Deeper Illusions (26 page)

Nick rolled his eyes. “Where is your place?” he asked. “I’ll call one of my buddies out here to bring you the goddamned cat.”

I gave Nick the address, and he got on the phone. “Yeah, Jack? I need you to do me a favor”… “I need you to pick up a cat and bring her to the Starbucks here on
Market Street.” Then he gave the guy my address, and looked at me and gave me the thumb’s up. “Thanks, man,” he said. “I owe you one.”

Then, not fifteen minutes later, I saw a dark-haired man in a leather jacket and sunglasses approach us with a carrier in hand. I could hear Madison yowling. Nick got up and took the carrier, giving the guy an iced coffee that he ordered before Jack came on the scene. He patted him on the shoulder. Then he looked at m
e. “Here she is,” he said, giving me the carrier. “Now, let’s move.”

We walked to Nick’s
rental, Nick carrying Dalilah and me carrying Madison. The car was a spanking new Ferrari. “Crap,” Nick said. “We can’t take this car with Dalilah and the cat.” At that, he called somebody to come and pick up the Ferrari and take it back to the rental place. “We’re going to have to hail a cab,” he said, getting off the phone and motioning for the cab that was approaching. It stopped, and we got in after I fastened Dalilah’s car seat. Nick sat up front.

We got to the airport hangar, where there was a bar, and Nick got a Scotch, which was what Ryan always drinks
. I got a glass of iced tea. Dalilah was still nursing, and I was trying to do everything right. I was feeling stressed about the poor cat, but I hoped that she could calm down some and fall asleep. As it was, she was still mewling and crying in her carrier, and my heart broke a little.

“So, go ahead. Give me all the dirt of what has happened since I’ve been away,” I said.

“What’s there to tell? Ryan is devastated. He barely talks to me anymore. Nat does, though, all the time. She’s good friends with Alexis, so she hangs out with us a lot.”

“Alexis. You’re hanging out with her?”

“Yeah. I’m living with her now.”

I raised my eyebrow. This was getting more like
Days of Our Lives
every second.

“When did that happen?”

“The shit hit the fan after my soon to be ex-wife found out about Ryan and me. As I knew it would. Fuck her, though. I shouldn’t make any apologies for that.” Nick motioned for the waitress. “At any rate, it was bound to fail. We were just too different.”

“But Alexis? Really?”

“Yeah. Listen, I’m sure that Ryan told you that the three of us used to be together?”

“He said something about that.”

“Anyhow, we spent a summer in college at a Hampton’s house. We all messed around with each other, and Alexis and I started to have a thing for each other. Just each other. It was kinda a mess, to tell you the truth.”

“
Kinda
a mess?” That was an understatement.

“Yeah. Word to the wise – never get into a three-way relationship with your best friend and his girlfriend. It never ends well,” he said, shaking his head.

“Thanks, I’ll take that advice.”

“Anyhow, Alexis and I hooked up a lot behind Rielle’s back over the years. Alexis was always in love with Ryan. Always.”

“Sounds familiar,” I said, thinking of Nat.

“When he married you, she finally gave up, and, well, we were single at the same time. We always liked each other. And, most importantly,
she’s perfectly fine with my bisexuality. I can be exactly who I am around her. So, now we’re together.”

I sighed. Why did I foresee a messy quadrangle between Nick, Ryan, Alexis and Nat in the future?

“Thanks for catching me up. But what about Ryan?”

“As I said, he doesn’t talk to me much. I call him all the time, but he is very laconic.”

I remembered that the word “laconic” was what Sarah said about Ryan before he met me.

“So, what I
know about him I hear from Nat,” Nick continued. “Poor Nat doesn’t know what to do. Nate actually wants her back. He told her that he doesn’t care if Christopher is Ryan’s, he wants her back. But Nat doesn’t want to go.”

“And why not?”

“I don’t think you realize how much that girl is in love with Ryan. She makes it out like it is a little crush, but it has always been far more than that. So, even though she can’t get Ryan to touch her, and she can barely get him to talk to her, she’s sticking it out.”

Sticking it out. With my husband.

“So, what does Nat tell you about Ryan?”

“That sh
e thinks he hates her. He does blame her for what happened to him and you. He has a point.”

“But he keeps her there.”

“Well, of course. His presumptive child is there, although, as I said, I highly suspect that. He has told Nat that they are basically roommates who are raising a child together. Nothing more. She won’t accept that, though. She always thinks he’ll come around.”

“I take it he’s not coming around, though?”

“No. He has told her, point blank, that he will never love her. When she asks why not, he always just says that he’s still in love with you, and he never sees that changing.”

My heart melted still further. “He says that? That he’s still in love with me?”

“Have you not been listening to me at all? He’s told anybody who will listen that you are his soul mate. Ryan isn’t the type to take that sort of thing lightly.”

“What about his, uh, relationship with you?”

“What about it? Listen, I really don’t consider him to be bisexual. Yeah, he and I get into it, and I know we have feelings for each other that go beyond bros. But he doesn’t get around with guys. I do, though, and I still do. I make no apologies for that. As James Dean said, why would I want to go around with one hand tied behind my back?”

I would imagine that the men he gets are as smoking hot as the women he gets.

I was afraid to ask the next question. “You said earlier that you didn’t think he was back on drugs. Are you sure of that?”

“No, not sure. But Nat doesn’t think so. He doesn’t sleep much and he doesn’t eat much, so he is starting to take on the junkie look that he had in college. But she checks for track marks, and doesn’t see any, so she doesn’t think he’s using. Oh, and there’s one other thing.”

“What’s that?”

“Nat says he paints rather obsessively. I mean, he’s at work a lot, but when he comes home, he really doesn’t pay attention to Nat, or Christopher, for that matter. He goes into h
is studio, and he paints portraits of you.”

“He does?”

“Yeah. She said he must have 50 portraits of you in that studio. Oh, and by the way, there still isn’t a stick of furniture in that house. Aside from the baby room, that is.”

“What? Where do they sit and eat and stuff?”

“Orange crates and TV trays. They sit on the floor. Except, of course, for the baby room, like I said. Nat got that decorated, but he refuses to get furniture for any other room in the house.”

I wondered where Natalie slept.

I didn’t want to know.

But I asked anyhow. “Where does Nat sleep?”

“She has a bed in the baby room. It’s a nice queen-sized bed.”

“Why no furniture?”

“Because he thinks that you will be home at any minute, and he promised you that the two of you would decorate the house together. Are you starting to get the picture here?”

“But Nick, he doesn’t know about Dalilah. How I lied to him. He probably will never forgive me.”

“I don’t think he should’ve forgiven you for the stupid stunt you pulled when you went off the grid like that. Jesus fucking Christ, why would you do that? Don’t you see that your actions were the snowball that started the avalanche that resulted in all of this bullshit happening?”

“I wasn’t in my right mind.”

“I know that, and I’m sorry for what happened to you, but you made some really poor decisions there. Any normal woman would’ve called a friend, or gone to a rape crisis center. But no, not you. You decided that the best course of action would be to go to a drug house and get high.” Then he looked thoughtful. “Come to think of it, that was Ryan’s reaction to trauma, too, so I guess that you guys do have something in common.” Then he looked at me again. “But not calling him and turning off your phone was inexcusable. And just plain stupid.”

“I didn’t want to be found. I didn’t want to go back into that house.”

“Don’t you think for one second that Ryan is sensitive enough not to make you go into that house again? As much as he protects you and takes care of you, and you think that he would just go ‘la la la, I think I’ll make my wife re-live her trauma every time she looks at the kitchen floor?’”

“How did you know it was on the kitchen floor?”

“I found some blood there. I didn’t tell Ryan that, though, over the phone, when he called from Tokyo. He would’ve gone absolutely ape-shit.”

Dalilah
started screaming again, and I picked her up and put her on my lap. I put a pacifier in her mouth and felt her bottom. “Would you excuse me? I have to change her.”

“Sure,” he said.

When I got back, I put Dalilah back in her bassinette.

Nick continued. “Anyhow, I had never seen Ryan so enraged when he found out what happened to you. He immediately knew that it was Andrew who did it, and I literally had to talk him out of finding him and killing him. He literally would have. Ryan maybe a putz when it comes to women, but he’s not a pussy. He’s been around tough people in his life, and he felt he could take him.” He shook his head with a smile. “A retired government assassin, and he thought he could take him. That’s Ryan for ya.”

“Ryan told me something about that. He told me that you talked him out of killing him.”

“Yeah, I had to. The only thing that brought him to his senses that I told him what impact it would have on you. It took him less than a second to realize that you would suffer even worse for his actions, so he put the gun away
. But I had never seen him so devastated and angry as he was at that point.”

Nick confirme
d what Ryan told me about his feelings about my rape. I was reminded, anew, of how much Ryan was affected by what had happened to me.

“Now, of course, Ryan an
d his father are strained again,” Nick said. “The father was the one who hired Andrew, although Ryan had him checked out independently. Andrew was clean. Turns out he was far from clean, and he had a target for you.”

“Target for me? What does that mean?”

“It means that the bastard lied about Rochelle hiring people to come after you. Rochelle did no such thing. Andrew lied and said that she did, so that it made it seem that you really needed his protection. He was apparently concerned that he wouldn’t get the job unless he made it look like there were a bunch of people out there, gunning for you.”

“How did you find that out?”

“It’s hard to prove a negative, but Ryan hauled Rochelle in for a lie detector test about it. She passed with flying colors.”

“Sociopaths usually can beat those tests.”

“Yeah, but Ryan can also read people extremely well. Or haven’t you figured that out by now?”

“Of course. That’s one of the many reasons why I am so
madly in love with him still.”

“Anyhow, he believes she is telling the truth. And there never were any names forthcoming from Andrew about who was after you. That was pretty suspicious.”

“Ok. So Andrew lied to get the job. You said he had me as a target. What did that mean?”

“It means that Andrew wanted you, specifically. Not sure why. But he wanted to be your bodyguard, and we think that he intended to rape you all along.”

My hand involuntarily flew to my mouth. “Why?”

“We’re trying to figure that out. That’s the other thing that Ryan does with his time. He paints, he works, and he obsessively looks into Andrew’s background, trying to find out anything he can about him. He still wants revenge, he just doesn’t know how to go about it.”

Dalilah was crying again, so I picked her up and bounced her. She sucked on her fingers, and I gave her a pacifier and one of her stuffed animals.

“ Anyhow, Ryan’s theory, from what Nat tells me, is that Andrew’s mother is red-headed. Which she is. And he is angry with his mother for something, so
he took it out on you. You know, the classic killing the mother over and over thing.”

“Why does Ryan talk to Nat and not you?”

“Because sometimes he gets in spurts where he starts talking. Nat says that the only thing he talks about is you. He is still trying to figure out why everything happened the way that it did. You really fucked him up.”

I sighed. I had
made some really poor decisions. Poor decisions that resulted in all of this. This is why Nick was here. He was the boulder that came crashing through the window, telling me that I had made a serious wrong turn in life. They say that, when you make bad decisions, the universe tries to tell you to make a U-Turn. At first, it’s a pebble thrown at you, as the universe gently tells you to get back on track. Then, if you don’t listen, the universe sends a boulder that you cannot ignore.