A Perfect SEAL

by Jess Bentley

  For a minute, it isn’t so bad. Jake can dance; he’s probably had high-priced lessons for this sort of occasion, and he’s just handsy enough to make it interesting without being outright offensive. His hands are large, and warm, and it’s difficult not to let my imagination get carried away.

  It really has been a long time since I was with anyone, if just this little interaction is enough to get my blood running hot.

  “One song,” I tell him, and let him lead. It’s slow, thankfully. I didn’t wear the kind of outfit that looks good on a flailing mess.

  As we sway, I can feel the heat from his body even through my dress. More, I’m close enough to him that it’s obvious he has a body under that clean, well-fitted suit. We’re not talking yet, so I distract myself from all that by doing mental inventory of the storeroom as of this afternoon, before the lounge opened, and recite the types of peppers that are going into the new hot sauce I have planned for later this season.

  “All those cameras,” Jake sighs near my ear. “They never quit, do they?”

  “People like a spectacle,” I reply, disinterested even though I’m already starting to think of what I’ll say when the papers start asking me whether we’re dating, and how I’ll convince them we’re not.

  Jake, though, has the opposite on his mind. “You know, I bet we’d stir up quite a storm, you and I. Imagine what the tabloids would say: Jake Ferry and Janie Hall. Could be a PR goldmine, good for both our ventures.”

  And in that moment, it all makes sense. I should have figured. But I’m a businesswoman, not a celebrity. Not yet, anyway, and not a real one even when it’s forced on me for a while.

  I let go of Jake’s shoulder, and remove his hands from my hips. This little charade is over. “I see,” I tell him quietly, my face still showing a smile for the cameras. “You can see yourself out of my lounge, Mr. Ferry. Thanks for dropping by.”

  His reaction is a mystery; I’m sure I’ll see it on YouTube later when Red Hall gets tagged in the Facebook post for it right alongside Ferry Lights. For now, though, I don’t look at him as I stalk away through the crowd, ignoring the smartphones pointed at me.

  I can’t believe I fell for that.

  Chapter 29

  Janie

  Chester is a smart guy, and he keeps his mouth shut when I step behind the bar and discreetly pour myself a shot of the closest bottle of dark liquor I can reach — cognac, turns out. His eyes do get a little wide when I turn away from the crowd and quickly down the shot. No, I don’t normally drink when I’m at work and it’s against the rules for everyone else. Sometimes it’s good to be the boss.

  Luckily, Chester knows me well enough to simply retrieve the shot glass from my tense fingers and even tap the bottle in question.

  I shake my head. One shot is fine, just enough to put a different kind of warmth in my stomach than what’s already there.

  Jake fucking Ferry. “I could strangle him, that dirty son of a bitch.”

  Chester clears his throat, his face angled down as though busy with bar work. “Okay,” he mutters, trying to calm me, “do you need a moment? Maybe in the back? Where no one can take any more videos?”

  Shit. I shake my head, and then blow out a long breath to get a handle on myself, just like Mama’s therapist tells her to do. “I’m fine,” I tell Chester.

  “So,” he says when he’s assessed that I might be telling the truth, “that was awkward, huh? What was that all about?”

  Rehashing it is the last thing I want, so I wave Chester’s curiosity off. “Forget it.”

  He seems to — Chester is good like that — but I certainly can’t. Where does that Ferry prick even get off thinking that I would want or need his fucking PR influence like some kind of social climbing groupie slut? Sure, Red Hall is taking a temporary hit from the foray of Ferry Lights into the neighborhood — but that’s just the way the market works. A few more weeks and the pressure will equalize and my place will be back on top where it started.

  After all, every celebrity — A, B, C, or even D-list — that shows up at my place comes because they want to be here. Not because I pay them.

  I’m not good at staying angry. I try to hold grudges, but they never last very long. As this one wanes and I recover myself, my traitorous imagination takes the opportunity to defect. Whispering images of Jake’s flushed lips, and that glint in his eyes that made me briefly imagine what was going on in his head to make him look at me like that. Worst of all was that it had worked; that swell of heat between my legs wasn’t a fever.

  Nope. Nope, nope, nope. I turn, pasting the smile back on my face. It can set like plaster for all I care. Tonight I have guests. Tonight I have work to do. No way am I going to let Jake Ferry screw up my head.

  For me, the best way to clear my head and get focused is to throw myself hard into work. So that’s what I do, schmoozing and mingling until Jake Ferry is a distant, irritating memory.

  Chapter 30

  Jake

  The wall outside Red Hall meets my fist in a brief conflict that it easily wins, but the pain serves to clear my head. My hand starts to throb almost immediately, and I’m reminded that I need to stop doing shit without thinking of the consequences first.

  I’m an asshole. That’s not really a surprise to me — my apple didn’t fall more than a few feet from my father’s tree — but every time I have the opportunity to tell him no, I just fall in line instead. What kind of man does that?

  And what kind of man tells a woman like Janie Hall that he wants to date her for the PR benefits?

  Nobody in this town opens a business of any kind without having Reginald Ferry’s hard eye on them. That means my eyes are on them as well. I know what Janie’s been through. It wasn’t easy for her to get Red Hall started. She begged, borrowed, and stole to get that place off the ground, and when she finally opened the doors it was epic.

  It’s stayed that way for over a year and opening Ferry Lights literally across the street only barely made a dent in their regular business. Fact is, Red Hall has something that Ferry Lights doesn’t: a modern day heroine for an owner.

  My father had given me the background on my… target. Janie Hall comes from practically nothing. She’s self-made, not just the hobbyist housewife of one of the local boys’ club. And she’s a good girl. Precisely the kind of girl I avoid when I have an itch that needs scratching.

  It doesn’t help that Janie is unbearably hot. That just isn’t a fair game. Plenty of girls are beautiful; they have to be to get through the glass ceiling that guys like my father and me are standing on. All the women, in fact, are so drop-dead gorgeous that they all look the same. Might as well be wallpaper.

  Janie, though… I’ve been with so many beautiful women that one may as well be another. Not her. She has spirit, and poise, and a lot to prove. Hell, she’s already proven herself.

  And she’ll keep doing it, too, won’t she? The way she looked at me when I suggested we make good for the tabloids, like she didn’t want or need my help... why did that turn me on so much?

  I grit my teeth as my hand reminds me it’s still there, and still possibly fractured. To top that off with big red cherry, I can feel the drip of blood off the tip of my middle finger. Great.

  Ferry Lights is across the street, of course. They’ve got napkins, bandages, a whole first aid kit I’m sure. But the thought of being in there at the moment feels a little too much like being under my father’s shadow.

  So I head down the street instead.

  I’m fucking tired of being Reginald’s lackey. I’m tired of feeling like an asshole.

  Chapter 31

  Janie

  Just days after Mama’s panic attack, she calls me and begs me to come over for dinner. My brothers will be there, she says, and she’ll never hear the end of it from George if I don’t come and see them. I can tell by the sound of her voice that turning the invitation down is going to trigger a meltdown, and only because of that I cave.

  So there I find m
yself, seated at the table with my brothers — the twins, Chris and Derek — listening to them preen and compare dick sizes under the approving gaze of our stepfather while my mother smiles weakly. It doesn’t get to her eyes.

  “Yeah, we did about fifty grand last quarter,” Derek says, as he and Chris get to the part of dinner where it’s time to impress George. “Gross. Took a little bit of a hit when the new shop opened up down the street, of course, because I had to drop the price of cuts for a couple of weeks. You should have seen their place — crickets in there. Who thinks they can just open up a business next door? I’ve been in that spot for three years.”

  Chris rolls his eyes with a knowing nod. “Upstarts,” he snorts. “Stupid. We had something like that happen a couple of years ago. One of my first therapists up and leaves, right? And she opens her own spa just two miles from my front door. Of course, she can’t just steal clients — but she can put her face and name up all over town and make it easy to find her.”

  “What did you do?” Derek asks.

  Chris grins like a shark. “I didn’t do anything. But word somehow got around that she was, you know…” He makes the universal gesture for a hand job, and this sets George and Derek both off on a chuckling fit.

  “What about you?” Derek asks me. “Didn’t uh… Ronald Ferry or someone open up that Ferry Lights place right across the street from you?”

  “Reginald,” I say.

  “Yeah, okay,” Derek laughs. “What are you doing about it?”

  “Nothing,” I tell him. “I trust my business model, and my staff, and our customer base trusts us. I don’t have to do anything.”

  “That’s optimistic,” Chris mutters.

  I give them both a baleful eye, and that conversation is done. Chris and Derek are younger than I am. When George came around, he became the only father they knew. They grew up to be his kids, that’s for sure. They’re both ruthless businessmen with one concern: money. To George, of course, that made them the successful ones.

  Red Hall isn’t just a paycheck to me. It never has been. Oh, it turns a profit — I’m good at what I do — but I opened the restaurant as proof I could do it, not to get rich. I wanted something that was mine, and now I have it. More than that, Red Hall saved my life.

  College was a difficult time for me. I had started out going the culinary route because I loved food and I loved to cook. What I discovered was that I was more a theoretical chef than a good chef. It had been my only dream since childhood so, naturally, discovering that I didn’t have the talent for it was crushing.

  Red Hall didn’t just give me a paycheck. It gave me life, gave me a direction. It reminded me, from the day I changed majors to the day the doors finally opened, that I didn’t have to be bound by the ghost of my mother’s instability or the taint of George’s obvious borderline personality disorder. I was free the day I started dreaming.

  Chris and Derek are both quiet for a moment, simmering in the now-impotent need to know how big my dick is compared to theirs and frustrated at not knowing. George casts a disapproving look my way, but I ignore it. The twins crave his approval like heroin. Not me.

  By and by, dinner begins to be obviously finished. We’ve moved on from eating and talking about our own lives to comparing them to everyone else’s lives — the natural next step. Mama still hasn’t said more than a dozen words since I got here, and she’s getting more and more agitated. Soon after this, I know, she’ll end up having another panic attack.

  I want to slap the twins for ignoring her in favor of George. My mother is proud of her boys, and she says it when she gets the chance. They couldn’t care less, though. Mama’s always been free with her praise and approval. George, on the other hand, always made us work for it, gave it rarely, and never without reminding us that he could withdraw it at any moment. Supply and demand. The first lesson he ever taught us.

  When I’m finally full up with hearing about how someone at work was promoted over George — he didn’t deserve it, of course — and Chris’s purchase of a new hybrid that gets better gas mileage than Derek’s — and at a steal after he haggled down the salesman, no less — I stand, and gather my mother’s dishes along with my own.

  She stands up with me, eager to be away from the table, too.

  “I’ll handle the dishes, Mama,” I tell her when she reaches for the plates I’ve gathered. “Take a load off. It’s the least I can do.”

  George eyes my mother as she leaves the room, and flashes me a nasty look before he turns his attention back on my brothers. Good. Maybe they’ll jerk each other off all night.

  The task of washing dishes gives me some tangible work to focus on, even if it does lull me into a dangerous reverie where that smug bastard is still, somehow, waiting for me with those stupid smoldering eyes and that idiot’s grin. Why he’s still lodged in my brain is a mystery I don’t plan on solving.

  I’m content, though, to do this work and then leave. George apparently has other plans. His heavy gait announces him like war drums. The counter creaks when he leans on it.

  “Can’t even socialize with your own brothers?” he asks.

  “Is that what they were doing?” I wonder out loud. “I thought it was a dick-measuring contest.”

  “You didn’t have to come, you know.” From his tone, he could have been telling me I didn’t have to be born.

  “Yes, I did,” I mutter, and put the next to last plate in the rack to dry.

  “I’m not the one who invited you,” George growls. “You don’t have to be pissed at me about being here. For once, you could just show a little respect.”

  It’s a bad time to say those words. I feel an itch in my hand, and nearly drop the plate instead of throwing it at him like I want to.

  “You just make your mother worse, showing up like you do,” George goes on, oblivious to the imminent threat of concussion. “Just like your father.”

  It stings. I know how to keep from showing it, but that doesn’t keep me from feeling it.

  He’s wrong, though. My father made my mother’s craziness worse by leaving — not by coming around. Not that he caused it. He could only take so much of it, I guess, because eventually he got fed up and left her to go play out his midlife crisis with a rich Somalian supermodel.

  At least, that’s the story I was told. Lately, I’ve been gradually getting back in touch with my father — not much, just a few Facebook messages and one or two short calls that amounted to small talk. I had tried to get Chris and Derek to join me in that, but they both refused. I suppose I can’t blame them, but… there are times when I feel isolated from the rest of the family for it.

  What I can tell of my father so far? He’s a better man than George. Of course, that isn’t saying much.

  “If I’m more like my father,” I tell him, “than I am you, then I’m proud of it, George.”

  He snorts at me and when I turn I get the rare chance to sneer at him. “Jesus, you're pathetic.”

  He trembles with anger as I pass him by to get to the dining room, and from there drop in to say goodnight to my mother. Chris and Derek both stay seated, and give barely interested waves when I announce that I’m leaving.

  I swear, one day I have got to stop getting mired in this bullshit.

  Chapter 32

  Jake

  Reginald’s plan, after I failed to snag Janie Hall, was worse than the one before. Leaning on the corner of Ferry Lights just an hour after getting the text that it all went off without a hitch, I watch as Janie comes tearing up to Red Hall’s curb and doesn’t even bother to hand the keys to the valet. Instead, she dashes inside.

  There, I know, she’ll find the damage. A busted water main. It’ll put her place out of commission for up to a week depending on who she can find to fix it, and unfortunately my father already ensured that it wouldn’t be anyone local.

  Reginald’s text was triumphant and banal. It took no effort to get one of his thugs in there, of course. It is a restaurant. His man simply made r
eservations.

  My father has no real reason to harass Janie this way. Ferry Lights is doing fine, and so is Red Hall. It’s ridiculous to prey on a woman like Janie just on her own merits, though. She worked hard to get where she is and she did it with no significant investors, a single Facebook page, and a dream.

  And me? I don’t have much of a choice but to sit front and center to watch this train wreck happen. The fact is, Reginald gets what Reginald wants. So do I, normally, except where it conflicts with his interests. Right now, my father wants to crush an innocent woman’s dream — more so now than before she turned me down.

  It’s easy to tell when Reginald is getting impatient. He stops being subtle.

  Though, in truth, I can’t really blame her for turning me down. Most people have a price tag on them somewhere, and the fact of the matter is it’s usually not that high. That Janie doesn’t seem to have one is… intriguing? Refreshing?

  The door to Red Hall swings open, and I reach for a cigarette. Guilt gives me cravings. I light it, and puff it slowly as I watch her dialing one- handed while she presses a hand to her forehead, then shakes out her hair, and then plants the fist on her hip. Here it comes.

  She talks to someone, frantic and animated, and then hangs up. She flicks the screen one, twice, looking for another plumber nearby. Another call, another cry for help. I can’t hear her from where I am, but I know what the conversation is that’s taking place each time she calls another plumber. She needs someone asapASAP. There’s no slot available until next week. That’s not soon enough. Nothing the plumber can do about that, mMa’am. Maybe call this other place…

  And on and on, until she runs out of options and realizes she’s going to have to shell out big bucks to get someone in from out of town — maybe out of state.