by Bromberg, K
“But if we share a child…” He turned to face me, one green eye catching the light. “I don’t want you to feel that way.”
“You promised you’d leave me alone.”
“I will. If that’s what you want, I’ll disappear. You’ll never see me again. But what if you wanted me around for him? Wouldn’t that be better?”
“What if the moon was made of green cheese?”
“The bottom would fall out of the dairy market, and a child would have a father. Preferable, no?”
I faced forward with a sigh. I didn’t want Byron to feel trapped, and he wasn’t. I was the one hemmed in on all sides.
“What are you trying to manipulate me into?” I asked. “This isn’t some play to build that house, is it? Because if it is—”
“My God, you think I’m some kind of monster?”
“I’m not sure what I think right now.” Somewhere on the block, a car alarm showed off seven ways to shriek. “Have you heard of Francois Hollande?”
“The director? French, right?”
“He’s my father. If you were into obscure foreign films, you’d be oohing and aahing over what a ‘genius auteur’ he is. And even if you only cared about American movies, you’d be asking what he did after City in Thunder, but thankfully, you’re neither. Bursting people’s bubble is a pain in the ass.”
The alarm died, and a mockingbird took up the call, whistling in seven melodies.
“When he met my mother,” I continued, “she was a model, and of course she wanted to get into acting. I mean, she was twenty-three and not getting any younger. So, she meets my dad, and he’s famous in France. He was trying to get something going here that might make him some money. She auditions, and he gives her the lead in City in Thunder, to which you’re saying, ‘That was Ursula Rozen, who isn’t your mother,’ right?”
“Right.”
“Well, so of course they start sleeping together, and three months before shooting, he knocks her up with my sister. She can’t play the part pregnant. To which you’re saying, ‘It takes two,’ or ‘Why didn’t she use birth control?’ or some garbage I’m going to stop you from saying right now. Because when I asked my mother that, she shrugged and said they were out of condoms and he was really insistent. Insistent. Don’t speak. I don’t want you to tell me what that means to you, but it means something very definite to me. She lost the part, and more importantly, she stayed with him. She married him. Even after she found out he’d recast with Ursula Rozen weeks before he was ‘insistent.’ She still married him, and she stayed married when he knocked her up again with me two years later. This way, he didn’t have to cast her in Eastern Wind… which you never saw because by then my mother finally got smart. She hired a private investigator, found out he was fucking the wife of the studio head, and that finished him. Fatal blow. No movie. No friends. Done.”
“What did he do?”
“Slunk back to France. We haven’t heard from him since.”
The mockingbird gave up and tweeted another melody.
“How old were you?”
I shrugged. My flashes of memory of the gray-haired man who talked funny: him standing over the stove with his hand over mine so he could guide the spoon around the corners of the pan, or reading a script by a window, or asking me to say the word squirrel over and over with his eyes on my mouth to figure out how the hell I made those sounds… None of that mattered.
“So.” I stood so I could pull up my underwear and pull down my skirt. “I know what my mother put herself through when she should have known better. I’m not doing that. You might be manipulating me for some kind of financial gain, or you might not. The point isn’t that I don’t trust you, because that’s obvious. The point is that really…” Clothes back where they belonged, I crossed my arms. “Really… I don’t trust me.”
Chapter 10
BYRON
I’d met a lot of women in my life, but none who shapeshifted like Olivia Monroe. She’d started as a pawn in a game, shifted into a worthy opponent, then the object of my desire, and in the past few hours, between telling me she was trying to get pregnant and the moment she explained the holes in her trust, she’d become someone I wanted to care for.
Now, standing before me in a dark room with her arms crossed, she’d shifted into a woman too complex to fathom. If there had been straight lines between what I wanted and what she wanted, I’d have known the play, but they were curved around themselves like a gold chain in the bottom of a drawer. I could easily discern the unknotted lengths of chain where I wanted to fuck her. But the rest was hopelessly tangled, and yanking too hard would break the whole thing.
“I have an idea,” I said, giving myself a moment to change my mind by putting my dick back in my pants. “It’s the worst idea I ever had.” I zipped up.
She reached under the table lamp to click it on, and I could finally see our surroundings.
“Let’s hear it.” She sat on a white chair with blue flowers upholstered into the fabric. I recognized the pattern as a custom weave from Surya, and it didn’t match the couch, which looked as if it came from a dorm. The rug was a floral IKEA job, and the side table was a thirty-year-old rosewood Niemeyer. If the lamp was brighter, I’d probably see the same mix of high and low. Nonetheless, her cool beauty and the glow of her skin elevated everything in the room.
“You don’t trust yourself with me.”
“I’m not trying to stroke your ego.”
“As a tactic, flattery is beneath you.”
“But it’s not beneath you,” she said, acknowledging that I’d flattered her and that nothing I said would make her believe it wasn’t a tactic.
“In the end, either you’re pregnant, or you aren’t. If you are, I’m going to keep my promise and leave you alone. But I don’t want to. I want to take care of it, and you, and be as much of a father as you’ll let me be. Which I understand you don’t want. You have a career; you have enough money to get by. You think I’m more trouble than I’m worth. I want to convince you otherwise. I’m not…” I held my hand up to stop her train of thought. “Not interviewing for the job of husband. That’s not in the cards. But I want you to see me as a father. I want you, in the ledger of your life, to see I can be in the plus column.”
“What’s your deal?”
“My deal?”
She crossed her legs and leaned her elbow on the arm of the chair that was closer to me. “Why are you so intent on this?”
That was as good a time as any to tell her the hard truth. It would make things easier later.
“The odds of me ever loving a woman are nil,” I said. “Getting married is less than nil. I’m not husband material. However, that doesn’t mean I don’t want children. A family of my own.”
“And I can give you a child without the hassle?”
“The same thing you want.”
She nodded with a cock to her head as if she might actually believe me. “We’ve fucked twice already, and this time, just now, it wasn’t carefully thought out. It was… I mean, for me it…” She held her tongue and looked down. Her eyelashes cast long shadows on her cheeks. “I don’t have great control around you, and I already said I don’t trust myself.”
“I have control.”
“You can’t control me.” Her blue eyes blazed as if she’d forgotten who called the shots when her legs were spread. The thought gave my balls a twinge.
“Everything you hate about me as a partner isn’t going to change.”
“But I’m supposed to embrace you as a family man?”
“I think it’s worth a try. Listen, it’s Labor Day weekend. My family has a place up in Santa Barbara. Come up. We have a house. It’s—”
“What are you going to tell them? I’m an egg bank, and you have a deposit maturing?”
“There are enough bedrooms for me to bring a friend.”
She scoffed and sat back in her chair with her face turned to the ceiling. “You don’t know people at all.”
“It’s not a
bout what they think. It’s about what you think.”
“I think you’ve got some kind of hard-on for me and it’s scrambling your brain.”
I laughed. She was right. She was a cord of desire running between my head and my dick. I’d never felt such a strong pull from a woman. Her scent, a soft lavender that sneaked up on the edges of my consciousness, was a narcotic lulling me into a haze of sexual need.
But for all that, she knew the lesser truth. I wouldn’t confuse desire for love. Ever.
Neither would she.
“I have a hard-on for you,” I admitted. “Your body, your voice, the way you walk into a room makes me want to fuck you. But I’m not scrambled. I can’t love you or anyone. That’s not in the cards for me, and as far as I go, it’s not in the cards for you either. You won’t ever cross that line, because you despise me. You know I’m wrong for you. That’s why I trust you.”
She regarded me, tenting her fingertips and tapping them as if giving rhythm to her thoughts. “This might work. Except the jealousy over Alan.”
“I wanted you, and he was an unexpected obstacle.”
“Will every man I meet be an obstacle?”
She was thinking into the future, and she was right to. If there was a baby between us, we needed utter clarity for the long term.
“As long as you and I are fucking, I offer exclusivity. And we’ll fuck until we’re bored. No hard feelings.”
“Do you have any actual emotions?”
“Not anymore. No.”
She laughed and slid down in her seat. We had a deal, and with it, the possibility of her spreading her legs before dawn.
But not quite.
“I need to ask you something you’re sensitive about,” she said.
“I know what this is.”
There weren’t too many things anyone would suspect me of being sensitive about.
“Samantha,” she confirmed. “Was it suicide?”
I’d expected questions about my feelings, which ones had died and which were still hanging around. The death was a death, and few people asked anything past what had been announced. Years of walls built around the truth set my jaw against an answer.
“Is this line of questioning a deal-breaker?” I asked.
“You’ve delineated the exact ways I trust you and the exact ways I don’t,” she said. “But I have no idea of the lines around where you trust me.”
I sat in a chair across from her shadowed shape, settling in. I had nothing to prove to her or anyone, but I wanted to fuck her more than I wanted to keep a secret. Or maybe I was a fool.
Both could be true.
“Early in the morning,” I said, “when everyone was asleep, she used a crowbar to break the pool light. Then she jumped in wearing her pajamas. She didn’t drown. It was electrocution.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“Faster that way actually. Her parents didn’t want anyone to know. I honored their wishes and trust you will too.”
With that, for reasons I couldn’t define, I’d widened the lines of trust by a mile and a half. Sam’s suicide was a source of shame for me, and this woman wasn’t close enough to me to know it. I waited to feel a stab of regret but didn’t.
“I will,” she said with an emotionally flat seriousness that only increased the trust by another half a mile.
“Thank you.”
“Do you have any idea why she did it?”
I knew I couldn’t tell her, but at the same time… I was compelled to.
“We had a fight.” I tapped my knee. No more. We’d hit the line. “So. There you have it. Is that all?”
“Are you okay about it?”
“Am I fucked up if I say yes?”
“You’re fucked up,” she said. “You are one fucked up son of a bitch. You’re hard as iron. Sometimes you’re hot. Sometimes you’re cold. But still cast iron through and through.”
I stood, and she looked up at me with her legs crossed and her posture relaxed as if she had the upper hand.
She did. She’d earned it, and if we were doing this thing, I needed to let her have moments of victory. I’d made the mistake of being too hard with a woman already, and I wouldn’t do it again.
“You understand me, then.”
“No.” Pushing herself up on the arms of the chair, she stood nose to nose with me, our bodies barely brushing against each other. The sharp smell of sex came from her. When she spoke, her breath fell on my lips, and I wanted to feel her from the inside one more time. “I don’t understand you. But I don’t need to.”
“This, Olivia.” I kissed her. “This is why I trust you.”
We were kissing again, and I was getting hard under the pants I’d just zipped up when she gently pushed me back.
“Go,” she said. “Before we’re up all night.”
With a little effort, I could have taken her. I could have persuaded her the orgasms would be worth the lost sleep, but I needed to convince her she could trust me.
I plucked my jacket off the floor and got into it while she opened the front door.
We kissed one last time, and I left.
* * *
Early the next morning, surrounded by the humble silence of big, yellow earth-moving machines, I stood on what was truly the most perfect piece of land in Los Angeles. Ocean view to one side. City views in every other direction. On a clear day, you could see the future, and the sun was rising without a drop of marine layer between me and what I’d been convinced I’d never have.
A spit-shined black Suburban crunched rocks and dirt under its tires as it rolled onto the lot. By the time I got close enough to hear the engine, it was turned off and Logan got out in a suit, tie, and shoes made for the office.
“I told you to wear boots,” I said after a quick hug and a back slap.
“I’m not staying long enough to step on a nail.”
“It’s your foot.”
“So,” he said, turning to catch all of the view. “This is it?”
“This is it.”
“Your choice for the One Big Thing.”
“It is.”
Until both our parents died, which wasn’t happening any time soon, each of us could request a family investment in what we called the One Big Thing. After that, we were limited by trust funds, which were ample enough to keep us in gold-plated dinnerware, golf club memberships, and my string of spec houses, but not nearly enough to fund a project of this size. It was planned that way to make sure we learned how to raise our own capital, avoid waste, and prioritize investments over wanton spending.
“You had some environmentalists on you over the footprint?”
“Fixed. We’re solid.”
“Thank God,” Logan said. “Dad has regrets over Colton’s OBT.”
“I’m not Colton.”
Of the six of us, only my younger brother Colton had called in the OBT so far, taking it in cash when he turned twenty-one. He blew it in two years, setting the bad example we all strove to avoid.
“No, you’re not. But when you decided not to run Crowne Industries, he got a little worried.”
“Too much responsibility,” I replied. “Too many eyeballs in my business. You can have it.”
Over the ridge, a cloud of dust was kicked up by the arriving crew.
“Your loss,” Logan said. “It’s fun, you know.”
“Sure. While we’re on the subject of fun…”
“Were we?”
“Labor Day weekend. Crownestead. You going?”
When Mom’s hands had started tremoring constantly, our parents moved up to our summer house in Santa Barbara to live full-time.
“Dad considers that a working holiday, so yes. Lyric will bring a dozen annoying friends; Colton may show up. Dante’s who knows where.”
“And Liam?”
“Playing daddy at Malin’s parents’.”
“Ah.”
“Why? No one to torment?”
“Counting bedrooms.” A handful of trucks pulled in,
and men in work clothes spilled out. “I’m bringing someone.”
Logan was easy to read, and for him, I was too. The less I tried to say, the more information he’d get out of me.
“What’s her name?” he asked.
“Olivia. She’s a friend.”
Logan could have said plenty. He could have teased or prodded, and after half a lifetime of living with him, I knew he wanted to. But he didn’t. He hadn’t given me a hard time about women since Samantha died.
“You’d better get to work,” he said. “See you in Santa Barbara.”
Chapter 11
OLIVIA
After work, I went to Amelia’s to help Emilio with the menu. The construction team was putting up the custom lighting and art deco brass finishings when I arrived. An array of small plates was lined up along the bar.
“What’s this one?” I asked as Emilio held up a wedge of bread with a clear gelatin wiggling on the edge.
“Bone marrow with raspberry reduction.”
He fed it to me. I chewed slowly.
“Salty. Maybe too salty?”
“More raspberry.” He made a note in a little book.
“I wanted to tell you something,” I said.
“You hate it? Just say so.”
“No. Not that. About the IUI.”
“Did my virility finally show up?”
“No, I mean, I don’t know. I skipped this month.”
“Second thoughts? Giving it a rest? Manuel!” he interrupted himself, shouting to the construction supervisor before rattling something off in Spanish.
Manuel agreed, but si was all I understood.
“Sorry.” He forked a ball of gnocchi. “Tell me if this is too meaty.”
He fed it to me, and I took my time chewing.
“Not. It’s good. Cloves?”
“Yep.” Another note in his book. “Russel’s telling me I need a hamburger. I’m like, Jesus Christ, can we be the one place in LA without a twenty-two-dollar ground beef sandwich on the menu?”
“About the baby thing?”
“Yep.” He shifted the plates around.