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Ethan
Terra cotta tiles covered in months of dirty footprints lead me deep into the Lang mansion. Because one of my shoes came off in the pool, my feet make two different sounds—thecreakof a boot and theslapof a wet sock—like a cartoon.
The back of the house doesn’t match what I saw through the front windows at all. I pass empty rooms and furniture draped with sheets, crusty yellow squares on the walls where pictures used to hang. A half-eaten box of Oreos sits on an antique table that looks like it could pay my mortgage for a year. I almost trip over a scrap of black fabric I’m pretty sure is a G-string, and I imagine Scooter’s face if I gave him that to auction on eBay.
Everything about this situation is soofffrom my mental image of a billionaire celebrity athlete that I start opening drawers and sticking my head into rooms as I pass by, looking for anything that makes sense. I stop in the doorway of a cramped bathroom with no windows, barely big enough to turn around in. A worn-out dog bed occupies the floor, edges crammed in around the toilet and cabinets, along with a messy duvet and a load of pillows. It smells, not a stink but musty, like nothing has been washed in a while. As a hopeless animal lover, I wonder what kind of dog he has and feel sorry that I didn’t get to meet it.
There’s a TV balanced on the sink, cord plugged into the outlet meant for shavers and toothbrushes. As I turn around, I notice two deadbolts nailed to the door. Something feels off about them, but the sound of voices down the hall distracts me.
The house starts to look brighter and more habitable as I get closer to the voices, until I stumble into a dining room that seems ready for a magazine shoot, with pastries and orange juice and vases of snapdragons arranged on the big table.
Victor is standing across the table from an old man in a suit, a man whose face I recognize from the covers of countless business magazines and websites: Werner Lang, the German-immigrant-turned-tech-mogul who broke every record for fastest self-made billionaire and who happens to be Victor’s father.
I’m trespassing, dripping wet, missing my shoe, in front of a man who has the power to not only get me fired but probably buy the entire city of Kirkland and turn it into a shopping mall. Father and son are both staring at me, so I focus on the less scary one. “If you’re not going to sign it, give it back.” I hold out my hand, which is still trembling with adrenaline. When he narrows his eyes at me, I stare back, refusing to blink.
“Why?”
That’s not the question I expected, and the audacity of it irritates me. I take a step toward him. “It belongs to my cousin, and it’s important to him.”
“You were big fans. Of me.” Victor speaks hesitatingly, eyes tracing down to my feet and back to my face, like he’s struggling to remember what I said just a few minutes ago.
“Yeah, of course.” Flattery seems like a good option. “We dreamed of meeting you.”
He splays a hand flat across his bare chest, runs it slowly down his ribs as if daring me to count them. It’s barely a shadow of the body that carried him to fame. “Happy? Is this what you wanted?”
Werner sits back in his chair. He doesn’t seem surprised at his son’s behavior or interested in helping me out.
Victor smiles tightly. “Did your little cousin cry when they banned me?”
My vision flashes white. I grab his wrist, squeezing it when he tries to pull away as I pry his fingers off my card. Like kids on a fucking playground. When I cradle it in my hand, I see that one corner has bent and an unfamiliar urge to kill someone rises in my stomach.
Victor backs away. His chin is tipped up like he wants to fight, but his eyes look wary. “Congratulations. Now stop fucking dripping on my floors. Unless you want to pay to have them refinished.”
The hardwood looks like shit: patchy black water stains, dirt ground in between the boards. I snort in disgust and walk away. He had everything I ever wanted, and he’s wasted it all.
As I storm down the hall, trying to smooth the card flat between my palms, I finally realize what was bothering me about those deadbolts on the bathroom: they’re on the wrong side, the inside. I guess if I was his dog I’d want to lock him out too.
My shoe is still at the bottom of the pool, and I don’t see any kind of pole or net to fish it out. I’ll have to skip some meals to afford another pair, especially since I’mnotgetting paid for this job. I slam my tools into the wagon and drag it around to the front. I’m about to spit on the driveway when I realize Werner Lang is standing next to the Bentley, arms crossed.
He has a commanding presence, like I should be bowing as I apologize. “I’m really sorry about this, sir. Please don’t sue my company. We seek to provide only—”
He scoffs impatiently and holds out a slip of paper. It flutters in the muggy breeze off the lake. I’ve never seen a check for twenty thousand dollars, but if I had, I think it would look an awful lot like this.
When I don’t touch it, he sets it on the wheel well of my truck, weighing it down with a very expensive-looking pen. “My son needs a boyfriend.”
I sag against the truck, exhausted. “Excuse me?”
“Victor has decided to return to the public eye as the face of my newest advertising campaign.”
I can see him as a model, the high cheekbones and the permanent smirk on his pouty lips. Maybe looking pretty is all he’s good for, now that he blew up his career. Plenty of more problematic celebrities have managed to make a comeback in a different line of work.
“Have you heard of the dating app comeVa?”
I nod mutely, like I’m a kid trying to please his teacher. ComeVa connected me with my only relationship: a nice few months with a nice guy that ended nicely when I realized none of it—the fuzzy feelings, the physical connection, sharing activities that I could just as well have enjoyed alone—did anything for me. Not good, not bad, just nothing. This morning was the first boner I’ve popped in I don’t know how long, and that was just a fluke.
“I’m holding a press event to announce my company’s procurement of the app and my son’s role as the face of the brand.” He waves his hand like he’s trying to turn the cogs of my brain himself. “The press will go wild when they catch sight of him, and I want his story to be as compelling as possible—something like ‘I was lost until I met my partner through this app; he gave me the strength to go on.’ Yes?” He pauses like he expects me to agree.
When I just stare at him like he’s speaking a foreign language, he continues. “It’s simple: one night, twenty thousand dollars. Complete an NDA, smile and nod as you stand next to him, and make sure he doesn’t go off the rails—” he points at the check “—and I’ll sign that for you. Everyone hired to work on this property has already had a background check run on them, so we can skip that step.”
