By Blood Written

by Steven Womack

  She climbed the flight of wide brick and concrete steps up to the heavy wooden double doors and rang the bell. A few moments later, the tarnished brass doorknob turned and Brett Silverman pulled the door open.

  “Hey girl!” Brett called, reaching out and taking Taylor’s arm. “C’mon in.”

  “Hi,” Taylor said, stepping into the entrance foyer. Taylor set down her briefcase, shrugged off her overcoat, and handed it to Brett. Brett hung the coat on the hook of a large, ornately carved antique oak hall tree, then turned and opened her arms. Brett and Taylor hugged briefly, then Brett led the way into the large living room of the three-story brownstone.

  “C’mon, let’s have a quick glass of wine, then we’ll walk down the street to the restaurant. It won’t get crowded for another hour so anyway.”

  Brett Silverman had decorated her home in the style of a turn-of-the-century New York matron. Red velvet drapes covered the front window; thick Oriental rugs covered polished oak floors. Her furniture was Victorian and heavy. It didn’t suit Taylor’s tastes, but it was a welcome change from her recent surroundings. The past couple of weeks, Taylor had shuttled between her apartment and office and seen little else.

  Taylor followed Brett through the house and into a large kitchen that was as modern as the rest of the house was Victorian. A large Garland stove dominated one wall, with an institutional-size stainless-steel refrigerator across from it on the other wall. Brett stepped over, opened one of the two large doors on the refrigerator, and pulled out a bottle of Chardonnay.

  “This okay?” she asked.

  “Perfect,” Taylor answered. She pulled a stool over and sat down behind a counter.

  “So how’s it going?” Brett asked. “I feel like I haven’t seen you in a month of Sundays.”

  “Been kind of crazy,” Taylor offered. “Prosperity’s going to be the death of us all.”

  “Where’ve I heard that before?” Brett joked as she pulled two wineglasses out of the cabinet next to the refrigerator and poured each of them a full glass of the buttery, cold white wine. She handed one to Taylor across the counter, and the two women clinked glasses.

  “So tell me, what’s the word from our favorite best-selling author on the end of his tour?”

  “Well,” Taylor said, pausing to take another sip of the wine. “He’s bushed, but I think he’s happy. The end of the tour went really well. I think he’s real tired of being cooped up in a car with Carol Gee. I don’t think they’re getting along together very well.”

  Brett Silverman leaned down on the counter and placed both her elbows on the ceramic surface. “I can back you up there,” she said. “Carol said they’re about to drive each other crazy. I don’t really know what’s been going on, but apparently it hasn’t been very pleasant. In fact, I think Carol’s probably going to ask for a transfer when she gets back.”

  “Oh my God,” Taylor said. “I had no idea it was that bad.

  Michael doesn’t talk about it much. It’s just that whenever her name comes up, I can hear his teeth clench over the phone.”

  “When she called last night, she was so upset I told her to take a week off. The tour ends tomorrow in San Diego, she’s got friends in L.A. What the hell, take some time off, lie in the sun, decompress, let go of it all.”

  “Good idea,” Taylor said. “At least give her a chance to think things over.”

  Brett turned, opened the cabinet door behind her, and took out a box of gourmet crackers. She spread some on a plate, then slid the plate across the counter to Taylor. “Here, something to munch on.”

  Taylor bit into one of the crackers, realizing that she was getting hungry. It had been a long day, and at that moment she couldn’t remember if she ever ate lunch.

  Three sips of wine, she thought, and it’s going to my head.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  Brett stared across the counter at her friend, studying her face intently for a few moments. Taylor looked up from the plate she’d been staring at.

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” Brett said.

  Taylor frowned. “What? What are you looking at?”

  Brett straightened from where she’d been leaning over the counter and fingered the stem of her wineglass. “It’s none of my business, but you really do look tired. What’s going on?

  You can’t be working that hard.”

  Taylor paused a moment before answering, as if trying to decide how much to say. “I’m not sleeping well. I’ve got a lot on my mind,” she admitted.

  “Anything you want to talk about?”

  Taylor turned away, uncomfortable. “Not really.”

  “You know, when you called today I got the feeling something was the matter. I also figured it was kind of weird your being willing to come to my house. You almost always want to meet somewhere in the midtown area close to your office.”

  Taylor sighed, took another long sip of wine, and set the glass down on the counter. “Well, there is something …”

  Brett nervously pulled her long hair over her shoulders into a ponytail and grasped it with her right hand. Her left hand drummed on the countertop. “I think I’m beginning to understand. Something tells me there’s a man involved in this story somewhere.”

  “There is,” Taylor confessed. “And if I don’t talk to somebody soon, I’m going to go nuts. One thing though …”

  Brett let go of her hair. “Yeah?”

  “You’ve got to swear,” Taylor said, her voice somber. “I mean it, Brett, this can’t go any further than this kitchen.”

  “Whoa, girl,” Brett said. “This does sound serious. What is he? Some famous actor or, let me see, the head of a major publishing house? Is that it? You’re afraid of being accused of sleeping your way into book deals, right?”

  Taylor wearily rubbed her eyes, then squinted and focused on the woman across from her. “Worse than that, I’m afraid.”

  Brett’s forehead wrinkled. “Good heavens, Robinson, who the hell is it?”

  “You’ve got to promise,” Taylor insisted. “This is top secret. For your ears only.”

  “You got it,” Brett said. “I swear. No further. But who is it?”

  Taylor hesitated a few more moments, still agonizing over whether to say anything. But then, she realized, she had to talk to somebody or she was going to go crazy.

  “It’s a certain best-selling author we both know,” Taylor said softly.

  Brett focused on a midair space halfway between her nose and Taylor’s. “Best-selling author,” she mumbled. And then, as if a burst of light had gone off inside her head like an explosion, her mouth opened and her eyes seemed to quiver in their sockets.

  “No!” she gasped.

  Taylor nodded her head.

  “It can’t be,” Brett whispered.

  “It is, dear heart. Believe it.”

  “You’re sleeping with a client?” Brett asked, aghast.

  Taylor leaned forward, rested her forehead on the counter, and moaned.

  “Oh my God, is it serious?”

  Taylor raised her head. “He’s moving here after the tour.

  And he wants to go on vacation together. The Caribbean …”

  Brett walked around the counter and sat on a stool next to Taylor, then put an arm around her shoulder.

  “I mean, Taylor-” she stammered. “How did it happen?”

  Taylor wearily let her head fall onto Brett’s shoulder. “Oh, God, he was staying at my apartment. We’d been working so closely together for so long and we went out to celebrate the night he signed the contract and had that great signing at the Barnes amp; Noble. There was a lot of brandy and hand-holding, and then we went back to my place and one thing just kind of led to another.”

  “But sweetie, that night of the party he had that blond bimbo up in the guest bedroom.”

  Taylor sat up straight, reached for her wineglass. “I know,”

  she said defensively. “I know. He apologized. Profusely …

  He
was so damn charming about it all.” She took another long sip of the wine, polishing off all but a few drops at the bottom. Then she turned and smiled weakly at Brett.

  “At least we did the safe-sex thing.”

  Brett smiled back at her sympathetically. “Well, thank God for small favors.” She got up, retrieved the wine bottle, and filled both their glasses.

  “I’ve got to ask this, babe,” Brett said as she stuffed the cork back in the wine bottle. “I mean, do you like this guy?

  Are you in love with him? Is this going anywhere?”

  “I don’t know,” Taylor said, trying not to sound whiny and not at all sure she was succeeding. “But it’s been so long since I’ve been with anyone. I work a gazillion hours a week. You know how hard it is to meet anybody in Manhattan if you don’t do the bar scene?”

  Brett shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve never not done the bar scene.”

  “It’s damn hard. And the men I work with are either disaffected grungemeisters or incredibly attractive, perfect men who also happen to be gay.”

  “Okay,” Brett snapped. “You’re lonely, you’re horny, blah blah blah. But Michael Schiftmann? “

  “Why not?” Taylor demanded. “I mean, he’s a good-looking guy, he’s intelligent-”

  Brett turned, held up her index finger. “And he is rich.”

  “Okay, that too. So what’s wrong with it?”

  “Have you ever read his books?” Brett asked. “The guy’s a perv! Trust me, I edit him!”

  “Of course I’ve read his books. His books aren’t him,”

  Taylor insisted.

  “Okay, grant you that. The main question is, do you like him?”

  Taylor thought for a moment. “I like him. Yes, I like him.

  Could I love him? I don’t know.”

  Brett leaned down on the counter again, smiling, and lowering her voice to a conspiratorial level. “And there is one other thing … Is he any good?”

  Taylor looked directly into her friend’s eyes and stared for a moment, then: “Un-fucking-believable. The best ever, Brett. I mean it, the Earth shook and I was fogged up the rest of the day.”

  Brett straightened up quickly. “Whoa, girl! Okay, as your friend and spiritual advisor in matters of the heart, I recommend you go for it, ASAP. Ride that wave as far as it’ll go.”

  Taylor smiled. “You think so?”

  “Hey, what’s the downside? The worst that can happen is it doesn’t work out, then you have to suffer with great sex from a rich guy until he dumps you or you dump him.”

  “It could be worse than that,” Taylor said. “I could lose him as a client.”

  Brett took her hands in hers and squeezed them. “He’s a smart guy, Taylor. He knows who got him where he is. Business is business, no matter what.”

  Taylor thought about that for a moment. “Yeah, I guess you’re right. At least I hope you are.”

  “C’mon, the Empire Diner awaits. Let’s get down there before it gets too crowded.”

  Brett Silverman always considered Saturdays her quiet time in the office; a chance to go through the mountain of paper in her in-box, stack up the phone calls that hadn’t yet been returned so she’d be ready to go first thing Monday morning, go through the e-mail messages she hadn’t had time to deal with.

  Pull together the stack of rejected submissions for Marcie, her assistant, to get started on …

  Brett had slept late this Saturday after a huge meal at the Empire Diner with Taylor the night before, followed by several more glasses of wine before bedtime after her friend grabbed a cab back to SoHo. She’d watched an old movie on cable, gotten more than a little drunk, then stayed under the covers until almost noon. She drank a pot of coffee and scrambled some eggs and read the Times before grabbing a cab to her office around three. There was no particular reason to move quickly on this Saturday afternoon; this was only the latest in a string of dateless Saturday nights she’d endured. She was beginning to wonder how long her dry spell was going to last.

  Manhattan had chilled overnight; the afternoon temperatures back down into the low thirties. In line with the latest cost-saving measures, the heat in her building had been cut back. Brett threw off her parka but left her ski sweater on as she sat down at her desk.

  At least, she thought, she was here alone: no meetings, no frantic phone calls, no juggling six projects at once.

  An hour into her work, Brett Silverman began to get sleepy and to wonder if she shouldn’t just bag it and head back to her brownstone for a long nap before her solo dinner. She leaned back in her chair and rubbed her eyes, fighting the urge to indulge in self-pity at the prospect of eating dinner alone. She wondered if perhaps Taylor might be free again tonight. What the hell, with her new boyfriend thousands of miles away in Southern California, she was probably facing a dateless Saturday night as well.

  Brett relaxed and put her feet up on her desk, contemplat-ing Michael Schiftmann and Taylor Robinson as an item.

  She wanted her friend to be happy, but still there was something that made her profoundly uneasy at the news. She tried to put it out of her mind and leaned forward to grab another stack of correspondence to answer when her phone suddenly went off.

  Brett fumbled for the phone, jolted out of what she realized had become a quite serious reverie. She also wondered who would be calling in on her direct line on a Saturday afternoon.

  “Hello,” she said.

  “Brett? Carol.”

  Brett smiled. “Hello, Carol Gee! Welcome to your last day on the road for a long while.”

  “Thank God,” Carol said. “I quite literally couldn’t take another day of this.”

  Brett felt her grip on the handset tighten. “Has something happened?” She heard Carol Gee sigh loudly into the phone and then groan.

  “Oh, I just can’t take any more,” Carol said.

  “What did he do now?”

  “Nothing. I shouldn’t say anything. I just wanted to call and blow off some steam. You’re the only person I can talk to at the office about this.”

  “Look, it’s almost over,” Brett said. “I know this has been a rough trip. But after tonight, hey, you’re on vacation for a week.”

  “About time,” Carol said. “I just hope a week’s long enough.”

  “Go hide out, lie on a beach, forget there are such things as telephones, fax machines, e-mail …”

  “Best-selling authors,” Carol interjected.

  “C’mon, it can’t be that bad,” Brett countered. “After all, his fans like him, his mother likes him-”

  “God knows why,” Carol said, exasperated. “You know, last night he went out-”

  “He’s even got a girlfriend,” Brett said.

  “What?” Carol asked, her voice shocked.

  “Oh, I’m not supposed to say anything, but these kinds of things never stay hidden very long. Truth is, he and Taylor have got a little thing going on.”

  “What? What did you say?”

  “He and Taylor.”

  “Taylor Robinson, his agent?” Carol Gee sounded surprised beyond belief.

  “Yeah, it was a shock to me, too,” Brett agreed. “But apparently this may be pretty serious.”

  “My God,” Carol whispered, her voice sounding far off.

  “Yeah,” Brett said, then added, “Hey, you all right?”

  For a few moments, Brett heard only the hissing of trans-continental static. “Carol, you there?”

  “Oh, yeah. I’m here. Just surprised. That’s all.”

  “The whole world’s going to be surprised,” Brett said, chatting on. “I expect this is the kind of thing that’ll even make the scandal sheets, maybe even Hard Copy or Entertainment Tonight. But you know what they say, there’s no such thing as bad publicity. It’ll sell the hell out of his books.

  Maybe it’ll even-”

  “Brett, I gotta run,” Carol interrupted. “I’ll call you the next day or so, okay?”

  “Don’t you dare,” Brett said
, her voice mock-stern. “After tonight’s signing, you’re on mandatory R amp;R for the next seven days. I don’t want to hear your voice until you’re back in the office a week from Monday. Okay?”

  “Sure,” Carol said. Brett thought she still sounded distracted, far away. “Sure.”

  The two women hung up, and Brett went back to the stacks of paper on her desk. As she thumbed through the addenda to a contract that had to go out by next Wednesday, she suddenly remembered her pledge of secrecy to Taylor the night before and briefly felt a surge of guilt.

  “What difference does it make?” she whispered to herself as she turned to page six. “These things always go public sooner or later.”

  CHAPTER 11

  Saturday afternoon, San Diego

  Carol Gee hung up the phone and stared out the twenty-fifth-story window of the Hyatt Regency San Diego. Her room overlooked the harbor and the glimmering deep blue of the Pacific Ocean. The sun was high overhead, the day brilliantly clear. Far below her, in the distance, the Coro-nado ferry chugged slowly southwest.

  Right now, she would have given anything to be on that ferry, sailing away to anywhere but here. Ten stories above her-on the Gold Passport floor, of course-Michael Schiftmann was settling into his room and planning God knew what for his last evening on book tour. Carol had almost five hours to herself, time that she would need if she intended to regroup and steel herself for the signing tonight after what she had just learned.

  Carol stood there for a long time, leaning against the heavy plate glass and staring out at the sea. She tried to find a calm place inside herself, someplace where she could sort out all the conflicts, all the noise in her head. She wished, honestly wished, that Brett Silverman had never said a thing to her about Michael Schiftmann and Taylor Robinson’s involvement. If she’d never been told, she’d never have been faced with the kind of dilemma now forced upon her.