“Sir—”
“It’s still Robert, Alex. That hasn’t changed.”
Suggesting something had….
Robert didn’t return to his side of the desk but perched at the corner, half-leaning, half-sitting—orchestrated body language meant to convey we’re confidants and I’m on your side. For the first time, she spotted the bullshit inherent in every manufactured psychological tactic they had used to collect high-profile clients.
“What has changed?”
“I went with Diana for VP.”
Like that. As if he had picked up the phone and said “I’ll go with Som Tam and spring rolls.” No leading-up. No sugar-dusting. Pieces of her composure plummeted to her lap, crumbled away like bricks on the buildings assembled behind him.
“Diana, as in how-do-I-unzip-a-file, Diana?”
Alex’s voice was distant. She might as well have been standing—shouting—from the Prudential Tower rooftop over his right shoulder.
“She’s run a company before.”
“For four months before it merged and disintegrated.”
Now Robert did retreat behind his desk, constructed a wall.
“Your math, your ideas, are strong, Alex. But part of leading this company into the next phase means meeting clients where they are, not ten steps ahead, leaving them behind. And the follow-through has to be solid.”
More bricks picked away. “My mother died, Robert.”
“I understand—”
“And before that? I didn’t take a day of vacation in five years. Nights. Weekends. Five years, Robert.”
Longevity, dedication, just like Jonah and his sunflower seeds.
She warmed, despite the advanced chill of the room, of Boston.
“It comes down to working smarter, not harder,” said Robert.
“And Diana is the smarter choice?”
“For our vision? Yes.”
“That leaves my team one person down.”
Robert scratched at the bridge of his nose. “I’m afraid it’s not your team anymore.”
He reached into his desk and passed her an envelope. Clement Grant, Esquire, all over again, only this time fingerprints marred every surface. She couldn’t open that envelope, Alexandra scrolled in her daddy’s script, and she refused to open the blank one set before her now.
“You’ll find the severance more than generous.”
The scaffolding inside her throat collapsed. She couldn’t swallow, couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe. The skyline stood behind him, unwavering, even as the sun’s final rays scrambled to find purchase.
“I don’t want your money, Robert. I want this job. I love this job. It was one mistake.”
“One mistake that compromised the success of the largest free-market medical experiment ever attempted. It set the industry back, Alex. Spooked investors. It’ll be years before anyone tries it again.”
“The patch worked.”
“The patch wasn’t what they asked for.”
“Isn’t that our job—to anticipate? To look down the road for these companies?”
“You looked down the wrong road, Alex. The team agrees. I’m sorry. I really am.”
She left the envelope on the table, the buildings behind him to their darkness. He kept talking but she walked, out of his office, down the hallway, past her six-by-eight-foot room that had become a living, breathing entity in her life, a child she had nursed since the birth of the company. When her heels didn’t carry her fast enough, she kicked them loose and snatched them, one in each hand, Guiseppe Beneventi stilettos swinging from her clenched fists. She mashed the elevator buttons until the doors swept open.
Her IT team member, Duncan, stepped out, all five-foot-average, round cheeks, with his gym locker room hoodie on under his blazer and seven-day hipster beard.
“Alex…” His voice was pliable, contrite, like he already knew. He reached for her hand.
She yanked it away.
“What? I’m good enough to bang but not good enough to take a stand for? So much for solidarity.”
“I tried, Alex. I really did.”
“All y’all can go to hell.” Her southern bitch, rearing its head in real moments. She stalked into the elevator and tapped out a distress code against the button until the doors closed. In the mirrored walls, she caught her reflection. Her coiffed and sprayed-all-to-hell hair looked perfect, almost militaristic. She thought of birds and removed the pins. For forty-five sweeping and unstopping floors, she lifted her hair, tried to make it look like the bird in Isabel’s photo.
In the back of the cab, she texted Michael: Can’t make it. Got fired.
Thirteen minutes later, she unlocked her apartment door. Every one of her blinds was open to the harbor view, stayed open, a privilege of the privileged. Bear’s head peered out from the bedroom. His toenails slow-clicked across the marble.
Whine-click. Whine-click toward her. Every step agony. She knew the feeling.
She found the closest surface not cold and antiseptic—the rug beneath the dining room table—and curled beneath it. Through the glass top, she watched moon shadows climb the walls and unravel. Bear curled against her belly. She melted into him, a tearless cry squeezing her features. Her job, her self-respect. Relationships, her grandest of flaws. Not enough journal pages in the world to itemize them all. Not by half.
That was how Michael found her.
* * *
They ate sashimi of Maine, Peekytoe crab, and red beet hummus, pared with Picpoul de Pinet wine and a pumpkin soufflé. Or rather, Michael ate. On the glass surface over which she had lain hours earlier. When he arrived, let himself in, he’d pulled Alex into his arms and carried her to a hot shower.
A shower, because she had to be clean.
Michael moved around the space, ordered food, opened an IPA he had abandoned in the refrigerator. He didn’t trust the dishwasher they had bought together years earlier, so he polished his silverware on his cloth napkin, presumably to remove dust, germs—ever cognizant of other men’s mouths where they should not be—before taking his first bite. He breathed out at the first bite, his exhale as arousing as when they made love but, now, attributed to a butter-truffle sauce.
Her skin had dried, her hair not so much. Eyelids the size of prized oysters filled her sockets, swollen though there had been no tears, perhaps because of it. She curled up in the dining room chair at a right angle to Michael, her robe open, exposed from the waist down.
His gaze trickled south.
“My father had an affair,” Alex said.
Michael stopped chewing. A congressman accustomed to dining with dignitaries, he finished his mouthful against his napkin and swallowed before speaking.
“Serious?”
She wanted to say, no, I’m joking, but she lacked the energy to go there with him.
“A woman named Camilla Day. A waitress on a coastal island in Georgia.”
“When?”
“When I was eight and Charlotte was four,” said Alex. “She had a daughter. Our half-sister. She showed up at the reading of Mama’s will.”
Michael swiped a hand down his face. “Christ, Alex. What does she want?”
Alex didn’t know how to answer that question. She hadn’t figured it out yet. One swig of wine offered no clarity. For a two-hundred bottle of wine, it tasted like primate piss.
“You have to protect yourself.”
“From what? Getting hurt? Too late.”
“She could be insane, destitute, a scammer. Does she have proof? She could be coming after you to get to me.”
“Michael! For once, can it not be about you?” Alex stood and walked to the kitchen to get distance, to give Michael’s ego room to grab its own nuts. He was the biggest conversational narcissist she had ever met. Went with the territory of politics, she supposed. It hadn’t always been that way. To justify her trip to the kitchen, she grabbed the biggest spoon she could find and dove into the dessert the moment she returned to the table. Huge bite. Huge. The
sugar rush cinched her glands, medicated her past wanting to find a place on the balcony to lean too far over.
“Did your mother know?”
Alex nodded. “She found the woman, his child, a few months before she died. Said she wanted to do right by her.”
“What does that mean?”
“Freesia Day is one-third owner of Match Made in Devon.”
“What a goddamned mess.” He cared. Not enough to stop eating, but he retreated as much into himself as she had at the news. Elias March had loved Michael like a son, damned near worshipped him. Told everyone in Devon who would listen that his son-in-law would be president someday. “Some father, huh?”
A sliver of annoyance streaked white-hot up Alex’s spine. “He made a mistake, Michael.”
“Why are you defending him? What he did was unforgiveable.”
“How is it any different than what we do?”
Michael leaned his elbow on the table, one finger up in the air like he was prepping to list off the merits to a legislative bill. “Totally different. Deception is totally different.”
Like the time he’d told her his career would keep him local, that he had no ambition to go to D.C. Like his extra bank accounts—transparency purposes, he’d said. Like when he proposed an open marriage, so forgiving after she had been the first one tempted, a way around failure, not a way out.
He threaded his fingers through hers. Again, his eyes detoured to the spray of hair between her legs and lingered, long enough for an arousing heat to tickle her from the inside.
“Things just got…I don’t know. We made sense. We always have, and I don’t want to lose that. I don’t want to lose you.”
“Why did you ask me to come back?”
“I missed you.”
“The real reason.”
Michael struggled with words, always wrestling what he intended to convey before he spoke, controlled in most things, then placed his napkin on the table, sated from the meal but hardly sated. He filled his Armani slacks.
“Soline came into my life for a specific purpose, and it wasn’t to meet an emotional need or an intellectual need. It was purely physical. I got to the end of it and I felt empty. I realized the times in my life I felt the most whole, the most me, you were there.”
Alex warmed, bone-level, much as the sluicing hot water of the shower had scorched her scalp. She felt exposed, as much in hope as bodily.
“I want it all, Alex. I want it back. Emotional, spiritual, intellectual. And I want to take you in that bedroom and make you scream until this crap disappears—the family, the deceptions, the injustices—and all that’s left is us.”
He was perfection. Thick, black hair that walked a line between edgy, young and mature, responsible; groomed skin worthy of a glossy magazine feature; full, sexy lips perpetually split at the middle seam, like he was always on the cusp of speaking but thought better of it; the way he commanded her pleasure, and his tenacity to see every detail through. He drew lazy circles on the back of her hand with his thumb, the way he used to tease her core and bring her unprecedented first-minute climaxes that were only the beginning. Alex was exposed, fragmented, desperate to push aside thoughts of Devon and hold onto her last excuse for Boston, one thing in her life she could claim was unblemished. Her parents had found their way back from unimaginable pain. Why couldn’t she and Michael do the same? She had been right to come back. Persevering was what she did. Her husband was where she belonged.
Michael shifted against the hard chair, adjusted himself through the navy blue Italian weave. The gold watch on his right wrist made a soft clink—reminding her of two things about him that never failed to prime her: the power and tradition inherent in a watch when most men no longer wore one, the recollection that he was left handed, a uniquely erotic visual stimulant. No man since had been left handed. No man since had been as polished.
When had cultivated become her ideal? When had perfection elevated beyond shirtless in the grass and strawberry juice on skin? That Jonah was there, between them, when she was trying so hard, propelled her past hesitation, self-preservation. She shifted her flesh against the chair and leaned in.
“Say the word, Alex.” His voice was low, unhurried, textured. “I’ll get up and leave, right now, if this isn’t what you want. I know I’m not an easy man. My life—our lives—are complex, but my world is easy with you, effortless. I know myself better now, I appreciate things more. I appreciate you.”
He scooted his chair back, shifted his backside closer to the seat’s edge, spread his legs wide, waited for her to make a move.
Her skin rippled with possibility. She wasn’t proud to admit she might have begged. That she didn’t have to, that his heated gaze did that for her, had her off her chair and approaching him before she made the decision to move. She straddled his knee, watching him wet his lips, aware that was his tell when aroused. She had teased him once; he denied it. After so much history, she could have scripted where he looked, what she could do to engorge him. The idea that he had been with other women, learned new things, ever mindful of cleanliness, never one to ignore the details of transmitted diseases, free with her because he knew she would do the same if she wanted him back, was an unexpected turn-on. The script would be different, better, more experienced and perfect than she imagined when she closed her eyes to other partners and evoked Michael’s scent, his sounds.
She untied her robe, left the garment draped from the precipice of her shoulders, so close to dropping clear of her body.
Still he waited, watched the canvas of her body, framed in white terry. She pleasured herself. The rise and fall of his chest stopped. His jaw tightened, unyielding. This was them—her pushing the boundaries of his close-fisted control, him losing it, subversively, piece by piece, until he exploded in a grand gesture of untamed need. The cat and mouse of it was her supreme goal, what heightened her past mindless copulation, what kept her engaged in memories of him long after he was with others.
The moment she reached her mouth with her exploring fingertip, tasted her tangy musk, he shot to his feet. In one swipe of his well-tailored sleeve, he divested the table of its contents. Crystal goblets shattered. Food congealed to the white marble.
Bear clicked away. Whine-click. Whine-click.
Michael planted her on the table and made a buffet of her, a sensual feast years in the making, before reacquainting himself with who they were in all the spaces of the apartment, together. The kitchen where she’d burned his first meal. Against the oil painting they’d bought in Tuscany, driving her bare ass against the thick lavender field strokes in the corner, knocking the canvas to the floor, splintering the frame, him promising to have it repaired. Using the trappings of his career—his red power tie, his high-security clearance badge, stacked law books, his slippery slide into fluent French when conducting intense negotiations—to do some decidedly un-legislative tasks. Finally in their bed, the sacred epicenter of their union, where she allowed no one but him.
He was a silent lover but for lucid moments when he growled and murmured and moaned and orated on her as deity, magnifique partner, everything he needed in this lifetime, and assured her that they were only just beginning. Alex lapped up every strained word, along with the saltiness of his sweat, the spice on his fragrance, the butter on his tongue.
As promised, he made her scream, the violently primal kind that ignited the throat and purged the soul, again and again, prolonging the inevitable parting of her from reality when he entered her with the unyielding intent to shatter. At one point, when the precipice threatened and her walls strangled him in a cyclonic storm bigger than herself, bigger than them, and he was awash in her wetness, he uttered, “You’re perfect.”
They were. And she was. Right then, with him, she captured a pinnacle of euphoria reserved only in the past, on page ten, in the realm of the impossible.
After that, she remembered little. What modest wine she had consumed bridged the gap between the engulfing, sticky-sweet black
ness of orgasm and the emotional fatigue of loss and gain in such a short span. She remembered his kisses, tender, attentive. He cleaned her with something steamy and luxurious—a tepid, wet cloth, ever mindful of clean. He brought her the pills from the medicine cabinet, the ones that had delivered sleep for a month after Daddy died, the ones she used on nights when her imagination set loose on images of Michael with other women. She remembered taking one, only one, then Bear’s stale breath against her face and his warmth, such warmth she thought she might die from it. And then, nothing.
* * *
For three days, nothing.
Alex replayed the morning after, what she would have done differently had she the ability to gather it back. She wouldn’t have called so much, thinking Michael had gone out to grab them a bite, knowing the fridge was empty. And she wouldn’t have cleaned up the meal from the night before, thinking the mess was her doing, the way she’d undone her robe and started it all. And Alex certainly wouldn’t have taken three trains to get to Soline’s only to embarrass herself with rambling gibberish and screaming threats. Certainly, she wouldn’t have finished the whiskey before the sun went down again. Had it never come up again, she would still have that one perfect moment.
The next morning, she aligned another perfect moment—one that tickled her insides past the toxicity of Michael’s lies and abysmal behavior to a place of soaring. Alex’s attempt to grab hold of some semblance of equilibrium. Bear enjoyed the moment, too, barking and wagging his tail and watching Michael’s five-thousand-dollar suits catch the nearshore breeze off the balcony and sail to the earth. All but one, which she used to scoop up Bear’s smelly jubilance.
* * *
The abandoned trailer at the far end of their property sprouted the best wildflowers. Near the tires where mowers couldn’t destroy them, on the north side to gather the most morning sun. Alex looked every one of them up in the book she borrowed with her new library card: green adder’s mouth, thimbleweed, purple asters, and if she was lucky, what Mama called Doll’s Eyes—white fuzzy blooms that looked nothing like those in her Mercy Me doll, as rare around Devon that summer as rain. Mama said the drought was playing havoc with the land. Alex thought if she could find a Doll’s Eye, Mama wouldn’t roam the house at night in her gown and cry.
Our Bridal Shop: Match Made in Devon Bridal Shop Book One Page 13