by Reiss, CD
“You let me buy you out.”
“Buy me out? Of the clubs?” He laughed. “Right.”
“Market price and I destroy the box.”
“Yeah. Sure.” He drank, and I wasn’t fooled into thinking he was agreeing to the deal. “You know why I agreed to meet you? Because I thought you’d come with something relevant to discuss, but you came with this shit. FYI – Thoze & Jensen? Those assholes? They weren’t handling our licensing until 2007. So, okay, you’re misguided, but if you have tapes that touch you in places that make you feel sad?” He shrugged. “I could take a look at them.”
“Market price,” I said.
“Out of respect for my mother’s memory, I’ll buy the clubs at twenty percent under market.”
“Discuss with your father first. You sell, or I go to the DOJ.”
“You’re sexy when you put your foot down,” he said with a wink. “And when another guy makes a move on your gal? Big-time sexy.”
“Excuse me?”
“You really showed that magazine rack who was boss, tough guy.”
I could have snapped back at his gibberish or walked away, but something told me not to. There was a thread of sense to it, and with every word, it untangled itself.
“What the hell were both of you doing out in the boonies anyway? I mean, Harmony? That’s near Cambria. It’s like a poor man’s Morro Bay.”
Cambria. Magazine rack. Another guy.
I thought I’d walked away from the Harmony convenience store a hundred dollars poorer but clean of scandal. There was video, but virality wasn’t a guarantee, and not everyone knew how to get it into the media’s hands.
Someone had though.
“I kinda destroyed Mandy Bettencourt’s honor on the tail end of tenth grade, but you, my man? Defending it was quite the play. Kudos to you.”
Kudos to me for putting her back in the public eye.
Of the two of us, I looked worse, but I didn’t care. She’d be called names, be retied to Renaldo, and publicly shamed all because I’d lost my temper in public. That couldn’t happen.
“What do you want?” I asked.
“Mandy’s a downtrending commodity right now, but unless some celeb knocks up a maid, we’ll have space for her again in about… say, eight days? Could be six. Never can tell. Video’s always hot though. So, we’re looking at four days for you to hand over those tapes and sell us the clubs for thirty under market.”
He was railroading me, and I was letting it happen. I had to think fast before he turned the deadline into twenty-four hours… yet I couldn’t just accept the entire offer.
“You can have the tapes but not the clubs.”
“Dude,” he said with exasperation. “Look, they belonged to— My. Dead. Mother. You’re like this starfish sticking to them with the little underbelly suckers. You’re lucky I’m offering anything for them, okay? Killing sweet video of your convenience store tantrum’s just a token of my esteem.”
I stood. This was going nowhere, and the offer wasn’t getting any better.
“Kill the video, and I’ll give you the tapes. That’s the trade. We can talk about the other business later.”
“That’s not how this works, bro.”
“It is now. Bro.”
He waved a thought away, glancing around the room as if he was bored now. “Say hi to Mandy for me.”
His last request was the most casual and least threatening of anything that had come out of his mouth since I arrived.
Caleb Hawkins was a little shit. I wanted to beat the life out of him, but Mandy didn’t need Hawkins Media releasing a video captioned with her name.
Chapter 32
MANDY
It was Saturday morning, and I had a business to run. Maybe not much of a business, but it was mine and I liked it.
On the way to West Hollywood, I replayed Dante’s insults from my first night in Cambria, when he implied I was a dilettante. He’d called my work a vanity project.
Well, fuck him and his private clubs. At least I showed up. He—
The phone rang as I made a mental point that would shut his dismissive words out of my head for good. I tapped the cracked screen to answer, and a voice from the past came over the Bluetooth speakers.
“Hello? Is this Ms. Bettencourt?”
“Caleb?” I narrowly avoided an accident.
“Hey,” he said smoothly. “You remember me.”
“Of course I do. How are you?”
“My stepmother said it was mission critical that I call you,” he said with a laugh.
How many times had I cried to hear his voice sound so warm and relaxed? How many nights had I stared at the phone, trying to will a text or a call into existence? It was so long ago and still one of the clearest emotional memories I had.
“My mother casually threaded a needle about seeing you, but I didn’t think you would,” I replied, still getting over the shock.
“Call? Or want to see you?”
“Yes.”
“How about it though?” he chuckled, and I remembered the charm of the sound, how it was so easy and relaxed, not too loud yet completely committed.
“How about what, Caleb?”
“How about we catch up? Maybe lunch?”
Lunch.
I could have parsed his intentions by the meal he chose and been utterly wrong or completely right, but the fact was lunch wasn’t good for me and wouldn’t be until the weekend. This was my last day off before I had to get back to my business.
“I have a lot to catch up on today.” I turned into the parking lot under the building. “I can make a lunch tomorrow.”
“How about Sunday brunch then?” he replied.
“How about that new place in the Grove?”
“How about one thirty?”
“How about…” I looked for another detail and found none. “You get the last word.” The signal got fuzzy. “You win.”
“I’m putting you in my contacts. You still Mandi with an I?”
“It’s a Y now.”
“Great. See you there.”
I tapped off, remembering what I’d liked about Caleb.
He was charming, and he knew how to have fun. He was rich without being a snob and worked hard for his father’s company without being overly serious about it. He was educated, smart, and handsome as hell. He looked great on paper.
He was made to love someone, but no matter how many adolescent tears I’d shed, that someone had never been me.
And though I wasn’t going to cry about it the way I’d cried over Caleb, I wished it had been Dante calling. I glanced at my phone, saw he hadn’t, and pocketed it, determined to be the best dilettante I could be.
* * *
WearHaus was going to attract paparazzi, and even though the sizzle of my Renaldo drama was over, it was still fresh in my mind.
My mother told me not to worry about it as if she had it all taken care of.
I didn’t know what she meant until we were on the red carpet. At WearHaus, she wore a white Chanel jacket and pencil skirt from the 1980s that she’d had altered to fit like their current spring line. She looked terrific, but that wasn’t why she’d chosen it. The white blew out camera flashes set for darker colors, making pictures of her—and thus the two of us—useless without a touchup. The paps and tabloids would have better, easier pictures of real celebrities that would sell faster. She clutched my arm and stood in front of me when my name was called, smiling and waving as if one Bettencourt was as good as any other. Once we were inside, she let go to check the shine on her nose in a compact. She touched up, snapped it shut, and had it back in her bag in three seconds flat.
“Thanks, Mom,” I said. “For running the gauntlet for me back there.”
“Easier than I expected,” she replied, taking my arm and pulling me forward. “I thought I was going to have to shove a Nikon up someone’s ass.”
Ella’s team had turned the warehouse into a wonderland that felt both luxe and edgy. High he
els clicked on concrete, and satin hems snagged on raw beams, but the walls were covered in a riot of vines and blooms, so the atmosphere was verdant, with huge chandeliers that brought old-world Victorian to a modern space. Under a feathery cascade of flowers, jasmine and bougainvillea brushed my bare arms as we worked our way through the crowd. The best parts of Los Angeles, its riches and its roughness, had been gathered under this one roof for a single, glittering night.
“Mandy!” A woman’s arm shot up. Millie. Logan’s high school flame. A pink velvet ribbon around the base of the bun at the top of her head matched the bodice of her dress, which plunged at the neck. The color brought out the bronze of her skin, and her smile lit up the room.
Next to her, Aileen was a contrast in a navy suit dress. She tinkled her fingers at me. Her shyness had turned into reserve in manner and dress.
“Girls!” my mother said, hugging them before I did.
“My producer’s been up my ass all week.” Millie plucked a second glass of champagne from the waiter while the rest of us cleaned out the tray. “I haven’t had a minute to breathe. I practically had to blow him to leave tonight.”
“Cheers to that.” Aileen lifted her glass, and the three of us clinked our rims together.
I had worried that once I was back in my element in LA, I would feel uncomfortable, out of place, or anxious, but I was strangely serene. The three of us had been attending events like this one together since we were teenagers. It was the easiest thing in the world to wear the hell out of my dress, to flag down waiters when I needed a refill, to gossip about work and men and money with my friends.
“I’d suggest we do a vacation,” Millie said, “but someone already took one by herself.”
“Where did you go?” Aileen asked. “I called to check in after the Renaldo thing hit, and you were gone.”
“She was ready to send in the brigades,” Millie added. “Ella talked her down, thank God.”
“Did you miss me?”
“Were you at the house in Tahoe?” Aileen said. “Remember junior year? At the lake?”
We toasted to the lake.
“Everyone missed you,” my mother said.
“God, he’s really something, isn’t he?” Millie murmured with an elbow nudge.
She could have been talking about anyone—these events were always packed to the brim with handsome men, celebrities from A-list to Z-list, with perfect pecs and thick hair, finance guys with melting smiles, young heirs freshly tanned from a trip to St. Barts.
And Dante Crowne, who wasn’t supposed to be there.
He was in a three-way conversation with Logan and an older man I didn’t recognize.
Our eyes didn’t meet as much as his attention sought out mine.
He was as tall and broad-shouldered as ever, the height and solidity of his frame especially evident in a room where half the guys were actors—who were always shorter and less imposing in real life than they looked on TV. More than that though, I wasn’t ready for the sight of Dante in one is his suits, crisply put together, the simplicity of the stark black and white tux making a lie of his inner complexity.
In Cambria, his clothes had been casual, rough, more often than not a little dirty from chores, and I had forgotten about how powerful he truly was. The way the silk double Windsor knot fit exactly right at his throat, he looked like a gift that needed unwrapping, a bomb that needed defusing, a man who could fuck me raw and senseless without removing his cufflinks.
“Oh,” my mother sighed. “The Crownes.”
The brothers reminded my mother of Samantha, and they should have done the same for me. Byron Crowne had found his fiancée, my sister, dead in the swimming pool, and I’d spent my time in Cambria juggling thinking of her while avoiding the connection.
“He’s the kind of guy who marries a thirty-year-old when he’s in his seventies and makes her pop out three babies before he drops.” Millie twirled her glass by its stem, eyeing the last drops of golden liquid at the bottom.
“No,” I said absently as Dante excused himself and made his way toward us. I couldn’t have articulated what I was objecting to exactly. Luckily, no one asked.
“Well,” Mom said from outside the tunnel between Dante and me, “those Crowne boys… you have to be careful. They’ll eat a woman up and spit her out.”
Was he really coming this way?
“Dante’s more off,” Aileen said. “Cold as ice. Guarded like Fort Knox, you know?”
Passionately guarded.
“He has his reasons,” I heard myself say.
“Oh?”
Dante was halfway across the room. I wouldn’t have time to answer fully before he arrived. He was nodding and shaking hands, avoiding conversations, only breaking our eye contact for moments at a time before resuming his path back to me.
We were going to fuck again.
His dirty texts had made it clear this wasn’t over, but what I didn’t expect was the level of intensity in his stride.
I was in danger. He was going to break my heart, and I was going to beg for him to shatter it.
“What reasons?” my mother asked skeptically.
I didn’t have to answer. He would be here before I made the case, but then he looked away and another suit blocked my view. For the first time since he started across the room, he took his attention away for more than a second.
“All the money in the world,” Mom continued. “Perfectly decent parents. And what do you get but five grown men with issues?”
“Everyone has issues,” I said into my champagne, glancing at Millie and Aileen to see if defending him had set off any alarms.
But they weren’t listening to me because their attention was fixed to my right—on someone about to descend on our group, and it wasn’t Dante.
It was Renaldo.
He was still handsome. Denying he had a good face was pointless. But the thing was, I realized, he knew exactly what I saw when I looked at him, and that was in part because there wasn’t much else to see. Next to Dante, Renaldo was smaller and thinner, less substantial, and that wasn’t physical—it had to do with who he was on the inside. He was a gilt-edged mirror: beautiful and flat and empty until someone showed up to fill in the frame.
He greeted me last, after my mother made a mouth-twist of distaste over his shoulder during their hug, giving me time to unpack the reality of what he was and who he wasn’t.
“Mandy.” He kissed me carefully on each cheek.
We had so much practice greeting each other politely at events, appearing friendly but never intimate, that it almost felt normal. Except this time, it was.
Millie and Aileen had moved aside to give him access to me, watching me over his shoulder with exaggerated faces, Aileen mouthing, Yikes! as Millie gestured to ask if I wanted them to get him the fuck out of there.
I shook my head slightly and refocused on Renaldo. “Renny.”
He was chewing gum. God, I hated the constant fucking gum-chewing.
“How are you?”
I hadn’t heard his voice since before Cambria. He was giving me the full package—slick sincerity with his boyish charms turned to eleven. How had I missed that fact? That Renaldo was a boy and had never been close to being a man?
“Fine,” I said.
“You look amazing.” He stepped back to admire me from head to toe, and I didn’t turn to the side, didn’t cross my arms. I let him think he was undressing me because he wasn’t doing any such thing. “This color, it suits you.”
“Thank you.”
“Please,” he said more to my companions than me. “I need to borrow her attention.”
Millie and Aileen were struck silent. Mom smiled over a sneer, reading my expression.
“One minute,” I said, checking for Dante, but he was gone.
Good. I could handle this better without him.
Renaldo brought me to the bar. We ordered drinks, and once we were alone in the crowd, he pulled the same levers, turned the same dials, made the
same moves he always made.
This time though, he was talking to a different woman.
“When I said you looked good,” he said as he put his thumb on my hand to stroke it, “I meant you look like regret.”
I used the hand he was touching to pick up my glass. “Your regret, you mean.”
“Of course mine. It was so ugly. I never meant for it to be like that, Mandy. You have to believe me.”
“Do I?”
“I made mistakes. Big ones.”
“Okay. Well, you can improve for next time.”
Our drinks came. More champagne for me.
“Tatiana’s coming out next week,” he said.
I almost choked on the fizz. “Out?” I whispered. “You mean out out?”
“Yes.”
“Good for her. That’s amazing.”
He nodded, staring into his glass. “She doesn’t give a shit how that makes me look.”
“How does that make you look?”
He didn’t answer. He just drank until an ice cube hit his upper lip, then he wiped it with a square napkin. The quick jerk of his jaw told me he’d tucked his gum between his cheek and teeth while he finished his whiskey sour. “I missed you. And I’m a free man now. More free than I’ve ever been.”
“What about Gretchen?”
“Whatever.” He shrugged. “I don’t care about her.” He took my hand between his. “I care about you.”
Discount Mandy would have tried to determine what the touch meant, whether he was about to stroke his finger against my palm and start the whole thing over again. She would have decided to do that over the alternative—kick him in the shins and make a big scene.
Couture Mandy didn’t consider either option.
Couture Mandy was tired of this nonsense.
“I care,” Renaldo continued, “about what we had and what we lost.”
I took my hand back. “Renny, sweetheart, I know you care, but I don’t.”
“No, no—”