by Britney King
Elliot
She wants to go to New Orleans. Says she’s never been. It’s a dirty place, I assure her. She’s seen it on the internet, she says, and she doesn’t let up. She wants to walk through the Garden District, she wants to visit the museum. Once you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all, I say. But she disagrees.
She’s never seen a plantation, and she loves Gone With The Wind, and wouldn’t it be fun? It’s not my kind of fun. But there’s something interesting about her, something I can’t put my finger on, and this is the first time she’s really offered much of an opinion, and even now I get the sense she isn’t sure of herself. I don’t know whether I’m attracted to this quality or appalled by it.
After a bit of back and forth, I dial my assistant.
“What are you doing?”
“Chartering a flight.”
“Why, when we can drive?”
“It’s faster and more efficient.”
“Faster isn’t always better, Elliot,” she scoffs. It’s weird to hear her say my name—so few people ever really use it. “There’s something to be said for taking the scenic route.”
“Have you ever been in an airplane?” I ask. “It’s pretty scenic.”
“Not at nighttime, it isn’t.”
“Fine,” I relent. “We’ll drive. But next time, I’m picking the restaurant.”
We drive forever. And ever. It’s pitch black out, so she was wrong about it being scenic. She rolls her eyes when I mention this, just the same as Emily would and for a second I feel like she could almost be a surrogate.
“Tell me about your childhood,” I say, not because I actually care, but this seems like the kind of thing women want to talk about, and we did not make an efficient choice in our travel mechanism, which leaves plenty of time for conversation.
“There’s not much to tell.”
“Where’d you grow up?”
“Nowhere you’d know.” She glances over at me. “And you?”
“Somewhere between Austin and boarding school on the east coast.”
She doesn’t say anything, which forces my hand.
“Your husband,” I say. “What’s he like?”
“He’s all right.”
“The kind of all right who’d do that to your face?”
Maybe she shrugs, I can’t tell. But at least she doesn’t lie.
“So remind me again, how does one get into this profession?”
“It’s a long story.”
“I’ve got nothing but time. We have at minimum another two hours on this very scenic route you’ve chosen. I figure that’s at least enough to do some damage.”
“I like sex,” she says. “I like money. The end.”
“I like sex and money. I don’t sell myself.”
“No?” She cocks a brow. “You should try it.”
“Believe me, I have.”
She pulls out her phone. It’s an evasion tactic, and it’s annoying as hell.
“So your husband doesn’t hit you, and he willingly lets you have sex with strangers for money and doesn’t seem to care if those strangers take you on weekend getaways. I’ve heard a lot of things, I have to confess. But that’s pretty out there.”
“My husband is older.” She shrugs. “He isn’t much into sex.”
“Ah,” I say. It’s the first thing she’s said that makes any sense.
“So, he’s trying to keep you around by allowing you a little leeway.”
“Something like that.”
“And is it working?”
“So far, so good.”
“Is that him you’re texting?”
She looks over at me then. “Do you always ask so many questions?”
“Only when I’m curious.”
“Curiosity is foreplay.”
“Really?”
“So I’ve heard.”
“Do you trust him?”
“Who? My husband?”
“Yes.” I want to know how she thinks.
“No, not really.”
“That’s too bad,” I say, and I feel sorry for her. Because if a woman can’t trust the man who said he’d love her forever—if she can’t trust him to protect her and keep her safe—who in this world can you trust?
No one, is the correct answer.
“Aren’t you going to ask about me? About my wife?”
“No one reveals the truth about themselves straight away.”
“Wow.” It’s like she reads my mind.
“I figure if you wanted to tell me then you would have.”
“Emily is amazing in every way.”
“That’s the thing about the good ones, isn’t it? They always leave in the end.”
“We’re working it out,” I sigh. “We just needed a little breather.”
She doesn’t say anything, which forces me to take the sting out of the silence. “I think you’d like her.”
We arrive in the middle of the night. I don’t tell her why I agreed to come here. That would ruin the surprise. If I’ve learned anything in the lab, it’s that falling in love works best when it looks like it happens organically, even if it doesn’t.
And I don’t even hate the next forty-eight hours. We visit plantations outside the city, and I take pictures. I snap photos of her at dinner and breakfast, in the pool, reading in bed. All of which I upload to Instalook while she sleeps. I know Emily will see them, and she will wonder.
I like that she likes sex, and she’s good at it. I don’t know what changed, but she’s stopped holding back even when I can see she wants to. The first time was in the shower, shortly after our arrival. I was tired, quite frankly, and I told her we should wait until morning. But she had other plans. "Sex is just a conversation between two people,” she said, reading my mind.
I smiled. “Speak to me slowly, softly. Speak to me any way you want to. Just don't let me say no.”
“How’s your decision coming?” she asks late on our second afternoon.
“It’s not,” I admit, furiously typing away at my laptop.
“I guess I’m not as much help as you thought.”
“I wouldn’t say that exactly.”
She stretches out, and I’m almost tempted to climb back in bed with her. “What would you say?”
“I don’t know. I’m supposed to close a deal.”
“And?”
“And… I don’t want to go through with it. So they’re trying to force me out.”
“What’s the hesitation?”
“I don’t want to sell.”
“What is it you’re selling?”
“Drugs.”
“I gathered that. I mean…what exactly? What’s the drug do?”
“It’s in the chlordiazepoxide family.”
“Which means?”
“It makes people compliant. Docile. Effective. Among other things.”
“Huh.”
I can see she’s only half following. “Do you really want to know about my work, or are you just making small talk?”
“I’ve never been very good at small talk.”
“You must be, in your line of work.”
“Obviously, if that’s what you think, you don’t know much about what I do.”
“Fair point,” I say. “Assumptions are the devil’s work.”
She smiles. “You have no idea.”
“Anyway,” I continue. Emily hates talking shop. This is refreshing. “What do you know of chemistry?”
“Not as much as I’d like to.”
“Any successful drug,” I start to say before pausing to make sure she’s really listening. Emily never did. “And by that, I mean any highly profitable one, is nothing more than a formula, a compound of chemicals that when used on a large sample of people is expected to produce a certain outcome.”
She laughs, but nothing’s funny, so I take it as a cue she finds this as fascinating as I do. I continue. “It’s the outcome that interests me most.”
“Obviously.”
&nbs
p; “From the moment a drug company patents a compound, the clock starts ticking.”
“Why?”
“It only has twenty years of exclusive manufacturing and selling rights on it.”
“Okay?”
“In theory, a company’s monopoly on a drug dissolves after its patents expire and generics flood the market.”
“So it’s about exclusivity?”
“Isn’t everything, when it comes to money?”
“Actually, in my line of work, it’s just the opposite.”
I ignore her sarcasm and go on. “Drug companies usually file for patents in the discovery stages as a way of staking their territory in the field. The approval process for drugs from the FDA involves lengthy clinical trials, which usually take around twelve years—meaning that manufacturers typically only get to actually sell their drugs exclusively for about eight years before generics come onto the market.”
“And let me guess? That’s where you come in?”
“Exactly. The most common way to extend the shelf life of exclusivity is to change a drug ever so slightly. A company can file a new patent if it makes a version of a drug with a slightly different dosage, or with a different way it’s released in the body over time. The patent system doesn’t require something to necessarily be better—just different. Which means that rather than creating new medicines, pharmaceutical companies are largely recycling and repurposing.”
“I can’t say I find that surprising.”
“My job is to take existing therapies and reformulate them to have the same effect. But sometimes I get lucky in the tweaking and find something that has an effect we hadn’t counted on. In a good way. And when that happens, I sell the formula on the black market. Like a free agent. Kind of like you.”
“Is it legal?”
“It’s a gray area.”
“For the drug companies, I mean.”
I shrug. “Competitors could theoretically make the case in court that these compounds aren’t actually different, but the legal battle would likely be too costly and time-consuming to be worth it.”
“And what makes this deal different?”
“The drug itself. And the fact that I don’t trust the buyer.”
“Does that matter?”
“Not usually,” I say. “But this time it does.”
Amanda/Vanessa/Emily as I’ve taken to calling her, wants to visit the St. Louis Cathedral before we hit the road. “Where your attention is, there will be your heart also,” I tell her in response. “Jesus said that.”
“Oh.” She looks at me funny. “And what do you know of Jesus?”
“Not nearly enough, apparently.”
“I love churches,” she says. “Especially the old ones.”
I scan the crowd. “I feel exactly the opposite.”
She raises her brow, so I don’t stop there. “A religious prostitute. I never thought I’d see that.”
Her eyes open wider, like she can see something denied to the rest of us. “Sex is the closest to God you’ll ever come.”
I seem to forget people can always surprise you. “Never thought I’d get turned on by a prostitute in a church either and yet—”
“Look at you just ticking things off.”
“You grow up in church?”
“Literally,” she says.
“And you believe all that stuff?”
“I don’t know what I believe. Not anymore.”
“What changed your mind?”
“Life.” She looks sad when she says it, so I try my best with what I say next. I don’t have to dig too deep; I genuinely like spending time with her. She’s the first person in a long time who hasn’t asked something of me, with the exception of fair payment for her time. I don’t think the exchange is so unreasonable. Not anymore.
“I was just thinking…” I say. “We should meet up here again. Sometime in the future.”
She cocks her head. “Why would you say that?”
“Just in case everything goes south.”
“As opposed to what?”
“Nothing.” I glance at my watch. “It’s November fourteenth. Let’s agree to meet here again ten years from now.”
“That’s crazy,” she tells me through narrowed eyes. “And quite cliché.”
I nod. “A lot can change in ten years.”
“Yeah,” she says. “And we probably won’t even remember.”
I smile. “You’re right.”
We each stare at the church ceiling for several minutes without speaking. “I think he’s crazy, just so you know. Your husband.”
“You don’t know him.”
“I don’t have to. But also, I think you’re crazy for staying.”
“Sounds like you’ve got it all figured out.”
I shake my head. “I have nothing figured out.”
Later in the car, she told me to pull over. It was raining out, so I took the next exit and pulled into an empty lot. She wasted no time. She climbed in the backseat and prompted me to follow. “Last call,” she said sliding out of her jeans. “Before we go back to real life.”
“This isn’t real life?”
She didn’t answer; instead she pounced. I don’t know how to describe it except to say that it was different. It was more. It was a finding without knowing. There had been a tsunami in Sri Lanka once—I had been there. I saw wood and concrete buildings ripped before the fury. This was a tsunami between two people—a man and a woman who each belonged to other people.
Then it was more: an understanding, like enemies who’d once been friends might understand each other.
Afterward, there was silence between two people who should not have been silent. She didn’t want me to hold her. The storm had passed, and it seemed our words went with it.
Chapter Twenty-One
Vanessa
If it weren’t for Matthew, I would have been sad to tell Elliot Parker goodbye following our trip. I know the attraction isn’t real. He pays me to play a part, and I am playing him because that’s my job. But still. I like him, and I can’t say that about all of the people I sleep with.
Still, I’m very aware soon he will find out who and what I really am, and it’s far worse than what he suspects. This part always makes me a little melancholy. It’s terrible to lose a friend when you don’t have many.
The reminder alarm chimes on my phone. I don’t have to read it to know what it will say. If I don’t hurry, I will be late to the clinic. I have a standing appointment for my quarterly injection to ensure I remain sterile.
Many women within the local congregation—all women, in fact, who are not permitted to bear children— will make the same trek. It is my fault that we are no longer to be trusted with managing our own birth control.
Matthew wasn’t supposed to exist. It’s not that I wanted a baby—I didn’t. I really didn’t. The truth is my son only complicates things. He makes it harder to leave, harder to take risks, and for him, I have to keep going.
Maybe this was the reason I found it difficult to bond with him. It wasn’t until he was talking that we hit it off, and even then the connection was spotty. I blamed it on being away so much for work. But I think we all knew it wasn’t that. I was angry to have to make the sacrifice. I knew loving something—or rather someone—this much was going to be difficult to bear. I knew they would use it against me, and I knew it was Matthew who would suffer for it.
After my appointment, I’m in the office typing up notes on a mark when the doorbell chimes. I stop what I’m doing and walk to the foyer, only to find that Sean has beaten me there. “Oh,” I say to Gina. “I wasn’t expecting you today.”
“I have a 3 o’clock tee time,” Sean says. “Gina is going to take Matthew to the Children’s Center for a few hours.”
“The Children’s Center…what for?”
“Are you feeling okay?” he asks cocking his head.
“I’m fine. I just—”
“Sorry,” Sean says to Gina. “We’re ke
eping you. The plans of the diligent lead to profit, as surely as haste leads to poverty.” He points to the stairs. “Matthew’s in the playroom.”
“Proverbs 21:5,” she says, like it’s a test. I watch as she climbs the stairs. Sean turns to me. “Go up and shower. I’ve laid a dress out on the bed. You and I are going to have a little fun.”
“Why is Matthew going with Gina?”
He smiles and takes my hand. “Like I said, I have something to show you.”
I follow him down to the wine cellar. “Sean, what’s going on?”
They like to keep you in the dark. Literally and figuratively. “Why is Matthew going with the nanny?”
He locks the door. My throat swells. “Sean?”
“You ask a lot of questions, don’t you?”
“I have a right to know where my son is going.”
“You have no rights. Your parents married you off to the highest bidder. And that was me, darling. I saved you from a wretched life in the wretched town. I saved you from a life where your only purpose would be to pop out baby after baby. There wouldn’t be fancy dinners or weekend getaways. And certainly, none of those expertise classes you’re always insisting on.”
“But none of that has anything to do with Matthew. You know this.”
“You signed the agreement and now you want to disrespect me by questioning my judgment? And you have the audacity to tell me you have rights?” He laughs. “I own you, remember? Bought you fair and square. Just like all those men…in all those hotels…oh, and speaking of—I heard about your trip. I also heard it was your idea to pursue this one. You like him. And clearly, he likes you.”
“He was a better target, that’s all.”
“For who?”
“For the church, of course.”
“You sure about that? Because I’m not.”
“I never wanted to be a Siren, Sean. It’s not like I had a choice.”
“Some people can’t help what they are. You started out as a whore, looking for a man to take care of you, so this should be nothing new. I’m just hoping for everyone’s sake that you don’t get any bright ideas in that tiny little brain of yours. You aren’t educated, remember that. That’s why you have me to make the decisions.”