She took the book from his hands and set it behind her, then sat on her stool and started unwrapping her sandwich. “That would be correct.”
“Well, I’m famished. That bitch Ethan came in late today,” he said. “You talk. I’ll eat.”
She laughed. Ethan was a great worker, but he was almost always late for his shift, leaving Zack — and Katie, when she was working — scrambling to deal with the morning rush.
She hesitated while Zack dug into his sandwich. She hadn’t talked to anyone but her mom and her brother about Locke since college. Maybe it was time.
She talked while she ate, starting at the beginning: the way Locke had swept her off her feet, how he’d been different from anyone she’d ever met — bold and daring, unafraid to take chances, not just physical ones but emotional ones, too. Everyone else in college had been so afraid to be honest about how they felt, so intent on keeping up the charade of apathy. But Locke had been all in with her from the beginning, and she’d been surprised to find herself open up like a rose in sunlight.
Zack was silent through most of it, right up until she got to the part about his parent’s company being responsible for the loss of the original Matheson and Matheson. Right up until she got to the lie.
“Wait… so he knew his parents were strong-arming your parents and he didn’t say anything?” Zach asked.
She finished chewing, trying to get through some of her lunch now that he was asking questions. “He knew,” she said. “And he didn’t say anything.”
“Bastard!” His pronouncement was almost good-natured.
“Right?”
“Did you have a knockdown, drag-out fight?”
Zack was a drama queen. He loved knockdown, drag-out fights and swore the sex was better afterward, a fact that led to the end of his last relationship with a man named Ben.
“I don’t know if you’d call it that,” she said. “I think I was all out of knockdown and drag-out by then. My parents were losing their legacy. I was losing the place that meant more to me than the house I grew up in. And then my dad died and…”
“And?” Zack’s voice was soft.
She looked up at him. “I just couldn’t, you know?”
“Would it have been different if he’d told you?” Zack asked, balling up the wrapper to his sandwich. “Because the lie sucks, but the rest of it…”
“Wasn’t really his fault,” she said. “I know.” She thought about his question. “I don’t know if anything would have been different. Maybe in the moment everything was just too heightened. Too raw.”
“And now?”
“Now… I don’t know. I’m not sure what to make of the book or what he’s trying to say with it.”
“What do you want him to be saying?” Zack asked. “Or put more simply, did you still want to fuck him when you saw him?”
She laughed. “I was not thinking about fucking him.”
He looked skeptical. “I’m just saying: if you were thinking about going to bed with him your body knows what it wants even if you don’t.”
“Can you please stop?” She shook her head. “You’re unbelievable.”
He leaned forward. “I’m being serious, Elle. Sometimes the mind just confuses things.”
“So you think we should all just go around sleeping with the people we’re attracted to regardless of the consequences?”
He seemed to think about it. “I wouldn’t go that far, but I think deep down, we all know what we want. We try to talk ourselves out of it when it doesn’t make sense the way we think it should, but sometimes it’s better just to let something play out.”
“Let something play out?”
He nodded. “You don’t have to have all the answers right now.” He looked at the book behind her. “I don’t know as much about books as you do, but isn’t that kind of what that one’s about? I mean, the little guy didn’t know what would happen when he left his planet, right? And maybe things didn’t turn out the way he’d imagined, but it seems like he was meant to experience the story the way he did.”
She couldn’t help staring at him.
“What?”
“I’m just trying to figure out if that’s the smartest thing I’ve ever heard or the dumbest.”
He shrugged. “I’m an enigma.”
She laughed, but his words were already working their way through her mind.
You don’t have to have all the answers right now.
He made it sound so simple, and for the first time, she considered the possibility that he was right.
10
Locke waited in the line outside Bolton’s, wondering if Elle was watching from across the street. He hoped she wasn’t, that she’d found someone else to man the store so she could go to the beach, feel the sun on her face, the wind in her hair. Anything but be witness to what would probably be the beginning of the end for Matheson and Matheson.
Maybe the flowers he’d sent would help. He'd chosen them first thing in the morning, marveling at the peonies, still damp with dew. The pale pink petals had been like the silk of her skin, the voluptuousness of them reminding him of the way she’d opened her body to his all those years ago.
She’d been a virgin when they’d met, but there had been nothing virginal about her passion. She’d devoured him, had been a curious participant in anything and everything they experienced together. Making love to her had been spiritual, had changed something inside him. He still couldn’t quite quantify it, and he’d never found it again.
He wondered how many men she’d been with since him, then pushed the thought away when jealousy rose in him like a rogue wave. It was none of his business. He had no claim on her. It’s not like he’d been chaste for the past eight years. He'd had his share of women, although none of them had moved him like her.
And wasn’t that the truth? The reason he’d remained alone? Not his business, the excuse he always gave himself when he started to wonder if something was wrong with him, if his desire to be alone meant there was something deeply defective about him.
That had been a lie, and he felt a surge of anger at himself. He was not a perfect man. He made mistakes. Did stupid things.
But he didn’t lie.
Not to anyone else and not to himself after what he’d done to Elle.
And yet he had been lying. Had been telling himself he hadn’t found the right person — that his business made it too dangerous for him to be truly intimate with someone — when all along it was her.
The ghost of Elle Matheson.
Fuck.
The line started moving, and he shuffled forward with the crowd streaming into the store. Some of them branched off toward other sections, but a majority headed toward the bookstore at the back of the giant space. Red and blue balloons crowded the ceiling overhead, and he followed signs with arrows pointing toward BOLTON’S BOOK STORE GRAND OPENING!!!
The smell of coffee was heavy in the air as they came closer to the warm brown walls at the back, the area standing in stark contrast to the antiseptic white that decorated the rest of the store. A clerk handed out balloons to the children entering the area, and everyone crowded around a small dais in front of a ribbon strung across the store’s entrance. Movement caught his eye behind the ribbon, and he watched as the bookstore employees hurriedly adjusted books, made coffee, organized cash inside the registers.
He took up a position at the back of the crowd, watching as a few store clerks hovered around the area roped off at the front. A couple minutes later a line of people in business attire streamed toward the store area. He recognized Glover at the front, head held high, pace brisk like this was just one of many stops he would make today.
He stepped into the roped-off area like he owned the place — not a stretch given his position — and the people behind him lined up on either side of the dais. There was a woman in a red suit, hands clasped in front of her, that Locke recognized as the company’s VP of Marketing. She was joined by two men Locke remembered as the COO and the
VP of Strategic Development from his background on Bolton’s. On the other side of the dais was another woman he didn’t recognize, plus two more men, one of whom was the VP of Merchandising for the West Coast.
He watched as they stood in front of the crowd, smiles plastered on their faces, and wondered if they hated this place as much as he did. Maybe they were just regular people who needed a job. Not everyone was a monster like Glover, motivated by greed and a total lack of empathy.
It was one of the reasons Locke was careful about doing real damage to companies like Bolton’s. He wasn’t some kind of hipster activist. He understood the intricate web that was the economy. People needed jobs to earn paychecks so they could pump that money back into the economy via mortgage payments and trips to the grocery store, school clothes for their kids and investment in their 401k.
Working for a company didn’t mean you had fealty to it. Didn’t mean you agreed with their business practices. Most people were just trying to take care of their own, eek out a little happiness along the way.
But Glover was a different kind of animal.
He’d been raised with money, his father one of those shadowy figures in finance who had earned billions manipulating the stock and housing markets. None of that was Malcolm Glover’s fault. Locke knew all about the sins of the father, the way they could weigh on a man.
And yet by all accounts Malcolm Glover was unconcerned with the wreckage in his father’s wake, had opted to create his own in the name of more wealth rather than trying to repair some of the damage. Locke didn’t expect every privileged son or daughter to even the scales in as radical a way as he did, but would it fucking kill them to do a little good for the world? Or barring that, would it fucking kill them to not make it worse for the people struggling to make their corner of the universe a happy one?
The VP of Marketing — Candace Russell was her name — stood in front of the crowd and began issuing welcoming remarks. Locke tuned her out, let his eyes skim to Glover, standing with his hands locked in front of him.
The sight of Glover made Locke think of all the things he’d learned in the past few days doing deep background on him. Glover’s house in Mexico, his frequent trips there, the slow liquidation of assets that had begun the year before.
None of it had been easy to find, which was just one of the reasons the discoveries had raised the hackles on Locke’s instinct. It wasn’t unusual for a high profile CEO to have property out of the country, and liquidation of assets could be done for all kinds of reasons, most of which were legal.
But Glover had taken pains to hide the Mexico property behind several shell corps, and the liquidation of his assets had been painfully deliberate, a slow trickle of stock and fund sell-off that would be hardly noticeable to anyone who wasn’t paying attention.
It screamed escape, and Locke had begun to feel a bone-deep urgency on the Glover job, the feeling that they were running out of time to get him before he disappeared like smoke.
The audience clapped as Candace Russell finished her speech, turning with a smile to Glover as he approached the dais. Locke forced himself to clap along, not wanting to stand out by withholding his applause.
Glover shook Russell’s hand, and she resumed her position to the side of the platform while he stepped up to the microphone. The crowd was still clapping like he was their messiah when half of them probably didn’t have a clue who he was or why they should be clapping for him. People were funny that way: hardwired to follow the crowd, not make waves.
Locke liked making waves.
Glover just stood there, soaking it up, taking it in when the last thing he deserved was applause, the smile frozen on his face.
Smile, motherfucker, Locke thought. Smile while you can.
11
Elle stood at the window, watching as people streamed into Bolton’s. The sign on the front of the building had been changed for the occasion.
Full Service Bookstore Grand Opening!!
She looked around the store, strangely empty for a Saturday, and tried to tell herself it wasn’t because of the opening across the street. Some Saturdays business was great. Others were quiet. There wasn’t always rhyme or reason to it.
She turned away from the window and took a few slow breaths to calm herself. It didn’t work, and she crossed the store to the desk and lit the candle next to Buddha.
There was no religious ceremony in it — contrary to what many people believed, Buddhism in its more common form was more of a philosophy than a religion — but the glow of the wick followed by the faint scent of hot wax elicited a Pavlovian response in her body. She felt her shoulders relax just a little.
It was a ritual she’d repeated countless times over the years, and her psyche had learned to recognize it as a cue for letting things go in the same way her body released tension when she sat on her meditation cushion. The goal was to get to that place of centeredness without the ritual, to carry it with her.
She was still working on that part.
For now the rituals helped. They were a kind of training and she reached for the small wooden mallet and rubbed it inside the little brass bowl she kept next to the Buddha, letting the gentle ringing further calm her.
It was only after she took another slow breath that she felt capable of turning her attention to the flowers sitting on the counter.
The pale pink peonies were so lush she had to resist the urge to reach out, rub the satiny petals between her fingers. The shop was full of their scent.
Full of Locke.
She picked up the card that had accompanied the arrangement when it had been delivered that morning.
Food still makes everything better. Dinner tonight at seven?
She’d laughed in spite of herself when she’d opened the card. It was something he’d said to her in college.
Food makes everything better…
Anytime she’d scored poorly on a test or gotten into a fight with her roommate, Locke had taken her out for pizza or ice cream. She’d complained about the dangers of eating your feelings, but he'd waved away her concern, citing her already-perfect body as proof that the theory was deeply flawed.
His adoration of her physical self mirrored the love he had for the rest of her. It bordered on worship, and she’d never stopped trying to figure out what he saw when he looked at her, why he’d chosen her when he could have had any girl on campus.
It’s not like she had low self-esteem. She was moderately pretty. She was honest enough to admit that she’d been luckier than most when it came to the genetic lottery.
But there wasn’t anything different or special about her, and she’d spent the first six months with Locke convinced that he was going to wake up and really see her, decide she wasn’t so special after all.
Something else had happened instead; she started to see herself the way he did. Had felt empowered when he’d told her an argument she made was compelling and insightful. Had felt beautiful when he’d run his hands along her curves, connecting the spattering of freckles on her nose with his index finger, transfixed by what he saw in her face. Had felt the truth of her inner peace when he’d told her how she calmed him.
Of all the things he’d given her, belief in herself was the greatest. Maybe she would have come to it on her own eventually, but she’d come upon it sooner because of him, and she’d spent every moment since convinced she could accomplish anything, conquer her demons, save enough money to start the bookstore, stay focused on the goal of restoring the business that had been her parent’s passion. She’d seen the truth of herself in his eyes, and she’d never had a moment’s doubt since then that she was worthy. That she was special, not because of how she looked, but because of who she was inside.
Of course, none of it had been enough to save them. Not after her father’s death.
She remembered their last fight, the sobs that had swollen inside her until she was choking, heaving while she tried to talk to him, already grieving the loss. She’d carried the look in his
eyes with her all these years, could still see the pain and shame in them. She’d wanted to go to him even then. To tell him it wasn’t his fault.
But she’d been too wrecked by his betrayal. By her own loss.
She’d walked away without a backward glance, had cried so hard in the car on the way home that she’d had to pull over by the side of the road. She’d told herself it would get better. That she just had to get through her father’s funeral. That her feelings for Locke would fade.
It had been a lie, one she’d believed right up until the moment she’d looked into his eyes outside Bolton’s the week before.
She’d stuffed down her feelings for him. Had focused on her goal of opening the store, sometimes working multiple jobs to save enough money. It had kept her busy, and she’d often fallen into bed at her mother’s house so exhausted she didn’t bother eating the plates of food her mom left wrapped in the fridge. Occasionally there had been men, though they’d been few and far between, her encounters with them far from memorable.
Then she’d opened the store, finally gotten her own apartment. It had been a different kind of busy, a happier one, but one that had still allowed her to pretend she didn't think of Locke every day. That she didn’t remember his hands on her body, wake from dreams where he stared into her eyes while he thrust inside her.
She knew now that he’d been there all along.
But that didn’t mean they could go back and start over. Did it?
She thought of Zach’s advice, spoken to her over lunch.
You don’t have to have all the answers right now.
It was a dangerous idea. What if she saw him again and it didn’t work? What if she couldn’t let go of everything that had happened? What if the chemistry that had been between them didn’t hold up under scrutiny?
Rebel Love (Kings of Corruption Book 2) Page 5