by Amber Stuart
So at the last minute, I had decided Lottie needed to be with us as we planned the kidnapping of the man who thought she was so dangerous that he had ordered her execution. It was a huge gamble; I’d had to convince Mark and Eric to let her participate in the first place, and then, we had to hope she could handle what we were about to tell her.
As we sat at the table, I left out the details of how I had learned about Abram in the first place, but I’m sure news traveled fast in their circle. She must have known Jackson was dead and that the fire that killed him coincided with the time I had been out of town. But she never mentioned it.
Instead, when I finished, she just looked at each of us, letting her eyes linger on me the longest, before asking, “And what happens when I’m done questioning him?”
I glanced at Eric. I couldn’t tell Lottie the truth.
“Don’t worry, Lottie, we’ll take care of it,” Eric offered.
Lottie was chewing on her lower lip again, still staring at me, her face filled with a concern that made me wish I had just disappeared with her, taken her anywhere she wanted to go and tried to vanish. Maybe it wasn’t really feasible; if my contract weren’t willingly terminated, we’d be completely fucked, but it was just a fantasy after all. But her concern wasn’t for her anyway; she was worried about me.
“You aren’t going though, right?” she asked.
“No, I’ll be here,” I assured her.
Lottie exhaled slowly, relief maybe, but never took her eyes off mine. “Well, I guess we have to do this. For Lydia. They never should have dragged her into this.”
“I like her,” Mark suddenly said, and we all jumped at the sound of his voice. He had been so quiet, just observing us as we rehashed, planned, deliberated. His announcement would have been comical if we hadn’t been discussing kidnapping and murder, but Lottie just tilted her head at him and smiled.
“Of course you do. Everybody likes her. She’s like a sun that pulls the rest of us around her in her orbit. And if you ask me, you’re all pretty damn lucky to be part of her galaxy.”
Mark smiled back at Lottie, and if he’d had my north German complexion instead of his dark southern Mediterranean one, I probably would have been able to notice him blushing.
More than ever, I wanted five minutes alone to complain to Eric about what a fucking sci-fi love triangle this whole trip had become. But Lottie had made up her mind. Mark and Eric were going to New York, and they were bringing back Abram.
Chapter 13
Lottie was nervous. She remembered Eric. She knew he was one of her closest friends. And she had just sent him halfway across the country to participate in the kidnapping of a man who had no reservations about having harmless young women killed.
I didn’t care what Jackson had said or what any of them believed. Lottie was not dangerous. What she had done could only threaten them if others found out, and Lottie wanted as few people to know as possible. She already felt like too many people knew. If they had just tried to talk to her instead, they would have been able to see that for themselves: this was a woman who just wanted to get on with her life, not interfere in anyone else’s.
Lydia assumed Lottie’s anxiety was about the man who was coming to see her soon to determine if her mind was salvageable or not, if their friendship would be allowed to survive. But Lottie wasn’t worried about that; she already knew she wasn’t giving up either one of us.
We anticipated it taking Mark and Eric at least three days, so that was a lot of time to kill. I was far less concerned; I knew them. I had worked with them so many times, and this was the kind of thing that we could have done without more forethought. Actually, we had done this without much forethought or planning. Whoever these guys were and from wherever they came, they had certainly never expected to find themselves the targets of one of the most powerful intelligence agencies in the world. They were outnumbered, outwitted, beaten at a game they hadn’t known had begun.
So I planned on spending the next few days trying to distract Lottie whenever she wasn’t at work, and to remind her that everything would be ok even when she was. I showed up during her shift just so she could feel reassured by my presence there. I bought a copy of The Sleepwalkers: How Europe went to War in 1914 by Christopher Clark and sat in the café reading while she worked.
At least once every hour, she would stop by my table, kiss the top of my head, then go back to stocking her shelves or helping a customer find a book on new age crystals or origami or Minecraft. I made a mental note to look up just what the hell Minecraft was one of these days.
Lottie had majored in English and was at home among the shelves here, floating naturally among books on self-help and local history and popular fiction. Books held a sort of magic for her. She treated them with the veneration most people would treat a Bible or Koran; books were Lottie’s religion.
She had worked as an editor for a local magazine in Houston, occasionally writing pieces on the fashion shows Jamie worked or new exhibits at one of the museums. She’d had everything she wanted except for the children she knew would come some day. She was so happy.
This bookstore was located in a busy shopping center, and when her shift ended, I bought her supper at a seafood restaurant nearby. She ordered the salmon. She picked the zucchini out of her steamed vegetables and plucked them onto my plate, just like she used to, while she chatted about the awkwardness of helping middle-aged women find anything located in the erotica section.
“Hey,” I countered, “you’re going to be middle-aged one day. If that’s how they wanna get off, then leave them alone.”
Lottie looked up at me through her eyelashes, still hunting through her vegetables to make sure she hadn’t missed any of the offensive squash. She offered me one of those makes-my-heart-skips-beats hybrid smiles.
“True, and who says I don’t read erotica now? I just don’t talk to the salesperson about it.”
I put my fork down. “You read… women porn?”
Lottie laughed. My stomach flipped, but not in that dangerous, I’m going to lose my supper kind of way, but a happy, tingling, I-can’t-believe-I’m-sitting-here-with-Lottie-talking-about-porn kind of way.
“Dietrich, this isn’t news. You know I read all kinds of stuff.”
“Yeah, but… well, I never actually read any of those books.”
“And it’s not porn. It’s erotica. It’s different.”
I was skeptical. Sounded like the same thing to me. “Isn’t that just porn with words?”
Lottie glanced up from her fish. “Huh. I guess so. I never thought of it that way. But, unlike porn, no humans are actually harmed in the making of this book.”
I smiled at her. “Will you read it to me?”
“What?” She was blushing now. I had known she would. But the thought of Lottie reading erotica – which I still thought was just porn for women – had suddenly turned me on. A lot.
“Pick your favorite book. Read it to me.”
Lottie was caught somewhere between being intrigued and maybe even aroused by the thought of this too and having the look of a trapped animal ready to gnaw its leg off to get the hell out of here.
I was about to tell her it was ok, she didn’t have to share this part of her fantasy world with me when she finally leaned her head toward me, resting her chin in her hand, looking at me intently with those shining hazel eyes.
“And what else do you want for me to do for you?” she asked.
Holy shit.
I swallowed. I couldn’t think of anything to say. My mouth felt dry. I felt seventeen again. Seventeen, naïve and scared, so inexperienced and young. We were lying on my bed in my dorm room making out, and she had taken off my shirt, was trailing the lines of the muscles in my abdomen with her fingertips, up to the curves of my chest, across my nipples and back again, and I had a horrible premonition that if I didn’t stop her, didn’t back away from her now, something so mortifyingly humiliating would happen that
I would die a virgin.
I grabbed her hand and pulled my mouth away from hers, gasping, “Lottie, I… I need a break.”
We had been dating for almost three months then. This was a familiar scene. Lottie sighed and pushed herself away from me, but not by much, still lying on my pillow watching me. She wanted to touch me. I wanted to touch her, too. More than anything I had ever wanted before, actually. I couldn’t look at her. I closed my eyes and concentrated on my breathing, but this time, Lottie stopped me.
“Dietrich,” she said quietly, “open your eyes.”
I opened them. “Why?”
“Because I love your eyes. They’re the most remarkable shade of blue I’ve ever seen. Like the ocean.”
I was blushing. Hell, I had probably been blushing the whole time. I didn’t know how to respond, but by then, she knew that about me. I was shy, awkward, clumsy in my interactions with people – even her.
“I don’t want to stop tonight, Dietrich,” she whispered.
My heart was beating so quickly I thought surely she could hear it, she must be able to feel the vibrations across the pillow and thin dorm mattress we were lying on. I didn’t want to stop either, but some part of me – a very vocal voice in my head – kept taunting me, telling me that I was just a discarded child that no one had ever loved and I had no idea what I was doing now, and she would be so disappointed or she would find my attempt to make love to her so comical that she actually would laugh at me, before getting dressed and leaving my room forever. I also suspected that voice was being extremely unfair to Lottie. And maybe even me, but more so to Lottie. She probably wouldn’t laugh at me out loud.
As I lay there arguing with that voice in my head, Lottie reached out for me again, moving her body closer to mine, and kissed me. She asked me to take her shirt off, to touch her, to explore her body like she wanted to explore mine. And the testosterone of youth finally quieted that unbelievably annoying and condescending voice in my head, but I was still surprised when, afterward, Lottie neither laughed nor seemed disappointed at all. She wrapped my sheet around our naked bodies, rested her head on my heaving chest, and enfolded her arms around me.
“That was perfect,” she murmured against my skin, and despite trying not to, I felt myself getting aroused again. “This was exactly how I imagined our first time.”
We made love twice more that night before I had to bring her home.
Looking at her now, I wondered if she ever saw that seventeen-year-old boy in me; sometimes, I still felt him. Like now. I needed her to take charge again, tell me what to do, what she expected me to do, but she was waiting for me to speak. She didn’t want to take charge this time.
So I thought about what I wanted most from her, what I wanted most of all, and in that way I had of speaking before really thinking about the consequences, I told her, “I want you to still marry me.”
Lottie took my proposal – or reproposal – better than I thought she would, especially since I hadn’t even known I was going to say it. But Lottie was still practical, and she knew we could never return to Houston. Her mind was already running through the scenarios of what I would have to be willing to give up, what I would have to be willing to do and change, and I knew this was Lottie – this was her assiduous nature, careful to analyze every detail of any potential problem in a future as my wife. So I didn’t interrupt her. It would have been as pointless as trying to see any difference between ivory and creamy ivory, or for all I knew, even peridot or sage.
But that night at her apartment, Lottie told me to sit on her bed as she disappeared into her closet. I heard her moving boxes around and wondered – ok, hoped – she was looking for her favorite erotica novel. But when she emerged, she was holding tightly onto a wad of carefully wrapped cloths, taped closed, so that it formed a small lump the size of a golf ball. She handed it to me and sat next to me. I knew what it was.
I tried to keep my fingers steady as they pulled at the tape to release the strips of cloth then carefully lifted the white gold and platinum ring inside it. Set in the center was a Kashmir sapphire, surrounded by diamond accents. The intricate metalwork that held the sapphire and diamonds in place had been designed by me. It didn’t have any particular significance, other than the brilliant blue sapphire. I had simply looked at a dozen different jewelry stores and countless websites, and couldn’t find anything that looked like it had been made for Lottie. So I called a jeweler who could do custom pieces and had a ring made – a perfect fit for her delicate fingers, as luminous and unique as she was. And for once, I had caved and intentionally bought something for her that was the color of my eyes.
As I lifted her engagement ring from the cloths she had so carefully wrapped it in, the light reflecting from the stones as I held it between my fingers, I thought of the night I had given her this ring, the night I had asked her to become my wife. It was only a month before Christmas, and I had originally planned on proposing then, but once I had the ring in my hands, I knew I wouldn’t be able to wait. So I did something impulsive, something I had once thought I would never do again, something I had hardly thought about in the nine years since coming to the United States. I booked a surprise trip for us to Berlin.
I don’t know why – I’m still not sure why – I had the overwhelming desire to take Lottie to Berlin then; maybe because I wanted to start this new life, to begin this new chapter of my own family, my own love and wanting, in the same place where I had been rejected, where I had never fit in. Maybe it was my way of saying “fuck you” to my mother for not loving me, for not wanting me, for blaming me for her own mistakes. And so I had proposed to her along the Spree River in Berlin, and it was there that Lottie had promised to become my wife.
And now? She was giving her ring back to me? I didn’t want it. How could I ever take this back?
“Lottie,” I said, putting it back in the cloths she had taken such care to preserve her ring in, “this is yours. Why are you giving this to me?”
“Because one day, you will know for sure if you want to give it to me again. And you should keep it until then, because if you decide to propose to me, I expect another proper proposal.”
I smiled at her. “How am I supposed to top the last one?”
Lottie smiled back at me. “I’m sure you’ll figure something out.”
That night, the only thing we figured out was that keeping our relationship platonic was impossible. Lottie still didn’t understand why I had thought it was necessary in the first place, and I was still too scared to bring up Kyrieana again, so I did something I was not very good at: I tried to stop obsessing.
And the next few days were such easy ones; we were happy, elated even, to be together again, so that even doing laundry or dishes or helping her shop for groceries – which reminded me I still had no food in my own apartment – felt like an adventure. We didn’t talk about this man who was coming to judge her, or Abram who would be here soon; she would only ask occasionally if I heard from Eric and Mark and if they were ok.
Four days after leaving Baton Rouge, Eric called to tell me they were back. Abram had been brought to a rental house in a rural area outside of the city off of Greenwell Springs Road. They were ready for us.
We drove there in silence, Lottie staring out her window as the sun sank lower casting a gray-blue haze over the city. She was fidgety, tense, and every red light that stopped us earned a disapproving scowl from her. She was anxious to find out why Abram wanted her dead.
Maybe my imagination sometimes got the better of me, too, because as I drove up to the house Eric had told me to come to, I realized I had been expecting some dark, tree-lined alleyway leading us to an old cabin or abandoned house or something that indicated we had just stepped into a Jean le Carré novel. But the house wasn’t too far off the street and was well kept, a small wooden home painted white with bright blue shutters that made me cringe when I saw them. Of all the worst times to make an eye analogy. But Lottie didn’t say anyth
ing. I looked over at her and squeezed her hand.
“You’ll be safe. There are three of us in there, and he’s restrained.”
Lottie twitched, as if she’d never really thought about what kind of scene she would be walking into. I didn’t even know what kind of scene we’d be walking into. Christ, this was a bad idea.
Lottie followed me onto the porch and took my hand again. I thought about taking her back home, but she had wanted to be here. She felt she owed it to Lydia. So I knocked. Eric opened the door immediately. He must have heard us drive up and was probably waiting on the other side of the door. We stepped inside.
The home was fully furnished, and by the looks of it, hadn’t been updated since the early 1980s. Mark was sitting at the kitchen table, picking at something in a Styrofoam container. It smelled like curry. Where had they gotten Indian food around here? He smiled at Lottie when we came in and pushed the bag on the table over toward us.
“Want some?”
I shook my head. Lottie turned paler. I couldn’t imagine what she must have been thinking – after what they’d done, after what we were going to do, these men were just sitting around eating chicken tandoori and… actually, I didn’t know what Mark was eating.
“What is that?” I asked, leaning over the table and wrinkling my nose. I liked Indian food almost as much as I liked vegetable juice.
“Lamb vindaloo.” He picked through it again and held a chunk of lamb up triumphantly.
He dropped it back in his Styrofoam bowl and looked at Lottie seriously, carefully. “How’s Lydia?” he asked.
Lottie looked away from the bright orange-red lamb in front of him, a brief moment of shock and uncertainty morphing her features before recognition transformed them again, softening them. She offered him a small smile. “Great, actually. She really likes having all of you in town with us.”
Between the Indian food and Mark’s obvious crush, this small home was becoming unbearably cramped and confining.
