  He shrugged, hooking his toes around an empty chair to turn it and prop his feet on the cushion. “You’re all right. I definitely would have fucked you under other circumstances.”

  “But you never would have married me.”

  “Can’t say that’s a lie.”

  “Can you can keep it up for a year?” I said.

  “Maybe.” He leaned his head against the back of the chair to gaze at the sky, then closed his eyes. “I’m too tired to think.”

  “Me too.” I stood, holding out my hand. “Come on. There’s an ocean of mattress in there. It’s big enough for both of us.”

  He considered my hand for a moment, then took it, grabbed his laptop, and led me to the bedroom. He put down the computer, and I shut off the light before getting under the covers.

  “This is my side of the bed,” he said, standing over me and tossing his hoodie over a chair.

  “You said that the first time we slept together,” I answered, pulling the blanket up to my chin. “Our first date.”

  “And you pretended you were already asleep.”

  I shut my eyes, opened my mouth, and made snoring noises. He laughed, and I felt the mattress dip at the center as he crawled over me. When I felt him get under the covers, I thought I’d won the battle for territory until his feet pushed my legs.

  “Hey!”

  He shoved me to the edge, laughing as I fought back move for move. I was no match for him, and before I knew it, the sheets were a mess and I was halfway to falling off.

  “Yield!” he cried, pinning my wrist to the night table.

  “Never!” With my free hand, I pinched a chunk of skin under his ribs.

  He pulled away, back to the center, giving me enough room to slide back. “Is that how it is?”

  He grabbed me and we wrestled, our troubles forgotten in laughter and hand-to-hand combat. I tried to pinch him again, but he was too quick, grabbing my hand, then the other, and holding them together with two fingers.

  “You want to play dirty.” He reached under my arm and tickled me. I squealed. “Oh, she’s ticklish!”

  “Cheat—” The word was drowned in u
ncontrollable giggles. I twisted away, and he rolled with me, getting on top so he could pin my wrists to the headboard with one hand.

  “What was that?” he asked.

  “That’s cheating,” I said between gasps for breath.

  “You mean this?” He went to tickle me again, but when I tried to roll, he slid between my legs to pin me with his pelvis.

  He was hard.

  We didn’t say a word. We didn’t move. We’d gone from dead serious, to playful, to aroused in the space of ten minutes.

  “That night,” he whispered, letting my wrists go. “You let me have my side of the bed, but not right away.”

  “When?” My hips pushed into his rod with an involuntarily jerk.

  He slipped his hand under my sweatshirt and traced the underside of my breast with his fingertips.

  “After we finished our first date.” His teasing fingers were cool on my nipple, making it even harder.

  “So we’re on the same date? Now?”

  “Do you want to be?”

  “Yes. Do you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I think…” I had to stop when he turned the nipple just enough to make me push into him. “It’s the same night so…” He gently twisted the other way. “So not a problem for feelings. Right?”

  “Right.” He pulled my shirt over my breasts, eyes flicking from one to the other as if deciding between desserts before choosing the left to suck. “No feelings.”

  He slid his hands along my sides and pushed my pants down, his mouth following. When I was bare, he threw the pants aside and held me by the calves, raising and spreading my legs.

  “I ate your pussy,” he said, kissing the inside of my knee and working up. “And you came, but you tasted so good…” He ran his tongue along my seam, leaving the tip at the head of my clit and circling. “I couldn’t stop.”

  He kissed the nub, and I groaned. When I looked down, he was looking right back at me. Pressing me open, he flicked, watching me as he made me writhe with his mouth, gently pulling my clit between his teeth before pushing his tongue inside.