Eyes Like the Night

by Emma Accola

  “You and I have been through enough,” I said. “Why should we peel back every single layer of our psyche until we leave each other bleeding on the floor?”

  “The blood is already on the floor. In case you haven’t noticed, Harry Spice has used my student help to embarrass us and that’s just the start. He’s vindictive and motivated. We have to work together on this. We will have to trust each other or he will pry us apart the way he did our former relationships.”

  I sensed Micah’s urgency, but I wasn’t exactly in a trusting mood. “So, what is a reasonable number of questions to ask to build intimacy?”

  “Twenty. Twenty questions ought to suffice.”

  Was that too many or too few? How many questions did it take to get to a man’s heart? How would I know? I’d never been there. The only thing I was sure about was that those I had been close to were no longer in my life. The place where my family and lifelong friends had been standing had become a cold, vacant room. With them had gone my ties to my past, except for my brother and Micah. Yes, Micah and I did have a past, albeit a rocky one. My stomach tumbled inside me. I tried to appear casual, as if there were no questions I feared answering, but anxiety gnawed at my soul.

  “Is that twenty questions between us, or twenty questions each?”

  “Twenty questions each.” Micah sat back down without taking his eyes off of me. “And nothing is off limits. There can be no dissembling. Everything has to be on the table. And whatever we tell each other has to be kept in confidence. We will have a cone of silence around us.”

  Curious, I slid back onto my chair. “What are the ground rules?”

  “Each of us can ask the other whatever he or she pleases. If either refuses to answer a question, the person who was refused gets to start at twenty questions again. If either of us answers with a lie, our relationship is finished.”

  “I wouldn’t lie,” I said sharply. “I have nothing to hide. He who has nothing to hide, hides nothing.”

  “What an excellent cliché. Do you think I have something to hide?”

  I smiled and leaned toward Micah. “Are we playing the game?”

  “There’s no time like the present. Ask away.”

  Though Micah looked relaxed and casual, I saw a hint of wariness in his eyes. “I want to know why you and Caleb fell out.”

  Micah couldn’t stop a flinch. “Most people don’t know that we did.”

  “I knew.”

  “You go right for the jugular, don’t you?”

  “Isn’t that the place where honesty resides?”

  He emptied the rest of the wine into his glass as if he needed it for courage. Then he got up to put the bottle into recycling, but he didn’t come back to the kitchen island. Instead he leaned his backside against the sink and didn’t look at me. He drained his wineglass and then cleared his throat as if to loosen up the bitter words that were cutting off his speech.

  “The falling out with Caleb probably had nothing to do with Harry Spice, but I can’t be sure,” Micah said, exhaling sharply. Speaking those words caused him pain. “I’m not sure about anything anymore.”

  “Stop.” I cut him off, suddenly aware of the sacred and terrible power of the truth these twenty questions would extract. I had made the inquiry just to see if he would really go to the painful places, and now that I saw his distress, I found myself backpedaling. “If your falling out doesn’t have anything to do with Harry Spice, then I withdraw the question. Don’t say any more.”

  “Why not?” he shot back.

  “Because it doesn’t seem like any of my business.”

  Micah’s eyes suddenly became sharp points of anger. “Is this because you don’t want to handle the emotional fallout of my truth?”

  “No—it’s just—no—I don’t want to rake you over the coals for something that has nothing to do with me.” I sought more words. “I’m trying to respect your boundaries. We’re little more than strangers.”

  “My boundaries, as you put it, crossed over yours when the two of us met Harry Spice. He knows about us.”

  I shook my head. “There is no us for him to know about.”

  He grew testy. “Yes, there is. May I go on?”

  “Fine.”

  “Thank you.” His pretty eyes scolded me. “A week after Harry Spice was sentenced, my mother invited Caleb and me to dinner at her house. She’d become very frail. We knew her days were numbered. At that dinner, she told us that the man we knew as our father wasn’t, in fact, our biological father. I was completely blindsided. I couldn’t believe my ears. Later I found out that Caleb had known for years, but he never told me. After Mom’s funeral, here in this kitchen, I got up in Caleb’s face and demanded to know our father’s name. He said the man was dead, there were reasons he couldn’t tell me his name, and in time I would understand. We had a terrible fight. A week later I was in the morgue identifying Caleb’s body.” Micah gestured around himself. “At night, when the moon is out and I’m in here alone, all those words I can’t take back ring in my ears.”

  Horrified by the disclosure I’d asked him to make, I tried to lose myself in the pattern of the granite. He’d revealed something personal that had nothing to do with me or Harry Spice, the subject at hand. He could have said anything at all and I wouldn’t have known the difference, but he gave me a painful truth.

  “You don’t have to say any more.”

  Micah didn’t seem to hear me. He lifted his wineglass and gestured as if toasting the kitchen. “This house was Caleb’s. Did you know? As his only heir, all his property came to me.”

  “This home is nice.”

  Micah went on as if he hadn’t heard me. “This house is nicely done, isn’t it? Caleb was dating a decorator when he bought it, and she spared no expense. He was already thirty when Mom died, so he got his share of Mom’s estate right away and used it to buy this place. I’m twenty-eight, so I have a couple of years before I get my bequest.” Micah set down his empty wineglass and turned to face me. “My ex thought Caleb and I had fought about the estate. I never told her about the paternity.”

  “Why not?”

  “Is that one of the twenty questions?”

  “No. I withdraw it.”

  Micah gave me a cool smile. “Would you have shared such news with Leonardo?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  I frowned. “I wouldn’t have needed to.”

  Micah gave me a cool smile. “No, you wouldn’t have. You would have rearranged your thoughts about your family and got on with your life. Do you know why I’m telling you?”

  “Because I asked and you’re trying to build intimacy.”

  Micah gave me a knowing smile. “Because we both have skin in this game.” He opened another bottle of wine, this one not from my family’s winery. “I know you lost your sister because of what Harry Spice did, but I lost those last precious days with Caleb because I couldn’t shut up and let him tell me about our father in his own time.” Mocking, Micah raised his glass to me. “What do you think of how I acted, pretty Gracie?”

  “That’s not for me to say,” I said calmly, parroting the words my mother had taught me to use when in what she called a sticky situation.

  “I haven’t changed anything in this house since I moved in. It’s like a living museum. I wish I could forget our last moments together.”

  My eyes began to sting at the pain of his loss. “You couldn’t have known what was going to happen.”

  “That’s a cold comfort.”

  “Logic isn’t meant to be warm.”

  “How much ease has logic offered you whenever you think of Faith?”

  “None. It’s not meant to. So I surrender because there’s nothing more to be done.” A fog had filled my mind, making me glad when he refilled my wine. I felt like I could hardly think. “Didn’t Caleb have any children?”

  “No, though he did always attract his share of women. You must have noticed.”

  “The only interest I ev
er had in your brother was as an adversary,” I said tartly, not missing the wisp of the question in his statement about women.

  “Then you’re an uncommon female. From when he was a teenager on, women would slip their phone numbers into his pockets. But somehow you resisted him.” Micah’s mouth became a grim line. “You should know that Caleb told me to stay away from you.”

  “If he said that, I don’t know why.”

  “You’re sure?”

  Micah’s hard stare made me want to squirm, so I affected outrage. “Of course I’m sure.”

  Micah nodded. “Caleb wanted me to be finished with you.”

  “I guessed as much.”

  “How?”

  “Because I watched you two at the restaurant where you always had dinner on Thursdays. The way you and Caleb tipped your heads when you laughed and ate your spaghetti, it was totally alike. That night we had the same waitress, and she told me that Caleb always picked up the check. To your point, I suspect he had heard about our little interlude in the wine cave and wanted you to distance yourself from the case as much as possible for your own safety. He had guessed correctly that Harry Spice would exact revenge.”

  “You were surveilling us. I’m impressed.”

  “Everyone says that turnabout is fair play. And it was just that once.”

  Micah’s eyes burned. “At some point you talked to Caleb, didn’t you?”

  “Never outside of court.” Tamra’s face filled my mind, as it always did whenever anyone mentioned the Harry Spice case. She was still in hiding in Georgia and I missed her.

  “Caleb called Harry Spice a vampire.”

  “He’s not a vampire,” I said with a mocking edge to my voice. “He’s a cannibal who needs to feed on others in order to make himself strong.” My limbs began trembling as if I’d just had a long run. “Maybe we’ve had enough talk for the night.”

  “It’s still early.” With a tip of his head, Micah invited me into the living room. Reluctantly I followed. He gestured toward the leather sofa that faced the fireplace. “Have a seat.”

  I lingered by the dining room table. “Why? Are you planning on telling a long story?”

  Micah sat down in a black leather recliner, rocking it slowly. “I kept this night free for you.”

  “This isn’t a date.”

  “Yes, it is. If we were at a fine restaurant in Marin County, would we be talking about something else?” He watched me for a moment, missing nothing. “Sit down, sweet Gracie. It’s my turn. Quid quo pro. Talk to me about Faith.”

  The words came out like a prayer. I anticipated what Micah would ask me. He had talked about his brother. I would be required to talk about my sister. Quid quo pro. I took a seat on the couch, mostly because my knees were already weak and the story of what happened with Faith wouldn’t come easily. Other than with Tamra, I’d never spoken of it because the telling of it felt as if the skin of my heart was being peeled back slowly. Losing my sister had been much worse than losing Leonardo. Micah turned the fireplace on low. The gas flames transfixed my eyes. I started talking before the grief of her loss could stop my tongue.

  The raw agony of the memory gave my voice a tremor. “One morning she stormed into the winery office, grabbed my phone, and screamed at me to put in the passcode. Her behavior actually scared me because I’d never seen her come so undone. I did as she asked because I thought there was some kind of emergency. She started a video and slapped me hard enough to knock me out of my chair. Then she threw the phone at my head and ran away wailing.”

  Now I had to stop talking. Faith’s grief-stricken face battered and tore at me. I took several deep breaths.

  “I could hear a low laughter and moaning coming from my phone. I picked it up and saw that it was playing a video of Damien having sex. The camera doesn’t give a good look at the woman’s face, but she does look like me, blonde and petite. He calls her Gracie. There’s a television in the background playing a newscast, so the time and date are visible. The video had been made the night before by my phone. I had it checked.”

  “Where was your phone supposed to be that night?” Micah asked, his voice low and grave.

  I fought to keep my voice from cracking. “With me. I swear to you that I never left my apartment that night. I worked on my dissertation and went to bed. Tamra was out with her boyfriend, so she couldn’t vouch for me.”

  “Then how did your phone make a sex video?”

  I threw up my hands. “You tell me. That question has ruined my sleep too many nights to count.”

  “Where do you usually keep your phone when you’re at home?”

  “Usually it’s in my purse or on the kitchen table or counter, and sometimes it’s in a coat pocket.”

  “That night you never heard it chime?”

  I shook my head. “No, because I silence it when I’m in class and sometimes forget to turn the chime back on. You must know all about that. You used to be in the classroom.”

  “Did anyone visit your apartment that night?”

  “No one. When I checked my phone to see what else it had been doing that night, I found that Tamra had texted me saying she wouldn’t be home until the next morning. Whoever had my phone replied with an emoji that I had never used before. Then sometime late that night, whoever had my phone sent that video to Faith. She saw it when she got up the next morning.”

  A shadow crossed Micah’s face. “Ah, damn. Even if you were the woman in the video, what would be your motive for sending it to Faith?”

  My nervous fingers found a pillow for me to hug. “There are various versions, but the most popular one is that Damien spurned me for Faith, so I outed us in order to spite him.” I kept my eyes on the fireplace. “It took about a nanosecond for the entire staff of the winery to hear that something really bad had happened between Faith and me. When news came out that Faith and Damien were finished, the staff didn’t have to work too hard to make me the whore of Babylon.”

  “Those rumors will eventually pass.”

  “Yeah. Like a kidney stone.” My stomach clenched at the memory. “Don’t bet on me. Whoever made that video beat me like a drum.”

  Micah shook his head slowly. “You’re a lot of things, but you’ve never been beaten. How did Leonardo find out about the video?”

  I averted my eyes, cringing. “From Faith. He demanded that I get out my phone and watch the whole thing with him, over and over again, looking for proof that the woman with Damien wasn’t me.”

  “That was cruel.”

  Micah’s words stunned me. No one, no one, until Micah just now, had looked at this from my point of view. From the day Faith had gotten the video, I had been on the defensive. I appeared to be in the film, so I was the one doing all the apologizing. I’d never liked being a victim or claiming the label of a wronged party, yet there I was, responsible for soothing the ravaged feelings as if I had caused them. My bitter anger at this still choked me. The one time I had tried to talk about what this situation was doing to me, Leonardo had told me that there was no throne for fallen princesses, so shut up about it.

  When I spoke, my voice was low with pain. “Eventually Leonardo believed me, but not before battering my ears with accusations and endless questions. I know all that cost him too, staying in a relationship with me, the person who allegedly cheated with her own sister’s fiancé.”

  “How did you manage to convince him that it wasn’t you?”

  “The hair of the woman in the video is shorter, and she had a dark spot on one shoulder, probably a tattoo.”

  Micah lifted an eyebrow. “What else?”

  I paused to choose my words. “There was a sex act that I’ll never do.”

  Micah took a moment before responding. “People are different with different partners.”

  Leonardo had said exactly the same thing. “Not for me. Not for that.”

  “What finally persuaded him?”

  “He noticed that the carpet didn’t match the drapes on the woman in the vide
o.”

  “So you are a true blonde.”

  An angry flush burned my face. “You want me to hit you, don’t you?”

  Micah held up his hands in surrender. “Are there copies of this video?”

  “Mom deleted the one on Faith’s phone and then smashed the phone up. Apparently Faith wanted a new phone because she couldn’t look at that one anymore. I transferred the video to a flash drive that is now in a safe deposit box. Then I bought a new phone. No matter how many times I wiped the old one with disinfectant, it felt tainted and foul. I could barely touch it with my hands, let alone put it to my face.”

  I fought the urge to chew a thumbnail that was already bitten to the quick. Micah joined me on the couch and took my hand in his. I had thought my strange story would make me seem pathetic and sad, but his expression didn’t carry any judgment or suspicion. The burden of the memory lightened. At his touch, my heart thrilled and fluttered, the sensation of butterfly wings.

  “Do you believe me?” I asked so softly that my words barely carried over my lips.

  “I do. I’ve seen how you treat your cell phone.”

  “My cell phone? What?”

  Micah clasped my palm between his. “I’ve seen you drop your cell on concrete without batting an eyelash. You haven’t bothered to personalize any of the chimes or ring tones, the home screen, or its cover. You don’t take your phone into the bedroom with you. You don’t even have it with you now. Someone like you, who cares so little for her phone, wouldn’t put something as intimate as sex on it.”

  “And yet sex got on my phone.”

  “Not by you.”

  I stared at Micah, my mind racing. “You think Harry Spice or one of his minions took my phone and I didn’t notice that it had gone missing.”

  “That night your attention was on writing your thesis.”