“Yes. That’s what I thought. Right?”
“Have you told your boyfriend?”
“Jesse’s not my … we don’t have … he’ll be cool with it.”
“So you haven’t told him yet?”
It was barely detectable. And if you didn’t know Will Foret, well, you wouldn’t have picked up on that bit of joy he was taking out of imagining Jesse’s reaction when I told him I’d be training Will for a sex fantasy. Maybe that’s what this was really about—a competition between two men, one of whom wanted to prove himself to the other. Maybe Will just wanted to show Jesse he was a better S.E.C.R.E.T. swordsman, that given a chance he’d have punched Pierre Castille at that stupid soirée many months ago.
And as much as I hated to admit it (even to myself), I was secretly happy to act as judge.
Will easily passed the physical and psychological tests, and Matilda gave us the go-ahead to book our training. We joined our calendars and found a time that worked for both of us, which, naturally, was a Monday night, the night Cassie’s was closed.
“Good for you?” he asked, punching in the appointment.
“Good for me,” I said.
“Good,” he replied.
“Good!” I said. “See you at the Mansion at eight.”
“Do you want a ride?”
“We arrive separately. My call time’s earlier.”
“Good. Right,” he said. “You’re the trainer.”
“I am.”
We were like that for the days leading up to that night—curt, polite. But when I finally told Jesse over a greasy dinner at Coop’s, he visibly squirmed in his chair.
“Why’s it gotta be you?” he said, dragging his restless hands to his temples.
“No one else wanted to. And besides, it’s just sex, Jesse.”
“Sex with your ex. I know a bit of what that’s like.”
I began to pick at his fries. I wondered if other owners of fine dining establishments craved diner fare or cheap takeout on nights off.
“It’s not like it’ll be our first trip to the rodeo, Jesse. Besides, I’m just going to give him a few pointers.”
“What’s the scenario?”
“I don’t know yet. I find out tomorrow. But you know I can’t tell you. Discretion, remember.”
Funny to think that I’d once had no sex life. And even the one I had with my husband was almost nonexistent. Now, sex was a big part of my life. I guess that was progress. I guess that was the point of all this. I shook off my shoe. Then, discreetly under the table, I lifted my foot to rest between Jesse’s legs. He adjusted it so my toes curled over his zipper. On cue, I could feel him get hard.
“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” he said, signaling for the bill.
We drove to my place, both of us silent. By the time we reached the door to my apartment, my shirt was shoved up, my bra askew. Inside, he closed the door and turned me around, lowering me to my hands and knees, while he wrestled his jeans down. Once, twice, I tried to turn around to face him, but he resisted, preferring to take me like that, bent and arched, my knees on the hardwood, my hands clutching the fringe of the area rug, pulling it towards me as I felt his mouth exploring all my darkest places, his fingers digging into me. He was growling and impatient, furious at the condom interruption, and then at my excoriations for him to be quiet, to slow down, to let me turn around.
“The sisters,” I whispered, “they can hear us.”
“Fuck the sisters,” he hissed.
“Stop. My knee. Wait,” I said, the moment bursting like a pricked balloon.
He stopped, exhaling loudly before collapsing onto the floor next to me.
“What are we doing?” he said, the palms of his hands pressing into his eye sockets.
I rolled onto my back, my jeans and panties still wrapped around one of my ankles, my shirt still shoved up. I had never really seen the ceiling from this angle. Was I looking at new cracks, or had those been there the whole time and I just hadn’t noticed them before?
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe this part of our relationship … maybe it’s done.”
He rolled onto an elbow to look at me, his eyes smiling.
“I think you might be right.”
“What do you think happened?” I asked, genuinely curious. “I mean, we had something, didn’t we?”
“We did. We do. But maybe it’s not enough to conquer what we had … with other people,” he said, caressing my face.
He was talking about Will without really talking about Will. I had no reply. Funny, when things run their course there’s no fight left, no questions unanswered, no resentments. There was just this lovely release.
He pulled on his jeans and did up his belt, crouching down in front of me so our eyes were even.
“We are good friends,” he said, as though newly noticing something new and interesting about me.
“Always,” I said, smiling.
He leaned forward and kissed me on the forehead. “S.E.C.R.E.T. makes some damn good women,” he said.
As he stood up and left, closing the door behind him, I fell back onto the floor, throwing my arms wide, blinking into the living room ceiling for a few minutes. Dixie padded over to me, tapping her nose on mine. When she realized I was perfectly happy lying there, completely surrendered, she curled into my armpit and went to sleep.
Whenever I felt like I was in the middle of a transition, unsure of my next step, I did what I always did, what always worked. That night I got up off the floor, took a hot shower and made the hour-long trek across the city to the Coach House to talk to the one person who knew me well, who would know what to do, who’d always tell me the truth: Matilda. My training session with Will was a few days away. I needed to go into it with a clear head and an uncluttered heart.
It was late, almost nine o’clock, but sure enough the lights were on in Matilda’s office, though it was odd to see the red door ajar. I stepped inside, preparing to scold her for leaving it unlocked. The Garden District was a pretty safe neighborhood, but still. I heard a male voice coming from inside her office. This wasn’t terribly odd. Though training always happened at the Mansion, we interviewed and tested recruits here all the time, well into the night. A few steps closer and I could make out Matilda’s voice sounding more emotional than I think I’d ever heard her. I was about to make myself known when I heard the male voice speaking again, this time loud enough for me to recognize that it was Jesse.
Make yourself known, Cassie. Now’s the time. But my feet felt suddenly welded to the oak floors. I was trapped between two horrible options. If I left now, I’d risk getting caught running away. If I stayed, I might hear something not meant for my ears. By the time I heard Jesse yell with genuine ache in his voice, “Of course I adore her! But it’s you I love,” it was too late.
“Why won’t you just let me in?” he continued. “I don’t care about age, for fuck’s sake! How many times do I have to tell you, Matty? I just want to be with you. I miss you. Finn misses you.”
Matty? Finn? The closest I’d come to meeting Jesse’s son was watching him sleep that night.
“You don’t care about our age difference now, Jesse, but I do. I care. When I’m seventy, you’re going to be in your fifties. It’s ludicrous. And I told you I won’t have sex with you so long as you and Cassie are still involved. It’s wrong and unfair. I love you both. In fact, you should not even be here—”
“We’re done. Cassie and me. We’re just friends. That’s all we ever were, really. That’s all we were ever meant to be.”
Before I heard anything else, I quietly, calmly, regained the strength in my legs and staggered out and back to the sidewalk. The facts followed after me. Jesse adores me. Jesse loves Matilda. Jesse is my friend. Jesse wants to be Matilda’s partner. I thought back to his drunken little tantrum on Christmas Eve, and of all the ways Matilda had probably thwarted Jesse’s plans to be with her by placing me in their path, hoping I’d go from being an obstacle to a ge
nuine reason they couldn’t be together. I thought of what he’d just said to me that night, how people from our past were in the way of anything we might have in the future. I was so arrogant to think that Jesse wasn’t carrying around his own burdens. Oh, the hearts we break to avoid heartbreak.
What a crazy, sad little circle, I thought, warm tears flooding my eyes. I searched for my anger because it had to be there somewhere, but strangely, as soon as it surfaced, it disappeared. Then fear rose up. But fear of what? Of rejection? Fear couldn’t find any purchase either, and it drifted away. It seemed like there was nothing for these old, bad feelings to cling to. I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand and made my way down Third. At Magazine I flagged a cab, too tired to walk back home.
After a good cry, I slept better that night than I had in a long, long time.
SOLANGE
I got out of the car and stood at the foot of Rue Foucault in the Trocadéro, holding my Step Eight card between shaky fingers. Poking my head out of the back of the limousine, I double-checked the directions, noting the word Bravery etched into the heavy paper, and beneath that, a note from Matilda.
Even if you decide not to accept this Step today, know you’ve already earned your Bravery charm. With great admiration, Matilda. P.S. The car has been instructed to wait for you. Please proceed with caution. And call me when you get back to the hotel.
I walked up to the imposing Moorish door of the four-story mansion, a dozen Juliet balconies above facing the street. Technically it was a townhouse located at the end of a stretch of sumptuous buildings dating back to at least the 1700s. Before my knuckle could strike the ancient wood, the door eased opened and a very tall, very old butler bowed deeply before me. He straightened and his arm swept me into an all-white marble foyer almost as big as the one at the New Orleans Museum of Art.
“Nous vous attendions, Mademoiselle Faraday. Puis-je prendre votre manteau?” he said.
Manteau. I knew that much French. I wasn’t sure what to wear to an interview-masquerading-as-a-sex-fantasy, so I had just dressed the part of a reporter—cream slacks, silk scarf and fitted navy blazer over a white blouse. As I handed him my blazer, my arms suddenly felt chilled.
The butler led me down another long, white hall, the gallery of windows to one side framing the Eiffel Tower in the distance. My god. This is his view. We traipsed through two more sets of fourteen-foot double doors before the white walls gave way to dark brown paneling surrounding a stand-up stone fireplace with lion heads on the cornices. It was clearly the den or the library; books covered one wall, and on the other were large black casement windows, burgundy velvet curtains on either side cascading to a pile on the marble floor. In the middle of the room was a long mahogany desk centered over a beautiful oriental rug, behind which was a black high-back chair and another spectacular view of the Eiffel Tower. I was just catching my breath when a man behind me cleared his throat.
I spun to face Pierre Castille himself. Plain and simple, this was a handsome man.
“Solange Faraday. How nice to see a familiar face. You’ve certainly come a long way, from my TV set in New Orleans to my little place in Paris. I hope you didn’t have any trouble finding me,” he said, his smile genuinely warm, his hands extending to clasp one of mine in both of his. He had the barest of Bayou accents and was dressed casually in faded jeans and a light blue linen shirt, half tucked, the color setting off his intense green eyes. His hair was darker, shorter too, than the last time I’d seen him. And he was sober, maybe even somber. But that didn’t take away from his incredible presence; he had the kind of sexiness that, dare I say, even rivaled the MMS’s.
“Thank you for agreeing to … meet with me,” I said, surprised at my sudden butterflies.
“You have been very persistent. And I was very curious,” he said, walking past me to the bar. “What can I make you?”
“Scotch, neat. Please,” I said.
“Hmm, a grown-up’s drink.”
As he made our drinks, I looked around. “You have a beautiful home.”
“I’m glad you like it.”
Like it? I felt my shoulders drop, my jaw loosen, my knees melt.
“What does it do to a person to wake up seeing the Eiffel Tower every morning?” I asked. “Do you grow to appreciate it, or does that just get old?”
Still smiling, he approached me and handed me my drink, then took in the scene from where I was standing. The house seemed to be built on a curve, the courtyard acting as the crisp green foreground to the famous monument in the distance.
“Truth be told, it never gets old,” he said, corralling me towards one of the two leather club chairs in front of the desk.
He was a man who moved with ease, a man thoroughly comfortable in his own skin. We talked about Paris, where he was born and lived as a boy before his American mother brought him to New Orleans for his formative years.
“They wanted to scrub any vestiges of socialism from my blood before I took over the family business.”
“They seem to have succeeded.” This was my in. “You know I came here for an interview about you, your family business, its history in the city, your plans for the future of New Orleans, in particular that land down by the French Market. As one of the city’s biggest developers, are you—?”
“Yes, we’ll get to that part, I promise, Solange,” he said, waving his hand as though to clear my words from the room. “But first I have a question for you.”
Here we go.
“Shoot,” I said, trying to sound calm.
“How does S.E.C.R.E.T. seem to lure such exceptional women into its fold?”
I hated that—when men, particularly powerful men, changed the subject to something frivolous and flattering when a woman asked a tough question. It was such casual sexism it almost went unnoticed, and if you complained, you were labeled humorless and, god forbid, unsexy.
“Well, seeing that you’re a former recruit, I’m assuming you understand something of S.E.C.R.E.T.’s mandate.”
“Former and hopefully current recruit.”
I gave him a tight smile. I didn’t know how to reply because my mind was suddenly churning with doubt about this adventure. A minute ago I might have been persuaded. Admittedly, I was almost swept away by the grandeur of this place, and Pierre’s considerable charms. But I knew even he could sense the chill in the room brought on by my sudden withdrawal.
Pierre shook his head as though pressing some sort of internal restart button, his voice turning buttery and conciliatory. “Before we proceed, I’m sure you’re well aware that you’ve caught me in the middle of a most unsavory year, Solange, during which my behavior has been less than stellar. Especially with your benevolent group. My mother, rest her soul, raised me to be a better man. In fact, I was quite surprised—delighted, even—that you deigned to consider including me in your … adventures.”
The more he talked, the more that chiseled jawline, the white teeth, the lock of sandy hair across his forehead began to disassemble into features that were no longer handsome; in fact, they were turning downright menacing.
“Yes, well, we made an agreement, didn’t we? I would be allowed to ask you some questions, and then you’d get to ask me yours.”
“So you first, and then me, is that what you’re saying?”
There was something unmistakably dark bubbling below the surface of his voice, and my defense mechanisms were on high alert.
“Yes, I’d prefer that,” I said.
“Besides beautiful, you’re also a savvy one, Solange.”
Okay. Mind made up. I can’t accept the Step. Time to wrap this up and get the hell out of here. But he walked towards me, freezing me in my tracks.
“Now, Solange, let’s save the interview for later. The only question that really matters now is this: Do you accept the Step?”
I nearly choked on my Scotch. Suddenly, even this so-called feather in my journalistic cap wafted out the window and down the streets of Paris. He wanted this story on
his terms, not mine, killing any remaining enthusiasm I had for this fantasy.
“How old is the house?” I asked, trying to change the subject. I crossed the room, moving away from him, acting the part of a bored tourist. I casually maneuvered over to the casement doors that led to the courtyard outside.
“Parts of it are more than three hundred years old. Can you imagine? What our lives would have been like three hundred years ago?”
“Well, I certainly wouldn’t be sitting here talking to you,” I said, looking around. “I’d likely be out in that courtyard with the other servants, boiling sheets.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure about that. The men in my family have always had excellent taste in women,” he said.
Sickening.
I looked through the windows at the Eiffel Tower, trying not to seem like I was scanning the grounds for any other living soul. My inner voice told me to open the patio door and just start walking. But when I reached for the handle, Pierre placed his hand directly over mine. Shit.
“I’d be thrilled to take you on a tour of the grounds … after. Now once more: do you accept the Step, Solange?”
I pulled my hand away and faced him. Be brave. I met his gaze, speaking as evenly as I could without letting the fear bleed into my voice.
“Thank you for asking, Pierre. I’m flattered. But in the end, I don’t believe I can accept the Step. My apologies for taking things this far and for pressing you for an interview that you still seem quite reluctant to give.”
My heart was pounding so loudly I could feel it beating through the soles of my shoes.
“So … if you don’t mind, please call your man. Tell him to bring me my blazer. I think it’s best if he shows me out.”
He looked at his watch, disappointment on his face. “Ah well, I’m afraid Charles has gone home for the evening. We’ll have to fend for ourselves. I get to ask one final time: do you accept the Step?”
“As I said, I didn’t really come here for this.”
“Here’s the thing, Solange,” he whispered, placing his hands on my upper arms and slowly walking me backwards. I inhaled sharply. “You did come here for this. You, a high-profile member of the media in our beloved city of New Orleans, are also, don’t forget, a member of a group that arranges discreet sexual encounters for a few lucky ladies. And the nature of these encounters can vary, can’t they? Some are soft and lovely and gentle. Still others take on a darker hue; they’re risky, dangerous. They can get a little rough. They can take odd, interesting turns. These ones, I think, satisfy very deep urges that we all have, but few are brave enough to give in to. In fact, these are the kinds of urges that can lead some women to cross an ocean to satisfy. You came for this, Solange. You came to play dirty.”
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