Sine Qua Non

Chapter One

“Nicholas? It’s Arthur. I know it’s the weekend but I thought you should know that our VP of Operations resigned.”

“Eileen did?”

Nicholas sat up at his desk. “Why?”

Arthur paused. “She cited creative differences. Off the record, she’s very Christian.”

Nicholas closed his eyes.

“And with the scandal—”

“I can imagine.”

He cut the other man off, not wanting to hear any further recriminations, real or speculated. “I suppose we’ll just have to grin and bear it until we can hire somebody else.”

He scrubbed his hand over his face, staring up at the ceiling. Fuck .

“Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.”

“No, thanks for letting me know. I’m about to have a video interview with a cleaner, so we’ll have to wait until Monday to discuss this further. We can plan a course of action then.”

Nicholas set his phone down on the desk. His fingers began to tap in agitation and he growled in annoyance when he realized that he was unconsciously copying the cadence of the clock mounted on the office wall. It was his father’s, purchased at auction from some dwindling estate. He wished he’d thought to remove it before. Too late now.

The video app on his computer flickered into focus and he arranged his face into a picture of something approaching civility as a disgustingly earnest-looking girl in her early twenties appeared. She adjusted her tennis headband like she heard there had been a casting call for a reboot of The Virgin Suicides and was afraid that she had missed it.

Nicholas didn’t think she looked very much like a maid.

“Mr. Beaucroft,”

she said eagerly. “Hi! Thank you so much for this opportunity to work with you.”

With him? He nodded tersely, bristling. Why was she talking like she’d already gotten the job? Who was this excited to clean somebody else’s toilets? Did she think they were going to collaborate over fucking Fabuloso?

And he was only going to have to go through a higher stakes version of this with the interviews for the Vice President position. The sales and marketing team were such fucking parasites.

“Do you have any prior housekeeping experience?”

“Well, I used to work as an au pair for this family in Paris.”

“This is a bit different from watching some French brats paddling around in the Seine. I own a very large piece of property and I’d expect every inch of it cleaned. Do you know how to polish granite?”

he demanded abruptly. “Clean hardwood? Can you dust?”

Her smile faltered. He wondered idly who had put her up to this.

“Let me guess,”

he said, when she continued to falter. “You don’t have any maid experience.”

“I’m a fast learner.”

She sounded defiant, which suggested she had done this to herself. They weren’t accepting any interns, so if someone were conniving and desperate, Nicholas supposed they might seize upon a job for a cleaner and try to upgrade it a paid entry-level position. “I have a college degree,”

she was saying now, “I could do filing, type up papers—”

“I have a secretary. What I need is a maid.”

“But I—”

Nicholas ended the video call, cutting her off mid-protest. What a waste of his time. Six applicants so far, and not a single one of them fit the bill. Competence and discretion, that was all he asked. If only Carmela had kept her snide comments about his houseguest to herself. Then he wouldn’t be here, subjected to graspingly ambitious college students.

And now, Eileen had quit.

He stood so abruptly that his chair shot back a few feet, edging around the sharp corner of the desk to yank the clock bodily from the wall. The nail it had been hanging on tore through the plaster, shedding bits of drywall on the bloodred fibers of his late father’s carpet.

Take that, asshole , he thought.

Carrying the clock under his arm like a football, he marched down the hall, up to the front door, blinking into the harsh sunlight. The air was redolent with dust and pollen, shimmering in the spring heat, though there was still a saline nip in the breeze from the nearby ocean.

He continued down the dusty walk to where the trash cans waited at the bottom of the hill rise for Friday pickup. He slammed the clock into the gray bin, and when he replaced the lid, the ticking sound was finally silenced. Only the throbbing of his own pulse remained to taunt him.

As he headed back into the house that he had inherited from his father, he looked up at the Chihuly sculpture hanging from the ceiling. When the sun passed through the glass, it glowed a violent neon. Over the years, he had grown accustomed to its organic and vaguely menacing silhouette whenever he came in through the main door. Bathed in translucent shadow, however, visitors often revealed a flicker of unease as they looked up at it, over his shoulder.

Jay, he knew, didn’t like it. To her, it was a relic of his father. But when he had talked casually about its replacement, she had given him a disappointed look. If she were here, she would have stopped him from throwing out the clock, and probably gotten angry at him for being rude to the interviewee, but she wasn’t here. She was at the farmers’ market. He had offered to drive her but she said she wanted to walk.

But he knew the truth. She didn’t want him to take her because she didn’t want to be seen with him in public. She had turned down ten million dollars for his sake, but she hadn’t fully accepted him. Part of her was still closed off, and he could see that remove every time she looked at him with a caution she didn’t try to hide.

His ambling steps took him to her bedroom. The door was closed, to keep the cat in. When he opened it, her dark gray cat poked its head out from beneath the bed, watching with reflective eyes.

It smells like her in here , he thought wistfully, closing the door behind him.

Apple freesia, coconut, dusty sunshine.

He tilted his head, taking in the mirrored closet, the padded window seat, the faded sunflower motif on the walls. Most of her belongings were still boarded up in her San Francisco hovel, which was now leased in his name, so the room was a strange, frozen blend of the way she had left it in the late two-thousands and what she had brought back with her from the city.

His eyes lingered on the nightstand crammed with fantasy novels and old romances. She’d been reading one; it was face-down on the nightstand beside her Kindle and a pair of tortoiseshell glasses that he hadn’t known she owned.

They had been apart for nearly nine years and she was the same in so many ways that it was always startling to find something that had changed. Once, he had known her better than anyone. It was disturbing to realize that this might no longer be the case.

But when she turned down his proposal, she had said, “I’m going to need some time to think about this.”

He had been taken off guard. She had decided to stay. As far as he was concerned, that was a tacit declaration that she was ready to be his.

“What’s there to think about?”

“You’re asking me to uproot everything I’ve done on my own to spend the rest of my life with you and I don’t know if I can do that.”

She had lowered her eyes to the box in her hands, holding it with a care that hurt like violence. “I need to think about my answer.”

How long? he nearly demanded.

They had been in the car, and he had floored the gas, gripping the wheel in a stranglehold.

How long are you going to make me wait?

“Nick.”

Her voice had been wary—frightened. “You’re going too fast.”

With a glance at the odometer, he hit the brakes with a screech, bringing the needle back down from the 90-mark.

“Nick?”

(Please don’t hurt me)

“Take all the time you need.”

The words tasted like sawdust. He couldn’t look at her again until they got home, which seemed to fill her with pity because she had chased him down in the hall, and said, “Wait”

in a tone that had made him think she was about to change her mind, so he turned, expectant and ready for victory, only to have Jay press her lips against his.

“Why?”

he’d asked, stepping back from her in the shadowy dark hall, and she had responded, rather harshly, “Because I want to.”

Had she slept with him that night because she pitied him? As he surged between her thighs beneath that ghostly sculpture, with the marble steps leaving divots in their flesh that became lilac bruises worn beneath their clothes, had she already been thinking about when she would leave?

“God, I don’t think I can move,”

she had said afterwards, her hair a tangled smudge against the stark white marble. “You haven’t been that rough with me since that night at the pool.”

“I didn’t realize you paid such close attention to how I fuck.”

Jay rolled on one arm to look at him. “What’s gotten into you?”

You , he thought, but he knew better than to say that, so he said nothing as he played with her hair, so focused on the rich texture of it that Jay frowned and pulled his hand away. Her expressive eyes traced his face with a familiarity that was scalding, sloughing away all but the sorry core of his being. He looked away with a frown as she touched his face.

“Are you all right?”

She doesn’t want you. The words in his head were his father’s voice, cold and amused. Drink it in, boy. This is all you’ll ever have. Unwillingly, his eyes dropped, taking in the moon-bathed contours of her body, her full breasts. “Yes. Let’s go to bed. I’ll carry you.”

“Okay, but be carefu—oh my god! Nick!”

She grabbed onto his shoulders in alarm as he swept her up easily, and the sensation of all that warm, bare skin against his own zipped through him like wildfire, leaving him bereft.

She doesn’t need to love me to give me what I want.

It didn’t matter that she was in his bed. They might as well have been separated by glass.

As she fell asleep, and and all the stiffness melted from her limbs like glacial ice, he pulled her against him, burying his face in her hair with a sigh.

“Don’t leave.”

There were still some things he wasn’t ready to say to her face. Not with the phantom scores of old hurts still blistering on his heart. But he could say it to her now as he breathed her in, drowning in her sweetness. “Please, stay for me. Love me. I want you to love me.”

She hadn’t responded, which was fine. He told himself he didn’t need an answer.

But he did. He needed “yes.”

Shaking his head at his foolishness, Nicholas left her room, making sure to close the door behind him. His eyes went to the swinging jellyfish that they had made love under the night he proposed. Here or not, there were traces of her everywhere, and now that he had freed her from their bargain, his need for her throbbed like an infected wound.

If she left again, it would destroy him.