Bang. Bang. Bang. Those knocks sound mean.
I scuttle further underneath the table, curling my knees to my chest. I imagine the glass shattering, the man barging his way through. Should I scream for Garth or just pretend not to be here?
Garth makes the decision for me. His hefty boots pound their way across the store, and the lock clicks, the door jangles, and the stalker is met with my intimidating bodyguard. That should deter him.
“Where’s Lily? I’ve been trying to call her.” The voice is calm, smooth, familiar and so very very unthreatening.
“I’m right here!” I crawl out from under the booth and dust the cobwebs off my kneecaps. Connor raises his eyebrows, as if he knows exactly what I was doing under there.
Garth must be confused because he (truly) says, “What were you doing under there?”
“I thought I saw a…rat,” I say quickly, “so I was inspecting the area to lay some traps later.” Before they can foil my lie, I turn to Connor. “What brings you to S&S?” I really should not try to shorten the name because every time I say it, I immediately think of S&M. My mind has dangerous side roads.
“Lo wants me to look over a contract. He said he left it in his office.” He gazes at me with a little more concern than I appreciate from Connor Cobalt. I like his self-satisfaction much better.
“Okay, I’ll bring you back there.” I add to Garth, “Can you stay here? Watch the door?” I try to smother the worry in my voice, but I fear I’m not doing a good job.
“Of course.”
In Lo’s office, I flick on the lights, and Connor targets the file folder on the desk. I find my dinky flip phone and scroll through all the missed calls from Connor.
“So who did you think I was?” Connor asks as he opens the file and sinks into the leather chair.
“What?”
“This is a new building. I don’t think rats have moved in yet. So obviously you were hiding from whoever you thought was at the door.” He’s too astute for his own good, and I’m sure he already knows the answer to his own question.
I pick up a Black Widow action figure on Lo’s bookshelf. “I wish I was Rose,” I say softly.
“Why is that?” She wouldn’t be so scared.
“She’d handle this better than me. She doesn’t even have a bodyguard.” I want that kind of confidence, but I just don’t think it’s something a twenty-year-old can learn. I’m too late.
“There’s a difference between courage and pride. Believe me, I’d sleep better at night knowing she had a bodyguard.”
“She is alone a lot,” I say. How can she not be brave? She’s willing to face the swarming paparazzi and media-hungry press by herself every day.
“Yes, but that girl would rather carry her own Taser than let someone else defend her, all to prove a point. So when she meets an adversary twice her size and in a much larger quantity, she’s going to realize that some battles are best fought with a sidekick.”
“Oh,” I say, finally understanding, thanks to his superhero analogy. My sister is not a team player. She’d rather do things on her own.
“While my talents are immeasurable, I don’t have the power to save her from halfway across the city,” Connor says. “And our relationship is a bit different from yours.”
“That’s an understatement, I think.”
He smiles. “Yes, it is.” He closes the folder. “What I mean to say is that I’m trying not to be afraid for her. Since we were teenagers, she has always looked to me for reassurance, even if she won’t admit it. I’m her…rock.” He stares off as he finds the right words. “The…unwavering thing. Confident, poised, unrelenting and annoyingly persuasive. If she sees that I’m frightened, she’ll gloat on the outside, as though I lost a round of chess, but internally she’ll begin to question herself. And I don’t particularly like when Rose loses her confidence and becomes less self-assured. She’s more vulnerable, and it breaks my heart.”
This is brand new honesty for Connor Cobalt, no insults hidden beneath the words. It’s just…the truth, from the soul. I kind of like it.
“Do you love her?” I ask, returning the action figure and taking a seat on the couch.
He flips the folder back open and reads the contract in his brisk, super-human manner, turning the page faster than I can read a magazine on a toilet. “Love is irrelative to some.” He dodges my question with a strange answer. As he concentrates on the contract, he begins closing the door on his brief openness.
I squint at him as I realize something else. “How come you don’t say wicked anymore?”
He briefly tears his eyes from the papers. “What are you talking about?”
“You used to say ‘wicked smart’ and ‘wicked cool.’ It was my favorite thing about you.” His lingo has changed since I first met him. Not completely though. I mean, when we run into someone he knows, he’ll sometimes throw out a ‘hey, bro.’
His lips rise. “I usually dumb down around the intellectually deficient so I don’t come off like a complete prick.” I think he just called me stupid. “But I see you as a true friend, so I’ve backed off some of the pretenses. Most people wouldn’t be able to stand all of me.”
“Can Rose?” I ask, still trying to process everything he’s saying.
His lips just lift higher. I suddenly come to the conclusion that I won’t ever know what Connor Cobalt really sounds like in his head—what words he finds abhorrent, what he thinks of certain situations, his real honest reactions that aren’t half-insults and half-something a little nicer. Maybe Rose already knows him. Or maybe she’s just as clueless as the rest of us.
I stick to a safe subject. “So next semester, you’ll be at Wharton and Rose will be in New York.” They both graduated from college in May (along with Ryke), and we threw a small celebration for all of them a couple weeks ago.
Connor’s dream came true—an acceptance to Penn’s prestigious Wharton School of Business for his MBA. Rose always scoffed at grad school. She thinks it’s just a piece of paper to brag over, at least for someone who’s an heir to a fortune. So she’ll spend her time at the Calloway Couture office in New York City, commuting from Princeton, New Jersey.
“That’s the plan,” Connor says.
I’m worried for them, and I know neither Rose nor Connor would appreciate my concern. But long distance relationships are difficult, and I can see all the drives back and forth not being worth the trouble—especially if Rose continues to struggle with her intimacy issues. She conquered sleeping in the same bed as Connor during Cancun, but she has yet to make the leap to sex.
I want her to find love and the fireworks, but nothing I do or say will change her problems. I’m just her little sister, and a broken one in her eyes.
Connor’s gaze falls to the floor where a comic book is splayed—the page opened to a pair of giant nak*d boobs and an erect penis. “Lily.”
“I wasn’t looking at it!” I defend. “I mean, I was, but then I wasn’t.” I grimace. How can speaking be this hard? I take a deep breath and realign my thoughts. “I was flipping through it and then when I came upon the…” I frown. “…gen**als. It burned my eyes and magically flung from my hands.”
“I’ll forgive you for the hyperboles if you’re telling the truth.”
“I am! Cross my heart.” I start drawing crosses over my heart with my finger, but then I get confused. “Am I supposed to draw Jesus crosses or X’s?”
“Sometimes I wonder if we speak the same language.”
“X’s,” I say with a nod, ignoring his slight. “Definitely X’s.”
He returns to the contract, and I sidle to the window, peeking through the blinds to check for paparazzi or sketchy men lurking on the side street.
I don’t know how to vanquish this fear. I have an overwhelming desire to hide in the bathroom and masturbate my anxiety away. But I want to feel like I did in Cancun. Safe and not so crazy compulsive. I yearn for that stasis again.
My new therapist doesn’t seem equipped to help me, and I can just imagine his methods to combat this fear, a monster-sized shock machine in hand. So I refuse to share my anxieties with him.
But I won’t drown in self-love either. I’m going to try something new, and just wade in my unease until I figure out how to handle the close scrutiny and media properly. Until I figure out how to breathe again.
{ 47 }
LOREN HALE
I feel like a creep.
Sitting in my rental car for an hour and staring at the same four-story brick house. The lawn has newly mowed lines, a sign poking from the grass: McAdams Middle Honor Student.
Maine carries a breeze that beckons people outdoors, but I’m still rooted to the seat, my joints frozen solid. My biggest fear is staying in this damn sedan, coming this far and not mustering the courage to walk up the driveway.
I can smash a bottle of liquor on another guy’s door, but I can’t put one foot in front of the other to say hi to a woman. There’s irony somewhere in that. And maybe if I wasn’t scared out of my f**king mind, I’d laugh.
I rub my neck that gathers with nervous heat. I should have brought Ryke and Lily like I originally planned. When I told Lily I was looking into meeting my mother, she was nothing but supportive. They both wanted to come.
But I ended up only buying one plane ticket.
I have to do this on my own.
No one has entered or exited the house. From the outside it resembles a normal middleclass family home. It’s what I could have had. Normal.
I let out a long breath and run my hands through my hair. Just go. Just get it over with, you f**king bastard.
Before I can process what I’m doing, I climb from the car and reach the mailbox. I breathe like I’m in the middle of a five mile jog. Inhale. Exhale. One…two…three. But I’m not sprinting. I’m not running. I’m barely walking.
My worn sneakers land on the front stoop. My legs weigh me down. My shoes, however ugly, are filled with lead.
I raise my fist to the door, falter and drop my hand to my side. Come on. Do it. I’ve replayed conversations in my head, thinking about this moment for years. Come on, Loren. Grow the f**k up.
Inhale. Exhale.
One…two…
I ring the doorbell.
The door opens. And my mind goes blank.
A woman stares at me with an identical stunned and stupefied expression. I never called her, never warned her about this meeting. I was too scared that she’d shut me down. I just wanted to see her face, hear her voice, all at the same time.
She’s young, not even forty. I search her features: slender nose, thin lips, and shiny brown hair. I suddenly realize I’m looking for me in her.
“I’m—”
“I know who you are.” Her voice is velvet, the kind you can close your eyes and fall asleep to. I bet she reads her kids bedtime stories. The thought knots my stomach. “I’ve seen you on the news.”