by Helena Maeve
Mr. Hamilton barked a hearty laugh. “That’s a very diplomatic answer. Don’t worry, she won’t hear a word of our conversation from me. I’m good at keeping secrets, remember?” Something knowing gleamed in his eye and I knew he was thinking about me in those fishnet tights, my short skirt glued to my every curve. “You’re a smart girl,” he went on. “I can tell, you know, you’re well-spoken and bright—” He canted his head. “And you’re also very, very pretty, Miriam.”
The heat in my cheeks sank into my gut like a stone, weighing me down like a body dropping to the bottom of a lake. I could still see the light peeking through the shimmering water above me, but it was getting very dark and very cold where I was headed.
Get a grip, Chase. You’re making a big deal out of nothing.
“Oh,” I said. “T-thanks.” It was a compliment, right? Compliments were supposed to be answered with polite gratitude, even if they were unwarranted and just this side of inappropriate.
Mr. Hamilton was going through a rough patch in his marriage. His compass might have been just slightly off. I was sure he meant nothing by it. I told myself that his innocent flattery was nothing like getting heckled in the street by men who thought my tits were a good conversation opener and tried to focus my attention on chopping the bananas for Zara’s milkshake. I didn’t want to slice my fingers off by accident.
Mr. Hamilton didn’t seem to get the message. “Oh, Miriam…” He shook his head as though disappointed with my demurral. “Did I embarrass you? There’s no need to hide. A woman like you should own her beauty, especially when it doesn’t come out of a bottle.” Out of the corner of my eye, I thought I saw him stare me up and down, as though evaluating my assets. “Although I must say, you looked very nice the other night, as well. I don’t know why you insist on hiding yourself under such shapeless clothes…”
I dumped the bananas and the strawberry wedges into the bowl of the blender, my hands shaking badly. I couldn’t seem to fit the plastic lid in place.
“Here,” said Mr. Hamilton, clucking his tongue at my failure. “Let me help you.” He was suddenly so close that I could smell his cologne. I tried to remove my hands, to retreat, but his were in the way—long, thin fingers sliding over and between mine to pop the lid and switch on the machine.
I jumped with the first grating roar of the processor.
Mr. Hamilton chuckled, his breath gusting against my cheek.
This can’t be happening. I wanted nothing more than to ignore the sick churning in my stomach as I watched the fruit being mashed into a fine, pinkish sludge. His warm, long-fingered hand on the curve of my left ass cheek made that impossible.
Correction—this was happening and it was happening to me.
I made to back away, flattening my back to the counter, but he followed me, settling both hands on the edge of the sink as if to trap me. I could feel his body heat, the velvet caress of his pant leg against my bare calf. I shuddered. Mr. Hamilton didn’t notice. He was smiling the same smile he’d offered me that night when he and Mrs. Hamilton had come back early from Santa Barbara and I had seen him being abandoned by a wife who clearly didn’t understand him.
Or maybe she did understand him. Maybe she knew exactly what he was like. The sheer magnitude of my short-sightedness nearly floored me.
It was Mr. Hamilton’s saccharine sweet coaxing that brought me back. “Now, now,” he murmured, as he reached up a hand to brush a stray strand of hair behind my ear. “We both know you want this. No need to pretend otherwise.”
What? Was that what he thought? I tried to retrace my behavior, find the thread of evidence that would have justified him misunderstanding so completely.
My vision bled to white-hot rage as I realized I was pre-emptively blaming myself for something I could still prevent from happening.
I couldn’t hear myself think over the din of the blender, but I damn well could act. I fisted both hands into Mr. Hamilton’s shirt and before I gave myself the chance to think better of it, I thrust my knee up as hard and as brutally as I could.
Mr. Hamilton’s reaction was predictable and immediate. He doubled over, stumbling over the power cord and pulling it out of the wall with a snakelike twist.
The screech that spilled from his throat was loud in the now-silent kitchen. It wasn’t the only sound that cut through the blood whooshing against my eardrums.
“What in God’s name is going on here?” I heard someone ask. It was a voice I knew well, though the last time I’d heard it so horrified, Phoenix had just convinced me to attempt baking a chocolate cake with him. Suffice to say, I wasn’t much of a baker and Phoenix lost interest after about half an hour. We’d made a mess of the kitchen on the night before his mother’s Breast Cancer Charity soirée, with near-cataclysmic results.
I levered my gaze from Mr. Hamilton’s huddled, cringing form on the kitchen floor to find his wife staring back at me.
She stood in the kitchen doorway, as white as a sheet. A vein throbbed so visibly on her brow that I thought she might have an aneurysm right in front of me. “Will someone tell me what’s happening?” she snarled, repeating her question.
Red-faced Mr. Hamilton was no help. He was holding his privates with both hands as though he was afraid they might fall off. I could live in hope. That only left me to conjure up an explanation. None came. Panic choked me. I had just brutalized one of my employers and been caught red-handed by the other. There was no universe in which this could possibly end well for me.
“Miriam—” Mrs. Hamilton started.
I didn’t let her finish. Whatever adrenaline was still coursing through my veins was enough to spur my feet as I made for the back door. She shouted at me again, but this time I didn’t turn around. I couldn’t.
I ran.
Chapter Eleven
I backed away, out of the room and away from the focus of Mrs. Hamilton’s vivid disapproval, and didn’t stop until I was outside, my heart thudding violently in my chest.
I could still hear Mrs. Hamilton’s words ringing in my head—“Get the hell out of my house!”—even though I had left her to shout them to my back.
Somehow, I made my way to the end of the block, the slope of the street carrying me down on unsteady feet, until I hit the bus stop.
I didn’t mean to get on, but a bus was stopping just as I hit that portion of the sidewalk and the next thing I knew I was sitting down on a scuffed plastic seat, the world swaying around me as we lurched into motion.
“You all right, sweetheart?”
My seatmate was a big, black guy with a red bandanna and one too many chains dangling from his jeans. I shook my head. “Just. Think I just got fired.” Was that what had happened? I was reeling and everything around me seemed intangible, surreal. I felt like I was floating ten inches above the ground.
The man shook his head as if to say I’ve been there. “That’s rough.”
You don’t know the half of it. I hadn’t just been fired, I realized—I had been thrown out into the street. I hadn’t even taken my purse. I didn’t have my wallet or my keys, never mind any money. I was still wearing slippers.
The precariousness of my situation began to sink in.
Where was I going to sleep tonight? Visions of myself knocking on the doors of homeless shelters, of huddling beneath a piece of cardboard under a bridge took hold.
It wouldn’t get to that, I told myself. I wasn’t entirely friendless.
“Could I use your phone?” I asked my seatmate.
He was kind. He said yes.
I only knew a handful of phone numbers by heart and one of them was my mother’s. I wanted to call her and badly. However bootstrap-driven our family might have been and whatever bad blood still flowed between my mother and I, I knew she wouldn’t turn me away in my hour of need.
But if I turned to her now, I’d never hear the end of it. She had told me that something like this would happen if I squandered my future on a thankless, dead-end job—the very kind she’d hoped
I would avoid by getting a college education.
I felt too bruised to handle the lecture right now I wasn’t up for defending my choices. The last time I’d gone in for an interview had been for Mrs. Hamilton and the only reason she’d ever hired me had been sheer desperation. I’d been lucky. No one else wanted the job.
And what had that brought me? Six months of hard labor, emotional attachment to three kids I was sure never to see again and a dire lack of references. I was screwed.
I thought of Elliot and his plans for the house in Sausalito. I doubted he’d want anything to do with me after this fiasco. I was the girl he sometimes slept with. The Hamiltons were old friends. They went way back. Elliot had gone to college with Mr. and Mrs. Hamilton both, nearly been best man at their wedding.
Nothing short of a miracle would preserve our non-relationship.
At last tears welled into my eyes, making it hard to see and harder to dial. My voice caught in my throat as the call connected.
“Penny?” I croaked. “H-hi. Is there any chance I could crash on your couch tonight?” The rest was unintelligible blubbering nonsense as the dam broke and the magnitude of what I’d lost threatened to overwhelm me.
Somehow, though, Penny understood.
* * * *
I would’ve liked to say I felt better after a hot shower and a cup of coffee spiked with whiskey, but the truth was that I didn’t. Penny’s condo was too nice, too homey for my drama.
I wept in the shower and I wept some more as I got changed into a pair of PJs that Penny lent me. Her efforts weren’t to blame. She did everything right. She hadn’t even asked me many questions when I finally made my way to her front door, just welcomed me inside and let me catch my breath.
She offered to call my mother for me, but I told her not to bother. I would do it, later. Once I could speak without blubbering like an idiot.
It was just shock, Penny told me. I was safe. Everything would be fine. I wanted to believe her.
Eventually the words spilled out of me. They came slowly, at first, as disjointed as fragments of a dream.
I told Penny about the Hamiltons’ kitchen, how it was laid out like a horseshoe around a vast kitchen island. I told her about the state-of-the-art oven range and how I never cooked anything more complicated than eggs and toast. It was a meandering, purposeless narrative and I was surprised when Penny’s husband Dustin joined us once he got home. He and I had never been close. Breaking up with Penny once had earned him a black mark in my book that no amount of groveling could erase.
Penny had forgiven him, but I couldn’t. In my opinion, she was too good for Dustin and always would be.
That didn’t mean I snarled and hissed when I saw him, much less did so when I owed him and Penny for giving me a place to regroup. And Dustin didn’t gloat when confronted with my sniveling misery. If anything, he actually looked concerned. He poured me another drink and sat beside me on the couch, saying nothing.
Neither of them interrupted as I finally zeroed in on the reason why I had fled my employers in such a hurry.
My conscience bade me assure them I’d done nothing to arouse Mr. Hamilton’s interest. “Unless he thought the bananas were code for something,” I mused, snorting with mirthless laughter.
I felt wrung out. The whiskey had made me relax my clenched fists. I drank whatever they put in front of me and tried to occupy as little space as I could. Despite Penny’s assurances to the contrary, I couldn’t help but feel like a nuisance.
“Shouldn’t you go to the police?” Dustin asked when my rambling had wound down.
“I can’t press charges.” I could, but I had no proof and I was sure that Mrs. Hamilton would take her husband’s side. “With my luck, they’ll sue me for assault.” I held up my glass, wordlessly requesting a refill. “There was Riley’s teacher a few days ago…” Something I hadn’t told Penny about but probably should have. “And I did knee Hamilton in the nuts…”
“He got off easy,” said Penny as she topped up my cup. I’d seldom heard her sound so adamant about hurting someone. My surprise must’ve shown because she flashed me a rueful smile, shoulders drawing up into a shrug. “What? It’s true.”
It was, but I couldn’t afford to feel righteous about what I’d done. The consequences were likely to set me back.
“I shouldn’t have done it,” I sighed. “The hell am I gonna do for work?”
“You’ll find something.”
“You know that for a fact?” I didn’t want to argue with Penny. She had a nice condo just south of Market Street and she had a great career. Even the new husband was tolerable. Okay, he was nice. I didn’t want to like him, but Dustin had mellowed out since we’d last met and he didn’t even seem to mind me crashing on his couch. That predisposed me to thinking a little better of him.
Penny canted her head into a nod. She had that determined glint in her eyes, as if we were about to go in for a tough final and she wasn’t even considering the possibility of failure.
“Right now you should just worry about getting some sleep,” she told me sagely. “You’re totally smashed.”
“I am?” I asked and hiccoughed.
“There’s your answer.” Penny let me drink the rest of the whiskey down to the dregs before gathering up cup and bottle, and rising gracefully to her feet. I was sure she had imbibed just as much as I had and yet she seemed unaffected.
She was the bionic woman while I had become a lightweight. A failure. I couldn’t even hold my liquor anymore. I groaned, letting my head drop heavily against the back of the couch. Self-pity was in vogue this year.
Halfway to the liquor cabinet, Penny spun on her heel. “Hey, does Elliot know?”
“Who’s Elliot?” Dustin asked, glancing curiously between us. I shouldn’t have felt so gratified that Penny had kept my secret, but I did. I liked knowing that I could trust her.
“My boyfriend.” My lover. The first one seemed to fit just as well. I wanted Elliot to be my boyfriend.
Maybe we could catch a late night movie and tumble drunkenly into bed together afterwards. I could introduce him to my mother someday—she’d be pleased to know he was a professor, even if he wasn’t Iranian.
I reminded myself that none of that was likely to happen. “He’s friends with the Hamiltons.”
“Ah.” Dustin winced. “Well. That’s all the more reason you should call him.”
“Yeah, right.”
“He has a point,” Penny said. With my eyelids so heavy, I had a hard time focusing on her features, much less disagreeing with her.
“The only thing calling him will accomplish is me getting my heart broken. Can’t do that right now,” I muttered. “It already feels like a pincushion. So for now, my heart’s closed for maintenance.” I tapped my fingers against my ribcage, giggling as they resonated dully. “Come back tomorrow.”
Penny sighed, but she didn’t press the point. I caught her exchanging a glance with her husband, but I felt too tired to puzzle out its meaning. Their couch was comfortable and Penny’s liquor had done its work.
The minute my head hit the pillow, I was already asleep.
* * * *
The apartment was plunged in darkness when I woke. A sliver of moonlight hit the grandfather clock in the foyer, providing just enough light that I could spy the hour. Twelve twenty-five. I had slept like a log for a solid six hours. My head felt only slightly like it was stuffed full of cotton.
I felt rested, if a little sluggish, as I pushed myself up to sit. Someone had draped a quilt over me while I dozed. I wondered if it was Penny. I assumed it must have been. The afghan looked old and smelled faintly musty, but I welcomed its warmth.
On the coffee table in front of me I noticed a glass of juice, two aspirin tablets and a sandwich resting on a white porcelain plate. Apparently hospitality in the Kim household didn’t end with a boozy, emotional welcome. Gratitude overwhelmed me. I must have been a fool for thinking Penny’s desire to have a private wedding ceremony had
anything to do with me. I was a fool and a selfish, awful friend.
Among other things… I couldn’t help think about Zara, Phoenix and Riley, the kids I’d abandoned in my rush to get away from their awful parents. Even if by some miracle Mrs. Hamilton wouldn’t have fired me for seducing her husband with my feminine wiles, dereliction of duty would surely be enough to earn me the boot.
“You’ve done it now, Chase. You’ve fucked it up,” I grumbled and barely recognized my own voice. It sounded raspy, like I’d been shouting a lot in my sleep. I sincerely hoped that wasn’t the case but downed the orange juice anyway to chase away the cobwebs.
I didn’t know how else to psych myself. I understood, rationally, that the next few days would be hard, that what was coming for me was more than disappointment and fear for the future.
I was prolonging the inevitable by sitting around and listening to the ticking of the clock.
I reached for the phone with a shaky hand. It was just as well that Elliot and I had exchanged numbers recently or I wouldn’t have known how to contact him. Maybe, I thought as I listened to the first ring, that would’ve been for the best.
He picked up in a matter of seconds. “Hello?”
I felt my breath catch. Elliot sounded harried, like he’d been running. Did he already know?
“Hi,” I croaked. “It’s me.” The number flashing across his cellphone screen would be unfamiliar and I didn’t know how many girls he had on speed dial, so I added, “It’s Miriam,” just in case he didn’t recognize my husky voice.
“Miriam, Jesus—I’ve been trying to call you all evening,” Elliot said, urgency audible in his tone. “Where are you? Are you all right?”
He knew. I could tell that he knew. Mr. Hamilton must have called to warn him off.
“I’m fine. I’m, uh, staying with a friend.”
“Oh, thank God. Bridget said you just ran off. What happened?” I could hear the incomprehension in his voice. Mrs. Hamilton had given him just enough to whet his appetite but not enough so he wouldn’t think that I’d lost my mind.
