“You needed to avoid being hauled in for questioning by the cops,” Cooper finishes for him.
“That, too. Look, so I slept with ’em—”
I can stand it no longer. Really. I feel sick—and not just because of all the Indian food we’d eaten in the car on the way over, either.
No, this isn’t just indigestion. It’s disgust.
“Don’t act like it’s no big deal, Chris,” I say. “Your sleeping with those girls, then not calling them again. Not even telling them your real name in order to keep them from knowing who your father is. Because it is a big deal. Or it was, to them. You used them. You used them because you know you…you know you’ve got…well, performance inadequacies.”
“What?” Chris looks shocked. “I do not!”
“Of course you do,” I say, knowing I sound like Sarah, and not caring. “Why else were you looking for girls who don’t have any sexual experience—until Hope here—so they don’t have anything to measure your performance by?”
Chris looks as stunned as if I’d hit him.
And maybe, in a way, I have.
Cooper tugs on my sleeve and whispers, “Whoa, tiger. Simmer down. Let’s not get our roles here confused. I’m the bad cop. You’re the good one.”
Then, patting me gently on the back—the way I pat Indy when I want him to calm down—Cooper says to a red-faced Chris, “Listen, nobody’s accusing you of murdering anybody. What we want to know about is your relationship with Rachel Walcott.”
“Why?” Chris is over being scared, and back to being surly. My remark about performance inadequacies has upset him. Undoubtedly because it’s true.
Chris strides past Cooper, heading for the pool. “What about it?”
“Was there one?” Cooper wants to know.
“A relationship?” Dropping the towel, Chris climbs onto the diving board. A second later, he’s sprung into the pool, hardly making a splash as his long, lean body arcs through the water. He swims up to the side of the pool we’re standing on, then surfaces, seeming to have had a change of heart under water.
“All right,” he says. “I’ll tell you everything I know.”
27
She told me
She thinks you’re fine
She told me
It’s just a matter of time
She told me
She’ll get you someday
But I told her
Not if I have something to say
’Cause you’re
My kind of guy
Yes, you’re
My kind of guy
My friends tell me I’m high
But you’re just
My kind of guy
“My Kind of Guy”
Performed by Heather Wells
Composed by Dietz/Ryder
From the album Summer
Cartwright Records
“Okay,” Chris says, through chattering teeth. “Okay. So I slept with her for a few months. It’s not like I asked her to marry me, or anything. But she went fucking psycho on me, okay? I thought she was going to cut my balls off.”
I scoop up Chris’s towel and drape it over his shivering shoulders. He doesn’t seem to notice. He’s on a roll. He’s climbed from the pool and has started walking toward the house, Cooper and Lucy and I following behind, like an entourage after…
Well, some famous rock star.
“It started my junior year,” Chris says. Now that he’s started talking, it’s like he can’t stop. Or even slow down. You have to admire Cooper’s technique. Not hitting the guy had done the trick. “A bunch of guys and I got in trouble for smoking pot in the dorm, you know, and we had to go see the dorm director—Rachel—for sanctioning. We all thought we were gonna get kicked outta school. So some of the guys, they were like, ‘Chris, put the moves on her,’ ’cause, I dunno, I was a little older than they were, and I had this reputation with the girls, you know?”
I envision Rachel—in her Manolo Blahniks and tailored Armani—being hit on by this smooth-talking, golden-haired Adonis. No, he isn’t the suave businessman she’d been hoping to attract with her rock-hard glutes and blown-out hair.
But he has to have been the closest thing she was likely to get to it in Richmond, Indiana.
“Anyway, she let us off. For the pot-smoking thing, you know? Said it would be our little secret.” There’s a smirk in Chris’s voice. But it isn’t a happy smirk. “At first I thought it was because of whom my father is. But then we started running into each other in the cafeteria and stuff. More like—well, she’d run into me, you know? And the guys were like, ‘Go for it, man. You start going with the dorm director, we can get away with anything we want.’ And I had nothing else going on, you know, lady-wise, so I figured, ‘Why not?’ And one thing led to another, and then, well, we were an item, I guess.”
He ducks under an archway, and we follow, through an open sliding glass door and into a dimly lit, sunken living room, where the primary decorating theme appears to be black leather. The couches are black leather. The ottomans are black leather. Even the mantel appears to be encased in black leather.
But surely not. I mean, wouldn’t that catch on fire?
“Turns out, I was her first,” Chris explains, going to the mantel and twisting a dial. Suddenly the room is bathed in an unearthly pink light. If I hadn’t known better, I’d have thought we’d walked into a bordello. Or maybe one of those oxygen bars in SoHo. “She wasn’t always as…put together as she looks now. She was actually kinda…well, when I knew her, back in Richmond, Rachel was kinda fat.”
I blink at him. “What?”
Cooper throws me a warning glance. Chris is on a roll, and Cooper doesn’t want me interrupting.
“You know.” He shrugs. “She was fat. Well, not fat, really. But like…chubby. And she wore sweats all the time. I don’t know what happened to her, you know, between now and then, but she slimmed down, majorly, and got, I don’t know, like a makeover, or something. Because back then…I don’t know.”
“Wait.” I am having trouble processing this. “Rachel was fat?”
“Yeah.” He shrugs. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe there is less…pressure being with someone who doesn’t have anyone else to measure you by. There was definitely something—I dunno—exciting about being with this older chick who was so smart in some ways, and so dumb in others…”