Crowne Rules

by Reiss, CD

  “Nope,” I said.

  “So, you really didn’t know about Logan’s theory?”

  “Which one?”

  “That Dante’s always had a thing for you?”

  I laughed into the massage table’s donut.

  “There’s no way in hell,” I said truthfully.

  “Could be like pigtail-pulling. You know?”

  “He’s not a pigtail-pulling type.” Again, the truth. His hair-pulling was much more serious, and when he decided to hurt me, it was more painful and delicious than any schoolyard game.

  “No, I guess not.” She took a deep breath. “I’m sorry I went up there. I was just worried about you. And when I saw you, I thought there was something going on with you guys.”

  The denial was halfway out of my mouth when the truth muscled past.

  “There was.”

  “What?” I heard a rustle and the thump of a rock falling to the carpet. When I looked over, Ella was up on her elbows.

  “Ella, please,” I said with a gentle firmness I’d learned from Dante, “it’s fine. He’s fine. It was a thing… a fun thing, but it was temporary. I used him. He used me. Done. I’m not emotionally attached at all.”

  That was a fat lie. I was, and the attachment nagged at me. It was wrong. It was a weakness I didn’t need to shore up.

  “But…” After I put my head back down and closed my eyes, I made a conscious decision to continue. “I don’t think I’m cut out for casual sex.”

  “So, it was bad?” Ella said as she went horizontal.

  “No, no, no. Not at all. It was—”

  “Skip the details, please.”

  “I want more. That’s all. I want to be unrestricted, and if I can’t have that, I’ll just hang out with my girlfriends and have fun.”

  The idea was appealing the way I’d phrased it. I could have easily said, “If I can’t have Dante, I’m fine being alone,” but I didn’t because Ella would have seen that as an emotional five-alarm fire when it wasn’t. I really was fine being single.

  “You sure you’re okay?” she asked.

  “Fully. Really. It was exactly what I needed, but it wasn’t real.”

  That felt like such an unexpectedly huge lie I almost choked on it.

  “Logan’s going to fuck him up anyway.”

  I chuckled at the thought and put my head back down, trying to forget that I’d lied to Ella about how real my time with Dante had been because the truth was too hard to swallow.

  Chapter 29

  DANTE

  After the austerity and quiet of the Cambria house, the glass high-rises of Crowne Industries HQ came off like a game show host officiating a funeral.

  My father, Ted Crowne, the patriarch of the companies we simply called Crowne, was seated on the brown leather couch in what used to be his office, going through the contents of the box with me. He’d ceded this space to Logan when my brother got married, but with his white hair and graceful command of what he’d built, my father still acted as if he was officially in charge. I’d taken a seat in an armchair, where I felt oversized and awkward. Ted Crowne was probably the only person in the world who could still make me feel like an ungainly adolescent dragging around the secrets of his misbehavior.

  Ernie had perfectly transcribed both tapes in two hours, but I missed Mandy’s hunting and pecking, her look of studious concentration, the ambition to get it right coupled with the knowledge that she wouldn’t. Those transcripts meant nothing to her, and she could have stayed in the house even if she’d misplaced a thousand commas.

  She’d wanted to be perfect because I’d asked her to be. She didn’t need another reason.

  I’d paid an arm and a leg for those transcripts, and I could barely read them. All I could think about was the woman who’d typed up the first few pages with two fingers and the tappa-tappa-tap-ding from inside her room.

  “You have nothing.” Dad leaned back and looked at me with his hands laced over his chest.

  With Mandy on my mind, it had taken me that long to go through the transcript, but I tossed it on the table with the nothing contracts.

  “What about the FCC conversation? It could be a bribe.”

  “He said four words, and the chairman refused.” Dad plucked up the transcripts even though he knew what was in them. “This was a fishing expedition, and you came home with an empty bucket. It happens.”

  “They won’t let me buy them out without a threat.”

  “Mm,” he muttered, scanning the pages again but leaning back this time, as if he could trick himself into being surprised by something in them. “She didn’t take an opportunity to renegotiate her prenup. Why?”

  “We were going to run away together.” I kept my voice as smooth as possible. “Run private clubs an ocean away. Why bother with a renegotiation?”

  “Technically”—he plopped the folder back onto the table—“she was breaching both the infidelity clause and the criminal activity clause. And you were underage. You weren’t a safe bet.”

  My answer was that she was safe with me. We’d set up businesses overseas. We were going…and soon. I’d had it all under control.

  But it struck me differently today—maybe because I’d spent so much time with Mandy, a woman who reminded me viscerally of how young I’d once been, how untrained and untried in the world. For years, when I’d remembered my relationship with Veronica, it had been from inside the experience of it: all of the passion of loving her and the rage of losing her.

  Now I could see it from the outside, and it looked more like what my parents had always insisted it was instead of what I had once known it to be.

  “Maybe.” I crossed my legs. “Maybe she was hedging.”

  “Maybe you were too.”

  When I looked at him as if I didn’t know what he was talking about, he took a deep breath and leaned forward. “You spent a lot of time at Crowne chasing Delilah Doctorow.”

  “Is it chasing if I caught her?”

  He smiled and nodded. “You guys were attached at the hip for months.”

  “That’s not how I remember it.”

  “Do you remember your mother sitting you down and asking you how serious you were about her?”

  If I thought hard enough, I could call up a vague memory of my mother casually mentioning it by our pool and a sharp, clear remembrance of terror so thick I’d jumped in the water to dilute it.

  “Even when you were little,” he continued, “you wanted a say in everything. You had to lay down one rule. If we said bedtime was nine, you said no, it was 8:55. Not 9:05, because we would have said no. But you’d give up five minutes so we’d agree, and you’d be the one in charge of your life.”

  “Maybe I was tired.”

  “And maybe you let Veronica Hawkins use you because you liked it.”

  There had been plenty to like, but the sex wasn’t what he was talking about.

  “She was there,” Dad said. “She’d never commit to you, no matter what she promised, no matter how many clubs you financed for her. It was a game. She said nine, and you said 8:55. You called the shots, but she set the limits.”

  “You know a lot about my relationship.”

  “I know a lot about you. You’re still hedging.”

  “You’re telling me to let go of the clubs.”

  “You think you’re in charge if you keep them, but you’re barely even there anymore. You’re not getting any joy from them, and here you are”—he spread his hands to show me the trove of documents I’d stolen—“trying to completely own something you don’t really want.”

  The idea behind pushing the Hawkins’ out was to expand an unencumbered business, but why? Mandy worked for just enough. She created what she wanted, made the money she needed, and enjoyed the remainder.

  I was keeping the clubs because I couldn’t let go of Veronica’s memory.

  The realization came so hard and fast I laughed at myself, and before my father could ask what was so funny, Logan threw open the offic
e door, slamming it behind him so the walls shook.

  “Oh, here you are,” Logan said, approaching what was now his desk. “At last. You didn’t get ‘delayed’ in Cambria again?”

  “No.” I mocked his finger quotes.

  My father looked impassively between us. He had never had any interest in mediating our fights. His attitude was that our strength as a family came through conflict and its resolution, so Logan starting a fight was as unsurprising as his continuation of it.

  “Mandy’s been one of my best friends since high school, and you—”

  “Logan.” I held up a hand and watched with satisfaction as his mouth shut. “If you’re going to worry about someone, it should be your wife, who clearly doesn’t understand her limits.”

  “Don’t you start on Ella.” He said it as if I’d threatened the love of his life with bodily harm.

  “The same goes for Amanda,” I said even though she clearly, clearly wasn’t the love of my life. We’d agreed on that, so it must have been true. “She’s a grown woman. She doesn’t need you to set boundaries for her.”

  “I was setting them for you.”

  The hair on my arms stood up. He could ask me not to see Mandy, and he could tell me not to hurt her. One was a request, and the other was unlikely. But when he set limits for me and put her outside of them, my cells reacted before my brain even heard him.

  She was mine.

  She’s not yours in Los Angeles.

  The lizard part of my brain couldn’t fight the facts, so it made its own reality.

  Mine.

  “Gentlemen.” My father rose. “Let’s put these back the way we found them. Have them sent to the Bel Air house. I’ll ship it to Thoze from there with an apology. We have nothing on the Hawkinses.”

  “Shocker,” Logan said, sitting behind his desk.

  “Sorry it didn’t work out, Dante.” My father put a comforting hand on my shoulder as he passed.

  When he was gone, I pulled together the papers on the table.

  “So,” Logan said, tapping into his laptop as if he wasn’t speaking at the same time, “you and Mandy in Cambria.”

  “Don’t start. Dad’s not here to pull me off you.”

  “You finally realize you like her.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  The typing stopped for half a second, then resumed.

  “Your jaw’s clenching that way it does when you’ve got your lid screwed on too tight.”

  “My lid?”

  “She’s not your type anyway.” Tap-tappa-tap at the keyboard, with a smack on the ENTER key. “She’s cool. You’re a dud.”

  In the barrel of all the things that could have rubbed me the wrong way, he’d reached down to the dregs and found the one that would bother me the most. Mandy wasn’t a dud or a bore, and if I was, that meant Logan was right. I wasn’t her type. Logan knew it. Ella knew it. Mandy knew it. The only person with their head up their ass was me.

  “I’m not a dud.”

  “Sure, dud.”

  “First of all, ask her before you decide what I am. Second of all”—I plopped a pile of papers into an envelope—“we have plenty in common.”

  “Sure.” Tappa-tap. He sounded nonplussed, and my lid was screwed on too tight to realize he was drawing me out.

  “She knows how to waltz, for one.” I closed up a second envelope. “We can both cook. We have the same sense of humor. She’s willing to do things she never did before—”

  “Stop.” His hands flew up to block the rest. “Too much information.”

  I was thinking about the crawlspace, not the bedroom, but words were pouring out of me too fast to backtrack. “She’s smart and resourceful.” I slid the tapes into the last envelope and closed it. “Loyal to a fault.”

  “You were talking about what you have in common.”

  “She sings like metal bending, but she feels it. She means every word, happy or sad. The worst lyrics in music history come out of her mouth… and I believe every bad note because she does.”

  A silence followed. I’d stopped talking, and Logan had stopped typing. The envelope with the tapes swung from my fingers, and I was staring at an undefinable point between myself and the floor while the Mandy in my head danced and sang with everything she had.

  She only made a few beautiful dresses a year and had her heart broken so often for the same reasons. She didn’t know how to do anything halfway. Not make a dress or love a man. Not make a promise or offer her body.

  “Are you…” Logan sounded as if he couldn’t believe what he was about to say, so he started again. “Are you in love with Mandy?”

  “That’s ridiculous.” I got the box from under the table and put the envelopes in it. “It was nothing. Two consenting adults.”

  “Holy shit. You love her.”

  “What would be the point of that?” I shouted.

  “I have no idea.” He turned back to his computer to tap-tap at his keys. “If you figure it out, let me know.”

  Picking up the box with one hand, I got out of there in three steps. I didn’t know why I was annoyed, but I felt two inches to the left of my body all the way to parking lot.

  What would be the point of loving her?

  None. There was no point to it.

  I’d kept the truck home in favor of the Bugatti because I wasn’t hauling anything or rocking up muddy hills. The trunk sprang open when I hit the key fob. I slung the box in and tried to slam it closed, but the hydraulics stopped me.

  With a deep breath of patience, I waited, letting go of this one thing that was out of my control.

  * * *

  Forgetting Mandy was easy. Generally, I didn’t think about her at all.

  She didn’t show up in my thoughts until the moments when the morning light hit my closed eyelids and exploded into bursts of yellow. When I opened my eyes, I was reminded of her by the sunlight on the wall, and I stared at it so long I realized it was blue, not yellow. I was only eager to tell her this so she could explain what her obsession with yellow was about, which I didn’t consider thinking about her as much as wondering about her and regretting that I hadn’t wondered sooner.

  When the contractors called with estimates, she came to mind, but only because she’d fallen through the ceiling and spoken truth to me though the roof they were fixing.

  One of them complimented the ingenuity of the umbrella contraption, and I remembered her suggesting it, then us working together to design it and put it together until the sun came up.

  I lived my life, did my business, ate, slept, spoke, walked, bathed without her on my mind—except when I was awake, and when I wasn’t, I dreamed about her.

  Our encounter was supposed to stay in Cambria, but she’d followed me to Los Angeles, where I never thought about her unless I was breathing.

  Was the problem our city?

  Or the breathing?

  There was only one way to find out.

  * * *

  She wasn’t hard to find.

  I could have called or texted her, but I needed to see her smile, smell her shampoo, hear how her laugh vibrated through the air. I needed to see the shade of yellow she was wearing to know how she was doing and how she felt when she woke up in the morning.

  Her office was in a West Hollywood building off La Cienega. I had no excuse to be there, but I came up with one. At eight thirty in the morning, I waited in my car in the parking lot of the nearest coffee shop.

  Cars came in and out constantly. Mercedes and bent-up Chevys. A white dually had to park diagonally, taking up two spaces so it didn’t stick out, and a woman yelled at the driver anyway. Birds were flipped, but no humans were hurt.

  An open box of fries from the Carl’s Jr. across the street sat at the curb. Next to it, a bun lay upside down, like a distressed turtle, with bent spikes of cigarette butts sticking from it.

  At ten to ten, a man snapped open the padlock of the smoke shop and pushed open the black accordion gates, chatting in Spanish wi
th a mustached man carrying a tray of coffee cups. Irritated, he pointed at the inverted ashtray bun as if to say, “How are people such slobs?” which was what I was thinking.

  At 10:07, a buttercup Jaguar pulled into the lot and took a spot behind me. In the rearview, I saw her park crooked and too close to the line, just another Angeleno not paying attention.

  She got out. White jeans. Yellow top. Sunglasses. Tote. Curls flying. Wrestling with her jacket because she had her phone in one hand. I was about to get out when she caught a glimpse of something, dropped her shoulders, and got back in.

  “Where are you going, amea?”

  Her brake lights flashed, and she backed out, stopped, then pulled in again, but straight this time, with enough space between her car and the one next to her. Then she started over again but with her jacket on and her phone in her pocket, and I realized she’d be fine. She’d figure herself out. She might not get it right the first time, but she was a separate, evolving human being who was going to be okay.

  Mandy Bettencourt didn’t need me to fix her, and I didn’t need her. I could live the rest of my life the way I was living now and be no the worse for it.

  And not one bit better.

  When she went inside the coffee shop, she brought the sunshine and the possibility of me becoming anything brighter, better, bigger.

  So, I did what I’d come to West Hollywood to do and went in for a cup of coffee.

  Chapter 30

  MANDY

  My iced latte took a minute, so I scrolled through my email, marking what I had to take care of from the office and yes-or-no-ing the rest, which was why I didn’t see him, but his voice cut through the air, shot through my spine, and dropped between my legs.

  “No milk, thank you.”

  It was Dante Crowne, paying the cashier at the crappy Fairfax Starbucks with an Amex Black. He didn’t look in my direction, even when I moved. He took his cup and walked out without seeing me, which seemed wrong and irritating and even somehow insulting.