Mating Theory

by Skye Warren

  The memory of those blue eyes watching Christopher comes back to me. He was trying to prove something letting him be the first, but I don’t know what. That he might be first, but Sutton would be last? I don’t know what he’s playing, but there’s far too much thinking in it.

  So I let my thumb brush over the tip of Sutton’s cock, smoothing precome over the blunt satin of him, feel the shake of his body—and the moment when he breaks.

  Firm hands grasp my body and turn me over, facing down. I pushed him toward this, but it’s still a surprise to feel him arrange me, knees beneath my body, a pillow supporting me. He pushes inside me without preamble, and I’m glad I can hide my soft cry of pain in the mattress.

  “Harper,” he says, his voice rough-edged with desire.

  “I’m okay,” I manage to gasp, because I’m stretched and aching—but I’m telling the truth. I can survive anything to feel Sutton come apart. “Please, Sutton. I want you.”

  He groans his surrender, covering my back with his body. “Christ.”

  His cock pushes against the walls. He’s thicker than Christopher was, or maybe I’m just that sore now, but either way I wince with the effort to let him in. Until his large hand delves beneath my stomach and between my legs. He finds my clit with rough fingers, his touch knowing and merciless. He pinches me hard enough to distract me from the stretch. Hard enough that I’m pushing back so he’ll give me more.

  “You’re incredible. Do you know that? You’re a goddamn miracle and you walked into my office. How could I not want you? How could I not have you?”

  I’m glad I don’t have to answer those questions, because I don’t know. My lips can’t form words when he fucks me hard and fast, letting the desire from last night build, pull us into climax. His body uses mine in a way that feels primal. A sharp pain on my shoulder. He bites down hard, which sends me over the edge. Orgasm clenches my body as he rides toward his own release. In the last minute he pulls out and spills, hot and thick at the small of my back.

  My body collapses, slick with sweat and arousal and come.

  Sutton strokes a hand down the side of my thigh, a caress that says what words can’t. How I’ve pleased him. How he needed that and I gave it to him. There’s animal pride in me, even as I lie in a limp puddle on the lace bedspread.

  There’s running water and then he’s back with a warm washcloth. He cleans my back and then turns me over, tucking me into bed. My eyes are closed when he joins me, curling his body around me as if he can protect me from morning. As if he can keep me when it comes.

  His breathing evens out, and I know he’s asleep. But no matter how tired I am, I’m not going to fall asleep again. I’m wide awake in his arms, counting down the hours until I’ll slip away. It was everything I wanted it to be—sensual and mind blowing. I’m halfway in love with Sutton, lying here, but the sad part is, I’m still in love with Christopher Bardot.

  Somehow I’ve only made it worse.

  When I was little we had a series of condos in Beverly Hills, because Mom wouldn’t consider living anywhere else in LA. Maybe it’s because I grew up with her that I could never condemn the rich. It was taught to her the way other families tell their children to say please and thank you, the idea that you were defined by the zip code you lived in.

  It wasn’t only pride. It was life or death.

  I understand that survival instinct, because she taught it to me.

  There would be some new husband, always. Our refrigerator would suddenly be full again. That’s how I knew it was happening. He would pay the bills that were overdue. He would pay out the lease so we could move in with him. All these things were so normal I didn’t know there was any other way to find food or shelter.

  Maybe art saved me, because talent is the great equalizer. There’s no way to pay for more of it. No way to trade a roll of cash for the hours spent late into the night, working and tearing your hair out. It was the whisper in my ear that there’s something else that mattered.

  In the end even art could not defy that survival instinct.

  Those paintings supported us after Daddy died. They paid for the two-bedroom condo in Baldwin Hills. There are ceramic picnic tables in the courtyard with mosaics of palm trees etched into them. Our window overlooks the parking lot.

  Absolutely no one from our old life would speak to Mom if they knew she lived here. But then, they never spoke to her again after the public humiliation of the will came out. It was as bad as we thought it would be. Worse, because of the memes and public jokes that came after. We were a spectacle for a couple weeks, before another rich person did something crazy.

  “You look skinny,” she says, puttering around the small kitchen. Nothing that tastes like food has ever been made there, but we manage to eat well enough on premade bags of salad and delivery from the Korean restaurant down the street. “I’ll make you something to eat.”

  “Not hungry,” I tell her, dropping my luggage in the middle of the living room. I left Sutton warm in my hotel room and took the first flight out of the airport, that’s how desperate I was to leave. Then I caught a connection to LAX. “Besides, I should be the one making you something. Tell me you’ve had more than smoothies.”

  She comes and sits down by me, holding a glass of green sludge. “I think it’s helping. I haven’t felt this good since the treatment started.”

  I peek at her through one eye, but she looks serious. And peaceful.

  It’s a little ironic that the will reading was probably the best thing that could have happened to her. She lost everything that mattered to her that day. But once we picked up the pieces, she didn’t have that frantic edge.

  And she never again had to sleep with some new husband to fill the fridge.

  “I was thinking of starting work at the studio again,” she says, referring to the yoga studio. She started working there maybe a year after the will. She teaches classes or works behind the desk. They basically pay pennies, but it helps her feel in control of her life.

  “The doctor said you should rest.”

  “Doctors,” she says, waving away cancer like it’s nothing. “I feel fine.”

  She doesn’t look fine. There are still shadows under her eyes, but they aren’t as pronounced as before. I can’t look at her and not see the way she looked in that room full of her enemies. That day may not have broken her, but it broke something in me.

  Impulsively I reach over and touch her hand. She looks surprised. Then she folds me into her skinny arms, resting my face against her shoulder the way she did when I was little.

  “What happened?”

  Only two words, but they have the power to make me cry. Maybe because there’s already such knowledge in them. Out of anyone she knows what it’s like to be hurt by a man. I let the tears fall, because love is terrible, terrible, terrible. And it doesn’t go away.

  When I can speak again, it isn’t Christopher that I talk about.

  “Sutton walks around like nothing can surprise him, like nothing can shake him. He’s so freaking capable, it’s like vibrating in him. It would be just a day’s work to make a business deal and then build a house.”

  “I see,” Mom says, in this speculative voice like maybe she does see. Maybe her motherly instincts have somehow told her that her daughter had a wicked threesome in a French hotel.

  “But I left, and worse than that, I think I let him down. He wanted me to save that library. He never told me that, not with words.” He spanked me with a nonfiction book over the counter, though. “It’s something I felt from him.”

  “Wasn’t it his company?” she asks. “He could stop the construction if he wanted.”

  There was that story about the horse, though. About Cinnamon. You didn’t throw away a horse because it was wild. You kept it, even when you weren’t sure what to do with it. And then one day someone came along, someone no one expected, to tame her.

  That old library lives and breathes as much as any animal. Christopher doesn’t feel that. For a
ll that he genuinely cares about me, he sees the building as a commodity. Real estate.

  “I think maybe… finding me was his way of stopping the construction.”

  It meant he put his faith in me. There’s a knot in my stomach that says I let him down.

  And I let that old library down.

  “I didn’t get you into the treatment study.”

  “And I didn’t want to do it. I would have, for you, but I didn’t want to.” She would have put herself through the pain of needles and chemicals, because I want her to get better. Does that make me selfish or stupid? Maybe both. Or maybe I’m just a little girl who wants her mother.

  “Daddy would have paid for the treatment,” I say, feeling stubborn.

  “Yes,” she says, simple and certain. “He would have insisted that I do it, too, even if I didn’t want to. You and he are a lot alike.”

  “I don’t know whether that’s a compliment.” On some level I’ve been doing to my mother what Christopher does to me. Using my protection of her as a crutch. She did need me once, the way I needed him to dive in after me and rescue me. But she doesn’t need me to make smoothies or buy butterfly gardens in her name.

  “Of course it is. I loved your father.”

  “He loved you back.”

  “He asked me out, you know. That night at the art gallery. Asked me on a date, like we were young and foolish. I said yes, of course. I could never say no to him.”

  My throat burns. No wonder she had thought he wouldn’t leave her out of the will, among many other reasons. And we’ll never get to ask him why he did. Was it a moment of anger toward my mom? Was it a lesson for me? But he didn’t have any answers for me.

  “Do you wonder why?” I ask.

  “Sometimes. Not much, these days. He was a complicated man. Ambitious. Afraid.”

  That makes me look up at her. “Afraid?”

  “Afraid that someone was using him for his money. He couldn’t let it go. He never really trusted anyone.” She’s looking into the past now. “He loved me the same way I loved him, without being able to help it. That kind of love, it takes away your control, and he hated that.”

  It breaks my heart to think of how different we could have been. If she and Daddy had gone on a date and then another. If they had finally been able to reconcile their love into building a life together. So many possibilities ended the night of that exhibit.

  I close my eyes tight. “I think I have to go back.”

  It was fear that sent me away from Tanglewood like a scalded cat. But I can’t wait the rest of my life wondering what might have been. Love is outside our control, but we aren’t defined by love. We’re defined by our choices. Our actions. By the willingness to do what’s right even when it’s hard.

  I’ve always been hurt that Christopher didn’t fight for us, but how can I walk away without fighting for him? Without fighting for the library? Somehow those two things are the same.

  Mom smoothes my hair back. “You always were my warrior. Even in school, with that Medusa painting. Even when it seemed impossible. You never gave up.”

  “I gave up this time.” The words are acid in my mouth.

  “Nonsense. You came home because you wanted a kale smoothie and a hug. That’s not giving up. That’s taking a break. Everyone needs a break.”

  “What if I’m too late?” I’m not thinking of the library crumbling, though I should be. I’m thinking of the look in Sutton’s eyes. I’m thinking of the way he held me like I was something precious, and the way I walked away. He won’t forgive me for that. I don’t blame him.

  “Well,” Mom says, her voice half pragmatism, half mystical acceptance of the world and its vagaries. “You might be. But you won’t know unless you try.”

  My Uber driver is from Egypt, something he tells me only when he sees the library book I’m reading as we leave the airport. Maybe he thinks I’m getting ready for international travel. “Don’t use a purse,” he says. “Too easy to steal. You want to keep things in your pockets, but deep inside. With buttons or zippers to close them.”

  “You seem to know a lot about picking pockets.”

  He waves a hand. “Everyone knows a lot. It’s the only way you don’t get robbed. There’s no place on earth with more thieves than Cairo.”

  That makes me think of the Thieves Club, the semi-ironic name that four men in Tanglewood gave themselves. Hugo and Sutton. Blue and Christopher. Because every dollar they earn must be taken from somebody else. “Is that why you moved here?”

  “It was the killing,” he says frankly. “The stealing I could live with.”

  “That seems reasonable.”

  “I have two daughters. It was no place for them to grow up.”

  Fathers. So protective. There’s a tightness in my throat I don’t want to be there. It’s terrible to be angry at someone who isn’t alive to defend himself. The older I get, the more sure I am that he knew what would happen at that will reading. Maybe he would have changed it if he and Mom had started dating for a while, but at one point he knew he would humiliate her.

  He did it to protect me. He knew I would hate him for it and did it anyway.

  “Don’t believe anything they tell you,” Abdel says. “They will try to sell you a thousand artifacts in the streets and around the pyramids. Mummified cats, but you open them—only birds and rocks and dirt inside.”

  “Why would I want a mummified cat?”

  “Ancient scrolls that are made of plastic. Convincing plastic.”

  “Okay, I’d like an ancient scroll. I might have fallen for that one.”

  “They charge you so much money, that’s why you believe it’s real. That is the irony. If it was cheap to buy, then you would know.”

  Abdel takes me to Walmart, because it’s the only place that sells paint at midnight. He accepts cash for waiting in the parking lot and helping me load the supplies into his trunk.

  Then we go to the library.

  “This place doesn’t look open,” he says, eyeing the dark corners in all directions. “Or safe. This looks like a place you will experience the stealing.”

  “Better that than the killing,” I say, moving the gallons of paint to the curb. There’s a lot to do before morning, and I think construction crews start sooner than art gallery exhibits.

  He walks toward the driver’s side door. Sighs. Comes back. “I don’t think I should leave you here. Probably you’ll get stabbed and then they’ll take away my Uber license.”

  Clear as day I can hear Christopher’s voice telling me I have a death wish.

  Maybe I did, back then. It’s not that I wanted to die, but I didn’t really know how to live. There was always money in the way, always something that had to be fought over. Always a struggle to survive.

  “I’ll call a friend,” I say because I’m a long time from sitting on a railing alone.

  On my phone there’s a long list of contacts. People from Smith College who always knew where the best parties would be. Artists from New York City. Actors in LA. There are only a handful of people in Tanglewood. I’m not going to call the newly expectant parents, Bea and Hugo, to the west side in the middle of the night, even if they would come.

  Even though I know I can’t call him, that I lost that right, it still hurts to see Sutton’s name. It would be nice to have his steady, capable presence beside me while I do something inadvisable. My finger hovers over his number, not pressing.

  And then there’s Christopher, who helped me paint a mural once. I thought I might have fallen in love with him that night, the night he kissed me, but I think it was earlier than that. When he wrote me a letter at my boarding school in Germany.

  When he dived into the water after me.

  I’m not sure who I am if I’m not the girl hopelessly in love with Christopher Bardot.

  Tonight I’m going to find out.

  There’s no listing for the Den online. None for Damon Scott, either. Finally I have to call Avery who has connections in the cit
y. She gives me Penny’s number, but there’s no answer. In the end I have to settle for leaving a message and hoping she gets it in time.

  And that she’d even want to help if she knew.

  Abdel parks with his headlights angled so I can see what I’m doing. He also orders pizza, which is initiative I appreciate in a man. “I didn’t drive you around the city for two hours so you could get murdered,” he says when I tell him to leave. I’m pretty sure I’m going to send his daughters to college. I’ll be past twenty-five when they need the tuition, finally and forever in charge of that damned trust fund.

  By the time Penny arrives, I have the eyes painted, which is no small feat considering I’m using a fifty-dollar ladder that had clearly been used and returned before I bought it. It leans up against metal and glass that’s decades old, shaking with every brusque wind. My canvas isn’t a wall, not really. It’s the entire south side of the building. Mostly windows. Some brick.

  The eyes are the most important.

  Usually that’s true in a portrait, but it’s a million times more true right now.

  This Cleopatra isn’t sexy. Isn’t seductive. Unless it turns you on to be with a woman who wants to destroy everything you’ve worked for, which some perverse men probably do.

  She’s angry, this one. Determined. Resolute.

  They paint her knowing, usually. As if the world is full of puppets she makes dance. I think she knew what she was doing but couldn’t have known the outcome. It’s an act of sacrifice to throw everything you have toward a cause. Part of you has to be sure you’ll lose to even try.

  Like the way I know this painting will be demolished at six a.m. There’s going to be a wrecking ball right through Cleopatra’s face. With every stroke of these cheap brushes and clumpy paint, I know it’s the best work I’ve ever done. Art with more than prettiness or pride. Something more important than power.

  There’s survival, something every woman has had to look in the face.

  And sometimes, sometimes we walk into a fight we know we’re going to lose.