Under the Surface

by Anne Calhoun

  “Let it go, Mom,” she said, resigned. “Please.”

  They ate in silence for a few moments, then Eve cleared the table and loaded the dishwasher. Only when they sat down to frozen yogurt topped with strawberries did her mother circle back to Door Number One. “Are you seeing anyone?” she said brightly.

  Just a tall, mysterious, newly hired bartender, and for the most part, in her dreams. “Not really,” she equivocated. “No one serious anyway.”

  “Evie, dear, you don’t really have time…”

  The screen door squeaked, then the front door opened. “Hello?” Caleb called.

  Thank God and all his archangels. “In here,” Eve said as she jumped to her feet. “Have you eaten?” Normally she’d make Caleb get his own food, but escape, if only to the kitchen, seemed prudent at the moment. Her neck felt as tight as Chad’s had in the Jeep.

  Her brother skirted the dining room and came straight into the kitchen. Like her, Caleb had inherited their father’s wavy black hair and green eyes, and he’d kept the muscular, rangy build from his college basketball days. “Hey, sis. Quinn and I split a pizza. What’s for dessert?”

  “Frozen yogurt and crushed strawberries.”

  He lifted his brows, then looked at the barely touched pan of eggplant congealing in the red sauce. “What the hell is that?” he asked incredulously.

  “Language, Caleb!” Her mother’s voice came from the dining room.

  Eve lowered her voice. “Dad’s cholesterol is still too high. Mom’s gone vegetarian.”

  A longer look from her brother while she scooped frozen yogurt and spooned mashed strawberries into the bowl, then he said, “Based on the way you’re attacking that tub of fake ice cream I’d say they had you roasted.”

  She slid him a glance. “Dad talked to Lee McCullough at Lancaster Life about a job for me.”

  “And?”

  “And I don’t want to develop communication strategies for a mutual insurance company,” she said as she snapped the top on the container of strawberries.

  Her mother’s lowered voice filtered through the pass-through. “… should be watching out for Cesar, not dragging him into … admire her initiative, but … isn’t going anywhere.”

  Caleb gave her a wry smile, then opened the fridge for her and said, “I’ve got your back, sister dear,” then swung through the door to the dining room. Eve put the yogurt back in the freezer, then followed him. Her brother waited until she had a spoonful of strawberries in her mouth, then said, “So, Mom, who’s pregnant?”

  Eve glared at him, but the look slid right past their mother, who’d brightened right up. “Melissa Reyes just had her baby boy, and Trina Martin is due any day now. It’s her first. Poor thing, she’s so uncomfortable in this heat.”

  “That’s wonderful,” Caleb said, smiling right at her. “They must be so happy. Children are such a blessing, and the first one’s really a special experience for the parents.”

  Goddammit, Caleb.

  She made her escape an hour later but waited beside her brother’s Mercedes until Caleb emerged, a plastic container of red sauce and purple goop in one hand.

  “Thanks for all your help in there,” she said.

  He shrugged. “You’re not going to change their minds, Evie, so you might as well have a little fun with it.” With complete disregard for the supple, tan leather, he tossed the container onto the passenger seat. “After the way they grew up, Mom and Dad have a finely honed sense of what’s right and proper. I’m not saying you should spend your life trying to meet their expectations, but you have to understand where they’re coming from.”

  “I know all about what respectable people do,” she said. “I grew up respectably. I am respectable!”

  “Do you want their approval?”

  “No,” she said simply. “If I did I would have quit the Met ten years ago. I want their acceptance. The same acceptance they give you.”

  And, if she were honest, maybe their approval …

  He gave her a slightly twisted, very un-Caleb smile. “Acceptance isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, Evie, because it usually means you’re going up in flames on the pyre of expectations. You could get married. That might help.”

  “You’re older. You get married.”

  He ignored her. “I missed the boyfriend discussion. You seeing anyone? Quinn asked about you again.”

  “I’m not going out with your partner, much less marrying him.”

  “He’s a good guy,” Caleb said mildly.

  “Blond laid-back ex-surfer dudes are not my type.”

  “Eve, just define some parameters for me and I’ll solve all your problems with Mom and Dad. Every unattached male at the firm’s Christmas party last year asked me for your number, and a couple of the married ones too.”

  With Eye Candy’s plans already set in motion, she’d served as her brother’s hostess for the party to make connections, and would do so again this year. She rolled her eyes. “Men are dogs. Barking, rutting dogs.”

  He didn’t deny it. “What are you looking for? An intellectual property attorney making half a million a year? A level-headed mediator leaving a trail of peace and calm wherever he goes? A public defender on a crusade against crooked cops?”

  Completely unbidden, the image of Chad, his eyes dark and heavy-lidded as he watched her grind against him, bloomed in her mind. Tall, with boxer’s hands and broad shoulders, and something dark lurking in his serious hazel eyes. The questions he asked about her, about Eye Candy, like he really saw her, really liked her.

  “What he does for a living doesn’t matter. When I do start looking seriously, I want someone who sees me for me, not as a piece of ass to bang for a few weeks, or a trophy wife to go with his car and his house and his big-screen TV.”

  “That’s going to considerably limit my candidate pool,” Caleb said wryly.

  “I have met your colleagues,” she said, then eased up a little. “Stop being such a big brother. You’ve got lots of time because I’m not looking for anyone now,” she said, then pointed at the eggplant leftovers steaming up the Tupperware plastic interior. “You don’t want to eat that.”

  “It’s going down the disposal as soon as I get home,” he agreed. “Take care, sis.”

  Caleb roared off in his Mercedes while she climbed into her Cherokee and headed toward Eye Candy. Once there, she got out of her car, her own plastic container of leftovers in hand, and stood in the empty parking lot. The heat clung oppressively to the blacktop, but as the sun went down the air became tolerable. Maybe she’d put on shorts and running shoes and go for a walk in the twilight, let humidity and exercise ease some of the kinks worked into her neck by her family’s loving disapproval. Or their disapproving love. However she framed it, it clung to her much like the buildup of the day’s heat, close, suffocating, yet life-giving as the air she breathed.

  As she climbed the stairs to her apartment she tried to imagine Chad coming to a Monday night dinner with her parents, but somehow he didn’t fit. Too quiet. Too constrained, especially on a night when Caleb and her father really got going on local politics and the East Side’s pressing needs. Which was a shame because half of what attracted her to him was that solid quiet, listening, absorbing, processing.

  * * *

  For the next week, Chad continued to show up early. On Friday she tucked the cash for his extra hours helping her with prep into his tip jar, only to find it when she counted the night’s take, neatly rubber-banded with a sticky note on top. NICE TRY, BOSS.

  On Saturday she got downstairs before Chad knocked, which was unusual. She unlocked the door and found Travis Jenkins leaning against the wall. The second guy from Lyle’s unwanted visit did his slouching thing against the black SUV.

  “This okay?” Travis asked. He wore church clothes, black pants, a white shirt, and a tie. Eve would have smiled at the transformation if her stomach wasn’t swelling like a bullfrog in her throat.

  “That’s fine,” she said, surprised
that her voice came out normal, not a croak. “Come in.”

  “Anyone else here?” Travis asked as he followed her into the dark room. Their footfalls echoed in the space, Eve’s faster, more in time with her racing heart as she went for the light switches and turned on every light on the main floor. Normally she preferred to work by lights over the bar, especially when Chad stood beside her, but with Travis, she wanted as much light as she could get. At the same time, she turned on the video cameras, the ones she normally left off until the doors opened.

  “Not yet,” she said. Chad would show up in a while, Natalie shortly after. She needed to get Travis out of the bar before either of them appeared. “Where’s Lyle?”

  “Busy. How’s your dad?”

  “Fine,” Eve said absently. Not good. Her contact at the police department, Lieutenant Hawthorn, made it very clear that they needed evidence of Lyle’s involvement, not Travis’s. She’d failed to get that evidence the night Lyle showed up, and she wasn’t going to get it today either. She’d counted on seeing Lyle personally. If he started using a middleman to deal with her, this could take months, if not years.

  Long haul, Eve. Stay calm, and focus on the long game.

  “Your brother? What’s he think of all this?”

  Travis knew perfectly well how Caleb felt about Lyle. “Like I told him anything,” Eve scoffed, then wondered if she was playing it too obviously. “What Caleb doesn’t know won’t hurt him.”

  Travis flicked a glance at the wall of liquor behind her. Eve realized he expected a drink. “What can I get you?”

  “Vodka rocks,” he said, nodding at the Ketel One.

  Eve splashed a healthy amount over ice cubes and handed him the drink. This was precisely why clubs like hers were great for laundering money. Liquor ordered was easy to quantify coming in, but harder to quantify going out. As long as Lyle kept his deposits reasonable, she could explain the high take with a good client base and watered-down drinks.

  Travis slid a slip of paper across the bar to her, followed by a black plastic bag wrapped in a rectangle and duct taped. “Account numbers and your first deposit.”

  She picked up the paper and looked at the account and routing numbers, then took the bag and used a knife to slit it open. Her eyes widened at the stack of bills, smoothed and neatly stacked. “Tell Lyle he’s got to do this more frequently than once a week,” she said. “I can’t up my deposit by this much one day a week, even factoring in a Saturday night bump.”

  “He knows,” Travis said, once again looking around the bar. “Spread that out over a couple days if you have to. We’ll even things out next week.”

  Bank, routing, and account numbers were good, but Hawthorn had told her they needed more. “Any chance I’ll see him again?” she asked, trying for casual as she shoved the dirty drug money under the counter.

  Travis huffed air through his nostrils. “Miss him?”

  “Of course,” Eve said. “We were good friends. I want to catch up, you know. He got a girlfriend?”

  Travis’s smile shifted into an oily smirk. “Lots of girls. No girlfriend.”

  She almost choked on her next words, forcing them through her tight throat, because the last thing she wanted was to get personal with Lyle. They had been friends, when they were kids, back before Lyle made his choices. She hated everything he’d become, what he did to people and communities, knew the lies and betrayal were absolutely necessary, but it went against her grain to pretend she felt something she didn’t. “Well, tell him I miss him and I’d like to see him one of these afternoons.”

  “What about you, Eve? Got yourself a man?”

  His tone was silky, as intimate as the way his gaze slid over her. She was used to men looking at her like that; most of the time she ignored it, but right now, she didn’t like it. But she bit back her automatic withering response. “Nothing serious,” she said, trying for a coy smile, knowing she probably looked like a simpering idiot. God. The cops should give acting lessons. “Just a little something to tide me over until I find someone who’s got the same interests I do.”

  “He said if you do a good job for him, he can do a good job for you,” Travis said with an oblique nod at the back of the room.

  It took a second for Eve to get it. The abandoned warehouse behind Eye Candy. Lyle must have friends at the county records office. “Oh,” she said. “Oh! He could do that for me? That would be great!” The surprise was real, but the delight was totally fake. If Lyle bought that building and the operation worked, the land would be tied up with the court case, leaving her high and dry. More importantly, she got what she had on her own. She didn’t want help from anyone. Not her family, who couldn’t afford to help her. Not Caleb, who could. Especially not a drug dealer.

  “I’ll let him know you’re keeping your options open,” Travis said, then tossed back the rest of his drink. “All your options.”

  After he left, Eve snatched up the money and the accounts list, then called Lieutenant Hawthorn. No answer. She left a message for him to call her back as soon as possible, then went upstairs to get dressed for the night. After a quick stop in the office to stow the drug money and accounts in the safe, she hurried through the door to her apartment and stood in front of her tiny closet. Trying to pick out an appropriate outfit for the night wasn’t easy, but she had to look and act completely normal. What she really wanted was to make sure Chad couldn’t keep his eyes off her during the night, and his hands off her after close.

  Black leather caught her eye. She shoved hangers aside, then smiled. Perfect.

  * * *

  The alarm on Matt’s personal cell yanked him from REM sleep to full alert so quickly there was no time for his brain to layer identities. Shards of reality crashed into his consciousness in a huge, clattering jumble: Eve, cop, music, Luke, the prices of various AC units, and a recipe for a Soul Kiss an extremely persistent blonde had insisted on teaching him the night before. Her number was on a napkin in his tip jar at the end of the night.

  Eve. Green-eyed, smiling, sexy Eve, who made the blonde look as appealing as a blowup doll.

  The phone vibrated persistently on the bed beside him. He shut off the alarm. Eyes still closed, he fought free of the sheet then lay on his back and tried to piece identities together. No luck. The white napkin held an imprint of a reddish lipstick, not puckered in a kiss but in the stretched lips of a blowjob, with a phone number and a ridiculous, incongruous smiley face in the center. But Chad Henderson was falling for his boss, so he didn’t want mindless, impersonal sex with the blonde.

  Matt Dorchester didn’t want to fuck her either, because for the last week, he’d continued to show up early, help with prep, talked to Eve every night.

  The talking sucked.

  When he could keep it purely physical, pretend it was just attraction and the lure of the forbidden, he’d hide behind his body’s response to Eve, which started out sizzling and after a week of slow was on a steady boil. He treated her like a girl he was getting to know, a girl he liked, so he still got the smiles, the looks from under her sliding, gleaming hair. Every time he touched her, his brain stopped working for a second.

  He swung his feet over the side of the bed and rubbed grit from his eyes before running his hands through his hair. It still surprised him every time he touched it, the length and wiry curl a distant memory from childhood, before his father took him for his first high and tight when he was seven. The hair went a long way toward masking cop/ex-military, and so did Eve’s first choice of conversational topics.

  Sometimes she talked about the Riverside Business Park but mostly she talked about music. Bands they’d heard live, bands they wanted to hear live, concert venues, their perfect concert lineup, tours they’d missed. He held up his end of the conversation there. Based on their conversations, she’d put together an ever-changing selection of music to liven up the repetitive prep work. He’d heard more music in the last week than he had in the last decade, and it was damned good music too—sing
er/songwriters who could articulate everything he felt but never found words for. Eve had an equally potent knack for stringing together playlists, and his stomach turned over at the thought of her sitting down in the early morning hours or early afternoon, drinking her coffee, poring over iTunes to find new music she thought he might like.

  The serious cognitive dissonance between what his heart felt and what his brain knew meant two-hour workouts at three in the morning were now the norm. His body ached, so he needed extra time to pull on jeans and a polo, flexing his hands before buttoning his fly, stretching gingerly to see what popped, cracked, or flat-out broke. So far so good, but he needed coffee before operating a motor vehicle.

  Half a pot of coffee steamed in the kitchen. He got down a travel mug and filled it, drained it black, poured out the rest of the old coffee, then measured out grounds and water for a second pot, and sat down at the dining room table next to his brother. Without a word Luke adjusted his ultra-lightweight wheelchair to give Matt some leg space under the table, then went back to clicking and tapping at his laptop.

  “You look like shit warmed over,” Luke said a few minutes later.

  Matt grunted. “I’ll take your word for it,” he said. “Looking in the mirror this morning seemed like a bad idea.”

  “I heard you working out,” Luke said. “You’ve been at it pretty hard this week.”

  “I’ve been busy,” Matt said. “Sorry to keep you up.”

  Luke looked at him like he’d lost his mind. “You finish at six a.m. I’m up for PT at seven.”

  His brother hated physical therapy. In the months after the accident Matt had bullied, cajoled, enticed, and flat-out forced him to do the PT. Around eighteen, Luke grudgingly accepted that it was a fact of his life now, but he’d still rather do it first thing in the morning than dread it all day.

  “You ate?” Matt asked as he mainlined coffee, then rummaged through the cupboards and pulled out a box of Pop-Tarts.

  “Dude,” Luke said. “Your diet sucks. If I have to quit smoking, you have to start eating something that grew in the ground or fell off a tree.”