by Moriah Jovan
“So did I. Here’s to growing up piss poor. Now, you know,” he said after he started the truck and before he let off the clutch, “we can’t go anywhere unless you tell me where that is.”
“Seventeenth and Brooklyn.”
Sebastian thought his heart had stopped. “You’re kidding.”
“Nope. I feel like getting some nasty, dirty barbecue.”
And again he laughed at the surprises she held. When she began to laugh because she apparently liked what happened to his face when he laughed, he didn’t even try to hold back. He leaned over and kissed her again, softly as before, touching her lip with his tongue to make sure she remembered the one in the garden. While he kissed her, he looked straight at her and she him. He could tell the minute she decided to go with it, but she never closed her eyes—and he liked that. He liked her two different eyes, liked watching the play of emotion across her face.
“I decided not to ask today,” he said as he drew away, “in case you said no again.”
She flushed a little. “I still think it’s not a good idea. I’m not very good at judging men.”
His eyebrows rose as he started to follow the roundabout, then up the driveway. “Does that mean you think I’d be a bad choice or that you don’t trust yourself to make good decisions?”
“I don’t even know why we’re having this conversation. Stop a minute.”
They had passed the gate and Sebastian stopped the truck, this part of the driveway barely sunlit. She had pulled out her Blackberry and thumbed in a command that made the gates close behind them.
“You’re my court-appointed babysitter,” she continued dryly once she indicated the property was secure, “and I’m the teenager who can’t be trusted with the house to herself.”
He laughed again. “Okay, okay. I get your point.”
* * * * *
45: SUPERCALIFRAGILISTICEXPIALIDOCIOUS
Sebastian drove unerringly to Bryant’s. Once he turned onto Brooklyn, however, she said slyly, “So. I’m not the only fan in this wreck.”
“Oh no,” he murmured as he looked for a parking spot and found one—a block away. He helped her out and they began to walk. He was careful to walk on the outside of the sidewalk, his fingers lightly touching her back. “Bryant’s is a rite of passage. I end up getting Bryant’s almost every Saturday while I’m out and about. Some time I’ll take you to get the best homemade kielbasa ever.”
“Are you talking about that broken-down little grocery just south of the Truman Road viaduct? Peter May’s?”
He groaned. “Oh, no—you’re a native.”
“Oh yes. I know all the good little spots. Although I will say that the Strawberry Hill povitica isn’t as good as mine.”
He slid her a look. “Not possible.”
“Is too. I roll the dough thinner, more like baklava than cinnamon rolls. I also use more filling.”
“Now I just can’t surprise you.”
“Maybe not with food, no.”
Sebastian’s eyebrows rose. That was packed with innuendo and he’d like to think she’d said that on purpose, but he couldn’t tell.
From the outside, Bryant’s looked like a typical mid-century diner with red awning-covered glass facing west. On Saturday afternoon, at least half a dozen of the city’s movers and shakers stood in the line that went back half a block. Eilis tapped him to point them out, and they traded amused glances.
Sebastian knew why she’d brought him here; she wanted to test his barbecue tolerance as a measuring stick of his worthiness. He knew this because he’d done the same thing with the few women who’d ever consented to a date. Sharp and vinegary, grainy with spices, Bryant’s sauce was not for the faint of heart and those who preferred ketchup-with-molasses were suspect in Sebastian’s milieu.
“You know all about my company,” Eilis said suddenly. “Tell me about yours. What’s it called?”
“Taight, Inc.”
She chuckled. “That’s simple to remember. What kinds of things do you do?”
“Oh.” He waved a hand, unsure how to describe it. “It’s a hodgepodge of things that interest me. I have an office, but I work at home a lot. I’m a serial starter.”
“Let me guess—it’s that ADD thing.”
He flashed her a grin. “Never underestimate the commercial value of mental illness.”
That comment drew laughs from several people around them, as well as Eilis, who was the only person he cared about entertaining. “How did you get started?” she asked.
“If I tell you, do you promise not to think badly of me?”
She nudged him with her body. “Too late for that, Sebastian.”
He grinned. He’d never thought he could be this relaxed with a woman he desired so badly, talking business, being personal, not picking her up to take her directly to the Den of Iniquity. He’d never thought he’d meet a woman who wanted to know about him, who he was, how he ticked—and he wanted to enjoy it for its own sake.
Maybe he’d been wrong about her fixation with Ford. She was here, with him. She was smiling and laughing, going along with the flow of the afternoon. She was asking questions, and he hadn’t made any gaffes. Yet.
“My family was very poor, but my mother understood how money worked. She just didn’t have much to work with because my father had a tendency to give away what little we had to people who had even less than we did.”
“Oh, how sweet.”
“No, it’s not sweet,” he returned sharply, surprised at her comment and surprising her with his sudden sharpness. He backed off the sharp and held up a hand to apologize and soften it. “It’s stupid. You can’t help anyone if you have nothing and there is no value in teaching your children that being—staying—poor is a virtue.”
She remained silent, so he went on.
“I made my first loan—a whole quarter—when I was ten. My father chastised me for demanding repayment. He said, ‘If he was destitute enough to ask, he needs it more than you do.’ My mother waited until my dad went to work the next day and set me straight about that. She said, ‘Not only do you demand repayment, you never loan money without getting paid for it.’ She explained to me how interest worked. She taught me how to barter: what was valuable and not, what might be valuable and why. She taught me to read the stock tables. She taught me what good debt and bad debt were, when, and how to tell the difference.”
“Well, if your mother knew all this—” Eilis began.
“I’m getting there.”
Eilis laughed then. “She had a shoe box.”
“She did. She made me my first loan out of it when I really began what she called ‘enlightened usury.’”
“What’s that?”
“In principle, it’s just supply and demand. You charge exactly what people are willing to pay. If Johnny Rich Daddy needed a loan—which is what my mother loaned me money for—I’d ask for some outrageous vig and nine times out of ten, he’d agree to it.
“So she made me this loan and charged me twenty percent.” Eilis gasped. He noticed he was drawing some attention, but that didn’t faze him. He wished the whole world could understand how he made money and occasionally, he didn’t mind sharing his methods and reasoning.
“She said, ‘I don’t want to know how much you plan to charge that boy, but I’ll be very disappointed in you if you charge less than double.’ So I charged him fifty percent. When it was all done and I got my money back with interest, I paid her back. Then she sat me down with a pencil and paper and showed me how it worked and how much money I’d really made.”
“Margin.”
“Right. She didn’t know any of those labels, though, so it was rough on me for a while when I actually went to business school. I had to completely reorder my language so I could understand the labels the people in my classes already understood. On the other hand, they didn’t have a dime to their names and by that time, I’d made my first million, so definitions didn’t bother me too much.”
“You m
ade that kind of money loan sharking?”
“Oh, no. I made odds.”
“You were a bookie?” Eilis demanded in a whisper because she’d finally noticed that people were listening very intently, and she began to fidget. So he winked at her and she began to relax with a slow smile.
“My mother would have killed me. People who gamble are stupid. I never gamble; I play to win. I don’t play games where the odds are against me and I just happened to have a talent for being able to figure rough odds on the fly. So that was a lot more lucrative than loan sharking.”
“If you lived in a poor area, how did you get so many customers?”
“Oh, Knox. I wouldn’t have made near as much money in my neck of the woods alone, so I ended up loaning money to all Knox’s private school schlubs. They’re also the ones who’d gamble away their trusts given half a chance.”
“How did you make sure you got paid back?”
He slid her a look but ignored the question, continuing with his story. “So, I had, oh, twenty-five thousand dollars by the time I was sixteen. Then—” He shuddered. “—my mother made me get a job.”
The line burst out laughing and Sebastian shook his head. Feeling very . . . odd . . . in a good way . . . about people listening to him and laughing at what he said, he continued to act as if Eilis were the only one listening. “That was the most miserable period of my life—strike that, the second most miserable period of my life. I was a busboy at Shoney’s. It was hard work, paid next to nothing and I was completely stymied by why what I’d earned didn’t match what the check was for.”
“Ah, taxes.”
“Bastards.”
By this time, Sebastian had the line rolling and no longer trying to hide the shameless eavesdropping. The movers and shakers in the line had recognized him, but simply smiled and nodded. They wanted to be normal people on Saturday as much as Sebastian did. They should’ve recognized Eilis because they would know her, but they didn’t have a clue who this gorgeous blonde was, and suddenly he wondered how so many smart people could be so collectively stupid.
“I was livid,” he went on, still talking only to Eilis. “She just laughed at me and said, ‘Welcome to normal people world, son,’ and I decided that just wasn’t for me. She made me stick with it because she said I needed to know what it was like for ninety-nine percent of the population.”
At that, the crowd applauded and Sebastian couldn’t stand it anymore. He doffed a nonexistent hat and made an elaborate bow to the crowd.
Eilis gasped in delight. “You’re a ham! I never would’ve guessed.”
“Me neither,” muttered Sebastian, who, for the first time in his life, understood what it was like to not have people back away from him, to have people value what he actually said instead of assuming just enough to be mad at him for what he hadn’t said.
“Excuse me, sir?” came a small voice from below him and he saw a black boy no older than ten or so. “Can you teach me that? What you were talking about?”
Suddenly, his mother appeared and snapped, “Christopher! You get over here this instant and don’t bother that man. You can see he’s talking to his wife.”
Sebastian’s eyes widened. Eilis. Wife. That felt kind of sort of . . . good . . . but he’d think about that later. “Ma’am,” he said, his hand on her arm, “please don’t rush off.” Sebastian squatted in front of the boy so he was at eye level. He pulled his wallet out of his back pocket and pulled two business cards out and gave them to him.
“My name is Sebastian Taight—” and he heard a couple of gasps in the somewhat trendy crowd, which still eavesdropped. “You give one of these cards to your principal at school and tell him to call me. You keep this one for yourself. If your mother says it’s okay, you call me and I’ll take you around and teach you everything you ever wanted to know about money. The more people who have money, the better for everybody because money really does grow on trees.”
He knew that was too metaphorical for the boy to understand, but he wasn’t eager to stifle children who understood what they wanted but didn’t have the means to get it.
Sebastian rose and smiled at the boy’s mother. “Nice to meet you, Mom of Christopher.”
“Thank you for being kind to my son,” she said.
“Mom?” Christopher said, looking up at her pleadingly. “Please, can I call him?”
“May I,” she corrected.
“Tell you what,” Sebastian said. “I have to go to the Board of Trade Monday. Would you and Christopher care to accompany me?”
She swallowed, her eyes wide. “I don’t even know what that is.”
“They buy and sell wheat there, Mom.” Sebastian looked down at him, as shocked as his mother. “Please, Mom? Please may we go?”
She looked down at him and caressed his face. “All right.” Sebastian’s smile deepened when she looked back at him. “My name’s Christina Van Horn.”
“Nice to meet you, Mrs. Van Horn. If you’ll call and leave a message with your address and phone number, I’ll pick you up Monday morning at seven. That all right?”
“Yes, thank you,” she whispered and hesitantly offered her hand to Sebastian, which he shook firmly. She and Christopher turned then and walked up the street, across the street toward the gated and fenced rattletrap neighborhood of pale blue townhouses.
“That was nice,” Eilis murmured.
“Naw,” he murmured in return. “It helps my bottom line to teach people how to make money.”
“How?”
“Money isn’t a zero-sum game. The pie gets bigger as more people have money and therefore the pie has the opportunity to gather more people. It’s a cycle. People making money, not being in debt, letting their money do all their work for them, putting it back into the economy by investing? Good for me. Companies working at their best, hiring, putting out good products? Good for me.” He stopped then. Generalities, principles, beliefs, he’d share. Specifics, no, and especially not with a crowd packed with people who could and would take detailed notes in their heads.
So he wrapped his hand around her neck to bring her close to him—oh, she smelled divine, like almond and cherry blossoms—and whisper in her ear, “I don’t think I’m going to be able to have a decent conversation with you now with all these people listening. Do you want to go somewhere else?”
“Oh, no,” she said in a normal conversational tone, grinning, eyes sparkling, arms crossed over her chest. “I’m enjoying myself immensely. Where did you go to business school?”
Sebastian squirmed because at this point he was more on display than he wanted to be—especially now that everyone knew who he was—and he had just passed uncomfortable. On the other hand, he wanted so very badly to amuse Eilis and he was doing a very good job. “Harvard.”
“What did you do between your horrible job and Harvard?”
“I lived in Paris for six years and studied art at the École des Beaux-Arts.”
Eilis’s mouth dropped and several people turned around to stare at him. It didn’t help matters that now that he and Eilis were in the threshold of the doorway, the whole of the restaurant was listening—and it was a tiny place.
“Really.”
“Yes, really,” he repeated dryly.
“I— I’m—” Eilis laughed then, her fist over her mouth to try to control it, but couldn’t.
“It’s part of the ADD thing.”
She laughed until she cried and he wanted to see her that way forever. Other than his only actual lover, Vanessa, he had never spent more than a few days at most fucking any one woman and this one—ah, this one he wanted to take to his bed and keep her there for as long as she wanted to be there.
He decided not to speak again until the restaurant patrons had begun to mind their own business, and, fortunately, Eilis understood without having to be told. However, the little nudges in his ribs from her elbow didn’t make him stop wanting to amuse her.
“What did you do in Paris besides study art?” she as
ked later, low, once they’d gotten their butcher-paper-wrapped soggy white bread and brisket-piled-to-the-ceiling sandwiches complete with equally soggy fries and a mess of pickles.
“I discovered wine and absinthe—”
She gasped. “You drank absinthe?”
He grinned. “I love absinthe. Anyway, I listened to a lot of good music, saw a lot of nice gardens—” He smiled when she flushed and picked at her sauce-drenched beef. “Fu—er, met a lot of nice women, ate a lot of good food, wore a lot of nice clothes, and basically partied my way through school, Louis XIV style.”
“Not like frat boys here, huh?”
“Oh, no. Paris is where I got culture. Knox introduced me to a lot of things, but it was nothing compared to what I could get in Europe. I loved it. Here,” he said when it seemed she meant to stop eating after just a couple of strips of brisket. He loaded up his fork, slathered the load with sauce, and said, “Open your mouth.”
Confused, she did as he said. Her eyes widened when he popped that bite in her mouth. “Eilis, if you don’t eat, I’ll feed you myself.”
He suddenly wasn’t joking and it only took a nanosecond for her to get it.
“I’m not as hungry as I thought I was,” she whispered around the food, a sudden desperation in her eyes.
“Yes, you are. You’ve been hungry for the last ten years.”
If it was possible, her eyes got even bigger. “How— That’s not true.”
“Oh, sure it is. And I’m not going to argue about it. You show me you can eat like you haven’t eaten in two weeks and then maybe I’ll think about not holding you down and feeding you myself.”
“No, you don’t underst—”
“What I understand,” he murmured, narrowing his eyes, “is that you have a body Rubens would have sold his soul to paint and you don’t need to fix it.”
She swallowed the mouthful of food. “Rubens painted fat women,” she whispered, obviously horrified.
“Bullshit. He painted goddesses. Now eat like one and quit trying to be something you’re not.”
Eyeing him warily, she took one bite, then another. With a little further urging on his part, she finally allowed herself to eat her fill. She couldn’t eat the whole thing, but he didn’t expect that. As far as Sebastian knew, only he and the other men in his tribe could put away a whole sandwich and the fries. Morgan and Kenard could eat two. Certainly his female cousins couldn’t do it and even the Protein Princess could only eat a whole sandwich because she abstained from the bread and fries.