by Megan Crane
Because if it wasn’t…She’d been in love with a criminal when she was twenty-two, so maybe she was the one who was broken, not Antony. Maybe this was all her fault. And if she was afraid to say that to herself, she was even more afraid that anyone she dared tell might say it out loud.
But of all the things Lanie might say, Merritt knew—down deep, like the tangled, deep roots of the live oaks standing all around them that she didn’t have to see to know were there—that she would never, ever say that.
“Antony is a senior associate at my law firm.” Merritt clenched her hands together in front of her. She frowned out toward the bayou as if she could feel the waters rising already and closing over her head. But that was life here. Always a short step away from being drowned, one way or another. It hadn’t occurred to her until now that there was a freedom in that. Because she hadn’t seen it coming in New York and she’d thought she was safe when she hadn’t been. At all. “He seemed like such a grown-up when I met him. He’s older. Very successful. So smart and committed and he helps people for a living. He’s always pulled together, always capable of handling any given situation, in court or out. He wears three-piece suits and owns a loft in SoHo. He’s exactly the kind of man I always told myself I wanted.”
“The really bad ones always look good at first,” Lanie murmured, then laughed in that low, delighted way of hers. She’d always laughed like that. Like she was in on the joke and knew all your secrets already. Now, as then, it made it that much easier to tell her anything. “Or you’d know better. The thing about a biker is there’s no pretending you didn’t see him coming.”
“We worked together on a few cases and I was impressed by him. It would be hard not to be. He’s good at what he does. Maybe too good.” Merritt shook her head. The firm’s questionable closeness with certain clients was a whole different story. “He wanted to make our relationship personal almost from the start, but I wanted to be sure. It took him eight months to get me to go out to dinner with him without it having something to do with work. I was so proud of myself. Eight months felt so adult when the last time I was with anyone it was, what? Thirty seconds in a strip club before I was throwing myself at him?”
“I think it was at least thirty minutes in that strip club,” Lanie chided her gently. “Don’t sell yourself short.”
“Much classier. I’m so proud.” Merritt blew out a breath. “I did everything right with Antony. I waited. I liked him—and I knew I liked him because I’d spent months with him, practically night and day, working crazy hours. I got to know him, I thought. Whatever the opposite of my behavior with Greeley was, that was what I did with Antony. We dated. We did things when we went on dates. Impressive things, I thought. Broadway plays no one can get tickets to. Impossible restaurants with magician-like chefs. Art openings and museums and charity events that required black tie.”
“It sounds like a fairy tale,” Lanie said.
“I thought it was,” Merritt agreed. “And when he wanted to take things to the next level, I was all for it, even though it had been a long time.”
Lanie glanced at her. “Five years?”
“Five years,” Merritt agreed. Grimly.
“Huh.” Lanie’s tone was so scrupulously nonjudgmental that it rendered her judgment pretty decisively. “And?”
“And it was fine.”
It was funny to say that today. Yesterday Merritt would have told this same story, but she might have said it had been good with Antony. Because she’d thought it had been good, at the time. She’d enjoyed herself that long weekend at his house out in the Hamptons when they’d finally had sex after two months of Antony’s high-octane version of dating. But last night had happened and she remembered now. That great big gulf between good and Greeley.
She kept going. “He seemed to like me so much. He was so attentive. He already had pretty much all my attention at work, but he also wanted every second of my free time. I liked it at first. I liked that a girl from the swamps could make a sophisticated man like him fall head over heels.”
“But.” Lanie’s voice was quiet.
Merritt pulled in a breath. “Yeah, but. It started to get weird. I caught him going through my phone, but he had a reasonable excuse, so I shrugged it off. But I started to feel paranoid about things. Like at first I thought it was so cool and progressive that none of the partners in the firm seemed to mind that we were together, when so many firms have policies against that. Eventually I started to wonder why they were okay with it. But anytime I asked someone a question about anything, they would treat me like I was crazy or intense or hormonal, and they would tell Antony. Then he would interrogate me about it, brimming over with all this concern as if I’d been caught in the middle of a psychotic break…That doesn’t sound like a big deal, I know. It makes me seem weirdly oversensitive.”
Her fellow first and second years at the firm would have agreed. But this was Lanie. She shrugged. “Did it feel like a big deal?”
Merritt thought about those odd months. The tiny little things that she’d bent over backward to explain away, and had, every time, until there were too many tiny little things and a knot in her stomach that wouldn’t relent.
“One time I dropped some files off with a bunch of paralegals,” she told Lanie. “But I forgot a few documents I needed, so I had to go back. The room was set up so people could walk in behind these giant file cabinets without being seen, and when I walked back in they were laughing. About me. About how I was Antony’s latest toy and how his track record wasn’t so great, because he usually broke his toys into smithereens. Not an awesome conversation to overhear.”
“Bitches are always bitches, whether here in the bayou or up in the big city.” Lanie laughed. “You can depend on it.”
“I didn’t think he didn’t have a past. Who doesn’t have a past?” Merritt rolled her eyes. “I certainly didn’t want to talk about my past. But when I asked Antony about it he got furious with me. I ended up apologizing to him for treating him like that. Listening to gossip about him and tarnishing what we had by repeating it.” She swallowed, not wanting to give her friend the humiliating details. All those hours pleading with him, until she almost forgot that all she’d done was ask him why those paralegals had talked about him that way. “I mean, seriously apologizing. Because he started to make it sound like if he and I weren’t together, I couldn’t stay at my job, either.”
“Did you really like your job that much?”
“I did.” She shook her hair back from her face, pretty sure it wasn’t the weather that was making her sweat. “But I started to wonder about that, too. It seemed like maybe the firm was a little too beholden to some of its bigger, flashier, more obviously wealthy clients.” Merritt bit her lip. “I’m talking about people whose concerns run to FBI wiretaps and who claim they run import-export companies.”
“You did not work for drug dealers.” Lanie sounded more amused than scandalized. “You with your hatred of all things outlaw.”
“That depends on who you ask.” Merritt laced her fingers together in front of her. “Things were weird. I became more and more suspicious about everything. The firm. Antony himself. Once I started looking, nothing added up, but there wasn’t anything concrete I could point to. Not in the firm. Not with Antony. There was just me being paranoid.”
“Were you really being paranoid?” Lanie asked softly. “Because you’re back home in Lagrange when you said that would never happen, so…”
“Antony told me I was.” Merritt smiled faintly. “And he would know, right? He was the successful one, not me. Worldly and even a little jaded. I was obviously overreacting. Or making stuff up to be dramatic and get attention. Or too much of a hick to understand the intricacies of things.”
Lanie only shook her head, her gaze intent on Merritt. But she didn’t say a thing. And again, that made it easier to keep talking.
“Antony told me I was lucky to have him. And I started to wonder why I did. I mean, why did he choose me? Th
ere were millions of other women in New York. And other first-year associates at the firm. Second years, by that point.” She could feel her own smile then, too brittle on her face. “But I studied them, and they were different. They had local families. Husbands, fiancés, boyfriends. Roommates. They weren’t isolated. They had people to go home to. They had people. I was the only one who had no one to wonder why I spent all my time under Antony’s thumb.”
“You have people,” Lanie said, her voice quiet but strong. Her gaze was almost hard on Merritt’s. “You’ll always have people.”
Merritt couldn’t process that. It meant too much. It wound its way deep inside, where she’d gotten too used to being all alone. But she knew if she paused to acknowledge all that, she’d never keep going. And she knew that if she didn’t keep going now, she’d never tell anyone.
“One night we were at a party,” she said, her heart kicking in hard. She lifted a hand and rubbed at her chest as if that could soothe it. “It was a dinner party thing at one of the partners’ houses in the Hudson Valley. ‘House’ is a laughable word to describe this place. It was a castle. And the whole thing was over the top. There was a butler. Footmen at dinner. It was like Downton Abbey.” She tried to even out her breath. “Everyone there was either part of the firm or one of these particular clients. These remarkably wealthy importers. And one of them was sitting on the other side of me, and he was very friendly. Not flirty, just friendly. I don’t even remember what we were talking about. But Antony didn’t like it.”
She remembered Antony’s hand on her thigh, hard and unyielding beneath the table. His fingers, digging in. Hurting her.
“He told me to excuse myself from the table, but I didn’t want to go. I thought it would look weird and I didn’t understand what was happening.” She was sweating now. She could feel it, rolling down her neck and spreading out beneath her breasts. “I said no.”
Lanie reached over and put her hand on Merritt’s arm. It was almost enough to make her feel better.
“So Antony picked up the nearest bottle of wine. It was red. About three quarters full. And he dumped it over my head.” She caught Lanie’s gaze. “I want to be clear. He didn’t toss it in my face. It wasn’t quick. He quietly, carefully, upended three quarters of a bottle of red wine over my head, right there at the table.”
She could still feel her own shock, sharp and sickening, her heartbeat like a drum in her temples. The smell of the wine, rich and tangy, and the way it coursed over her, then pooled in her lap.
“Then he made me sit there,” she told Lanie. “At first I was paralyzed. I couldn’t breathe, much less move. But then I started to get up and he just looked at me…” She shook her head at that, gulping back the same panic that had washed through her that night at the flat, murderous look Antony had aimed at her. “I was afraid to make him any angrier. So I sat where I was, with wine dripping off me, all through the rest of dinner. And dessert. And after dinner drinks.”
“What did everyone else do?” Lanie asked, her eyes wide.
Merritt couldn’t seem to stop her mouth from curving in that same brittle way, so pained it nearly hurt.
“Nothing,” she said. “They did absolutely nothing. It was as if I was the only one who’d noticed it.”
Lanie muttered something that sounded like a curse.
“I broke up with him that night, of course,” Merritt said, rubbing her damp palms over her thighs. “I locked myself in an empty room in that place and walked three miles to the nearest town the next morning. It was the weekend, so when I got back to New York I holed up in my apartment. I was worried he’d come after me, but he didn’t. I thought that was a good sign. When I went into work on Monday I thought the best-case scenario would be that it was awkward and I’d get transferred to work with a different senior associate on different cases. I thought the worst-case scenario would be that I got fired, which I’d talked myself into thinking wouldn’t be too horrible. But that wasn’t what happened.”
Lanie shook her head. “I’m afraid to ask.”
“Nothing,” Merritt said softly, the quiet horror of it making her dizzy again, the way it had then. “Nothing happened. Everything was exactly the same. Everyone acted as if nothing had happened. Antony was confused when I brought it up. The partners who’d been there didn’t seem to recall that I’d run off, dripping wine all over the marble floors. In fact, they all talked to me as if I’d had too much to drink and was remembering it wrong.”
Next to her, Lanie let out a long breath, as if she’d been holding it.
“That’s fucked up.”
“I knew I needed to get out of there,” Merritt said after a moment, willing her heart to stop that kettledrum effect against her ribs. “Because where could it go after that? He didn’t need to hit me. He’d proven that he could do anything and no one would acknowledge it, much less help me.”
She made a face. “He was all over me, at work or at home, and it was easier to just go along with things than fight him. Less scary.” She shuddered. “He got this look if he thought I was defying him, or giving him trouble, even while he would talk about how concerned he was about me. I stopped sleeping. My work suffered and the partners started wondering out loud if maybe I should take a little break to get my shit together.”
“Maybe that was their way of helping without admitting that’s what they were doing?” But Lanie didn’t sound as if she believed that possibility.
“I think they saw that he was getting close to destroying another toy,” Merritt said matter-of-factly. “And no one wants that in the office. So messy. I decided I didn’t want to be a toy, and if I was insane and he was actually a great guy, well, I’d have to live with that. I told him I wanted a romantic getaway and I’d plan it. He thought that was a terrific idea. I asked him to meet me in a little bed and breakfast all the way up in Bar Harbor, Maine. I assume he raced right up there. And here I am. Possibly a crazy person. But not his toy any longer, either way.”
Lanie leaned into her then, and stayed there. For a long while, they just sat on the step with the story of Antony heavy between them. But then, there were a lot of heavy things down south. The weight of the air, getting warmer as the day wore on. The scent of the bayou, all that rich earth and deep, muddy water. The way the bare skin of Lanie’s shoulder was too warm against Merritt’s leg, that little bloom of sweat between them as familiar and haunting as any swamp ghost. The feel of her own body connecting to the rough step beneath her, to Lanie, to all her half-forgotten history here, as if she was a boat finally reaching the shore. She blinked that last thought away.
Because she wasn’t staying here. She was never staying here again, not for long. Eighteen years here had been more than enough, surely.
Lanie was the one to pull away and Merritt missed the connection instantly. Then hated herself for that, because she’d been the one to break it in the first place. Lanie surged up to her feet in the kind of sleek, careless move that reminded Merritt that regardless of what costume she wore—or didn’t—Lanie had always had that innate dancer’s grace. That Merritt had managed to forget that, too, seemed like nothing short of a betrayal.
But she choked that down, because Lanie was grinning at her.
“Come on then,” she said. “He’s a creep and you’re not crazy. Fuck that guy. Let’s live a little.”
This was Lanie Latour. She’d been born with a wicked streak that no amount of god or shame had ever been able to stamp out. Living a little with Lanie could mean anything. Literally anything.
And Merritt had been hiding for a long time, one way or another. She’d been afraid constantly. A deep, gnawing sort of fear that never went anywhere and never let up. Her world, her whole life, had gotten very, very small and scared, hidden away in the corner of her mind where she didn’t think she was crazy and she didn’t want to stay with this man who terrified her more each day—but didn’t know how to get away from him. She’d had to act like the happy girlfriend and adoring, subordinate se
cond chair she’d been before the wine incident. She’d had to go off somewhere in her head while he touched her. She’d had to lie awake but perfectly still every night so she didn’t wake him, then lie about her anxiety dreams every morning.
You’re so neurotic, he’d tell her, inspecting the dark circles under her eyes while she’d choked down the breakfast he insisted she eat. When all she’d wanted was coffee. But it didn’t matter what she wanted. That was what she’d learned and Antony took care to reinforce it every day in a thousand little ways. What would you do without me to take care of you?
Lanie, meanwhile, was a lot of things, but she wasn’t small or scared. She’d never, ever been small, not even when she was a skinny little girl with two skinned knees and that shit-eating grin of hers that had been the despair of every authority figure in St. Germain Parish. And if anything had ever scared her, she’d never admitted it.
Merritt had moved away twice, to two different cities, and she’d never felt as free and unfettered as her friend. Never—well. She had. Once. If only for a few steamy months in the arms of a man who she’d wanted too much. A man who was rooted into this town where everything could be dragged down into the swamp at any moment, and she’d been afraid of the fact she wanted to be one of the things that sunk deep and caught hold. With him.
And suddenly she thought she’d die if she didn’t experience that feeling again. If she couldn’t feel big and wide and full, if only for an afternoon. It had been so long. She’d put herself into a necessary deep freeze up north to survive but less than twenty-four hours in Lagrange and she was already thawing.