The Lion's Den

by Katherine St. John

  I’d have loved nothing more. “I can’t.”

  Even if he stopped seeing Summer altogether, if she married someone else and was totally happy, I’d still never be able to go anywhere near Eric without being ready to permanently end my friendship with her.

  I knew this. Yet in the elevator, we stood face-to-face. His eyes rested on mine. An electric current coursed through my body, pulling me toward him with a force I couldn’t describe. Was it just me? A reaction to his blinding beauty? Or did he feel the same current? I reminded myself once again he was a rake, a trust-fund kid with the privilege to “reject money” who was moving to New York in a few weeks.

  Don’t fall for it, Belle.

  And then, without warning, as though the magnetic force was too strong to resist, his lips were on mine. The heat of a thousand suns burned between us, our arms wound around each other, his pelvis pressing into mine. And there the blaze burned even brighter.

  Ding! The elevator doors slid open, and light poured in. I pulled away. “Eric,” I cautioned.

  “Belle.” His voice was rough with desire.

  He reached for me.

  “We can’t,” I said. “This didn’t happen.” And without a backward glance, I was out the elevator door and running down the hallway toward my car.

  The following week I was on my bed memorizing lines when Summer arrived home from her private-airline steward training class. She flopped down on the duvet, sending pages fluttering. “Hey,” I protested. “I was using those.”

  “Sorry, I’m just so tired.” She groaned. “I’ve been on my feet all day. I need a nap.” She crawled under the covers next to me. “Can you maybe do that in the other room?”

  “Summer—” I pressed the palms of my hands into my eyes in frustration. She’d been living with me three months and had yet to donate a cent in rent. But we both knew I didn’t have the balls to ask her for it. I got up and started straightening the room, throwing discarded piles of clothes into the hamper.

  “What’s up? You’re mad. I can tell you’re mad,” she said.

  I sorted through a pile of books and magazines stacked on the bedside table. “My sister’s looking at USC Law School for next fall—”

  “That’s great!”

  “…so my parents are coming out with her during the holidays.”

  “Nice. Where are they staying?”

  “Here,” I said. “In my bed. Lauren and I’ll share the pullout couch. Paying for a hotel for a week in LA is too expensive, and I want to spend time with them. Anyway, you’ll have another apartment by then, right?”

  She sat up on her elbows. “Oh. So that’s what you’re mad about.”

  “I’m not mad, I just…can’t afford to support you forever.”

  She sighed dramatically and flopped back on the pillow. “It’s not forever. I told you, it’s just for a few months…”

  “You said a few weeks.”

  She looked at me, hurt. “Are you kicking me out?”

  Now I felt like an asshole. “No. I’m not kicking you out, I’m just…wondering when you might get your own place.”

  “I don’t know. I mean, I’m done with training next week, but I’ve gotta get a job, and I’ll need a security deposit, a car.…It’s a lot. You’re lucky—you have parents that help you out, but I don’t.”

  “You know my parents don’t help me,” I said flatly.

  “Yeah, but, like, they would if you needed them to.”

  I shook my head. The kind of help my parents provided was unconditional love and a hundred dollars at Christmas. They couldn’t afford anything else, and I’d never ask. Sure, I guessed I could always go home to my childhood bedroom and figure out some kind of job in Georgia if I totally couldn’t make it on my own, but I’d never seen that as an option. “I love you. You know I love you. But it’s been three months, and I’m struggling myself. If you’re gonna live here, it would really help if you could at least pay some rent.”

  Her eyes widened. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize things were so bad for you.”

  I looked at her like she was crazy. “How do you possibly not know things are bad for me? Do you think I eat pasta every night because I love it?” I grabbed the scuffed-up pair of heels I broke at the flower market. “My stilettos are worn down to the nail. I busted my ass wearing these in the rain last week.” I chucked them into the closet.

  “I’m broke, too,” she said. I picked up a pair of Prada booties she came home with last week and raised an eyebrow. “I didn’t buy them,” she protested.

  I sighed. “Can you just contribute something? My rent is eighteen hundred. I’m not asking you to pay half. Anything helps.”

  She nodded. “Yeah, yeah, of course…Dad’s coming into town next week. I can ask him.”

  It took me a minute to remember that “Dad” was Three, Rhonda’s third husband and Summer’s recent baffling choice of father figure, who now lived in a gaudy mansion in Vegas with a bride just ten years our senior. I guessed he was the best (or richest, anyway) of Rhonda’s erstwhile husbands, but he’d been sleazy ten years ago, and I couldn’t imagine that had changed. Summer had despised him when we were in high school, but now that he periodically sent her money, she’d changed her tune. These days she referred to him as “Dad” and waxed on about looking up to him for being able to “capitalize on opportunity,” whatever that meant.

  “Or you could just get a job,” I suggested. But she was already shaking her head. “If you were at Heaven, you’d make at least a couple hundred a night.”

  “I told you, I’m not doing that again.”

  I gathered my script pages from the bed and the floor, irritated. She had no problem with me working in a club to pay for the apartment she crashed in, but she was too good to do it herself. And yet I was too freaking nice to kick her out.

  “I’m gonna get some rent money. I swear!” she promised to my back as I stomped down the hallway to finish my work in the living room.

  A few days later I came home early from a soul-crushing Tinder date with a handsy wannabe director to find the door to my bedroom closed, sex sounds coming from within. The blood rushed in my ears. I wanted to scream.

  After the afternoon I’d shared with Eric, he had the audacity to fuck her in my bed not two weeks after? And she was yet to give me a dime of the rent she’d promised. Screw them. I had half a mind to throw open the door and kick them out. I stood with my hand poised above the doorknob, listening to the grunting as my headboard slammed against the wall. It was all male. I heard nothing coming from Summer. And it didn’t sound like Eric. Not that I knew what his sex noises sounded like.

  I quietly backed away from the door, unsure what to do. I wanted to leave, but it was 10:00 p.m., and besides the fact that it felt wrong to vacate my own apartment so that Summer could soil my bed, I didn’t have anywhere to go. But I also didn’t want to be sitting in the living room when she and whomever she was screwing emerged from their tryst. Especially if it was Eric.

  The porch would have to do. I’d have a clear shot of the walkway below, so I’d see him when he left and know when the coast was clear to return to my apartment and rip Summer a new asshole. I grabbed a hoodie from the hall closet and stepped onto the balcony, leaving the curtains drawn across the French doors so that I wouldn’t be visible from the living room. God, I hoped they’d finish up quickly; it was freaking freezing outside. I sat in the uncomfortable iron chair hunched over my e-reader, but I couldn’t concentrate and kept having to reread pages of the novel that had been so gripping until now.

  Eventually, after what seemed like eons but according to the clock in the corner of my device was only ten minutes, I heard footsteps in the living room, then on the stairwell, and finally spied a man emerge from the building. It wasn’t Eric. This man was tall and balding, wearing a sport coat, and there was something familiar about him. I sat up and watched while he loped down the walkway with the carefree gait of a man who’d just bedded a hot blonde, toward a t
own car idling at the curb. As he climbed into the backseat, he cast a glance toward the building, his face illuminated by the streetlight.

  It was Three.

  Immediately I ducked, praying he hadn’t seen me. Summer was fucking Three. My God. What the hell?

  When I heard the car pull away from the curb, I emerged from under the table and slid open the door to the apartment. I stepped through the curtains to find Summer curled on the couch, staring at me with red eyes. “Was that Three?” I asked, though I knew the answer.

  She nodded, then burst into tears. I sat next to her and wrapped my arm around her shoulders. “What happened?”

  “He said if he was going to be paying the rent, he wanted to come see the place.” She suppressed a sob. “So he came up, and when we got in the bedroom, he shut the door and he…he…” She broke down.

  “It’s okay.” I hugged her. “Did you tell him no?”

  “At first. But…” She wiped away tears. “I didn’t know what to do. I needed the money, and he…” She buried her face in her hands. “He made me call him Daddy.”

  My heart plummeted. “Oh God.” I stroked her hair as she cried into my sweatshirt. “I’m so sorry. That is so fucked up. I’m so, so sorry, Summer. If I’d had any inkling this might happen, I would never have asked you for rent…”

  “It’s not just you.” She pulled away. “I’m out of money, and my mom hasn’t been working. She’s staying with a guy she’s been seeing who treats her like crap…” She shot to her feet abruptly, cutting off the tears. “I need a shower.”

  “Wait. You shouldn’t take a shower before we go to the police,” I said.

  She emitted a short bark of a laugh. “I’m not going to the police.”

  “But he raped you—”

  “So? What good is going to the police gonna do except to stop him from sending me the five grand he promised?”

  “But, Summer, he—”

  “It’s my decision,” she snapped. “At least he paid for it. I’ve been sleeping with Eric for over a year and he won’t give me a dime.” She slowly moved down the hallway, but paused when she reached the bathroom door and turned. “I’m not gonna live my life like this.”

  “No,” I said, going to her. “You deserve so much more.”

  She met my gaze with steely resolve. “Let’s never talk about it again.”

  Day 5

  Wednesday evening—Golfe de Saint-Tropez, France

  The monstrous boat looms above us, silhouetted against the bright-blue sky. This one’s got to be twice the size of ours, and she does have a helipad. We bob in the cool of her shadow, her shiny black exterior so close I can see our reflection as our tender slowly makes its way around the back of the yacht into the full glare of the low sun, where TYGER is etched in gold script across her stern.

  A ladder lowers, and we shade our eyes and gather bags as two crewmen in crisp white uniforms help us up one at a time. A crew woman offers a tray of champagne, and I gladly accept a glass, briefly wondering what percentage of the world’s champagne is consumed on the Riviera in August. A photographer appears and snaps photos as we toast for the camera.

  We’re all looking fresh in the blue hi-lo dresses gifted to us by John. They’re each a slightly different shade of blue, but all the same cut: gauzy fit-and-flare spaghetti-strap with a crisscross low back, save Rhonda’s, which is less revealing—a fact I overheard her complaining to Brittani about through the paper-thin walls on the boat, but as far as I know she has not shared her displeasure with Summer. We look like a bunch of bridesmaids for Summer, who’s dressed in a similar-cut dress by the same designer, in white.

  They’re beautiful dresses, and very expensive, I’m sure, but the whole thing is just weird. And blue has never been my color, especially the shade of dusky blue my particular dress is made from. I wouldn’t be surprised if Summer selected it for that purpose. Wendy’s shade would have looked much better on me and mine on her, but Summer wouldn’t let us switch, pointing out that since I was taller, Wendy’s would be much too short on me, and mine too long on her.

  Summer notices me check my watch. “I thought I told you not to wear that,” she says.

  I meet her glare with a smile. “Sorry. Forgot.”

  We both know I didn’t forget.

  “You can put it in my purse,” she says.

  “No, that’s okay.” I swig my champagne. “I like it.”

  I can tell she wants to rip it off my arm, but she is stopped by John, who takes her by the hand.

  It’s true; she told me not to wear it when she came down to our quarters to see us in our dresses earlier. Which, of course, was never going to stop me. She was eating something out of a jar with a mother-of-pearl spoon.

  “What is that?” I asked, knowing full well what it was.

  “Mmm…It’s caviar. So good. I’m starving, and this was the only thing in the fridge in our room. Go figure.” She didn’t offer me any, and I didn’t ask.

  She reviewed our jewelry selections and made suggestions as to whether we curl or straighten our hair. “I mean, we need to look our best. You know who Marlena Falgione is, right?”

  When we all shook our heads, confirming our ignorance, she gleefully informed us, “She’s only one of the premier artists on the scene right now. Everybody is crazy for her work. John bought a painting of hers last month for one-point-two, which was a steal. And she’s a designer as well, super stylish. The dresses are from her summer line. And her husband, Charles Bricknell—well, you know who he is. He owns one of the biggest tech companies in the world, and John is trying to secure him as an investor for this huge development he’s working on. So, everybody, best behavior tonight. That means you, too, Brittani.”

  “Don’t worry, honey. I’ll keep her in check.” Rhonda winked.

  Rhonda keeping Brittani in check is like a bear keeping a wolf from mauling anyone, but it seemed to satisfy Summer.

  “Why you gotta pick on me?” Brittani said. “Belle was the one hurling behind the restaurant earlier today.”

  Summer feigned surprise. “What?”

  “From seasickness, not alcohol,” I clarified. “I guess the pill you gave me didn’t work.”

  She didn’t flinch. “Are you okay now? Because you can’t be doing that tonight.”

  I nodded and displayed the patch on my neck. “I got a patch. I’m fine.”

  After Summer had spritzed us each with her signature Chanel No. 5 and departed for her own quarters, Amythest tried to change back into the predictably short, black dress she had originally selected for herself, but I managed to convince her otherwise. Nothing was to be done about the violet contacts, though. Summer had tried to talk her out of wearing them, but Amythest insisted they’re prescription and she’s blind without them.

  As Amythest turns toward me now with the glare of the low sun in her eyes, the rim of her almost black irises is visible around the violet. The effect is startling and a bit unsettling, as though she’s a member of the undead. “Who I gotta screw to get a room on this boat instead?” she whispers.

  A stocky crewman leads us up a set of stairs onto the lower deck, with its sleek built-in loungers and tables open to a sunken living room that features an ostentatious chandelier, a grand piano, and a giant fish tank. But he doesn’t stop there, ushering us up a wide exterior spiral staircase that leads to the main deck, where a table for twenty is being set by white-uniformed staff and a couple of musicians are testing their sound equipment.

  “Everyone is on the upper deck for the sunset,” he informs us as we follow him into a game room lined with huge TVs, past a pool table, poker table, foosball table, and a bar that wouldn’t look out of place in a restaurant. We ascend another wide spiral staircase, this one carpeted in white shag, with a light sculpture made of crystal orbs running up its center, and emerge onto the open upper deck.

  It’s nirvana on the Mediterranean. A long-haired flamenco guitarist picks a melody with his eyes closed, the notes drifting
on a gentle breeze that lifts the heat of the day as waiters pass hors d’oeuvres to a handful of elegantly dressed guests scattered across the deck. The shimmering sea is speckled with ships suspended in the tide, and green hills rise from the water, dappled with villas whose windows are lit fiery orange by a setting sun that bathes the entire scene in golden light.

  I accept a sliver of grilled octopus, which melts on my tongue, and follow it with crisp champagne, amplifying the nutty flavor. A striking woman who looks to be in her late forties approaches us, smiling. Her dark hair is short in the back and longer in the front, streaked with a dramatic blue that accents her slate eyes, her tanned face clean of makeup save a bright-red lipstick. She is dressed in a cream modified leisure suit, which sounds awful but looks incredibly stylish on her slim frame.

  Summer lights up at her approach, clearly pleased when the woman takes her hands and air-kisses her cheeks three times before looking her in the eye and saying in Italian-accented English, “Summer, so lovely to see you. And John, of course, always a pleasure.” She turns to the rest of us. “I am Marlena.”

  As we introduce ourselves, she grasps each of our hands in turn, meeting our eyes with interest.

  “Thank you so much for inviting us,” Summer croons when the introductions are over. “And for letting my friends come, too.”

  Marlena envelops us in her radiant smile. “Welcome aboard Tyger.”

  “‘Tyger, Tyger burning bright’?” I venture, ignoring the sharp glance from Summer.

  “‘In the forests of the night,’” she confirms.

  The other girls look at us blankly.

  “I noticed the spelling when we boarded,” I explain. “May I ask why?”

  “It is between my husband and me a—how do you say—private funny?”

  “Inside joke?” I suggest.

  “That’s the one. Thirty years I am married to an Englishman, and still the words escape me.” She takes my elbow and steers me toward the bar. “You must come and meet my husband and my son.”