by Chloe Finch
“God, Jessica.” She was certain the guy eating alone at a table near theirs was hearing this entire conversation.
“What? I’m just asking. And I’ve always been kind of curious if a guy that hot is also, ahem, blessed in other areas.”
“I don’t really have much to compare it to.”
Jessica held her hands together like she was praying and pulled them slowly apart. “You just tell me when to stop.”
“Oh my god.”
“That big, huh?” She looked down at her hands, which were at least two feet apart.
Grace, massively embarrassed, just wanted her to stop talking about penises in Chipotle. Hoping to shut her up, she held her hands up and said, “Like this, maybe?”
Jessica raised her eyebrows and nodded approvingly. “Wow, nice. Good for you. Does he have a six-pack? I bet he does. God, he’s so vain I bet he never eats carbs.” She was talking a mile a minute.
“Yes, he has a six-pack. And yes, he eats carbs. Pancakes at least. He even cooks them. Can we end the inquisition before I die of embarrassment?”
“Wait, is this why you’re so tired all the time suddenly?”
It was true Grace hadn’t been getting much sleep. Since last weekend she had been totally distracted by Zach. Not only that, she had been going to regular meetings in his office. He wasn’t kidding about bending her over his desk and fucking her in the middle of the workday. It was massively hot and it turned out Zach had many fun ways to keep her quiet. She knew it was bad. Enough to get them both fired. It felt so good though, she didn’t want to stop.
The unfortunate downside was that it was busy season, and she had an overwhelming amount of work to do already, and now she was spending precious time having sex or thinking about having sex with Zach. So she kept having to work late into the night to finish everything on time.
“I’ve been working a lot,” she said by way of explanation.
Jessica eyed her suspiciously. “Oh yeah, I’m sure you have been ‘working a lot.’”
Grace changed the subject quickly, before she could ask any follow-up questions. “How was your show last weekend?”
“It was great,” Jessica said. “Ivy, our singer, set her wig on fire for the finale. She didn’t realize it was real hair though, and the show was in a basement. The whole place stunk so bad they had to shut it down.”
Grace laughed, relieved that hadn’t been her weekend. “That doesn’t sound great.”
Jessica laughed too. “No, it was. We were covering ‘Like a Virgin,’ but like, a metal version. The crowd loved it. And at the end of the song, Ivy goes off on this speech about how virginity is a social construct and everyone is freaking out cheering and shit, and then she sets her wig on fire and they lost their fucking minds. It was incredible.”
“That sounds crazy,” Grace said, shaking her head. Jessica was so nonchalant, as if this was a perfectly normal way to spend one’s Saturday night. She admired Jessica’s ability to compartmentalize. She worked the stuffiest corporate job imaginable yet kept her identity as a radical feminist punk guitarist like it was the most natural thing in the world. The only hint at her other life was the Georgia O’Keefe flower tattoo on her forearm that sometimes peaked out from under her suit jacket. “Wasn’t she afraid she’d burn herself?”
“Well, she took the wig off,” Jessica said, as if that explained everything. “Have you gotten your dress for Apex yet?”
“I think I’m going to wear one I already have,” Grace said. She had two floor-length dresses leftover from her CEO days.
“You’re so fancy. I don’t think I’ve worn a floor-length gown since prom. What’s it look like?”
“It’s navy, off the shoulder, fitted through the hips,” Grace said.
“Sounds sexy. You trying to impress someone?” Jessica raised an eyebrow suggestively.
Grace blushed at being caught. Impressing Zach was exactly what she’d planned on doing. “I’m making it sound sexier than it is. It’s actually kind of plain. Have you found one yet?”
“I haven’t even looked yet,” Jessica said, waving a hand dismissively. “I’ll probably swing by Barney’s on the way there to pick something up.”
Grace shook her head. “That would give me a panic attack.”
“Well, we all have to get our thrills somewhere,” Jessica said, digging into her salad. “And we can’t all fuck the hot mentor.”
* * *
Zach
Zach was feeling so good, he decided to walk the forty blocks home from work. There was a spring in his step there never used to be. Fucking Grace was truly life changing. The sky was bluer and the city was cleaner and the world seemed to be smiling at him. He didn’t know life could be this easy. This carefree.
He had thought he was happy before. He was making truckloads of money. Going out every weekend. Could take any woman he wanted home with him. He hadn’t realized what was missing. Grace had unlocked an entire part of himself he didn’t know existed. He wanted to be with her all the time, take her places, show her everything. Take care of her. It felt weird, but it felt good.
By the time he finally made it all the way down to his block, he was sweating. Walking seemed like a good idea when he left the office, but he had forgotten just how far it was. He was relieved to spot his building, visions of a cool shower playing through his head. But when he got to his building, he stopped dead.
Down the block someone was crossing the street towards him. A cocky gait he’d recognize anywhere, because it was exactly the same as his own. It was the first time he laid eyes on Derek in six months. The longest they’d ever been apart. It was almost a relief to see him. From a distance, he could mistake him for the old Derek. The one who made judges laugh at the bench and brought back bagels and coffee on his way home from Sunday morning workouts.
As he got closer, his features came into focus. He looked terrible. His face was hollow, skin stretched thin over his cheekbones, patchy beard growing like moss on his chin. His nose was sunburnt. It was unsettling to see the warped, drug-ravaged version of his own face.
Derek waved, as if this was some chance encounter. He was wearing baggy khaki pants held up with a string belt. There was a time, not so long ago, that Derek wore a larger size jacket than Zach because his shoulders were so jacked from CrossFit.
“Hey bro,” Derek said casually, once he was in earshot. “Your nose looks different. Did you do something to it?”
Any relief at seeing his brother drained out in an instant, replaced with barely controlled rage. He gritted his teeth. “Your drug dealer friends broke it when they paid me a visit.”
Derek was unruffled by this information. “Ah, yeah. Sorry about that.” He jangled the change in his pocket.
“Get the hell out of here, Derek.” How dare he show up, acting like nothing was wrong.
“I thought things might be different, now that you’re not ignoring me anymore,” Derek said, wounded. He was even farther off the deep end than Zach thought if this was going to be a happy reunion. “I thought maybe we could hang out sometime.”
“You’re delusional,” Zach spat. He didn’t give a shit if he hurt Derek’s feelings. “The only reason I got involved in this whole mess is because you sent some drug dealer you owed money to beat the shit out of me. And now I’m going back to cutting you off. Bye.” Zach headed for the door of his building
“Why do you want me to fail?” Derek whined. He knew exactly how to push Zach’s buttons, and Zach fell for it every single time. He stopped on the first step of the stoop and turned to look at Derek, incredulous. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. The ungrateful shithead.
“Are you kidding me?” Zach shouted. “You stole the money I was using to pay off your debt. I blew a hundred grand in the past two weeks on you.”
“Oh, that’s right. Saint Zach, I forgot,” Derek said, disgusted.
The door to Zach’s building opened and his downstairs neighbor, a bookish reporter for the New York T
imes, emerged. Zach ignored him. “I can’t believe you,” he shouted. “You have no idea what I’ve done for you, you fucking junkie. You’re just like mom.” It was the most hurtful insult he could think of.
The neighbor scurried down the block with his head down, purposefully avoiding the shouting match on the sidewalk.
“Don’t you say that.” Derek was raving like a lunatic, getting up in Zach’s face. “I’m nothing like Debbie. Nothing like her. I’m just going through a rough patch. And you don’t even care enough to help me.”
Zach threw his hands up. “I helped you a hundred thousand dollars,” he roared.
“You want me to grovel at your feet or something? I don’t need money, I need my brother. What happened to you?” Derek spat.
“Nothing happened to me. You’re the one who screwed everything up and only comes back when you need money. We had everything. Everything was perfect, and you couldn’t handle it. You dropped the ball, and now you’re trying to drag me down with you.”
Derek laughed. “Are you fucking delusional? You are exactly the same as me. You just don’t have ethical standards at your job. You’d have lost your license years ago if you were a lawyer.”
Zach rolled his eyes. “Oh here we go again.” He couldn’t stand when Derek pulled the lawyer card. He always acted like being a lawyer was the pinnacle of human achievement. It has been almost a year since he’d been disbarred. After that, there was no saving him. “You’d have been fired from McDonald’s by now.”
“Is this about your girlfriend? It used to be you and me against the world. And now you won’t even let me inside your apartment.”
Zach’s heart turned to stone. “Leave her out of this. I don’t have a girlfriend,”
“What are you doing all over town with that little slutty librarian, Grace, then?”
Zach could have snapped his neck right there. He had no right to even say her name. Any last tidbit of self-control disappeared. In his blind rage, the only option Zach saw to ensure she couldn’t ever be used as human collateral again was to lie, and make Derek think she was worthless to him.
“She’s no one. Just some girl from work I’ve been fucking for fun.” It made him even angrier that Derek was making him say these things. He shoved Derek in the chest, and he fell to the ground.
“You sure seem to be making a lot of ga-ga eyes at her for not caring about her,” Derek said. He didn’t move to get up.
“Have you been following me?” He was wild with rage. He just wanted it all to stop. He’d say anything to get rid of him. “I told you, she’s no one. Joe gave her my best prospects. I’ve been hate-fucking her as revenge. She doesn’t mean anything to me.” It was almost physically painful to say the words.
He silently willed Derek to get up, throw just one punch so Zach could feel justified kicking his ass so bad he sent him to the fucking hospital. He kicked him in the stomach, and Derek let out a puff of air and curled into a ball, hamming up his role as the victim.
Zach shook his head. Pathetic.
Derek’s lip curled into a triumphant smile. It reminded Zach of a night, years ago, when Derek was fresh out of law school and Zach was climbing the ranks at Sterling, when they ended up on a yacht with all these rich Russians who were doing coke and smoking cigarettes and taking their clothes off all over the place. On the dance floor with a bunch of girls who looked like models, someone shook a magnum of Dom and sprayed it all over the ceiling so it was raining champagne. Derek had looked at Zach with the exact same expression and said, “We’re going to run this fucking town.”
Curled like a grub on the sidewalk, with that same, superior glint in his eye, Derek was suddenly calm. “Wow, dude, that’s messed up,” he said. “That’s cold even for a heartless bastard like yourself.”
He had baited Zach into saying all this awful shit. Into acting like the angry, crazy one. Then acted all superior. Zach lunged for him. They were both on the ground, grabbing at each other’s limbs, rolling around like they were wrestling on the floor of Debbie’s apartment. They weren’t even fighting, not really. Not throwing punches. Zach wasn’t sure what he was even trying to do except hurt Derek. Then one or both of them was bleeding. There was a strangled noise like an animal, and Zach realized it was him. He was crying. He hadn’t cried in years, but tears were streaming down his face and he wasn’t even sure why.
Suddenly Derek was standing over him, sneering. He knew he’d won, something like pity and disgust in his eyes. “Enjoy dying alone, asshole,” Derek said.
“Like you’ll live to see it,” Zach spat. He didn’t move to get up, too exhausted to go after him. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be, none of it. And it fucking sucked.
Derek dusted off his filthy pants and walked away without another word. So typical. Zach was having a perfectly fine day, actually enjoying life for once until Derek came and ruined everything, and somehow he was the one left looking like a violent jerk.
He noticed for the first time a woman nearby on the sidewalk in booty shorts and flip-flops, legs covered in scabs. She was holding up a cell phone pointed directly at him. Even worse, Derek threw his arm around her, and she lowered the phone and stuck her tongue out at Zach. They walked away together, and Zach’s stomach sunk. She had been filming them. Shit.
* * *
Grace
On the train home from work, Grace was reading a book on her phone when she got a text message from a number she didn’t recognize. It was a video. She was about to delete it, thinking it was spam, but the preview image made her pause. She looked closer and realized it was Zach’s brother yelling at someone. The subject of his anger had their back to the camera, but she didn’t need to see the face to know who it was.
He was wearing the same emerald-green suit as he had been at work that day, and something about his stance was instantly recognizable.
She knew the smart thing to do would be to delete it. There was no way Zach would want her to see this. He made a pointed effort to keep her at arm’s length from his family drama, especially since the whole kidnapping incident.
After meeting Derek, however briefly, she couldn’t picture the two brothers together. They seemed so different. Her curiosity got the better of her. She tapped play. The sound was off, but she could see Derek screaming and pointing his finger in Zach’s face. Zach threw his arms up and got up in Derek’s face. Whatever was happening, he was furious at Derek.
Zach shoved Derek and he fell to the ground. Don’t start a fight, she willed video-Zach. Derek said something else, and Zach exploded with rage, kicking Derek hard in the stomach when he was already down. She grimaced. She didn’t like to think about this side of him. Volatile. Mean. She looked out the train window.
Why the hell did this random number send this video to her? And why was anyone filming in the first place? She plugged her earbuds in, hoping sound would enlighten her.
“She doesn’t mean anything to me,” Zach was saying. Her heart dropped. She was already making up contorted explanations for why he would say that. Maybe the video was old. Maybe they were talking about someone else. It was narcissistic to assume he was referring to her.
She backed the video up to the beginning and watched all of it with the sound on. It got worse with every second that passed. She felt it in her whole body when Derek said her name. And then the things Zach said about her. After all this time, she was still stunned at how cruel he could be. It was like he knew her exact insecurities and exploited them. It was deluded to think he had miraculously changed. At the end of the video, Zach was on his knees on the sidewalk, looking devastated and lost, his face streaked with tears. The person filming the video laughed. Then it started auto-playing from the beginning again. She pulled the slider forward to watch the worst part again, turning the knife in the wound, like it might be different this time. She made herself watch it again, punishment for being so stupid, so trusting. Tears welled up and blurred the video by the third viewing.
She ripped the
earbuds out. She never should have trusted him. He had shown her exactly who he was from the first moment she met him. He didn’t try to hide the fact that he hated her. That he was a selfish asshole. He had never given her any reason to believe he had good intentions.
For some idiotic reason, she had trusted his poor-me act. It was the first time she had opened up to someone since GiveAnalytics went under. Since her CFO betrayed her. And she ended up the butt of Zach’s sick joke. Revenge for “stealing” his commission. Or giving away his address. It didn’t really matter. It was her worst nightmare. Here she was getting all into it, letting him spank her and asking him to tie her up, meanwhile he was probably laughing at her.
But what about the cabin? That weekend he was so loving. So protective of her. And he paid fifty thousand dollars to a drug dealer to rescue her. That must mean something, right? Or maybe he was just pissed off that his conquest got kidnapped. Even more sickeningly, maybe he felt entitled to fuck her after paying all that money for her, like a prostitute.
She actually agreed with Derek—Zach was a heartless bastard. She was crying for real now, despite her efforts to hold it together. She was the woman crying on the train. Over Zach. How pathetic. At least New Yorkers had the decency to leave someone the hell alone when they were crying in public. It was the one thing she could thank them for doing right.
A text message from Jessica popped up.
Jessica: Dude, WTF. Are you okay?
She blinked at the message, confused. Jessica couldn’t possibly know about the video unless… With a fresh wave of despair, she checked the message again, and realized it had been sent in a group message. She scrolled through the list, horrified. The whole class of fellows was on it.
They’d never respect her now. She would never make it to the level at Sterling she needed to pay her parents back. The bros would think she was trying to sleep her way to the top. Or that she was such a doormat with such little self-respect she would fuck any guy who’d have her, including one who obviously hated her guts. The worst part was that it was true. She had really been beginning to think she and Zach might have a future together. He had been so different the past few weeks. She thought he really had feelings for her.