by Kitty Parker
"Darien," my mother acknowledged, blonde hair too light to go visibly grey shining icy white in the light. I had to admit, she looked handsome tonight, tall and proud and regal, but I did have to get my good looks and bearing from somewhere, and I had stopped trying to convince myself that I was adopted a good few years ago.
My father only nodded curtly, eyes as blue as mine darting to Emma and back to me. I could see the gears in his mind grinding beneath heavy brows, and hastily moved to intercept it before he got the wrong conclusions.
"Mother, you've met Emma before, I believe," I announced, drawing Emma forward from where she had sunk back, more sensitively than shyly. The stilted, formal language slid effortlessly off my tongue, the years of practice making it second nature.
"I have," my mother agreed with a slight smile playing over her face. She offered a manicured hand to Emma. "Welcome."
"My pleasure." Emma gave the hand a firm shake without being self-effacing, the same polite, cautious smile on her face. I let out a bit of the breath I had been holding, but that was the easy parent. I turned to my father.
"And this is my father," I continued, praying to any deity listening that both of them would behave themselves. Although my father wouldn't make a scene here, not with all these people watching. "Father, this is Emma Laycha, Mr. Lexington's stepdaughter."
I could see Emma's eyes do the customary flit between me and my father, surprised by our resemblance. But she recovered far faster than most people, and held out her hand again. "It's very nice to make your acquaintance, Mr. McGavern."
My father did a surreptitious survey of her, more intense now that he realized that she was more than just a nobody, then took her hand. But instead of shaking it, he raised it courteously to his lips. "Charmed," he murmured over it before letting it drop. Of course, I had forgotten. He could charm paint off the walls when he wanted to.
But I saw Emma's eyebrows rise imperceptibly as she shot a look at my mother, and knew she wasn't taken in. After all, my smoothness hadn't worked on her, my father's couldn't either (though I wasn't fool enough to think there anything sexual in that gesture, it was just my father knowing how to get people on his side). But I hoped Emma had taken note of how very little he had condescended to notice his own son, and how quickly he left again without another word to either of us as he saw someone else enter. My mother favored us with one of the sphinx-like smiles that she was famous for before she also swept away, blue dress glimmering with a frosted light.
"So," I said with false joviality, turning to Emma with a smile and dead eyes, "Now you've met my family. What do you think?"
Emma watched them from across the room, giving nothing away with her expression. That meant there was none of the sympathy I had hoped for, but also none of the pity I think I would have killed her for showing. It was just a blank, except for eyes that looked like she had just had a revelation.
"Darien," she said slowly, her gaze never leaving my parents. Her voice was quiet enough that no one else could hear it, but it wasn't soft. It had too much of tightly bound anger in it, and a hint of something like regret, "now I'm just impressed you turned out as well as you did."
Chapter 31
* * *
Emma
* * *
This man would not stop talking. I don't even know what he was prattling on about – something vaguely financial and self-important, I guessed from the few words I could make out – but he had been pontificating at me and Darien for well over fifteen minutes. My patience – never my strong point – had worn down past breaking point. I wasn't the one who needed to curry favor, after all.
"Darien," I murmured, standing on tiptoe to reach his ear, quiet enough that the man couldn't hear over his noises of vanity. Darien's eyes darted to me, though his expression of polite interest didn't move an inch. "I have to, umm…" I sought an excuse, choosing the first one that came to mind. He would know what I was doing anyway. "…get a drink. I'll just leave you here."
He shot a glance at the irritation, who hadn't noticed anything, then looked down at me with amused eyes. "Traitor," he hissed out of the corner of his mouth, nodding civilly when the man looked at us.
"Of course," I grinned back evilly, also speaking in an undertone, though the man had gone back to his speech; I doubt he would have been distracted if I had screamed. Darien flashed a pained face at me before it shifted back, but ignoring the twinge of my conscience at leaving a companion in the lurch, I stepped behind him and dissolved into the crowd before anyone – namely, the boy I had just abandoned – could stop me. Behind me, I heard Darien's voice, sounding courteous to anyone who didn't know him but exasperated to me,
"You don't say?"
The man just kept talking.
I smirked to myself as I reclined against a wall, congratulating myself on an escape well done. Honestly, some people should be legally required to wear muzzles. Or electric collars with universal remotes that anyone could use to shock them.
I am totally inventing that. Humanity would thank me.
Surveying the room from the safety of my wall, I laughed without a sound as I saw Darien, who had just gotten rid of the talkative man, accosted by another blowhard. Ha. Sucks for him, but better him than me. Some of these people were nice and intelligent, statistically speaking that had to be true, but how I was supposed to find them in the flood of glittering gold, I didn't know. The sheer amount of posturing and insincerity, matching that of any high school I had ever known, was giving me a headache. I had thought I would be able to escape that once I entered real life. It was good to know how false those illusions were.
"So you're the McGavern boy's girlfriend." I spun, startled, to face the regal voice that had appeared as I was watching Darien. An elderly woman, the lines on her face and iron grey hair giving away her age. Neither bowed with age nor with eyes dimmed of any intelligence, she stood before me, tall and proud and imperious. Her bearing spoke of condescension and of the knowledge that I wasn't worth much, but she didn't have the same air as Mrs. McGavern. Darien's mother acted like a sorceress, all power held deceptively in check beneath the surface, chilling in the threat of what you didn't know she knew. But this woman, with her hair arranged in waves around a triangular face and eyes of the same steely tint, was a queen who didn't bother to conceal her power. A Titania, secure enough in her power to stand up to Oberon.
"No, I'm not," I corrected her calmly, though with the tired air of someone who had been forced to make a lot of the same corrections. And I had. Could people not comprehend the idea of a platonic friendship between a boy and a girl? It really wasn't that difficult a concept! "I'm just his friend."
The fey glint in her eyes told me clearly just how little she believed me, but she didn't press the point. "Well, be sure you take him in hand," she admonished me with all the dignity of a matriarch commanding her tribe, "He used to be such a well behaved child, but he's become rather wild in the last years."
"And why would I have any influence on his behavior?" I inquired delicately, trying not to get irritated. Why did everyone always say the same damn thing? Though it was interesting that Darien's rebelliousness was a relatively recent thing… of course, to someone like her, relative might be a while back. "As I said, I'm only a friend."
"It's high time someone had a word with him," she continued as if I hadn't spoken. If it had been two hundred years earlier, her fan would have been slapping menacingly across her palm. "He'll make a mess of his life if he's not careful, just like his father."
"His father?" Darien's father had, I admit, surprised me. I mean, I had been expecting someone nasty from what I had gleaned from him and Troy and Brock, but that man had not been nasty. He was cultured and charming and cordial and cold. In a way not even his wife was, and that neither Darien nor I, despite our facades, could match – for now. It was frigidity so cold that it would disguise itself as warmth until you looked hard at him, and no one would ever bother to do that. The only time I had glimpsed a hin
t of the man beneath the mask was when his eyes had met his wife's, and even then it was only a peek, something nobody but she could read.
"Oh, yes, Steven was a wild one in his youth," the lady explained with a vicious excitement, the malicious enjoyment of airing old skeletons playing through her voice. "His son's a carbon copy of him at this age. But then he went off to college, and he came back like he is now. Personally, I believe it's an improvement, but not many people agree with me."
"Really?" if she would just keep talking this could get very interesting. It was like looking at a story of what Darien could be; what he would be if the same things happened to him. Not that I hoped – or thought – he would become his father. The elder Mr. McGavern didn't seem overly happy, at least not with his sons.
The old lady cackled, her shrewd gaze seeing right through my plan. But she answered anyway, as if pleased by my curiosity, or roundabout way of satisfying it. "That was all before he met his wife, of course. She certainly put some life back into him." A smile that bordered on lewd. "Rumor has it that he was engaged during college, but then the girl had a baby, and the timing wasn't quite right." she shot a meaningful look at me that I had no trouble deciphering. "He didn't look at another woman for years, but the minute Olivia started working with him, he was caught. " she smiled, a bit nostalgically if not at all benevolently. "Of course, it didn't hurt at all that her competence made the company's profit nearly double." Then, and I could have sworn I heard the sound of a fan snapping shut reverberating through the time stream, "But that's all only gossip. You, young lady, should stop him before the scandal."
I opened my mouth to speak, but she was my objection coming. "I am a woman child, and we have eyes, even if men don't. That boy there is watching you even when his back is turned." She raised her glass to me in a kind of wry salute, and I could have sworn I saw her wink at me before she stalked off, as elegant and eldritch as a hunting cat.
"Well." I spoke to the air after a second of realizing that I hadn't breathed since she left, "That was interesting." I was pretty sure I had just met one of those intelligent people I had known must have been here, but the effect was… unsettling to say the least. She was not a comfortable person.
"I see you've met Selina Wayne," another voice beside me observed. Once more, I spun on my heels in shock. I really had to work on not getting surprised if this was going to keep on happening. Mrs. McGavern stood there, staring into space and yet very, very alert, a glass of burgundy liquid held meditatively at the level of her eyes. "Her husband owns Wayne Enterprises, the largest manufacturers of cutting edge technology in the country."
"I'm sorry, ma'am, I didn't see you-" I stammered, trying to apologize for my inattention and indecorous reaction, but she cut me off, waving my apology away.
"She knows everything about everyone, especially what they don't want anyone to know. She takes a malevolent delight in learning everyone's little secrets, and an even greater one in telling them. Still, you can be sure that whatever she says will be true and, somehow, help her husband's company, whether by currying favor or blackmail. She's certainly been around long enough to know what helps."
"Um…" I hesitated. Was there a point in telling me this? Darien did say that his mother didn't do anything without an ulterior motive, but I couldn't see what she could get out of saying this. Then again, I hadn't swum with these sharks long enough to know their mannerisms.
"I'm going to be her in about twenty years," Darien's mother continued without any emotion, crystalline eyes steady and apathetic, just making an objective observation. "Her daughter never speaks to her unless she's forced to, but Selina doesn't need it. She's perfectly happy with her husband and her money and her secrets."
"That doesn't sound very fulfilling," I ventured. What was it with people and talking to me tonight? Or was this just some sort of gauntlet newcomers had to run; a sort of hazing ritual maybe? If it was, I wished they'd just hit me and get it over with. This was much more torturous; albeit also much more intriguing.
"Perhaps," she allowed briefly, taking a leisurely sip of her drink. I kept quiet as she swallowed, trying to read her blank expression, but she spoke before I could. "But for people like us, who didn't always have the money we have now, is it really that wrong to want the security it brings?" She sounded interested in an impersonal sort of way, like a teacher posing a question to a class that they hoped would spark discussion.
I sighed. For all my posing and patronization, I had rejoiced when I heard Mom was marrying a rich man, just because it meant more money and an easier life. "No."
"We had barely anything when I was growing up," she explained, her voice and gaze lost somewhere and sometime far away, in a past I couldn't imagine. "So all my life the one thing I wanted was… something. Money, security, comfort, love. And I got it too, I got it all." She gestured around with a sweeping hand, somehow encompassing not only the room but the neighborhood, the house, her life. "All this…this was my dream, but I didn't wish upon a star to get here. This is the product of constant, backbreaking work."
She fell silent. I copied her, following her gaze to the crowd around us. Where on Earth was she going with this? Was there a message I was missing between the words of her past? Or was it just a fun story?
"Being a woman in a man's world – it's not easy, Emma," she eventually pronounced, vaguely explanatory in tone, almost as if she was justifying something to me. But her eyes were still sharp and clear and unapologetic, taking in everything even as she spoke. "You have to fight and claw for every inch you climb. Timidity, scruples; they get burned out of a woman far faster than a man, because she can't afford to show weakness. Especially one who came out of nothing. You have to be hard, hard as ice."
Her eyes fixed on Darien's back. He had been detained by two or three more people, all yammering their heads off. From the tense set of his shoulders, I could tell that his temper was reaching a maximum point, but nothing in the faces of his companions said that he was showing any of his vexation.
"Having a husband – that's nearly requisite. Otherwise all sorts of nasty rumors circulate. They do anyway, of course. It's all part of the double standard- their sexuality is the easiest target for a man to hit when a woman starts to threaten him. Like it matters." A slight, contemptuous smile cracked her façade, one that invited me to share in the foolishness of men. "Even loving your spouse isn't absolutely frowned upon. Most of my colleagues at the very least are fond of their wives; we're past the age of arranged marriages-" my lips twisted disbelievingly, remembering Rhi "-and matchmakers." I flinched unwillingly, but she didn't seem to notice. I bet she did, though, at least subconsciously. I know I would have.
"But acting like a mother to your sons, showing the least bit of tenderness – men don't get that. They see a maternal instinct as weakness, and then the wolves pounce and you don't get back up. I learned how to be hard in a more difficult school than college, and how to want. If I lost any of this," again that sweep of the hand, "it would be worse than death, it would be the death of everything I ever worked for."
"But – Darien. And Troy," I protested without thinking. Yes, I knew the lust for material goods. But not at the expense of someone close to me. I wouldn't even consider –then again, I hadn't spoken to any of my friends from before Mom's marriage did I?
"I love my sons," she replied, cool and collected, though the gaze that had stuck to her son was no longer expressionless. I couldn't read the emotion in it, though- longing? Regret? Acceptance? "But being a mother to them would mean risking some of what I fought so hard for – especially Darien. When he was little, I was still carving out my territory. His unconditional child love convinced me I could ignore him and he would still love me, and now I look at him and see a stranger. Troy will soon be the same too. But I'm still here, still at the top."
"Was it worth it?" I inquired keenly. Her grip tightened around her glass and the air around her tightened, but her answer was calm as a summer's day.
"M
aybe," she answered thoughtfully, eyes still fixed on her son. "I don't know. I have everything I ever wanted out of life." Suddenly, she turned to look at me, gaze piercing through all my defenses, and I saw the woman who had risen so far out of nothing. "I've always thought we were rather alike. Born poor, smart, proud, desperately ambitious – but you won't become like me. That much I know." Her eyes flicked back to her son. "And perhaps that's fortunate."
My head was going to explode from curiosity if I didn't ask soon. "Mrs. McGavern," I asked, almost timidly. I didn't want to jolt her out of this odd mood she was in; if not because I still wanted an answer, then because it would be painful for her. "Why are you telling me this?"
"As I said," came her answer, eyes still on Darien, "I do love my son."
"But-" if that wasn't the most irritating of non-answers I had ever heard, I didn't know what was. I had never been on the receiving end of one of those. God, my enigmatic ways must be really annoying to some people. Maybe I should stop…yeah, right. I'd have a better chance of figuring out how to time travel. It's just a part of me that was too comfortable to change; not like I want to in any case.
"Now, why don't you go rescue him," she suggested, sharp as broken glass again, without any of the vaguely dreamy quality of before. The business woman was back, and as she had said, weakness was fatal.
The abrupt change in subject startled me, but I was improving; it didn't turn off my smart mouth. "And how would you propose I do that?" I eyed the crowd Darien had attracted warily. Pompous men and eager mamas; neither would react well at my interruption, and with an equal potential for being annoying when they were mad.
"You're a smart girl," she glanced conspiratorially at me, and I allowed myself a slight smile back, accepting the compliment in the spirit it was given. "You'll think of something." And she melted back into the crowd.
