by C. L. Donley
“Why didn’t you come??” Esmee gasps, ignoring Ben’s attendance being her possible impetus for skipping it. Luckily, the truth is much less exciting.
“I wasn’t invited.”
“You’re joking!”
“I’m serious. I wasn’t known for that sort of thing, so I think they were afraid for me, in case the design didn’t go over well.”
“Most people don’t notice details like that, but I’m absolutely mad for ambiance. What makes people feel open and happy. A space can really affect a person’s mood. It’s fascinating to me. I’m thinking of going into it once I’m done with modeling.”
“You should,” Cynthia encourages her.
“I still have a decent window to keep doing what I’m doing. I know I could make a name for myself. A brand. Benjamin’s agreed to help me,” she says, her hand going to his knee in a loving gesture.
“He does love to help the ladies,” Cynthia found herself saying. Oh geez. She needs to get out of here.
“How do you mean?”
“I… don’t know,” Cynthia shrugs with a plastic smile.
“I can see why the two of you were together.”
Cynthia nods, keeping her mouth shut, her safest recourse.
Esmee continues while Ben is trying not to watch Cynthia across the table, fiddling with his silverware, his arm around another woman. The conversation is barely discernible above the energy that swirls between their silence.
Cynthia staves off feelings of remorse for the young woman. He does not love her. Or perhaps he does, but it pales in comparison to the current feelings Cynthia is now bringing up in him, which feels more like frustration than anything else. He’s likely regretting his decision to reach out as time wears on.
“Your mother’s from Essex, isn’t she?” Cynthia volunteers.
“She is.”
“So’s my grandmother. On my father’s side.”
“No shit!”
“I’ve been meaning to make a pilgrimage.”
“You should, it’s lovely. Oh, I’m so chuffed that we have so much in common!”
“Well… some things are a little awkward.” Cynthia alludes.
“You know Benjamin’s been engaged two other times. I think the third one is a charm, don’t you, love? Ben says he thinks I’ll be the one to stick.”
“Remind me of the second one?” Cynthia says, ignoring a wave of nausea.
“The singer, with the Brazilian mum. A very long, elaborate pre-nup.”
“The yellow diamond engagement ring,” Cynthia nods.
“That’s the one!” Esmee said. “He and I met at a charity function when they were together and… when they broke up, he called me.”
“Romantic.”
“Why didn’t you propose to Cynthia, darling?”
“Because he was already engaged at the time,” Cynthia fills in.
“Shocking!” Esmee gives him a reprimanding look.
“Can we please change the subject?” Ben groans.
“Nah,” Cynthia wrinkles her nose.
“I think we can firmly establish Benjamin’s type.”
“What’s that?”
“Ambitious women,” Esmee innocently answers.
“I think you mean ‘slightly colored’ women,” Cynthia replies, teasing him.
Ben looks up from the table at that, gives Esmee a laughing smirk and looks back down again, as if faintly present but mostly pre-occupied. Esmee grabs his chin and wiggles it.
“Is she your first colored girl, Ben?” Esmee teases him back.
“No,” he says.
Cynthia’s eyebrows go up in surprise.
“Really?”
He looks over at Cynthia’s playful gaze, temporarily lifted out of his mood.
“I’m not rattling off my love life to the two of you.”
“We want to know when this fetish of yours began, Benjamin.”
“It’s not a fetish.”
“Slightly colored,” Esmee repeats, snickering. Cynthia can’t help but laugh as they both look over at him.
“I think I still pass the paper bag test,” Cynthia boasts. The two women hold out their arms and compare their hues as if young girls again, instinctively turning their diamond-studded wrists palms up first, and then down, revealing the difference in their shades.
“You were in the oven a bit longer, yeah?” Esmee says, Cynthia nods.
“I’m very turned on right now,” Ben confesses. The two women laugh.
Cynthia parts ways with the couple after dinner and Ben is immediately hailing a cab.
“What’s the matter, darling? Not feeling up to the walk? Are you aching again?”
“You could say that,” he says with a mischievous grin as he grabs Esmee around her middle.
“You weren’t kidding in there, were you?” Esmee giggles, moving her hands to his chest. He gives her a head-spinning kiss so intoxicating, that she doesn’t even hear the sound of the cab pulling up. They get in and Ben is instantly handsy, leaving Esmee to tell the clueless cabby where they are going.
“You cheeky boy,” Esmee smiles. She looks into Ben’s eyes, beckoning her wordlessly and she is surprised at him.
But then she stops. What are the odds that Ben is looking at her in a new way on the same night he happens to have dinner with a woman he “used to date”?
She stares and stares and watches as he looks back at her, oblivious. He’s not even responding to her. She doesn’t even need to be there.
“What?” he finally asks.
She wonders if she can take some other woman’s love and be satisfied. She doesn’t know if she can, but it’s worth a shot.
She takes hold of his hand and moves it between her thighs, holding his gaze, waiting for an objection. They’re less than a block away from home.
But there’s nothing less than that confident gaze in his eyes, the one he arrested her with when they first met. His eyes dart back and forth between her eyes and her mouth. He licks his lips and she watches his jaw go a bit slack, a look she’s never seen before. She takes hold of his arm, her wetness soaking his fingers. He rewards her arousal with a faster pace.
Dear God, is he imagining he’s touching her right now? The thought hits her brain and lights up her body’s erogenous pathways like a subway map. Before she can second guess the impulse, she’s climaxing in record time, breathing hard into his neck with a handful of his lapel in one fist.
The cab lurches to a stop, and before she can fully recover, Ben has a hold of her arm, plucking her from the cab and leading her up the front steps to their apartment on wobbly legs.
This is a problem, she thinks as they make their way up to the penthouse in the elevator.
“Get on your knees,” Ben commands in a low panting voice, his hooded eyelids doing nothing to shield his gaze that has turned dark.
Tomorrow, she thinks, as she sinks down in front of him, her belly a churning storm of electric anticipation. She’ll deal with this tomorrow.
Hours after their lovemaking Ben lies awake, long after Esmee has stopped pretending to be asleep, rolled over beside him. He stares up at the ceiling and sighs, a weight on his gut.
A house.
Extortion plus interest. His father paid to manipulate their lives. And with it, she forged an empire. It certainly went farther than he’s ever seen hush money go. But it hadn’t started that way.
She simply bought her and her mother a house. A need so achingly simple and fundamental. A need she never trusted him to fill or understand.
And she was right not to.
* * *
When Ben takes the short trek to his father’s apartment, his heart nearly stops when he is greeted by Rosie at the door.
There is his father behind her, slightly stooped but still tall as ever, his curly salt and pepper hair now fully white and thinning up top. He is looking him square in the eye.
Ben freezes. His body turns cold.
Part of his brain is in denial, the ot
her part is ready to be scolded. For something. For taking over the company. There’s something he’s missed and his father has found out about it. It’s something simple. He is about to be humiliated. Hundreds of employees will lose their jobs because of him. And his father will only stare and stare, his eyes as bottomless as his and everyone else’s debts. It will all come crashing down. Foreign countries will lose their wealth and its citizens will eat each other. And his father is staring and staring.
What is it, old man? For God’s sake, he panics. The stare is as long as a year.
And then suddenly, it is over.
His father simply walks away, walking with purpose to another part of the room. He stops at a table, where he organizes papers. He then tears them up into squares. He moves with purpose to another part of the room.
Ben’s eyes follow him everywhere. The sight is shocking. Humbling. His heart is still in his throat.
“He’s never done that before,” his sister Val’s voice cuts through the surreal moment.
He looks over at his sister who looks ragged and worn. Dark circles are around her eyes.
“How long has he been like this?” Ben wonders.
“At least a week. All day. All night. He won’t sleep at night.”
“What the hell’s wrong with him?”
“It’s called Sundown Syndrome. Whatever’s regulating his circadian rhythms is completely fucked.”
“Won’t he die if he doesn’t sleep?”
“He’s dying anyway. At least his brain is.”
Ben lets out a sharp breath and shakes his head in disbelief. “This is fucking torture, Val. Weird, sick, psychological torture.”
“It’s nearly over.”
“Put him in a facility Val.”
“No.”
“He sent us away when we were perfectly healthy. Don’t you have a husband of your own that needs you? This is tearing you apart, I can see it.”
“Do you remember the name of his sister? The one that died?”
“…No. Victoria? Vanessa?”
“Was it Ella?”
“No. It was ‘v’ something.”
“He yells it sometimes. It’s hard to restrain him and get him to calm down after that.”
“Are you sure that’s what he’s even saying? Are you sure it’s even a name?”
“Pretty sure. He keeps saying ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’ It makes him cry.”
“Val, you don’t deserve this. To hear the broken, unfiltered contents of some sadistic person’s mind? No one deserves this.”
“That’s exactly what I want,” Val retorts. “That’s exactly what I deserve. He recognizes me.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Not all the time, but sometimes. He recognizes me, for the first time. Ever,” she says, the tears immediately falling. “He tells me he loves me. He calls me his baby girl.”
“Val, that’s not him. He doesn’t even talk like that,” Ben insisted, “that’s not him in there. He doesn’t even know what he’s saying.”
“Sometimes he does. Sometimes it is. You can feel him come back. When you’re around it long enough, you can start to feel it. The other day, I asked him how old he was and he said ‘30.’ He didn’t even hesitate. And then we had a good laugh about it.”
“Jesus, Val.”
“He knows what’s happening to him, Ben. And he’s scared. Like… he thinks he’s already gone, but… then he comes back and he isn’t. Every time it’s like they’re his last words. Completely stripped, no manipulation. I want to hear them. I want to hear every word.”
* * *
Ben leaves his father’s house completely drained, returning to work in a fog. Between last night’s dinner and what he’s just witnessed, he feels an urgent dread in his gut, like he’s done something terrible and he’s about to be called into the headmaster’s office. And it would be a lot less terrifying if he knew what he’s done to land him there. He stares absentmindedly at his desk. His assistant’s voice interrupts his stupor.
“Sir, you had a reporter from the Tribune call while you were out, wanting a statement on the recent article about Evan Bolinger, and also CNN is still waiting on the okay regarding their previous interview.”
“Not now.”
“Can I give them a timeline?”
“Fuck, Lisa. Tomorrow, alright? Before noon.”
“Thank you, sir. Also, I’ve got Dev for you on line 2.”
“Dev? What does he want?”
“He says he’s having trouble with a high priority client.”
“Which client?”
“He didn’t specify.”
Ben picked up line 2.
“Dev.”
“Boss. I just talked to Dale Abernathy.”
“About?”
“He wants to buy an island.”
“What?”
“He’s getting married or something… his assistant says he found an island near Santorini.”
“What’s the problem?”
“He wants to buy it and build on it. Like within the next two weeks.”
“…I’m still missing the plot here.”
“He’s paying me to advise him. Should I tell him it’s a dumb fuckin’ idea?”
“You should absolutely not do that.”
“But it is a dumb fuckin’ idea, isn’t it?”
“Of course it is.”
“Okay. Just wanted to make sure I wasn’t losing my mind.”
“Look, Dale doesn’t hire yes men, so tell him what you think. Because if he even smells that you’re blowing smoke up his ass, I’m gonna get a phone call.”
“So?”
“So, tell him the truth.”
“If I tell him the truth, and it works out anyway, then I’m a shitty advisor. If I tell him the truth and it doesn’t work out, then I’m a shitty advisor.
“All in the delivery, just don’t be a buzzkill. Tell him that it’s a dumb fuckin’ idea, but what the hell, it’s his money and you only live once. He can fuckin’ buy Greece, he’ll still have enough to retire. Not in those words, but you get it.”
“Sir, Cynthia Gordon is here for your 2:00.”
“I gotta go Dev, are we done here?”
“Did I just hear the name ‘Cynthia Gordon’?”
“It’s a long fucking story. Later, Dev. Try not to lose our single most important client.”
“No pressure.”
* * *
Cynthia waits outside the familiar office, the one that changed her life a decade earlier.
She was still in her work uniform when she was called up. She smelled like french fries. She could feel the grease on her skin and she felt strange sitting on the tufted black leather couch in the waiting room that was softer than anything she’d slept on in over a year. Aside from Benji’s bed. He used to make fun of her, how long she would sleep when she was over. He would come home from work and she was still asleep.
The assistant outside the office had gotten much younger, she noticed. Probably one of Ben’s first orders of business was to get rid of that old bat of his father’s.
She was rude, apparently equated the attribute with professionalism. She had ushered her in with a smirk, and Cynthia knew right then, whatever Sol Dvorak had to say to her couldn’t possibly be good.
There wasn’t anything about the job that warranted her seeing the damn CEO anyway. Silly how she hadn’t realized that. Even if she’d burned the whole place down, he would’ve had people to deal with that. She scoffs at the memory. He must’ve seen her coming from a mile away. She was intimidated, but for all the wrong reasons.
She is in the same waiting room now. The furniture is different. Less comfortable. Aside from new carpet, it’s virtually the same, down to the layout. It’s in desperate need of a makeover.
“I’m a huge fan of your work, by the way,” Ben’s assistant suddenly blurts.
“You’ve seen my work?”
“You did Mr. Manchester’s place. We had our
Christmas party at their house in the Hamptons. And Farm to Table downtown, of course.”
“Of course. Thank you, very much.”
“I heard you used to work here.”
“A million years ago. In the kitchen.”
“Dev still raves about your food. We all call him Dev. He insists.”
“How is Dev?”
“Lisa, send her in,” Ben is heard over her intercom.
“Mr. Dvorak will see you now,” his assistant says as she got up from her desk. She’s young. No particular feelings of jealousy or suspicion radiating from her. She can’t tell if Ben has ever slept with her or not.
Lisa leads her into Ben’s office which is just as large and overwhelming as she remembers. Much fewer people in it this time. The grand cherry wood desk remains in place. As she would imagine. He probably has a sentimental attachment to his father’s desk. Naturally, he would want it to be his as well. They made love on it once. She couldn’t stop staring at it the day they sacked her. She kept thinking to herself that there was no way his father would’ve known what they had done. No way he would be sitting at it so confidently as if he owned it, if he knew.
“You kept the desk,” she says, instantly addressing the room’s elephant.
“It’s cumbersome to get rid of. It would have to be dismantled. Carried down 27 flights of stairs. Too big to fit in an elevator. Hell, too big to fit through one of these windows and turn it into firewood.”
“I wonder how many more times it was christened since you became the president.”
He gives her a heart-melting smile that tells her he’s pleased that she brought it up. He gives her a slow once over as he gestures for her to sit down, admiring her expensive looking turquoise dress with the embellishment on one shoulder.
“Do you? Wonder?”
“Sure,” Cynthia volunteers, as if her curiosity is common. “Have you had your way with young Lisa out there?”
“Not yet,” he chuckles.
“Waiting for the right time?”
“Typically, I sleep with them first and then I hire them.”
“Unorthodox.”
“They don’t last very long.”
“So you thought you’d try it the other way?”