Dirty Tycoons: King of Code-Prince Charming-White Knight

by Reiss, CD

  “I’m fine.” A yellow tennis ball rolled slowly away.

  They were both off the truck. I held up my hands, but they helped me to my feet.

  “You all right?” Johnny asked.

  “Yeah. I stepped on a ball.”

  The culprit rolled to the porch step and Redox appeared, locking the tennis ball in his jaws. He came back and dropped it in front of me, sitting on his haunches expectantly.

  I shook out my wrists, wiped my hands on my jeans, and picked it up.

  “Yuck.” It was slimy, but not everywhere. Still kind of new.

  “Must be his,” Johnny said. “Sorry about that.”

  “It’s fine.” I threw it into the grass and he chased it with the slow roll of a king who knows the ball isn’t going anywhere. I fixed my hair and the guys went to strap down the barbecue.

  With the hollowness still haunting me, I looked at my house as if for the first time.

  What had Chris seen? Had he been disgusted by how I lived? The cracks in the paint, the missing shingles, the patchwork of roof tiles. I scanned the porch as Redox dropped the ball right in the letter box, as if he was done with this game. I was about to take it out, but the sad state of my house through a stranger’s eyes was too horrifying to look away from.

  The marks by the second floor window were still there from thirteen years ago, when a tennis ball had been thrown from the ground to get my attention.

  He’d written to me. All of his feelings were lost to the elements, but he’d written to me repeatedly.

  He hadn’t abandoned me.

  I’d abandoned him.

  In a moment of vulnerability falling in a crack of time between breaths, my defenses fell away and the hollowness filled.

  In that moment of opportunity created by a fracture in my armor, that old love I’d shut away saw an opening and took a chance, bursting through the fissure.

  The feeling was like getting too close to a car moving at ninety miles an hour. I almost lost my footing. Emotions flooded me. They hurt like a too-rich bite of food early in the morning. It was urgent, heavy, and hot, an electrical current animating my body. Jacket. Bag. Keys. Box.

  Sixteen.

  I was sixteen. Smarter. More experienced. Twice as tired and half as ashamed, living from moment to moment, risk to risk, decision to decision.

  Sixteen had been terrible, but the love had been real. It saturated my skin and laced my bones. His rightness. The click of the clouds and the sky locking together.

  I ran back up to the porch and snapped a random letter from the nearest box, then I ran to my car.

  “Catherine?” Johnny was strapping down the huge grill. “Are we blocking you in?”

  “Don’t worry about it.” I got in and started the car. I had a quarter tank. “Johnny?” I called out the window. “Wild Horse Hill, right?”

  “Yeah, we can go together.”

  Backing the car onto the lawn, taking down a hedge and a ceramic frog to turn, I drove around Johnny’s truck and onto the driveway, avoiding their reactions in the rearview. I was sixteen again, and I only had the will to go forward.

  Chapter 22

  chris

  The orange and yellow leaves up on Wild Horse Hill spun in cones when the wind whipped. Without close family, the holidays always approached with a certain stealth. There were no gifts to buy for kids, just sloshy parties in high rises. Glittering women and serious men returning to their true personalities under the influence of spiced drinks.

  Lance had always been home for me, waiting for me to drop a tray of foil-covered leftovers in his corner of the kitchen. He’d been responsible for some of my best Thanksgiving memories.

  In the front seat of the rental car, I scratched my head. A notepad leaned on the steering wheel, and I’d written only one incomplete line.

  Lance, you weren’t just a good boy, you were—

  Wild Horse Hill was a disorganized mess of oddly-shaped tombstones from a hundred years ago to the present. The land had never been purchased for a cemetery, but no one in their right mind would buy it and dig up a bunch of bodies. The unofficial pet cemetery was behind a copse of trees. There wasn’t as much of a view, but all the good girls and boys were at their master’s feet.

  —you were family.

  Such a cliché. Everyone said that, but no one had a Lance. A car pulled up next to mine. Assuming it was the delivery guy with Lance’s body, I got frustrated by the end of my time alone. I wouldn’t finish the eulogy.

  My irritation flipped to relief when the car’s engine cut and I looked across the windows to the driver.

  Catherine.

  Jesus. Catherine. The girl in the roses. Not sixteen anymore, but filled out with experience and maturity. Knowledge made her even more beautiful.

  Hold it together, Chris.

  She got out, clutching her shoulder bag to her side, and stood at the front of her car with an envelope in her hand.

  I got out. “Hi. I’m glad you—”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “For?”

  She handed me the envelope. It was desiccated and crumbling. The pale blue envelope I’d used to send resumes in had yellowed and browned at the edges. The envelope flap hung on by the last bits of glue. I looked at the front. Her address. My handwriting. We were at least joined in that.

  “This was the last one I sent,” I said, handing it back. I knew what was inside it.

  “I didn’t know,” she said, clutching her bag’s straps to replace her grip on the envelope. “My mother. Or my dad too. I don’t know. She knew she was leaving as soon as she could, and she wanted me to be taken care of. She didn’t want… me to make a bad choice. She hid them. All of them.”

  I looked at it again and flipped it open.

  The night I met Lucia and she looked over my shoulder at my checking account, I’d been so broken about this letter.

  “Did you read it?” I asked.

  “No, I just pulled out one. There were boxes of them. All of them. I’m so sorry.”

  I handed her back the envelope. “Open it.”

  She took it and opened the folded paper. I hadn’t forgotten what I’d written.

  “Oh, Chris.” She took out the check. “Seven hundred forty-nine.”

  I leaned over her to see my words.

  We’re even.

  Just those two words in the center of a page. No more words of love. No more promises of one rose to the dollar or anything else. Simply an accounting.

  “It was never about money,” she said. “Not for me.”

  “I couldn’t figure out what else. I couldn’t believe you’d miss every single one.”

  “They must have hoarded them.”

  Catherine Barrington always saw the good in people. Thirteen years later, she was still defending her mother’s paranoid psychosis. All I’d do by arguing was disabuse her of the illusions that kept her sane. I leaned on my car and she leaned on hers, the letter and the check fluttering in the wind as if they wanted to finally be free.

  “If you’d read them, what would you have done?”

  She looked into the wind, letting her hair blow away from her face. Her ear was perfectly shaped in a delicate swirl. The hole in her lobe was an empty comma.

  “I want to say I would have run to you,” she said, still looking over the cemetery. “I want to say nothing could have stopped me.” When she turned back to me, her hair flew across her face like lines on a ledger. “But I don’t know if I can say it. I never wanted to leave. Sometimes I thought I used you as an excuse to stay here. Then you were gone and I missed you, but would I have gone to you if I saw the letters? I don’t know.”

  She pushed a pebble with her toe and I knew it was because she couldn’t look at me. She was ashamed, and despite that, she was honest to her own detriment. With every word, she gave everything she had no matter how much it hurt her.

  The distance between us wasn’t more than two feet, but it was made of cold air and wind. Hard, black asphalt
and the density of the years. I couldn’t keep my hands away from her. I had to bridge time and the arm’s length of miles between us.

  When I laid my hands on her arms, she stiffened and looked at me.

  “Do you want me to go away?”

  “No,” she whispered and relaxed into me.

  I put my arms around her, and though coats and scarves and layers of fabric were between us, I could feel her heartbeat, the press of her fingertips on my back, and the rise and fall of her chest as she breathed.

  “I wish I’d come,” I said into her hair. “I was afraid it had been too long. But when Lance died…” I shook my head, struggling to put into words what he meant. “He was my last connection to Barrington.”

  “I wish I could have seen him.” She pulled away enough to look at me. “Was he happy in New York?”

  Was he? Had I ever asked myself that?

  He was the harness that held me together. A bloodhound mutt with floppy ears and a child’s love was my connection to the boy I had been and the man I’d become. He was the reminder that I’d been a different man with a different future. He was the fork in the road. The opportunity to go back. The signpost away from loneliness and cold realities. Then time blew him away and I was left on a dark road disappearing into a point on the horizon. No more forks. No signposts.

  But had he been happy?

  He’d needed me and I’d needed him. That was all there was to it.

  “He was a good boy.” I barely had the sentence out before I choked back a sob.

  Catherine said nothing. I held her tight and rested my head on her shoulder, crying for my lost friend and everything he represented.

  Chapter 23

  CATHERINE

  I’d held men as they cried. They’d cried for lost babies and broken dreams. They’d cried for their self-image when their wives had to work. I’d held children with boo-boos and deeper hurts that would never heal.

  All of that was practice for holding Chris in the cemetery parking lot. I took in his pain and made it my own. I was strong for him for just a moment. And I did something for him I couldn’t do with anyone else.

  I gave him hope.

  I didn’t mean to, because I wasn’t sure what I wanted from him, but I became his last connection and his last hope. Hope for what? I didn’t know. Nor did I know if I could shoulder the responsibility of it. He felt so good in my arms, and when I thought of him weeping without me, my jaw tightened with no.

  He was mine to comfort.

  The moment I accepted that in my heart, my mind rebelled. I was freeing myself. Now wasn’t the time to go backward.

  But his lips on my throat. His breath in my ear. His tears had stopped and the connection between us had started something else.

  He paused when we were nose-to-nose, brown eyes so close I could see the flecks of black and green.

  Could I do this?

  “Don’t kiss me,” I said. “It’s too soon.”

  “I won’t.” His lips brushed mine so gently, I only felt the shifting of air between us.

  His gentleness forced me to yield, returning his kiss. He was different. The kiss was different. He was a little taller and broader, holding me tighter, and despite his vulnerability a minute ago, his kiss was confident. His kiss wasn’t a demand or command. It listened, and my body screamed into it.

  His kiss was achingly familiar, yet startlingly new. I remembered everything that I had tried to forget. I remembered the way his hands gripped my back as if trying to find purchase in the way his tongue could command my mouth, I remembered the feeling of a new beginnings. His kiss was the start of something old. His kiss was the birth of a child we knew and loved and welcomed.

  “Chris,” I said when I had to breathe. “Chris.” I put my hand on his cold cheek.

  He turned and kissed it, closing his eyes. “Do you forgive me?”

  “Never. But also, I did the minute you came back.”

  “I want to go back and do it all again. Every moment.”

  We kissed again, but we weren’t gentle. Passion excluded care, mouths slipping, tongues lashing to taste every surface in each other.

  Gravel crunched on the road, and we pulled apart with an inward gulp as if we wanted to suck away the last of each other’s breath.

  Three trucks. Johnny and Kyle in the first. Orrin, Reggie, and Percy, who barked when he saw me, in the second. The black pickup in the back was strange to me.

  Chris answered my question before I could voice it. “That’s the delivery service with Lance.” He straightened my collar. “The guys are helping me dig.”

  “I’ll get you guys something to eat.”

  “Will you stay for the service?”

  I’d forgotten I’d told him I couldn’t make it. “Wouldn’t miss it.”

  “Will you stand next to me?”

  Orrin got out of the truck, and Percy jumped out, a smaller version of Lance.

  “Yes,” I said. “I’ll stand next to you.”

  * * *

  By the time I got back with coffee and sandwiches, the hole next to Galahad’s plot was four feet deep and wide. A brown leaf fell onto Lance’s black crate and surrendered to the wind, clicking across the surface and away. Percy sat next to it with his tongue lolling, standing guard as if he knew his brother was in there.

  The men made short work of the job. Cross-legged like children, we ate and drank in the grass.

  “How long are you in town?” Reggie asked Chris.

  “As long as it takes.” He tossed Percy a slice of ham from his sandwich and the dog kept his post while gobbling it up.

  I knew what Chris meant, and I turned my face away to smile.

  Reggie glared at the place where my knee touched Chris’s. “Long as it takes to what?”

  Reggie was a gentle man and an artist. He was one of us. But his voice dripped with alarming hostility and suspicion. Chris was going to answer and I had no idea what the reply would be. If he wanted to prove his commitment to me, he’d say he was staying for me. Or he could obfuscate. Or change the subject. But with his companion in a plastic bag, ready to be lowered into a hole, he might be vulnerable enough to make me his reason.

  “Long as it takes him to bury Lance,” I scolded. “And if he wants to visit with us afterward, he’s as welcome here as anyone in the family.”

  Reggie snorted and wrapped up the last third of his sandwich.

  Johnny, who was never good at letting things slide, threw a chip at him. “Take it easy, asshole.”

  “I’m easy. Sunday mornin’ easy.” Reggie got up.

  “It’s Friday, dumbass,” Bernard said around a big bite of sandwich.

  Reggie ignored him and pointed at Chris’s feet. “Got your fancy shoes dirty.”

  “Yeah. Thanks for letting me know.” Chris stood.

  I gathered his trash before he had a chance to bend down for it. “We should get started before it rains.” I picked up the last of the containers.

  Above me, Chris reached down to help me up, but before I could take his help, Reggie was on my other side, offering his hand.

  If I took Chris’s hand, Reggie would lose his Sunday mornin’ easy.

  If I took Reggie’s, he would get the wrong impression and Chris would feel betrayed.

  With an armful of containers and foil, I only had one hand free.

  I tensed it on the grass and got up myself without dropping a single thing.

  “Let’s get to it then,” Johnny said, groaning about his bones creaking.

  Kyle and Bernard followed suit. They lowered the black bag into the ground. I stood next to Chris as dirt clapped off it and Lance slowly disappeared.

  “I have this thing,” he said, taking out a leather-bound pad. “A few words. It’s not very good.”

  Reggie scooped dirt into the hole and watched me with Chris. Was he going to be a problem? I didn’t think I could take it.

  “Go ahead.” I put a reassuring hand on Chris’s arm. He needed me more than Re
ggie did. “Please.”

  Chris ran his fingers through his hair. I’d never imagined him feeling insecure or unsure, but the cracks in his confidence were wide enough for me to see what was inside him.

  The boy I’d loved.

  He looked at the paper, then back at me. I nodded, loaning him a little confidence.

  “Lancelot Carmichael, you were a good boy. Always. You were always there for me, even when I didn’t have food for you.”

  He stopped, tilting the paper. That was all that was on it, but he kept going.

  “When it was raining and cold, he stayed with me.” Chris closed his book. “He gave me everything. There was this one time, right in the beginning, when I had…” He made a rectangle with his fingers. “I had this much in a Chinese food container. It was all I had. I knew he was hungry, but when I offered, he wouldn’t take the meat. He pushed it to me. He took care of me, even when I failed him… and… I’m sorry, Lance. I’m sorry for letting you down. Putting you second to my work. I’m so sorry.”

  His fingers found mine. We twined them together, and he squeezed my hand so hard I thought they’d fuse into a single gesture.

  He let go and helped shovel dirt in. When it was no longer a hole but a mound in the grass, we set up the slab of stone at the head.

  Lancelot Carmichael

  Brave Knight.

  Marked territory in Barrington and New York City

  2004-2017

  Chris held my hand on the way back to the car. He leaned into me and whispered, “Tonight. Are you free?”

  “Lucky for you, I am.”

  “Can you meet me at our tree?”

  I couldn’t contain my smile.

  Reggie watched us from the other side of the parking lot, and he didn’t look happy.

  Chapter 24

  CATHERINE

  I discovered the picture of Chris and Lance in New York in my pocket and inspected it. It was taken early in our separation. The background was hatched with monkey bars, blurry children running, a chain-link fence with a solid wall of red brick behind it. The ground was beige concrete. Lance was fully grown, looking away from the camera. Chris was still a boy, and very much a man. His shirt was tight in the arms, his pants were short, and he crouched next to a knapsack that had seen better days.