The elevator doors slide open. Conrad still hasn’t said a word. As the elevator begins to rise something feels different. It’s either going faster or slower than usual. Or, I notice when the doors open, it’s stopping on a different floor.
This room could not be more different than Conrad ’s office. It looks like the den at a ski lodge. The walls are covered in dark wood. A fire is going in a stone fireplace. I realize that every room in the building might be some sort of adult playground. Conrad is sitting in a chair by the fire looking at a book that is propped open on an ottoman. I reach for a joke, something witty, but when he looks up at me, my breath catches in my throat. “Come here,” he says.
As if my body is not my own, I walk towards him. He picks up the book and sets it aside. “Sit.” He pats the ottoman. I should stop him. I should stop this. But I don’t. I set my bag on the floor and I sit. Facing him. He’s only three feet away. He reaches out and grabs the sides of the ottoman, pulling it—and me—closer. Now it’s only two feet. No, less.
Conrad moves out of the chair and kneels. He leans towards me and I open my legs to legs to let him get closer . He puts a hand on my shoulder, but his hand is so large that it feels as if it ’s covering my entire chest. He squeezes lightly and something in me moans. In a quick motion, he raises his palm from my skin so that only his fingertips are touching me.
“You shouldn’t have left me there,” he says. “And now I need to touch you. But I think you’ll let me.”
I can ’t say anything in return because he is close enough to kiss me. He presses his lips against mine and puts a hand in my hair. He lightly pulls my head back so I have to look into his eyes. I know that in this moment I will do anything he asks. Anything he wants. This is not me but it feels so good that maybe stepping out of myself for a while isn’t a bad thing. He moves back in, parting my lips. Our tongues dance around each other and then he withdraws, getting to his feet. It feels like I could come at any second, and we’ve barely touched each other.
I can see how hard he is through his pants. Instinctively, I reach out and unzip him. I put my hands on the backs of his thighs and guide him towards me. I would say it’s like an out of body experience as I reach through his fly and put my palm against that massive cock, but I’m nothing but body right now. His hand is back in my hair, tightening, pulling me closer.
But no. It ’s actually pulling me the other way. What the hell is he doing? I look up at him, up, up, up, and it’s the most annoying thing in the world to see that he’s smiling. I can tell he wants this as badly as I do, I can see it in his pulsing body.
“That’s enough for now,” he says. “I’m kind of tired. I don’t think I want to work tonight after all. You can sleep on the couch.”
“Are you fucking serious?” I say. My voice is throaty, husky, full of a wanting that is so desperate it almost hurts.
“Oh, I am, Maya. You haven’t earned that yet. We’ll see what happens. Feel free to use that change of clothes however you want. There’s a refrigerator over there. If I change my mind about anything, I’ll come back down in a bit and check on you.” He winks and gets on the elevator. Goddamn him.
Chapter Ten - Conrad
Any time you show someone that they can get the upper hand on you, guess what they’re going to do? You got it. It’s not just in business, either. You can’t afford to let people score a point without getting one back. Now Maya knows it. I know she’s down there right now, squirming, wishing that I were all over her. Don’t get me wrong, it would be nice. Even the kiss was intense. But I’m in charge here and she needs to remember that. I can’t let anyone else run the laboratory.
I turn off the light and sleep like a baby.
In the morning, I go back down to check on her. She didn’t call 911 or run through the room shrieking, so she must not have felt like a captive. When I step out of the elevator into her room, though, I’m surprised to see that she’s sitting at a table, writing in a notebook. She looks up and nods. “Conrad, I trust you slept well?”
Is this a joke? Why is she suddenly talking like a British governess?
“Yeah, I slept fine. And you?”
“Not so good,” she says. “Not that it’s your problem.”
“Yeah, well. Sometimes the world is mysterious. So listen, I need to do something different today. We’re getting out of here for a while. If you can swing it, it’s going to take about two weeks. Part of the project.”
She nods again. “What do I need?”
“You’ll tell me. For now, bring your bag. Once we’re there I’ll get you sorted out. Oh, do you have any problems with flying?”
30 minutes later we ’re on top of the building. We board the helicopter and Maya grips my knee as Mike takes us up into the sky. She’s not scared, but she isn’t comfortable. Good. Comfort leads to complacency. Mike takes us 15 minutes outside of town, up into the mountains. I have him land at the helipad near the cabin where we’re going to spend the next few days.
“Do I even need to ask if this is yours?” she says.
“Only if the muse moves you,” I say, taking my bag out of the helicopter.
“What are we doing here?” she says.
“Research. More research.”
“Like last night?” she says. I hear the mixture of hope and irritation in her voice. Perfect. Let her keep smoldering. It’ll be more fun when she finally blows her top. So far everything is going according to plan.
“ We ’ll see,” I say. We go inside and set our stuff down in the foyer. The cabin belonged to my father. Lots of people say they need a way to “get away from it all,” but dad meant it. He proved it. This cabin traverses the boundary between isolation and solitude.
“It’s gorgeous,” says Maya. “How long are we going to be here?”
“Two weeks, if I’m right about certain things. But how long can you afford to be here?” I say. “We might be hiding out for a while. That wild cop is still out there looking for me, you know. I need to lay low.”
Maya rolls her eyes. “Conrad, seriously. What are we doing here? Can we just talk like adults for a few sentences? Without riddles?”
“Yes. Yes, we can. We really are here to do some research, Maya. That doesn’t mean it’s all going to be doom and gloom, or fun and games. There will probably be some of both.” I thought about how it had felt when she reached into my pants. “But right now I want to take a quick nap. I’ll explain some things to you later. Your bedroom is to the right at the top of the stairs. If you want to go for a walk or sit outside there’s a pond in back. It’s impossible to miss. Before we start working tonight, there’s something I need you to think about for me.”
“And what might that be?”
“I need you to think about whether someone can actually learn to become a good person.”
That catches her off guard. She ’s always prepared to respond to something flippant with something brassy. She’s not as good at handling sincerity. When people are off balance, that’s when you really need to watch them.
Before she can say more I go to my room and lie down. I got plenty of sleep last night, but something about her takes it out of me. In a good way. But when I get in bed my eyes won’t shut. I think about the first time I saw her. She has no idea that she was there when a piece of the old me died.
I ’ve spent so many nights in this room. I miss my dad. I can admit it. We understood each other. When you have as much as I do, the ability to make small talk with people disappears. It’s tough to know what people want from you, but they all want something. So many people act as if we’re great pals, but in the end, they always ask for something. It sounds like such a cliché, but is it so wrong that I want to know that someone wants me because I’m me, and not because of what I have?
Well, Maya wants something I have. More than one thing, in fact. That ’s not a bad thing. She’s here because she’s curious. She’s here because she’s part of my story. She doesn’t even know.
But she w
ill. Tonight, she will. And it ’s going to feel good to get a few things off my chest.
Chapter Eleven - Maya
I go for the walk. I didn ’t sleep much last night and he damn well knows it. But I’m not going to give him the satisfaction of listening to me yawn all afternoon. It’s lovely out here. I can’t tell if I think it’s lonely or not. I wonder how often Conrad comes here, and what he gets out of it. Thoughts of him from last night rush in between every breath I take. I don’t know what the hell I’m doing here. I also don’t know how I’m supposed to get through the next few days without my stuff. I’ve got a toothbrush and my change of clothes. That’s about it.
The pond is the color of the cloudy sky. It ’s so quiet out here. You can get used to anything, and the background noise of the city barely registers to me anymore. Until I’m in a place like this, where I can actually hear the water stirring in the slight breeze. It’s the kind of place, and moment, that you want to share with someone. It’s been a long time since I’ve shared anything real with someone besides Angela. My most serious relationship had been with a guy named Ian. It was good but not great. Still, I thought we might wind up together. When Ian told me he was leaving me for someone else, I couldn’t believe it. It hurt, it always does, but once he was gone, it wasn’t just him that I missed. I thought about how we would never do certain things together again. Even if there were a million perfect moments in my future, there was no longer any guarantee that anyone would be there to share them with me. In a way, it felt like I had stopped existing, and I don’t mean that in the “You’re not complete without a man” way. But other people prove to us that we’re here.
Which brings me back to here. Where is here? What are we doing? I feel like I’ve been waiting my whole life for a real mystery. Now I’ve got one. Of course, the mystery could turn out to be why I let myself get talked into any of this.
There are ducks on the pond. I didn ’t see when they flew in, but now they’re drifting around in a lazy circle. Now I see a frog on the bank. It’s a regular wildlife party out here. But now I’m thinking about Conrad and his hands, and shoulders, and how he’s lying in a bed—or so he says—thirty seconds from where I sit. The real animal is in the cabin and I still don’t know what he wants from me.
I turn to look, half expecting to find him watching me from the upstairs window like a serial killer. But the window is empty. Conrad ’s not in his bed anymore, though, he’s walking down the trail towards me with a smile on his face.
“Here,” he says, handing me a bag of bread slices. Then he whistles.
“You can’t whistle for ducks,” I say. “They’re not like—”
At the sound of his whistle, the ducks turn and glide towards us. Shows what I know about ducks, I guess. “Wow, I say. You’re like the duck whisperer.”
“Maybe that’s the book you should write,” he says. “The Man Who Loved Ducks.”
I tear a few pieces of bread and toss the chunks into the water. The ducks go wild. They were obviously expecting this. “What makes you think that my book would be about you?”
“I think there’s a big role for you in it,” he says. Conrad sits in the chair next to me and sighs. Then he takes my hand. I turn my head to look at him, but he’s staring at the lake. I don’t take my hand away. Whatever this is, it’s a shared moment.
“Are you happy?” I say.
He laughs. “I’d have to be a pretty ungrateful, crazy bastard to say no, right?”
“Does that mean you’re a crazy, ungrateful bastard?”
He turns towards me. “The truth is, I’ve never been that interested in happiness. I’m not sure what it means. At least, that’s what I thought. I always had a plan. I always knew what was going to be next. So I executed the plan and I got what I wanted. Did that make me happy? I didn’t really think about it like that.”
“You’re talking about it in the past tense like something changed.”
Conrad smiles. He squeezes my hand. “Something has. Something did.”
“What was it?” The sun is starting to set behind him and it’s making his blond hair look like it’s on fire.
“That’s for me to know and you to find out,” he says, taking his hand away. “Now, you’re still my assistant. It just so happens that I need some assisting this evening.”
“After the stunt you pulled last time, you think I’m going to come anywhere near you?”
“Yes. I think you will. It’s my job to know what people are like.”
Whatever it is, it ’s a shared moment.
“Come on,” he says. “I’ve got a couple of things for you. Then we’ll eat. Then we’ll get to work.” He stands up and takes the bread from me, which I had forgotten about. He throws the slices into the pond like they’re Frisbees. The ducks rush back into the water in a quacking mob. I watch his broad back as he strides back to the cabin. There’s nothing to do but follow him. To see where this leads.
When I get inside, the kitchen table is covered in toiletry supplies. “I know we left quickly,” he says, “and I wasn’t sure how long we’d be here, so I had my pilot go into town and get some supplies for you.”
It looks like enough supplies to keep us here until Judgment Day. “So, we might be out here for like…a year?” Is this going to turn into a horror movie? Does he know something I don’t? Has the world I knew been destroyed by nuclear radiation and we’re the last people in the world?
“Not a year. We don’t have enough food for that,” he says, getting into the refrigerator. “But what we do have, I’m about to cook for you. So strap yourself in.”
As shared moments go, even if we ’re about to plunge into the apocalypse, there are worse ones than having a hot billionaire cook for you in a cabin. “I’m strapped,” I say. “But I still want to know what we’re doing out here. What are we working on?”
“Well,” he says, “ Isn ’t it obvious? We’re just trying to get to the bottom of it all?”
I ask him what in the world he ’s talking about. He happily ignores me.
Chapter Twelve- Conrad
Now that she ’s here, I’m having second thoughts about telling her. But I’m going to. She’s been more than patient with me. But first, I’m going to cook. She’s sitting in the living room reading something. I keep sneaking glances at her. I’m sure she knows. I'm worried about how natural this feels. This is what people do, right? They spend time at home together. They eat dinner. They talk. They reveal themselves.
I ’m not in the habit of revealing myself. What people know of me is what I show them, and it’s always a calculation.
While the steaks are cooking, I ask Maya to go into the wine cellar and pick whatever looks good to her. She comes back up with two bottles of red and astonishment on her face. I take a bow. I ’ve got a hell of a wine cellar. Then she goes back to her book and I finish cooking and set the table. After lighting two candles I call her in and pull out her chair for her. I have outdone myself, but right now I don’t understand it much better than she does. I did more than I needed to.
“So,” I say, after we ooh and aah our way into the steaks. “I have a bit of a confession to make.”
Maya takes a sip of her wine, holding my eyes over the rim of her glass. She isn ’t going to make this easy for me. She isn’t going to ask. She thinks she can outlast me, and maybe she’s right, for now.
“I wasn’t hiring for an assistant, although I really do want to write the book. The truth is…I put out that ad so I could meet you.”
She sets her glass down. “What? Why would you want to meet me?”
The fact that she has to ask means that she can’t see what I see. “Once I saw you on that video, I knew that you were someone I wanted to know. In person. This isn’t easy for me to say, Maya, but I feel like I already know you.”
“After one video, a couple of times together, and running out on me after getting me so horny?” She’s smiling, but she’s confused as well. Wary. Wariness is a sign of intellig
ence.
“That’s the other part of the confession. It wasn’t just that video. It was all of them.”
“Wait, you watched all of my videos?”
“As many as I could find.”
“Conrad, there are over five hundred hours of my lectures on Youtube.”
“Then yes, I’ve watched them all. Don’t you think you’re worth five hundred hours?” I’m starting to feel the wine. I’m starting to feel how she would feel in my hands. How she would taste on my tongue.
“I’m flattered. I think. But why did you watch them all?”
“Because of the way you talk. Because you’re trying to understand the world. Because it’s my job to understand what people are like, and how they fit together. And to know if they’ll fit together.”
“That’s all?”
“It’s enough. Most people just don’t care. They think that they live a passionate life because they have a favorite show. You aren’t like that. I couldn’t stop. I felt creepy, honestly, like I was a stalker.”
“Well, I put them online so people would watch them. That’s what they’re for. I just didn’t think that any playboy billionaires were going to be watching them.”
“You were saying things that I needed to hear.”
She takes another sip of wine. It ’s no secret that everyone looks good in candlelight, but she is angelic. Is it wrong to feel lust for an angel? Either way, it’s happening.
“And everything I know tells me that we’ll fit together,” he says.
She puts down her glass. “Okay. But now, Conrad, I need you to hear something from me. And I want you to really listen.”
“I’m listening.”
“Are you sure?”
Yes Sir Page 58