Burn (2 page)

I went through my shift at the Stock confused, panicked, and anxious. I put on my smile, made witty repartee when necessary, and delivered drinks as if I had twinkles in my toes, but I felt the rock in my chest go from still and heavy to vibrating. Not in a good way. In a painful way. The hum was the sound of regret. I had a chance at a career move, and I was going to lose it because it was the wrong one. Because I wasn’t the audience’s fucktoy any more than I was Jonathan’s. I’d walked away from him to protect my non-existent career, and it had careened out of control.

At the end of my shift, I flipped through my tickets, closed out my money, and handed the open tables to Mandy.

“Real bitch on five,” I said. “Watch the salt in her cucumber cosmos. She has a ‘condition,’ and her untimely death is going to become your fault. Henrietta Sevion is by the pool. She’s on the phone, so just bring her wine and smile. Renaldo Rodriguez is on the corner with a fucking entourage of blondes. I have no advice.”

Mandy cracked her gum one last time and gently spit it into a napkin. “You’re grumpy.”

Robert, who seemed to hear everything no matter who he was serving at the bar, said, “Needs a drink.” He nodded to me. “Want something before you go?”

“No, thanks.” His offer was tempting, but it was nine o’clock, and I still had work to do. “Where’s Debbie?”

“Office.” Robert flipped a bottle as a prelude to wiping it down. “Can you tell her to hurry on the schedule? I have an audition this week.”

“Nope. She hates when we nag about it, so I’m not going to do it for you. I’m asking her for time off, and then I’m going home.”

Mandy poured the mixers for the drinks on her tray. “Oh yeah? Going somewhere for Thanksgiving?”

“Vancouver the week after.”

“Ah that thing you’re doing with both your ex-boyfriends? Which you don’t think is weird?”

“It’s not weird unless you make it weird. The piece, you should see it. It’s going to make me famous.” I wagged my finger at her. The piece
had
to make me famous. I could be Art Girl instead of Bondage Girl. I could do abstraction. The Vancouver piece gave me a gem of hope in the seven acres of shit I’d slogged through with Eddie. Mandy rolled her eyes and went to serve Renaldo Rodriguez and his blonde entourage.

I’d just gotten a passport. It had just come in the mail, Kevin and Darren had to go to the B.C. Mod without me to take meetings and do the setup. Letting my passport expire was a stupid oversight on my part, and I promised I wouldn’t let it happen again. I would be fully present for every step from then on.

I went into the guts of the hotel to the liquor room, where Debbie’s unobtrusive little office sat. When I got to her door, I heard two voices: hers and one male, talking seriously. I knocked. Usually Sam was in there with her, as if she owned the hotel and he worked for her, not the other way around.

“Come in,” called Debbie.

I opened the door and saw Debbie first, leaning on the window ledge. Then I had the wind knocked out of me.

Jonathan sat in her leather chair in his work clothes. Blue suit, striped shirt, red cufflinks. He looked at me like the first time, when I felt as if he was drinking me through the straw of his gaze. But back then, though I’d been celibate, I had something for his eyes to drink: a piqued sexuality and availability in my heart that I didn’t realize existed until he’d awakened it. When I saw him in Debbie’s office, I felt emotionally dehydrated and sexually bloodless.

“I’ll come back later,” I said and spun on my heel before I heard the answer.

He caught me in the liquor room, by a stack of boxes piled eight feet high. “Monica.” His voice was so gentle I couldn’t ignore it. I turned. “Hey. How are you?”

“I’m fine.” My voice sounded out of tune and ill-played. He looked perfect, well rested and fed, as though my absence had had no effect on him at all.

“You look good.” He stood three feet away. Why could I feel the heat from his body? How was his gaze so physical on me?

“Thanks. You too.” He wasn’t moving away. Just standing. I couldn’t even look at him. “I get your texts,” I said.

“I know,” he whispered and raised his hand, his fingertip touching my sleeve. “You can go in to talk to Debbie. I’ll wait out here. You’re at work. I don’t want you to be uncomfortable.”

My laugh was a gunshot on a yesterday’s bloody battlefield, so short and awkward that I cast my gaze up to see if he’d noticed. His eyes, tourmaline with blue flecks I’d see if I got close enough, had that bemused look, as though nothing happened in his purview that he hadn’t predicted, and the hurt I’d caused myself was simply something I had to get control over.

Until that look, I hadn’t wondered, or even thought about, who he was fucking now. But with his heat on me and under the pressure of his presence, I had to ask myself if he breathed her name at the height of his pleasure, if he touched her with all the violence and tenderness he’d touched me with.

“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll be out in a minute.”

Debbie had moved behind her desk. She’d been looking older lately. I’d been led to believe her real age was thirty-eight, but that was never discussed. “Sit,” she said.

I stood. I didn’t need to stay long. I didn’t want to keep Jonathan waiting outside. The thought of him existing on the other side of the wall was painful.

“I need these days off.” I handed her a slip of paper. She checked it against the calendar on her desk.

“This should be fine.” She looked back up at me. “How are you doing?”

“All right.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

She leaned back in her chair and indicated the leather chair where Jonathan had been sitting. Anyone who hadn’t been attuned to his lingering smell might have missed it. “You took it seriously, didn’t you?”

I sucked my lower lip between my teeth and nodded.

“I told you not to,” Debbie said.

“Yeah, I kinda forgot.”

“Understandable. Just keep it together on the floor. Yes?”

“I’ll be a woman of grace.”

Debbie looked at the schedule again. “Thursday, Doreen needs to leave at ten. Can you do half a shift?”

“That’s Thanksgiving.”

“Do you have plans?”

I shrugged. “I can be here.”

She scribbled my name in the schedule and dismissed me.

When I went back out into the liquor room, Jonathan was gone. I didn’t know whether to be relieved or sad.

                                                   
CHAPTER 4.
 

JONATHAN

I don’t know what I must have looked like to her. She looked more feral, hungry, and proud than she ever had. On edge, too. I knew if I touched her, she’d calm down. If I put my lips on her face, her breathing would slow. If I put my body close to hers, she’d stop twitching.

But I had to wait. She had to come to me. And she would.

Even as we stood outside arm’s distance of each other, I felt the space between us mold into something perfectly matched. I’d thought she was on edge, but the fact was, I hadn’t felt right since she rode away in that cab. Two weeks had stretched out into an endless horizon. I was on a path getting smaller in the distance, but always staying the same in reality. She chose to walk away, and she would have to choose to come back. I was a patient man. I could wait, but I didn’t have to like it.

“What are you going to do with her?” Debbie asked after I let Monica leave without seeing me again.

“Wait like a good boy.”

“How long?”

“I don’t know. Why?

“Because you’re here, talking to me about bulk ordering liquor and borrowing staff, when you have a bar manager to liaison with me.” She waved her hand dismissively. “Go run your empire.”

I threw myself into the leather chair. “What if the bar manager at K is a douchebag?”

“You’re saving me from a douchebag? Have we met?”

“In fact—”

“Did I not help you get through that nightmare with your ex-wife?”

“You were a godsend.”

“So stop bullshitting me. You come during her shifts and stay with Sam and me in the back, or you come after her shifts to drink at the bar. How long are you going to wait?”

“You want an exact date?”

“I want an event. Something that has to happen.”

“Fine. When I meet someone as close to perfect as she is.”

“Better start looking, my friend. She’s already moved on.”

“What does that mean?” I leaned forward. I felt myself getting pissed as the bottom dropped out of my chest.

“It means if there’s not someone else already, there will be soon. I can see it when she talks to customers.”

Debbie was always right about people. Usually, that was beneficial. Today, it was a problem. Today, I wanted to hurt someone, starting with myself. I left before Sam even got there. I could drink at home.

 My phone rang as I turned onto my street. Margie.

“What?”

“Good evening to you too, little brother.”

“What can I do for you, Margie?”

“You have Will Santon’s team flying to Vancouver to watch Kevin Wainwright?”

Before I left the Stock, I’d called Will to let him know Monica’s travel dates. I had his team following Kevin, to make sure Monica was safe from him, as well as tracking the money behind the cameras in her house. He said he was close to finding out where they came from, as if I didn’t already know.

“Yes?”

“Has it occurred to you I might need to use him?”

“To do what? Have some movie producer followed to his mistress’s house?”

“What’s the difference?”

“The difference is a few million everyone involved can afford, and someone I care about getting hurt. Physically and irrevocably hurt.” I was yelling. That wasn’t going to get me anywhere.

“You know, Jonny, I don’t mind you getting paranoid and crazy, but you’re doing it on my dime.”

“You’re an attorney. You’re protected. If I get caught stalking, I fry. I’ll write you a check if you can’t afford to feed the kids this week.”

“Now you’re getting nasty.”

“Margie, sweetheart, please.”

“I gotta pull him, Jonny. I’m sorry.”

“Fine. Thanks for letting me know.” I hung up.

Things were not going well. My patience with Monica was wearing thin. I hadn’t considered her casting around for a new lover so soon. The thought of it made my fingers go cold. Will’s inability to trace the cameras before he got pulled, a mere week before Monica was going to Vancouver with that sicko, pushed me out of rational thought and into a place of frozen rage. The situation was getting more slippery than I could manage.

Then I saw Jessica’s Mercedes SUV in my driveway, and I thought I might break something. Aling Mira must have let her in before retiring for the night with Danilo.

My ex-wife sat on the back patio sipping coffee from a silver pot that had been on our wedding registry. I hated that thing. I thought about packing up all the shit of ours I hated and giving it to charity.

“Jess,” I said, “how are you?”

She put her hand on my shoulder and kissed my cheek. Just one cheek, not a double air kiss. Somehow, that seemed more intimate.

“I’m fine.” She wore perfectly fitting blue jeans, cowboy boots, a white shirt, and a bandana around her neck. I used to find her country girl airs charming. She was raised deep in Beverly Hills, where tourists got lost looking for Olympic Boulevard. “I came to talk about something. I thought you’d be here this time of night, but well, I guess not. And my appointments keep getting pushed.”

I sat down. “If you came here to fight, Jess, I don’t have the time.”

“No. Of course not. I, uh… There were guys doing renovations to my studio? New plumbing? And I was confused.”

“There’s lead in those pipes—”

“I was just worried you were getting it ready to sell it.”

“I’ll let you make an offer if it comes to that.”

“I can’t, Jon. You know that.”

“You didn’t sell the trees?”

“I did. I got two million each for them, and the documentation was bought by the museum. But they cost a fortune. Keeping a dead thing alive takes a lot of engineering.”

I nodded. Jessica’s problem had always been that the cost and ambition of her work didn’t quite jibe with what she could ask for it. She didn’t have Kevin Wainwright’s way of turning something that didn’t exist into money. Art, for her, wasn’t about money, or professionalism, or business. Art was about art. I used to love the purity of her vision.

“You could make smaller things,” I said. “And more of them. Just an idea.”

She looked away. She didn’t know what I was talking about. She said, “Remember when you first took me in
that
way? Right there, by the shed. You pulled my hair back and bent me over the wet bar. Then you yanked my pants down and hit me.”

“I slapped your ass. Yes, I remember. I didn’t exactly know what I was doing at that point.”

“I was offended.”

“You were scandalized.” I was surprised to find myself smiling. Only in hindsight did how outraged she’d been seem funny. At the time, I was guilt-ridden and devastated over her reaction. “I believe you called me a pig and moved to a guest room on the other side of the house.”

“And you—”

“I jerked off. Do you have a point here? We’ve covered this.”

Her tone got hard, as if she feared I’d interrupt again. “You persisted, and I never considered your way. I never gave it a chance. Even when I was trying to reconcile, I still wouldn’t try things your way. I don’t think I was fair to you.” She smoothed a nonexistent crease in her jeans. It was the only crack in her poise.

“This because Erik left?”

She shook her head. “He’s back, sort of. We’re talking, but I can’t stop thinking about you… and kissing you again. You always knew how to kiss.”

I leaned back. Was she really going there? Was she really going to offer me my married life back with a little kink thrown in? Did she honestly think I’d take her back? I should have kicked her out right then, but something else was in play. Some other motivation I had to tease out.

“And you’re saying you want to try it my way?”

“I want to.” She looked me with those big sapphire disks, wheaten lashes blinking. She was so beautiful. Angelic, even. “We’d need to set some boundaries beforehand.”