I stumbled out to the kitchen, unsure if I was hungry or still nauseated, and almost walked into Lottie, who was pouring some red drink that looked suspiciously like vegetable juice. I hated vegetable juice. “Here,” Lottie said, pushing the drink toward me, “sip on this. It’s good for you. It’ll help you feel better.”
I smelled it. It was definitely vegetable juice. I grimaced but sipped from it anyway. Lottie had come back. If she had told me to drink rat poison, I would have. “You’re here.” Jesus, I had such a talent for stating the obvious.
My brain felt like it had been put through a mulcher, and I suspected I was staring at her stupidly, but I couldn’t stop. I had been so sure when she left last night that she was done with me; that I had hurt her so deeply she could never forgive me. And yet, she was here. And she didn’t even look like she wanted to kill me. I mean, she wanted me to drink vegetable juice, but I didn’t think that would kill me.
Lottie took my free hand and led me into the living room. Someone had brought a futon in while I was asleep. I swear to God, it was like living with furniture ninjas.
“Eric told me you were in pretty bad shape. I don’t think you’ve ever had a hangover. Maybe before we met, but not since.”
“No, not before either. Not like this.”
I sat down on the futon and Lottie sat next to me, eyeing the vegetable juice carefully to make sure I didn’t spill it. “Well, what the hell, Dietrich, were you trying to kill yourself?”
I should have immediately told her no, of course not, but I took too long to answer. “Dietrich,” Lottie said softly, “if you leave me, I will never forgive you.”
I looked at her, those big hazel eyes so full of love and concern, all of that anger and fury from last night gone. “You left me,” I said.
Tears pooled in her eyes. “Not by choice. I would never choose to leave you.”
“But what about last night?”
Lottie wrinkled her brow and if she hadn’t been so worried about me, she probably would have rolled her eyes, told me I was being silly, kissed me, smelled me, then ordered me to go take a shower. “Last night was a fight. I guess you’re right about some of this. Things are different now. I still don’t think you should have tried to push me away like that, but I forget how new this is for you still, how unbelievably confused you must be. So last night, I lost my temper and I’m sorry.”
To appease her, I took another sip of the vegetable juice and tried not to make a face. Why couldn’t she have brought me a sports drink? She had probably just grabbed what she had in her apartment; Lottie actually liked this shit.
I turned her words over and over in my mind; what did she mean that I was right? Was she giving up on this idea that she could be just my dead fiancée? I wanted to ask her but I didn’t want to fight with her again. I didn’t want to fight with her like that ever again. Things are different now.
But there was also something in that argument last night about her past, about her life before she became Lottie, about the life she rarely talked about and even when she did, I suspected she was hiding so much more than she was telling me.
“What happened to you? Before coming here.” I didn’t know if she was serious about me never saying her name again. If so, this was going to make future conversations extremely challenging.
I half-expected her to get defensive or to try to change the subject or to tell me it was none of my business or it was all in the past, a different past so we shouldn’t worry about it anymore, but she never looked away from me or indicated she was going to do any of those things. “Dietrich, promise me something first.”
She should have known I would have promised her anything. “Ok.”
“Don’t do anything like this again. I can’t lose you. Not again.”
“Lottie,” I whispered. A stinging sensation behind my eyes threatened to make them brim with tears, but I did not cry. I never cried. I set the vegetable juice down and took her hand, kissing each of her fingers, and promising her, over and over, I would never leave her. I would always be hers. She ran a hand through my messy hair, smoothing it down, and smiled at me, but it was a sad smile, a smile bearing the grief of unshared memories.
“What do you want to know?” she asked. She was still trying to get a patch of particularly unruly hair to stay down. Lottie would often do that on those lazy mornings when neither of us had to go to work and we would stay in bed as late as we wanted, having absolutely no plans and never feeling the need to make any. There were days we never left our apartment and those were some of the best days.
“Why did you really come here? It wasn’t curiosity.”
“No,” she said sadly, “I made a deal to get Lydia and me out of there. I came from a very wealthy family, and when we reach adulthood, each child gets a percentage of the family’s wealth. I used my share to get us here. To get me out of a potential marriage I didn’t want to be in, and to get Lydia out of a horrible situation.” Lottie took a deep breath and rested her forehead against my shoulder. “Lydia’s family worked as servants for mine. We have known each other our entire lives because we would play together even though we weren’t supposed to. As she got older, she was put to work in our house, but as my brothers and sisters married and moved out, we needed fewer and fewer staff, and Lydia’s family was poor and desperate. Even though I had promised them I would take her with me when I married, once she was let go, she was dispensable and her parents decided to sell her into a marriage of her own.”
“Holy shit,” I muttered. “How can you guys figure out how to travel across space and be so fucking backwards?”
Lottie just shrugged. “Y’all beat us there. So this was our escape. Except everything’s gone wrong and I’ve been so scared about something happening to Lydia, but I know you can protect us, Dietrich, I know you can. I shouldn’t have made you worry so much that night.”
“Hey,” I stopped her, “you can worry. I know you, Lottie. You worry about everything, like the difference between ivory and creamy ivory.”
She laughed against my chest, and the warm scent of pears and honey surrounded me. I wrapped my arms around her. “For the record,” she said, “I had decided on sage and creamy ivory.”
Creamy ivory. I knew it. I kissed the top of her head, and she lifted her face toward me to kiss me, then smiling, told me, “Now go take a shower. You stink.”
The next morning, the physical exhaustion of trying to recuperate from alcohol poisoning had finally worn off. Mark and Eric, the furniture ninjas, had somehow procured a table and chairs for the dining area overnight. My iPad was on the table in front of us with a map of Abram Mirowski’s neighborhood locked on the screen. My plan was fairly simple: Mark and Eric were going to go to New York, kidnap Abram, and bring him here so that we could keep him alive as long as needed and so we could be in the same city as Lottie and Lydia.
But after last night, I started wondering if Lottie would want to get answers for herself. She had given up so much to purchase this freedom, this future, for them both and she was standing on the precipice of losing everything she had risked her life for. She had more of a stake in this than anyone else. So at the last minute, I had decided Lottie needed to be with us as we planned the kidnapping of the man who thought she was so dangerous that he had ordered her execution. It was a huge gamble; I’d had to convince Mark and Eric to let her participate in the first place, and then, we had to hope she could handle what we were about to tell her.
As we sat at the table, I left out the details of how I had learned about Abram in the first place, but I’m sure news traveled fast in their circle. She must have known Jackson was dead and that the fire that killed him coincided with the time I had been out of town. But she never mentioned it. Instead, when I finished, she just looked at each of us, letting her eyes linger on me the longest, before asking, “And what happens when I’m done questioning him?”
I glanced at Eric. I couldn’t tell Lottie the truth. “Don’t worry, Lottie, we’ll t
ake care of it,” Eric offered.
Lottie was chewing on her lower lip again, still staring at me, her face filled with a concern that made me wish I had just disappeared with her, taken her anywhere she wanted to go and tried to vanish. Maybe it wasn’t really feasible; if my contract weren’t willingly terminated, we’d be completely fucked, but it was just a fantasy after all. But her concern wasn’t for her anyway; she was worried about me. “You aren’t going though, right?” she asked.
“No, I’ll be here,” I assured her.
Lottie exhaled slowly, relief maybe, but never took her eyes off mine. “Well, I guess we have to do this. For Lydia. They never should have dragged her into this.”
“I like her,” Mark suddenly said, and we all jumped at the sound of his voice. He had been so quiet, just observing us as we rehashed, planned, deliberated. His announcement would have been comical if we hadn’t been discussing kidnapping and murder, but Lottie just tilted her head at him and smiled. “Of course you do. Everybody likes her. She’s like a sun that pulls the rest of us around her in her orbit. And if you ask me, you’re all pretty damn lucky to be part of her galaxy.”
Mark smiled back at Lottie, and if he had had my north German complexion instead of his dark southern Mediterranean one, I probably would have been able to notice him blushing. More than ever, I wanted five minutes alone to complain to Eric about what a fucking sci-fi love triangle this whole trip had become. But Lottie had made up her mind. Mark and Eric were going to New York, and they were bringing back Abram.
Chapter 13
Lottie was nervous. She remembered Eric. She knew he was one of her closest friends. And she had just sent him half-way across the country to participate in the kidnapping of a man who had no reservations about having harmless young women killed. I didn’t care what Jackson had said or what any of them believed. Lottie was not dangerous. What she had done could only threaten them if others found out, and Lottie wanted as few people to know as possible. She already felt like too many people knew. If they had just tried to talk to her instead, they would have been able to see that for themselves: this was a woman who just wanted to get on with her life, not interfere in anyone else’s. Lydia assumed Lottie’s anxiety was about the man who was coming to see her soon to determine if her mind was salvageable or not, if their friendship would be allowed to survive. But Lottie wasn’t worried about that; she already knew she wasn’t giving up either one of us.
We anticipated it taking Mark and Eric at least three days, so that was a lot of time to kill. I was far less concerned; I knew them. I had worked with them so many times, and this was the kind of thing that we could have done without more forethought. Actually, we had done this without much forethought or planning. Whoever these guys were and from wherever they came, they had certainly never expected to find themselves the targets of one of the most powerful intelligence agencies in the world. They were outnumbered, outwitted, beaten at a game they hadn’t known had begun.
So I planned on spending the next few days trying to distract Lottie whenever she wasn’t at work, and to remind her that everything would be ok even when she was. I showed up during her shift just so she could feel reassured by my presence there. I bought a copy of The Sleepwalkers: How Europe went to War in 1914 by Christopher Clark and sat in the café reading while she worked. At least once every hour, she would stop by my table, kiss the top of my head, then go back to stocking her shelves or helping a customer find a book on new age crystals or origami or Minecraft. I made a mental note to look up just what the hell Minecraft was one of these days.
Lottie had majored in English and was at home among the shelves here, floating naturally among books on self-help and local history and popular fiction. Books held a sort of magic for her. She treated them with the veneration most people would treat a Bible or Koran; books were Lottie’s religion. She had worked as an editor for a local magazine in Houston, occasionally writing pieces on the fashion shows Jamie worked or new exhibits at one of the museums. She’d had everything she wanted except for the children she knew would come some day. She was so happy.
This bookstore was located in a busy shopping center, and when her shift ended, I bought her supper at a seafood restaurant nearby. She ordered the salmon. She picked the zucchini out of her steamed vegetables and plucked them onto my plate, just like she used to, while she chatted about the awkwardness of helping middle-aged women find anything located in the erotica section. “Hey,” I countered, “you’re going to be middle-aged one day. If that’s how they wanna get off, then leave them alone.”
Lottie looked up at me through her eyelashes, still hunting through her vegetables to make sure she hadn’t missed any of the offensive squash. She offered me one of those makes-my-heart-skips-beats hybrid smiles. “True, and who says I don’t read erotica now? I just don’t talk to the salesperson about it.”
I put my fork down. “You read … women porn?”
Lottie laughed. My stomach flipped, but not in that dangerous, I’m going to lose my supper kind of way, but a happy, tingling, I-can’t-believe-I’m-sitting-here-with-Lottie-talking-about-porn kind of way. “Dietrich, this isn’t news. You know I read all kinds of stuff.”
“Yeah, but … well, I never actually read any of those books.”
“And it’s not porn. It’s erotica. It’s different.”
I was skeptical. Sounded like the same thing to me. “Isn’t that just porn with words?”
Lottie glanced up from her fish. “Huh. I guess so. I never thought of it that way. But, unlike porn, no humans are actually harmed in the making of this book.”
I smiled at her. “Will you read it to me?”
“What?” She was blushing now. I had known she would. But the thought of Lottie reading erotica – which I still thought was just porn for women – had suddenly turned me on. A lot.
“Pick your favorite book. Read it to me.”
Lottie was caught somewhere between being intrigued and maybe even aroused by the thought of this too and having the look of a trapped animal ready to gnaw its leg off to get the hell out of here. I was about to tell her it was ok, she didn’t have to share this part of her fantasy world with me when she finally leaned her head toward me, resting her chin in her hand, looking at me intently with those shining hazel eyes.
“And what else do you want for me to do for you?” she asked.
Holy shit. I swallowed. I couldn’t think of anything to say. My mouth felt dry. I felt seventeen again. Seventeen, naïve and scared, so inexperienced and young. We were lying on my bed in my dorm room, making out, and she had taken off my shirt, was trailing the lines of the muscles in my abdomen with her fingertips, up to the curves of my chest, across my nipples and back again, and I had a horrible premonition that if I didn’t stop her, didn’t back away from her now, something so mortifyingly humiliating would happen that I would die a virgin. I grabbed her hand and pulled my mouth away from hers, gasping, “Lottie, I … I need a break.”
We had been dating for almost three months then. This was a familiar scene. Lottie sighed and pushed herself away from me, but not by much, still lying on my pillow watching me. She wanted to touch me. I wanted to touch her too. More than anything I had ever wanted before, actually. I couldn’t look at her. I closed my eyes and concentrated on my breathing, but this time, Lottie stopped me. “Dietrich,” she said quietly, “open your eyes.”
I opened them. “Why?”
“Because I love your eyes. They’re the most remarkable shade of blue I’ve ever seen. Like the ocean.”
I was blushing. Hell, I had probably been blushing the whole time. I didn’t know how to respond, but by then, she knew that about me. I was shy, awkward, clumsy in my interactions with people – even her. “I don’t want to stop tonight, Dietrich,” she whispered. My heart was beating so quickly I thought surely she could hear it, she must be able to feel the vibrations across the pillow and thin dorm mattress we were lying on. I didn’t want to stop either, but some pa
rt of me – a very vocal voice in my head – kept taunting me, telling me that I was just a discarded child that no one had ever loved and I had no idea what I was doing now, and she would be so disappointed or she would find my attempt to make love to her so comical that she actually would laugh at me, before getting dressed and leaving my room forever. I also suspected that voice was being extremely unfair to Lottie. And maybe even me, but more so to Lottie. She probably wouldn’t laugh at me out loud.
As I lay there arguing with that voice in my head, Lottie reached out for me again, moving her body closer to mine, and kissed me. She asked me to take her shirt off, to touch her, to explore her body like she wanted to explore mine. And the testosterone of youth finally quieted that unbelievably annoying and condescending voice in my head, but I was still surprised when, afterward, Lottie neither laughed nor seemed disappointed at all. She wrapped my sheet around our naked bodies, rested her head on my heaving chest, and enfolded her arms around me. “That was perfect,” she murmured against my skin, and despite trying not to, I felt myself getting aroused again. “This was exactly how I imagined our first time.” We made love twice more that night before I had to bring her home.
Looking at her now, I wondered if she ever saw that seventeen year old boy in me; sometimes, I still felt him. Like now. I needed her to take charge again, tell me what to do, what she expected me to do, but she was waiting for me to speak. She didn’t want to take charge this time. So I thought about what I wanted most from her, what I wanted most of all, and in that way I had of speaking before really thinking about the consequences, I told her, “I want you to still marry me.”
Lottie took my proposal – or reproposal – better than I thought she would, especially since I hadn’t even known I was going to say it. But Lottie was still practical, and she knew we could never return to Houston. Her mind was already running through the scenarios of what I would have to be willing to give up, what I would have to be willing to do and change, and I knew this was Lottie – this was her assiduous nature, careful to analyze every detail of any potential problem in a future as my wife. So I didn’t interrupt her. It would have been as pointless as trying to see any difference between ivory and creamy ivory, or for all I knew, even peridot or sage.
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