by Claire Adams
I was ready to try just about anything as long as it made what I was feeling in that moment to go away.
* * *
“No,” I said. “I’m sorry, but I’m just not interested. Maybe you don’t understand that. Maybe you don’t understand, but I really don’t feel comfortable with it.” I couldn’t believe we were having the conversation—and in public.
When I got to the hotel, I spotted Dean across the lobby. He motioned for me to follow him, so I did. When we got up to his room, he said he had to get a few things ready for some big meeting he was having the next morning, but asked if he could take me out to a nice dinner in a reasonably private setting. I was still insecure about eating in front of him, but he’d said the magic word: “private.” The restaurant was sparsely attended, that much was true, but still, he could have been quieter about asking what he was asking of me.
“If you try it,” Dean answered, “I bet you’ll find that you really enjoy it. I know it’s a little different than what you’re used to, but everyone I’ve met who’s tried it has had nothing but good things to say.”
“I have tried it, though, and it was the most painful, frustrating forty-five minutes of my life. I get that some people like it, but that doesn’t mean I do, or that I’m eager to try it again.”
“Look, if you don’t want to do it, it’s not like I’m going to make you or anything, but I really wish you’d just give it a try. I’ll walk you through the whole thing.”
“Oh, I think I have the basic idea. Not interested.”
He sighed. “All right,” he said finally. “Chess really isn’t that hard to learn, though. I bet you’d have me checkmated before the end of the night.”
“Would you mind if we just talked awhile?” I asked.
“Sure. What do you want to talk about?”
I took a breath. “I’m really not sure what this is,” I told him. “We established a few rules about the two of us when this whole thing started, but I have to tell you, this kind of has me thrown for a loop.”
“What’s that?” he asked, taking a bite of his dish, the name of which I couldn’t begin to pronounce. I knew it had something to do with duck.
“This,” I said, “dinner in public. I thought the whole idea was to be discreet.”
“Oh, nobody cares,” he says. “I just didn’t want you going out and spilling the whole affair to a tabloid or something.”
“I wouldn’t do that,” I told him.
“I know that now, but you have to remember, I didn’t know you when we had that conversation.”
“It’s not that I’m complaining or anything, but are you sure you’re not embarrassed sitting alone in here with me?”
“Why would I be embarrassed?” he asked, wiping his mouth with his napkin.
“You know exactly what I’m talking about. Don’t act like you don’t. It’s really not fair.”
“Marcy,” he said, setting his napkin on the table, “I really don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He was actually going to make me say it. Maybe I could just change the subject. “So what’s going on with the overseas account? I heard there was some sort of problem, but didn’t get any details about it.”
Dean raised an eyebrow at me. “It’s just a local issue with one of our factories in Italy,” he said. “It’s nothing to worry about. I won’t put you on the spot anymore while we’re here, but when it’s back to being just the two of us, I really would like to hear what has you acting so bothered.”
“Can’t we just go back to the hotel and have sex?” I was careful to say the words quietly, but it turns out people are naturally attuned to certain words. Judging by the wide-eyed looks from random patrons in the area, it appeared sex was one such word.
Dean was unflappable, though. It was somewhat disconcerting. “Well, we certainly can, but I think you made a good point the last time we got together. We really don’t know all that much about each other. For my part, I don’t see any reason why that has to be the case.”
“Yeah, about that,” I said, glancing down at my untouched plate of food. “I’ve had some time to think it over, and maybe it’ll be easier for both of us, you know, in the long run, if we don’t get too attached.”
“What is with you today?”
My first drug of choice wasn’t working, so I looked back down at my plate to the second. I was hungry, but my desire for the endorphins that come from a good meal was still wildly overshadowed by my growing fear of eating in public. It’s not like I used my hands or shoveled heaping mouthful after heaping mouthful into my gob, but people like the guys in the cafeteria were everywhere and the last thing I wanted to do was find out Dean was one of them.
“Do you not like your food?” he asked. “If there’s a problem with it, or if you’d like something else, I can always send it back.”
“The food’s fine,” I answered.
“You haven’t tasted it yet.”
“I mean it smells fine. It looks fine. I don’t know, maybe it was a mistake getting together tonight.”
“I don’t think so,” he said.
“How do you figure that one?”
“Well, the biggest problem you had with our arrangement was that we didn’t communicate. We’ve still got a ways to go because I don’t know what the hell is bothering you, but it’s kind of nice that you’re starting to relax enough to give me an idea about how you’re feeling.”
“Why didn’t you go to college?” I asked.
“What?” he returned. I was asking myself the same thing. I didn’t have a good answer, but it didn’t seem like one of those times I could just say, “Never mind,” and have the whole thing go away.
“You’re a very intelligent man, but you never went to college. You couldn’t have known you’d be a billionaire. Why risk everything on a business without a backup plan?”
“I always have a backup plan.” He took a sip of his wine. “If it’s all the same to you, I’d just as soon not talk about work and how I got into business and all that tonight. I’d much rather talk about more important things. For instance, did you know that chess was actually invented fifteen hundred years ago?”
Chess. He wanted to talk about chess. “It’s really a problem that I’m not interested in playing, isn’t it?”
“I wouldn’t say it’s a problem,” he answered, smiling. “I’ve just found it to be an especially effective tool for getting to know a person. After all, the game is literally built on breaking down each other’s defenses, and isn’t that what’s keeping you and me on opposite sides of the board in the first place?”
“You kind of lost me there at the end, but I think I get the point.” Ah, the futility of everything. He was trying—in his own way, I knew that he was making an effort to possibly get me past some of the insecurity that still dominated my life.
The problem was it wasn’t working. There I was, sitting across from the most gorgeous man I’d ever seen in real life, a man who also happened to be immensely successful, powerful, and to be frank, just phenomenal in bed; all the while, I felt more unsure of myself than ever. In that moment, I don’t know that anything would have changed that.
“Do you really want to know why I didn’t go to college?”
I looked away from the food growing cold in front of me and back at Dean. “If you don’t want to tell me, I’m not going to make a thing of it.”
“No, no,” he said. “I don’t think that. It’s really not all that interesting. My family was lower-middle class when I was growing up, and as soon as I turned sixteen, I had to get a job. I figured I was going to spend my life working in a grocery store or making cold calls. College seemed like a big waste of time, and an even bigger waste of money.”
“You had to know you were intelligent, though. I mean, you had to know that you could have done it.”
“I didn’t. Still, to this day, I worry about ending up back there. I know it’s never going to happen, but there’s a lot of ways I never really
left that place—not just the city, but the situation I grew up in.
“That’s not to say I had it worse than anyone else, it’s just when you’re around that kind of poverty, you see a lot of things you wish you hadn’t. I close my eyes now, and I can still see a lot of it. There are just some things that don’t go away, no matter how hard you try.
“When I designed my first commercial program, I didn’t think it would go too far. It was less flashy and more complicated than any other tax preparation software out there at the time. I figured it’d just be another thing to hang my hat on at the end of the day when I came home from whatever factory I happened to be working in at the time.”
I knew the feeling; the causality and the finer details were a lot different, but I knew what it was like to want to escape and not being able to do it. “So, that was really it, then?” I asked. “There was no big break from the heavens: you made your own break.”
He chuckled. “I guess you could put it like that.”
“What’s kept you single all this time?” I asked. “You have to have women coming up to you all the time, throwing themselves at you.”
He shrugged. “I never pay attention to that sort of thing.”
“There must have been at least a few women to make an impact like that, though. I don’t know, maybe I’m asking for a double-feature after only paying for popcorn. We don’t have to talk about it. I just can’t imagine someone like you not finding someone in all this time.”
One of the few things I’d picked up from Luke’s incessant whining rants about the company was that Dean had been married at one point. The marriage wasn’t on any public website or forum that I’d found, though. But Luke wasn’t the type to mix up details like that.
It was a trick question. Maybe I could get him to describe the woman who’d managed to tie him down and make some changes to my own life to be more like that. Maybe it wouldn’t keep the fling going indefinitely, but it might set me up in a better position in the future.
“It’s true, though,” he said. “I haven’t been in a serious relationship—at least not one that serious. I guess I’ve just been so focused on the company all this time, I kind of forgot to have a normal life.”
He was lying to me. Well, either he was lying to me or Luke had bad information, but why would my brother make something like that up? “Never?”
“I went to prom,” he said. “There were dances in high school, and I usually found a date and everything, but I don’t know that I’d call that serious.”
It was none of my business—and I knew that—but I didn’t know why he would lie about being married. Luke said the whole thing was a long time ago; it’s not like I was the mistress. He was probably just wrong, Luke. The other possibility was Dean was trying to keep me at arm’s length with one hand, while pulling me toward him with the other.
“What about you? Ever get the question or ask it yourself?”
“Pardon?” I asked.
“Have you ever been in a relationship that got that serious?”
I glanced back toward my plate and took my first bite of my meal. It probably would have been delicious if it were still warm. “Nope.”
He was lying to me. That was reason enough for me to do the same. A lot of what I was running from by moving in with Luke—in fact, the only reason I ever agreed to live with my brother in the first place—was a result of my last relationship.
Donny. He wasn’t the nicest guy in the world, or the best-looking, but who was I to judge? The problem with Donny was he was a violent drunk and a compulsive liar. From the first moment he threw a bottle at me during an argument while calling me a “fat, stupid bitch,” I should have known better than to stay with him, but I figured being with him was about the only way I’d ever find someone.
I’d gotten so used to being treated like I was worthless, I’d started to believe it, so I probably wasn’t as upset as I should have been when I found out Donny had stolen my credit cards and left town. The sad thing was I was so mortified by the whole situation I never got around to telling anyone about it. Anyone, that is, except for Luke.
Of course I was confident Dean wouldn’t be making a play for my pocketbook anytime soon, but the entire downward trajectory of my relationship with Donny started with a single, seemingly innocent lie. Maybe I was hyper-sensitive to that sort of thing, but after living under someone like Donny, knowing what it was like to have to make up ridiculous stories about why I had bruises all over me “this time,” hyper-sensitivity hardly felt like enough.
We didn’t speak much for the rest of the night.
Chapter Seven
Fugu
I was sitting at home, enjoying my first full day off in nearly a week. There wasn’t a lot to do around Luke’s house.
He had a TV, but no cable or satellite, no DVDs or Blu-rays. What he had was C SEED 201 television—201 is the size of the TV in inches: nearly seventeen feet of television, corner to corner—and stacks of old business tapes on VHS. I’m not going to lie, since I’d moved in with my brother, I’d watched every one of them, but that was for the lack of another option. I’d even offered to head out and buy a cheap DVD player with what little money I had in my pocket, but Luke insisted he didn’t want “any of that new-age voodoo” in his house.
I’d gone swimming in Luke’s pool three times that day, but I didn’t really feel like making it four. If I weren’t an unpaid intern, I might have been able to afford going out and doing something, but as it was, the meager stipend Luke gave me for personal expenses while I waited to be hired on full-time had to last. I’d asked Luke to borrow one of his cars one night about a week prior, telling him I wanted to go find something part time so I could afford to pay my own way, but he refused to entertain the notion.
He said what I was doing working as an unpaid intern was paying my dues. He said that once I got hired on, I’d be making more than I ever would at a gas station, or wherever else I could get on my own.
I told him it wasn’t really his place to tell me where I could and couldn’t work. He told me I was free to work wherever I wanted, just as soon as I was out of the house and back on my own.
Without Luke’s help, I was dead in the water. The whole thing was supposed to be a growing experience, or an exercise in learning to budget wisely, or “because I don’t want my neighbors seeing you get out of the car wearing a fast food uniform or something.” He gave me a lot of reasons, though I’m pretty sure that last one was the most accurate.
I’d been in and out of contact with Dean. Whatever was going on in Italy had taken over a great deal of his time; Luke’s, too. In fact, while I was sitting on my brother’s overstuffed couch, playing one of the low-rent games that came with my phone, he was burning lean calories as Dean’s point man on the issue. Luke was very proud of the phrase, but was still tight-lipped about the problem, itself.
I’d finally reached level 150 on the game I was playing—before I moved in with Luke, I didn’t know the game even had that many levels—when I heard the garage door open and close. I was going to get answers.
Dean’s lie to me in the restaurant may not have been so big a deal if it weren’t for the way he’d started acting toward me. Before, the only times we’d talk outside of work or the hotel were short texts, generally planning out when next to meet. Since dinner, though, he’d started calling me.
At first, it was a welcome surprise. He was just calling to let me know he wished we could get together, but “this thing at work” was eating up all of his time. I told him I understood, and I thought that was going to be the end of the conversation. Then he asked if I had a few minutes.
I was home from work and Luke was out on the town with some “business associates” (read as three drinking buddies and a sober driver) to blow off some steam, so I said, “Sure.”
“This is difficult,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about you. It’s been a while since I’ve actually felt the urge to call someone up just to let them know that.�
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“Thanks,” I answered. For about a second and a half, I waited to say anything in return. It was a miniature power play—not long enough a gap to make him actually uncomfortable, but long enough to pretend like I hadn’t had him on my mind in one context or another almost constantly since he first walked up to me in the club. “I’ve been thinking about you, too.”
We chatted more casually for a few minutes and that was the end of the call. A couple of days later, he called again and it was the same kind of thing. He said the problem was bigger than he’d originally thought, and he might have to cut ties with Italy completely. It was in that moment I realized software companies don’t have factories. Some do, if they manufacture actual goods, but as far as a strictly software approach, all that really had to be made was the packaging. I did a little research and found F&T did all that out of China and India. There was nothing on the company having any kind of substantial operation in Italy at all. Then the conversation turned again.
He said, “I want to figure out a time we can get together as soon as possible. I was thinking maybe we could do dinner again.”
It felt like we were moving from fantasy into something a little more real, but there was a lot he wasn’t telling me. Maybe there was an operation in Italy I couldn’t find, or maybe it was a cover. What bothered me is if it was a fabrication, then Luke was in on it, too. It wasn’t too hard to shrug that off, though. Even with my brother being who he was, I was still as far down the totem pole as a person can be and still technically work at the company. There was no reason for either of them to give me specifics.
By the time Luke pulled into the garage, I had already ignored a call from Dean. He’d left a voice message, saying that he could slip away for a few hours and gave me an address to a restaurant. He said he could send a car. It felt like he wanted more than a fling, maybe even some sort of relationship. It was the dream that had been drilled into me and every other girl in America since Disney started making movies: Do nothing out of the ordinary and one day a rich and powerful man will come and steal you away from your boring life, and you’ll never have to worry about spending time getting to know each other for it to work. The problem was I couldn’t trust his motivations.