by Alix Nichols
Usually discreet, my fiancé regales the company with hilarious stories and witty quips, all while stroking my thigh under the table.
“You’re so lucky to have snagged a man like that,” a retired career woman on my right whispers in my ear.
“I know,” I mouth to her, unable to wipe the smug grin off my face.
After dessert, everyone poses for a group photo.
“You are all invited to a tour of the bridge tomorrow,” the captain says before wishing us good night.
“I’m so looking forward to that,” Julien says to me as we stroll to our cabin. “Can’t think of a better way to finish this amazing cruise.”
I sigh. “I wish it were longer.”
“What?” he asks in feigned surprise. “You aren’t eager to go back to work?”
I roll my eyes. “Unlike some people present, my job consists of fattening my ass and wearing down my brain so I can help the rich partners of my law firm get even richer.”
The fake surprise in Julien’s eyes turns real, and I regret my words immediately.
What’s wrong with me today?
The only thing Julien had heard about my job until now was how much I loved it. And I do. How can I not? Being an associate in a big law firm is a dream come true. The job is demanding, but I know if I work hard enough, network harder and lick my boss’s bespoke Italian shoes harder still, one day I’ll be promoted to partner.
Yay, right?
Exhaling a heavy breath, I wave my hand. “I didn’t mean what I just said. Decidedly, my tongue is full of poison.”
“Your tongue is full of honey,” he says, flashing me one of his devastatingly sexy smiles.
Only this time, it misses its mark, and my panties stay firmly sewn together.
Whether it’s because my distress served as a shield against his charm or Julien’s eyes didn’t truly partake in his smile remains to be seen.
Julien
Isn’t it ironic that the run-down McDonald’s where Noemi and I sealed my fate eight years ago is just three blocks from the swimming pool where I’ve trained for the last two years?
When we were eighteen, Noemi lived farther down the street. My parents’ apartment was spitting distance from hers, and our school was no more than ten minutes away.
After my failed suicide attempt, we moved to Belgium, and I never set foot in this neighborhood until I returned to Paris and joined Lucas’s up-and-coming club. And now I pass this calamitous spot every day except Sundays or when we travel. That must add up to something like four or five hundred occasions to recall a certain windy December afternoon and shake my head at my incredible naïveté.
Today is no different.
I park my car in the first available spot, grab my duffel bag, and hoof it to the pool. As I pass the McDonald’s, I forget I’m a self-assured twenty-six-year-old athlete admired by thousands of fans and rid of my aggressive cystic acne for five years.
I’m eighteen again, sitting across the table from an angel in skinny jeans and white sweater at this very McDonald’s.
I’d planned to take Noemi somewhere nicer, but she said she didn’t have time, what with today’s homework, the papers to finish and hand in before the Christmas break, and the exams to prepare for.
“So, what is it you wanted to tell me?” she says, glancing at her watch. “Make it snappy.”
I’d prepared a speech filled with pearls of eloquence from the “Top 10 Most Romantic Love Declarations No Woman Can Resist” article from the Internet. I’d learned it by rote.
But I can’t remember a word of it to save my life.
Noemi taps her fingertips on the table. “So?”
“I’m in love with you,” I say.
She sighs and stares out the window. Her expression tells me she expected me to say something like that. Small wonder, with all the yearning looks exchanged between us since September. True, I’ve done most of the looking and, especially, the yearning. But she did return quite a few of my stares, especially when we worked on that history presentation in her room.
I would’ve never dared to do what I’m doing now if she hadn’t.
With my gaze trained on my Christmas blend, I wait and lose hope with every passing second. I’m so screwed. She must be searching for words to break it to me gently. She’s going to say she’s sorry but she doesn’t feel the same way about me. Given the way I look these days, who can blame her?
“Are you sure what you’re feeling is love, and not… you know… hormones?” Noemi asks.
I look up from my paper cup, flabbergasted. She didn’t say no. She’s trying to gauge the depth of my feelings.
Could that mean…
Noemi cocks her head, prompting me to answer her question.
“Yes, I’m sure,” I say.
“Are you willing to prove it?”
“Of course. How?”
She shrugs. “I don’t know… Do something that will leave no doubt in my heart that you’re truly in love.”
“I’ll do anything,” I say. “Name it, and I’ll do it.”
She gives me a mischievous smile. “Will you dye your hair bright green?”
I smirk. “As if I didn’t look vile enough with my zits… But yes, sure.”
“Will you go out in yellow briefs?”
“Sure.”
“And nothing else.”
I picture myself walking the streets of Paris in my underwear. “Can I have my sneakers on?”
She nods. “Will you get a tattoo on your back?”
“Absolutely. Anything specific?”
She describes what she has in mind and surveys me for a long moment. “Will you write me a love letter?”
“Already have.”
I reach for my jacket to pull the folded sheet with my “speech,” but she catches my hand. “Don’t give it to me now.”
My mind draws a blank, and all I can think of is her hand on my wrist. This is our first time touching. It feels like heaven.
“Did you swipe it from the Internet?” she asks.
I smile apologetically. “Writing isn’t my strong suit.”
“I don’t care if your letter isn’t elegant,” she says. “But I want your words to come from the heart. They have to be sincere.”
I stare at her hand on top of mine. “OK… I’ll write it in my own words. Then what?”
“I’ll invite you to my birthday party next Saturday,” Noemi says, shifting her hand ever so slightly.
Was that a caress? My eyes drill into hers, looking for a clue.
She holds my gaze and shifts her hand again, this time applying more pressure, stroking my hand. My lids drop, and my cock stirs against my thigh.
“You’ll come in yellow undies,” she says, “with green hair and the tat on your back, and you’ll bring your love letter. We’ll go to my room once my parents are out and everyone is dancing, and you’ll read it to me. If I find your letter heartfelt and passionate enough, I will…” She blushes and looks at our hands on the table.
Emboldened, I reach over and touch her cheek. “Noemi…”
“I’ll kiss you,” she says, leaning her head into my touch. “And… more.”
Holy. Cow.
This is so much more than what I could have hoped for that a part of me wants to jump on top of the table and yell my joy for the whole world to hear. The other part wants to lean forward and kiss the hell out of Noemi. But I do neither of those things. She has stated her terms. I’m not enchanted with them, but clearly, they mean a lot to her. So, I’m going to play by her rules and hold my end of the deal.
And she’ll hold hers.
Except, she didn’t.
She had never meant to.
The whole thing had been intended as a lesson: How dare you hope a girl like me would want anything to do with a loser like you!
As I step into the locker room, my teammates attack me with confetti guns.
“Congratulations on your engagement!”
“Woot! Woot
!”
“When’s the wedding?”
News travels fast.
Jean-Michel shakes his head. “Lucky bastard, snagging a girl like that. I was hoping she’d dump you and go out with me…”
“Luckily for Julien, his girl is too smart to fall for a horndog like you,” Valentin says.
Zach, our hole-set and team captain, pats my shoulder. “I’m happy for you, man.”
I feel bad because I know Zach means it. He always means what he says. Recently married himself—and happily so, judging by the way he and Uma dote on each other—he’s thirty-three. That makes him the oldest player and the only “veteran” on the team.
But the club’s longest in the tooth is our coach Lucas, who could’ve still played at thirty-seven if it wasn’t for his injuries and all the other shit he went through a few years back.
Everyone else is in their twenties, which means a couple of Olympic Games and at least half a dozen seasons to look forward to.
Today’s workout begins with weight lifting and stomach exercises before we jump into the tank for leg conditioning. In this game, everything comes down to strength and endurance. After my attempted suicide, I set out to harden myself mentally and physically. I did tons of research on various sports. Water polo looked like the toughest of them all, so I chose it. I’ve never regretted my choice.
What happens above the water is bad enough, but the real effort—and the real fight—takes place beneath the surface where the public and the refs on their walkways can’t see.
We tread water all the time—even during time-outs—to keep ourselves afloat since we aren’t allowed to touch the bottom of the pool. We position ourselves so we can make plays on offense or defense with one arm out of the water at all times and ready to handle the ball.
No one gets to rest if they’re in the game.
Even in peaceful moments when players are “just” swimming across the pool, things are not what they seem. Suddenly, two or three guys come up from underwater, and there’s blood everywhere. Only no one rolls on the grass screaming and weeping like those clowns do in soccer.
We take our lumps and carry on.
As the team’s hole-defender, I tend to end up with more lumps than any other player on the squad. While Zach must focus on scoring, my main job is to prevent the opposing team’s hole-set from shooting. The way I do it is by jostling, hurtling myself into the guy, jabbing him, pulling, hanging on him, and doing just about anything short of stabbing to shut him down.
Considering the average hole-set’s size and skill, defending the hole is a job from hell. Good thing I’m just as big as Zach. And twice as mean.
The only other guy meaner than me in the field—and in life—is Jean-Michel. We could’ve been besties if I’d had for him a fraction of the respect I have for Zach.
Zach’s lack of meanness aside, I truly admire our hole-set.
He’s honorable, and he trains like a beast, which is why he’s in top form. Last year, he was named France’s top scorer, and became the first Nageurs de Paris player to be selected for the national team. Our goalie Noah was the second and, once Lucas took over as the national team’s coach, he picked me to be the hole-defender on the main squad and Jean-Michel as a substitute hole-set.
Aside from the fact that it’s an honor to represent France in international competitions, my pay doubled, and I quit my part-time job at my parents’ accounting firm. Mom was OK with that, but Dad wasn’t happy. I had to promise I’d join again when my days as an athlete are over.
What I failed to mention is that I plan to become the longest-playing water poloist in the world.
After the workout, we go for drinks. This time, coach takes us to a fancier place than our usual post-workout brasserie and orders champagne to celebrate my engagement. I had expected this to happen, so I asked my fiancée and my best friend to join us. Noemi had to work late, researching some messy case for her boss, but Roland said he’d come.
True to his word, he did.
“Congratulations!” Roland gives me a shamelessly fake smile and clinks his champagne glass to mine. “Everything on track?”
While my teammates and coach are here to wish me joy and happiness, Roland is asking about the progress of my plan. What with being my best friend since childhood, he’s the only person who knows about it.
“Oh, yeah.” I flash a bright smile that competes with Roland’s in its falseness. “The paperwork is done and submitted to the mairie, and we have a date.”
“When?”
“November 22.”
“That’s two months from now.” Roland frowns. “Will you survive?”
“Are you abstaining until marriage?” Jean-Michel asks, widening his eyes.
I hadn’t noticed him sit next to us.
I rub the bridge of my nose, scrambling for a plausible explanation. “That’s not what he meant.”
“I meant it in the sense that Julien here is way too eager to call Noemi his wife,” Roland says.
“Aww. How sweet.” Jean-Michel gives me a you-poor-lovesick-sod smile. “So, will you survive?”
He wouldn’t be smiling if he knew the real meaning behind Roland’s question. My friend was asking if I can keep up the act for two more months.
I can.
I will.
Even if it’s getting harder by the day.
Noemi
“Where’s that darned memo?” Melissa inquires of the universe for the umpteenth time. With a panicked expression, she flips over the neatly stacked contents of her outbox and spreads them across her desk.
As Bertrand’s PA, it’s Melissa’s job to be organized. And she was, until recently. But her longtime boyfriend took off with a bimbo half his age, leaving her and their toddler in a mortgaged house she couldn’t afford on her own. So, the house was sold to pay the debts, and Melissa moved in with her mom. Quiet by nature, the poor woman’s level of confidence took a huge hit after that debacle.
For a split second, I consider saying something kind and supportive to Melissa. Then I think again.
In this company—and in this life—it’s every man for himself. Melissa shouldn’t have let her personal issues affect her work. She should’ve stayed on top of things at the office, regardless of what’s been going on at home. Now she only has herself to blame for her downward spiral.
Bertrand, who used to be satisfied with her performance, has started shaming her in public at every staff meeting over the last month. He also reams her out between staff meetings, “in private”, but loudly enough for everyone to hear.
Almost every time he crawls out of his office, he asks Melissa a seemingly innocuous question. She answers with a quiver in her voice, and before you know it, he’s yelling at her.
She’s become his PB—Punching Bag—as much as his PA.
If I didn’t know my devious boss better, I’d think he’s developed a sudden and passionate hatred for his assistant of two years. But Bertrand doesn’t do emotions, and even hatred is an emotion. There must be something that motivates him to prey on Melissa during her rough patch—pushing her down instead of pulling her up.
Ingrid sashays to Melissa’s desk. “Do you need help looking for that memo?”
Melissa shakes her head.
In her place, I wouldn’t accept Ingrid’s help either. The twenty-one-year-old is a secretarial intern in our firm, recruited personally by Bertrand. There’s speculation in the office as to whether she’s his mistress, a distant relation, or a friend’s daughter. She could also be a mistress’s daughter or a friend’s mistress. The possibilities are endless.
But whoever she is, she wasn’t hired in response to a need.
Lawyers and legal associates recruit their own interns, generally law students, to help with the workload. As for the administrative side of things, we have a top-notch hyper-efficient office manager who’s more important to the firm than any of the lawyers. She picks her own temps and interns whom she puts through a rigorous evaluation test be
fore hiring. She wasn’t involved in or even aware of Ingrid’s recruitment.
Suddenly, everything clicks into place.
Bertrand is harassing Melissa in the hopes she’ll resign so he can offer her job to Ingrid.
If Melissa wasn’t one of the two staffers hired by the other partner on an open-end contract, I’m sure Bertrand would’ve sacked her by now. He still can if he gathers sufficient proof of her incompetence.
Seeing Melissa’s escalating forgetfulness, it won’t take him long.
Which would be a shame, because the woman is… nice. Unlike the ruthless baby sharks the corporate world teems with, Melissa has always refused to get involved in backstabbing and intrigues. She’s honest and unguarded, and at thirty-two, she still doesn’t understand what others figured out by the time they finished school: You can’t survive without soul armor.
If you refuse to grow it because it makes you ugly on the inside, someday someone will put a spear through your heart.
I’ve known that since my last year of high school, and not just because of what my friends and I did to Julien. Two months before graduation, I had a spear driven through my own heart.
After the Cats and I taught Julien a “lesson in humility,” as we liked to call the public disgrace we inflicted, he came down with pneumonia. Our teachers told us it was so bad he had to go to the hospital and then recover at home for a month.
By the end of that month, his family moved to Belgium. That meant I didn’t get to see Julien again until we bumped into each other in June. I like to think that if he’d returned to our school after his illness, I would’ve apologized and made it up to him somehow.
That said, I doubt I would’ve gone as far as admitting I had a secret crush on him.
Yes, that’s right—one of the school’s most popular girls fancied one of its most pathetic losers. The very guy she’d humiliated in front of everyone for daring to fall in love with her. I couldn’t bear the mortification of such an admission. But I would’ve tried my best to convince him I was truly sorry and hadn’t realized how cruel my little joke would turn out to be.
