by Megan Bryce
“Cass. Carlton! Oh, Carlton!” He wiggled his finger between the two of them. “This fling is over.”
“He didn’t pick it, Shane. And anyway, what’s Christian’s middle name?”
“No! I don’t want to know!”
Christian said, “Hyrum,” and stopped the conversation.
The silence lengthened until Cassandra said, finally, “He didn’t pick it.”
Shane mouthed to her, “Hyrum.”
Cassandra took another bite of lobster, thinking all she’d had to do was get Christian to say his middle name? She should have guessed that.
Christian ate another bite of filet. “Is it really that bad?”
Shane tried to clear his head with a shake. “It’s not Carlton, I’ll give you that.”
Brady sent a dead-eyed glare over to Shane’s side of the table, and Shane shivered. He whispered behind his hand to Cassandra, “Okay, fine. Carlton can stay.”
Cassandra nodded. Brady could have been named Rainbow Brite and his badass self still could’ve stayed.
Shane’s obsession with names had come in high school. They’d both been in the drama club’s production of Romeo and Juliet and they’d rehearsed for months.
Cassandra could still recite by memory,
What’s in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.
Shane’s reply had always been no. Romeo and Juliet would never have got off the ground if it had been Romeo and Brunhilda.
Cassandra could have said something about real, lasting love right then. The kind that lasted, no matter what name your love had been blessed with. But instead, she ate another bite of lobster.
Shane said, “Hyrum. Maybe I can work with it? Hyrum. Hyrum.”
When Cassandra glanced at Christian, there was a smile on his face. A smile that said Shane was just so funny. A smile that said. . .
Cassandra’s fingers tightened on her wine glass.
Brady’s hand settled on her leg under the table. His thumb lightly stroked her thigh and when Cassandra lifted her eyes from the pale yellow liquid in her glass, Brady’s gaze caught hers. Dark and nearly black and. . .not dead. No matter how much either of them wished, they just weren’t dead.
The vice around her heart stopped squeezing, her fingers stopped trying to wring the goblet’s neck. Cassandra wasn’t alone with her misery. She had Brady. At least for a little while, and he wasn’t a small consolation prize.
Shane whispered, dragging her attention back to him and Christian, “Maybe I can work with it,” and when she looked at them, Christian was lightly touching Shane’s hand.
Shane’s face blossomed with happiness. “What about shortening it to Hy? Christian Hy Johnson. Ooh, I like that.”
Cassandra pushed her plate away, no longer hungry. She muttered, “We are relieved,” and Brady snorted.
“Yes, your majesty. We are all relieved.”
He squeezed her thigh hard and distracted her by ordering a triple chocolate layer cake for dessert, and by the time dinner was over, she was okay again.
As okay as she was going to get.
They walked back to the cars, and Cassandra watched Shane and Christian leave together. No hand holding, a good foot between them.
It was just so awkward. He was just so awkward.
She looked down at her empty hand and then Brady’s, and told herself it was different. There was no awkwardness between them. They weren’t dating. There was no wooing. It was two people having a good time together. Nothing more.
She held her hand out for the keys and Brady said, “You let me drive here.”
“That was before I knew you were trying to take the Z away from me. I’m not going back to my Civic, not when I live with you all the way out in Brentwood.”
“Trust Rodrigo.”
She snorted. “I don’t trust him. I don’t trust you. I’m keeping the Z.”
Brady stuffed his hands in his pockets and looked up. Cassandra almost mimicked him, but then remembered she’d seen the stars. She liked looking at his face better.
Sometimes she watched him sleep just because she liked how he looked. She liked how she saw two people when she looked at him. Before and after.
She thought he might have been a little like Ethan before. Go-lucky. Special. The heir.
She could see it even now. He knew he’d get his way. Whatever he wanted, he’d get it.
And now he knew he’d never get the one thing that really meant anything.
After.
He looked down at her, catching her eye, and there wasn’t any charm in his look. He didn’t make her dreamy and forget who she was. He didn’t make her want babies and marriage and happily ever after.
Although, God, he made her want sex.
He was anger and heat and black nothing, and Cassandra wanted it all. She had her own anger and heat, and wanted to disappear into the black nothing, if only for a little while.
She motioned for the keys again and taunted, “Ivy.”
He coughed out a laugh, closing his eyes. “Brady.”
Cassandra reached for the keys in his hand, slipping her fingers between his.
Everyone would give him whatever he wanted. Because he was scary and tragic and big. But she wouldn’t. Because she liked him after better. She liked him slightly frustrated and teetering on the edge.
Brady let go of the keys and said, “Just know that I am going to make you pay tonight for getting your way in this.”
She stopped herself from saying yes, please at the last second, and instead stepped in to him, pressing herself against him and feeling every hard, bulging muscle. She swallowed, shivering with her want, and said huskily, “Only if I can’t get you to toss your cookies on the way home.”
Cassandra woke the next morning in protest. It was Monday, she had an hour-long drive to make, and Brady kept telling her with his eyes that she wasn’t getting the Z today.
He’d also told her by hiding the keys.
Cassandra crossed her arms and glared at him over the breakfast table.
He took a bite, looking rested and ready for the day. And she knew he looked that way because of her. They’d expended quite a bit of energy when they’d made it back from the restaurant last night, and then had both gotten seven hours of shut-eye, and he could thank her by giving her the goddamn keys to his Z.
He said, “Do you really think that’s going to work?”
“Do you really think I’m coming back here tonight?”
He blinked in shock, then reached for his coffee cup and took a long, slow sip before saying, “It hadn’t occurred to me that you wouldn’t.”
“I have uprooted my life to move in here with you for two things.” Cassandra held up two fingers, and when he started smiling that satisfied man smile, she said, “The pool and your car.”
He snorted out his coffee.
He patted his lips, coughing, and Cassandra ate her eggs.
When he could talk again, he held up his two fingers. “I asked you to move in here for two reasons as well. We’re even.”
“Except you just took away one of my reasons.”
He shook his head. “I’m replacing it. Trust me.”
She muttered, “You keep saying that. I have no reason to.”
“You have no reason not to, either. I think you’ll like your car. I think you’ll prefer your car to mine.”
She tried not to laugh, really she did. There was such a thing as loyalty.
But his car was a Z.
She said, “Maybe you’ll prefer it.”
“We won’t know until we see it, will we?”
Oh, she knew.
But she pursed her lips and finished her breakfast, and when they went downstairs to see what a car thief could do to a 1996 Civic, her jaw dropped to the floor.
Her old green civic was no longer green, it was pearlescent peach.
It looked brand-new! But retro, too.
It had a rear bumper. Sh
iny new hubcaps. Shiny new everything.
The windows were now tinted, except she could see through the windshield that the seats were now upholstered in black and white zebra stripes.
Brady looked at her expression, heard the squeaking sounds she was making, and said, “This wasn’t quite what I was expecting.”
She rounded on Rodrigo. “You said you were going to bring her back a lady. What kind of lady is this?”
“A lady young enough to have some fun and old enough not to care what anybody thinks.”
Cassandra kicked a tire. A new tire. Four new tires.
She reached for the door handle and stopped. A shiny new door handle.
It was the old shape and new hardware, all at the same time. Cassandra shook her head. “Impossible. This can’t be the same car.”
Rodrigo folded his arms. “You say impossible. I say it is done.”
“You’ve suped up my car.”
He gave a satisfied nod.
She said, “A new engine?”
“New everything.”
She poked her head inside the window to look at the new zebra-striped upholstery and Rodrigo said, “Now, she doesn’t have to drive your Z, jefe.”
Cassandra pulled her head back out. “Oh, please. You’re telling me there’s even a comparison between his car and mine? Even now that it’s new and improved, I doubt it.”
Rodrigo opened the driver door and waved her inside with a flourish.
She sat reluctantly, looking around critically. “It’s like my car, but it isn’t.”
Rodrigo closed the door with a solid thunk. “Take her for a spin.”
Brady got in the other side, smoothing down his tie and gripping the door handle, and nodded at her that he was ready.
Cassandra said, “Oh, you’re coming?”
He nodded again, not saying a word, and Cassandra’s mouth tilted up. She started the car, ready to turn it back off and hand the keys over to Brady. He could drive the painted lady; it was his car thief who’d made her into one.
And then sat there as the engine revved and the power ran up the steering wheel and into her fingers.
She looked at Rodrigo, and he folded his arms and tilted his chin and stared back at her.
Cassandra drove around the block. And then she went another block. And then she raced for Mulholland Drive, not caring that she was going to be late for work. Not caring that Brady was sweating in her brand new seats beside her.
She laughed and whooped as the car raced around curves, up and down hills. And she shouted over the engine and the wind racing in through the open windows, “It’s like I’m eighteen again! But better! Like I’ve got the looks, I can run down the block without wanting to keel over, but I’ve got some experience behind me as well and I’m not so tiringly stupid!”
Brady didn’t say anything. Just gripped the door handle and tried to stay in his seat as she rounded corners.
Two hours later, she made it back to the hotel.
Rodrigo watched her pull up, his chin still raised, his arms still folded.
She put the car in park and sat there and stared at him through the windshield. She said, “So I have to tell him he was right?”
Brady unpeeled his fingers from the door. “He already knows he’s right.”
And Rodrigo did look like he knew exactly what they were saying.
Cassandra said, “Can I drive your Z on the weekends?”
“Do you think you’re going to want to?”
When she didn’t answer, Brady pushed open his door and said to Rodrigo, “OK. Now you can come talk to me about that raise.”
Six
Brady woke with a gasp, sitting up in bed in the dark room.
Cassandra slept peacefully next to him, and as he looked at her his heart slowed and his muscles relaxed.
He’d woken not from a nightmare, not from the screams that no longer plagued him.
He’d woken from the absence.
He’d woken because in his dream, he’d been happy. And he’d realized that with peace came forgetfulness. He was forgetting his son, his wife.
All Brady had left of them was that one last memory, and every night that he slept, every night that he chose Cassandra, they moved a little farther away from him.
One tear slid down his cheek. And another.
He’d thought peace would be peaceful, but it wasn’t. Peace came with its own heartache.
Cassandra rolled toward him, her eyes opening to see him sitting up in bed. She reached for the tear hanging stubbornly to his jaw, wiping it away, and he gasped as the pain seared him.
Another wave of tears flowed and he rolled into Cassandra, gripping her tight and hiding his face against her chest.
The tears emptied from him. And all the pain, the horror, the hate and self-loathing rushed out of him.
Cassandra stroked his hair and cried with him. For him and with him.
When he’d quieted, she whispered, “Life’s a bitch.”
Life’s a bitch. What’s next?
Brady said, his voice rough, his throat swollen, “I don’t want to lose them. My dreams are all I have left.”
“Are they? Just because you can’t see them, touch them, doesn’t mean you don’t have anything left of them.”
It was all he had. He had nothing else accept the last memory. His wife’s blood, his son’s screams. His own personal hell, and he couldn’t give it up because it meant he would be giving them up as well.
But he didn’t think he could give up Cassandra, either. Couldn’t give up the sweet release from his endless hell.
She said, “You have other memories of them. I’m sure you have pictures. Why aren’t they here, where you live?”
“I don’t live here. I exist here.”
“Then where do you live?”
Brady drove her to his home. The traffic as light as it ever got; the drive from Brentwood to Calabasas cutting through the last green space in Los Angeles and making her forget for a few minutes that they lived in the middle of a concrete jungle.
He parked in the drive and looked at this home that had stood empty for so long. It was long and boxy, one-story. Glass and white walls, über-modern.
His wife had loved it, but had kept telling them they needed something different. This wasn’t a home where kids were free to be wild. And she’d wanted more kids. More happy, wild kids.
The outside lights blazed, welcoming him home like they’d always done. And he knew that when he went inside, ghosts would be there to greet him.
When he’d been released from prison, he’d headed here first, but everything had been exactly the same. The cleaning crew still cleaned, the gardener still tended. They’d changed nothing, just doing what they’d done for years because no one had told them differently.
He’d taken one step inside and had died all over. He’d rarely gone back since then.
Brady walked around to the back first and when Cassandra sighed at the pool, he almost smiled.
“Charlie loved to swim. He was fearless. He was only four and he would run down the diving board and fling himself off. Samantha always said he’d give her a heart attack one day.”
Cassandra didn’t react to the first time he’d said his wife’s name, just sat down at the edge, taking off her shoes and sticking her feet in the clear blue water. “I bet he loved the slide, too.”
Brady looked at the short slide built into the rocks and nodded. He closed his eyes, hearing the shrieks, remembering the fun they’d had together.
Cassandra said gently, “It all ends, Brady. It doesn’t change what happened. It doesn’t make it less or even tragic. The good times are good. The end.”
“And the bad times are bad?”
“The bad times blow. The bad times are inevitable. Celebrate the good times. Remember them.”
But it felt so wrong. It felt so wrong to remember the good times when he’d been the one to end them.
Brady unlocked the back door, stepping inside and
leaving Cassandra by the pool.
He wandered into the great room. White and clean. Sterile. There were no toys littering the floor, no little hand prints smudging the walls.
The tears threatened again and Brady turned away. The kitchen sparkled with disuse and he sat at the counter and remembered all the times he’d sat here watching his wife clean up after a meal.
Cassandra found him there, skirting around him to open cupboards and drawers. Dishes were stacked neatly, but the fridge was empty, the pantry bare. She swiped a finger on a shelf and found no dust. Took out a bowl and held it up to the light to see it sparkle.
She said, “Creepy.”
“Cleaning service.”
“They just keep cleaning an empty house?”
He nodded. “I can’t tell them to stop.”
“I can’t believe your TV is still here.”
He laughed, and it echoed. Cassandra sat next to him at the counter. “I’d like to see some pictures.”
“That. . .will hurt.”
“I don’t know why it has to. Every end is tragic, Brady. It doesn’t, can’t, change what came before.”
He waved his hand toward the office, and she tugged at him until he stood up to come with her.
When they entered the office, she said, “And the computer is here, too? Did you hire nuns?”
He didn’t have a clue what was on the computer; wouldn’t have cared if it had been taken.
He pulled Cassandra to the bookcase where seven thick photo albums stood side by side, and Cassandra said, “Scrapbooks. I’m getting a real impression about what kind of woman your wife was.”
He chuckled again and this time it didn’t hurt so bad. “You don’t scrapbook?”
She puffed out her cheeks. “No.”
She grabbed the first, the one with swirling gold script that said, “Our Wedding,” and opened it to the first page.
“Yep. She’s beautiful; I just knew she would be. And look at you! So young.”
“I was twenty-five.”
“You both look like babies.”
He looked, and they did. They looked young and fresh. The bridal party flanked them and he realized with a jolt how young his father looked. How old he looked now. How tired.