by Lucas, Helen
Oh, who am I kidding? They’re one in the same anyway.
“Well, there’s the thing, Kyle,” Nicholas said with a sigh. “Liana says she’ll behave herself but the heroin doesn’t necessarily agree with her. She’s at rehab on Long Island now but who knows how long she’ll stay? She’s a grown-ass woman. We can’t make her stay somewhere she doesn’t want to.”
“Why can’t we get her parents on board again?” I grumbled.
“They’re on permanent vacation in Maui. You know that as well as I do. They’ll keep moving twenty-grand into her checking account every month until they die, and then she’ll get it all at once. Hell, if she overdosed, I doubt they’d even notice—that account would just grow fatter and fatter, with no one to spend it on smack and Lululemon yoga pants.”
I scowled. I blamed Liana’s parents for fucking her up, but hey, we all blame our parents for messing us up, don’t we?
Marrying her was obviously a mistake, in retrospect, though tell that to my young self four years ago. I had just finished my gig at Goldman and I was on top of the world, flush with cash, and horny as hell. I was a young stud, determined to make New York City my bitch.
I was an asshole.
I still am, but I’ve got more self-awareness now.
And there she was—a hot mess of a Barnard girl, gorgeous blonde hair pulled back into a braid, skinny to the point of sickness but looking like an Eastern European model, leaning over the railing of a SoHo loft and giggling as the DJ spun records. I had pulled her into my arms, we had danced, and we had breakfast the next morning. For me, breakfast was eggs, bacon, and toast. For her, it was a cigarette, a cup of coffee, and a line of cocaine.
I should have known it was wrong, but the things that are bad for us are so tasty sometimes. The wedding was an outrageous, almost disgustingly luxurious affair on Governor’s Island. Bloomberg was there, so were the Clintons. Katy Perry played the reception.
And from day one, things started to fall apart. Probably the first thing that should have clued me into the fact that we wouldn’t work out was the day after when I woke up alone in bed, stumbled into the bathroom, and found her in the bathtub, naked, twitching, with the busboy dozing shirtless between her legs.
We tried to make things work. Really. We did.
But sometimes, you can’t buy everything.
But you can try. And boy, did I try. I got the best marriage counselors I could find—half of them bullshitted me, the other half suggested a divorce, an annulment, or a separation, depending on who I asked. I tried to get Liana to go to rehab twice, only to have her check herself out after less than a week, claiming she had “seen the light” and whatever else the staff wanted to hear. I tried getting her a job so she would have responsibilities, have something to do during the day that wasn’t heroin and yoga, but she was fired from Edelman, Nicholas’s old public relations outfit, within a week and barely managed to hold down a gig as a yoga instructor for a month before she blew off a week of classes to go to Bermuda with friends.
In the end, I was spending more time working on Liana than I was working on my company. I knew one of them would have to go and at thirty-one, I’m too young to retire. I gave her an ultimatum: get help, or I was leaving.
I had told that to Liana one morning over breakfast. For me, my morning routine consisted of a run, half an hour at the boxing gym, and then a big breakfast of oatmeal, eggs, chicken sausage, and a kale smoothie. For Liana, it was a cigarette, a glass of white wine, and a cup of coffee if she had to go anywhere.
She looked at me with dull, uncomprehending eyes as I delivered my final decree.
“Wait, what?” she mumbled as I finished up my planned speech. I scowled and stormed out, something the marriage counselors had advised me not to do. But that was my first reaction. First reactions are usually bad.
I found my things being loaded into a moving truck when I came home that evening. I charged up to our fifty-ninth floor high-rise condo and found it locked. A big Israeli mover pushed me out of the way as he strode by with boxes.
I’m not a man who likes to be pushed. I’m not the kind of man you push. I’m the kind of man who does the pushing. I push. I don’t get pushed.
But then I stopped. I found my hands sliding into my pocket, feeling the cool, sharp metal of my condo keys, pressing the metal into my flesh.
No, it wasn’t worth it. I had everything else. I had money. I could go to a hotel. I would figure it out.
And so, instead of confronting Liana, I had turned around and walked right back to the elevator. I took the elevator down to the lobby in silence, ignored the quiet gazes of the other residents, other bankers and lawyers and doctors who usually ignored me, usually didn’t have much to say to me nor I them. But now, the only human interaction they would offer me was a quiet look of pity.
I didn’t want their pity. I didn’t fucking care.
I stormed out of the building, gaze the moving company my phone number, told them to call me when they had picked everything up and take it to a storage warehouse in New Jersey. Then, I checked myself into the Hilton and called my lawyer.
The divorce was easy. Liana agreed to everything, and we had signed a pre-nup beforehand, so the proceedings went smoothly. It was what happened afterwards that made my life a living hell.
Liana calling me constantly, showing up at my office, interrupting dinners, stalking me around town… The particular instance immortalized on the cover of this tabloid showed a moment last weekend when she had tracked me down to a Midtown restaurant where I was holding a dinner for my new management team, congratulating everyone on a good first quarter. It was a welcome distraction from the madness of dealing with my ex-wife.
And then, into our private dining room, Liana stormed, her thin, pale face running with mascara, her lipstick slathered on awkwardly, a glass of white wine in her hand.
“Kyle,” she screamed. “I can’t find the fucking remote!”
I remember simply putting my head down on the dinner table, face-down, as the staff escorted her out. My people know about my wife; they know the trouble we’ve been going through. None of them were surprised. I couldn’t think of a better crowd to have that happen in front of.
But then, she had hidden out outside the restaurant, in a line of clubgoers waiting to get into the night spot next to the restaurant. She flung herself at me, screaming as I hailed a cab that was meant for me, but which I ended up depositing her in, handing the cabbie a hundred-dollar bill, and telling him to take her back to the condo.
I guess there had been some paparazzi in the area. You can never escape. There’s something that money can’t buy me, I suppose. Damn it all to hell.
“Nick, just make her go away…” I sighed. “Make it all go away.”
“Like I said, Kyle. Not that easy,” my friend and PR man said with another long-suffering sigh. “You know that Jenkins Consulting is starting to say they don’t want to work with us?”
My eyes widened and I sat up in my chair. Jenkins was a consulting outfit we had been looking at acquiring for the last six months. The deal was almost done with.
“What? Why is this the first time I’m hearing about it?” I demanded, reaching for my phone.
Nicholas smiled cautiously, smiling the smile of a man who’s not happy about anything.
“They—“ this meant the other senior company officers. “—wanted me to tell you. So you wouldn’t be mad.”
“Damn right I’m mad!” I yelled. “Just over this stupid thing?”
“It’s everything, Kyle. Your divorce has been in the tabloids for weeks, months even. It’s one thing after another. These aren’t glamorous celebrities you’re working with—they don’t want to work with Chris Brown. They want someone who doesn’t get written up for slapping his ex-wife.”
“I didn’t slap her! I put her in a taxi home!” I protested, growling like a cornered beast. But like a cornered beast, I was ready to fight.
“I know that. And she know
s that. And hell, the tabloids probably know that. But does the rest of the world know that?”
I sat back in my chair and once again, turned around, taking in my skyline, the skyline and panorama of the city I planned on someday owning. It had darkened over the course of my conversation with Nicholas. Now, storm clouds were moving in from off Long Island Sound. Big, bloody, angry ones, with deep rumbling emanating from their guts that spoke of an oncoming tempest.
I glanced down to the street, seeing the people, like little ants down there, rushing about, trying to take cover and hail cabs as the rain began to fall. Within moments, moments of silence between myself and Nicholas, bullet-sized drops of rain began to pour out of the sky, peppering the ground like shotgun pellets.
I might have been a cornered beast ready to fight, but that didn’t matter one damned bit if I were shot down before I could do anything.
“Is there anything I can do to improve my reputation, then?” I asked, turning back once more to my friend. Nicholas stood, taking his glass with him as he walked over to one of my bookshelves. I used to keep books on management and finance in my office, but found that I never looked at them and, besides, who really cares about reading books like that? So, instead, I switched them all out for the classics—Faulkner, Hemingway, Melville, Shakespeare. Nicholas set down his scotch and plucked The Great Gatsby out of the shelf.
“Gatsby dies in the end, Nick,” I grumbled. “Your choice of reading material is not making me feel anymore confident.”
“You could always start a charity or a foundation,” Nicholas suggested finally, setting down the book. “Something that’ll get people distracted, that’ll make them think of you as a philanthropist, rather than a wife-beating billionaire.”
“I’m not…”
“Damn it, Kyle!” Nicholas roared, turning on me. “I know you’re a fine, decent man but that’s not what you pay me for. I’m telling you what this says you are! That’s what you pay me for!”
He strode up to my desk, pointing at the tabloid.
“And this says you’re a rich playboy who slaps around his ex-wife, a girl barely out of college! It doesn’t say anything about her using drugs or cheating on you or kicking you out of your house! All it says is that you were seen with your hands on her outside of a nightclub!”
Nicholas was one of the only people I’d let talk to me that way, and even then, it was hard not to leap over my desk and throw a left-hook into his jaw.
Hell, if I did that, he wouldn’t even hold it against me. And not just because he’d be too busy holding a package of frozen carrots against his cracked jaw.
But that would’ve been a waste of time.
And besides, he was right. Right about every damned thing.
“Fine. Fine,” I growled. “I’ll look for… Something. Some way to give back.”
“Think of it as a long term plan. Look at Bill Gates—billionaire to philanthropist. Don’t see it as a chore. See it as an opportunity.”
All right. I would try to see it as an opportunity.
At least this seemed like something I could, literally, throw money at. My favorite way to pass the time.
Coming soon… Homecoming: A Stepbrother Romance Novel.
Excerpt:
Laramie, Georgia. Population: 52, 890. Not quite a small town. Not quite a city. But it’s home.
It was the last day of summer vacation. The last day of summer before my senior year. And then after my senior year would be my freshman year of college. And then after that…
It was hard to imagine. Hard to imagine that I would ever have a life that extended beyond the narrow confines of my hometown. Hard to imagine that a time would come when I wasn’t walking down the main town’s main street when I wasn’t on my way home to that… That house.
A shudder ran through my body as I caught a glimpse of it over the tops of trees and buildings. Laramie has maintained a nice, old-timesy downtown. The kind that looks like it just stepped out of an old movie or a Norman Rockwell painting. And sitting on a hill at the end of Main Street was… my house. A huge, 19th century mansion, ornate but decaying. The sun tended to set in such a way that as I walked home from school each evening after doing my homework in the school library till god knows when, it would sink down behind the house. A total eclipse, wrought by my childhood home.
I couldn’t wait to get out. And the idea terrified me.
Laramie used to have more going on. Happening, as my dad might say. Affluent, my high school teachers might say.
Not shitty, is what we say. By we, I mean the kids who’ve had the misfortune to grow up here. We used to be right on the railroad to Atlanta, used to have factories outside of town that gave everyone a good living. Or, that’s what everyone says.
Now, the factories are all closed. The railroad decided to close down the train station since no one was using it. And now, we’re a nowhere town, with barely anything happening.
You could tell that from the way people walked around, the way they moved so listlessly, as if the world were passing them by and it was fine by them.
I had to get out. I couldn’t wait to get out. But I had never known another world.
My father grew up here, and so did his father, and his father before him. My mother was from somewhere else—she had grown up in New York City, the daughter of a banker or something like that. I had no idea why she’d come down to Laramie—why you’d leave the glitz and glamor of the city for a place… A place like this.
But she died years ago. I barely remember her. My step-mother, Maria, is also from somewhere else—from Italy, of all places. She runs a pizzeria downtown, maybe the only business in Laramie that isn’t in any danger of closing.
It was unseasonably cold for late August, and especially late August in Georgia. The news stations were making a big deal about it, calling it a once in a century occurrence, the fact that the temperatures had gone below sixty degrees. Like most everyone else who grew up down here, I turn to mush if it ever gets below sixty. I could never imagine living somewhere with snow.
But I wanted to try it.
That afternoon, I was on my way home from a meeting with my college admissions counselor at the Laramie United High, the only public high school left in town after all the others were consolidated. Consolidated because people had moved out, because people had moved on, because there was damn near no one left in town.
I had assumed I would go to either Powell University, where my father teaches law and where my city studies—it’s located in Laramie and it’s probably the only business besides Maria’s restaurant that’s not in danger of going under—or the University of Georgia.
But based on my grades and all the volunteering I had done over the last three years of high school, my counselor was pushing me to aim higher. She was a nice, smiley lady, not too many years older than me, and she had been an admissions officer at Duke a few years ago.
“Honestly, Sarah,” she was telling me. “You maintained a 4.0 GPA while volunteering twenty hours a week, every week, for the past three years. There’s not a college in the country that wouldn’t be interested in you.”
Honestly, Ms. Cassidy—that was her name—I was just trying to stay out of the house, because the less I’m in the house, the less opportunity my dad has to get drunk and slap me around.
But I didn’t say that. I just smiled and nodded, thanking her, all demure, just like I was supposed to. A perfect little Southern belle.
I was lost in thoughts of where I might apply—the dream of getting out of Georgia now weighed as heavily on my mind as the admissions brochures from the University of Pennsylvania, Syracuse, Dartmouth, Georgetown, and more did in my backpack—when I walked straight into a tall, unmovable object.
I gasped, yelped, tumbled to the hard sidewalk. Typical Sarah. Total klutz that I am.
“Watch where you’re going,” a voice growled as I cradled my bruised head.
I looked up and that was the first time I really saw what I had run
into—a man, not a lamp post.
“Oh, Jesus, I’m sorry,” I said, stumbling to my feet. He was tall, soaring to well over six feet as far as I could tell, with shoulders that seemed to go on forever. His dark face was covered in a scowl.
He wore his hair cut short, like a military crew cut that had grown out, and his jeans, his wife-beater, and his worn leather jacket tossed over his muscular shoulders seemed to fit him like a tight, bespoke glove. A few days stubble glistened on his cheeks and chin, except for a spot along his left cheek where a long, thick scar stretched up to his ear.
