Hilariously Ever After

by Penny Reid

  The room quiets for the first time since I got there.

  “Very amusing,” Dartford says, trying to take the microphone. I back away, daring him to go after a woman and a cute dog in front of all these people.

  I nod as if Smuckers is talking and I’m listening. Out of the corner of my eye I see Henry’s warning face. I pause halfway up the aisle. “Smuckers here thought he was going to a nice community meeting where we talk about making a neighborhood nicer, but instead, it’s battle of the jerky titans. Please.”

  There are more murmurs. Chuckles.

  “Very funny.” The Dartford guy is coming for the mic.

  I walk again. I feel Henry trying to catch my gaze, trying to shut me down. Too late.

  “Is Smuckers in charge of this?” I look Henry in the eye. “Right now he is. This guy’s right. A dog is literally in charge of a worldwide development and finance company. Here’s the thing. Smuckers agrees with a lot of you about more green space, not less. He thinks so many buildings are just huge pieces of shit—new ones are the worst. Maybe they win awards, but seriously? Smuckers believes in human- and dog-centered design.”

  People laugh. Somebody yells “More fire hydrants!”

  “Nobody’s redesigning this project,” Kaleb says. “That’s not happening.”

  I turn to Kaleb. “Why can’t we? Smuckers doesn’t understand. Why can’t it be nicer, like a garden?”

  I feel Henry’s gaze on me. Not thrilled.

  “Because it took a year to design, and that phase is over,” Kaleb protests.

  “Smuckers doesn’t understand. If people don’t like it, why not make a new design? Right?”

  A few people clap.

  “We can’t,” Kaleb says.

  The Dartford guys are laughing. I turn to them. Yeah, it’s their turn. “But here’s the thing. Smuckers hates racetracks. He thinks they’re messy and noisy and bring a lot of traffic and are horrible in a residential area, and he knows you guys are going to put it in. I mean, seriously? A racetrack?”

  “We’re planning no such thing.”

  “Smuckers says that everyone in the building community knows you are. You tried to get one in on Brockton Greens, right? You have partners looking with you. Isn’t that right?”

  “I don’t know what ridiculous rumors you’ve heard.”

  “Smuckers wants to know if you’d sign a thing right here swearing you wouldn’t ever build a racetrack here.”

  Dartford glowers. He is not enjoying the feel of Smuckers’s fluffy paw on his balls. “This is silly.” He reaches for the mic.

  I back away with my ear to Smuckers’s mouth. “What is that, Smuckers? You think it’s suspicious they won’t sign a thing like that? I think so, too!” I finally catch Henry’s wary gaze. “Henry, Smuckers wants you to put up that slide of the neighborhood-facing structure.”

  “We’re done with that slide,” he says.

  “Smuckers wants to see it again,” I say.

  “We’ve seen it,” Henry says.

  “Smuckers wants it put up.” I raise my eyebrows. Does Henry really want Smuckers to pull rank?

  No, as it turns out. Henry puts up the slide.

  The Dartford guy protests. He doesn’t want to revisit our project. He just wants the no vote.

  “Let’s make it amazing,” I say. “More green, less building. We can do that, right, Henry?”

  I can’t read Henry’s expression, but I know he doesn’t like surprises. He doesn’t like the feeling of being bossed. “We can,” he says. “That’s not really the question, though...”

  “There are cost issues,” Kaleb says. “With every square foot lost, the cost of the remaining goes up.”

  “So what if the cost goes up?” I say. “If it’s cool. Let’s see options. Something will have to go in to replace the factories that are moving out. What does it look like if it’s something better?”

  Again Henry catches my gaze. He shakes his head, a tiny movement most people probably don’t catch. I put Smuckers’s fuzzy muzzle up to my face, and Smuckers licks my cheek, and I smile at Henry. Because we’re down this road now and there’s no going back.

  Henry grabs his laptop and gets up the picture he showed me—that’s the one I want everyone to see.

  I want them to hear him talk to the picture with the passion I heard. I think they would love him if they heard him like I did.

  “How about this. We could integrate something like this,” he begins. “This landscape is brown. Imagine it full of greenery and natural light.” He shows them his favorite Australian building. “Look how the natural light flows. And this gathering space. We can do this. We can have this. We’d do benches along here. Greenery.” He goes on, getting excited, pulling people into his vision.

  Kaleb stews. He’d rather lose the project than only make a few hundred thousand bucks. But Henry’s on fire.

  And sentiment is moving—I can feel it in the room.

  There’s a preliminary vote. People want Locke to develop the parcel. They want more meetings. They want Henry.

  I want him, too.

  I’ve set Smuckers down on his leash and take a breath, trying to come down from the panic I felt. Some teenaged girls are petting him. Brett and Kaleb are talking with Henry and he’s nodding, hands shoved in his pockets.

  He puts his suit jacket back on. All buttoned down. Perfect Henry.

  Not looking at me.

  Is he mad? He doesn’t like being pushed around. Well, Bernadette was his mother.

  When I glance over there next, he’s coming across the room toward me, bypassing small groups of people, computer bag slung over his shoulder.

  Brett stays behind. He looks angry.

  Henry looks…beautiful.

  My pulse races.

  “Let’s get out of here,” he says when he reaches me, breathless. He takes Smuckers’s leash and my hand. “Now.”

  “I can carry...”

  “I got it.” He’s pulling me along, down the hall, toward the door, with Smuckers trotting alongside on the leash.

  Somebody calls his name. I don’t know if it’s Locke people or neighborhood people. They want him back.

  “I got your gift,” I say. “It’s the most beautiful thing anyone ever made for me.”

  He shoves open the door with strange force. My heart jumps. Is he going to yell at me, too?

  I step out into the night, afraid to face him. Did I screw up again?

  A strong hand grasps my arm. Henry spins me back to him. I’m flush up against him.

  He gazes down at me, breath ragged, pulse banging beneath his strong jaw. He looks at me like he wants to say a million things, eyes full of tenderness. Wonder. People never look at me like that. But Henry does.

  I brush my knuckle along the scruff of his beard, a whisper of a touch with enough electricity to light up the night.

  I mouth his name: Hen-ry.

  “Goddamn,” he grates, dark and needy.

  His lips come down on mine.

  There’s nothing tender about this kiss—he devours my mouth. His tongue sweeps lewdly across mine. A fist closes around my ponytail. He pushes into me, or maybe that’s me, pushing into him, finding the way we fit, hot and perfect.

  He pulls away. “The hell,” he says. “How did I not believe you? How did I not trust you? All this time—god, I was an asshole.”

  “It was a lot to ask, that level of trust.”

  “Not when it’s you.”

  My heart slams out of my chest.

  Henry smooths back strands that escaped my ponytail, tucks them behind my ear.

  “I didn’t listen to what I knew about you. You’re amazing and beautiful, and you take my breath away. And you said things will turn out. You gave me your word. It’s good enough for me.”

  I press trembling fingers to his lips. “The circumstances are what they are.”

  “To hell with the circumstances.”

  I tighten my arms around him, press my forehead to his c
hest. “Thank you.”

  Smuckers waits patiently below us, panting. Just another day for Smuckers. He looks like he has to pee. “He has to pee,” I say. “But not on flat pavement.”

  “So. Freaking. Romantic.” Henry pulls Smuckers to a light pole. “Come on, boy.” The light pole is way more Smuckers’s peeing jam. “So romantic,” he whispers.

  “You’re not mad?” I ask, circling my arms around from behind him. “About the meeting?”

  He turns in my arms and rests his hands on my hips. “Mad?”

  “From me doing the Smuckers says thing?”

  “Baby, I have spent a lot of time on the wrong end of the Smuckers says thing. I have not enjoyed it. In fact, you could say I’ve pretty much hated it. Couldn’t wait to be free of it.”

  I swallow.

  “But seeing the Dartford brothers victimized by it?” He leans in. He brushes a kiss over my lips. “Priceless.”

  After Smuckers finishes fake covering up his pee with pretend dirt expertly kicked from his hind legs, we head over to the limo.

  I slide in and Henry slides in after me, sitting right next to me. He shuts us into the small space and puts up the window.

  “Here’s something else I need to tell you,” he says. “You made that joke, and I know you were being funny, and I reacted like an idiot.”

  “You care about the company—”

  “No, I know you wouldn’t do something like that, paint the cranes like that.” He takes a strand of my hair.

  I squeeze his hand. Would he say that if he knew I was Vonda? “Thank you.”

  The driver pulls out.

  “Painting the cranes? That’s a move my mother would make. And it sent me down a rabbit hole of fuckedupness that you said it.”

  I nod, easily imagining her doing something like that. Delighting in it. “I get why you cut her out of your life.”

  He straightens. “You think I cut her out of my life?”

  “She was always talking like you did, like—”

  “Vicky, she cut me out. She didn’t want to see family. Her doormen had instructions to turn me away. You think I didn’t try to see her? At least get her out of that shithole?”

  “Right,” I say, shocked at how stupid I was to have kept believing Bernadette’s side of it. “I can’t believe I didn’t put that together. I mean, you’re the most loyal person I’ve ever met. I should’ve realized.”

  “Bernadette talked a good game.” He’s so casual about it, that’s what breaks my heart.

  “I'm sorry.”

  “Oh, don’t be,” he says. “She knew how to have fun, how to make you feel like the only person in the world.”

  Even as he says it, I hear the but. I’m thinking about my own mom. “But it wouldn’t last,” I add.

  Again he shrugs. Knowing him, he’s starting to regret complaining right about now.

  “And it’s worse when that goodness is taken away,” I say.

  I want him to know I get it. He deserves something real, something that’s not part of my fake identity.

  He takes my hand, warm in his. He turns it over and traces the surface of my palm, as if to learn it.

  Recklessly, I continue. “My mom was great when she was off drugs. But when she was on? Not pretty.”

  He stills. “She was on drugs?”

  “Meth,” I say. “And there were things she did when she was desperate for money, for another buy, the deepest betrayals.”

  I’m getting into dangerous territory—I’m not contradicting my fake identity, but I’m definitely off-roading from it. It was safer when we were enemies. Enemies hide things from each other. Now I just want to know everything about him, and I have this crazy idea that I could bare my heart to him, and it would all be okay.

  Except it wouldn’t.

  Still, I continue. “Much as I had cause not to trust Mom, I’d always think things would be different the next time around. I always hoped.”

  He says nothing. Doesn’t even flinch. He wants to hear. He wants to know things about me.

  “The last betrayal was the biggest. You wouldn’t even believe.”

  “And then your parents died,” he says. “And you were alone with your sister.”

  My pulse quickens as he searches my face, as he fits our hands together, like fitting the pieces of my story together. He turns the knot we make over, so that mine rests on his.

  “And you had to leave Prescott,” he adds.

  I lean into him, wanting to stop talking about my fake life.

  “But you made it,” he says.

  “More or less.” What the hell am I doing? “Hey,” I lift my head. “April said it was almost your birthday. Happy early birthday.”

  “I don’t celebrate my birthday,” he says.

  “Why?”

  “I just don’t.”

  He doesn’t have to say why. I know. Bernadette. God knows how a woman like that did birthdays. “Okay.”

  He lifts my hand, still trapped in his, brushes a kiss over each knuckle, then looks into my eyes. “So, FYI, no birthdays. Now that you’re in my life.”

  My heart flops upside down in my chest. The air stills. The cacophony of horns outside the window seems to fade. Now that you’re in my life?

  I feel stunned. Happy. He considers me to be in his life—not on the other side of enemy lines, but in his life. And he’s in mine. Henry, with his fierce beauty and loyal heart and amazing vision for things, he’s in mine.

  I’m ecstatic for a fraction of a second, like I won some kind of lottery.

  Until I remember why it could never work with us.

  Vonda.

  I never want to see hate in his eyes when he learns I'm Vonda. It would pierce me clear through to the bone.

  He traces soft circles around my knuckles with a finger. I’m glad he has something to do, because things are turning too dangerous and too beautiful, all at once. And the air between us runs thick and wild. And I want him like mad.

  Get away. You can’t have him.

  “But your birthday is soon?” I blurt.

  “I want nothing to do with it. It’s a thing with me.”

  “Fine. Your birthday is just another day,” I say.

  “Say it again,” he turns to me, eyes hooded.

  “Just. Another. Day.”

  Just another day—with one big difference, I decide.

  I’ll give him a present he’ll never forget—the papers that transfer Smuckers’s shares of Locke Worldwide to him. It’s a few days short of the twenty-one-day cooling off period, but it’s close, and the papers aren’t technically telling him. I already hired a lawyer to do it. I told him to buy a ream of that thick parchment paper to print the stuff out on it so it would feel more impressively gift-like.

  I want everything ready.

  But I can’t be in his life anymore. He’s too high profile for me not to be revealed as Vonda.

  It’s not just about the hate in his eyes. It’s remotely possible he’d believe me, but it wouldn’t matter even if he did.

  My getting outed as Vonda would hurt the people we most want to protect.

  The publicity of Vonda would attract my mother’s attention and she’d take Carly back in a heartbeat, use her to squeeze me. Maybe even Henry. Or just use Carly as a meth ticket somehow.

  And Vonda O’Neil linked to Henry Locke? So toxic to the trust and stability of the Locke name. To his family he protects. All those people with names he memorizes so carefully. He can’t be linked to Vonda.

  I need to stay away from him. Get out of his life and stay out. He’ll love his birthday present. It’ll make him so happy.

  I visualize myself getting out of the limo. Walking to my door. Alone. It’s not where this night is going, but things need to take a U-turn.

  My heart hurts. I’ve never wanted to be real with somebody like I want to be real with Henry.

  Smuckers fusses, and I use it as an excuse to free my hand from Henry’s, like his fussing is this emergency t
hat requires snout-smoothing caresses and a deep gaze into doggie eyes.

  I try to think of some unromantic thing to talk about.

  “One question,” I say. “And you need to answer honestly. What is up with the Dartford brothers? Do they just sit around rubbing their hands and dreaming of building what people most don’t want them to build?”

  “And then laugh maniacally? Something like that.”

  “They were mad,” I say. “I’m glad people could see they were jerks.”

  “It wasn’t just showing them up as jerks,” Henry says. “It was how you were. You have to understand, at these meetings, usually there’s nobody on the side of the everyday people. I think they sense their powerlessness sometimes. Then you step in with the Smuckers thing, and it was brilliant. And you were on their side, and they knew it was genuine.”

  “They should’ve known you were on their side.”

  “Yeah, I’m still the developer. Whereas the way you blazed in, you were their ally. I think Brett and Kaleb are going to need months to recover. Shit. Kaleb’s protests? We couldn’t have staged it better if we tried. Like we’d written a script for him. It couldn’t have been better. It really was like a dog is pushing everyone around, which I guess it was. It’s the most bizarre thing I’ve seen in all my years in business. You and Smuckers did what we couldn’t do in an hour of yelling—you made them open their minds and listen. You opened the door to a redesign of the Ten.”

  “That you thought of.”

  He brushes my neck with his knuckle. Hot blood courses through my veins. “God, Vicky,” he says. “Battle of the jerky titans?”

  “Umm…” My cheeks heat.

  “You don’t like rich, entitled guys. That’s what I think.”

  I like one of them. A lot.

  “I don’t want to be that to you,” he says. “Though I did try to trick you and make you sign everything away.” He slides his finger over my cheek.

  “And you got me arrested,” I say.

  “Detained. Still—I’m sorry about that,” he says.

  “Oh, you should be.” I give him a fake angry look, like it’s all a joke. Henry’s made so many things new for me. He gave back some of the things that Denny stole from me.

  His eyes are dark. He’s not in a jokey mood.

  “Well, to be fair,” I rattle on, “I did put a dog throne in your boardroom and make you talk to Smuckers as if he were human.”