by Bella Love
My heartbeat slowed down a little, in a getting-ready sort of way. We were going to fight. I knew it. I knew all about fights. Family fights, fistfights, firefights, didn’t matter—I did them all.
“Tell you what?” I said, strumming the guitar.
“What you do for a living.”
“Ah.” I was quiet a minute. “How did you find out?”
She looked at me for a long time. I didn’t like it. “Find out? Find out?”
I rested my arm over the guitar. “Yeah, find out.”
“Mrs. Lovey,” she said. She might be drunk, but her eyes had no problem drilling into mine. “I’m trying to think of why you wouldn’t have told me.”
“Think hard.”
She looked shocked. I don’t think she expected this response. But what the fuck? Jane was a beautiful superhero, but she was also a liar. To herself. “Think hard about why I might not have mentioned it.”
She got up, a little unsteadily. “What the fuck, Finn?”
“‘What the fuck?’” I repeated quietly. “What the fuck does ‘what the fuck’ mean?”
“It means why didn’t you tell me? I asked what you did for a living.”
I met her eyes and strummed a chord. “Yeah, but you were more interested in talking about ginger, and you never got back around to it, did you?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
I locked my eyes on hers. “What do you think it’s supposed to mean?”
There was a pause. “I think it’s supposed to mean I only wanted you for sex.”
“And?”
She looked at me for a long minute, then leaned sort of drunkenly across the table in my direction. “I think you can take the girl out of the swamp, but not the swamp out of the girl.”
The fist in the center of my gut hardened. “Well, there you go.” I gave her a cold smile. “Don’t worry, Janey. You’re going places, remember? It can be your little secret, what you did here, trashing out with the pawnshop guy.”
She jerked as if struck. Then she lifted her bottle and looked at it thoughtfully, “Oh, yeah, I’m going places.” Sunlight made the bottle glow a deep, rich brown. “Did you know I can’t speak French?”
I narrowed my eyes. I hadn’t seen this detour coming.
“Four years in school and a whole lot of tutoring, and I still can’t say anything but ‘Parlez-vous Anglais?’”
It sounded like a threat. I stopped playing. “Do we need to be speaking French right now?”
“I can’t speak Spanish either,” she told me darkly. “I have no talent for languages.”
“Jane—”
“I can’t play an instrument either. I can’t sew. I can’t dance.”
“Jane—”
“I can’t fish either. I can’t cast a reel to save my life.” She looked over at me, as if awaiting judgment on this.
“You don’t cast reels,” I told her quietly. “You going to tell me what’s going on?”
She plunged onward, ignoring me. “Plants die when I walk into the room. I can shoot a rifle, but except for a turkey shoot or home invasion, how is that really helpful? And school, well.” She gave a drunken snort. “We all know how that turned out.”
She leaned her elbows on the table, beer in hand, and expounded on her academic failures. “History, math, science, the names of trees or stars or rocks or antibiotics or chemicals or anything else you might need to know.” She shook her. “I suck at knowledge.”
I stopped trying to interrupt, because she was on a roll and I wasn’t an idiot.
“I have one talent, Finn.” She held up an index finger, weaving slightly on the elbow she had propped on the table. “One. Do you want to know the one thing I do well?”
“Confuse the shit out of me?” I suggested.
Her smile was bleak. “I am a human motor of getting shit done, to quote a friend.”
“Yeah. Remember, it’s going to get you on all those maps,” I said slowly.
“Right. The maps.” She lifted her bottle again, examining it. “I’ll pay you for this,” she said and threw it across the room. It hit my kitchen wall and made a clunking noise, then fell to the ground, spraying beer but not shattering.
I got to my feet, guitar in hand.
“I can’t even break a beer bottle,” I heard her say.
“What the fuck is going on, Janey?”
Her head turned to me. She should look flushed from exertion and emotion. Instead, she looked pale and flat. “I’m not going anywhere, Finn. Not anymore.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I got fired.”
“Oh shit.”
“And I can’t even break a beer bottle.” Her voice cracked at the end.
Our eyes met. “You want to break a beer bottle?” I said, low.
She nodded, her hair mussed around her scared white face.
“You’re going to have to throw it harder than that,” I told her, and crossed the room to show her how, because I knew all about breaking shit.
Eighteen
~ Jane ~
FINN STRODE OVER to me as my phone buzzed yet again. Another text from Savannah.
2 more clients bailed. Foster Aug wedding & Stone Intel Corp.
It was her third message this afternoon. This one finally expressed the natural sentiment, What the f is going on up there, Mac???
I was not only taking down my career, but possibly Savannah’s as well.
Finn was grabbing beer bottles out of the fridge. Then he took my hand and dragged me outside, up onto the deck, near the thirty-yard trash container half-filled with construction debris.
He swung me around and shoved a bottle into my hand. “If you want to break shit, Janey, you got to do it like this,” he said and flung a bottle at the container hard. It shattered into a hundred pieces, spraying broken glass and foaming beer like sea foam all over the container.
He felt fierce, and fierce was just what I wanted right now.
I was breathing hard and fast. I tightened my grip on the bottle he’d put in my hand and turned and hurled it at the container. It shattered in a beautiful, satisfying mess. Glass shards crashed everywhere. He slapped another one in my hand.
“Want to tell me what happened?”
I began slinging them, hard and fast, one after the other, and Finn kept me supplied, I have no idea how. They shattered in bright, wet, splintering arcs until the deck was a war zone of shattering glass and foaming beer and one crazy woman losing her mind.
“Peter J. g.d. Sandler fired me”—smash—“which means DC is out”—smash—“and all the clients they referred to me are out”—smash—“and soon everyone will know.” Smash. I wiped hair off my face with the back of the hand that gripped a fresh bottle. “I guess it really is in the blood.” Smash. “You can pretty it up any old which way, but blood”—smash—“will always”—smash—“tell.”
Smash.
Silence descended. I was shaking but done. Or at least there were no more bottles in close range. In front of me was a sea of broken glass and foam and beer fumes.
My shoulders slumped and my head went down, and then Finn was there, behind me, lifting me in his arms, taking me away from the splintered glass carnage. He carried me inside and sat me on his lap on the sofa.
I indulged in the drama of the moment and rolled my face into his chest and just held on, let him carry me, literally, and smooth down my hair and rub my back until I started to calm down.
Inside I felt all empty and echoey, like a cloud might feel. In a bad way. Finn just waited. This was one of his greatest strengths, his ability to just sit still, to be the cyclone center
When I was no longer hyperventilating, he shifted us to a more comfortable position on the couch and said, “Okay, so tell me why Pete the ass fired you?”
I sniffed. “Well, there was an incident with blueberries.”
He lifted his brow. “That doesn’t sound like something I want you doing with Pete Sandler.”
A longer pause. “Okay. I didn’t expect that. Why?”
“He—” I paused, searching for a word that wouldn’t send Finn out of the house with a weapon. “He startled me.”
We looked at each other in silence. Then Finn started to roll me off his lap. “I’ll be right back.”
“No, Finn, no,” I said, pulling him back down by the wrist. “You can’t go kill him.”
“I have no intention of killing him. Just hurting him. And scaring him. A lot.” But he let me pull him back down anyhow.
“No, Finn. That’s stupid. One of us has to be smart tonight, and I certainly can’t, because I’m drunk. And I have to figure out what to do.”
He sighed. “Okay. Right. Well”—he looked at me—“first of all, this isn’t the end of the world.
“It’s my equivalent of a nuclear blast. I’ve been hemorrhaging clients all afternoon.”
He looked more serious. “Why?”
I sighed. “People in this world talk. A lot. It’s just a matter of who talks first and the loudest.”
“And how much money they have.”
“Right. How do you think this is going to get spun? I hit on him. That I’m an opportunist at best, a gold-digging fraud at worst, finagling my way into rich people’s homes to snatch their wealthy husbands, if not to become a next wife, then at least with a good shot at being mistress. How many jobs do you think I’m going to get again? Ever?”
“I’ll hire you right now.”
I laughed weakly and he grabbed one of the throw pillows and slid it behind my back. We reclined in our positions, me against pillow on the arm of the sofa, and looked at each other.
“Why don’t you start at the beginning?” he suggested.
“There’s not much to tell. Mrs. Lovey and Olivia left the house, Mr. Peter J. came in a few minutes later and started…startling me. I moved around the center island, away from him, but he moved too—”
“You probably don’t want to give me these kinds of details if you don’t need to,” he said, looking grim. Like he might roll me again to get up off the couch and go get the gun I hadn’t ever seen but was pretty sure he had stashed somewhere.
I nodded. “Right.”
“Did I create any of this, babe?” he asked grimly.
“You?” I was startled.
“The pawn?”
“Oh, no. No… But he knows where I come from. He knew all about me, and my parents, and he said something about me, you know, being trash—”
“What?”
“I thought you didn’t want details.”
“I lied.”
“And then he said something about you. And that’s when I poured the daiquiri over his head.”
Finn looked more cheerful. “You poured a daiquiri over Pete Sandler’s head when he said something about me being trash?”
I shrugged. “Then I whacked him upside the head with the blender.”
I figured he’d laugh. It was funny, if your entire professional career hadn’t just been ruined by it. Finn was not the kind of guy whose life could be ruined by cold blueberries, not even a little bit. Finn’s life could only be ruined by Finn, and it would probably involve something hot and metallic. I figured he’d have a good laugh.
But he didn’t. He just kept looking at me. “That’s a problem,” he agreed.
I nodded. My eyes felt hot. “I know,” I said, my voice catching.
“Because that’s a good drink.”
I blinked. I think he missed the part about where I assaulted my client.
“Too bad you wasted your amazing drink on his fat head,” he said.
“I hate his fat head,” I whispered fiercely. That empty cloud of numbness was passing. Behind it was a huge fiery ball of…what was that? Fury? No, dammit.
I was scared.
My nose was all pinched and my eyes were hot, like I was going to cry.
“What am I going to do Finn?” I whispered, looking up helplessly. “The Sandler-Rosses were my ticket. I can’t start over. I’m branded. What am I going to do now?”
His face was calm and serious. “Well, what do you want to do now?”
“I don’t know.” I wiped my hand over my mouth, then my cheeks, then the tops of my thighs, but nothing stopped the shaking deep inside me. “I think I’d like to have this not be happening.”
“You know you could do anything, Jane, right?”
“Anything?” I looked at him stupidly. What did that even mean?
His body was warm beside me on the couch. “Anything.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means you don’t have to keep being an event planner if you don’t want to.”
I stared at him, my eyes wide, because I didn’t understand Greek. “What are you saying?”
“I’m asking if you actually want to keep doing this.”
I thought of it all, the decade-plus I’d had of being a steamroller. I thought of all the Mr. Sandler-Rosses I’d run into and all the ones I was going to run into again. I thought of turning from a steamroller into a bully. I thought of the money. I thought of the maps. I thought of my empty, glossy apartment. I thought about the eagles and the mountains and the wave and the blue sea and Finn’s blue eyes.
It was one of those stupid, life-flashing moments.
I hate those moments. I hate sitting through them, feeling stupid for seeing my whole life, because who does that? Feeling like an idiot. Feeling like crying.
I gave a gasping sort of wet laugh. “Finn, that’s ridiculous. If I can’t do this, what do I have?”
He looked down at me, hooked some of my beer-y hair with his finger, and pulled it off my cheek. “You have some things.” He said it all quiet, and it scared me. Because I might not have the things that low voice implied I did. And if I stuck around, he’d find that out.
I drew in a breath. “I need a plan.” Plans were good.
“To what?”
“Fix it.”
“Fix it?” He sat quietly for a minute, then said, “Babe, you don’t even like what you do.”
I stared. “I-I do too. I love it! I adore it.” I was being very emphatic.
“Mm. Guess that’s why you married it.”
I sent him the coldest look I had in my arsenal. “I am excellent at it.”
“And you hate it.”
“Are you trying to piss me off on purpose?” I asked coldly.
“Yup.”
“Why? I’m already sad, heartbroken, crushed. You’re supposed to uplift,” I explained, raising my palms to demonstrate. “Encourage me. Cheer me up.”
He put his hand on my knee. “I know you’ve worked hard, and on the surface, I agree this sucks. We can talk about that all day. But in the end, you’re starting to hate what you do, and I’m not going to encourage you to keep doing something you hate, and I don’t think you should be cheered up by the idea of ‘fixing it’ with the Sandlers.” He looked out the window a second and shook his head. “I don’t think it’s worth it.”
I heard the words through the dissipating cloud of my confusion and deep-down fear.
Maybe it isn’t worth it.
It was a terrifying thought. A disorienting, confusing, emptying, terrifying thought.
Because if this wasn’t worth it…what was? If the life I’d spent my life building, if the hole I’d poured all my effort and time and money into was not worth filling up, what in God’s name had I been doing all this time?
What was I going to do now?
A cold wind blew. Or at least it felt that way. I shivered and looked up. The sun was still shining. I scowled at it. How could that be?
Absent a college degree and without any training in anything, I knew nothing but running other people’s lives.
What else could ever fill the hole I’d filled with other people’s complicated lives?
I, of course, did not have a life. Or hadn’t. Until Finn came
in, glowing in the sunlight, the calm, cyclone center of him.
And that thought was almost as terrifying as the first, only in a bright, uncomplicated way. I wasn’t used to brightness. I was used to murky complications.
I’m a mole, I thought glumly. I need dark tunnels of busyness to feel safe.
And wasn’t that was a depressing thought.
“What if I can’t do anything else?” I said, at the same moment he said, “It’s not like you can’t do something else, Janey.”
What an offhanded way to discuss my lack of career options. “It’s exactly like that,” I snapped.
He looked at me like I was insane. “Are you insane?”
“Explain,” I ordered.
“You have options,” he said matter-of-factly. “You could do just about anything.”
“Like what?”
“You like to cook. Open a restaurant.”
“Open a…” I stared. I might be drunk, but even a drunk person knew that was nuts. “A restaurant? Me?”
“Sure. I’ll build it for you.”
“A restaurant.” I exhaled, stunned. He was so light about it, so cavalier. “That’s…” Terrifying. Exciting. “Ridiculous.”
He gave a little shrug. “Why?”
I scrambled around, sat up on my knees. “Why? Nope. I couldn’t handle it. The finances, and the loans, and the accounts and ordering— I’d never be able to keep my head above water.”
“Bullshit.”
“Not bullshit,” I told him firmly. “Or any other kind of shit. I’m not good with numbers.”
“Is that what the tests said?”
I squinted at him. “Which ones?”
“In school. The ones that said you were stupid.”
Oh, right. Those ones. I eyed him. “I am bad with numbers, Finn. I don’t need a test to tell me so.”
“Yeah? How do you manage your business now?”
I was taken aback. And drunk. I attempted to explain. “Those aren’t my numbers. All I do is pay vendors with my clients’ money, if I’m even involved in the transaction at all. I don’t have to keep track of that money. I don’t hold it or distribute it. I don’t have employees; Savannah is an independent contractor, and she fills out her 1099 for me. I just hire staff per event, pay them cash night-of. With Savannah’s help, the taxes aren’t very hard, and.…”