Cutting Loose

by Westlake, Samantha

  Rudy Beale came rushing up to me, dressed now in a full tuxedo but looking no less frantic and overeager than he’d appeared this morning. Perhaps the man had a hidden stash of Red Bulls that he’d been pounding throughout the day. “What’s going on?” he exclaimed, his tone equal parts excitement and concern. “Why is no one here?”

  I glanced at my cheap cell phone. “It’s only seven fifteen.”

  “And the party was supposed to start at seven! Why aren’t people here? Are the doors unlocked? Do they know where to park?” I sensed that Rudy was working himself up into more and more of a frenzy, and I hastened to calm him down.

  “This is normal, Rudy,” I promised, lightly resting my fingers on his arm as if I could siphon off some of his energy. “Trust me, I know what these people are like. It’s a poor sign to be the first to arrive at a gala or event, so they’re all trying to wait long enough so that they’ll arrive just as the party is really taking off. We probably won’t see anyone for another twenty minutes.”

  Maybe that was the wrong thing to say. Rudy’s eyes nearly bugged out of his head. “Twenty minutes?” he erupted.

  I sighed, cast my mind about for some task to distract him. “Why don’t you go check on the new exhibit?”

  That did the trick, although Rudy still looked a bit concerned. At least he wouldn’t be freaking out in direct view of the first guests when they arrived, I considered. And I did need him to look at the new exhibit; the pieces arrived earlier this afternoon under heavy guard. They’d been unpacked from heavy wooden crates and hung under the supervision of a private security detail. In the course of preparing for the gala, I looked up the featured artist, Rene Magritte. He did very strange works, often featuring ordinary green apples in otherwise weird and otherworldly scenes.

  Those paintings were also, I’d learned from Eastman, worth tens of millions of dollars – each.

  “Millions?” I had exclaimed, nearly spilling my coffee in shock. “For a painting of a giant apple in a room? Or maybe it’s a normal sized apple in a really small room? Those are worth millions?”

  Eastman shrugged. “Art. People pay crazy prices for it, and that makes other people – unscrupulous people – want to steal it.”

  Standing in the lobby and watching the main doors of the Institute, waiting for them to open, I found myself drawing strength from my earlier conversations with the agent. Eastman would look out for me – but even more than that, he’d convinced me that I was more than capable of looking out for myself.

  I found myself remembering a chat we’d had just a couple days earlier. I’d started off talking about how Sawyer helped set up the light sequence for guests traveling through the exhibit, so they’d be guided by a constant, slowly drifting spotlight. As it always did, however, the topic shifted to being about us. Eastman ended up divulging how, during his first cases as a detective, he felt like he was just stumbling around and uncovering clues solely based on luck.

  “But you did it!” I pointed out to him. “And you got better! Look at you now, working for the FBI! That shows that you had talent, even if you didn’t know it at first!”

  “No,” he countered, speaking with the strength of inner conviction. “There’s no such thing as talent. There’s only practice. Anyone can be good at something, but only if they’re willing to put up with being bad at first. I really believe that’s the only way anyone gets better at anything. People just see it at the end stage and assume that the person’s always had the talent. We never see the work that goes into making something look effortless.”

  I smiled at him. “Why, Jack, you’re practically a poet!”

  In that moment, I could have sworn that I’d seen the faintest of blushes on his face before he looked away. “I just know how much some people work to get good at things,” he said a little gruffly. “And that’s why you need to stop insisting that you don’t know how to be a real adult, how to survive on your own. We’re all bad at it at first. It just takes practice.”

  When he’d said that, it made me think of my cooking. It wasn’t nearly as bad, these days. Most of the time, the recipe came out looking pretty much like the pictures I’d seen online or in the cookbook, and Sawyer’s sarcastic comments dropped way down (although I think that, secretly, he still liked playing the part of food critic). These days, I felt much more confident in my cooking ability - but it had taken a lot of hard work to get to that level.

  Now, waiting for guests to arrive, I remembered those words. They lent me strength, along with the occasional soft jingle that I heard when my purse bumped against my shoulder or arm. The jingle came from Eastman’s gift to me, the blacksmith’s puzzle, wrapped with a sock but still occasionally clinking together.

  Finally, the first couple of guests started arriving. After making sure that Rudy wasn’t nearby, I breathed out a sigh of relief, letting go of a breath I hadn’t been fully aware I’d been holding in. Yes, I knew that the guests would come late, trying to not commit the faux pas of being first to arrive, but I’d had my own little voice in my head agreeing with Rudy, worrying that they’d all decided to skip the party, that no one would show up and I’d be to blame for it all going wrong.

  My mother wasn’t among the first batches of guests, of course. I knew that she’d wait at least another hour. She liked to arrive when at least half the party was crossing the line from tipsy to drunk. Part of that was because her own drunkenness would go unnoticed, but I knew that a bigger motivation was because she wanted to hear what secrets spilled from their lips.

  “Remember, Alice,” she informed me one time as we waited in the backseat of our car, while the party grew into full swing in the building across the street. “Sober thoughts are drunk words. By waiting, we’re sober enough to learn a lot more than they want us to take away.”

  I believe I’d been twelve, at that time. I could remember my bare knees knocking together beneath the too-thin fabric of my dress as I sat silently in the backseat next to her. She’d been nipping at a flask that smelled of paint stripper, but I hadn’t opened my mouth to point out that she wasn’t sober at all. I knew better by that point than to suggest she was ever wrong – and besides, there was a reason why our family kept a full-time chauffeur on staff.

  If she hadn’t drastically changed her modus operandi in the last couple of years, I still had at least three champagne glasses per guest to go before she made her entrance. In the meantime, I took the chance to mingle with the present guests, socializing and making sure that nothing had yet gone wrong.

  Most of them seemed to be quite enjoying themselves. Those that were at all put out had fairly petty complaints – they didn’t like the temperature, or they’d been hoping to see so-and-so who hadn’t arrived yet – which I tried to address when possible. I steered the old lady complaining about the temperature towards the steaming hot appetizers, and I checked the guest list to assure the obnoxious social climber that yes, so-and-so would arrive shortly.

  No one recognized me. I didn’t find that too surprising. First of all, most of the guests were local, not migrating here from Chicago. Even those that I vaguely recognized, however, didn’t show any hint of recognition in their faces when they glanced at me. I’d always been just a trophy on my mother’s arm, or a shrinking violet against the far wall, not good at the mingling and socializing. It wasn’t surprising that I didn’t stand out to them.

  More guests arrived, and the room grew more crowded. Soon, I had to pick my way through large groups of the mingling upper class, barely able to see three feet in front of me. I slipped past one especially large woman, attempting to not rub up against her bare and sweating back-

  -and found myself face to face with a man it took a moment to identify.

  “Jack?” I exclaimed in surprise when it clicked, looking up at Eastman. “Wow, I almost didn’t recognize you!”

  “That’s kind of the point,” he muttered back to me through the mask of a wide, totally fake smile he’d managed to plaster across his face. H
e’d also switched to a tuxedo – but unlike his normal outfits, this one didn’t look creased and rumpled.

  In fact, he didn’t look like a cop at all.

  “You look like Batman!” I hadn’t planned the words at all, but they were the first thing that came out. I wanted to smack myself. What a stupid thing to say!

  His smile briefly grew a little more genuine, and I relaxed slightly. Maybe he got the compliment. “I hate this,” he said a moment later, the fakeness returning.

  “Hate what?”

  He waved a hand around us. “Mingling. I’d much rather be the guy out in the van or up watching the cameras, but as the agent in charge tonight, I’ve got to be closest to any action. And that means dressing up in this monkey suit.”

  “What if something happens somewhere else, though?”

  He reached up and tapped his ear. “I’ve got my whole team in my ear. We’ve got all the angles covered, and we’re monitoring all the sensors on the paintings. Sawyer’s not going to get away with anything tonight.”

  “That sounds good – so you can relax a little!” I patted his shoulder. It felt stiff, almost made of stone.

  He looked around. “I can’t relax here. I hate being hemmed in like this.”

  “Well, I’m not going to offer you any champagne to relax – you have to stay sharp.” I looked around. “Oh, I know! This way!”

  “What? Where are we going?” Eastman protested, but he let me tug him along. “Oh, wait. No. Not happening.”

  Rudy had insisted that, despite the music coming from a string quintet of musicians, we set up a dance floor area. I’d tried to protest several times, but eventually decided it would be simpler to just go along with his request. After all, he was handling the bill. I doubted that anyone would really cut some rug on the dance area, but I arranged to have a smooth, raised floor brought in and laid out in front of the musicians.

  Now, I tugged Eastman out onto the edge of the dance area. He glared down at me, although his lips quirked slightly up at the corners, ruining the angry tilt of his eyes. “I’m supposed to keep a low profile,” he hissed at me. “This isn’t going to help!”

  “Sawyer knows that you’re here, and I’m sure he’s aware of the rest of your agents, too,” I countered, slipping my arm around him. “You don’t need to hide from him. And I’m sure he won’t do anything until later tonight, when more people are drunk and their guard is down. Come on, this has to be better than socializing with stuck-up rich people!”

  “This is far worse,” he sighed, but I felt his arm loop around me, warm against my back through the fabric of the dress. “I hate dancing.”

  “It’s easy. You just sway back and forth in time with the song, and don’t step on my feet.”

  “You’ll likely end up losing a toe,” he warned, but he moved back and forth, holding me carefully. I slipped my arms up around his neck, smiled at him.

  “That’s not so bad, is it?” I asked after another minute. “Are you feeling better? At least you don’t need to keep that stupid fake grin on out here.”

  He winced. “You could tell it was fake?”

  “The drunkest person here could tell it was fake,” I said. “You’re a great FBI agent, but you’re not very good at concealing your feelings.”

  He blinked. “Alice…”

  I didn’t know what he wanted to say, but I felt suddenly, acutely aware of the warmth of his touch. He was holding me firmly but carefully, as if he feared that I was made of glass and might shatter. “Let’s just dance for a minute longer,” I requested, illogically concerned of what he might say. The moment was strangely perfect, and I didn’t want it to end just yet.

  Eastman nodded. He closed his mouth, cutting off whatever he’d been about to tell me – but this time, his smile was fully genuine. “Okay.”

  I leaned in, rested my head against his shoulder. He smelled good, I thought as we rocked back and forth. Despite his warning, he turned out to be pleasantly light on his feet, and he had no trouble keeping rhythm, matching the motions of my body so we moved together. His arms slid a little tighter around me, and I let my eyes close. Leaning against him, I felt safe.

  The song, a classical composition that I probably could have recognized if I’d listened closer, came to an end. Eastman loosened his arms around me, and I reluctantly stepped back so we could both lightly applaud for the musicians. I didn’t step too far away, however; I wanted to stay close to him, keep leaning against him and letting him wrap his arms around me.

  He looked down at me, and I again saw that warm light in his eyes. “Alice, I do have to say this,” he said. “Since I started-”

  “YOU!”

  The screech ripped through the crowd, piercing my eardrums and turning the blood in my veins to ice. I knew that shriek. I froze, split between spinning to face her, or fleeing with my tail between my legs like a frightened cat.

  She burst between us, shoving Eastman out of the way. I never imagined her to have the strength to knock over the brawny FBI agent, but she nearly knocked him onto his butt. She didn’t offer a word of apology, didn’t even acknowledge his existence. He was just a plank of wood to bump off as she came after me.

  “You!” she hissed again, eyes like pebbles, simultaneously freezing me and burning into every fearful little corner of my soul.

  Constance Melton.

  My mother.

  Chapter Nineteen

  * * *

  Eastman looked between the two of us, his hand loosening from its grip around me as he tried to figure out what was going on. I just stared, frozen, a mouse caught in the glare of a swooping owl.

  Apparently, she hadn’t decided to go for the subtle approach after all, once she spotted me. One glance at her showed me that she was furious, possibly more furious than I’d ever seen before, even angrier than when I broke off the engagement. I couldn’t speak.

  My mother, of course, had plenty to say. She always had plenty of venom to spit, and this situation seemed to give her an unending stream.

  “You!” she got out, her voice somewhere between a snake’s hiss and a feral cat’s scream. “Do you have any idea how much trouble you’ve caused me?”

  I wanted to defend myself, but I had nothing. My mouth opened and shut, but no words came out. A little part of my brain hysterically laughed, thinking that I probably looked like a beached fish, flopping about and searching for water that wasn’t there for me to breathe.

  Unfortunately, my mother must have seen some tiny indicator of that ridiculous thought in my brain. Maybe my lips twitched up, just enough for her to read it through my otherwise blank face.

  “You think that this is funny?” she exclaimed, the volume now rising towards a fire truck’s siren before she wrestled it under control. “You ran away, gave me no indication of where you were, and you haven’t sent any word back for months! You destroyed your phone! We’ve had to hire private investigators to try and find you, figure out if you were just a corpse lying in a ditch somewhere!”

  Eastman had released me fully and stepped back, looking uncertain. Maybe some part of him wanted to play the gallant knight and come to my rescue. I wish I could have told him not to bother. He wouldn’t be able to slay this dragon.

  Others around us were starting to look in our direction, now. My mother pretended not to notice them, although I knew she’d pull them into her performance. She certainly had come dressed to catch the attention of others – she’d managed to squeeze her bony frame into a long gown that could look elegant on someone else. As if trying to compensate for her lack of feminine curves, she’d apparently raided the jewelry box for every bit of bling we Meltons had ever inherited, bought, or stolen. Diamonds gleamed brilliantly on her ears, around her neck, and on her fingers. She practically clinked when she walked – or when she vibrated with anger, like she was doing now. Indeed, now her voice kept climbing, her cries taking on a pained and self-sacrificing tone.

  “We worried so much about you!” she wailed, someho
w selling the obvious lie. “Your sister thought that you were dead, and we had to keep telling ourselves that we didn’t need to hold a funeral! We held out hope that we’d find you alive, that you weren’t abducted or murdered – and you’ve been here, selfishly letting all of us suffer for not knowing that you’d just decided to… to…” Her hands flailed about. “To go gallivanting off like some TRAMP!”

  At that last word, her ring-encrusted finger stabbed towards me, and I recoiled instinctively from it like it was a poison coated dagger. As I stepped back, my mother seized the advantage, stepping forward and pulling her lined, bitter face closer to me. Her eyes burned darkly, like smoldering coals.

  “I know why you did it,” she hissed softly, so quietly that even the onlookers craning their heads all around us couldn’t catch her words. “I know that you wanted to get away, that you have no respect for anything our family has built. I won’t stand it, do you understand? I won’t let you destroy our legacy, destroy the good name that our family has worked so hard for so long to build.”

  That was it. She was going to not let me out of her sight for the rest of the party, would make sure that I had no chance to escape before she dragged me away. I’d be locked away in Chicago, a prisoner in gilded chains, and brainwashed until I never again had the strength to leave.

  I was done for. I opened my mouth, knowing already that the only thing that would come out of it would be a simpering, weak little apology-

  -and then suddenly, someone collided with my mother as they attempted to slip between us, as if they hadn’t realized that she was yelling at me.

  I looked up in surprise at the tall man, that dark hair curling at the nape of his neck, the knowing little smirk that he shot back at me over one shoulder as he came crashing through without heed for safety. Sawyer! Surely, he’d seen my mother in front of him, hadn’t meant to trample her like that…

  He held my eye for a second. And then, very carefully and deliberately, he winked.

  And with that wink, a small amount of my confidence and self-respect returned.