Suspiciously Obedient

by Julia Kent

Page 20

 

  “That’s not the kind of protection I’m talking about. ” Mike sighed. He walked over to the window and flattened his palm against it, staring out over the city. It was a beautiful view, and he’d picked the apartment because of it. Now, though, what he’d once thought he would dominate, own, control had all slipped away and it just looked like a child’s toy, a city of figurines and blocks, nothing more than a play space for others.

  “What kind of protection, then?” Jeremy walked over and joined him, staring out over the city. “Damn. This is one hell of a view. ”

  “Yeah. ” Mike nodded, sliding his hand down the unblemished glass. “Yeah. ”

  He could think of other views that were better, though. Peering up into Lydia’s face as a strand of hair tickled his nose. Or watching her ass walk away as she angrily stormed out of his office in those first few days of working together. This? The crystal-blue sky was dotted here and there with puffs of cotton clouds and the city rumbled and bustled along, an organism that was self-perpetuating. Not the view he craved.

  He turned to Jeremy and again found himself looking up, an unfamiliar and uncomfortable position. Hands planted on his hips, he squared his shoulders. “I want you to go to Iceland and make sure that she’s okay. I don’t know if the media is going to go crazy there. Diane is unstable enough that this could all fall apart, although…God, what great timing. Who would have known that her blood-hungry ambition to be the next Bachelorette could actually help me?”

  “Who knew?” Jeremy said, shrugging, hands up, palms facing the ceiling. Mike eyed him warily. It was an odd reaction. Shifty-eyed and suddenly nervous, Jeremy pressed his face against the glass, leaving an oily nose, cheek, and forehead print.

  “Now the views not so great,” he said.

  “Ah, a little piece of me to remember. ” He looked at Mike. “You really want me to follow her?”

  “Yes. ”

  “How do…why would she?” Jeremy asked.

  “I want you to try to salvage whatever you can of a normal life for her. ”

  “How the hell can I do that? My idea of normalcy is three hookers in Bangkok. ”

  Mike screwed up his face and glared. “Nice try. Dont use your schtick on me. ” Jeremy had spent a year or so fucking anything that offered, but these days it was more a ruse he used to have something to talk about. He was still dealing with the lingering effects of their breakup with Dana, their third in an unconventional relationship that had ended a year ago.

  “Where are the boundaries here?”

  Mike felt sized up, and he was right. Jeremy was trying to figure him out, to tease out the core of Mike’s request. And Mike was grateful—deeply grateful—his friend knew him well and was trying to gauge what all of this meant for Mike. Being emotionally in tune with someone else was a rare gift, and for more than ten years he and Jeremy had shared that, even as they’d shared women—perhaps because they’d shared women. It was a bit of a chicken and egg situation. Normally, Mike could put a wall up around it, the simple acceptance that the relationship was there, his to touch when he needed and his to push away when he didn’t, enough to allow him to follow his ambitions in the world. Always having a home to come back to. But home meant something different now. Home was Lydia, too.

  She was on her way to Iceland right now to a job that he had created to help her escape a mess that he, too, had created. He needed his home, his Jeremy, to go and put together the shattered pieces of a life Mike had almost lived.

  Jeremy found himself in a precarious situation here, navigating a complicated series of short, stilted phrases coming out of Mike’s mouth. Knowing his friend, what he meant when he said “protect Lydia” was something quite different from what Jeremy thought it meant. And yet, ultimately, what he thought Mike was saying was “make sure she’s well, make sure she’s happy, and see if she’s the one. ”

  This idea of “the one” was Jeremy’s, not Mike’s. For years he’d wanted someone to complete them. Dana had been close but she’d wanted something more conventional, ultimately choosing Mike. And when Mike had rejected that, she had left them both. A year-long traveling binge that ended in jail had helped take away some of Jeremys pain, for a time, until Dom had bailed him out in some Asian country that Jeremy still couldn’t recall. The sadness of being incomplete had never quite left him.

  What he’d learned over the past year, though, was that being complete wasn’t something that you acquired by loving the right person. It was something you had to put together within yourself so that when you did meet the right person you could detect their completeness. And that was when you knew you were home.

  “So, you want me to make sure that she’s happy,” he said, trying to understand and clarify.

  “Yes,” Mike answered, staring out the window.

  Jeremy had to admit to himself it was a gorgeous view, but he’d never understood why Mike spent so much of his money on these things: the right apartment, the right car, the right jet—rented, but still—the right charity balls, the right everything. As if by choosing and manipulating and selecting and being seen in the company of high-status people that he, himself, through osmosis would acquire that status as well, and as if Mike could translate that status into some sort of power. Jeremy didn’t even understand the math behind any of that, and certainly didn’t care.

  But this kind of calculation? Of hope and love? That he understood.

  “Does making her happy include sleeping with her?” There. He said it. He had to. It was the elephant in the room that they were both trying not to acknowledge, had been trying not to acknowledge for some time. Jeremy had become quite taken with her at the autism charity ball where theyd first met, and he would never step on Mike’s toes but…being sent to protect her? Being sent to make her happy? That was a completely different game-changer.

  Mike’s jaw flexed and Jeremy could see him doing the calculations behind his eyes, formulas that he couldn’t fathom but that would end with a sum, a result that would add up to their future. He turned, brow furrowed, eyes opened and vulnerable, and locked on Jeremy.

  “I want you to go to Iceland. I want you to find out how she’s doing. And I want you to discover why I don’t think I can live without her. ”

  Jeremy’s heart felt as if someone had pierced it with an arrow, the pain emanating through and through, into his fingertips and down between his toes, across his hips and into his mouth, his tongue, making him go numb. “This is your ‘one,’ isn’t it?” he asked, the blue sky so bright it matched Mike’s eyes, the room so starkly real it was as if he were wearing 3D glasses and seeing everything in an extra dimension.

  “Yes,” Mike choked out.

  Could she be our one? Jeremy wanted to ask.

  “If she won’t have me…” Mike added, his throat tight on the words, more emotion in that sentence than Jeremy had probably heard from him in his entire friendship with the man. “If she won’t have me,” Mike repeated, his voice stronger, “then I at least need to know that I haven’t caused her some sort of irrevocable damage. That what I did in losing my mind over her and forgetting those fucking cameras doesn’t turn her bitter, doesn’t harden the very qualities in her that softened me. ”

  He clapped a hand on Jeremy’s shoulder, then reached farther than you would expect. Fighting the instinct to crouch down like he did for everyone, Jeremy stood and just listened, letting his friend open up, liking what he saw. “Of all the people I know, Jeremy, you’re the one that I think can bring her back. Not…” He held up a palm. “Not back to me. But back. Back to her true self. She won’t show that to Michael Bournham. She doesn’t believe that he is anything but a snake…and maybe she’s right,” he said.

  Chapter Six

  The giggling tipped her off. Day two at the office and, so far, four hours into her day she had had four cups of coffee, one overpriced lunch because hot dogs were $10 in Iceland, had sharpened all of her pencils, checked her email,
answered two, written about fifteen to various members of Bournham Industries asking exactly what her job was, and had cleaned and re-cleaned her empty cubicle.

  Elsa was of absolutely no help, after all, when it came to administrative issues, aside from helping her to understand how health insurance law worked in Iceland. There was no employee manual, there was no chain of command, there was no directive for creating her own employee manual, there was…nothing. She didn’t know who she reported to. She didn’t know who reported to her. And by one o’clock on this second work day the reality that there was no “director of communications for European operations” position hit her with full force.

  Michael Bournham had turned her into a bird in a cage. She had to hand it to him, it was crafty—and, given enough time, she’d have her student loans cleared out. She would be able to legitimately say that she had European experience with this great, fake title. Human resources could give her a reference and confirm her employment. Working here, even for a few months, would make her résumé shine if she could play this just right.

  But Siggi kept giving her sideways glances and then plugging earbuds into his computer and watching something. Elsa was polite but tight-lipped. No one went out to lunch with her, no one sat down in the coffee room with her, and the handful of other employees there seemed to have jobs. What they did was a mystery. A sales force of about four or five people were on the phone constantly. When Lydia would ask them about their campaigns they answered happily, but at no point did anyone ask her for help or advice.

  In desperation she’d reached out to the senior vice-president for communications in the Boston office, who had promptly ignored her. To be fair, it was day two on the job, but Lydia assumed a tight ship run by Michael Bournham would…oh. Scratch that. The company was no longer run by Michael Bournham, according to the terse email sent yesterday, a two-paragraph ditty that said more in what it didn’t say than in the corporatespeak it used. Still, a few days after his absence she couldn’t imagine that the systems would change that quickly.

  Bournham Industries had turned into a very lean, mean, efficient machine over the past year as Bournham had some kind of bet with the board of directors—at least, that was what the rumor said—to increase profits. The idea that she would get a job that paid this much and have absolutely nothing to do—and not get a single response back from the SVP for communications when asked what she was supposed to do—fed her growing discontent and assumptions that she was here out of favoritism and not merit.

  How long would this ruse go on? She could ride it; she had no problem taking Bournham Industries’ money. Lydia also knew that deep inside it would rot her soul. She could do this for a month or two, but the need to achieve, to do well, to do work that was productive and beneficial and that helped her own mind to grow was what fed her. That was one reason why being an admin had been driving her nuts. She could make travel arrangements, order supplies, process incoming email requests, handle filing, information management, storage, update web files, and do all of the administrative work that helped keep departments running. But it had gotten boring. It had gotten tedious. It had started to make her a little bit insane, at least on a professional level. The inefficiencies and absurdities in the system showed. Receiving an email from a boss telling her to send the email to other people in their email system was one such example. Or being told that as the company shifted over to a cheaper office supply company she would need to print the attached PDF, fill it out, send it back so that they could enter her information into a computer system, and give her a new computer account made her logical mind spin in horror and burst into flames.