Neon Burn

by Kasia Fox

  “Oh don’t look so worried. I’m only teasing,” Berkley said. “I’ll tell you this. Ronnie will do anything for you. He will be loyal to you. He’s waited a long time to meet you. That’s all I meant.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Then again,” Berkley waved her glass in the air, “maybe you shouldn’t trust what I have to say. Ronnie pays my phone bill.”

  “I’ll be out of your hair tomorrow.” Out of her hair? Tessa felt stupid for saying it.

  “You’ve been hiding in that room all day. I wouldn’t mind having you in my hair.” Berkley tipped her champagne glass back. “Most days it’s pretty quiet around here.”

  “Will Ron be back soon?”

  “Tough to say. The man does love to wander.”

  “I have things to do back in North Dakota… my best friend is moving. Job interviews to line up.” Tessa made wide gestures in the air. The motion blew a bit of champagne bottle foil from counter top to the floor. Berkley bent to pick it up and her robe gaped open. When she righted herself, the satin fabric of her robe slipped to one side, exposing a smooth breast. Up close, her nipple was large and firm with a small, pinkish brown areola.

  “You don’t think Ronnie is going to let you go that easy, do you?” Berkley moved closer to Tessa. Her hand went to the neckline of her robe and lingered there, stroking the silky fabric for a moment before covering herself. The woman was so close Tessa could smell the champagne on her breath and the spice of her body wash. Suddenly, on the other side of the wall, there was the rumble of a garage door ascending and the tension in the room broke. “I want to get to know you better too,” Berkley said. “Ronnie works all the time. We’ll be alone together a lot.” With that she left the room, holding the champagne bottle by the neck.

  Tessa felt dizzy. Her cheeks were warm from the alcohol. If it were an hour earlier, she would’ve ran from the kitchen and cowered in the guest room. Maybe the alcohol made her brave. She waited. Ron entered the kitchen and flicked on the lights. Tessa blinked in the brightness.

  “Jesus,” he said when he saw her. “You scared the shit out of me.” He noticed the champagne flute. “I see you met Berkley.” He stared at her, and his mouth spread into a big grin. His big brutish face changed entirely when he smiled. “I’m just so glad you’re here. Part of me worried you were going ot run off while I was gone.”

  “I’m here,” Tessa said. “I have questions and I want to get to know you. I guess I’ve wanted to get to know you my whole life.”

  That night they stayed up talking for two hours. She talked about school, about her granddad’s dementia and about life in North Dakota. He told her about his ancestry and relatives who’d like to meet her, about the handful of times he’d reached out to her mother to try to patch things up to no avail.

  When she couldn’t stop yawning, Tessa said goodnight. The blue light of the pool paled the darkness of the guest room. She crawled into bed thinking of Berkley’s body slipping through the cold water. What was it like to swim naked, water streaming over her breasts, between her legs? Then her thoughts returned to Cal, his muscular arm cocked out the window. One of his big, powerful hands traveling down her body and into her own luxurious wetness. Tessa closed her eyes, imagined her hand was his. When she came, she clamped one hand over her own mouth so no one would hear her cry out.

  ✽✽✽

  When we are young, we yearn to belong. So why do we also yearn to be recognized for what is special about us? In new love, we long to hear what drew our beloved to us. Was it our eyes? The way we wrap a strand of hair around the finger when we read a book? What in particular? What specifically? How we hum when we’re nervous? That we cry when we see videos of soldiers coming home to their children? That we’d risk getting hit by a car to save a cat in traffic? Tell me what makes me special.

  Falling in love with someone is falling in love with yourself.

  He told me our song was ‘Unforgettable.’ Remember Nat King Cole crooning: “That’s why darling, it’s incredible, that someone so unforgettable, thinks that I am unforgettable too…” My dark parishioner counted the things he liked about me on his workman’s fingertips. He said, “You are so beautiful and you don’t know it.” He said to me, “You are so pure.” He said to me, “You are mine.” Oh, the little flower liked these words. When we are young, we often do.

  8.

  Deep in the house, at the end of a long dark hall, was a room for servants’ quarters. A tucked away place to keep a live-in nanny or a pesky mother-in-law. This was where Berkley made a living.

  Berkley sauntered down the hallway, swigging from the bottle of champagne. She passed through the door and walked into the room’s dark depths with the confidence of a blind man on familiar terrain. When she reached the far wall, she pressed the switch for her sign. The room filled with a muted violet glow. Berkley’s custom-made sign took up nearly half of one of the walls in the room. Three tiers of scrawling neon purple letters spelled the words Her Special Place.

  She was forty now. Fabulous lighting was worth the investment. The whole room was done up in purples and creams, filled with flounces and a furry rug so plush it begged you to strip and roll naked on it. Her workspace looked like the boudoir of a perverted little girl. The décor wasn’t to her taste – the rest of the house was more reflective of her style. This room was for other people’s pleasure.

  The white patent tabletop of her vanity was empty, except for a hot pink dildo sitting upright on the base of its balls. Laughter carried down the hallway from the kitchen. Father and daughter reunited. Charming. Berkley flicked the dildo and it swayed. Should she let it slip to poor little Tessa that Ronnie liked her to call him daddy?

  Berkley’s life had been a parade of Ronnies, starting with her stepdads. Unlike her mother, however, Berkley was never going to settle for the type of man who expected you to give him the blowjob on command and pay the rent. Berkley’s mother, if she weren’t dead to Berkley, would tell her she should be grateful to Ronnie. No man was good all the time, and he was the rich man. By comparison, as a woman who didn’t cook, Berkley was useless for anything but sex and basic human companionship. Ronnie thought he was smarter than her. Blockhead Ronnie. Bought a business at the right place at the right time and it did well and now he took himself for a genius. Meanwhile Berkley had made herself into a brand, had started Her Special Place with a laptop and a talent for making chumps get hard and ship cash.

  In the beginning, they were crazy about each other. As the years wore on, many times Ronnie had been a bad boy. It came with the territory, he said, being with a man in his business, a man surrounded by beautiful, desperate girls. She told him she’d find a new territory then. Once she’d worked making submarine sandwiches, and she’d do it again (of course she wouldn’t, not really). Now that she’d fallen out of love with him, Berkley could see that the poor thing actually loved her in his limited way. At first he tried to be a good boy. But he could only be disciplined for so long. He couldn’t keep his meaty hands out of the company cookie jar. And so Berkley had to warn him: There would be consequences if he was bad again.

  From what she’d pulled out of Ronnie’s lackey, Skinner, Ronnie’s latest side-piece was a twenty-one-year old dancer at the club, too dumb and pathetic to be fun to fuck with. Ronnie, on the other hand? Now that she was ready to jet, she was ready to have some fun with him.

  Ronnie hadn’t even told her that he was going to contact his daughter until she was on a plane coming to Las Vegas. Was it fair of Berkley to ruin an innocent bystander in pursuit of revenge against her boyfriend? Of course not. Was it especially twisted to want to seduce her boyfriend’s daughter? Possibly. (Definitely.) She knew right from wrong; she just didn’t care. Revenge was what she craved. Before little miss Mary-Therese came along, Ronnie didn’t have anything he loved enough to care if it was taken away from him. He brought the girl here and if anything happened to her, he had no one to blame but himself. If anyone had taught Berkley how to be ruth
less with innocent women, it was Ronnie Doucette.

  Down the hall, father and daughter laughed again. Tessa would stay. Berkley would play. How to get at this rosary-saying, Dean’s-list making, pony-tail swinging on her morning jog, cookie-baking girl? The same way she’d gotten everything she’d ever wanted from life: Sex and smarts. Little miss Tessa might have just got a master’s degree. Berkley Sutherland had a Ph.D. in sex as power.

  From the vanity drawer she removed a tube of lip gloss and spread a thin sheen over her plumped lips. She pinched her nipples, arranged her hair and her robe. She logged onto her server, gave her hair one final toss and smooth. The green eye of the camera blinked on.

  “Hello, little boys,” Berkley cooed. “Her Special Place is open. I just got out of the shower and I’m feeling especially dirty tonight.”

  9.

  A television camera swung around and zeroed in on Cal’s face. He knew the camera was on him, but he kept his eyes trained on the ring. Rodriguez and King were the title match of this week’s event from Cal’s company, and American Prizefighter. Fights took place all over the country and people like his brother Jay were at home watching them on pay-per-view. Under normal circumstances, Cal loved local fights. Boxing was his first love. The sport was his work too, but usually it didn’t feel like it. Morgan, his date, also sensed the cameras. She slid her hand onto Cal’s thigh and kept it there.

  Rodiguez landed some hard jabs and the crowd in the arena went nuts. Tonight he couldn’t focus. He was thinking about the women he’d almost run over earlier that day. Tessa. Her voice. The dark hair. That easy laugh. The flash of anger he’d seen in her eyes as he’d driven away. Had she heard his comment about not getting involved with someone connected to Ron Doucette? If she had, he couldn’t worry about it. She’d learn soon enough what her dad was like.

  The crowd in the casino stadium roared. The guy to Cal’s right jumped to his feet. Rodriguez had dropped King and Cal had missed it.

  Morgan leaned in, whispered, “Everything okay?”

  “Fine.”

  She sat back in her seat. Morgan was Cal’s usual type: gorgeous, blonde, lithe. She worked as a part-time yoga teacher, part-time cocktail server at a nightclub where all the girls looked like models. When they’d started hooking up a month ago, he’d been careful to stress that he wanted to keep things casual. Pretty clearly she wanted something serious. For example, he knew that she had aspirations to be a full-time mom and philanthropist on top of starting her own athleisure line one day. Many of Cal’s wealthier colleagues funded such vanity projects for their second, more glamorous wives.

  The announcer bellowed. A ring girl in bright red short shorts strutted the ring carrying a round four card. The camera swung by for a second look at him. Cal kept his face neutral. Since he’d founded American Prizefighter, people were suddenly interested in him. The camera panned to his reaction at fights. Fans flagged him down for pictures at restaurants. Journalists requested interview time to profile him. He didn’t get it and he didn’t like it – not the interview process, not the outcome. Stuff written about him didn’t line up with how he saw himself. He’d been described as grumpy, taciturn, unapproachable, unresponsive.

  “Whether you like it or not, you are the brand,” Sasha, the lead person on the team that handled American Prizefighter public relations, told him after a particularly unkind article had been published online. “Open up a little. Tell some funny stories about your days boxing.”

  “The less people know about me the better,” he’d replied.

  The suspicious part of him wondered if the girl with the car was all an act. If Ronnie had sent his daughter out on purpose. He didn’t think so. In his mind, they’d had some sort of connection. Then again, Ronnie was such a scumbag you couldn’t count him out. Cal made a low noise of disgust.

  Morgan leaned in and whispered. “You look pissed off, Callum. Did I do something?”

  He didn’t reply. The camera was on him again. Morgan rubbed his back. He scowled.

  10.

  No one was up when Tessa woke the next morning. First she went outside and sat on the patio furniture, marveling at being outdoors in a t-shirt. In the distance, two men on a golf cart disappeared and reappeared in the rise and fall of the fairway. Beyond the course, Tessa looked out at sweeping views of striated mountains. The desert was unexpectedly beautiful. For a full hour she sat outside, warming her bare toes in the sun. Soon enough, hunger pangs forced her back into the house.

  The kitchen pantry was barren. It contained flats of the same types of drinks occupying the fridge, a few canned goods and a half-eaten bag of tortilla chips. Did they eat all their meals in restaurants? Judging by the size of Ron’s gut, he enjoyed a good meal. Berkley might not eat at all. Tessa also found a bag of granola and she munched a dry handful and then she ate another apple from the bowl.

  Bored, she roamed about, peeking her head into open doorways and leaving closed doors closed. The house was a single level and sprawling. The floors were a pale beige stone thinly veined with white and grey, cool underfoot. Here and there the neutral color palate was dotted with terracotta planters and the deep greens of their plants. The twin atriums flanking the front entrance were her favorite part of the place. If she’d taken the time to imagine the type of home a strip club magnate might live in, she would’ve pictured more smoked glass and black leather and fish tanks.

  By nine thirty, Tessa was bored and decided to go for a run. Back home, running was part of her morning routine. In the winter, she ran the track at the university field house and in the summer she ran on the various trails around town. This had always worried her mom, who would text her links to various news stories about women attacked and murdered while jogging. Running was too important for Tessa to give it up, even for her mom’s peace of mind. The endorphins kept anxiety at bay. Seeing as eating was another favorite hobby, being active was helpful in that way too.

  Dressed in yoga pants and a thin t-shirt, she popped in her earbuds, chose an upbeat playlist on her phone and set out the front door. Not knowing the neighborhood was a problem. First she hung a right and ran down the road. The houses lining the street were all built to the distinct tastes of their wealthy owners. A French chateau. A Tuscan estate. An imposing white and glass modern mega-mansion taking up a corner lot. Eventually she reached a small park, no more than a stretch of grass, a few trees and a decorative bench that looked out onto the golf course. A concrete trail wrapped around the park and led out onto the green. Tessa followed the trail out of the neighborhood and ran along the perimeter of the course. A golf cart approached and she stepped off track so it could pass. A wizened pair of senior ladies in sun visors glared at her. Tessa was aware that she probably wasn’t supposed to be there, but anyone could tell that she was harmless. It was interesting to see all the big houses from the opposite side of the street: their infinity pools, the elaborate swing sets and basketball courts and, on one, a helicopter pad. Her heart rate was up and her mouth felt tacky. She wished she’d brought water. She reversed course on the same trail and headed back the way she came. A different golf cart was cresting the hill and Tessa stepped off the path, panting with exertion. The house she was standing closest to was built in a beautiful Mediterranean style. It had a tiled roof, huge windows, private balconies on the upper levels. For a better look, she went to the property’s fence, resting her hands on the wrought iron bars. She wished Dev were here. He loved houses and luxury. She imagined him drinking champagne near the pool with Berkley.

  Someone tapped her on the shoulder. She turned around and was face-to-face with a grey-haired security guard. The man was older than Ron and possibly in worse shape.

  “Ma’am, are you a guest of Badlands Country Club?” the man asked, his hand touching an actual gun holstered to his hip.

  “My dad lives in a house back there.” She pointed in the direction of Ron’s house.

  “Ma’am.” The man’s voice was both hard and annoyed. “That is a pr
ivate community separate from the Badlands Country Club. Residents of that private community do not have access to the country club golf course unless they are members of the country club.”

  “I have no idea if –”

  “Furthermore, ma’am,” the man continued, “even if you were a member of Badlands Country Club, there is no jogging permitted on the golf cart trail.”

  “It’s fine. I’ll leave. I’m going right up there.” She pointed to the opening to the park several houses up.

  “Furthermore,” he went on, “the fence you were touching there was on private property. Were you attempting to climb this fence?”

  “What?” Tessa cried. “Of course not. I was only looking.”

  On the other side of the fence, a tall, wiry man with buzzed black hair and an olive complexion greeted them. The man was dressed in a fitted black t-shirt tucked into back trousers and had a radio clipped to his waist. Unlike the gray-haired golf-course security guard, this man looked like he might actually be able to provide security.

  “You weren’t thinking of climbing that fence, were you?” The guard in black said.

  “Is this place Buckingham Palace or something?” She looked helplessly from one man to the next. Neither of them appeared impressed by her backtalk. She decided to play the country bumpkin card. “I got lost and the house is so beautiful. I’m from North Dakota. I just wanted to look.”

  “And what’s your name, ma’am?” the sleek security guard said. He had a slight accent.

  “Tessa Paul.”

  “Can I see some ID?” He scribbled in a small notebook.

  “No. Does a former president live here or something?””

  He looked up from his notebook and leveled her with an intense look.

  Tessa sighed. “I was out for a run. I didn’t bring anything with me.” The security guard dressed in black stepped back from the fence, murmuring into his radio.