Page 13 of Midnight Curfew

Some wear masks—doll faces and carnival are popular—but that’s for the shy ones. After all, it’s more fun to know who you’re fucking. It makes seeing each other in church or at your kid’s birthday party more exhilarating.

By the time I see my father, everyone else has splintered off, Milo already busy eating out the busgirl, who I’m sure is no stranger to giving in to demands that don’t fit her job description. It’s overpowering her that he likes.

I slide onto the bench opposite my father in an alcove with a perfect view of Mitchell Kenmont with his son’s wife sitting reverse cowgirl in his lap. She wears a mask, but he has to know it’s her. No one has red hair like that in a long, thick blanket down to their ass. But if it ever gets out, he has plausible deniability.

Turning to my father, I watch him tap away on two tablets propped up on stands as if they’re monitors and this is his desk.

He takes a sip of his drink.

“How can you work in here?” I ask.

With air that feels more filled with body oil and fake fog than it does oxygen, I can’t imagine he keeps a clear head.

“It’s called discipline.” He doesn’t take his eyes off his screens. “A successful man should be able to focus anywhere.”

I suppose it depends on what he means by successful. Garrett Ames has two failed marriages, a stepdaughter who can’t look at him without wanting to bash her head into a wall, and a son who will stuff him in a pine box with the cheapest grave marker he can find once he’s dead. I’m sure he also has a couple of offspring out in the world that he doesn’t claim.

None of that sounds like success to me.

Turning my eyes out to the party, I look past all the faces to the hallways beyond and the rooms where there’s more sordid shit happening. I’ve only been in here a few times, but I don’t think things have gotten less perverse.

“Who’s the pick of the litter these days?” I broach.

“Oh, you don’t want her anymore tonight.” He raises his eyes to me, taking another drink. “She’s already given a joyride to half a dozen men.”

What the fuck.

He laughs, and I just drop my eyes, pretending to dust something off my suit. Is that supposed to turn me on? Does it turn him on?

But I already know the answer. None of this is about sex. The Wolfe Room is about power, but more importantly, it exists to excite people who can’t get excited anymore.

It was never a mystery to me why my mother overdosed on pills when I was eight. She probably had to be high just to come in here with him. Enough drugs and you can be in the mood for anything.

Until the clarity of the morning after arrives, of course.

I give her credit, though. She was a good mom while she lasted.

My stepmother stopped coming in here years ago.

My father pushes his screens away. “I don’t know why you try to fake it,” he taunts. “You don’t give a shit who the new piece of ass is. I know what you like, and what you don’t.”

I cock my head. “You thought I wouldn’t leave St. Carmen,” I point out. “You thought I would live off you forever. You thought I wouldn’t survive UPenn. You thought I’d blow my mother’s money.”

Blah, blah, blah.

“But I did leave.” I hold his dark blue eyes. “I finished school with job offers in New York, Zurich, and Shanghai, and I doubled the money she left me, so let’s just settle on all you really know about me is that I’m yours.”

Maybe I’ll like this place and have more fun here than him, but my fun is my fucking business.

Slowly, he nods, the graying sides of his black hair glowing in shades of purple, pink, and blue as he quirks a finger at a server.

“I think that’s fair,” he tells me. “It’s a new day.”

A tall woman in a black vest and black miniskirt brings over two glasses of ice and a bottle of vodka.

I shake my head. “I’m not staying.”

Not long enough to finish a drink.