But I am beyond repair. He deserves more than me.
I hide the phone at the bottom of my purse.
Fuck lifelines.
I sail down the stairs of the apartment building, feeling the rush of anticipation, of flirtation, of sparks about to be ignited. I feel bubbly and alive in a way I haven’t felt in six months. It’s like someone hit a tuning fork against me and I am now vibrating at the perfect frequency again.
My frequency.
I hail a cab, and though it’s still rush hour, one comes squealing by in a heartbeat. I’ve never had a problem catching taxis. I give the driver the address of Bliss on Sixtieth and Lexington, far enough away that I might as well be in another world.
Even Miranda isn’t an East Side gal.
When she had me followed, it was all West Side operations.
The time Miranda confronted me, I was walking to my mom’s for dinner and talking to Cam on my cell phone. I’d given him the rundown on one of his top-paying clients, and he was laughing deeply, then lining up another gig for me. I turned south on Central Park West and spotted Miranda marching toward me, her slightly pouchy chin the identifying mark, along with her customary skirt that sat high on her waist. The next thing I noticed were those laser-like eyes, like an assassin’s zeroed in on a target.
Me. In her crosshairs.
I didn’t even have time to say goodbye to Cam. The next thing I knew, she’d slapped me, like in the movies, her palm smacking my cheek, my head careening to the right on impact. I dropped my cell phone, the battery spitting itself out onto the sidewalk of New York City.
“I bet you thought you were going to get away with screwing my husband,” she said.
“No,” I squeezed out, as I pressed my hand against my stinging cheek. That was true. I didn’t think I’d get away with it. I bent down to grab the phone, and she kicked it farther away with her brown leather boot.
That pissed me off. I looked up at her. “Really? Did you have to do that?”
She laughed, but the sound was cold and hurt, so much hurt, rage, and shame mashed together in her tangled voice as she tried to keep some semblance of control while I scrambled to pick up the phone parts. “That,” she said, hissing out the word, “is nothing compared to what I am going to do next. And you will be wishing for a broken cell phone for months, Harley Coleman. Months. Because you’re more than just a cheater. You’re a whore.”
A chill swept through me, as if icicles were breeding on my skin. She’d found out the whole truth. But I had it coming. Whatever she was going to do, I would have to bend over and take it. Even though I never screwed her husband.
And maybe that’s another reason why I am in this cab tonight. Because I have been taking it from her for months. I want to take something for me again.
The driver makes small talk and I exchange pleasantries with him as I give my breasts a boost so my cleavage peeks out of the top of the lacy bra. He does his best to appear surreptitious as his eyes dart back for a peek. I adjust my knee-high white socks, making sure they fit just so.
“Excuse me for a sec,” I say, but I don’t move out of the way of the rearview mirror. Let him enjoy his job today. Let me be in charge. I undo two buttons on my blouse, making sure my boobs look good.
The driver breathes hard. I smile into the mirror, knowing I’ve just given him his happy ending when he gets off work. When he pulls up to Bliss, I thank him. He turns around and says, “No, thank you.”
I press a twenty into his hand and hop out.
When my heels hit the sidewalk, I am officially in Trey’s territory, since he grew up on the Upper East Side. But I won’t run into him here because he lives downtown now. Besides, I’m not thinking about him or the cell phone stuffed down at the bottom of my bag, nor the fact that I’m certain he’s called and texted again. I always answer for him. I’m available all the time for him. I rely on his friendship more than anything.
He knows all this, and so he’ll know I’m up to something.
But I don’t care right now.
Hugo, the muscly dude at the Bliss door, knows me well, but still asks for my ID. He hasn’t seen me in six months. I show him the one that says I’m twenty-two.
“Been a while, Layla,” he says, using the name on my ID.
“Missed you too, Hugo,” I say with a wink. He blushes, waves me in, and gives me a kiss on the cheek as I go by. I blow him one back.
Then I’m inside. Just as easy as it’s always been.
Cam’s waiting by the bar, tall and sturdy and five-o’clock-shadow-stubbly, with the biggest shit-eating grin I’ve ever seen pinned across his face. He wears pressed black pants and a silk shirt the shade of raspberry. He’s ridiculously tall with receding wavy brown hair. Gelled, of course. He looks and talks like Vince Vaughn.
Just like the day I met him two years ago, thanks to my mom.
But here’s the best part. She doesn’t know he’s in my back pocket. She doesn’t know one of her sources is now mine. That I set myself up with my new job, my other life, because of someone I met through her. She didn’t intend to hook me up with Cam. She was simply meeting him for a tip on a story, and when she stepped away to answer a call, we got to chatting, and then we got to exchanging numbers, and then I got to know more about him than she ever did.
I learned something he never told her.
I learned about his moonlighting job.
“You and I could go places,” he said to me that day.
He’s a lawyer, and he was one of my mom’s sources on a huge story she broke uncovering the sexting senator. Cam had all sorts of shady clients, and that also meant he knew all sorts of shady things—things she wanted to know to bust the senator. He’d played a role in prosecuting the guy, yet he also ran a high-class call-girl ring on the side.
Call Cam morally ambiguous. Call him a hypocrite. Call him the best fucking time I ever had.
“Hey, baby doll! You look so fucking beautiful,” he says as I sit on the barstool next to him. I barely have time to say hello, because he continues, “How could you let me go this long without seeing you? I’ve been starving. I’m like a dying man in a desert, and you walk in and I can drink again.”
“You’re mixing metaphors. When you’re starving, you’re hungry. When you’re in the desert, you’re thirsty,” I say playfully, wagging my index finger as I correct him.
“When it comes to you, I’m starving and I’m thirsty,” he says, inching closer so I can smell his cologne, a cool, foresty scent that’s both sexy and sleazy at the same time.
“Looks like you already started.” I tip my forehead to his martini.
“I couldn’t help myself. I was waiting for you, baby doll.” Then he leans in for a kiss. I turn my face so his lips brush my cheek.
I loved teasing him then. Turns out it still rocks. It still sends a tingle from my toes to my nose. God, this feels so good. It’s the opposite of being blackmailed. It’s the other side of my mom setting me up with boys.
It’s my side. My turn. My time.
“The cheek? Six months and I get the cheek? It’s been a long six months. C’mon, just one kiss for your old man Cam.”
I shake my head. Cam’s never been about the kissing. There’s never been anything physical between us. There never would be. That’s not who we are to each other. I’m his prize, and Cam’s my entrée. He’s always been about the access for me. An entry into a world of power, into my very own war games.
“How about a drink, then?”
“You don’t remember?” I give Cam a pointed look.
He leans in to whisper, “Of course I do. But you’ve got your ID. And Tom”—Cam nods to the bartender at the other end—“has always believed you were twenty-two, my baby doll.”
“Cam! I’m not talking about my age. I’m talking about the fact that I don’t drink.”
He holds up his hands and shrugs. “You changed everything else. How am I to know you didn’t change that too?”
“Touché,
” I say.
Drinking has never been my thing. You could surround me with trays of cocktails, with tables full of sexy little frothy drinks, sugared on the rim, and I wouldn’t even notice them. I wouldn’t even touch them.
“A Diet Coke for my baby doll, Tom,” Cam says to the bartender, then winks at me.
“Hey, Layla,” Tom says, and I flash him a bright smile.
Then to Cam I say, “You remembered.”
“I remember everything about you. I remember you’re a junkie for your diet pop. And maybe for what I got going on again too?” He raises an eyebrow.
I give him a coquettish shrug. This is what I miss most. The banter, the back-and-forth, the chase.
“C’mon. You miss the biz, don’t you? You miss the way we played them all. You wore my favorite outfit after all. You wore the outfit they all wanted you in,” he says, and trails off to look me up and down.
He holds me tight with his dark-blue eyes, the color of the early-morning dawn before the sun breaks. His eyes are like a tractor beam, and I can’t let go. I know I shouldn’t be looking at him like this, or letting him look at me like he is, reeling me in with reminders of power, of playing, of the game being on our terms. But I’ve taken the pill, I’ve swallowed it once again, and now the effects are kicking in.
I finger the hem of my skirt—my admission that I came to play.
Then the low whistle from between his lips, the shake of his head, the grin that won’t stop. I’ve been ignited again, a sweet rush of what once was is now draped over me and the past is no longer the past. It’s the present once more. I am back in time, and it’s all so familiar and safe in its own way.
“You were easy,” I say. “You always liked the schoolgirl in me.”
He cocks his head to the side. “So I’m easy, baby doll. Sue me.”
“I know a good lawyer,” I tease.
“I couldn’t represent you. Conflict of interest.”
I laugh as Tom plunks down my glass of Diet Coke. I tell him thanks, then take a drink. “That’s a good way to describe me.”
“I like conflicts of interest,” he says. “But somehow we found the loopholes, baby.”
“We were all loopholes,” I say, because Cam and I covered ourselves in secrets. Like pulling a blanket over our heads, we were huddled in our fort, never letting anyone know we were running the numbers, making a mint, playing all the strange men in Manhattan who wanted a pretty young thing to look at them, talk to them, spank them, or tell them how big they were even when they were tiny little men.
Never more than that. He kept me clean. He never wanted anything to happen to me. Never wanted anyone to touch me below the waist. One of his clients tried to slip a hand up my skirt when I met him at a bar, and Cam made sure the guy had trouble walking the next few days. He protected me.
“Look at you,” Cam says, his eyes gliding over me, cataloging every curve, every shape. “Back here at Bliss with me.” This was our spot, and no one ever knew we were here. The place where I was Layla, Cam’s top earner, not my mother’s daughter, not the pretty pony she pawned off on her suitors’ sons. I was the player, I was the one who decided. I could say yes or no to anyone Cam brought to me. I could turn down the clothes he picked up for me at Bloomingdale’s. I had veto power over everything. He gave me choices. “Just like old times. You by my side.”
“It’s not like old times, Cam,” I say, but I don’t mean it, because it is like old times. Meeting him after a job. Toasting, like we were painting the town red because we’d figured out the trick. We were con artists, and our marks were men who liked ’em young. Never too young to cross the line. But just young enough.
“Tell me you miss it, baby. Tell me you miss the way we pulled them in,” he says again, moving closer to me, trying to nuzzle my neck.
“Not a bit,” I say, keeping my hand on his chest. Familiar ground—his chest, the game. He’s playing too. He loves it too. We are cut from the same cloth. We are both junkies, feeding each other’s fixes.
“Not one tiny little bitty ounce?” He holds up his thumb and index finger to show a sliver of space. I press my index finger between them, shake my head, and bat my eyes.
“Harley,” he says softly. “You know I missed you.”
“Don’t call me Harley,” I say sharply.
“Harley, you’re my Harley,” he says. “I missed you more than anyone. You know that, right? Nothing’s been the same without you.”
“You know who I am to you.”
He sighs and says, “Come back to me, Layla.”
I let him come closer, especially now that he’s used the name he gave me, the name I took when I was his. “Layla,” he says again. “My Layla. You know I missed you.”
My Layla.
All the months melt away. I fall back. Back into pre-Miranda, pre-Trey, pre-meeting, prehistoric Layla before I shed all this, before I learned what I’d been doing was bad for me. Because nothing is bad now that the past is here again. Everything feels right, how it should be, how it was.
So in a tiny voice, barely a whisper, I say, “I miss it too.”
Cam hears me, taking my cue, running his big hand through my hair. I let him, leaning into his hand, a cat arching its back to be pet. He closes his eyes, sighs, and says, “You belong to me. Work with me again.”
“I know,” I whisper, sliding into my old skin. It’s so easy, so simple to return to the girl I once was, the only girl I have ever known myself to be.
“You’re mine. You’re not theirs. You don’t belong with them, those people in your group. You belong by my side. We can conquer the world again.”
“I do. I do belong to you,” I say, and I feel the thing I missed, the thing that I’m terribly withdrawn from. The tug, the pull, the flip in my stomach that takes away all the confusion, all the uncertainty, that coats it with a feeling of blissful nothingness. There is no more aching, no more wondering, no more worry as Cam leans into me, inhaling me. I close my eyes as he smells my hair as if I’m his drug too. And I know he’s not the only one who’s high right now. I am too as the night turns hazy.
“Mmm,” he says again, his voice a low moan this time.
When my eyes flutter open, I take in the scene. Cam’s still there, lingering on me like I’m a long line of cocaine and he’s taking me in, grain of powder by grain of powder. There’s Tom, mixing a drink. There are men and women, coupling and uncoupling, along the length of the bar. There’s me on a plush velvet stool I’ve perched on too many times to count.
I spot a woman at the other end of the bar. She’s with a guy, and they’re wrapped up in each other. He tucks a strand of hair behind her ear, then kisses her gently on her jawline, and something, I don’t know what exactly, but something in the way he touches her—soft, tender, caring—tugs at me.
Reminding me.
Not of Cam.
Not of men.
But of one guy.
The one I kissed last night. The one who kissed me back like I was air, breath, and all the stars in the sky at once. Who tucked a strand of my hair behind my ear.
I clench my teeth. Force myself to look away. I don’t want to think of Trey right now. I don’t need him invading my brain and burrowing into my unknowable heart.
I want desperately to slip into my old clothes, my old comfort zone. I was fluent with Cam—I spoke our language like a native poet. Without him, without everything I was when I was Layla, I am clunking around without even a beginner’s dictionary.
But Trey’s with me now in my head. Telling me to be careful, ordering my triple espresso, checking in to make sure I’m okay. Asking if I made it through another dinner with my mom.
I am a rag doll yanked in one direction, then another, tossed and turned and twisted.
I don’t know which way to go. But the moment—the promise, the hit—isn’t quite as good as it was a minute ago. Because now I’m thinking of what’s beyond the door of Bliss. I’m thinking of Trey and SLAA and whether the arrow’s c
oming or going.
But Cam is determined. He always was.
25
Cam
When the thing you want most dances back to you, like a vision, like a temptation, like an offering from the gods, you’d be an idiot not to seize it.
I am many things.
And I am many things to many people, but I am not an idiot.
I don’t just know opportunity when I see it. I smell it. And I smell it all over my girl.
She wants out of her new life.
She wants back in the one we had.
And I can give it to her, like that.
Snap of the fingers.
But I know Harley.
She isn’t swayed as easily as before. She’ll want more. Need more. Require a stronger dose.
I’ve got doses to spare.
Plans for her, for us.
So even when she puts her hands on my chest and gently pushes me away, I’m flustered, but not for long.
Because I’ve got cards up my sleeve.
And I know how to play all my hands.
“I should go, Cam,” she whispers.
“Don’t go,” I say, setting a palm on her arm. I might be in my happy zone, but I’m still sharp as a tack. I know what I want. What I can use as a lure.
She shakes her head. “It’s not you, Cam. I swear it’s not you.”
“Then don’t go. You make me feel like all the others when you go,” I say, playing on her sympathies.
“You were special. You are special,” she says, like she’s correcting herself. But the words come out flat, and that’s why it’s time to go all in.
I don’t want to lose her again.
Because I can give her something no one else can.
I can give her control.
“Don’t leave me again,” I say, gentle but firm. And most of all, caring. Because I do care. I care so goddamn much. And I take care of her. I have taken care of her when no one else did. I gave her that, what she needed most. And that’s why I square my shoulders, clear my throat, and make my offer. “I’ve got jobs for you. No one can work them like you.”
The Start of Us: Book 1 in the No Regrets series Page 11