Double Cross

by Carolyn Crane

  They did. Packard let me into his secret life for a moment. The secret life inside him.

  I try to focus on Shelby’s complaints. Packard’s nodding, and then he lifts his gaze over her head, and our eyes meet, and this sensation plunges through me. He’d felt happy. Less confined—even in his prison! I’d never thought it meant all that much to him because, minutes later, he’d refused to apologize for making me his minion. But it did mean something to him.

  But then, if he’d felt any kind of connection or warmth toward me, why would he refuse to apologize?

  The answer hits me like a thump on the chest—he was simply trying to charge up the memory. This was about Ez, not Packard and me! I turn and storm off.

  God, I am so gullible! I fired at him and he was simply firing back, trying to charge up the memory. Exploiting my emotions—and doing a damn fine job of it. I round a corner and head for the copy area.

  I stop in front of a shelf stacked with reams of paper in all different colors—pink, yellow, magenta, electric blue.

  “Justine.”

  I turn and there’s Shelby, pink lipstick vivid against her dark curls and crazy knits, expression in a question.

  I say, “Why, after all this time, do I continue to be surprised that he’ll do anything to get what he wants? Do I look gullible? Because apparently, I really am.”

  “You are not,” she hisses as the store closing announcements come over the loudspeaker. I look away and she grabs my arm. She has a chipped front tooth that sometimes gives her a sexy, dangerous edge; other times it lends her vitriolic oomph. This is one of the vitriolic oomph moments. “Of all people, no. You are not.”

  “I am. I know what he is, and he can still dupe me. There is no limit to that guy.” She fingers one of my coat buttons as I tell her what he said. “Like it meant something to him,” I add. “It was a vulnerable time for me, that kiss. A raw time, you know? And he could sense that. So he gets hold of that one little genuine thread and works it, just to get his way. You know what it’s like with me and Packard? It’s like in the Peanuts cartoons where Lucy holds the football for Charlie Brown, and tells him to run up and kick it, and then at the last minute she pulls it away and he falls. And then she begs him to try again, she promises she won’t fool him again, so he tries again, but she pulls it away and he falls again. He gets duped over and over, just like I fall for Packard’s manipulations over and over. I won’t let it happen again.”

  “Because you are afraid.” She tilts her head, chipped-tooth smile. “You love your grudge against Packard too much. You are afraid to lose control, I think.”

  I give her an outraged expression, just a bit of a bullying edge. “No, it’s because I don’t like falling.”

  “Pfft.”

  “He just doesn’t want us to dream his secrets tonight.”

  “What secrets?”

  I haven’t told her about the schoolhouse dream; it doesn’t feel like mine to tell. “I’m not entirely sure,” I say. “But I can’t believe I fell for that talk when it was all smoke and mirrors. But I guess it’s fitting. Packard as smoke and mirrors. He was a momentary diversion for me, on my way to Otto, who is my ultimate perfect mate.”

  “In other words, not real. Otto is fairy tale.” Shelby smirks at her own cleverness.

  “Helpful hint—most girlfriends pretend to like their friend’s boyfriends, and act happy for them, or else they zip it.”

  “Such a friend is useless. You and Otto, you comfort each other. That is all.”

  “We fit.”

  “Your fears fit.”

  “I’m happy with him. Some people prefer that to grimness, believe it or not.” A sterner store announcement sounds. “Come on,” I say, leading toward the front. “You are going to meet your perfect mate someday and cringe when you think back on this whole conversation.”

  “Pfft,” Shelby says.

  We get into a checkout line behind Packard and Simon. I immediately engross myself in the magazine covers.

  Shelby pulls three briefcases from Packard’s cart: one black, one brown, one tan. “Boring,” Shelby says. “All.”

  “This isn’t a fashion show,” Packard replies. “Pick one and scuff it up. Read those books, too—you need to know the terms. Tech services’ll be couriering your laptops to you later, so don’t go to bed until you can work the software.” He lowers his voice. “Assume this guy has surveillance wherever he puts you. The screens’ll be nonpeekable, but you need to act right.”

  “This’ll be fun,” Simon says.

  “Have mine sent to Otto’s,” I say, flipping through Midcity Business Journal.

  When we get up to the front, Packard chooses four chocolate nut clusters from the impulse item rack, one for each of us.

  “Goody,” Simon says.

  Shelby unwraps hers and pops it into her mouth. “Thanks.”

  He holds mine out to me. It would be too weird not to take it, so I do. “Thanks.” I put it in my pocket for later and I go back to my magazine. I like finding chocolates in my pockets when I least expect it.

  Packard untwists the bright foil ends on his chocolate as the cashier rings us up. He extracts the dark Orb and smells it and I secretly watch him, wishing he wasn’t such a manipulator.

  He brings the chocolate to his mouth and bites. The planes of his cheeks move as he chews, jaw moving, teeth crushing. His Adam’s apple shifts with his swallow. Eating seems so shockingly carnal and animalistic all of a sudden.

  He takes another bite, and I watch, a hungry beggar outside a candy-store window.

  Chapter

  Ten

  OTTO LIVES in a classic stone building nestled between an old-century hotel and a yesteryear department store that caters to Midcity dowagers who no longer care about money or hipness. I love just walking into his building—it’s like a grand fortress full of heft and history.

  It’s not our night, but I want desperately to forget the stirred-up memory of that kiss with Packard. I need to get things back to how they’re supposed to be: me with Otto.

  Sammy the doorman tells me that Otto’s home. Good. I walk through the marble atrium and head up in the paleo-space-age elevator. Otto and I are together; get used to it, I think, in silent response to Shelby’s naysaying.

  The doors slide open and I step into his foyer, surprised the lights are all off. “Hello?” I make my way around the tall table and head toward the fire glow, dancing on the hall wall. “Otto?” I pause at the threshold to the grand living room; firelight casts a pulsating glow over the ornate woodwork and furnishings. It’s weird, because Otto would never leave a fire unattended.

  A voice from the shadowy corner: “Justine.” Only then do I make out his dark form, hunkered in the armchair by the velvet-curtained window.

  “Hey.” I move across the Oriental rug, pattern barely visible in the licks of light, toward the chair in the corner, like a dark throne. I kneel before him. “Hey,” I say again softly.

  He closes his eyes and shakes his head minutely. That alone tells me all I need to know. The headaches. The pressure. It’s bad tonight.

  “I thought it was getting better,” I say.

  “It is,” he whispers.

  But not enough.

  “The ones we’ve released so far, they’ve made a difference, haven’t they?”

  “Of course.”

  I straighten and kiss the top of his head, on his hat. “I wish I could take it away.”

  “My head?” he jokes wanly. “Please do.”

  “The pain.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  He sits still as a mountain, half his face in darkness, the other half glowing pale in the flames.

  I settle onto the chair arm and kiss the light half of his face, brushing his hair back from his jaw with one finger. I whisper, “Helmut and Simon are at the end of their targets. That’s two less, maybe three—Vesuvius is finishing one. We’re making progress.…” Only like forty more to go,
I think.

  A long silence leaves me feeling helpless, wishing so badly that I really could take away the pain and fear.

  “I can feel them, sometimes,” he says, fingers on his forehead, “trying to breach their prison walls. I can feel their will to break free of my force fields.”

  “It’s okay. You’re okay.”

  “I’m not. If they all surged to get out at the same time, the sheer pressure of it would explode the veins inside my skull. I’m sure of it.”

  “Otto, don’t,” I plead, imagining him holding his head in agony, bleeding out his ears, his eyes. “Don’t even visualize that.”

  “What if somebody figures it out and unites them? An orchestrated surge would kill me.”

  “You have no proof of that except your imagination,” I say, though it’s not the wildest idea. Gently I rub his neck, but not too hard, ever since we read about the woman who got a vein star episode from her neck being pinched in a beauty salon hair-washing sink. “You’re spiraling. You need to get control of your thoughts.”

  He says nothing.

  I rub in circles. “How long have you sat here?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “An hour?”

  “Maybe.”

  Two or three, then. Christ, if there was ever a perfect reminder of why we’re crashing violent highcaps, it’s this. Otto, destroying himself to keep them imprisoned. At the very least, the stress of maintaining those force fields with his mind is spiking his blood pressure, a factor that has been linked to vein star episodes. My heart beats in my throat; I pray he doesn’t sense my unease.

  “What’s the nature of the pain?” I ask.

  “Pressure,” he says. “Sometimes hot pressure, and sometimes dull—a dull spike that protrudes from my midbrain area to behind my left eye. And there’s a tingly numbness behind my right eye—”

  He goes on in minute detail. We’re both connoisseurs of the varieties of cranial pain, and I listen, horrified, until I come to my senses. “Enough. Stop it.” I squeeze his shoulder. “Let me do something.”

  “What?”

  I move around the back of him and touch his hat. He sucks in a breath.

  “Will you let me?”

  A pause. Then, “Okay,” he whispers. “Okay.”

  I pull it all the way off and kiss the top of his warm, darkly luscious curls, which smell faintly of his rosemary-mint shampoo.

  “What are you going to do?” he asks.

  “I’m going to relax the area.”

  “How?”

  “With my fingers. Lightly.”

  A silence.

  “Really lightly,” I add. He doesn’t like people touching his head, but sometimes he’ll make exceptions for me. Moving stealthily behind him, I rest my hands on his head and rub gently. “I got this from a healer.” A half truth. Shelby and I got massages together the other day, and even the lightest touch felt oddly calming. It gave me the idea to do this on Otto. Relaxation is good for any condition.

  “Be careful,” he says.

  “Of course.”

  With vein star syndrome, one of the veins in your head deteriorates in a way that causes it to bulge out in a star shape, hence the name, but it can shrink back to normalcy just as quickly. Because of this, you never really know if you have it. A normal scan might just mean you’re between star flare-outs. Then, without warning, you could get a bulge so fierce that it leaks or bursts. A burst is typically fatal. A leak can be too, but sometimes leaks subside, or they can be repaired if you get yourself to an ER stat.

  It’s the ultimate ticking-time-bomb condition. And it can be hereditary.

  My mom died of vein star syndrome, so I’m more likely to have it than most. Terror of vein stars used to rule my life; most days I felt sure I was one heartbeat away from a bleedout. Every head sensation sent me to the ER.

  Then Packard taught me to zing out my fear, and my paranoia about vein stars stopped.

  Too bad he didn’t warn me that it would forever change my neural pathways.

  There are times I wish I could go back to the old way—terrified but free. But being here with Otto makes me grateful I don’t have to sink into that dark, hopeless hole again and again. Actually, the hole he’s in seems deeper than usual.

  Otto was abandoned as a child, so vein star could run in his family just as well as mine. What if he has the hereditary weakness, and he’s stressing his craniovascular system by holding prisoners? We have to hurry up and release them, release the pressure.

  I move my fingers over his thick, silky hair, and the curves of his skull beneath it.

  “Soften your shoulders,” I command.

  He softens. Takes a deep breath. Good. That will tell his parasympathetic nervous system to ratchet down, which should help.

  “You’re okay,” I say, warm into his hair. “You’re okay.”

  But not really. I can’t believe I ever zinged him, ever attacked him. Packard says I generate twice as much fear as any other human or highcap he’s met. How in the world did Otto endure it? If I zinged him now, it would destroy him.

  This thought wobbles me.

  “You’re okay,” I repeat firmly.

  He shakes his head.

  “Yes,” I say. “Let this work.”

  He puts his hands over mine and pulls me down to him and kisses my cheek.

  I smile. “What are you doing?”

  “Come here.”

  I climb onto the chair with him, half on his lap, and give him his beret. He puts it back on and I snuggle into him, the way I love to do.

  “This is what’s working,” he says. “This is what’s helping.”

  “This?”

  “Just this. When we touch.”

  I gaze into his brown eyes and sense the truth of it. I put my hands on his arms, push them up under his sleeves.

  “I touch a lot of people during the course of my day, Justine, but when I touch you, it’s different. When I touch you, I’m not alone.”

  “You’re not,” I whisper, with all the seriousness I have in me. “I’m right here.” I hold his arms under his sleeves, thrilled and honored that I actually help him. He makes me feel safe and good, but I make him feel not alone. I lay my head on his chest, awash in his goodness.

  We sit entwined as the fire roars. I could stay forever, I think, ensconced in his strong arms, safe in his fortress penthouse.

  We need each other. We fit.

  And sure, it’s not all breathless, pulse-pounding excitement, but when you’re a lifelong hypochondriac, breathless pulse-pounding excitement is something you don’t mind leaving behind. It’s this that I’ve always wanted. Just this.

  He gets up once and brings back lemonades and teriyaki crackers. Another time he gets up to put more logs on, and then we squish back together.

  “Maybe we can just stay like this for the rest of the week,” I suggest.

  He draws a finger down my cheek, my neck. It’s a new touch. Slightly playful. “Stay how exactly?”

  I give him a saucy look. “Like this.”

  His eyes gleam as he snakes his hands around me, one down into my jeans back pocket. He pulls me closer and kisses my neck, light little kisses that make a feathery sensation inside me. “How about like this?”

  Softly, I say, “That would be good.”

  “Or this?” he says, finding my mouth.

  I kiss him back, sliding deeper into him, and we move together in a deliciously heavy rhythm that rolls his erection against my thigh. I kiss him deep and dirty, sucking his tongue into my mouth.

  “Mmm,” I say as we shift and move against each other.

  “Do you know what I’m thinking?”

  “Not precisely.”

  He pushes his hands under my sweater, draws his fingers up my bare stomach. “You don’t know what I’m thinking?” he asks.

  I smile into our kiss.

  “I suspect you do.”

  I grab his wrists, because the sensation is too much, and I gaze into h
is eyes. A question.

  “I want you to stay tonight,” he says.

  “I’m here,” I reply. And then, so that he understands it in the deep way that I meant it, I say, “I want that, too.” It’s sort of a weird exchange, but our meaning is contained in touch and tone now. He presses into me, sighs into our kiss, and we move against each other in a wavelike rhythm that builds, then swells and breaks, then builds again, all deep currents and power. He pulls away and pushes up my sweater and I help him, tearing my shirt and bra off in the same go.

  When he pushes his whiskery face into my breasts, I tense a little for the excitement of it.

  “You,” he says, in a way that makes me feel slightly roguish, as I maul him through his clothes, trying to get the sudden, unbidden thought of Packard out of my mind. Quickly I start unbuttoning his shirt. I feel strange, like there’s an unformed, unfinished, sad little emotion bottled up in me, and I need to fuck it away.

  He rises and I slide back into the big chair. My heart pounds as he stands up to his full height and roughly pulls off the rest of his clothes. I try to focus back on him, on his body, taut as a tree trunk. He kneels down in front of the chair and slides his hands up my thigh. “What is it?” he says. “Where’d you go just now?”

  I sit up, kiss his neck, and take his warm, smooth cock into my hand. “Here,” I whisper. Then I lean sideways, over the chair arm, cock still in my hand, and fumble for my purse, pulling out a condom. Letting him go, I unwrap it while he nuzzles my neck and moves around on me everywhere but where I want him. Because I want him in me—badly. I finally pull out the condom and unroll it over him, leaving the little bit at the top like you’re supposed to, and smoothing it down. I love touching him. I can’t believe we’re going to do this, after all these months of being apart, and the chaste dates. I say nothing, so as not to jinx it.

  Otto looms above me, hand on each of the armrests. “Are you sure?”

  “Of course,” I say. “Are you?”

  With the firelight behind him, his face is completely shadowed, but I don’t need to see his expression, because he leans down to kiss me long and strong, his thick hair brushing my cheeks, making a kind of erotic cave for my face.