Blackmail (Skeleton Key Book 1)

by Anna James Watson

  Now there’s a very high chance Mia will want nothing to do with Tristan, and maybe even me by extension. Tristan will almost certainly be mad at me for almost getting him caught, to say nothing about what a sour ass he’s going to turn into when Mia doesn’t forgive him…And I’m pretty sure she won’t, at least not for a while.

  As I walk the four blocks east and two blocks north back to my apartment, I begin running strategies in my brain, imagining all the ways I can maneuver the two of them to undo the unfortunate damage that has been wrought. Most ideas get quickly thrown away, but by the time I’m pressing elevator buttons and wriggling my key into my lock, I think I might have one worth trying.

  — Mia —

  The next day Tristan saunters up to me in the dining hall and says, “Busy tonight?”

  I stare at him dumbfounded for half a second, before I remember who I’m talking to. Of course he’s pretending nothing happened. With pursed lips and a haughty eyebrow, I do my best impression of a house cat and slowly turn my head away, as if he bores me.

  Unfortunately, Leanne is sitting across from me, and of course she wants to talk to him—he’s legacy, he’s rich, he’s a star tennis player, he’s almost guaranteed a tap, and lately, he’s been friendly which makes Leanne sure that she’s being courted by a secret society. A theory that I had to hear about at three a.m., when she finally stumbled into our suite, still in a state of happy drunk; I myself had already progressed to the state of want-to-pass-the-fuck-out drunk.

  “Umm, no, I mean, we don’t have anything going on that I remember, right, Mia?” Leanne says.

  I sort of want to stab her. Clearly Tristan was talking to me, not her. But if I drag this out in front of her, questions will be asked.

  I wish I could just tell Leanne what happened, that the reason Theo is paying attention to us is because Tristan is paying attention to me, and that those attentions are in no way related to academic merit, projected future prestige, or anything that makes one worthy of being tapped…But I honestly don’t think she’d understand. In fact, I think she’d look down on me for all of it and I just don’t have it in me to live with someone who thinks I’m either weak or a sexual freak or both.

  “I’ve got to meet Joe about some Daily stuff,” I lie. “Two of the articles that are supposed to be in tomorrow’s paper got pulled by the writer and now we’re probably going to have to pull an all-nighter to fill their space.”

  “Weird,” she comments in that oh-so-friendly social way. “Who did that?”

  “Joe didn’t say. You know how he is about discretion.” I stand up and fix Tristan with a hard look that I hope he gets the meaning of before saying, “Bathroom.”

  I hear Leanne laugh as I walk away. “Sorry, she’s just still a little hungover from last night. It was a great party, wasn’t it?”

  I don’t know what Tristan says in response and I don’t care. I just want him to be gone when I come back. However, when I return five minutes later, he’s sitting in my empty seat, right in front of my barely touched food, and he’s charming the shit out of Leanne. Fuck.

  I turn around and leave before either of them sees me. I’ll get coffee and some pastries at Atticus, then hide in the Daily’s office until Monday. By then he should get the hint. If he’s dumb enough to try to talk to me in class then I’ll start talking about things he doesn’t want talked about.

  —

  On Sunday, Tristan and I see each other in the hall, but he turns his nose up and pretends not to see me, as if I’m the one who’s wronged him. On Monday, we have no classes together and we continue to ignore each other. On Tuesday, he’s in lecture but doesn’t try to talk to me. Julian, however, does.

  “Oh, Mia,” he calls, just as I turn toward the door. His voice is casual yet formal, exactly the way a TA would talk.

  For a minute my mind feels like it’s been blinded by a spatter of stark contrast—the Julian from Theo’s party and the Julian of right now. They seem like such different people…Yet, unlike with the many different masks of Tristan, I don’t feel like either of these Julians is a lie.

  This Julian is perfectly normal TA Julian, in a perfectly normal lecture hall, with perfectly normal post-lecture things going on around us. Nearby, the other TA’s are casually chatting with each other. The professor is there, hurrying to pack his bag up and escape from the students trying to talk to him. So, autopilot kicks in and I act completely normal too.

  “Hi,” I say, then immediately start to think Hi is a very weird way to respond, even though maybe it isn’t, and add, “I mean, what? Uh, what is it?”

  “Hi.” He smiles. “Would you walk with me? I’d like to talk to you about your last paper.”

  “Sure,” I say, wishing I could come up with something—anything—wittier.

  “Great.” He throws his messenger bag over his shoulder, then politely motions toward the door, as if offering me right of way. I take it and we join the throng of people slowly filtering out.

  He sounds so light and…and so like TA Julian that for a few minutes I actually think it’s possible he does only want to talk about a paper.

  “So even though it was a comparative analysis, you really turned it into more of a campaign for Kierkegaard as Aristotelian. Can you elaborate on what you feel are his ties to—”

  Then we are out the door and in the hall and soon we are outside and both of us seem to have feet that are programmed to go to the nearest place with coffee, because that’s where we end up. Then we’re in line and I’m still trying to explain why I think that Kierkegaard’s concept of despair actually supports Aristotelian ethics, so I don’t notice that he’s already pulled out his wallet and paid for my drink before I dig mine out of my backpack. Then I suddenly realize how stupid it was of me to think this really might just be a conversation about the paper.

  “Thanks,” I mumble.

  By the time we sit down I have fallen awkwardly silent, but this doesn’t seem to bother Julian. He smiles the same easy smile he’s nearly always got, and blinks at me a couple times from across the table while I pretend to sip my way-too-hot-to-sip tea. Finally, just when I can pretend to sip no more, he takes pity on me and says, “How are you?”

  I let out a sigh of relief. Even though I thought I didn’t want to talk about it, it seems like it’s suddenly become impossible to talk about anything else, so I’d rather just get it over with. “Well physically I was kind of sore, but no big deal. Thanks for the tea, by the way,” I add, then I remember I already thanked him for the tea.

  His smile cracks into an amused smirk and I see the flash of a child in his face—the snickering ten-year-old boy he must have been. “That’s good. So, do you like sushi?”

  “Who doesn’t like sushi?” I reply, only to immediately become self-conscious. I’m not really trying to sound clever, but I curse myself for saying it anyway because it sounds like the sort of thing someone who is trying, and failing, to be clever says.

  “Want to go to Masuhito’s with me tonight?”

  I want to say is yes, but instead I ask, “Is Tristan going to be there?”

  “He doesn’t have to be,” Julian replies, calm and even and without any question over my objection.

  “Do you know what happened at Roger’s party?”

  “Yes,” he replies, blinking patiently at me.

  “Oh…” I deflate, my eyes shifting from him to my tea. I stare very, very hard—obsessively hard—at the tiny steam-release hole of the lid. A flummox of emotions swirl to life in the pit of my stomach and are soon coursing through me, leaving nausea and something worse in their wake.

  “What’s wrong?” Julian gently asks, tilting his head down, so he’s bent awkwardly and staring at me with big warm eyes from under curly thick lashes, with that sweet smile and treacherous dimple.

  “I just…” I just what? I ask myself. And then the answer comes, out loud:

  “I guess I thought maybe you actually wanted to talk to me, or get to know me, or something.
But I get it, Tristan is your boyfriend and you care about him and you’re trying to do damage control or something for him. Look, he’s an ass, but I really have no reason to be surprised by that so I still won’t tell anyone anything, just like I said I wouldn’t before this whole thing started.”

  Part of me watches in horror as the other part of me just prattles on uncensored, saying everything.

  “But I really don’t want to have anything to do with Tristan, and you seem great, but you’re his boyfriend, and you’re loyal to him, and I don’t want to get mixed up in anything—just like I didn’t want to in the first place—and the other night, I was drunk and you were drunk and then he was there and drunk too and stuff happened and it’s fine, but it’s really for the best if it doesn’t happen again, so…so I should just go.”

  I fling my knees around the edge of the chair to stand but as I reach for my cup I neurotically pause to, again, say, “Thanks for the tea.” This is a strategic mistake. It gives him enough time to reach across the table and cover my wrist with his hand.

  “Mia.” He smiles kindly. “I’m not just ‘doing damage control’ for Tristan. And I was hardly drunk at that party—certainly not enough to make me do anything I wouldn’t have done completely sober. I am interested in you, and I really, really would like to take you to dinner tonight. It doesn’t have to be a date. And I promise I won’t even tell Tristan if you don’t want me to.”

  “Is that…is that okay?” I ask. “I mean in your relationship.”

  “Haven’t you noticed our relationship is a little unconventional?” he jokingly whispers, the mischievous sparkle of a shared secret dancing in his eyes.

  “Oh.” I bite my bottom lip, feeling stupid, or naive, or something. “You’re in an open relationship? I just didn’t—”

  “No.” He smiles again. “I wouldn’t call it that, but you and I going to dinner wouldn’t be a problem. We can talk more about it tonight if you want to. But I’m more interested in talking about you.”

  This does weird things to my insides. Things that feel too light and fluffy to be based purely on carnal knowledge of what Julian can do to my body. “I don’t think that’s…I mean, there’s really…”

  “Mia, I promise it’s just dinner if that’s all you want it to be. You know I’m getting laid, so I’m not after that. I just want to talk with you for the sake of talking with you.”

  I take a very long, deep breath—the kind that makes my ribs feel like they’re about to pop—and then, because I am apparently even stupider now than I was when this whole thing began, I say, “Okay. Just dinner.”

  —

  Julian picks me up in a blue Prius. For some reason, this tickles me and I snort as I walk out of Atticus Coffee Shop, where I agreed to meet him—can’t have a grad student picking up an undergrad from a dorm, after all.

  He gets out of the car and walks around to my side. This is so strange to me that at first I think something must be wrong—he’s come to tell me we’re not going to dinner after all, or something like that. But as I grow closer his serene smile only deepens. Then he grabs the handle of my door and opens it for me.

  I slide in and position my laptop bag between my calves as he makes his way back around to the driver’s side.

  He is, in some ways, not so differently dressed than always—formal-looking slacks, shiny black shoes that I’ve always thought of as “fancy grandfather shoes,” a nondescript tie…But now he’s added a formal black jacket and left out the sweater vest, and the effect is quite different. His hair is still a touch disheveled, and curly, and longer than conventional, but despite that he looks more grown up like this.

  “How old are you?” I blurt out as soon as he closes his door.

  He smiles in amusement and meets my eyes in playful challenge. “How old do you think I am?”

  “Twenty-seven?” I guess, because usually I think he looks hardly any older than me and right now I think he looks thirty, in a good way.

  “Twenty-six.” He grins.

  “I thought you said this was just dinner.” I wave at my body. “You look like you’re ready to go to a wedding and I’m wearing jeans.”

  “It won’t matter. I’m well-known enough where we’re going that they’ll overlook your jeans, which, by the way, look wonderful.”

  I roll my eyes, but with a big, dopey, completely involuntary smile on my face, I’m not fooling anybody. “Just dinner, remember?”

  “Yes, yes,” he agrees with a playful smirk, “just dinner.”

  —

  It turns out that “just dinner” is just dinner, even though he pays for it, opens car doors, and we manage to drink a whole bottle of sake. He doesn’t bring up Tristan the entire time, and even when I do, he doesn’t try to defend what Tristan did or said or comment much on it at all except to say, with a casual shrug, “Tristan has been raised to say what he thinks people want to hear rather than what he actually thinks.” And before I know it we’re back to talking about how the Baroque musical movement actually arises from Enlightenment-era metaphysicians.

  When we part that night, it is with nothing more than big smiles. He doesn’t try to kiss me, and I don’t try to kiss him. I do think it’s safe to say our conversation has been flirty for most of the evening. Although I didn’t particularly want it to be flirty, I’m pretty sure I’d have been bummed if it wasn’t.

  Fuck, I think, shaking my head as I walk up the path to Berkeley. My rational mind is already producing several reasons why even going to dinner with Julian is going to be counterproductive to my focus, which really needs to be directed at my classes and the Daily. Regardless, I can’t stop smiling.

  The next day I don’t have any reason to see Julian, and I don’t, but Thursday after lecture lets out, we end up in Atticus, and we stay there for four hours—talking about a paper, of course. During those four hours I happen to mention that I was planning to go to the Vivaldi Strings performance at Eisenhower Library that evening, but Leanne told me earlier today she was too busy to go and I don’t really want to go alone. Julian mentions that he had been thinking about going and perhaps we could go together. So we do.

  After the music ends, and the small crowd disperses, we wander around campus under the light of the full moon. I learn that Julian’s mother was a professional pianist before he was born, and that from the moment the two of them came home from the hospital, she would sit with him and they would play piano together for at least two hours a day. I learn that he grew up in South Hampton. I learn that his father is president of a bank and that they only saw each other for four weeks a year when he was a kid because his father preferred living in Manhattan with his mistress. I also learn that Julian was perfectly happy about this as a child because he preferred having his mother all to himself.

  I tell him that makes me even more mortified that he heard me playing piano. He says I clearly have no training but do have a natural feel and offers to give me lessons. I tell him that I won’t have time until I’m retired, but if he’s still alive then I’ll give him a call.

  Then he asks about how I grew up. So I tell him about the little cul-de-sac in a little suburb of Seattle that I call home. I tell him about being opinionated but not popular, and how that led me to decide the best way to communicate with my school, and later my town, was through the written word. This led to the school newspaper, which led to the local newspaper, which quite accidentally led to an editorial I wrote being featured in the Seattle Times, which, also quite accidentally, led to a full ride to Yale.

  I tell him about both of my parents having to work, and growing up spending a lot of time with only the internet for company. I tell him about staying up late with my dad, who loved to talk about anything you could find on the History Channel. I tell him about my kitten when I was six, who wanted to play at night, and how I had to lock her out of my room so I could sleep, and how when she ran away several months later, I thought it was because she believed I didn’t care about her. To my great surprise,
as I tell this story, a little swell of tears actually boils to life in my heart and leaks out at the corners of my eyes. Julian gives me a playful but empathetic nudge and remarks that his mother cried when their cat ran away too.

  We do not talk about Tristan at all.

  The next night Julian takes me out to dinner again. This time I think about wearing a dress, and then decide it will be harder to pretend it’s not a date if I wear a dress. This gets me thinking about whether or not it’s really not a date. It seems like it has to be. But I don’t know.

  For a week we find each other too often for it to be coincidence, and nearly always extend these unplanned hang-outs well into the evening.

  Part of me likes that feeling of really not having any clear definition of what it is we’re doing. It makes it easier to push the rational mind aside, to say, “It’s not like I’m doing anything but hanging out with a friend,” and the sort of euphoric adrenaline that has been coursing through me for days loves that sort of uncertainty. Hormones are so weird. I sort of wish I was a neuroscience major so I could understand what’s going on with me, but I have a feeling even knowing the name and function of every single synapse and all the chemicals that flow through them wouldn’t help me understand this any better.

  It’s been over two weeks since whatever we’re doing began. Julian tells me that he will be going to visit his mother over the weekend, but asks me if I’m busy Wednesday night.

  “I’m busy in the way everyone is always busy.” I laugh, thinking about the time-management lecture I got from Joe, the editor of the Daily, and Leanne, who is increasingly suspicious that I’m not really always in the Daily’s office. “But no, I’m not busy.”

  Tonight, we’re eating wood-fire pizza and he’s got sauce on his cheek, right where his biggest dimple is hiding. I reach out to remove it but just end up smearing it into his five o’clock shadow. He grabs my hand and sucks what remains of the sauce off my knuckle. When he lets go we both smile at each other and continue as if nothing happened.