by Mel Gough
He’s upset, and she’s tired of his moodiness. She doesn’t deal well with men and their emotions. Maybe it’s for the best that she leaves. She can’t bring herself to fake sympathy right now.
“Okay,” she says. “If that’s what you want.”
She sits up, feeling some of his seed run down from inside her and onto the sheets. She gets up, glancing at the wet stain, and gathers up her clothes. She pulls them on, steps back into her sandals, and brushes through her hair with her fingers. Finally, she picks up her bag and the baseball cap and goes to the door. “I’ll see you around,” she says, and without another word she stalks from the room.
Victor waits for her when she gets home. He stands by the dining table in their huge living room, where he likes to spread his notes when he works. He looks up from a sheaf of paper he was just flicking through.
“Where were you?” he asks, sounding annoyed.
Viv steps out of her shoes in the middle of the room and walks to the sofa. He hates it when she leaves her stuff lying around, but today, she doesn’t care.
“At Lisa’s,” she lies, picking one of her few acquaintances at random. It doesn’t even make her blush. She flops down on the sofa and pulls her feet under her, snatching up a magazine from the coffee table.
“And you had a cozy little chat in bed?” he asks, his voice acid.
“What?” Viv says, frowning. She looks up at him.
“I saw the picture on your Instagram,” he says, going back to his bits of paper but throwing her a glance every so often.
Viv had forgotten all about the photo. “Since when do you waste your time snooping on my social media?” she asks, matching his tone.
“I don’t,” he murmurs, shifting papers from one side to the other on the table.
“We weren’t in bed, anyway,” Viv says, feeling the need to elaborate on the lie. “She was trying on dresses, and I was bored.”
“Well if you’d stuck around until I was awake you wouldn’t have been,” he snaps. “We were going to look at the promotional calendar together, remember? Slot in your interviews, and wrangle Harlan together. You know he likes you better than me.”
A niggle of guilt makes Viv bristle. “I’m sure you did just fine,” she says in a crisp voice. “And Harlan is an old creep. I hate being around him, and you know it.” None of this is true, but before Victor can reply Viv gets up from the sofa and marches from the room on her bare feet to go sulk in the bathtub.
They don’t see much of each other for the rest of the day, which is easy enough in their Beverly Hills mansion. Viv goes for a swim in the pool, where Victor would never follow. He hates the garden, because the flowers make him sneeze.
He spends most of the day with his papers and on the phone, then disappears into his game room to his geeky movie collection. Viv eats her grapefruit dinner lounging on the sofa in the living room, feeling bored and morose.
She retires long before her normal time. He comes to bed late and bumps around the bedroom until she quivers under the effort not to snap at him and start a proper fight. When he’s finally lying down on the far end of the mattress she manages to drop off.
In her dream, Viv has a baby. A little girl who laughs and coos and babbles. She’s so happy, and the dream is so real, she can smell the downy baby hair and feel the weight of the child in her arms. She holds her close and kisses her rosy cheeks.
And she’s not alone. Damien is there with her, smiling. He strokes the baby’s golden curls, then Viv’s face. He takes them both into his strong arms, and Viv knows that nothing bad can ever happen to them.
When she wakes in the morning, in an empty bed in a still, sun-flooded house, her pillow is wet with tears.
Part 2
BROOKLYN, NEW YORK, 2012
It’s the slow, steady drip-drip noise that will stay with him. Years later, the sound of water droplets hitting a liquid surface will still give Brad goosebumps, and he’ll not remember why.
Now, he barely notices the steady dripping from Aiden’s fingers onto the sopping floor. He’s unaware of his wet pant legs, kneeling in the puddle of blood and water on the old, uneven bathroom tiles. He doesn’t know that his cell phone, dropped from his numb fingers after he dialed 911, is drowning in the puddle by his side. All he knows is that he can’t let Aiden drift off into unconsciousness in that bathtub full of tepid, pink water.
“Hey, hey,” he says in a loud voice that reverberates off the tiled walls, shaking Aiden by the shoulder. His lover’s head bobs from one side to the other. “Stay with me. Don’t nod off!”
He checks again the makeshift towel bandage around Aiden’s wrist, which hangs over the side of the bath, white cotton turning red. He tightens his belt around Aiden’s bicep.
“Aiden,” he calls. “Aiden! It’s Brad, I’m here. Help is coming, not long now…” He makes his voice as firm as he can, but on the inside, he’s howling with fear and rage.
Aiden mumbles something incomprehensible. His face, white as marble—and just as cold; Brad has touched his cheek—blurs before Brad’s eyes. Angrily, he wipes away the tears, turns his face away. He needs to be strong, or else Aiden will give up and slip away.
The new tiles are stacked in the corner. Two tubs of paint sit alongside the cardboard boxes from the DIY store, off-white, to replace the faded browns and dusty pink Aunt Hedda picked out forty years ago. The workmen are scheduled for the morning. Brad knows they won’t be coming.
Aiden shifts in the tub, shivering and moaning.
“Stay with me,” Brad says, and wraps another piece of ripped-up towel around his lover’s slashed wrist as tight as he can. “I won’t let you go. I won’t!”
You don’t get to check out, he thinks, tears welling up again. Don’t do this to me. Don’t destroy us. Oh God, please!
17
The sky over Manhattan is gray, heavy with smog and exhaust fumes. September is just a few days away, and the heat has come back with a vengeance. Apparently, Damien missed a few days of cooler weather and torrential rain while out in LA. Just his luck, to come back from that infernal sunbaked city into this sauna. The humidity topped ninety-five percent around lunchtime, and he has retreated from the roof terrace into the living room, with the aircon cranked up and the curtains drawn. A dull, pounding pain just started on the back-left side of his head, and his vision flips in and out of focus every so often.
Being on the phone with lawyers and real estate agents has done nothing to help avert this latest migraine attack. There’s no progress with the lawyer; Idil still refuses to budge. Mike, who is a longtime friend and an excellent divorce lawyer, tried to shore up Damien’s optimism on the phone for an hour.
“Patience,” he kept saying. “This is not the end; there’s still a lot we can try. She won’t get it through the court, anyway. She has no grounds to refuse you access. It’s all just out of spite. That Elavil overdose was years ago, and nobody will believe her if she claims you did that on purpose. But I want us to find an amicable solution, so she still talks to you by the end. Let me speak with her lawyer again, and the judge. We’ll figure something out.” That’s Mike’s mantra, We’ll figure something out.
But Damien is so tired. He has used up all his mental and physical energy in the constant fights with Idil, on traveling to the West Coast every few days, hoping that she’ll relent. She loved him once, and he loved her. His heart hurts for Zoe, who is confused and frightened by it all. And, truth be told, so is he. His head gives another angry throb.
The phone call he had to make after he got off the line with Mike was even worse. The real estate agent in Beverly Hills is useless. Okay, she’s not, he’s being unfair. It’s his fault that the mere thought of moving to LA makes him want to puke. Even the most alluring properties she sends him make him feel nothing but despair. The prices there are insane. He now remembers why he never invested in an LA property when he and Idil got serious. Of course, she’s all set up now, with her second-year Chanel ambassador contract. H
er talent agency has started to take off as well. She could move her base of operations back to New York, now that she’s turned away from a movie career that never got off the ground. New York would be the logical place to concentrate on fashion and discovering new models. But she keeps Zoe on the West Coast to spite Damien yet again.
In February during Fashion Week, when she was last in New York for more than a couple of days, she refused to bring Zoe, claiming she’d be too busy with the galas and shows she had to attend. That hurt, and she ignored his suggestion that he could look after their daughter during that time. He’d been on a shooting break from Gaukur and had come back from Canada with the hope to see his daughter.
And then, when Damien went to LA for the last few weeks of shooting Dark Core, Idil sent the kid to San Diego, to stay with her parents. Damien’s gut churns when he thinks of it. He’s completely helpless. He hasn’t seen Zoe since the beginning of the year.
Now he has to grin and bear it, and look at brochure after brochure of houses in the Hills that he can’t afford and doesn’t want. “Make your home base LA,” Mike advised. “It shows goodwill.” The fact that the California sun will make Damien’s migraine attacks more frequent is something he’ll just have to learn to live with. He wonders if Rose would be willing to move to LA for him. He trusts her and relies on her more and more; she’s the best assistant he’s ever had.
Damien goes into the kitchen to turn on the coffee maker. He really wants a cigarette, but that would mean stepping out onto the terrace again. The thought of the relentless humidity stops him.
The best place he’s ever lived, as far as his migraine is concerned, is Winnipeg. He’s there only in the winter months, but the cold doesn’t bother him. It has never caused an attack. But soon even that might be history. Rumor from the studio has it that Gaukur might not be renewed after the next season, for which principal photography starts in the new year. Damien rubs his eyes hard. One thing at a time. He’ll cross that wobbly bridge when he comes to it.
He takes the cup of coffee he no longer fancies back to the sofa, but one look at the house catalogues and court files spread across the table he keeps on walking, admitting defeat. He grabs the pack of cigarettes from the bookshelf near the patio door and settles outside under the umbrella, even though the sun isn’t shining. The refracted light filtering through the smog and clouds still stings in his eyes, and he wipes them with the heel of his hand. Then he lights up and leans back in the chair with his eyes closed. But after a few drags he stubs out the smoke. It makes him feel worse today, not better. The coffee is also starting to taste bad, and there’s the familiar metallic, almost bloody taste on the back of his tongue.
With a sigh, he gets up again and goes back into the kitchen for the bottle of Maxalt rescue pills. He keeps it here for when he doesn’t feel he can make it down the stairs anymore to the lower level of the penthouse where the bedrooms are. Today, he could still navigate the stairs, and he should just go to bed, but Damien doesn’t want to admit that the day is a total waste just yet. He swallows the pills with a bit of water, then returns to the sofa, holding on to the furniture as he goes. He lowers himself with a wince and stretches out, burying his head in a cushion. The meds tend to make him drowsy, and they work best while he sleeps. Trying not to dwell on how the pain moves around the left side of his head he closes his eyes and focuses on his breathing, and soon feels himself drifting toward sleep.
He’s awoken by the doorbell. For a while, even though the sound penetrates the drugged fog around his consciousness, Damien can’t work out what it means. When his brain finally decodes the noise, he sits up and rubs his eyes.
It’s getting dark outside; he can see the faint glow of streetlights through the half-drawn curtains. His head feels better, but everything is slow and fuzzy around the edges.
For a moment, he sits with his head in his hands, then, when the doorbell chimes again, he gets to his feet. He grips the handrail as he descends the stairs. Falling down the gloomy stairwell is the last thing he needs now. He presses the button that activates the frog view camera by the entrance door and squints at the little screen next to the door. His heart misses a beat.
“The hell?” he murmurs and presses the button for the intercom. “Vivienne! What’re you doing here?”
“Oh, thank goodness!” she exclaims, and he can see her wringing her hands on the little screen. “You’re home! Can you let me in? Please?”
“Sure.” Still bemused, Damien presses the buzzer. Viv pulls open the door and disappears from view.
Damien leans against the wall by the open penthouse door. Why is she here? He rubs his eyes again; they hurt now. He can’t think well enough tonight to deal with Viv. They left it on such an awkward note in LA. Damien feels guilty for how he treated her when he took her back to his room at the Four Seasons. She didn’t deserve that. He’d had a feeling she wanted their fling to continue after Vegas, so the decent thing would’ve been to send her on her way right then and there outside the courthouse. But he’d felt so alone that day, and so scared. Having something, someone to take his mind off it had been too much of a temptation. Now it seems it’s too late to get out of this without hurt feelings.
Still, it unsettles him that she would come here unannounced. How does she even know where he lives? But of course, she has easy access to his details via his employment files for Dark Core.
The elevator rattles to a stop on his, the tenth, floor. Damien straightens up. He’ll be kind to her this time, he promises himself, but firm. She’s not staying, whatever happens.
As soon as the doors open, Viv comes hurrying out of the elevator. “Damien!” she calls and flings herself around his neck before he can stop her or say anything. “Oh Damien, thank goodness!”
He staggers under the sudden weight of her and untangles himself gently, hoping that won’t upset her more. He studies her face, which is blotchy with tears. “Viv, what happened?” he asks. “Why’re you here? Why didn’t you call first?”
She wipes at her face. “Can…can I come in?”
“Sure,” he says, cursing his good manners even as he steps aside. She makes for the stairs right away, and Damien follows.
When he reaches the top, out of breath, she turns to him, and there are tears in her eyes again. “I swear, I didn’t mean to. I was going to go to the apartment, and call you tomorrow… but these men, they…they followed me, and I was so scared!” She hiccups to a halt and wipes her face. Then she steps close and takes Damien’s hand. “Please, can we call the police?”
18
Chinatown isn’t on the list of Brad’s preferred neighborhoods to work in. Fortunately, few murders are committed in the warren of shops, tenements and family-run restaurants that make up this world-famous corner of Manhattan. These days, tourists are the main trade and money machine for the people who live and work here. There’s gang violence between Canal and Worth Street, sure. This is New York, after all. But most of the people who work in Chinatown, and the rest of the Lower East Side, no longer live there. Much of the organized crime has moved with them, away from the watchful eye of the NYPD to suburbs and other American cities not in the crosshairs of the world’s attention.
Today, however, all those changes mean nothing. Manhattan does her dirty best to make Brad as unhappy with his lot as possible. There’s a body in a tiny apartment above a Chinese restaurant, and in the fetid humidity of the late afternoon it doesn’t matter that the old man can’t have been dead more than a few hours. Brad has been in the airless front parlor since before lunchtime, and the CSI team are still busy. The one bit of progress they’ve made in the last couple of hours is that the dead man’s daughter has been traced; she has come from New Jersey to take her mother away from the scene. The elderly lady’s English is rudimentary, and even with the translator she wouldn’t budge from her dead husband’s side. Now she’s at NewYork-Presbyterian, admitted overnight for shock. Brad half wishes he could’ve left with the paramedics, too, just t
o get away from this dismal crime scene.
Not that it’s messy. The old man sat on the sofa watching TV when someone shot him through the chest. The neighbors heard the shot and called the police. Brad has his suspicion about the case. Nothing in the apartment seems disturbed. Old Mrs. Liu came home from her daily shopping trip to the squad car parked outside and the whole block in uproar. If someone asked Brad at this moment what he thought had happened here, he would hazard a guess at attempted robbery gone wrong. But nobody will ask him yet, not until he and Eric have done the entire preliminary investigation.
For now, finally, they and the CSI team can do no more. Brad shrugs back into his suit jacket with ill grace. He is sweating and feels lightheaded. The coroner loads the body onto a gurney, and the crime scene techs pack away their equipment. The uniformed policemen who responded to the 911 call have made a first sweep under Eric’s supervision, and interviewed every resident present in the building, as well as every employee of the restaurant downstairs, and the commercial printer working from his shop in the courtyard. Liu’s daughter has agreed to get her siblings to contact the station. None of them live in the tenement any longer.
Brad jerks his head at Eric, who is on the phone. “Let’s go,” he says in an undertone. “The uniforms can finish up, and we’re not getting anything here we don’t already got.”
As they exit the front of the building into a gaggle of onlookers, Eric ends his phone call. “That was the chief,” he says. “He’s asked me to do him a favor. You don’t have to come if you don’t want to.” He gives Brad an appraising glance. “You look like you need to lie down, or have a drink.”
“Just getting a headache,” Brad says. “What does the captain need from you?”