Sine Qua Non
Chapter Thirteen
67%
Nicholas watched Jay stare meditatively into the darkness, her face reflected in the dark glass window. Every time some specter from their past popped up like a fucking jack-in-the-box, he was afraid it was going to be the reason that she left him again.
She was like water running through his fingers. If he closed his hands over her too forcefully, there was a distinct possibility that she might slip past him out of reach forever.
Not wanting to broach the subject of Jake further, he said, “Where do you want to go for dinner?”
“I don’t. I’ll cook something. We have all that food we brought back from my apartment. I don’t want it to go bad.”
He didn’t want her cooking. Not when she seemed to think that he wanted her as his live-in possession. “I think I can afford to lose a few tomatoes. They’re, what, twenty cents each? Let me take you out. The guy who owns that Afghan place wants to give you his baklava.”
“It’s not generosity if you give me more than what I want.”
“Well, I don’t cook,”
he said gruffly. “I don’t expect you to do the same for me.”
“I don’t do it because I want something in return,”
said Jay. “I cook because I like cooking. You really don’t cook? At all?”
“Not unless you count the microwave.”
“What did you do in college?”
“Ate in the dining commons like a normal person.”
“You are not a normal person, Nicholas. Normal people don’t try to buy people apology paintings—”
he couldn’t help it, he laughed “—and have casual prix fixe dinners on a whim because they don’t know how to use their ovens.”
“I know how to use my oven. I use it to make pizza sometimes.”
“Oh my god,”
said Jay. “Stop trying to rationalize your insane amount of privilege.”
Nicholas hid a smile at her playful scolding as he pulled into the driveway, knowing that she wasn’t really angry. When she was yelling at him in earnest, her face got all flushed, and she got these three little lines between her eyebrows. Now she just looked sexy and cross.
“I don’t like that look on your face, either,” Jay said.
“You’d like what’s in my head even less then,”
he said absently as his eyes swept across his property. The satisfaction of owning it was tinged with the darker knowledge of what it had cost him, and how it had almost lost him the woman sitting in the car beside him.
His mother’s flowers glowed whitely in the moonlight, filling the air with a fragrance he could detect as soon as he had opened the car door. For years, his father had talked about ripping out the jasmine, lilies, and roses, and he had been forced to pretend at indifference to the matter, knowing that if he revealed just how much that would have devastated him, his father would have done it that much sooner.
He always destroyed what he couldn’t have , he thought, glancing sidelong at Jay. Especially if it was beautiful.
The cross expression had left her face as she hopped up the raised levels of the walkway with the same little skip in her step that she’d had when she was fourteen. She had smiled more over the last couple days than he had seen her smile at home in years.
Because she was unhappy.
Maybe he was more like his father than he thought.
Impulsively, he bent down and plucked a sprig of jasmine free. White sap leaked out, staining his fingers. He reached over and tucked the flower in the dark curls of Jay’s loose hair. It stuck, and she reached up to touch it with a startled sound.
“Hey! What are you doing? What is that?”
“Jasmine. It comes alive in the dark—just like you.”
The smile on her face faded and she looked at him with solemn eyes.
“What?”
he asked, defensive.
“You’re so surprising.”
She said it quietly, as if she hadn’t meant to say it aloud at all.
“In a good way?”
(Stop begging for her approval like the fucking dog)
Jay lowered her hand, leaving the flower in her hair. The white petals were striking against her dark curls. He didn’t dare breathe, afraid that the wrong response would send her running.
“In an I-forgot-how-charming-you-can-be-way.”
She touched his cheek, thumbing the corner of his mouth, before ducking her head in apparent embarrassment. As she stepped aside to let him unlock the front door, he noticed her cheeks were flushed. “I’ll go start dinner.”
Nicholas felt almost short of breath as he headed up the stairs to his room, his face still tingling where she had touched it. Ignoring the doubts in his head, he changed into a pair of worn gray sweatpants and a white wifebeater, hoping he hadn’t imagined the longing in her eyes.
Jay was standing over the stove when he came back downstairs, frowning into the pot as she added a powdery yellow spice from a jar. She was still wearing her work clothes, though she had kicked off her shoes. The open back of her blouse revealed a generous expanse of bare skin. He’d put his tongue to that dark beauty mark on her left shoulder blade more than once while taking her from behind. It always made her shiver. Sometimes, it made her moan.
He wanted to spend the rest of his life taking his time with her, finding out what other things could wrest little shivers and pleasure-sounds from her.
He wanted her to say yes .
“Can I help?”
Jay jumped, her fingers tightening on the ladle in her hand. She looked at him, and then away, where she gestured to a pile of carrots on the cutting board.
“You can chop those carrots for the curry.”
He grabbed one of his good Japanese knives.
She winced, watching him hack the top off the biggest one with a flourish. “It’s not an execution. Here—”
She left the ladle in the steaming concoction to take the knife from him, rocking the blade back and forth to slice off several neat and even pieces. “Make them nice and thin, like this. It’s a gentle back and forth motion.”
“I know how to cut vegetables, Jay.”
“You’re just holding it awfully close to your f—”
“Jay. Stop.”
He took the knife back from her reluctant hand. “I know how to— motherfucker .”
“Fingers,”
she finished helplessly. “Is what I was about to say. You’re supposed to cut away from yourself, Nick. Not towards.”
He swore again in response as drops of blood scattered on the wooden cutting board. Jay sighed and took the knife away, giving it a rinse with soap and hot water before setting it back on the cutting board, nudging the carrots away from his blood.
Tearing off a piece of paper towel, she said, “Let me see what you did to yourself.”
He gave her his hand, letting out a hiss when she gripped him by the wrist, one thumb pressing just above his pulse point, with her other fingers bracing against the backs of his.
“It’s not that deep,”
she pronounced, bowing her head over his palm. When a few locks of her hair slid against his bare shoulder, his groin tightened with need. Oblivious, she the paper towel and squeezed while looking up at him with one of her gentle half-smiles. “One time in college, I accidentally cut myself down to the bone while slicing an avocado. Avocado hand.”
“That’s not a thing,”
he ground out, staring at their entwined hands.
“It is. Look it up.”
She gave his finger a final squeeze before taking the paper towel away. “You’ll be fine. Make sure you bandage that later, though. And put some antibiotic on it.”
She picked up the knife.
“Are you ousting me from my own kitchen?”
Jay began to chop. Small, neat slices. It’s a gentle back and forth motion. “It’s your house. You can do whatever you want as long as it doesn’t involve knives.”
His cock throbbed. “I’m making the drinks then.”
“Not too strong.”
“If we’re having an evening in, I want to have some fun.”
“I’m fun without alcohol.”
“Yeah.”
He splashed a generous amount of gin into two cut-crystal tumblers. “Reading and rock collecting. You’re quite the party girl. Pass me a lemon.”
She took one out of his crisper and began grating it.
“Seriously? You don’t trust me with the fucking grater, either?”
“No.”
She dropped the zest in his hand. “You’d find a way to cut off your finger with it.”
“Well, aren’t you bratty.”
He scattered the zest into the gin before topping it off with some elderflower tonic water he’d brought back from France, watching the cocktail bubble. “Here, try this for me. If it makes you fall over, it’ll be just about right for me.”
Jay pointed the knife at him. “Take your devil water and get out.”
Rolling his eyes, Nicholas set down the gin bottle. He could feel her eyes following him as he carried the drinks out into the den and set them on the end table. The look was not disapproving.
Humming to himself, he got to his knees and began fiddling with the cables in the entertainment console, rearranging things in the HDMI ports until the screen flickered to life, revealing polygonal 64-bit graphics that looked only a little faded on the big plasma screen.
He was surprised by the wave of nostalgia it brought.
“Is that your old Nintendo?”
Jay’s voice sounded from behind him. “I can’t believe it still works.”
“It is and it does. Now sit down, blue jay. You’re going to loosen up and have some fun with me.”
She looked down skeptically before getting to her knees one leg at a time. While lowering herself from that awkward kneel, she handed him one of the bowls. She had pureed the carrots into the soup and now the liquid was a beautiful, rich orange color with a glistening sheen.
“This looks good.”
“I think it will be.”
She accepted her drink from him and gave it a wary sniff before taking a very small sip. “This tastes like you put the whole distillery in it.”
“Good.”
He picked up his controller. “That’s how it should be.”
“I feel like we’re about to get in trouble,”
Jay said, laughing self-consciously. “Eating and drinking on the white carpet. Remember how Yelena was always so particular about the carpet? She seemed to think your dad would skin her alive if it ever got stained.”
Nicholas glanced at her, and then casually let some of his curry tip out onto the rug.
“Nick! Oh my god! I put turmeric in that! It’s going to stain!”
She jumped up, and he reached out to catch at her hand, giving it a little tug. “Sit down, blue jay. It’s just a rug.”
“A stained rug.”
She looked at him for a long moment before sinking back down beside him. She looked so sweet with her skirt riding over her knees. Now that she’d brought it up, this really did remind him of when they were both in school, whiling away the hours until their parents came home to ignore them in person. “Why did you do that?”
“Because it’s my rug.”
Jay shook her head. “Unbelievable.”
“Cheers,”
he said, lifting up his cocktail. “To the carpet.”
She wrinkled her nose as they clinked glasses. “To getting ants.”
He clicked his tongue at her before shooting her ship out of the sky.
“Nick! I wasn’t ready.”
“Your toast was shit.”
“God, you’re so annoying.”
“You love it.”
“And manipulative.”
She gave him a challenging look. “Arrogant. Pretentious .”
“Well, that last one is more habit.”
He waited for her ship to respawn while he took a thoughtful drink. “You go to all the right schools, meet all the people, and you don’t need to be taught good taste because good taste is all you’re ever exposed to.”
“Nobody made you do any of that.”
“My father did,”
he said quietly.
Her face shifted, undergoing several changes in sequence. When she spoke, she sounded subdued. “You’re still haunted by him, too?”
He thought of the dark whispers in his mind whenever he’d reached another low, or found himself pushing up against another dark wall. “You could say that. In any case, I’m glad he’s dead. I often find myself thinking that if he wasn’t, I might just have killed him myself.”
“You’d be in prison, Nicholas.”
Her ship exploded into a cloud of pixelated fire. “When I think about what he did to you—what he would have done that night if I hadn’t stopped him—”
“Nicholas.”
She grabbed his arm as her ship smoldered on the screen. Her face was worried. “Nick,” she said, softening her words. “I don’t want you to hurt people for me.”
“I feel like I’m losing my fucking grip, Jay. First my father. Then your mother. Now Jake—”
“I know. Believe me, I know.”
She ran her hand over his bicep before taking her hand away. “After that fight with my mother, I drank a whole half bottle of wine. It made me sick as a dog.” She gave him a sympathetic glance. “What is Jake doing now? Is he the sheriff, like his dad?”
Nicholas breathed out a laugh. “Him? No. Even his father thinks he’s an embarrassment. He works for his uncle, who runs some sleazy detective agency. The kind that photographs cheating wives for their cuck husbands, like they’re not getting off on watching strangers fuck.”
“Wow,”
Jay said. “That’s a little ironic, coming from you.”
The remark stung and he grimaced as he raised his glass, causing the ice to clink against the side. “It’s easy to get used to seeing people through a lens.”
“Spying on them.”
“I mostly just spied on you.”
“Reading my diary.”
Jay shook her head. “Filming me. Sneaking into my room.”
“You were so fucking beautiful. Everything came to you so easily.”
He set his glass down, the florals of the gin thickly coating his tongue. “I just wanted a piece of you for myself.”
“You wanted me on my knees.”
She gave him a harsh look that crackled through him like static. “Everything I had, I had to work three times as hard for—and you wanted to take that all away. And nobody stopped you from doing it to me. Nobody stopped your father, either.”
“Poor blue jay.”
“That’s what’s wrong with this town,”
Jay said. “The people here will tell you that it’s a privilege to be able to breathe, and then they’ll sit back and watch you be suffocated.”
“I told you that.”
“I didn’t want to believe you.”
Her eyes blinked away. “But then you made me do things I didn’t want to do, and I did.”
He picked up the controller again. “I’ve made you bitter.”
“I’m not bitter.”
“And a liar, too.”
Jay grabbed his controller, sending his ship flying wide. His eyes widened in surprise, and then a smirk tugged at his mouth as he flipped his wrist, so her hand was trapped beneath his when he swung to his knees, using his weight to roll her onto her back while their ships both crashed.
Her drink tipped over right along with her and the scent of bitters and lemon rose up from the carpet as he pinned her down by his hips, stretching to cover her body with his.
“Daddy’s bitter little bird.”
Smiling darkly, he drew his fingers possessively down the side of her cheek while his eyes searched her face. “You don’t want anyone to save you from me now, do you? You like being at my mercy when I fuck you.”
“Nicholas—”
She shivered. “Please . . .”
“I asked you a question.”
She wet her lips. “N-no. I . . . like it.”
He reached past her for the remote, turning the TV off. Under the black eye of the screen, they fumbled. Her hands moved over his back and shoulders, and he was forced to get down on one arm so she could pull the wifebeater over his head.
“You want this.”
It was not a question, but she closed her eyes and nodded.
“Good. Because I never wanted it with anyone else.”
The buttons on her blouse were on the back, and with a grunt of frustration, he yanked at her sleeves, until her breasts were spilling over the neck of her top in that sheer, lacy bra. “Never.” He leaned down and kissed her through it, breathing out heavily against the stiff bud of her nipple. “That’s why I kept your old bed. I couldn’t get rid of the first place I ever had you.”
“Fuck,”
she choked out. “That’s—so messed up.”
“I know.”
He slid his hand beneath her skirt as he trailed kisses over her ribs. “But the thing is, Jay—” he rolled her skirt up to her belly and tugged aside her underwear, exposing her dark, glistening sex “—you’ve always had a way of getting under my skin.”
He bent his head and fucked her with his mouth right there on the carpet, tonguing her clit until she was bracing against the floor, her thighs squeezing his face until his jaw ached. When he looked up at her, one of her hands was on her breast. The other was tightly gripping her skirt, keeping it rolled up and out of his way. “Daddy,”
her hips lifted. “Daddy, please —”
The desire burning through him was violent enough to blow him apart. As she trembled beneath his lips, he knew he’d never get her out of his blood. It was Jay or nothing. All he had ever wanted was this. Even if it ended up scoring him raw, he wanted this .
With a harsh exhalation, he pulled away and fumbled with a condom before plunging inside her trembling cunt, letting his arms hit the floor on either side of her pretty face. The first thrust made her jolt, but then he felt her legs wrap around his hips and pull him deeper.
“You slutty girl.”
“Yes,”
she panted.
“Marking me up like your property.”
Her fingers bit into his back and he groaned again. “You think clawing Daddy up is going to keep you from getting fucked?”
“Sorry,”
she gasped, and he laughed against her throat.
“Don’t apologize. Fuck me harder.”
Make me yours.
She let her head fall back into the spilled drink as she lifted her hips at his command. He thrust deeply in response, crushing her breasts against his bare chest as he filled her until he met resistance. “Harder,”
he said, breathless himself now. “Make me work for it.”
She kept trying to arch into him but couldn’t maintain the pace, gripping his shoulders to brace herself as her thighs began to tremble with the strain.
“Daddy, I can’t—”
Jay collapsed on the next thrust, making her head fall back towards the ceiling as she struggled to catch her breath. “We ruined . . . the carpet.”
“I don’t give a fuck.”
Nicholas entered her again, pinning her pelvis to the floor with his cock, and came with a shudder, as he settled into the lush cradle of her hips with a final, shallow rock. “Help me christen the next one.” He traced the rise of her left breast. “Marry me.”
Jay shook her head.
“Marry me,”
he repeated. Still inside her, he reached down to unfasten the chain at her throat, pulling the little ring free from her cleavage even as she tried to grasp it from him. Unable to resist teasing her, he dangled it over her face, letting the ring bounce off the edge of her nose.
“Do you love me?”
Her chest hitched. “Yes, but—”
“But what?”
“I’m scared.”
Tears sparkled in her eyes. “Everyone leaves me because I’m not good enough.”
“That’s bullshit and you know it,”
he snarled. “I’ve always loved you.”
“Yes. Everyone says that . . . right before they go away.”
“I’m not going to leave you, Jay.”
His chest fell heavily against hers, and she stared up at him, her eyes wide. “I would never leave you. You’re mine. You have always been mine. But you have to trust me long enough to prove it to you.”
Jay let out a stuttering breath, more tears sliding down her wet face. “But I’m so scared.”
“But can you do that? Can you trust me?”
he demanded, thumbing the tears from one of her sharp cheekbones. When her eyes skated to the side, he let his hand drift to her shoulder, tugging the dangling straps of her bra back into place. “Tell me things aren’t that broken between us.”
“I’m tired of fighting you, Nick,”
she said wearily. “I can’t resist you anymore.”
He looked down at the beautiful woman beneath him, bent in surrender, and his conscience twisted. Gently, he cupped her face. “Are you always going to call me Nick?”
“I can’t help it.”
He felt the movement inside and out when she freed up an arm to stroke his jaw. “You’ll always be my Nick.”
My Nick . It felt like his chest was caught in a vise.
“I can be your Nick.”
He took her hand from his face and slipped the ring on her finger. It fit perfectly. “Say yes,” he urged, folding his fingers over hers. “And I will be.”
Jay closed her eyes and he felt his heart clench.
“Okay,”
she whispered. “Yes.”
*****
When Jay was younger, she had thought about her wedding like any other girl, but every template for marriage she’d ever seen had either been disastrous, like her mother’s, or had a hard, sterile stop after the “I do,”
like one of those children’s fairytales.
Nobody had ever told her what should come next after the happily-ever-after. She only knew what failure looked like, and had felt the brutal sting of its loveless lash as her parents’ marriage disintegrated. Relegated to the role of spectator, she had watched the matches play out as cold silences and shouted arguments, punctuated by broken plates and late-night rendezvous. Both her mother and Damon were far too proud and cruel to ever let the other leave unscathed, even if it meant that their own children would end up as the casualties. Which they had. Over and over.
What would happen when she and Nicholas inevitably fought? Because they would. They were like oil and water—if the oil was ablaze and the water was frozen. Would he mock her, trap her in a cage of her own words? Or would he follow his father’s teachings and allow himself to become poisoned by the hate he claimed to deny as she inevitably failed to meet his expectations and fled from his taunting?
For years, her resistance had become a steel bar that she could support herself against when everything else was crumbling down. If she didn’t need anyone, it wouldn’t matter if she ended up alone. If she didn’t let herself love anyone, it wouldn’t hurt when they left. But now that bar had been yanked away and Jay could feel herself falling into the cold dark void it had left behind, and for the first time in her life, she had to trust that somebody would catch her.
(You need someone to take care of you)
God, it terrified her. It had been so long since she had been in a relationship with anyone, and none of those had ever made her feel the tide of overwhelming sensations that threatened to take over whenever they were together. It left her feeling desperate—to run, hide, both, either. She wasn’t sure. She had tried both and been run to ground by his tireless, maddening pursuit of her.
The lines that were beginning to form on his face suggested that he was as exhausted by it all as she was. Far from being the carefree playboy she’d imagined he had become in her absence by living large on his father’s money, Nicholas ran his company with the defiant stoicism of a captain manning a sinking ship.
Not that he was saint—he had his father’s cold patrician arrogance and could be so hot-tempered that he was nearly bratty. But in the years that she had been away, Nicholas had become an adult in a way that she had not.
And she was so fucking lonely.
Nicholas wanted to celebrate their upcoming nuptials by taking her out to dinner. He didn’t call it a celebration but she knew it was one because this time they didn’t go to Accia; they went to the Bayview, which had a very expensive wine bar with a view of the ocean.
Hitting up all the old haunts , she thought, wondering if Nicholas knew that despite its quiet elegance, the Bayview was notorious for being the place where men brought their mistresses.
At least I fit the dress code , she thought, pulling down her strappy black dress. She felt ridiculous in it—her mother would say she looked like a “size fourteen sausage in a size ten casing”—but when Nicholas saw her wearing it, he had nearly walked into the wall.
“My fucking god,”
he said, fisting his keys. “Come here. Now.”
(“Tell me I’m yours”)
A ma?tre d’ walked them to a booth by the plush bar of Quentin’s father’s hotel. Or maybe it was his hotel now. She caught a glimpse of Quentin himself, dressed in a tailored suit and giving orders to a handful of staff as he no-doubt instructed them on how to handle the pre-dinner rush.
Jay looked away before their eyes could meet but thought she saw him do a double-take in her periphery. He was pushy enough that he would take a single look as invitation to come over, so she kept her eyes on her water glass. But when a complimentary bottle of wine arrived at their table that Nicholas denied ordering, Jay knew who it was really from.
It angered her. Did everyone think she was so cheap to buy?
“One More Night”
by Saleka was playing from some hidden speaker, the low, sultry music adding to the seductive atmosphere. Anxiety heightened her senses, making her aware of everything from the smells of cooking spices to the slight current of displaced air against all the skin exposed by her “punishment dress” every time someone passed by their table.
Nicholas took his napkin and covered the cork, twisting until the bottle opened with a muffled pop. “Was Quentin the one who told you about Jake?”
Jay looked at him so sharply that her earrings shivered. “He was.”
Taking the bottle from him, she poured them each a frothing glass, as a waiter raced over in a panic, trying to help her pour. “We’re fine, thank you,” she said, and then felt her mouth harden when his eyes flicked involuntarily to the low neck of her dress. “He mentioned you invested money in this hotel.”
“Very opportunistic of him.”
Nicholas leaned back in his seat as he watched the flow of pale liquid, his eyes a deep slate in the low lights of the bar. “I wonder if he’s kissing up to me or you.”
“You, probably.”
She handed him his glass and a spark shot up her wrist when their fingers brushed. “He made it very clear where his priorities lay when we last spoke.”
“He took you for granted then. Just like all your other friends.”
He raised the glass to his lips, causing his dinner jacket to fold open. He was the only man in the establishment who wasn’t wearing a tie and he outshone them all with his dark elegance. “It’s pathetic how quickly they’ve all come crawling back, isn’t it?”
“If you dislike it that much,”
Jay said, filling her own glass, “why are you here?”
“I never said I disliked it. But you do. Is that why you pushed him away? I always wondered. He looked at you like he wanted to add you to his collection of expensive, pretty things. In another life, it could have been you up there. The charming brochure-ready hotelier’s wife.”
Jay grimaced. “I don’t want to talk about Quentin anymore.”
“Then let’s talk about you.”
“What about me?”
“Well, we could talk about our engagement.”
He studied her in the low lights. “Or we could discuss how beautiful you look in your slutty new dress—and how distracting it is, when you fidget like that.”
Jay realized, when she saw his eyes go pointedly to her shoulder, that she was unconsciously fingering one of the straps. It was the one he’d shown her on his phone before he took her out to lunch at Accia, and was every bit as low-cut as he’d threatened. The structured fit made it look like she was about to spill out of her dress.
Expensive, pretty things.
Jay lowered both hands to her lap, resisting the urge to cover herself. “I’m not used to dressing up.”
“You mean, you’re not used to people looking at you when you let yourself look beautiful.”
“Don’t do that. Don’t analyze me, the way you do everything else. It makes me feel like one of your stock portfolios.”
“I just think it’s a shame. I bet those polite little cuckholds you dated thought so, too. When you walk into a room, you outshine everyone in it. But you always tried to dim your own light by hiding yourself away.”
Jay took a generous swallow of champagne. The bubbles stung her nose and she wrinkled it, feeling an unexpected flare of defiance that flickered through her like a candle. “Sometimes I don’t want to be looked at,”
she said heatedly. “I didn’t ask to look like this.”
“Like an angel of sin?”
Nicholas leaned back against the booth and the buttons on his shirt strained with the movement. “That’s what you always looked like to me.”
“At least I don’t make people cry on purpose,”
she said childishly.
“No, you just choose not to see how you affect people. I’d call it cruel if I thought you had it in you. But it honestly seems like you just really don’t want to see it.”
“You did call me cruel,”
she reminded him. “And if I am, I learned it from you.”
“Then you learned from the master.”
He picked his wine up again, thoughtful. “I’ll tell you a secret, though. Sometimes, I don’t mean to be cruel. I just don’t care enough not to be.”
“You could pretend. It might even start to feel real if you do.”
“It doesn’t seem worth the effort—my caring. At work, I get paid either way, regardless of whose feelings I end up hurting. In these circles, a bit of emotional bloodbath is a self-fueling spectacle. Entertainment.”
He scoffed. “Before you came back here, I figured I’d end up alone.”
“Oh, Nicholas.”
She hated it when he was like this. She could never tell if he was trying to paly on her sympathies or expressing genuine despair. His mobile face offered her no clues and she didn’t want to be caught staring, so she turned to study the opulent wallpaper with its bold peacock print, even as it felt like her heart might shatter to pieces. “You really didn’t think someone else would have fallen for you? With all that you have to offer?”
“You mean I should have gotten myself a trophy wife, like my father.”
“You know that’s not what I meant. You have your charms.”
She turned to face him, breathing a sigh of relief when she saw that some of the intensity had left his face. Even if he is pretending. “I think you like it better when people are afraid of you.”
He toyed with his fork. “Are you afraid of me?”
“No,”
she said, surprised to realize it was true. “I watched you grow up in your father’s shadow. I saw the hold he had on you—and how you tried to escape it. You aren’t the boy you were. I wouldn’t have had dinner with that boy. But I am here with the man you became.”
“You don’t think I’m—”
He looked up impatiently as their waiter approached.
One glance at Nicholas’s drawn eyebrows and hard mouth made the younger man flustered. “Shrimp tartlets for the gentleman,”
he said, grievously breaking protocol and serving Nicholas first in his eagerness to soothe, “and baba ghanoush for the lady?”
“Yes, that’s fine, thank you,”
Nicholas said, in a tone that very clearly meant fuck off .
“Thank you,”
Jay echoed after him before he could completely flee. It was strange, she thought, giving Nciholas a chastising look. She didn’t need to imagine what it would be like to sit across from this man at a kitchen table for the rest of her life. Because she had already done so for years. Unlike the other men in her life, there was no mystery.
With Nicholas, she knew exactly what she was getting.
“I don’t think you’re what?”
she prompted, finding his eyes on her.
Something flickered in his face. “Cruel. Heartless. Selfish.”
“Oh. Well.”
She rubbed at the back of her neck. “I think we can all be those things.”
“Enough so that you regret saying yes to me?”
“No.”
Jay leaned forward and saw a muscle in his jaw tighten. “I would have said no if I didn’t want this. I know you love me. But you also understand that sometimes—” her face flushed as she looked around. “Sometimes it feels good to be disrespected in the dark.”
Nicholas half-smiled. “Your faceless stranger.”
Jay winced. “You can stop bringing that up any time.”
“What kind of wedding do you want? Not one for the society pages, I’m assuming, since you don’t like being looked at. Did you want to get married in a church?”
Jay poked at a chickpea, making it roll across the plate. “I don’t really want a wedding at all.”
“That won’t be a problem,”
he said, so easily that she looked up suspiciously. “We can get a license. It will be faster. The sooner you’re mine, the better.”
Her throat tightened. “Can we wait until the interviews are over?”
Nicholas paused with the fork raised to his mouth. “Why?”
“It wouldn’t look good for us. People would accuse me of sleeping my way to the top.”
And they wouldn’t be wrong, would they? He had only offered her the position as a sort of sexual bargaining chip, even if it was with the best of intentions. “They already kind of do.”
“Give me names.”
His tone was grim.
“No. Please, Nick. It’s very important to me. I want people to take me seriously. Nobody ever has, not until about three years ago. I don’t want to lose all of that. If we’re going to enter this partnership—”
she emphasized the word “—I need to be self-sufficient.”
His eyes fell to her hand, where she was worrying the ring with her thumb. A line in his jaw relaxed. “Whatever you need to do,”
he said carelessly. “But I’m used to a certain standard of living, and I reserve the right to step in if your self-sufficiency isn’t up to par.”
“Step in to do what?”
she asked suspiciously.
“Mostly throw money at all of your problems until they go away.”
He gave her a sideways smile. “I may have bought you a new wardrobe that reflects your elevated role at the company. I don’t want to see my new Vice President walking around the office with a broken handbag.”
“I suppose you already bought a scandalous wedding dress, too,” said Jay.
“I actually thought you could wear my mother’s.”
He glanced at her. “If you want to.”
“Your father kept it?”
Jay asked incredulously. “I didn’t think he was that sentimental.”
“He wasn’t. I think he forgot about it. Otherwise he would have had it destroyed.”
The cowed waiter came back and asked if they wanted dessert while Jay reeled from that bombshell. Nicholas sent him away impatiently. “Just the check.”
“He was a terrible man,”
Jay said, recognizing the pain in his face. “You’re not him.”
His eyes went to her, hopeful and uncertain. As he pulled out his black Amex, he said, carefully, “Most people say I’m his spitting image.”
“Your coloring, maybe, but the shape of your face is different,”
Jay insisted, though she had believed the same once, when the cruelty on his face had been more apparent. “I always imagined that you must look an awful lot like your mother. She must have been beautiful.”
“She was.”
He folded the leather case closed over his card. “I’ll show you a picture.”
“I would love to see it.”
She put her hand over his. “And I’d love to wear her dress.”
“Good, because I—”
“Jay-Jay. Nick .”
Nicholas went stiff, the expression on his face chilling visibly as Quentin hovered over them, putting his hand on the back of Jay’s side of the booth while the waiter cleared away what remained of their dishes. “How are you both doing tonight? Was everything to your liking? Don’t tell anyone but I sent over a bottle of our best champagne.”
“We noticed.”
Nicholas was wearing a knife-sharp smile that was a pale shadow of its former glory. “How’s your sister, Ho?” he asked casually, handing the folder to the waiter.
As Jay watched Quentin react to Nicholas’s obvious contempt, she had a vivid memory of taking Nicholas to the store as a child. They had been doing their holiday shopping and she had wanted to go alone, but Nick, being his usual bratty self, had appeared out of nowhere just as she was halfway out the door. “Yelena’s not here and my dad says that you’re supposed to watch me.”
She had recognized for the lie it was immediately. Damon had never really told her to do anything. All of his orders had been filtered down through the untrustworthy mouthpiece of her mother, who was about as interested in watching them as she was in anything else.
But Jay had also known that dealing with Nick now would be easier than dealing with Nick later, when he would be bearing a grudge after her return alone.
“All right,”
she’d sighed. “Come on, toad.”
They had gone to a thrift store downtown called Hidden Marvels because Jay wasn’t used to having an allowance and was terrified that it would be taken away if she overspent. “Why aren’t we going to the mall?”
Nick whined. “They have an arcade. This is where old ladies shop.”
“We’re shopping here,”
Jay had said, already annoyed. “Don’t touch anything. If you break it, you have to buy it,” she added, noticing a sign.
“I’m not going to break anything.”
Jay, recognizing the bratty tone, had not been convinced. And when he did break something less than five minutes later, she was not at all surprised. It had been an old glass ornament—blown antique glass. Very expensive-looking and quite possibly irreplaceable.
Before Jay could get in an “I told you so”
or reluctantly reach for her wallet, the bratty little twelve-year-old that was her stepbrother had reached for a tiny leather wallet she didn’t even know he had, and handed the startled clerk three twenties. “A little extra for your trouble,” he said, in what was clearly a stiff approximation of his father, and Jay remembered staring at him with a stunned sort of awe, thinking, Just who the hell does this kid think he is?
Even dressed in deliberately casual disarray while surrounded by all of Hollybrook’s finest social climbers, it was clear who held the power here. Quentin’s suit might have cost the same on the rock, but the fact that Nicholas wore his so carelessly suggested a level of comfort that added to, rather than detracted from, his arrogance.
The difference between the Nick sitting across from her and the Nick from sixteen years ago was that this one knew exactly who he thought he was—and now, she did, too.
“Courtney’s great,”
Quentin said, seemingly oblivious to the fact that he’d already lost this game of social calculus before it had even begun. “She’s a doctor now. Married.”
“Are you married?”
Quentin’s face became unreadable. “No.”
Turning to Jay, his smile gained some fresh wattage. “Jay-Jay, how are you? I meant to reach out after we talked at Just Avocados but you must have changed your number. I was hoping we could catch up. Shoot the shit, spill the tea—just like we did during the good old days.”
Did you , Jay thought humorlessly, aware of Nicholas’s gaze. Picking up her champagne glass, she studied the legs of the wine, the fine spray of bubbles. It had obviously been very expensive.
“I didn’t think we had much left to discuss,”
she said. “You made yourself very clear.”
Nicholas smiled.
The corners of Quentin’s mouth turned down even as he somehow maintained his professional smile. “It’s been years, Jay. Can’t we forgive and forget? You never used to stay mad at me.”
“I’m sorry, Quentin. I’m not the girl I was in high school.”
“Did you want something, Ho? Or are we done here?”
Resigned, Quentin faced Nicholas without much enthusiasm. “Michael wanted me to pass on his thanks if I saw you. He wanted you to know that the development is going well. Everything is signed off and ready to build.”
“I’m more interested in him holding up his side of our bargain than I am in platitudes.”
He smiled but it didn’t reach his eyes. “Thanks for the wine.”
Quentin’s smile was now visibly forced. “With my compliments. Thanks for patronizing the Bayview.”
“I thought you liked him,”
Nicholas murmured, as Quentin walked away.
“I used to. What was that about? What bargain do you have with Michael?”
“Just a little business deal. Nothing for you to worry about. Our fathers used to do business together and he wanted it to be just like old times.”
He arched his brows at her continued silence, not even bothering to hide his obvious glee. “Wasn’t he one of your simps?”
“Quentin? Or Michael?”
Jay drained her champagne, the decadence of the waste thrilling her a little in the wake of her sudden adrenaline rush. “I’m not the pushover everyone thinks I am, you know. He can’t buy my forgiveness with a drink.”
“And to think you used to care so much about what they thought of you.”
His eyes were hotly admiring as he studied her over the delicate glass that looked like it might snap in his fingers. Nearly twenty years later, Jay thought, and he was still the small boy who gloried in the delights his own destruction wrought. “I could ruin him, you know. With a single phone call.”
Jay’s eyes snapped to his. “What do you mean, ruin him?”
“I mean, I can make all this—”
he snapped his fingers. “Gone.”
Jay backed up against the booth. “Y-you can do that?”
He leaned forward, his dress jacket creaking as he braced one hand near her thigh. “Why don’t you ask me and find out for yourself?”
Her throat tightened as she thought of herself nine years ago, terrified and desperate, and Quentin’s dismissive “sorry, babe”
while lying through his teeth.
Do it , a voice whispered.
A chill slithered down her spine at the look of seductive menace on his handsome face and she set down her glass with more force than necessary. “N-no,”
she said uneasily. “Just take me home . . . please.”
Nicholas nodded, like he’d expected nothing less, tucking the tip beneath his plate. They walked past the still-hovering Quentin and out into the cold night.
Jay could hear the roar of the ocean in the distance and it reminded her of her youth with the stinging salience of salt in a wound. No matter how hard she railed against it, this place belonged to her as much as her own weary bones did, and she could not unknow the taste of those dark waters any more than she could the bitterness of citrus on a man’s clean skin.
She wondered if Quentin knew how close he had come to ruin.
“Would you really have destroyed this hotel if I’d said yes?”
His lips curled into a small, private smile. “I guess you’ll never find out with that soft heart of yours.”
As they headed down the path that would take them back to the car, Jay impulsively tugged on Nicholas’s sleeve, nudging him down a side path. He followed her gamely towards the beach as she stumbled a little over the rocky shore. There was no one else there. It was off-season for bonfires and all the hotel guests would have been safely ensconced in the warm cells of their lamplit rooms, but as they got closer to the shoreline Jay could see the charred remains of old bonfires from last season, made out of circles of driftwood and cold pockets of ash.
“What are you doing?”
Nicholas asked in a bemused tone, as she shivered in her thin, low-cut dress, holding the hem down with one hand as she felt her way across the sand in the dark. “I thought you wanted to go home.”
He didn’t sound at all annoyed but she still felt compelled to explain. “I just needed to get out of there. Look at that—”
She pointed to the moon’s reflection, scattered over the swells like glinting pieces of broken mirror. “That’s a million-dollar view.”
Following her finger, he said, “That’s waterfront, blue jay. It’s closer to ten million.”
“Oh, who cares what it costs ? It doesn’t always have to be about the money.”
Jay hopped over a log, nearly losing her shoe when it got sucked into the wet sand. “We used to come out here back in high school. To this exact beach. We’d just bum around the sand all day, and then someone would get food and drinks and we’d sit around the fire and talk about all the things we wanted to be when we grew up. As if we had a choice,” she said, some of the bitterness seeping out.
Nicholas nudged a charred piece of wood with the tip of his brogue. Something in the detritus seemed to catch his attention because he stooped down to pick up what appeared to be a small white stone. He rolled it in his fingers, testing its shape. “What did you say?”
“Nothing, usually.”
She folded her arms tighter as she watched his hand. “They all said they wanted to leave here. I did, too. But talking about it like that made me realize that when everything was over, I’d be all alone. And then I was the only one who did leave and I was alone.”
She took a few unsteady steps to the side as the wind whipped her dress around her legs.
“Isn’t that sad, Nick? I was surrounded by people but I was always alone. I didn’t know how to be with people because I pushed everyone away. I was afraid they’d leave me as soon as I stopped being enough . And they let me do it. They let me push them away and they never asked if that was what I really wanted. Except for you. But there was always a cost with you.”
“Welcome to the world of business, darling.”
The words were mocking but his tone was achingly gentle. He kicked sand over the ashes. “I tried to tell you it was a fuck or get-fucked world.”
“Were you even happy? You were trapped in that house, too.”
“You’re the one who left,”
he pointed out.
“And you’re the one who stayed. You got everything you wanted.”
“We both know that that’s not true.”
He moved closer and she stopped breathing as the static tension between them heightened until it was like a touch she could feel against her skin.
“You were like a dreamer living in a fairytale. You thought there was goodness in restraint. But there isn’t.”
He straightened, the fabric of his jacket rippling. “When you feed your dreams to the bonfire, you just end up with a pile of cold dead ashes and a whole lot of nothing.”
Jay laughed humorlessly. “Says the boy who thinks he can buy his way out of trouble with a fistful of twenties.”
“Oh, blue jay. Don’t tell me you dragged me out here just to be sad.”
She shivered again and he shrugged out of his dinner jacket. It was the one he’d promised her he would look good in—truthfully, as it turned out. The fabric was still warm from his body when he draped it around her shoulders. “You should tell me your dreams instead. If you do it nicely enough,” he pressed his wind-chilled lips to her cheek, “I might even make them all come true.”
“You never answered my question,”
said Jay. “Were you happy, Nick?”
“No.”
Heedless of the fine weave of his trousers, he dropped down on one of the half-rotted logs facing the water. It was low enough that his legs bowed comically, nearly level with his chest. “I wasn’t happy.”
Mindful of the fabric riding high on her thighs, Jay sat down beside him. He immediately put his arm around her waist, stretching his legs out closer to the silent fire as he stared out at the silvery sea. Jay extended her leg, and knocked the tip of her heel against his leather brogue.
“I wasn’t, either.”
His hand rubbed up and down her back.
“I know.”
As they sat, breathing in the silence, she felt his hand cover hers. The dim lights of the Bayview blurred in the distance as she felt his fingers pry open her palm. The light graze of his nails sent a pulse of heat to her fingertips as he pressed something smooth and warm into her hand.
“You were looking for one of these, I think.”
The white object Nicholas picked up hadn’t been a stone at all. It was a sand dollar.
She looked up at him in surprise. He was staring at her.
“I’m only happy when I’m with you,”
he told her solemnly.
Jay ran a hand through his thick hair, curving her fingers to cradle his scalp. “I had a similar thought recently.”
She pulled him closer. “Right before you cockblocked me on your sofa.”
“Sounds like something I would do.”
“Dick,” said Jay.
And with the wind tangling in their hair, and the faint scent of the dead fires mixing with the salt of the sea spray, she closed the distance and kissed him beneath that brilliant moon.
The sand dollar went on her desk, next to her favorite mug and a chipped geode that was too broken to be part of her main collection but she also couldn’t bear to throw away because the thought of all those crystals glinting dully in a landfill made her went to cry.
She rattled the sand dollar unthinkingly sometimes while reading her emails, until she caught Annica giving her a dirty look. Then she shut it away in her drawer.
As she put together spreadsheets and pulled data, she found herself thinking of Nick.
Nick and his hands. Nick and his faint aura of menace. Nick and his devastating words.
(I’m only happy when I’m with you)
Another email had gone out that morning that Nicholas would not be interviewing candidates for the VP position, after all. Arthur would be carrying out the interviews alone.
“I’m trying to minimize the potential for conflict of interest,”
he had told her privately in the car that morning. “When you get the role, I don’t want anyone saying we didn’t do this properly.”
“If I get the role,”
she corrected him gently.
“Right.”
He winked and tweaked her nose.
Some people were disappointed. They had been hoping for a chance to hobnob with the CEO. But according to the chatter, this wasn’t unusual. Nicholas often cancelled redundant meetings and he didn’t manage people as closely as Arthur did. Numbers and fine details were his domain, and when it came to facts, he was like a fine-tuned machine.
Jay got up for her interview stiffly, feeling very self-conscious. She had dressed in eyelet lace and her favorite A-line skirt, not wanting to be too obvious. Someone had asked, “Is Jay applying for the role?”
while not entirely out of earshot and the other person had responded, “No, that’s just Mr. Hartwell’s secretary. She’s just here to take notes.”
It was only with supreme effort that she was able to walk through the room with her shoulders relaxed and her steps unfaltering. She was an administrative assistant, not a secretary. She had gotten a certification for her work and she did her work well .
No more tossing my dreams into the flames , she told herself.
As she passed Nicholas’s desk, he looked up from his computer and winked.
Her face was warm when she opened the door to the office where Arthur was waiting. He’d gotten a new desk chair, one of the ergonomic ones that looked like it belonged behind the console of a spaceship. “Hello, Jay.”
He leaned back comfortably. “I hear congratulations are in order.”
Her mind blanked out. “For what?”
His tawny eyebrows lifted and for a moment she thought—perversely—that all of this interviewing had just been a farce. That despite her repeated insistence that she wanted to do this her way, Nicholas had found a means of just giving her the position.
But Arthur was nodding at her hand.
Her left hand.
The ring .
Oh my god. Heat suffused her face as all of the shock and anger abruptly swirled out of her like colors down a drain. “I—yes. Nick and I . . . we—”
“I only meant to congratulate you,”
Arthur said quickly. “Not put you on the spot.”
Jay blushed. His tone was one of someone assuring another person that their mistake wasn’t really that bad. “We’re only stepsiblings. And we didn’t really grow up together—”
“You don’t have to explain. Nicholas told me earlier.”
Arthur looked as uncomfortable as she felt. “It’s why he isn’t interviewing. He didn’t think it would be seemly under the current circumstances.”
Current circumstances. Seemly . A hysterical laugh threatened to burst from her lips at the thought of Nicholas using such uptight language.
“It’s all right. You can say it. It’s distasteful. People are going to talk.”
His face softened immediately and he moved towards her as if he wanted to touch her before visibly changing his mind. His hand hovered a moment before falling to his side. “I wouldn’t say that,”
he said gently. “It’s very obvious how much he cares about you.”
Was it? Jay gave him a timorous smile. “You’d be one of the rare few, then.”
Arthur gazed thoughtfully out the window. “He never struck me as a particularly happy man. I don’t think I even really saw him laugh until you arrived. But now he does.”
His eyes flicked to her. “I assume, because of you.”
(when I’m with you)
“Yeah,”
Jay said faintly. “He did say something like that.”
The silence stretched and Jay shuffled her feet, wondering why her skin felt too tight on her bones. “Anyway,”
Arthur said, so loudly that both of them winced. “Let’s get on with things, shall we? You have an interview with me today, Ms. Varens. So why don’t you go ahead and take your seat, and we can start by having you tell me some of your strengths and weaknesses . . .”