by Amelia Wilde
He looked down, dripping water from his hair onto his big feet, then looked back up with a horsey grin. “Oh, sorry, man. You want it back?”
I rolled my eyes. “No, I’ll find another. You guys better not have left any of your…remnants in the shower.”
“Don’t worry, Sky. We were just getting clean, that’s all.” Jane clasped Greg’s hand and tugged him into her room. “Have a good time tonight!”
I pulled a clean towel from the hall closet before ducking into the bathroom with a spray bottle of Lysol.
This time I was waiting outside my building when Brandon pulled up. Since I wasn’t planning to repeat the last time Brandon had come to pick me up, I also wore clothing that was a lot harder to remove: a pair of black cigarette pants, the new blouse that hung provocatively off one shoulder, and black ankle boots with silver-tipped toes that Jane called my “shit-kickers.” I was tucked cozily into my black wool trench coat, and my hair, which I had only had time to dry at the roots, now lay about my shoulders in waves that were still frizzing a bit around the crown of my head. I normally didn’t wear a lot of makeup anyway, but I had taken the time to line my eyelids and apply a few coats of mascara to make my green eyes pop. I felt confident. And, after listening to the noises Jane and her dude-of-the-evening made through the thin walls, fairly hard up.
“Hi, David,” I said to Brandon’s driver as he opened the back door for me.
“Ms. Crosby,” he replied.
I slid into the back seat, and he closed the door behind me. As soon as I saw Brandon, I wondered how I had forgotten in six short days just how gorgeous he was. Immediately, my libido went from simmering to almost boiling over. Was it going to be like this every time I saw him?
Brandon was only slightly more dressed up than the last time I saw him, wearing a light-gray button-down instead of a Henley over dark jeans, his dirty-blond hair combed back in soft waves instead of mussed around his face. Finished with a navy wool pea coat and his brown boots, he looked sexy, polished, and relaxed all at the same time.
“Red.”
His deep voice rumbled in greeting as he kissed me gently on the cheek. The combination of men’s aftershave, a slightly almond scent, and that something else that was entirely just Brandon made my toes curl in my boots as his nose lingered for a moment. With a sharp intake of breath, he tucked a strand of hair behind my ear.
“Gorgeous as always,” he murmured.
We stared, suddenly caught in the spell of each other’s presence. The longer I looked into those bright blue eyes, the more the memory of his last kiss burned. Was he thinking about the same thing? Just as I was about to launch myself at Brandon, David awkwardly cleared his throat from the front seat.
“Where to, sir?” he asked.
Brandon jerked his head toward the front as if he had also forgotten about David. “Ah, Mass Ave to Albany, please. Thanks, David.”
As the car moved, I turned to the window to recompose myself. If this were a normal date, we could have enjoyed each other along the way to the T in dark corners made for kissing. Did dating someone with this much money mean there would always be someone to witness our intimate moments?
Brandon touched my fingers. I turned back to him, and the crooked smile on his face wiped away all negative thoughts. He was clearly so glad to be there with me, and truthfully, I felt the same. It was better to take it somewhat slow. Wasn’t it?
Brandon had promised earlier that he’d planned things out, but hadn’t said much more—just that we’d be going someplace important to him, that it would be casual, and that we’d definitely stay in Boston. So, when the car stopped on a familiar road off Kendall Square, I turned to Brandon curiously.
“You’re taking me to MIT for our first date?”
“I got it, David,” he said before getting out from his side and jogging around to open my door. Brandon told David he would call when we needed a ride again and then helped me out with a smile.
“You wanted to know me,” he said as the Mercedes sped off down the campus road. “Well, this is where I spent most of my time between the ages of twelve and eighteen.”
Brandon tucked my hand into the crook of his elbow. As we walked down the street, he gave me a mini-tour of the unusual architecture. There were few students on campus this time of night, although more than one light burned in a few of the strange, mish-mashed buildings.
“Right there is the student shop where I used to mess around with leftover equipment while my foster dad taught his labs. And over there is the auditorium where he lectured. I’d sit in the back and do homework. My high school let me take some MIT courses as a non-matriculated student before I graduated. I finished the high school curriculum kind of early.”
I snapped my head to look at him. “You were taking math classes at the best technical college in the world when you were in high school? Why didn’t they just skip you a few grades and let you finish early?”
“Well, ah, they did.” Brandon gave a bashful half shrug. “I graduated when I was sixteen.”
I gawked. Brandon was a genius. Like, a legitimate, Einstein-level genius.
“And you went here after too?”
He nodded. “Ray—that’s my foster dad’s name—pulled some strings and got me into the Electrical Engineering program.”
“Is that what you majored in?” At this point, I wouldn’t have been surprised if Brandon had a degree in astrophysics besides being one of the most powerful lawyers in Boston.
“I thought about it,” he admitted. “But no. The stuff they work on is really cool, but I wanted to do more than just work on unsolvable equations and fiddle with wires all day long. I ended up majoring in Economics.”
“Because that isn’t a numbers-heavy field,” I remarked dryly.
Brandon snorted, but squeezed my hand. “I know. Ray still thought it was a joke. It was a major beef between us back then. But it seemed more…practical at the time. I wanted to make some money, and I wanted to do it as quickly as possible.”
It wasn’t hard to understand what drove him. Brandon had grown up with little in the way of stability. Middle-class academia had probably seemed like a waste when he knew he could make a lot more money using his skills in the finance sector. His original plan, he told me, was to game the stock market using an algorithm he’d developed at MIT.
“I’m surprised you didn’t go to New York,” I said. Wall Street was the center of the universe as far as finance was concerned. I would know.
“Well, I wasn’t quite twenty when I finished here,” he said. “Even the small investment firms were nervous about taking me on that young.”
It had been a frustrating year, he told me as he steered us down another street lined with much taller buildings. Despite having a degree from one of the best schools in the world, he barely got a job as an assistant at a small hedge fund.
“I don’t blame any of them. Imagine me: an eight-foot-tall, skin-and-bones kid with acne, spouting what probably sounded like conspiracy theories about the marketplace.” He chuckled. “I wouldn’t have hired me either.”
His foster parents had allowed him to continue living with them rent-free so he could try his hand at investing the small salary he made working part time.
“They sound like they really believed in you,” I said.
“They’re good people,” Brandon agreed. “I don’t know where I’d be without them. I lived in a few homes before them, but with people who already had about five kids and were just looking to collect welfare.” He looked grim at the memories, but quickly shook them off. “Ray and Susan couldn’t have kids of their own.”
“Did they ever have any other kids live with them?”
“Nope,” Brandon said with a lopsided grin. “Just little old me.”
It turned out to be a good investment for them. His algorithm ended up predicting certain dot-com stock trends with uncanny accuracy, allowing him to triple his paltry minimum-wage salary within six months. He also managed to crea
te a nice retirement for his foster parents within five years, get himself a decent job at a hedge fund, and later, pay his way through law school.
Brandon kicked a stray rock after he finished telling me the story. He shrugged again, suddenly bashful the way only certain men can be when they are pleased with themselves. I squeezed his arm, although I was still processing the gravity of his accomplishments. All that by the time he was, what, maybe twenty-five?
“I’m surprised you didn’t just become the next Gordon Gecko, or whatever,” I said, doing my best to make light of his past despite the fact that I was awestruck and a little worried. He did run an investment firm. Maybe he was like the character, an investment snake, just nicer looking.
Brandon just snorted. “It was just a means to an end, and my goals at fifteen, or even nineteen, weren’t really the same ones I had ten or twenty years later. It becomes sad after a while, knowing your only job is basically to play a game—one that’s not that challenging, honestly—with money, a lot of which is legally swindled. I went to law school mostly out of curiosity, to know what my lawyers were doing, but I ended up really liking the law for that reason—I like the way justice works in court. Everyone has to be held accountable.”
He started Sterling Grove with one of his old law school classmates initially to represent the interests of some of his investments, but eventually it became the voice of a company that began working with closely held startups, allowing Brandon and his partners to pick and choose projects that, as he put it, actually made something more than just money. Many of those companies were now closely associated with his independent investment group, Sterling Ventures.
“I guess you could say I have my fingers in a bunch of different pies now,” he concluded, coming to a stop so he faced me.
He took my free hand with his other one and let our arms dangle, connected.
“Which do you like best?” I asked.
He tipped his head slightly from side to side, weighing the question. “I’m not sure. We funded a couple of instructional design projects that were pretty amazing a few years ago. But lately, I’ve been interested more in helping with some renewable energy ideas. There’s this—” He cut himself off abruptly and smiled sheepishly. “Actually, Skylar, I can’t talk about it yet. I trust you and all, but—”
“I get it,” I interrupted, though I desperately wanted to know. “Liability. Don’t worry about it.”
“It’s just…sensitive.” His voice rang with a passion I hadn’t heard in the rest of his story. “When I can say something, I promise you’ll be the first to know.” He looked around at the darkened silhouettes of the campus buildings that loomed over us and back down at me. “This is really what you want?” he asked. “Listening to me jabber on while we walk around these ugly buildings?”
“Is this who you are?”
“It’s part,” he said simply.
“Then yes,” I replied. “I want to know whatever there is to know about you. I just want the truth.”
Brandon squeezed my hands tightly and nodded, then let go of one as he turned toward the building where we had stopped, an unassuming brick box that stood a bit out of the way of the streetlamps. It didn’t seem like enough to house the brilliance undoubtedly inside.
“Home sweet home,” he said. “So to speak. Come on, Red. I’m going to introduce you to the man who raised me.”
Raymond Petersen’s office was at the end of a dreary hall that housed the Electrical Engineering faculty. A thin, hunched man with sparse gray hair and large glasses perched on a long nose, he wore stereotypical professor garb: faded khaki pants and a plaid, button-down shirt rolled up his forearms. A brown sport coat was tossed over the back of his chair. Engrossed in some sort of problem, he didn’t stop scratching equations at his very messy desk for at least a minute after Brandon knocked on the open door.
“Bran.” He pushed back from his rolling desk chair and stepped over multiple piles of library books in order to execute a brief, awkward embrace with his foster son, who towered over him. “This is a surprise.”
They eyed each other warily, reminding me of a nature show where two wolves circled each other, sniffing.
“We were just in the neighborhood and thought we’d catch you after your last class. Susan said you were running a graduate seminar on Friday evenings now.”
Ray turned toward me at the word “we.”
“Skylar Crosby, sir,” I said, extending my hand and shaking his firmly.
He returned my smile, but it didn’t quite reach his eyes. “Pleasure to meet you. Please sit down. Do you want some coffee? There might be some dregs in the pot.” He nodded to a small drip-coffee maker on a shelf.
“I’ll take a beer if you’ve got one,” Brandon said as we both sat in the two small chairs provided for students. The legs on Brandon’s creaked as he folded his large frame into the small metal seat. “I know you’ve got a few stashed under your desk where Susan won’t find them.”
Ray opened his mouth as if to argue, but then sighed, sat back into his rolling chair, and reached under his desk into a mini refrigerator for said beers.
“Damn woman is on a new health kick. Some Paleo-diet garbage,” he muttered. “I told her there was a reason why cavemen only lived thirty-five years, but she won’t listen to basic science.”
He held out three cans of PBR, and I took one, not wanting to be rude. We cracked open the cans and sipped in silence.
“So, what does the young lady do?” Ray asked Brandon.
I did my best to hide a frown; it drove me crazy when men talked about women as if they weren’t in the room.
“I’m in law school, Dr. Petersen,” I piped up. “Finishing my third year.”
Ray glanced at me with a slightly hawkish look behind his glasses. “Is that so? I’ve never really thought much of lawyers. Always seemed like a lot of rhetorical posturing if you ask me.”
Brandon’s grip on his beer can was the only thing that betrayed his irritation. I wasn’t so good at holding my tongue.
“I don’t know about that, sir,” I said as nonchalantly as I could. “I like to think of us as necessary interpreters of the abstract social boundaries by which our society operates. Without the law, there is chaos, which would be much more restrictive than anything we live by. Like John Locke said, ‘Where there is no law, there is no freedom.’”
Ray stared at me for a few seconds before turning back to Brandon. “Is she always like this?”
There he went again. I didn’t care if he was a Fields Medal winner; Raymond Petersen was obviously one of those old male academics who tended to treat women as if they had half a brain.
“Like what, sir?” I asked politely.
Ray rewarded me with another quick glance, but continued to address his foster son. “So outspoken?”
“Skylar’s at the top of her class at Harvard, Ray,” Brandon replied irritably. “I’d say her willingness to challenge others will serve her clients well.” He squeezed my hand. “I know I like it.”
Ray blinked between Brandon and me a few times, looking pointedly at our joined hands before focusing back on Brandon.
“So, is everything all right? What’s really going on here?”
Ray’s eyes continued to flicker between the two of us suspiciously. I took a large gulp of beer. It was an oddly direct question, particularly in New England, where most folks tended to swath their inquiries in pleasantries and passive aggressive behavior. I glanced at Brandon, who just sighed.
“Nothing’s going on, Ray,” he replied.
“Well, it doesn’t add up,” Ray said. “You call me or Susan, what, once every few weeks or so? We usually only see you when you’ve got some personal problem you can’t sort out. Last time it was because that other woman was suing––”
“That’s enough,” Brandon cut him off.
“Is that done with? What’s going on with this girl? Did you get her pregnant? There are clinics that can help you take care of that, yo
u know. You’re thirty-seven, Bran; you need to learn to deal with these things on your own.”
Brandon set his can on the desk hard enough that a bit of beer spurted out and down the sides. Ray immediately picked it up and wiped the liquid away. Brandon stood up and pulled me from my chair. I was barely able to set my beer next to Brandon’s before I was tugged backward toward the office door.
“Nothing’s going on,” Brandon said again. “I met someone I like. I wanted her to meet you. That’s it. Tell Susan I said hi.”
“It was nice to meet you, Dr. Petersen,” I offered as I was practically dragged away.
Ray didn’t look up; he had already dumped our beers in the garbage and had pivoted back to the mess of papers on his desk.
20
“Can I ask you something?”
We made our way back down the sober, concrete stairwell, each footstep echoing up the shaft listlessly in a way that I couldn’t stand for more than two seconds.
“What’s that?” Brandon asked distantly as he continued.
“What was he talking about, that you need to learn to deal with these things on your own? What things?”
Beside me, Brandon sighed. “Your dad and grandma. Do you ever feel like they treat you like a little kid even though you’re grown?”
“Constantly,” I admitted, thinking particularly of Bubbe.
“Well, that’s Ray. We didn’t get on so well in the beginning, and he still sees me as the headstrong fuck-up they took in. Doesn’t matter that was twenty-five years ago.”
“So, the woman he mentioned…”
“Ancient history,” Brandon said quickly. “Nothing to worry about.”
We continued to walk until the echoes once again carried too much tension.
“Did the Petersens ever adopt you?” I asked.
Brandon’s eyes flashed as we approached another flight. “No.”
“Could they have?”
Brandon was silent for a moment. “The Petersens were the best parents someone in my position could have hoped for,” he said finally. “They took me in, they cared for me, and they let me stay well past the time I was a ward of the state. I think that’s enough, don’t you?”