Rudeness would have been at least some recognition that Piper was a human. He was not a guest that night, he was the furniture.
Houses, watches, cars, jewelry, and tables at Michelin starred restaurants he hadn’t chosen. Tailors he hadn’t selected measured him for suits he hadn’t ordered. Flights he hadn’t booked, landing in cities he hadn’t asked to see. The contract his parents had signed when he was twenty-one. Rooms full of people who had known his name before he entered and who stopped knowing it the moment they stopped needing to. The dinner was not new for Piper, this was his life.
Piper picked up his Chardonnay again.
His hand was steady and he focused on it. That was a thing he could still do, watch his own hand be steady in a room full of people who were talking about him and past him and through him. He was, at a minimum, still good at that.
Chapter Twenty-Nine: Atherton
The staff were clearing the plates when Jayson stood as the other men dispersed to freshen up. He set his napkin on the table. He looked at Piper and nodded. Piper understood that the evening had moved from one part of itself to the event, and that he was meant to follow.
They left the terrace and walked through a long corridor. The floors were the same pale stone as the rest of the house.
Jayson continued to the end of the hall and opened a door.
The room was large and sparsely decorated. Dim lighting, a low ceiling, a single leather chair and a California King Bed with no pillows and what looked like a leather mattress protector. A bar with glasses and a decanter. A window that looked out to darkness. Music was playing,Crimson and Cloverby Tommy James and the Shondells. The opening verse haunted the room.
Jayson closed the door behind them.
Piper heard the latch click.
“Sit,” Jayson said.
Jayson walked to the bar and poured two glasses of Fonseca Vintage Port. He brought one of them over. Piper took it. Jayson sat across from him on a chair.
“Do you know why you are here?”
Piper said, “Yes.”
Jayson nodded slightly. He set his glass on the floor beside the chair.
Piper knew where the door was, and he knew it hadn’t locked, and he knew from knowing Jayson, that if he stood up right now and walked out of the room, he had no idea what Jayson or any of these men were capable of, because Piper had never left a room, but the seed had been planted.
I could leave, but could I? Piper thought.
Jayson was watching him think.
Piper didn’t stand.
He would tell himself several things about why he was not leaving. That it was strategic, that the punishment was not worth the escape.
Jayson looked at him for another moment. Then Jayson smiled, almost softly, and said, “Good.”
The door behind Piper opened.
Piper kept his back to the room. He had heard, across the dinner, the voices of the men who had been talking past him for hours, and he heard now, in the corridor beyond the door, the same voices arriving for what they really came for that night, Piper.
Preston walked in first.
Piper watched Jayson watch him.
Jayson didn’t stand, he just sat there.
The invitation had named Piper the way an invoice named an inventory item. He was one of the inventory items, albeit an extremely famous one, which made him more valuable to these powerful men.
Piper didn’t stand. He closed his eyes.
He opened them when Preston put a hand against Piper’s back and pushed him down on the large bed. He could feel Preston’s wedding ring pressing cold against his back.
