Hard Sell (21 Wall Street)

by Lauren Layne

  “Right, I get it. No point in putting on the show with no audience,” she interrupts. “I wrote the contract, remember?”

  “Sabrina.”

  She sets her champagne on the kitchen table. “I’m going to take a quick walk. I’ll call Juno in on my way back, and we can get going as soon as I get her cleaned up.”

  I grit my teeth. I know her well enough to know she’ll walk out the door no matter what I say, so I stay silent and let her go.

  I start to sip my champagne, but I no longer want it. I set it aside and pull a beer out of the fridge instead. Popping the cap, I wander out onto the porch, scanning the beach until I see Sabrina’s slim figure in the red sweater, the big dog running long laps around her with a huge stick extending on either side of her head.

  For a painful moment, I feel a fierce longing to join them. To be welcome to join them.

  Instead, I sip my beer and take in a long breath of salty ocean air.

  It’s nice. Nicer than I realized, to get out of the city, where I don’t feel the constant need to check email, to answer my phone, to straighten my tie, to be quick with a joke.

  It’s even a relief to have a break from the numbers. That’s the thing with this damn calculator brain of mine. If numbers are there, I process them, even when I don’t need to. Everything from the stock ticker on every TV in Wall Street down to the receipt at a restaurant sets the numbers part of my brain humming.

  Much in the way I imagine writers always have a little part of their attention tapped into their next story, a little part of me seems to be sorting and re-sorting numbers, just because they’re there.

  But they’re not here now. There’s nothing but afternoon sunshine, a brisk breeze, sand, water . . . a beautiful woman.

  My woman.

  It’s past time I do something about that.

  Hell if I know what. Or how.

  I go back into the kitchen and open the fridge, this time to survey the food situation. Not only did The Sams have a whole arsenal of gourmet groceries delivered by some fancy white-glove service, they’d been planning on a party of six for the entire weekend.

  The food options are endless. My cooking skills? Not so much.

  I pull out a couple of varieties of expensive cheese and an enormous New York strip steak. This I can handle. Probably. I also find a couple of baking potatoes and crackers from the pantry and a serving dish to put the cheese on.

  A few minutes later, I’ve got a decent-looking cheese plate happening, potatoes in the oven, and red wine decanting on the counter. My steak-seasoning skills are limited to salt and pepper, but gauging from the price tag on the steak, I don’t think it’ll matter so long as I don’t burn the hell out of it.

  I’ve just turned on the grill on the back porch when I hear Juno’s bark, followed by the dog’s awkward scampering up the stairs. A moment later, Sabrina appears.

  She freezes when she sees me, and I freeze, too, not in surprise, but because of how beautiful she looks. The wind and sea air have made her hair wilder and wavier than usual, and her cheeks are flushed pink, not from any expensive compact but from the wind, and because I know her . . . probably from a little anger. At me.

  Her gaze flits from my face to the grill lid that’s still open, then down at the dog, who must have some sort of sixth sense that meat is on the horizon because she’s panting happily, her tail wagging like crazy.

  I clear my throat. “Figured it was a waste to go back tonight. After we drove all the way here.”

  She leans against one of the pillars of the porch, crossing her arms. “It’s a big house to have all to ourselves.”

  Juno barks in objection at being left out, but we both ignore her.

  I slowly walk toward Sabrina. “I’m doing it for you, you know. As good as your professional skills are, your domestic persona’s a little rusty.”

  Her eyebrows lift. “Is that so?”

  “Don’t get me wrong, you do sushi restaurants and cocktail parties really well. And museum fund-raisers, and dinner parties, and dresses and heels.”

  “Why do I get the sense I’m being insulted somehow?”

  “Because it’s me,” I say, reaching out and capturing an errant curl, just because I can. “And because it’s you. And because over the years you’ve built up so many damn walls where I’m concerned, you won’t hear a damn thing I say without first filtering it for an insult.”

  “Maybe that’s because that’s how you started out this whole thing.”

  “Or maybe,” I say quietly, “it’s because even then you were primed to be suspicious.”

  Her nostrils flare in irritation. “Just like a man, putting the blame on me. Poor you, wrongfully accused—”

  “No, rightly accused,” I interrupt. “I don’t deny that I was an idiot. But maybe you got my motivations wrong.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning I have walls, too. And back on that first night, I think I was terrified that, for the first time in my adult life, someone might scale them. That you might scale them.”

  Her lips part in surprise, but for once, she has no sassy retort. Instead she studies me for a long moment. “If we stay, I’m not helping cook.”

  “Well thank God for that,” I say, playing along with her need to lighten the mood.

  Sabrina smiles, then reaches out and grabs the beer from my hand, taking a sip. Then she makes a face. “I hate beer.”

  “Wine’s open in the kitchen.”

  “Much better,” she says. “You fetch that while I take Juno around to the hose on the side of the house. Though I’m not sure wet dog will be that much better than sandy dog.”

  She heads back down the steps, whistling for Juno to follow, and I allow myself a small smile. I know that I’ve just lost a prime opportunity to spend time wooing a richer-than-shit dream client.

  But I’m not the least bit upset by it.

  Because instead, I get an entire weekend to go about wooing my dream woman.

  26

  SABRINA

  Friday Night, October 6

  After the sun set, the weather went quickly from being “brisk and refreshing” to downright cold, but neither Matt nor I seemed to care. Instead we pulled on every layer we brought with us, helped ourselves to the stack of fleece blankets rolled neatly in a basket by the back door, and curled up on the enormous padded chaise longue overlooking the water.

  Juno’s sprawled out at our feet, finally tired from her endless laps on the beach, and even with the zap of bugs against the porch light and the occasional rowdy laughter from a group of teens farther up the beach, the night’s the most peaceful I’ve experienced in a long time.

  “More wine?” Matt asks, glancing down to where I have my wineglass propped up on his knee, my head on his shoulder.

  “Nah, I’m good. You?”

  “Saving room for dessert.”

  I groan. “I can’t even think about having more food. That steak was enormous, and you put half a stick of butter on my potato.”

  “It’s the only way to eat the things. That or fried.”

  “Or mashed,” I point out.

  “I never liked mashed potatoes,” he muses. “I think because they remind me of Thanksgiving.”

  I lift my head to look at him. “You don’t like Thanksgiving?”

  He grins. “You’ve met my parents. What do you think?”

  “Tell me Felicia didn’t come over for holidays.”

  “Not until I was in college. I guess they figured with me gone most of the time, there was no point in keeping up pretenses anymore. Not that they ever did a good job of that in the first place.”

  “God, you poor kid,” I murmur.

  “It wasn’t so bad.”

  “It was pretty bad,” I say with a laugh.

  He looks at me, his eyes going serious. “Yours was worse.”

  I suck in a quick breath. “You know, maybe I will grab some more wine.”

  I start to stand, but he puts a hand on my leg
, holding me still. “Sabrina.”

  “What?”

  “Why don’t you ever talk about your childhood, your life before New York?”

  “Because it sucked. As you’ve already said, yours was bad; mine was worse. I don’t see the point in discussing things best left in the distant past. Ian’s the only thing from that part of my life that’s still around.”

  He flinches. It’s slight, almost imperceptible, but enough to give me pause. Surely Matt’s not jealous of Ian. Is he?

  “I didn’t mean to imply . . . I just . . . I didn’t even know you then.”

  “I know. Which is why it sucks that I’m always on the outside, like I’m being punished for growing up in Connecticut instead of Philadelphia with you two.”

  I touch his arm. “That’s not what this is about. This isn’t me trusting Ian more than you.”

  “Okay,” he says quietly, and my chest clenches in panic. He’s giving up on me already. I should be relieved. Instead, I feel . . . lost.

  “It’s fine, Sabrina.” Matt’s blue eyes soften as his touch moves from my knee to my cheek. “You don’t have to tell me.” The gentle tenderness in his voice is like a battering ram on the very walls he mentioned earlier in the evening.

  My self-preservation’s stayed strong for years, but my need to keep everything compartmentalized into painful past and carefully restrained present seems to be wavering a little more with every passing day. First with Lara and Kate, now with him.

  Especially with him.

  Maybe it’s time. Maybe it’s past time.

  I take a breath for courage. “It’s not a pretty story.”

  His eyes widen in surprise. Then he wordlessly hands me his whiskey, which is stronger than my wine. I smile and take a sip. I’m not above using liquid courage.

  “It’s not a long story, either,” I say, handing him back his glass. “I mean, it’s not like some convoluted saga.”

  “Damn, I love those. All guys do.”

  I smile at his sarcasm, using it to buy some time as I pluck at a stray string on the blanket.

  He stays silent, waiting for me. Letting me do it my way when I’m ready.

  “So. You know I grew up in Philly. But it wasn’t like Liberty Bell, cheesesteak-sandwich-wars Philadelphia. We’re talking a neighborhood you’ve never heard of, or, if you have, it’s because of its crime rates.”

  I pull harder on the string.

  “My dad died when I was a baby. Heroin overdose. Though, from what I was able to piece together about him when I got older, I’m not sure he’d have been around if he’d lived. Sexual assault record, vehicular manslaughter . . . all sorts of nasty stuff.”

  The tiny little string I’ve been fiddling with is now nearly a foot long, courtesy of my nerves. Matt puts his hand on mine, linking our fingers, and squeezes. Continue.

  “It was just my mom and me for a while. Then later, my two half brothers lived with us. We alternated between crappy housing and crappy trailers. I’m not sure I ever lived in one place longer than a year. She liked her drugs a little bit, her booze a lot. But mostly?” I take a breath. “Mostly she liked her men. Or maybe the men liked her.”

  “What’s she look like?”

  It’s an easy question, and I suspect he means it to be. I squeeze his hand. “Like me. Brown eyes instead of blue, but otherwise I look just like her.”

  What I don’t say out loud is that every time I glance in the mirror, I feel a tiny flash of fear that the similarities are inside as well as out. That I’m just as cold, opportunistic, and self-absorbed.

  “So she was beautiful. What else?”

  “You’re good at this,” I say begrudgingly.

  “Only with you.” He brushes a strand of hair off my face.

  My heart does something ridiculous, and I look away, knowing that the hard part is still to come.

  “She never kept a job for long,” I say, my words a little bit rushed. “She worked on and off at clothing stores but got fired for helping herself to the items. Or she’d work at a cheap diner and get fired for being a lot better at flirting with the customers than actually getting them their food.”

  “How about you? How’d you get your food?”

  “Let’s just say those Thanksgivings you dreaded? I’d have killed to have my mom even acknowledge it was Thanksgiving.”

  Matt’s fingers squeeze on mine, this time a bit harder. “Damn it, Sabrina.”

  “It wasn’t so bad,” I say. “When I got old enough, I figured out that some of the bigger grocery store chains did to-go boxes with turkey and potatoes, the whole thing. I’d save up every penny from my job at a Dunkin’ Donuts to buy enough for my brothers and my mom, too, if it was a good year.”

  “And for yourself?”

  I don’t answer, because what I need to tell him, what he needs to know, isn’t about whether or not I got cranberry sauce as a kid.

  “I mentioned my mom liked her men.” My words are quiet now, even more rushed. “It was more than that. She used sex to get things she wanted from them.”

  Matt makes a dismayed, angry noise.

  “It took me a while to figure out what was going on. How soon after she’d bring home a guy, we’d have a new TV. Or she’d have new shoes. Or a little more spending money. I’d ask her about it, and she’d laugh and say it was a loan. Or an arrangement. It got worse as she got more and more dependent on ‘having nice things,’ as she put it. On bad weeks, there was a different man every night. A different arrangement.”

  “Jesus,” he says in a stunned voice, setting aside his glass and dragging his hand over his face. “No wonder you don’t like to talk about it.”

  “Yeah, mentioning that your mom dabbled in barely disguised prostitution doesn’t make for great conversation.”

  He looks back at me, his eyes dark and glittering. “Did she ever ask it of you?”

  I suck in a breath that he hit so quickly on the truth. Nobody knows that part of it. Not even Ian.

  “Sabrina,” he says on a breath.

  “Nothing happened,” I rush to reassure him, because he looks ready to punch something. “And she didn’t ask me, not exactly. But the older I got, the more her men suggested it. My mom said no, but I saw her face, and the reason she said no wasn’t due to outrage over a forty-something man touching her daughter. It was jealousy. Competition. She’d never been particularly affectionate, but after that, it felt like an all-out war between us.”

  I take a sip of my wine.

  “I graduated at eighteen, and after basically harassing my half brothers’ family to take full custody and give them a stable home, I took the first bus I could out of there.”

  “You ever go back?”

  “Never,” I say emphatically.

  “You talk to her?”

  I hesitate, a little ashamed of my answer. “No. But I send her a birthday gift every year. I don’t know why. It only opens the door to guilt trips and requests for money.”

  He inhales long and hard through his nose, as though searching for the right words. Instead he pulls my wineglass out of my hand, sets it aside. Then he gathers me to him, my head against his chest, his heart steady and reassuring beneath my ear.

  I feel his lips on my hair, and though I don’t think I’ve ever sought a hug for comfort in my entire life, at this moment, I get why people do. I let my arm slide around his waist, closing my eyes at how right it feels to be held by him.

  Neither of us speaks for long minutes, lost in our own thoughts. Me, relief at finally having my ugly past out there. Him, likely trying to process it all.

  “I’ve got two questions. Not sure you’ll like either one,” he says finally, breaking the silence.

  I smile but don’t lift my head. “You sure know how to get a girl excited.”

  “Your mom’s past. Is that why you were so destroyed by my callous words when we first met? When I said you were worth every penny?”

  “Whoa, hey now,” I say, pushing up to a seated position. �
��I wasn’t destroyed. I was annoyed.”

  He says nothing, just waits.

  I wait, too.

  He wins.

  “Okay, fine, yes. You struck a nerve, although you obviously didn’t do it intentionally.”

  “Well, even not knowing your past, I shouldn’t have said it,” he says, running a hand over my hair. “But knowing your past . . . I’d give anything for a time machine.”

  “To change my childhood or to change that night?”

  “Both,” he says with a smile.

  I smile back. “What’s your second question?”

  “Are your mom’s relationships with men the reason you’re anti-relationship?”

  “Yes,” I say without hesitation. “But to be fair, where I’m from, there weren’t many happy relationships. Most of the kids in my class came from divorced homes, single-parent families, foster homes. My school wasn’t exactly a quaint little brick building off Main Street.”

  He winces, and I laugh.

  “Oh my gosh. You went to a brick school off Main Street, didn’t you?”

  “Technically it was Main Drive.”

  “Well . . .” I go back to fiddling with the string on the blanket. “If knowing you has taught me anything, it’s that a nice house in a neighborhood with clean streets doesn’t always mean a happy home.”

  “Certainly not,” he says in agreement. “But my family issues . . . God, I can’t believe I even complained about them to you.”

  “Don’t think that way,” I say, looking up and meeting his eyes. “Your pains are just as valid.”

  We hold each other’s gaze for several seconds, and there’s nothing uncomfortable about it. Merely understanding.

  “We’re kind of screwed up, huh?” he says with a sad smile.

  “I prefer the word guarded.” I wink in an effort to lighten the mood. “We’re just smart enough to know that two people can enjoy each other’s company, maybe even be friends, without the whole messy, painful stuff.”

  He pushes his hand farther into my hair, fingers tangling in the messy curls. “Friends, huh?”

  “Hypothetically. You know, in theory. For people who actually like each other.”

  “Not us, though,” Matt murmurs.