by C. D. Reiss
“Is everything all right with Paula?” I asked.
“Yeah. I mean, no.” He paused and took a deep breath. “We’ll figure it out.”
“Was it what we talked about? What she’d been saying about you?”
“I don’t want to hang too much on that. Just that she knows I know, and I’m sure she’s pretty mad at herself, which won’t make her easy to be around.”
“Do you want to go back and work it out with her? We’ll wait here.”
He turned his whole body in the tiny slice of space left on the twin bed, and looked at me over Nicole’s head.
“Really?” he said. “You’d stay here while I went back to make up with her?”
“Yes. It’s not that big a deal.”
He reached over Nicole and stroked my cheek.
“You trust me?”
“To what? Negotiate a reconciliation? Or keep it in your shorts?”
“Yes.”
“I’m sure I can find a cowbell around here somewhere.”
He smiled in the shadows. No cinematographer could have captured that moment better than my heart did.
“I bet,” he said. “If we got out of bed, she wouldn’t wake up.”
I slipped off the bed. He gently moved away, practically falling off.
Nicole shot up, looked at me with eyes half closed, then her dad.
“Where’s my pony?” she asked. I found it on the floor and gave it to her. She collapsed in a heap and was out like a light.
“I think we turned a corner here,” Brad said.
“I think so.”
He took my hand and pulled me out of the room. Down the hall, tiptoeing past a room where a man snored so loudly it sounded like a saw. We got to a door to the outside at the end of the hall.
“I’m in my nightgown,” I said, as if he couldn’t see my hips and hard nipples through the thin cotton.
“Not for long.”
He opened the door and took me to a rickety set of wooden stairs along the outside of the house. Clap creak clap clap, he didn’t say a word and didn’t leave me an opening to ask a question.
When we got to the bottom he picked me up, taking my breath away, saving my bare feet from the cold stones.
“Are you all right?” I asked when we got to a padlocked door. “What’s going on?”
“That house is too damned small.”
He turned the black disk on the padlock and popped it open. Swung the hinge and opened the door with a jerk. He dropped me inside.
The overhead light was dim, but I could see cobwebs and old movie posters on blue paint. Cardboard boxes were stacked everywhere, but I could discern the shape of a bedroom under them. A desk with boxes under and over. Loft bed with no mattress. A dresser with boxes on top and in front.
“When they said it was storage they meant it,” I said.
He faced me, and I knew why he wanted to be away from the house. Bathed in intensity, glowing with desire, he was a man on a mission.
“I’m not spending another night in bed with you unless you’re naked.”
I felt naked already, the way he was looking at me. My nipples stuck out of the nightgown, and my clit had just started to throb.
He brushed his hands over my breasts, feeling the tips. “All day, I wanted you. You sat down by the bluff, and I saw that little bit of skin over your waistband.”
“You were a gentleman.”
“Not anymore.” He pinched a nipple through the nightgown, and I groaned. My spine turned to jelly. It was easy for him to turn me around so I faced a stack of boxes. My body had no will of its own when he bent me over. I even hissed out a “yes . . .”
He picked up my nightgown in one swift motion, exposing my ass to the air.
“This is mine.” He ran his fingers over my slickness, slipping two inside me. I groaned. He took them out and put a third finger in, stretching me. “You ready to get fucked?” He pushed inside me as deep as he could.
I couldn’t see him take his dick out, but I knew he was, and I felt it on my cheek as he stroked my lower back.
“Take me,” I said. “Please.”
“You’re so hot. Such a sexy girl. You make me so hard.” He slapped my ass, and the sting made me shudder.
I pushed into him and he countered. Three strokes and he was deep. When he’d gone down to the root, he grabbed my hair and pulled.
“This what you want?”
“Harder.”
“Touch yourself. Make yourself come, and I’ll fuck you so hard you crack.”
He planted his hands on my hips. I reached between my legs, for my clit, his dick, feeling the way he moved inside me.
“Cara,” he whispered, sucking air in. The tenderness of his call the opposite of the way he fucked me.
He bit the back of my neck as I came, holding me up as I lost control of my body. I bit back his name, turning a scream into a deep breath and a grunt.
He pulled out of me, but held me still by the hair. Then he marked my lower back with his come, softly saying mine mine mine as if he was trying to convince himself it was true.
CHAPTER 57
CARA
“I decided something.” Brad pushed me against the wall outside the room where Nicole slept. He kissed me and felt my body through the nightgown. We whispered together after midnight, but I still worried about waking someone.
“You shouldn’t make decisions right after sex.”
“I made it during.”
“Even worse.”
“I need you. You’re staying.”
“You cannot pay me and bed me at the same time.”
“I’m only paying you for the hours I’m not fucking you.”
“Are you serious?”
“Dead serious.”
“No. That’s—”
“Good. It’s decided. I’m going to sleep on the living room floor. See you in the morning.”
He stepped back, looked me over from head to toe, and walked down the hall.
“Brad,” I said quietly. He slowed. “Do you trust Paula to be at your house while you’re here? Since the fight, I mean?”
“Stop thinking about this. You’re freaking out for nothing.”
I didn’t agree with him at all. I thought there was plenty to freak out about. His daily routines. His lists and tasks. Everything she did, which was so very much.
Pushing him was going to get me nowhere though. His breathing had already gotten slow and shallow. If he was letting go, I could let go.
“Good night, Brad.”
“Good night, teacup.”
CHAPTER 58
CARA
Brad and I had spent two days and two nights together. I met his friend Buddy, cooked with his mother, took Nicole on long walks around town. We took her to the ice cream shop in the afternoon, after the playground, where Brad sat with me and talked about his childhood and his family.
“I can’t believe how smart she is,” he said of his daughter as she climbed the play structure. “She’s reading. And stop telling me it’s normal.”
“It’s normal,” I said. “Between five and eight.”
He took me by the chin. “She’s exceptional.”
“She is. But her reading level’s in the normal range.”
When he held my chin like that I melted into a hot puddle. He was so close to kissing me, brushing his thumb along my jaw, his face softening a little bit. I didn’t know when he’d stopped being a star to me, when I stopped seeing his real face and his movie/billboard/magazine face at the same time, but he was more gorgeous without the mental backdrop of celebrity.
“No touching in front of the little one,” I said softly. “Later, you can finish that thought.”
“I’ll finish that and a few more.” He dropped his hand.
The past few days had been perfect, and I knew it was because I’d allowed them to be. I let Brad be Brad, and I let myself drop any pretense that I was upholding a standard of behavior. He didn’t treat me like a nanny, a
nd I didn’t act like one. I just let it go.
Maybe being outside Los Angeles made it easier. Maybe it was his determination that whatever we had wasn’t a fling. Maybe he just wore me down. But I didn’t pretend I didn’t have feelings for him. I didn’t get suddenly stupid or unrealistic. I knew we had to go back. I knew people were going to talk, and my job prospects were about to shrink to the size of a studio executive’s attention span.
Late at night, after he took me in the garage night after night, lying in the bed next to that beautiful little girl, I worried so much I shook. My heart skipped and twisted, and the pain in my chest seemed unbearable. I couldn’t breathe. I didn’t want to go back home, and I couldn’t stay. How many more days would this last? How long before I was in the cold with no job, no Brad, and no Nicole?
I’d done everything I could to avoid this happening, and here I was, in Arkansas, falling in love with a celebrity daddy and his daughter.
Late at night, with the crickets and the breeze outside, and Nicole’s breathing next to me, I panicked.
But in the morning, whether I’d slept or not, I felt at peace. I was living a lie, but it was my lie and if I didn’t live it, who would? I dressed Nicole and brought her downstairs. I let myself be affectionate with her. I smiled at Brad with the fullness of our shared secrets. I lived the way I wanted to live, realizing finally that even when this all ended I’d learned something. I learned what I wanted. I wanted a home, a family, and a man to call my own. And when I was with him, I could pretend that life was with Brad Sinclair, not the movie star, but the man.
The only boundary I maintained was with Nicole. She couldn’t see the physical affection. We needed plausible deniability to protect her from hurt.
“As long as we have her back for school, I have no objection.” I stroked his face in the garage. He’d set blankets out over the desk and fucked me on it in the dark. We’d taken the questions of our relationship in small bites, hammering out a plan in pieces.
“I may be in Thailand a month after you leave.”
“You won’t. It’s monsoon season. Two weeks tops.” I held up two fingers and he kissed them. “If we make it that far—”
“We will.”
“When we come to that bridge . . . I can’t even say it.”
“I’m going to call you my girlfriend. You’re going to find another job if you want. You’re going to see Nicole every night when you come over. Everything’s going to be normal.”
“You’re a real optimist.”
“Only when I’m with you.”
CHAPTER 59
BRAD
I’m dyslexic. Seriously dyslexic. It would be funny if you could see what I saw, but you’d never laugh. I’m sorry I never told you, but outside my family, no one knows but Paula and Mike. I wasn’t ready, and now I am. Because I love you.
And I hid your phone because I was trying to keep something else from you.
You can hate me for this shit, but I love you, and I’m not letting you go.
Everything sounded ridiculous and hammy. I played the admissions over and over, trying to make myself look good, then look bad, then more honest and self-effacing. In the end I was just going to say what needed saying, and I’d see how she reacted.
But Paula, she was a loose end. I had to put some ointment on that. She’d been good to me for a lot of years, and yeah, she’d had ideas about me, and said things that weren’t particularly true, but I wouldn’t hold them against her.
With Cara, Nicole, and Susan’s youngest in the front yard blowing soap bubbles, I texted Paula from the porch, speaking softly but clearly into my voice dictation app.
—Are you all right?—
—You led me on a lot of years—
Led her on? Not even a little. I didn’t touch her, didn’t wink at her, didn’t do anything. I’d put a lot of effort into not saying a single sexy thing or flirting even a little because I needed her to work for me, and here she was turning that into the exact opposite.
—You know that’s not true—
—I am not a stupid woman. I know how to read you—
This was ridiculous. I called her from the front yard. She picked up on the first ring.
“Paula, what’s happening? You’ve gone off the rails.”
“I’ve decided to tell you something, Bradley. I don’t care about anything right now but telling you this.”
I was sure I didn’t want to hear it, and I was sure I had no choice but to listen.
“All right.”
“I’ve been with you for years. Since everyone learned their letters in first grade and you just didn’t. No one knows you like I do. All these people in the business, like you call it, they don’t know who they’re talking to. I do. And all that time ago when we split up, I let it happen because I thought you needed time to sow your oats. Now I think you’ve sown enough. I think it’s time for you to just settle down.”
And there it was, on the line, person to person. Shit-and-butter-covered-biscuit . . . I was not prepared for this at all.
“No,” I said. “I love you, Paula, but not that way. You’re loyal and steady. I respect you. But I don’t feel what you want me to feel. I’m sorry.”
I wanted to crawl into a hole like a little brown gopher. Just disappear into the dirt. I didn’t want to hurt her. She didn’t deserve to be humiliated. I stayed on the phone for what felt like the longest pause in the history of awkward pauses, and I just prayed Nicole would be amused by the bubbles long enough not to interrupt that horrible pause.
“Paula?”
“I stayed by you,” she answered.
“I know.”
“I was waiting for you to wake up. Grow up. All that time. All the things you did.”
“What did I do?”
“I smiled through all of it.”
“Paula. What is it you think I did?”
I heard her take a deep breath, and I didn’t interrupt.
“We were on a plane to Dublin to shoot Everly,” she said.
“Sure. The Delta flight. What’s the—”
“No.” She cut me off. “The one after. The first time you flew first class and you were a smiling fucking rube when they gave you a hot towel. The flight attendant performed oral sex on you in the galley.”
Right. I was that guy. I was the guy who thought he needed to rack up conquests and movies. I hadn’t been the guy in Redfield watching my daughter and my girlfriend (could I call her that?) blow soap bubbles with my nieces and nephews.
“I don’t remember what you’re talking about,” I said, watching Nicole jump for a huge bubble and miss.
“I do,” Paula said. “You barely paid attention, which was exactly what Ken wanted. You were looking at her bottom, and I gave you the letter. I told you to read it, but I knew you’d barely try, like always.”
Her voice was a soup of rage and hurt. I’d ripped the rug of her life right out from under her. She was already off balance from Nicole, and I’d been a shitty friend.
“What did it say?”
“I told you to read it and you pushed it at me and said, ‘Can you just tell me what it says?’ so I did, I read it to you and I told you to sign off on what Ken said was best and you did. You signed where I told you to and you went right off to get the stewardess to be disgusting in the bathroom.”
“What did it say?”
“I told you exactly what it said.”
“Tell me again.”
CHAPTER 60
CARA
Brad worked every day. He locked himself in the office/sewing room and worked on his script. I’d nannied for plenty of actors. I’d never seen one work that hard. The hours he put into preparation were far and away the most intense.
Susan came around a lot. She lived around the corner, and her mother babysat most days. The street was like an extended Sinclair campus.
I was sitting on the porch playing a matching card game with Nicole when a delivery truck pulled up.
“Hey,
” the guy said, carrying a box under his arm.
“Hi.” I stood up.
“You must be the girl Brad’s been taking around.” He had dark skin and a crisp white smile. Six two. Rippling muscles. In Los Angeles he’d be an actor or a model.
“I think you’re talking about Nicole.”
“Her too.” He smiled at the girl and handed me the clipboard. “How are you, Nicole?”
“Good.” She looked up from the memory game long enough to say, “I like your head.”
He laughed and put his hand on his bald skull. “Thank you.”
I signed for the package, and we traded the box and the clipboard, saying our good-byes. I looked at the label as I walked into the house. It was for me. I didn’t expect that. The return address was West Side Nannies, but no name. Also strange.
“What did he bring us?” Brad’s dad asked when I got to the kitchen.
“It’s for me, apparently.”
He pulled out a knife, wielding it with three fingers. “Let’s see.”
He slashed the tape, popping the box open. I looked in.
Books.
Dealing with Dyslexia
The Dyslexic Adult
I found a white letter-size envelope and opened it.
Cara:
I’m sure Brad has told you about his problem.
Now that I’m no longer his assistant, it’s important that someone take over helping him memorize his lines. These books will help you learn how.
I hope you’re happy with him.
Good luck,
Paula Blount
His problem. I should have seen that coming a mile away.
The way he was so happy Nicole could read without trouble.
The way he never read anything in front of anyone.
The slow, rote memorization of the script.
Paula taking care of everything.
More papers inside. Marked scripts. Flashcards with phonetic spellings.
“Paula,” I said to myself, identifying the sender to his parents. “Brad’s dyslexic?”