Page 4 of Play Dirty

“I don’t—”

“Fuck you,” Alexander says. “Fuck you. Don’t lie.”

“She doesn’t want me either. She wants us both. I can’t give her you. You can’t give her me. So just sell me the fucking building and make it all go away.”

He inhales. Exhales. “It’s not in my name or I would’ve.”

Figures.

I walk over to the credenza in front of my office window, pour myself a drink—I do not offer one to Alexander—and say, “So… see you tomorrow?”

He pauses. Takes a moment to think about tomorrow. I sip my drink and wait him out.

None of this is the point.

He leaves without answering.

Dreams are unreliable things.

That’s how I got here.

I had a dream.

It involves a building with a revolving door. Which I have always thought clever and ironic because you had to walk through a dose of reality to enter the dream inside the club.

It involves a bar called the Black Room and a restaurant called the White Room and a grand lobby that hides the elevators to the basement behind the stairs to the second-floor landing. And up there is another elevator that takes you up into another world. And off to the side of that landing, there is another, smaller, even more private bar that looks out onto the grand lobby and bar down below.

I want to own this place. This dream world. This haven from the stress and expectations of the outside world. I want to go back there, but you know what they say.

You can’t ever go home again.

What does that mean, anyway? Like… yeah. You can. Unless the fucking apocalypse happened and your home was blown up or taken over by zombies, you can definitely go back there. It might not be the same place it was when you left, but it’s still home.

I could make it work.

I could get all the members back together.

There could be parties down in the basement again. There could be drinks in the bar again. There could be rooms upstairs again.

I could be happy.

If Augustine would just sell me the building I could get all this back.

I could.

Two weeks ago. That’s when I found out she and Alexander owned the building the club used to be in. Two weeks ago I was ready to fuck her over. Ready to do anything, everything, to get what I wanted.

So I called Alexander. Not her, him. And not because I’m sexist and I think the man is in charge of shit like this, either. I just didn’t want to talk to her.

And I asked him stuff. Like… “Hey, what’s going on with the building? What are you gonna turn it into? Ever think about selling it?”

And he said, “I’ll have Augustine call you.”

So she did.

And that conversation was something I’d imagined in the past and was not what I wanted to hear now, in the present.

It went like this.