Crowne Rules

by Reiss, CD

  She was shopping, and she’d answered me right away with an invitation. She didn’t seem angry or distressed, which meant she probably hadn’t seen the video yet.

  The light changed before I could answer, but I’d already decided waiting wasn’t an option.

  Chapter 35

  MANDY

  Pink.

  How had I never considered pink before?

  Pink could be soft and passive as baby powder, or it could be as aggressive and in-your-face as a throat punch first thing in the morning.

  Pink could be so orange it came in the side door after ringing the front doorbell. It could wrestle down deep red and make it sing soprano.

  Where had pink been my whole life?

  “And look at this!” I said, rooting around the Nordstrom’s bag, one of the many at my feet. We were in an outdoor coffee shop at the Grove. The metal table was uneven on the cobblestones of the courtyard and piled with not just coffee, but unrelated objects in an array of pink shades.

  I found the notebook I’d gotten from Nordstrom’s.

  “Brown-pink!” I handed it across the table and checked for a reply from Dante. If he was going to be waiting on my couch, I’d cut the coffee short and go right home, but he hadn’t replied one way or the other yet.

  “Dutch pink.” Caleb ran his hand over the leather cover. “Pink used to mean brown-yellow, actually. Pinkeln. German for piss.”

  “Yellow and pink aren’t even close.”

  “Same pigment as yellow madder, I think.” He handed back the book. “I forget the name of the berry it comes from. Let me look.” He took out his phone to fact-find.

  Caleb seemed to have an interesting fact for everything I said, and I was reminded of how he’d gripped my attention as a girl. He connected unrelated bits of knowledge, uncovered surprising meanings, and relayed them without making me feel stupid for not knowing them already.

  Five minutes into coffee though, I realized the exact mistake my young heart had made.

  Caleb was interesting and smart.

  He was fun to listen to.

  He was handsome and charming.

  None of that made him right for me.

  Those were traits—they weren’t a meeting of the minds. None of it made me the best I could be or enriched my inner life. He wasn’t someone I should have been loving, and he’d known that. I’d been confused, he’d been a jerk, and we’d both been too young to know better.

  “Oh.” His brow knotted at something on his phone. “This just released and—”

  Just as he was about to show me what had piqued his interest, a pigeon took flight a foot away from me, and I squeaked, jumping away. The bird tried to perch on the edge of one of my bags and fell in, flapping to get out in a burst of feathers.

  “Oh!” I cried in panic. “Oh, no!”

  The rest of the shoppers at the tables watched. Kids ran up to see. I didn’t know what to do as the bag turned over and the bird stilled.

  “Just wait,” a man said.

  The pigeon cooed, walked out of the sideways bag, crumpling the tissue paper a scarf had been wrapped in, looked around, and flew off to immediate applause with the tissue paper still tangled in its feet. It loosened and floated down.

  As my eyes followed, I saw the man who’d asked me to wait.

  Dante.

  I could tell it was him from his posture and bearing, but his head eclipsed the sun behind him, shadowing his face. We’d just texted a few minutes before, when he said he was close to my house, but he’d come here to see me sooner.

  “Hey!” I said with a voice colored by all the joyful surprise I felt.

  “Dante Crowne.” Caleb stood, hand out for a shake. “I haven’t seen you since—”

  “Friday night.”

  “Come on.” Caleb pulled out a chair. “Sit with us.”

  Dante rested his hand on the back of the chair but was disinclined to sit down. Caleb seemed to take it as a hint that Dante wasn’t staying, so he sat, slouched in the cast-iron chair, and put his fingertips on his coffee cup.

  “Five minutes.” I put my hand on Dante’s. “Caleb was just telling me—”

  “That he had to leave,” Dante finished my sentence, looking at Caleb, and I realized the tension in the air wasn’t triangulated between the three of us. It was just them.

  What did he think was going on here? Caleb wasn’t Renaldo. He wasn’t a threat, and the heartbreak Caleb had caused was way past its expiration.

  “Actually, I was telling her the origins of the word pink, but you’re right.” Caleb stood. “It’s time for me to go. Mandy”—he turned to me—“give me a call next week.”

  “I will.” I was annoyed enough to promise something that may or may not happen. This was the third time since Cambria that Dante had interrupted a conversation with a man who wasn’t him. Once had been welcome. Those were not good odds.

  “Later.” Caleb waved to Dante and—with a last nod to me—left.

  Once it was just Dante and me in the courtyard, my annoyance turned to something hotter and harder to contain.

  “What the hell was that about?” I asked.

  “You cannot see him—ever. Not—”

  “I’m sorry, what?” I couldn’t have heard him right.

  “Without me present.”

  There had been a time, not long before, when I would have mistaken his demand for affection—but not this day.

  “Are you kidding me?” I dropped my volume halfway through the sentence. If I made a scene, some well-meaning person would get between us and offer to walk me to my car. I wanted to handle Dante Crowne myself. “We were having coffee.”

  “Amea.”

  For the first time, the nickname wasn’t used affectionately, but as a call sign for obedience, and I was too enraged to take a hint.

  “Don’t you amea me,” I snarled.

  “You don’t know him.”

  “I don’t know you either.”

  He flinched in a way that was so Dante Crowne I thought he was just blinking away a dust mote. The expression was gone before the next breath, but it proved he was vulnerable, and my need to explain proved I was too.

  “Caleb and I had a thing in high school,” I continued, putting my hand on his chest. “That’s a lot of years. You have nothing to worry about.”

  “You can’t see him again. Ever.”

  “I just told you—

  “There have to be rules.” He took me by the wrist. “There have to be limits.”

  “And who sets them?” I yanked my hand away. “You?”

  “Please sit.” He put his hands up as if warding away my unease and telling me it was time to calm the fuck down. “Let me talk to you.”

  No. I wasn’t going to be soothed. I wasn’t going to listen to pretty words that wove me into a trap. I wasn’t that person anymore.

  “No.” Gathering the pink things on the table, I put them back into their bags, avoiding eye contact that would weaken me. “You don’t control me on this side of the bedroom door, and if you can’t trust me, maybe we made a mistake.”

  “Mandy, I have to tell you something.”

  He was trying to calm a child, but I was a woman, and I wanted to go home.

  “I don’t want to hear it.” I looped the bags on my forearm. “Not now.”

  “You’re being unreasonable.”

  “This is who I am.” I spread my arms, bags hanging, love me or leave me. “I’m emotional, sensitive, simple, shallow, and privileged… but I’m not stupid. This is the third time you got between me and a man I was talking to. The first time, you got a pass. The second was Renaldo and thank you. Both times I rewarded you with a fuck, but not now. No. This time it’s a pattern, and I’m not rewarding it.”

  “I don’t want a reward.” He slashed the air between us with the edge of his hand. “I want you to sit down long enough for me to show you something!”

  Now he was being loud, and I wasn’t there to entertain a crowd with my personal lif
e any more than I was there to take orders from a guy who constantly drew boundaries only to leap over them.

  “I’m going home,” I said. “Don’t follow me. Stay away.”

  I walked away, head down, kicking up a splash of pigeons as I crossed the courtyard. I didn’t look back, even for a moment, because there was no point to seeing his reaction unless I wanted to be weakened by it.

  When I got to the parking lot and opened my trunk, I looked back. Dante hadn’t followed me, and I was glad. Without the heat of his skin and the cool detachment of his eyes on me, I could discern the difference between who I was and who I wanted to be. If he was a bridge between them, great. If he wasn’t, he had to go.

  My bags had twisted around my wrists, and it took a moment to unwind them, giving me more than enough time to see the stack of headlines I’d tried to squash in my little corner of the world.

  RENALDO & THE HOMEWRECKER:

  HOW MANDY BETTENCOURT’S BIG PLANS BACKFIRED

  One woman had planned a life with Renaldo and felt betrayed when it didn’t work out. Another had bought this stack of papers and felt the weight of all the others in the world. Yet another had seen a similar stack in Dante Crowne’s truck and felt cared for.

  The woman putting her bags next to the old stack as she cataloged who she’d been knew nothing about who she’d become, but she knew what she wanted.

  I slammed the trunk closed and got into my buttercup Jaguar.

  I wanted a man I trusted, whom I could fight and love at the same time, and who’d challenge me to change. A man who’d set me free but keep me tied to him, who’d be his own man and mine at the same time.

  Dante should have been that man.

  Obviously, I’d been wrong about him.

  When the car started, my phone dinged, then buzzed. I opened my purse to see it lighting up the contents. A receipt from Bottega Venetta. A blue lipstick tube. Mints. Dimes. A bag of unnecessaries.

  The buzz stopped. I zipped up my handbag without looking at the notifications.

  So much had happened. So much had changed. But the thing I’d left Los Angeles to do hadn’t been done. I’d never been alone to think about what I wanted or what I needed, and now—before I saw him or spoke to him—I had to decide if Dante had a role where what I wanted and what I needed met.

  Chapter 36

  DANTE

  Mandy’s ass swayed in her jeans, and her bags knocked against her knees as the damp spray from the fountain cooled my cheek. She didn’t look back at me, even though I waited, but turned the corner out of sight without a glance, leaving me with the shoppers and the pigeons.

  She was a host of clichés. A tall drink of water. A long-stemmed rose with not a petal out of place. A whole human capable of intense emotion and painful candor. She could be deeply hurt and repeatedly walked into the pain with her softest vulnerabilities exposed because she couldn’t bear to give anything less than everything.

  I should have trusted her, maybe sat with her and Caleb or hung back until they were done.

  I should have been patient and waited until she was ready to see the video, not insisted on satisfying my own need to get it over with and deal with the consequences.

  Knowing she was right didn’t change anything but me, and I was suddenly exhausted from the years and years of running in place.

  Cambria had always been the cure for this feeling. The repairs were nearly done. I could spend a week or two alone in the house, separate from a world I hadn’t built and couldn’t change.

  There was wood to split and a driveway that could stand to be repaved. The fruit was still on the counter. The ice cream was unopened in the freezer and the Ruffles in the pantry. A backward version of things that had changed me were stamped on the typewriter ribbon, ending with the first shot in the revolution in my heart.

  Ive seen rivers, and you aint one baby.

  Mandy had chopped the wood stacked against the side of the house and cooked in the kitchen. She’d begged at my feet in the driveway, offered me her body in the bedrooms, and now the spirit of Amanda Bettencourt—my pet, my treasure, my amea—was all over that house.

  I couldn’t go up there—couldn’t run away, couldn’t walk toward, could barely lie still in bed all night—because I knew I had to let go of everything in my past. All the fears that built the walls around me and the boundaries around her. I had spent so long avoiding freedom that I didn’t know how to leave the cage I’d locked myself up in.

  By the time the sun came up, I still had no idea how to do what needed to be done, so I was just going to do it… but first I had to see her.

  Chapter 37

  MANDY

  The coffee shop was the same, but I ordered something different, and the cashier asked me if I was sure I wanted no caramel pump and two extra shots with that.

  “I’m sure.”

  It was nice to be known—pinned to a place and time, connected to another person by habit and ritual—because I was otherwise unmoored from my own desires.

  I’d woken up after a night out with Aileen feeling a little too headachey and dry for a single mojito. I hadn’t stopped talking long enough to drink more, but maybe that explained the dehydration.

  Guzzling a glass of water before filling a second, I recounted my relentless monologue of the previous night, when Aileen took me out, expecting me to be upset about going viral again. I wasn’t upset about the new video at all, but seeing it had slapped me in the face with how much I missed Dante.

  I insisted I felt generally better as a human. I’d taken control of my love life. I was a new, more complete woman. Except it’d have been better if I had him too. Like, I wouldn’t give up feeling like this to have him, or at least who I thought he was, but if he wasn’t that, then I wished we could be back in Cambria, where he was bossy but good bossy, not bad bossy.

  And Aileen wondered if I was too hard on him, but I wasn’t, because catching this stuff early is important. And I had. It was the right thing. And I was fine. Really, just fine.

  But it was nice to feel owned. Possessed. Important enough to be his prize.

  “And that, Mandy Bettencourt,” I schooled my reflection, “comes from the same place as him setting the rules about who you can and cannot talk to.”

  Aileen had agreed, then I’d gone on about how I couldn’t make this all work in my head because I wanted him to own me and free me at the same time, and it was wrong no matter how you sliced it. Like a pizza cut into, like, trapezoids or bunny shapes or something. How could it be both right and wrong? How could I be a better, happier person and miserable at the same time? Why couldn’t this just be straightforward?

  “It’s not binary,” Aileen said. “It’s not ‘he loves me, he loves me not,’ or ‘I need him, I need him not,’ all the time. There are, like, variables. You have to solve them. Or not. Whatever. Are you going to finish that mojito?”

  I thought about variables as I parked outside my usual morning coffee place.

  What could change, and what had to stay the same?

  I had never thought of myself as a rule follower, but where had I drawn the lines around myself? Around my work? Around the people I let into my life?

  How many of those rules kept me safe while I recklessly threw my heart at anyone who’d catch it?

  So, no caramel today and two shots because I was tired from a long night of talking to my friend about Dante—but not about him at the same time, because when I’d walked away from him at the Grove, his jealousy was half the reason. The other was that I needed to decide who I was, and he was getting in the way like it was his job.

  When I stepped away from the counter, I was sure Dante was right behind me. I could feel his body filling the space the way it had in the little Cambria house, but when I turned, I was disappointed to find I’d only imagined him there.

  I had to get over this.

  Chapter 38

  DANTE

  She must have seen the video, and I couldn’t do anything until I was
sure she was all right or I knew how bad the damage was.

  That was my excuse.

  This time, when I went to the strip mall parking lot outside the coffee shop, I didn’t sit in the front seat of an outrageously expensive car, nor did I go inside when she did. With the car parked around the corner, I walked to the smoke shop, bought a steel lighter with a pissed-off eagle on the side, and browsed the window display from inside.

  “You looking for a pipe, sir?” the guy asked, brushing back middle-parted shoulder-length hair. His orange T-shirt stretched over the bumps of his breasts and belly, and his light-brown beard had a recently adolescent unevenness.

  “Just looking,” I said, fiddling with the lighter in my pocket.

  “That yellow one’s Northern Waters Glass.”

  Just as he said “yellow,” Mandy’s buttercup Jag pulled into the lot and—without even slowing down—slid into the center of a spot and stopped right before the bumper. The car was lined up straight, equidistant from both painted lines—perfect, just like the woman who got out with the phone to her ear.

  I couldn’t see her face. Was she crying? Upset? Annoyed? Her gait told me nothing, but her head wasn’t bowed in sadness and her hands weren’t crumpling a soggy tissue.

  As a matter of fact, she had a crispness to her stride, and when she spoke, her free hand waved as if the person on the other end could read her gestures.

  “…out of the Upper Peninsula.” The salesman’s voice filtered back, closer now, but too far away to give a shit about. “That’s in Michigan.”

  “That’s interesting,” I mumbled, craning my neck to watch her approach the coffee shop.

  “If you want,” the man continued, “I have some real nice Northern Waters stuff in the case.”

  Mandy opened the door and held it for a woman juggling a tray of coffee and a stroller. Words exchanged. Mandy turned her head to wave goodbye, and though I only saw her for a split second, it was all I needed to know how she was.