by Reiss, CD
Fine.
She was fine.
Mandy Bettencourt—my amea—smiled at the mother in a way that couldn’t be faked. Her genuine peace radiated outward, spilling surplus happiness like loose change.
Did she not know about the video, or did she just not care?
I could tell her. I could show her the thing and apologize and comfort her.
But if she knew and didn’t care? Then she didn’t need me or my past. She didn’t need my rules or my dick. She was happier without me, and if I was a decent person, I’d let her have her happy life. The thought was a jolt from my chest outward—in her direction, pulling like one heart lassoed to another.
“Sir?” The salesman yanked me out of it.
“Yes.”
If she didn’t need me, then my plan was pointless. I had to know.
“Yes, the Northern Waters, here?”
Shit. Had I agreed to something?
“It’s three twenty.” The man held up a pipe with a huge ochre stone set in the base.
“Fine.” I dug out my wallet, pinched away three hundreds and a fifty, and handed them over. “Wrap it up.”
I left and ran across the parking lot, freezing at the window where I could see her ordering. Not just ordering. Chatting with the cashier. Nodding.
I put my hand on the glass as if I could touch her and feel a little bit of her comfort with herself.
What did I intend?
To burst in there and take her time? Steal her attention?
Break bad news or deliver information she already had?
If I went in there, it wouldn’t be for her. It would be for me. There was nothing I could do for her. Nothing I could give her, buy her, offer her. All I could do was know her, and now I never would.
My hand fell away from the glass, and the version of myself I’d nailed together out of dominance and self-reliance fell apart as if it had spent years rotting away from the inside.
That shell had kept me apart from other people, and only when it broke did I realize what it meant to be alone.
* * *
A man doesn’t go to his parents when he’s confused and upset, but I wasn’t a man after I saw Mandy ordering coffee through a window and realized I was superfluous to her.
I was a boy.
I was a sixteen-year-old who had found purpose rescuing a woman more than twice his age and lost it when she died. Meaning had been pried away so fast the procedure broke me. My manhood was put together with spit and chewing gum. The act of dominance and control had been a hardened bond that had started thinning in the Cambria rain and melted completely in the solvent of a woman’s smile.
“Dante!” my mother exclaimed when I appeared in the kitchen.
Dad handed her a water glass across the island, and a lazy Susan of amber pill bottles spun between them.
“Hey, son,” Dad said, the picture of health and happiness in a gray polo and chinos.
We shook hands, and I fell into a hug that was supposed to last a masculine second but stretched out because I wouldn’t let go. I’d always assumed I’d be like him but never understood what I had to do to get there.
“What is it?” Mom asked, coming behind Dad.
“I wasted all this time,” I said. “Now it’s too late.”
“Oh, no, it’s not,” Mom said.
“You don’t even know what he’s talking about,” Dad complained.
“I think I do.” She took me by the hand and led me to the kitchen table, sitting me down like a trainer with a docile puppy. “My Lord, I haven’t seen you like this since that horrible woman died.” Her manner got grave. “Nobody died, I hope?”
“No,” I said. “Nobody died.”
“Was she upset?” Mom took a chair diagonal from mine. “I have an appointment with—”
“What’s going on?” Dad asked.
“Don’t,” I said to my mother.
My father was getting impatient. “Who’s upset?”
“No one,” I answered. “No one’s upset. Except me. I’m…” I had to take a moment to get out words I didn’t associate with myself. “I’m upset. I’m confused. I’m…” The last one was a foreign language. “I’m… lonely.” I dropped my voice for the last humiliating word, cringing as I articulated two syllables.
I was a solitary man. I answered to no one. I came and went as I pleased, unburdened by the need for company. I’d been that way for as long as I could remember.
Without her, my skin didn’t fit around my soul.
“I can’t carry it all anymore,” I said. “I don’t know how to let anything go. I didn’t have to before. But we’re in the real world, and there’s just so much of it. I can’t get a handle on it, and I don’t know how to navigate it the way she does.”
“I still don’t know who we’re talking about,” Dad said. My parents looked at each other, layering meaning into a nonverbal language that could manage generalities but not enough specifics for my father. “Is it Samantha’s sister?”
“Yes,” I said, leaning back and looking at the ceiling because I couldn’t meet the compassion in my mother’s eyes or the surprise in my father’s. “Her name is Mandy Bettencourt, and I’m in love with her.”
The words hung in the air like physical things, then popped when my father spoke, as if they’d always been no stronger than soap bubbles.
“Okay,” he said. “What are you going to do about it?”
“I give up, Dad. I don’t know. I just give up.”
He nodded as if I’d answered a tough question correctly. “Good start, son.”
* * *
DAY 18
The location of my surrender was the Crowne HQ offices in the conference room facing the sea. The time was two o’clock, fifteen minutes before the sun peeked in from the corner, where the glass met the ceiling and the glare became unbearable.
Alone, I faced east with my back to the window because I was willing to go at this alone but not willing to do it at a disadvantage. William Hawkins sat across the table, next to Caleb, who flipped through the contract with Devin Thoze, his lawyer and the son of the firm’s founder.
William didn’t read contracts or wear ties. He preferred to show off his chest hair by leaving open his two top shirt buttons. His right hand was clenched in a fist on the table, and the other was laid over it as if he was holding himself back from punching someone.
Me.
In all the years my family had been connected to the Hawkinses, I’d never been in a room with William. My father had warned me that he was intense and tightly coiled for violence. Veronica had described anger that had been unleashed on her a handful of times, but I was full of myself. I’d believed Veronica and I would run to London, where I’d protect her from both poverty and pain.
But it had become more and more clear that I’d been the mark in a con I could still only half see.
“What happened?” William asked me. “With you? All these years you fight to keep us out of operations. You try to buy us out four times.” He held up four thick fingers, one with a gold wedding band around the base. “What changed?”
“I think it’s time to move on,” I said placidly. A man like William Hawkins fed off the emotions of others, and I wasn’t interested in being his dinner.
“Hold up,” Caleb said. “When we break out the payment schedule, we end up basically at market.”
“Yes.”
“I said half market.” Caleb slid the contract back to me and lied at the same time.
“You published a video you said you wouldn’t.” I slid it back. “The difference is payment.”
“I’m not paying your therapy bills because people saw you wrestle a magazine rack.”
“I don’t give a shit who sees me. But”—I leaned one arm across the table to point at Caleb—“you came for Mandy Bettencourt. That cost you. Then you sat across a table from her without telling her what you were trying to do to her. That cost you.”
“How much to fuck her?” Willia
m said.
Punching him in the throat seemed like a viable option, but I wasn’t going to be baited by a glorified frat boy.
“Full market, or the tapes go to the Times and the set of books I keep goes to the Crown Advocate.” I folded my hands in front of me. “No relation. She can compare them to your books and whatever else she has on you. See how that goes.”
I waited, watching the nonverbal communication between father and son—just as the sun dropped below the window and a blast of light hit Caleb in the face, forcing him to squint.
“When do I get to hear these tapes?”
“After you sign.” I stood, blocking the sun.
“Because you have nothing,” William added.
Once I won this, and I would, I’d be free of my ties to Veronica. Then I’d convince Mandy I could be different. No one would be out to get me or—by extension—her. We could start a new life without public temper tantrums or my fear of knowing a woman and being known by her.
“Sign in the next hour, and I’ll fly to London to have this prepped to go for the next quarter. Delay and your accountant can explain the tax penalty.”
I leaned down to gather my papers. The sun hit Caleb’s face, and he put his hand up to block it.
“God, you are insufferable,” he said.
“I’ll leave so you can discuss,” I said and walked out.
I would have sold them the clubs for half market just to get them out of my life, but they’d never believe there wasn’t a catch. I didn’t rush them for the same reason.
But I couldn’t be patient with everything. My heart was starving. It needed her to sustain itself, and it had been too long without news. I didn’t know what she was doing or feeling, and once I was out of the conference room, it drove me mad.
I went into an empty conference room and texted her.
—Are you there?—
Chapter 39
MANDY
—Are you there?—
My fingers flew over the glass to answer, then hesitated.
I was here but not for long.
After the feeling Dante was in the coffee shop, I’d called my mother and asked her for the keys to the Lake Tahoe house. I needed to be away from even the possibility that he was in my life, watching and protecting me, owning my body and my time.
I needed to take the solo trip I’d tried to take in the first place. Just me this time.
So, with his text on my screen, I kept hesitating because I was weak and indecisive and because I didn’t know if I was here or there until my assistant poked her head in my office door.
“Your noon is here,” she said, then cracked her gum.
“I thought we were sold out until next season?”
“Doreen Crowne? It’s been in the book.”
* * *
“Doreen!” I said, arms wide as I entered the showroom. Dante’s mother was leaning into a mannequin, inspecting the embroidery on one of the first dresses I’d done. We exchanged a hug. “How are you?”
“Nothing to complain about.” She gave me a good-natured shrug. “Not that that’ll stop me.”
We laughed at the old joke even though—in all the years we’d crossed paths—she’d never complained about anything.
“Gwen’s going to get us a tray,” I said. “Is there an occasion you’re dressing for?”
She explained that she was more of a collector who wore her pieces, but all I could think about was how Dante had the masculine version of her wide jaw and how when she waved away her illness or the trouble with a house the size of a school district, she led with her first finger, the way he did.
It was pretty common for a client to come in and not even look at a single article of clothing. Sometimes I was booked years in advance and they wanted a spot in six months. An hour went by without us talking about an actual dress. I thought nothing of it until she was getting ready to leave.
“I’m glad I came by,” she said. “I almost didn’t.”
“I’m glad you did too.”
“Dante said it would be all right.”
My smile froze across the bottom of my face. The mention of his name should have been enough, but the context shook me, and I had to think quickly to find a funny way to phrase my reply. “Does he curate your collection?”
“Oh, no!” She chuckled. “You two had a romance, and I didn’t want to… you know, hurt his feelings.”
“Ah.” She was protecting him because that was what people did for each other.
“I hope that’s all right,” she asked, hitching her bag over her shoulder.
“It’s fine. How’s… um… How’s he doing?” I tried to sound casual.
“Seems fine. He’s off to London to close a deal.”
“The clubs?”
“Yes.” She drifted off as if she wasn’t sure if she should say more. She was more taciturn than I was because I shouldn’t have asked the question in the first place.
But since I’d gone that far, I figured I might as well go all the way. “I didn’t think he’d sell them.”
“Things change.” We started out of the showroom. “Honestly, he should have sold out to his partners years ago.
His partners? The Hawkinses? Caleb?
“I hope…” I stopped at the door. “I hope he’s not giving it up because of what I did.”
“Mandy,” she said as a prelude to something serious, “from what I understand, you didn’t do anything. But Caleb Hawkins is slippery. He’d just promised Dante the night before not to release that video. The one of you both. And of course, he published them, so when Dante saw you two at the Grove together—”
“It wasn’t jealousy.” I didn’t know whether to be relieved or angry, but clearly I was both. He wasn’t trying to control me having lunch with a man. He was protecting me from a specific man because he had information I hadn’t had.
“You’d have to ask him.”
“I will.”
I thanked her for coming in, gave her a truncated version of the song and dance every potential client got, and went back to my office.
—Are you there?—
There wasn’t a follow-up text. He’d left it up to me to decide what I wanted without exerting his own will.
—I’m here—
Chapter 40
DANTE
—I’m here—
By the time her text came, I was already in the back of a car, getting driven to the airport. I hadn’t given up on her, but I’d accepted that the ball was in her court and she wasn’t hitting it back. There was nothing I could do unless I wanted to alienate her or take away the agency she’d earned.
“Mandy,” I said to my screen when the text came in. “You’re here.”
A second later, the phone vibrated in my hand, and her name flashed on the screen.
“Hi,” she said when I picked up. “I’m sorry.”
“No, no, don’t be. It was my fault.”
“I should have listened. I’m just… I was afraid you were turning into a domineering asshole.”
“I am a domineering asshole, Mandy.”
The freeway popped under the tires at seventy miles per hour, and the city blurred into gray. I could be at her door in half an hour if there was no traffic.
I heard a sniffle on the other side. “Are you crying?”
“I love it when you say my name.”
“And that makes you cry?”
“I’m relieved,” she said with a sob. “You know me. My emotional thermostat’s broken.”
“No,” I whispered. “The problem is that I don’t know you. I don’t know why you love yellow so much, or how you learned to sew, or what you’d do if I burned my hand.”
“It was Samantha’s favorite color, I taught myself, and I’d do whatever you did when I burned mine.”
I was undeterred by the answers because they weren’t the point.
“I bought you the flavor ice cream I liked and Ruffles, but I didn’t ask you what you wanted, and that… It’
s going to change. I screwed up. I told you what I wanted and expected you to do it. From now on, if you let me—”
“I’ll let you.”
“I’m done telling you who you are.”
“I’m yours.”
“I’m asking.”
“Is there a question?”
“Will you let me know you?”
She sniffled and took a deep breath, and though she’d already agreed to everything, she paused as if she wasn’t sure.
“Yes,” she finally said. “But…”
Chapter 41
MANDY
“But…”
I was leaning against the office wall when I left him hanging, which I wasn’t trying to do on purpose, but I couldn’t agree to be with him again while I was high on hope and so relieved I could take him back that I was sobbing.
I had to protect myself from my worst impulses, and nothing he’d said changed that.
After clearing the gunk out of my throat, I said, “But you’re on your way to London.”
“I can turn the car around and be there in half an hour.”
“And I’m on my way to our old house in Lake Tahoe. So…” Another throat clear. “I need to go. Alone. I need to clear my head out. Get back to baseline. Just… not be so intense, you know?”
“You need to get off the roller coaster.”
“Yeah. For a little while. Week. Ten days, maybe.”
There was a silence on the other end that the whooshing and rumbling of the cars couldn’t dispel. I slid down the wall and crouched on the industrial carpet.
“Dante?”
“I have a compulsion to come to wherever you are, pull your skirt up, and spank you raw for making me wait.”
Before he was even done, I was telling myself he could do that. Right now, he could turn around, punish me until I came, and get back in the car for a later flight.
