The Rivals

by Allen , Dylan

  She turns her head more so that nearly her full face is visible. A beam of moonlight breaks the dark shadowing them. I can see those eyes that tempted me so much tonight. Her face, even while twisted with pain and fear is like a painting—with features that separately you’d never think to pair together. Big eyes, a tiny nose. That lush, but small mouth … Yet they come together and create an expressive, very interesting, and beautiful masterpiece.

  My phone rings, and I answer it with my head still over the side so I can keep an eye on her “One sec, it’s about the rescue,” I tell her before I put it to my ear. Marco starts speaking right away and my heart sinks when he gives me the status.

  “What’s wrong?” she asks as soon as I hang up.

  “Nothing’s wrong—”

  “Your face says otherwise,” she snaps. “Just tell me because I’m freaking out down here,” she says.

  “It’s not a big deal,” I reassure her. “The station’s rappel team is one man short tonight. One of the guy’s wife went into labor about an hour ago,” I tell her. Her eyes widen in horror. She pushes up to sitting and scoots closer to the cliff wall. I listen for signs of cracking or shifting in the rock. I hear nothing and exhale in relief. “There’s a team thirty minutes away, and he’s already on his way to them.”

  “This is what I get for being so goddamn selfish. I’m going to die on a cliff in Italy and all because I wanted to live a little,” she cries.

  “You’re not going to die,” I repeat what has become my refrain.

  “Oh, the irony,” she shouts and throws an arm over her eyes.

  “Well, it will certainly be a loss for the theatre, if you decide to throw yourself to your death,” I say dryly.

  “It’s not funny. You come down here and see if making jokes seems like a nice thing to do,” she says, her eyes still covered by her arm.

  My anxiety and guilt are tangling with each other. I don’t know what to do and everything I say seems to only make her more upset.

  “Do you want me to go get your friend?” I ask, feeling like a failure.

  “No. Please don’t leave me.” Her hand stretches out to me. And she looks up over her shoulder again. Her eyes are full of sorrow. “She’s having the time of her life. I’ve already ruined her trip by coming in the first place. I don’t know why I did,” she says.

  “I’m sure she’s glad you came and maybe—”

  “I need to confess something,” she calls, lips having been pursed in pain and now they twitch. I feel a prick of unease.

  “No, you don’t need to confess anything. And it wouldn’t even count, I’m not a priest,” I call down. “Save your energy and try to think about something—”

  “You will listen, you owe me,” she yells in a high-pitched, primal voice that is rich with anxiety and fear.

  I give a sigh of resignation. I need to do whatever it takes to keep her calm and still while we wait.

  “I’m listening. But not because I think you’re going to die,” I say.

  “I got fired from my job three months ago. It was my dream job. And I was supporting my entire family with it. And I haven’t told my mother what really happened. I’ve lied to everyone,” she says in a rush.

  “You don’t have to—” I try to stop her, but she just keeps pushing forward.

  “I wish I hadn’t because I’m going to die, and those cunts who were making fun of me are going to think I’m really someone who uses men for money,” she says angrily.

  “Aren’t you?” I ask her.

  She glares daggers up at me. “Really? I mean, if I were, I’m clearly terrible at it. You practically threw me off a cliff to get rid of me,” she says.

  I laugh despite the real anxiety I’m feeling waiting to hear back from Marco.

  “I thought you were about to confess lies. You’re just telling more of them,” I quip.

  “Just because you didn’t put your hand between my shoulders and shove me, doesn’t mean you’re not the reason I’m out here,” she snaps.

  “Sorry.” I feel instantly contrite.

  “I heard them talking about me. Out there on the balcony,” she says quietly. “I was leaving and came back for something and overheard them. I just wanted to make them think that I didn’t care. But, of course I care. But all anyone knows are the rumors. And they would rather believe the most ridiculous theories, with no basis in fact, than hear the boring truth,” she says. I know exactly how that feels. Renee dragged my name through the mud and I know most people believed her.

  There’s an instant kinship, an invisible knitting of recognition and connection that I feel for her. I’ve been struggling with this very thing since I moved back to Houston. And I’ve had to endure gossip, not respond to innuendo and have everyone think Oh, look at the size of him. Of course, he choked her out or whatever. The gossip campaign that Renee started has died down in fervor, but I know that these people think they know things about me. And they know absolutely nothing.

  “Tell me what really happened,” I hear myself asking before I can think about it. It would be bad form not to ask, I tell myself. But, I can’t deny that I’m eager to know more about this woman who has me lying on my stomach with my head dangling off the edge of a cliff in the dirt, playing the role of confessor.

  “I was living in Nashville. I had a great job at the Southern Poverty Law Center right out of law school. But the money was shit and I wanted to be able to do more for myself and my mama. So, I started applying for jobs in law firms. Big ones where I swore I’d never work. I went to a shitty law school, but I was first in my class and I wrote an article that the Harvard Law Review published. So, I had no problem finding a job. I moved to Washington, DC. It was great. The cost of living was crazy. But, I was renting and took the train in. Everything was great until I started seeing someone at work,” she says.

  “Well, I don’t know how you could have foreseen that wouldn’t go pear-shaped,” I say sarcastically.

  “Oh, it gets even worse. He was my boss,” she drones.

  “Oh.” Damn.

  “That’s not the best part.”

  “What? Was he married?” I joke.

  “Engaged,” she says quietly.

  That was the last thing I was expecting to hear.

  “Shit, I keep putting my foot in my mouth with you, don’t I?”

  “You did say you were terrible at small talk.” She laughs, with real humor and shakes her head in what I have to guess—because I can’t see her face—is chagrin.

  “I lived in Rockville. That’s a suburb of DC. It was affordable and not crowded, you know. I didn’t really spend much time in DC beyond work. I didn’t have any friends there, so my time in the actual district itself was limited to my office in China Town. But earlier this year, I ended up having an unexpected free afternoon after a deal closed early. You have no idea how rare that is. It’s fucking brutal, that life. I worked like a mule at harvest time. On the days we were prepping for a deal to close, I would go forty-eight hours with no sleep. I never complained. I was proving to be something of a wunderkind in the practice that dealt with large insurance settlements. We were charting courses no one had ever even thought of. I was making an impact and I was making money. I never complained about the shitty treatment, the shitty hours and the constant sexual harassment.”

  “That intense,”I say.

  “It was. But like I said, it had its upsides,” she says and she sighs up at the sky in nostalgia. “On the first free day I’d had in a year, I woke up feeling like doing something special.

  “I decided to go to Dupont Circle and walk up Connecticut Ave to Nigel’s favorite store—so I could buy him a fucking tie. He was in California for the week and I thought I’d be wearing it, and nothing else when he got back in a couple days ...” The image she paints turns me on until I remember that she did that for another man. The surge of jealousy I feel is dismissed for the ridiculousness that it is. She’s not mine. Nor do I want her to be. But, I have to admit tha
t seeing her naked with only one of my ties around her neck would have been fucking nice.

  “Well, turns out his ‘I’m going to be in California for work all week’ was a lie,” she says.

  “He was at the store?” I ask.

  “Yup, with his fiancée. I saw him, and at first, I was excited. I called his name. They both turned around. You should have seen his face.” She snickers, and it makes me smile, too. “It was the classic, I think I’m going to shit myself, so I’m clenching my ass as hard as I can face.” She laughs to herself and I find it miraculous that she can laugh at the memory even while she’s lying there in pain.

  I feel my first pang of doubt about the conclusions I drew about her.

  “Can you believe that at first he tried to act like he had no clue who I was?” she says, and I guffaw incredulously.

  “No fucking way.”

  “Oh, way,” she says.

  “I mean, hello, motherfucker. Your tongue was buried between my thighs two days ago, remember that?” She laughs and I do, too. But my laugh isn’t a loose, easy one. It’s knotted around the discomfort I feel every time she refers to her sexual relationship with that man.

  I don’t like it. Not one fucking bit, and I have no idea why or where that feeling came from. Because honestly, half an hour ago, I didn’t give two shits whether I saw her again or not.

  “‘Come on, Rebecca, look at her, would I date a girl who shops at The Gap?’” She says this in a deep voice that I’m assuming is meant to be the boyfriend. “I mean, who says things like that?”

  “Well, apparently, your boyfriend. So, what’d you do? I hope it was worse than throwing yourself off a cliff because what he did was way worse than what I did … and look how you’ve punished me,” I quip.

  And when she laughs, I feel a swell of pride. And then immediately wonder who the fuck I am. Maybe I’ve had too much to drink.

  “I didn’t throw myself off a cliff, and I wasn’t trying to punish you. You’re so vain. Not everything is about you,” she says angrily but with no malice.

  “Anyway, I wish I’d done something to punish him then. It would’ve been much more satisfying getting arrested if I’d actually done something to earn it,” she says irritably.

  “You’re like one of those Russian dolls. So many layers,” I say in wonder.

  “Huh?” she replies.

  “Nothing, keep going,” I prompt, eager to hear what came next.

  “He had the nerve to call security. In seconds, they swooped in and escorted me out. I was truly speechless. Shocked beyond belief.”

  I can be ruthless with people I’m not happy with. But, I can’t imagine pretending not to know someone you’ve been intimate with.

  “What next?” I ask, intrigued beyond belief.

  “I get back to work and find out the girl he was with is the daughter of our firm’s managing partner. Overnight, my job became a different kind of hell. It wasn’t just long hours and hard work. It was impossibly long hours, being assigned to cases in practice areas like white collar crime—places where I had no expertise and no interest. They gave me all these extremely technical questions to answer for super valuable clients. Then they’d tell me they needed the answer back in a matter of hours. These questions required a full day’s worth of work in less time than I was given to complete the job. So of course, I made mistakes. I fucked up assignments. I took too long to return phone calls. Whatever you can think of, I did it. I was constantly being called to task,” she rants. “They started saying things like, maybe I couldn’t do the work because I didn’t go to Harvard or Cornell like everyone else. For nearly an entire month after the incident at the store, they did everything they could to get me to quit.

  “I knew what they were doing. I tried to stay strong. I was finally taking care of my mother the way she deserved. So, I hung on because I liked the money too much, and I thought I could outlast them. I’d never lost a fight in my life. And I have fought some really big demons,” she says, and her voice is clogged with heavy emotions.

  “Wow,” is all I say, despite the dozens of questions I want to ask. Her honesty is so refreshing. I want more of it.

  “But one day, the fuck up was too big. And a partner threw an entire three-ringed binder at me from across a conference room,” she says.

  I was stunned at that.

  “I know,” she says as if she can hear the shock in my silence. “No one did anything. In fact, they asked me to clean up the papers that had fallen out when it slammed into the wall next to my head.

  “I started to think about quitting. I decided that there was no amount of money worth all of this. And if, at the age of twenty-eight, I was making nearly 200k a year, it meant I could find something like that again, right?” she posits.

  “Right,” I agree.

  “Wrong,” she deadpans. “When I leave here, I’m moving back home to Arkansas because I can’t afford my rent in DC anymore. This trip was my last hurrah. But now, I’m going to die.” Her chest rises and falls rapidly as she tries to catch her breath after that diatribe.

  I ask her the question that’s been on the tip of my tongue.

  “How could you not know that your boyfriend had someone else in his life?” I hear a voice in my head say, Not now, she’s in the middle of what she believes could be her deathbed confession. But, the woman I’m looking down at, that I’m listening to—that woman is smart and damn perceptive.

  So, I double down when she doesn’t respond right away. “Really. How could you not have known?”

  “I ask myself that every day,” she responds miserably.

  “You seem like an astute person,” I muse.

  “Then you’re clearly not,” she says with disdain.

  “Thanks, that’s nice,” I say dryly.

  “Haven’t you been listening to my story? Don’t you see the parallels?”

  “Parallels?”

  “Yes. He fucked me on the down low, but basically said I was too low class for him to be seen with in public. You wouldn’t even fuck me. And you made it very clear that even if you could lower yourself to being with me, I was too cheap to do more with than that,” she says without any recrimination at all in her voice. “I must be the world’s biggest kind of fool. I keep meeting and liking the same kind of guy,” she says.

  “Hey, I am not the same kind of guy as that asshole,” I say.

  “What says you’re not? Certainly not the way you spoke to me. I mean, you being out here on this ledge is nice. But considering how it’s your fault and all, you leaving me alone out here would make you a pretty evil son of a bitch, so … I’m not sure that I can see any real difference between you and my boyfriend of five years except he kept his sense of superiority hidden for much longer than you did.” She lays this indictment on me with the force of a sledgehammer.

  Swish would be so disappointed in me right now, and there’s nothing worse than feeling that certainty settle down on my shoulders.

  “Anyway, all I’m saying is, clearly, I have a type. With Nigel, all I lost was my job. You’re about to cost me my fucking life,” she says.

  “Don’t say they actually fired you. Didn’t you have a contract or something?” I ask, ignoring her melodrama.

  “I know you only date heiresses, so you wouldn’t know much about jobs and employment like the rest of us working stiffs,” she snarks. She’s making a joke, but a lash of shame strikes me right in the center of my chest when I remember the way I spoke to her.

  “Most of us who have jobs are what’s called at will. I can quit whenever I want, and they can fire me for any reason. They found their reason and fired me,” she says simply.

  “What did you do?”

  “Nothing. I left. They offered me money to sign a nondisclosure, something saying I wouldn’t sue them for wrongful termination. I was tempted. That money would not have gone begging.”

  “So, you signed it?” I ask.

  “Hell no,” she says like it’s the stupidest question
she’s ever been asked. “Of course not. I would dance naked on a pole in Little Rock before I took their hush money. I’ve worked too hard to let them drag my name in the mud. That is my story. And I’ll tell it if I want to,” she declares.

  “So, have you?” I ask.

  She sighs loudly. “No. Because it would destroy what’s left of my career. No one would ever hire me again. But, I hope they spend the entire three-year statutory period looking over their shoulders for that lawsuit. They’re playing games. I’m playing for my life. I have one shot to escape the future that I was born to, and I’ll be dammed if they take it from me,” the lioness on the ledge roars.

  Goddamn.

  She’s sexy as fuck when she’s angry. Her voice is strong. There’s no fear. No apology.

  “Nigel made sure to stop by my office on my last day and tell me how sorry he was that things didn’t work out. He told me that I should lower my ambitions. I had a great body, a decent face and amazing hair. But my pedigree was all wrong. ‘Stop punching above your weight, find your kind,’ he said.”

  “Shit. He’s a proper asshole,” I say.

  “He’s worse than an asshole. He’s a hemorrhoid. Useless, painful, and rotten on the inside,” she says with real scorn. “My kind are hunters and trackers. We’re keepers of tradition. We’re salt of the earth. I refused to feel ashamed of that.”

  My dick gets hard. Like her words are her mouth and they’re wrapping themselves around it, sucking as hard. Just how I like it.

  Fuck. Me.

  I’m about two minutes from jumping down on that ledge with her and finding my way under that little dress and making both of our dreams come true.

  “Oh, about two weeks after I left, Nigel had what he called a ‘crisis of his conscience.’ But really, what he meant was that he wanted to fuck me again.”

  My dick deflates. “Please spare me the details.”

  “Oh, stop being a prude,” she says, misunderstanding my request. “Nothing even happened. I got home from another awful interview and found him sitting in his car outside my building. I lost it. I took my briefcase and started pounding his car. I broke his headlights and put a good dent in the hood before he drove off.”