“Later.” And fuck me if this scotch isn’t going down particularly well tonight. I have another, and another, and another. I sink so much scotch down my throat that the burn ebbs into a dull ache. The amber darkens to a color of mud and muck and all things wretched. Isaac’s eyes meet mine across the table, flinty and furious. I lift my glass to him in silent salute, while I lean into my neighbor and whisper words I’ll regret until my dying day. Words that buck and roil in my stomach when they should be drowned by the acid and simmered into an angry place so deep they can never escape. But no, I lean in and whisper to him, my breath as potent as his, since he’s been matching me drink for drink. “I’ve seen you looking at her. She’s yours if you want her. And in that dress, I bet she’s both naked and dripping underneath those scraps. Go on, test her out. You know you want to. Sabrina Broe, rhymes with hoe.”
In a flash he’s spinning in his chair, half leaning, half tipping. His arm stretches toward the twist just above Bri’s navel. She’s naked underneath. I know because I fucked her deep and raw before she dressed and watched her struggle with different combinations of skimpy underwear before giving up entirely. Her plaintive eyes begged me to choose another gown or leave her in the room. Mine flashed back at her pooling ones, daring her to decide and spare me from doing it myself. The decision that Trystan should have made years ago but nevermade. That’s because quitting is for the weak. Like poverty and obesity, and homosexuality, right, Dad? Sabrina didn’t quit; she lifted her chin with a defiance I’d underestimated. How very apt that this steely backbone reveals itself just before we hit a makeshift casino. Today will go down in the annals of history as a day of revelations.
His lecherous sneer joins Bri’s shriek of protest as he fists the fabric and snaps it clean in two. Ribbons of scarlet flutter to the floor like tears of blood, leaving her naked and humiliated. Her tiny, inadequate hands flare to cover herself while her heels struggle for purchase on the carpet. In the next instant, she’s tumbling backward while he looms over her. His potent breath comes in rapid pants while she struggles to cover herself and slide backward out of his grasp. The next actions meld into a cacophony and furious movement. A dinner jacket is hurriedly removed and thrown over the stricken woman. An arm at her elbow, aiding her to stand and adjust the jacket around her shoulders to hide her breasts and exposed pussy from view, a hand at the neck of her assailant, thrusting him toward an ornate fireplace, and a balled fist cracking into the side of my face. Men are shouting; chips clatter as they fall from assembled stacks only to tumble onto the felt below. Voices raise in pitch and volume, and the whisper of coated cards sliding against each other as men stand from seated positions, erupting in meshed fury. I did this. I brought down the house of cards so meticulously crafted over months and months of careful attention, just as my mother and father had commandeered that chessboard thirty years ago. I’m no better than the sum of their vile, shameful actions. I’m worse. So much fucking worse.
Iused to find it odd when witnesses were interviewed about an event and all saw the same thing unfold, all with differing recall and detail. So, you are saying the blue sedan struck the red truck; is that how it happened? Yes, sir. While another would insist the truck was at fault, only the truck wasn’t red; it was silver. Everyone present, the same scene unfolding at high speed before their eyes, and their brains pulled on threads it considered important. Where some will focus on the collision, who had the right of way, or who ran a light, others hone in on the damage and any injuries that might need tending to. There is sometimes a person who focuses on the irrelevant details happening at the periphery prior to the event. Who was standing at the curb waiting to cross the road? What were they wearing? Did they have any part to play when the truck struck the car, or vice versa, if the first witness is to be believed? Only time and a thorough investigation help eke the important from the irrelevant and the facts from the fiction. The truck and car collided because the pedestrian in the red dress stepped off the curb and into the path of both.
By the time I drag a bloodied Mason to his feet, Sabrina and my jacket are both gone. He remains belligerent and unapologetic, both to me and a seething Isaac Grenfer standing next to his father, Abe. Abe sat by the bar for most of the evening, content to sip soda water and avoid the spotlight shining on multiple beacons of industry in the room.Billionaires, network executives, tech squillionaires whose brilliant minds and nurtured visions gave us hardware, software, and the cell phones we thrive on for our hourly dopamine hits from social media acceptance as some quirky precursor to relevance. Abe wanted to meet with Mason, Bri, and I during the next intermission to ink the deal he’d hoped would be as fruitful as his television career. He came to the event pen in hand to sign in Mason’s presence. Zac had beguiled his father with relatable stories of tin can potlucks and a woman who worked incredibly hard to make life better for those around her. A woman who had a sound sense of family and faith, who pointed the spotlight toward her colleagues at Mercer Media at the expense of her own praise. Sabrina Broe was a distinct juxtaposition to Juliette Nasta-Vrees and Fenkels. Isaac was uncomfortable with Jules’s constant flirting and touching. He had found the woman difficult to work with, dismissive of those around her, and her social media outbursts and posts were divisive and acerbic. As such, both Grenfers thought it wiser to bypass Fenkels altogether, committing the pilot and spin-off programs to Mercer Media and subsidiary companies only. Abe was a principled man; hell, they both were. They wouldn’t turn a blind eye to Seth Fenkel’s open-secret adultery or Juliette’s barely veiled bigotry and blatant social climbing. Should Mercer cut Fenkel from the deal and allow Bri and I to oversee the burgeoning relationship, then Abe would produce his own bespoke ballpoint and seal any adjusted deal. Now that deal, months of work and research, was shot to shit. Not only that, but Mason has also destroyed Sabrina in the most humiliating, public way. Fuck, FUCK!
Our elevator car lands on the level for the suite, Mason’s breathing has returned to a somewhat normal, clunky rasp. His nose is broken. It doesn’t look as bad as mine did fifteen years ago, but it’s still a mess. Expelled air whistles in short clips asthe interrupted passages protest their new directions. Blood pools onto his crisp shirt in heavy droplets, thick and pungent. They spread across his chest before disappearing under the coal black of his vest and hidden from view. If only life’s metaphorical blood spatter was so easy to hide.
I’m angry. No, I’m fucking furious, with him and myself. To a nuclear level I don’t think I’ve experienced before. Not when Mason punched me or rejected me. “Do you know what Zac and Bri were looking at on his phone this afternoon? What was so outrageously inappropriate and tipped you from soulless husk to raging ogre?” A callous laugh bubbles up my throat and escapes across my tongue. “You want to know if all this was worth it?”
Mason remains propped against the wall while I pat down my vest and realize the key is missing. I don’t have it. It was in my jacket pocket. Fuck. I approach the nearest security and demand a card sent up urgently, while Mason continues to smear deep red lines against the patterned paper where he leans.
“What?” His head lolls to the side, studying me. His eyes, usually as pristine as the rest of him, are a mass of broken capillaries, the delicate skin under each now darkening in the first stages of mottled bruising.
“Bri’s gran, the one in and out of hospital. Uta, I’m pretty sure her name is?”
His shoulders shrug almost robotically. He either doesn’t remember, or that punch to his face has rattled him more than he’s letting on.
“Abe arrived this afternoon and recorded a video message. Not audio, a video, and in it he said how much he was looking forward to meeting Uta if she was anything like her lovely granddaughter. He invited her to come sit in the studio when the first episode is recorded. A video and invitation from AbeGrenfer, and here you are instigating a dick-measuring contest with a guy you are supposed to be working with. What the fuck is wrong with you?”
“Everything.” His head continues to roll from side to side against the wall. Blood drops sway and splatter like a sprinkler. A new keycard is pressed into my palm, and I hold it to the reader, leaning on the door as the light changes from red to green. I usher Mason inside and close the door behind us as concerned security fall into place on the other side of it. With the lights flicked on, the first thing I notice is the phone, face up on the end table beyond the sitting area and bedrooms. Her phone. When Mason staggers over to it, I jog down the hallway and throw the door to the second bedroom open. The bed is turned down, the room showing no sign of the storm that may or may not have rolled in. It’s when I glance into the wardrobe, to the space where her bag would have been, and no sign of her sketch pad, the bulky item she insists on carrying everywhere with her, that the true extent of the post-tempest damage is clear. Sabrina is gone, and she’s not coming back.
As we approach Onyx One,my heartbeat quickens. “I’ll drop you out front. You go up and look for her while I park. Now that she’s without her phone, we have no way of knowing where she is. Mas, I think the last place she wants to be is anywhere near you, but it’s worth a try, right?”
“What do I say to her? This is all my fault. Fuck!” His throat moves on a swallow that’s difficult. The muscles of his neck bulge as he moves. Whatever he’s struggling with, he manufactured himself.
“Itisyour fault. You created some ridiculous notion that she was cheating on you and leveled up, or down, moreaccurately, into a place of brutal horror that I never thought you capable of. What I saw last night, Mason, was something I’d expect Michael, Mitch, or Magnus to do, but not you.And never to Sabrina. Everything you asked of her, she did for you. She never faltered, not once. The accusation of cheating alone would be hurtful, but you didn’t cross a line, you erased it. I pray to anything and everything out there that you haven’t just erased her from our lives, asshole.”
He scrubs his jaw with a palm and winces. Yeah, that’s got to hurt too. “Be honest.Apologize. Fuck man, tell her how you feel because you may never get another chance. Go, Go!”
The soft click of the lock disengaging on the front door signals the guillotine readying to fall. After a night from hell, a very public sexual assault, and hours-long wait at the terminal for a commercial flight home, I’m beyond exhausted. All the breath freezes in my lungs as Mason drops his bag to the floor with athunkand begins tentative steps along the corridor.
Exactly as my heels had done all those months ago on the marble of the foyer floor. Click, clack, click.
I’m frozen in place, the strap of my portfolio anchored to my shoulder as his steps continue toward the kitchen where he sighs before opening a cupboard and filling what I presume is a glass with filtered water. Either he or Trystan must have instructed the jet to come straight home. I left my phone and everything else in the Charlotte hotel suite. I only took a tiny bag of necessary casual clothing, some shoes, and my portfolio after shrugging out of the dinner jacket I’d fled the room in.
Fuck. Taking his momentary distraction as an opportunity, I tiptoe as silently as possible to the studio door. I am almost through the doorway and into the hall, miscalculating my turning circle, and a box of graphite crashes to the floor from its resting place on another easel.
“Bri?”
My feet move toward the front door, and the bulkyportfolio swings into the wall, offering another audible thump. “Shit,” I hiss quietly, but not quietly enough.
“Sabrina?” He’s at my side in a moment. A flash of movement and he just teleported from sipping water to simpering fool. His face is swollen and kissed by purple and gray tints. Not today, Satan. “Sabrina. Please. I’m sorr?—”
“No! Don’t you dare touch me.”
“No?” Those muscular shoulders plummet. A man so assured and confident, now uncertain.
“You do not get to shove some half-assed apology at me like that. No, you do not.” Rage vibrates within me, a furious, roiling energy I want to hurl toward him like a lancet. Fucking prick.
“I am sorry,” he pleads; it’s almost a wail. He sounds like Juliette Nasta-Vrees with that nasal twang. Ha! To think how relieved I was when Zac and Abe Grenfer said they’d ink the deal if she and Fenkel weren’t in it. Zac hadn’t felt comfortable with them as a company, and Juliette’s constant touching and suggestive references went beyond praise. It was aggressive, sexual, predatory, and when she’d commented that she would stop at nothing to secure a deal, he knew she was literal with her intent. Like me, Zac and Abe had thought their days of being bullied were over. “I don’t care if you are or not, Mason. It’s irrelevant.”
“What are you taking?” His eyes drop to the items cradled in my arms. The only barrier between us. It’s not enough.
“Only my art supplies. Everything I brought here. Sketch pages and graphite sticks, kneaded erasers and blending sponges. Items that mean nothing to you. I don’t want a single thing you gave me. The cuff is on the bench by the dressing mirror in the wardrobe. I don’t want it. I don’t want any of it.”
