The Pleasure Contract

by Caitlin Crews

  He even saw her here, where she’d never been. Distance in her dark eyes and that wicked twist to her mouth.

  As if she knew how futile it was for him to look for some kind of clarity no matter where he went.

  Even if it was to this hidden patch of green surrounded by so much concrete.

  But that was where he stood, stripped down to his boxer briefs with his head tilted up, as the rain finally began to fall.

  That was where he stayed, arms open as if the storm could wash him clean.

  But it didn’t help.

  And the next morning, Lachlan got in his car, left Manhattan behind him, and drove himself north.

  Catriona and Ben lived in the Vermont countryside, closer to Canada than New York City—by design. Ben’s ancestors had once farmed these rolling acres miles away from any neighbors, but now Ben, a world-renowned architect, used the converted old barn as his studio. He’d used the barn as his base for years, while Catriona had quietly made the old farmhouse into a happy, rambling, picture-perfect home for her family.

  Lachlan thought about his sister’s choices as he turned down the long drive that wound in and around the woods and the rolling hills and eventually ended up in front of the old farmhouse. There were no photographers here. No paparazzi waiting to sell every sighting to the tabloids. Catriona and Ben guarded their privacy. And their children got to grow up with two parents who not only doted on them but who, better still, also cared for each other.

  It was nothing short of revolutionary, given how Catriona and Lachlan had grown up.

  And in case he’d had any doubts about that, he saw them both come out together from Ben’s barn-turned-office, holding hands as they came to see who’d pulled in.

  He’d never seen his parents touch, Lachlan realized. Not casually. They’d either performed affection in public or beat on each other in private, but there had never been what he saw between his sister and her husband. Intimacy, he thought. Two bodies that knew each other so well, two hands clasped together because clearly that was their default position.

  How had he not understood what this was? Or that he’d longed for it all this time?

  “Are you all right?” Catriona asked sharply, scanning his face as she drew closer. “You look...”

  “A little edgy,” Ben supplied.

  “I was in the neighborhood,” Lachlan said, even though his grin felt forced.

  “We don’t have a neighborhood,” Catriona retorted. “Deliberately.”

  Ben looked back and forth between them, then smiled at his wife. A thousand messages passed between them in another display of intimacy that really, Lachlan thought, he ought to celebrate. Given it was something neither he nor Catriona had ever witnessed in their youth.

  “I think I’ll leave you to it,” his brother-in-law murmured, then headed back toward his office.

  Catriona slid her arm through Lachlan’s. Then she steered him away from the barn and the house, toward a well-worn trail toward the woods that Lachlan had taken with her before.

  “Why don’t you walk with me,” she murmured.

  This was obviously what he’d wanted or he wouldn’t have come here.

  And for a long while, they simply followed the trail. The path meandered in and out of the woods, gradually making its way up the side of the nearest hill. But it wasn’t until they stopped at the top, with a view that made it seem as if they were the only people left on the planet, that Catriona settled herself on a big rock that might as well have been a sofa. And turned her sharp blue gaze on her brother.

  “Let me guess,” she said. “Bristol.”

  Lachlan blew out a breath.

  “Bristol,” he agreed.

  He waited for Catriona to jump on that. To start lecturing him, so he could disagree. Or have something to fight about.

  Turned out, he really wanted a fight.

  But Catriona was a canny one who knew him far too well, and so all she did was wait.

  “Where are the kids?” Lachlan asked.

  Obviously stalling.

  Catriona looked amused. “They’re all at summer camp, hallelujah. Is that what you drove up here to ask me?”

  It wasn’t as hot this far north as it had been down in New York City, which was a good thing. It stripped away one of the things gnawing at him. Lachlan shoved his hands into his jean pockets and was glad he was wearing a T-shirt. That he wasn’t in his usual work clothes.

  But as he glared out at all those rolling Vermont hills, he couldn’t help feeling that the only thing he’d accomplished yesterday, standing up on his rooftop in the rain like a lunatic, was bringing the storm into him.

  He didn’t feel washed clean. He didn’t feel made new.

  He felt sullen and low, like a brooding summer sky, when all there was before him was blue skies and sweet sunshine.

  “Tell me how you do it,” he muttered, though the words felt bitter on his lips.

  Or not bitter, maybe. It was possible he interpreted them as bitter because they were so unfamiliar. So dangerous.

  Because he’d decided, long ago, what was and wasn’t possible.

  But long ago, he hadn’t known Bristol. And he hadn’t imagined how different the world could look when someone actually got inside the way she had.

  He would have said it was impossible.

  He’d been certain.

  “It’s simple,” Catriona said softly, not pretending that she didn’t know what he meant. “All you have to do is decide that it’s worth the risk to make yourself vulnerable. Then do it. Especially when it feels impossible.”

  “As easy as that, then,” Lachlan scoffed.

  His sister smiled. “I said it was simple. I didn’t say it was easy.”

  Lachlan shook his head. “Maybe you and Ben have it figured out in ways that wouldn’t work for anyone else. Nice and calm, no bumps in the road. Easy.”

  Catriona cackled. “I can’t wait to tell him you said that. You’ve never seen us fight.”

  He turned, scanning her face. Then he frowned. “You fight?”

  “Of course we fight, idiot. What do you think? We’re real people, Lachlan. One time, and not as long ago as you might think, I was so mad at him I threw a coffee maker at his head.”

  She nodded when all he did was stare at her, confirming that he’d heard her correctly.

  “Oh, yes. I’m sorry to inform you that you’re not the only Drummond around. I have a nasty temper and, as I think you know, I never learned how to channel it appropriately. That’s been a pretty steep learning curve and sometimes I revert to type.”

  He couldn’t take that on board. Catriona had always been so solid, so stalwart when everything else around them was noise and fury.

  “But you...”

  “Here’s the thing, Lachlan.” And his sister’s gaze was steady. Direct. “You’ve spent all these years doing your best not to end up like Dad. Because you’re so sure you know what happened on that plane and you’ve made it your mission to make your life a monument to being anything at all but that.”

  “We both know what happened on that plane.”

  “But what you’re forgetting is that Dad didn’t have that relationship by himself.”

  Something in Lachlan stilled.

  Catriona kept going, even though Lachlan was pretty sure she knew that her words had clobbered him. “If he crashed that plane deliberately—”

  “He did.”

  Catriona nodded, slowly. “I agree. But then you know that Mom goaded him into it. You know she picked and prodded and laughed all the way down. That’s who they were, Lachlan.”

  Lachlan shook his head, reeling. That storm he’d taken into himself was wrecking him. Howling, raging—but his sister still wasn’t done.

  “Their relationship took both of them.” Her gaze was intent on his, a pi
ercing blue that rivaled the bright summer all around them. “I want you to take that on board, for once. They were both toxic. And they were both responsible.”

  But all he could do was shake his head. “You know Dad...”

  Catriona waited as his words trailed off.

  “Alone, neither one of them could have done so much damage.” She held up the index finger of each of her hands, then moved them both together to make one. “Together they might as well have been napalm. They made their own tragedy. Deep down, I know you know this.”

  Maybe he did. Maybe it was easier to blame his father.

  Because maybe it was easier to have someone to blame.

  “If I blame him, it’s better,” he managed to get out. “Because...”

  “Because if there’s a villain, then they didn’t race to their inevitable conclusion without a single thought for the kids they were leaving behind,” Catriona finished for him. “I’ve thought all this myself. But they did.”

  Something in him shifted, big and hard like the huge boulder his sister was sitting on, surprisingly easy after all these years. As if it had been waiting all along for him to get here.

  To understand that he’d wanted the anger. The fury.

  He’d found it clarifying.

  Because there was nothing on the other side of it but grief.

  Even all these years later.

  “They did,” he agreed, his voice rough. “They really did.”

  “As for you and me? It’s easy.” Catriona separated her fingers. “Don’t pick an atom bomb, Lachlan. Don’t be an atom bomb. And you’ll be fine.”

  “I thought that’s what I was doing. What I’ve been doing. You like to call the precautions I take squalid.”

  “Please.” His sister scoffed. “You’ve been hiding. And how will you ever know who you really are or what you’re capable of if you don’t stop hiding?”

  Lachlan hated that darkness in him. He hated what it told him, what truths it laid bare. “I already know what I’m capable of—what I could be capable of. We’ve seen it play out right in front of us.”

  Catriona only shook her head, as if he made her sad. “If you only let fear talk, baby brother, fear is all you’ll ever hear. Soon enough, it’s all you’ll have. And at that point, you might as well have gone down with them.”

  “Jesus Christ, Catriona.”

  But all his older sister did was smile at him then, as if all this was worth it. As if it was heading somewhere.

  “I have a better idea, Lachlan,” she said softly. “Fear has taken up enough of your time. Try love.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  BRISTOL HAD MADE it her official policy over the years to return to her hometown in Ohio as seldom as possible.

  She and Indy made an appearance over the holidays, of course, when both of their schedules—meaning, Bristol’s academic schedule and Indy’s utter lack of any schedule at all—allowed them to spend at least a week in their childhood home. The week was the baseline. Sometimes their mother got them to stay longer, but the week was nonnegotiable.

  Bristol had always considered a week in frigid Amish country more than enough time back home.

  So she couldn’t really understand why, when she woke up that first morning back in her Murphy bed in Brooklyn, she was seized with the urge—or, really, the sudden and all-encompassing need—to go home.

  Maybe it was because it was the first feeling she’d had in a long while that she didn’t have to shove down and hide. No serene smile was necessary, there in her bed, staring up at the ceiling with its leftover telltale signs of water damage from years and tenants past. Whatever the reason, Bristol embraced it.

  She flew back into Cincinnati, wedged into a middle seat at the very back of the overcrowded commercial flight. It felt a whole lot like penance after the way she’d been traveling lately. No leather seats and gilded edges in the dregs of economy. She was lucky to get a minuscule bag of stale pretzels and her elbows ached after a quiet, vicious fight with her neighbor over the armrest.

  At least I won, she thought darkly.

  And chose not to think about why that felt like a far larger victory than it was.

  She rented a car at the airport once she landed, put on some music, and then drove out into the countryside on roads she would have said she hardly remembered.

  But she didn’t have to look at a map. The southwestern Ohio landscape she remembered so well rolled out before her once she headed east out of Cincinnati. Green hills undulated in all directions from roads that gave her endless views of tidy farmhouses, red barns, and Amish buggies.

  Maybe it was simply because her whole summer so far had been spent in cities. With the exception of her time on Lachlan’s private island, it had all been skyscrapers, the crowded electric beat of Hong Kong, the proud stone chic of Paris. After all her years in New York, Bristol had come to think of herself as a city person. She would have said she longed for the concrete canyons, the snarl of traffic, the exhilaration that was always an undercurrent in big, sprawling cities.

  But for some reason, the sunshine drenching all the green hills in gold seemed to soothe her today.

  She didn’t need a map to find her way to the small town she’d always stoutly hated when forced to live there. But when she arrived, she forced herself to slow down, look around, and ask herself why.

  Why are you so driven? Lachlan had asked.

  Bristol had thought she knew the answer, but it was impossible not to think that there was a clue here. In this place that had made her who she was, whether she liked to admit that or not. Much as she liked to pretend she’d sprung forth, fully formed at eighteen when she’d relocated to New York, it wasn’t true.

  She’d had to decide to leave this quiet little town, then make it happen. She’d had to commit to hard work to leave it in the way she wanted. And while she couldn’t remember what had started those particular dominoes toppling, there was no getting around the fact the push had come from right here in Ohio. New York was the result, not the impetus.

  And as she drove into town, Bristol found she couldn’t quite remember why she hated this place so much.

  She also couldn’t remember the last time she’d been home in the summertime. All the green, the bright and happy flowers, the sunshine. She rolled down her windows and breathed in deep as the afternoon heat washed over her. She heard cicadas and crickets, lawnmowers and birds. It was so different from the intense chill of her Decembers here, all barren trees and stark storefronts. There was a lushness here today. A deep sweetness.

  And to her astonishment, Bristol found herself feeling something like...nostalgic.

  Her childhood home looked just as she remembered it, tucked away at the end of a dead-end street on the far side of town. As she drove toward it, she realized, with a little jolt that felt like recognition, that here on a bright July afternoon the house she’d grown up in looked the way she remembered it from her childhood.

  Instead of the picture she’d superimposed over it since. The dreary, high snowbanks and barren trees like desolate exclamation points, marking the life she didn’t want.

  Today she drove more slowly and found that she remembered every inch of this quiet road. She’d learned to ride a bike right here. She and Indy had played elaborate games of pretend and battle in and out of the trees that lined the way. Her parents’ house stood as it always had at the end, the cheerful blue shutters against the clapboard white outside, the wide front porch festooned with her mother’s latest planting experiments.

  Bristol pulled up out front and got out, breathing in deep. She walked toward the front door, marveling at all the summer sounds around her. At the scent of her mother’s flowers, which she’d somehow forgotten bloomed so riotously this time of year, making not just the porch but the whole front lawn a pageant of bright colors.

  It made her wonder if thi
s was why she had amnesia every year and imagined that she could grow things when she couldn’t.

  She wasn’t at all surprised when the front screen was thrown open wide, and then her mother was there.

  In all her state.

  “Bristol! Is it really you? Or am I having a stroke?”

  “Well, I really hope you’re not having a stroke, Mom,” Bristol said, grinning despite herself. “That would be very upsetting.”

  Margie March was a literal ball of energy. She was round and bouncy and in all her days, Bristol had never met a single soul who didn’t adore her. As a sulky preteen, Bristol had found that annoying. As she’d gotten older, however, she’d come to depend on her mother’s ability to light up every room she entered. Even on a summer afternoon, her smile was brighter.

  At Christmastime, Margie transformed herself into Santa’s most dedicated elf—the day after Thanksgiving. Literally every moment of the time Bristol and Indy spent here each year was crammed full of what Margie considered unmissable holiday activities.

  To be clear, Margie considered all holiday activities unmissable.

  But the fact that it wasn’t the holidays today didn’t slow Margie down any. She charged down the steps, swooping Bristol into a huge hug and enveloping her the way only she could. And would, Bristol knew, hold her until she was satisfied that her child was in one piece.

  And not just in one piece, but a piece she approved of.

  “I know it’s the fashion in New York City, but you and your sister are far too skinny,” she was already declaring, as if the red oaks were conferring with her. “At least you’re not always on this or that bizarre diet the way Indy always is.”

  “Mom. You know she just makes up random diets to drive you crazy. I’ve never seen her actually go on one.”

  But there was no getting a word in edgewise. Not at first. When the hug ended, Margie was marching her up the steps, then bustling her inside, depositing her in the very same place she’d always sat at the kitchen table.

  “I know what will make you feel better,” Margie said then.

  “I feel fine.”