by Doyle, S.
“Beth,” he growled. “This locker is empty.”
I peeked inside. “Yup. Empty as shit.”
“Is this some kind of a game?” he asked.
“You mean, this isn’t the part where I say I’ve sold out my country to the Chinese instead, just to fuck with your head?”
“Beth.” More growling.
“Keep your pants on, G.I. Joe.” I shoved him out of the way and removed the lock from the door. Then I twisted the key again and the bottom popped open. I slid the piece out and nestled inside was one small USB. I handed the chip to him but kept the lock.
He chuckled. “That isn’t the original lock.”
“Nope,” I said. “I knew I was going to need to hide it somewhere. A trick lock with a hidden compartment inside, seemed like a good idea at the time.”
“Where did you…wait, when you stopped at the Pont des Arts? There was a vendor there selling locks. I remember him.”
“How did you know I stopped at the bridge— Yeah, never mind. You have your ways.” I said, throwing his words back at him. “Yes. I saw the lock and thought, who looks inside a lock? Then I shook Marta loose for long enough to swap one of the station locks with mine. Well, we’re done here. You got what you needed and I’m going home.”
“I’ll take you to the airport.”
I shook my head. “There’s a train that will take me. I have my real passport—thank you for that—and some cash. I’ll be fine.”
Liam had taken care of the passport thing at the U.S. Embassy in Paris. I’d contacted the hotel in Florence and had arranged to ship my luggage home. Patting my coat pocket to make sure I had my passport, I turned and started to walk away.
“Beth…please. Don’t leave like this. At least let me…”
I turned around but I could see he didn’t have the first clue what to say. “It’s okay, Liam. I get it. You know what, you can have this, too.”
I tossed the lock toward him and he caught it easily. I didn’t wait around to watch him read the two names I’d scribbled on the back with a Sharpie. Instead, I walked away.
14
One Week Later
Philadelphia
Beth
Venice is a playground for adults…
“Venice is crap,” I said, looking at what I’d written on my laptop. How was it possible the one time I could write about a real place because I’d been there, the words were suddenly gone?
Probably not surprising, my enthusiasm for my travel blog was waning considering there was no up-and-coming book.
The publishing offer, Andrea, the editor, all of it, fake. A ruse by my father to lure me to Europe. Just one more disappointment to come home to.
I took selfies for nothing!
My father, who I barely got to know, was gone. Liam was gone. My plans for the book were over, although if I really cared, I could reach out to a few editors who had contacted me in the past. I just couldn’t summon the energy for it.
It was back to me alone in my condo, the place where I should have felt safe, but I didn’t anymore. Not because I was worried Dmitri was going to pop out and kidnap me. Agent Davies, who had visited slashed stalked me before my trip, came by again to assure me that my father’s work had been successfully delivered to the United States government and that I was under no current threat from any foreign adversaries.
No, the reason I didn’t feel good in my condo like I had before was because of how restrictive it felt. How restless I was inside the four walls.
My sanctuary, my retreat from the world, the place I once contemplated never leaving again, because you know…Uber Eats brought you everything you needed…suddenly was this prison holding me back.
I’d been to places now. I’d had adventures.
Before this trip, I thought there had been enough drama in my life when I was a teen that I really didn’t need any more excitement. However, since this trip, it was like the windows were open and I was smelling fresh air again, and remembering I liked it.
Before this trip, I’d gotten into a relationship with a guy I really didn’t love and had sex I didn’t really care for. I didn’t leave my space if I could help it, and I didn’t connect with people because I couldn’t trust them.
Then Liam entered the picture and basically blew the doors off everything. He made me feel.
Fuck, he’d made me come.
The one guy who had been lying to me this whole time, and yet he was the one who’d taught me it was okay to give people a chance.
Logically I knew it didn’t make any sense, but it was simply how I felt.
Not that there was anything I could do about it. He’d pretty much lied to me, fucked me and used me to get what he wanted.
I should hate him. I did hate him!
I just also sort of missed him. And missing him made sitting in my condo harder, because it made me feel lonely instead of isolated.
Flipping open my laptop again, I closed out the sucky blog I’d been writing and opened Facebook instead.
ME: You there?
A second later I saw the dots.
LEIGH: Yeah, what’s up?
ME: Do you want to meet?
LEIGH: Huh?
ME: You know, like, in person. Let’s meet. Let’s stop being internet friends and become actual friends.
LEIGH: You’re acting weird.
ME: I need to get out of this condo. I need to get out of this city. I want to go someplace and do something.
LEIGH: Uh hello, you just got back from Europe. Sexy guy, hot affair, remember?
ME: I might have elaborated about the hot affair.
LEIGH: What does that mean? Are you suggesting the sex wasn’t hot????
ME: No, the sex was totally hot. There just wasn’t a whole lot of it. It wasn’t really an affair. It was more like a one-time thing and now he’s gone and I’m stuck here and I just feel like the walls are caving in. Let me come to New Mexico. I’ve always wanted to see it.
LEIGH:…
LEIGH:…
I waited as the bubbles appeared and disappeared. Then appeared and disappeared again.
ME: Why do I get the feeling you’re not jacked about the idea of me coming to visit you? Maybe you prefer the anonymity of the online thing?
LEIGH: It’s not that. I think you would probably be surprised to know how much I would like to see you. Talk to you in person as opposed to messages here and there. But there are complications.
ME: Like what? Do you have a girlfriend? Do you think she would be jealous? Because that’s not how we roll, you and I.
LEIGH: No girlfriend. Nothing like that. I’m worried what you’ll think when you meet me in person.
ME: I’ll think, hey it’s Leigh, turns out she didn’t have scars or warts and shit like that.
LEIGH: I doubt that. You can’t come to New Mexico though. I’m not there anymore.
That had me frowning. She’d moved and she hadn’t told me. It was totally possible that I was putting way more emphasis on our friendship than she was. She most likely wasn’t a recluse who counted her one internet friend as her closest connection. So there was no reason for her to tell me about her life, but still it made me feel like this wasn’t such a good idea. To suggest we meet.
ME: On second thought, maybe it’s better if we didn’t meet. We’ve got a good thing going. Why mess with it?
LEIGH: Oh, no you don’t. No chickening out now. You want to meet, we’ll meet. Just let me come to you. It will be easier that way.
ME: What aren’t you telling me, Leigh?
Because there was something big there. Something huge that I could feel she was hiding behind her back.
LEIGH: I quit my job. Did I tell you that?
ME: No! You finally did it. You said you weren’t happy.
LEIGH: It was getting in the way of something I wanted. I had to make a choice, so I did.
ME: Good for you. But hey, if this is about money, then you should totally let me come to where you are.
/> LEIGH: Money isn’t a problem. Can I ask you something?
ME: Sure, anything.
LEIGH: That guy who was crappy to you at the end of your affair. Who kind of pushed you away. If he told you he was sorry, would you forgive him?
ME: Why are you asking me that? I told you he’s gone for good.
LEIGH: I’m trying to figure out, on a scale of one to ten, how forgiving you are.
That was easy. I was a total ten. I forgave my father for abandoning me. I was like the super forgiver. But I also knew she was asking me, because she wanted to know if I would forgive her. I didn’t know what she’d done, so it was impossible to answer that, but I also knew her being on the other side of my laptop had meant a lot to me these last few months.
ME: Try me and see.
LEIGH: Okay. I’ll see you soon.
ME: Uh, hello dummy, you don’t have my address. How are you going to see me soon?
LEIGH: I have my ways.
That made me cringe. I’d heard that line before. I was about to dig harder about how she might know where I lived, but instead, I closed my laptop. I was a fairly public person on the web. It probably wasn’t that hard to find me online.
My only real question was, how soon was soon?
And what was she hiding?
* * *
Liam
I shoved my hands in my coat pockets and jogged across the street from the hotel where I was staying to her condo complex and considered how nervous I was. Nervous as fuck. When I knocked on her door, would she put two and two together?
Would she figure out that not only had I lied to her as Liam, I’d lied to her as Leigh, too? But the truth was, I couldn’t stay away from her and this was the only way to move forward.
She left Paris. I did my duty by turning over the information, but instead of using it as leverage to get my job back, I quit for good. Not just for Beth, but because I knew she’d changed something inside of me. I couldn’t be as distanced from people as I needed to be to do that job. I couldn’t be as heartless when all my heart did these days was ache and remind me what it was like to actually feel something.
Now I was going to show up on her door and I was going to have to explain to her that I’d been Leigh this whole time. And then she would hate me all over again for thinking I used her.
Which of course, I had. I was a spy. It’s what spies did. I would just have to convince her that I was sorry and what was a seemingly harmless internet friendship to her was so much more to me.
Friendship. Connection. A sense of belonging. Then I met her in person and it had felt like being shot. Which, I knew how that felt because, well…Dmitri the Douchebag was The Douchebag for a reason.
Beth sucked the breath from my lungs. She’d told me she didn’t like sex, which made me actually want to fuck her that much more. Then she’d exploded in orgasm beneath me, and I knew it was because, in some ways, she trusted me.
The guy who had been lying to her about everything.
I entered her building. Made my way to her floor, then stood in front of her door and hesitated.
Maybe I didn’t have to tell her about the Leigh thing right away. Maybe I could suggest I happened to be back in the States and wanted to see how she was doing. Or maybe I should fall to my knees now and hope groveling worked.
“I’m fucked,” I muttered under my breath.
Then the door swung open and there she was. My little punk-ass princess. Nose loop, dark hair, lithe little body that I wanted to fuck up against the wall before taking her to bed and making endless love to her until she screamed my name.
She leaned against the doorframe and raised her eyebrow.
“Hey, Leigh,” she said sardonically. “Nice to finally meet you.”
My head dropped forward. “When did you figure it out?”
“Two seconds ago. What an idiot I’ve been,” she said. Only this time, the sarcasm was gone from her voice, replaced by sadness.
“No,” I said, reaching out for her hand, but she pulled away. “You’re not an idiot. I’m good at what I do.”
“You mean impersonating a woman? I’ll give you that. A gay woman at that…which, of course, you’re not. You’re really a straight man. Which now makes total sense. I don’t know what I’m doing here still talking to you. Go away, Liam.”
“You need to let me explain.”
She shook her head. “You did that. In Paris. I read back our conversation. You basically told me what you were doing through Leigh.”
“Yeah, and I admitted it was because I was stupid. And I was right. Beth, you need to understand you were a job—”
“I know that!” she screeched. “But that job is finished. So why didn’t you just tell me you were Leigh and let it drop? Or at the very least, stop responding and just ghost me? We’ve talked every day since I’ve been back. That makes no sense!”
It did to me. “I didn’t want to let you go,” I admitted.
“You mean the job. You didn’t want to let the job go.”
“No. I said you were a job. But that changed and you know it did. It’s why I quit. It’s why I’ve been living across the street. It’s why I reached out to you as Leigh. Because while I thought I couldn’t handle what being in your life meant, it turns out you not being in my life is worse!”
But again, she shook her head. “I can’t. You were Ted, and then you were Liam and then you were this guy who I could lean on in Paris, and then you were just a government agent doing his job. Now you’re Leigh, only Leigh was nothing more than a way for you to keep tabs on me. I have my ways…fuck that! I told you everything you needed to know. So, this is me officially acknowledging…I don’t trust you anymore. Goodbye, Liam.”
“Beth, wait—”
My words were cut off by the door slamming in my face. I pushed against the door, but it was locked. I could pick the lock, but I wasn’t sure she was in a state to hear anything I said right now. I needed to wait until she got over being pissed about the Leigh thing.
And there was probably the embarrassment thing happening, too.
At least it was behind us now. She knew I hadn’t been able to let go, and she knew I quit my job.
Which meant she was going to learn exactly how much time I had on my hands.
“I’ll be back!” I shouted through the door.
“Stupider line than I have my ways!” she shouted back.
I took this as a good sign. At least we were talking.
15
Three Days Later
Beth
Oh my God! I was going to kill him. To think he’d ever been good at spying on people because he was pretty sucky at it now. I always knew where he was. Which was typically just a few yards behind me.
When I went grocery shopping, he was there. When I took my laptop to the Starbucks to work, which I was doing just to get out of my freaking condo, he was there. When I went to yoga, because that was a new excuse I had to leave my freaking condo…there!
Where I was, he was. And when the asshole wasn’t stalking me, he was breaking into my condo to leave stuff.
A signed baseball by some player on the Phillies I didn’t know.
A framed picture of the selfie we took in Venice by the bridge.
The lock with our names written on it.
Every day it was something else, and the worst part about it was that I couldn’t share any of this with Leigh! My sounding board was gone. He’d changed his name to Liam on Messenger and was still sending me messages, mostly apologies, but it wasn’t the same.
I had no one to bitch with about Liam.
Walking back to my condo, I glanced over my shoulder and saw him on the other side of the street. Because I was feeling ornery, I flipped him the bird. He just waved and blew me a kiss.
“This has to stop,” I shouted across the street. He took the opportunity to cross to where I stood, as if that was some kind of invitation.
“I didn’t hear what you said.”
“You hav
e to stop following me,” I told him. And I meant it. Mostly.
Night after night, lying in my bed and staring up at the ceiling, I kept going over and over what happened in Paris. He was the one to pull away. He was the one who, writing as Leigh, said our time together was over. So, this stalking routine now didn’t make any sense.
“But I feel like I’m making progress. Look at us,” he said with a smile. “We’re interacting.”
I huffed out my frustration. “You wanted to get rid of me. Remember? You pulled away when I needed you most. If I could get over the lying. If I could get over you taking Leigh away from me, I’m still not going to get over that.”
He winced. “I know. I screwed up. I was…afraid.”
“Afraid of what? You’re a freaking spy for Pete’s sake!”
“Ex-spy. And the reason I’d been a good one for as long as I was is because I didn’t really do feelings. I was dispassionate about people in general until you came along. You said I took Leigh away from you…but I’m right here. What we had in person and online was real. Maybe the most real thing I’ve ever had in my life. So I’m here fighting for it.”
“What do you want, Liam? Seriously, what do you see happening between us?”
He took a second to consider it, then started counting off on his fingers. “One, I want to fuck you. Two, I want to watch a baseball game with you…the sportswriter thing was a cover, but the hats are actually mine. Three, I want to fuck you again. Four, I wouldn’t mind a blow job…”
I pushed my hand over his mouth to stop his list, which was probably going to end somewhere around anal sex, which would shock the people walking by us.
“You’re incorrigible.”
He swiped his tongue along my palm and smiled when I made a gross face. “I have an idea. Let’s go back to your place, order some sandwiches and just talk for a while.”
“Talk?”
“If you would like to take your clothes off while we have this talk, I won’t stop you. But it’s not a requirement. We liked each other, Beth. When we were Leigh and Beth. Then in Paris we were close, until I screwed it up. Let me make that up to you.”