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“I’ve been here half an hour, asshole. I already said hi to you.”
Harrison shrugs lazily. “Well then, Jonathan, that bow was for you. Interested?”
He holds out his rolled joint, but Jonathan shakes his head.
He doesn’t even bother offering it to me. I’m not against pot; I just haven’t done it in years and want my wits about me tonight.
Collette takes the joint from Harrison and inhales a short drag before waggling her fingers in greeting at Jonathan and me. She exhales the smoke in a long steady stream then tips her head back and resumes her pondering. I’m almost curious what she’s thinking about.
I take a seat on a couch facing the unlit fireplace, suddenly wishing I had a cigar, something to take the edge off this nervous energy. Maybe I shouldn’t have turned down the joint. My foot is bouncing. My gaze keeps gravitating toward the door as if Lainey could walk by at any time.
I feel fifteen again, anxious and—strangely—hopeful.
I’m not paying attention to the conversation. Collette is rambling about the sky and how pretty it is and how she can see the stars. I don’t care about any of it and my patience has worn thin enough that I finally just ask what I’ve been dying to know.
“Where’s your friend?”
“Who?”
“Elaine.”
That’s Lainey’s real name, and I’ve never once called her by it. I do so now because it’s a subtle way of putting a little bit of distance between us, like I don’t really care about the answer to my question. I wonder if I’m fooling anyone.
She shrugs. “Who knows. She’s impossible to pin down.”
Harrison speaks up. “I haven’t seen that girl in forever. Is she in Boston now?”
“Elaine?” Jonathan asks, completely lost.
He never knew her.
“Lainey Davenport,” Collette answers, rolling her eyes. “She was at St. John’s while we were there, but she’s like six years younger than us, which means you definitely wouldn’t have known her, Jonathan.”
“How do you know her then?” he asks me.
I don’t answer. I sip my drink and stare into the dark fireplace, trying to keep this burning ache in my chest from showing on my face.
When the silence drags on too long, Collette answers for me.
“She’s cool. She was friends with my little sister. I didn’t know her well back then, but she and I have gotten closer now that we both work at Morgan’s.”
“Lainey was hard to miss,” Harrison interjects.
My fingers tighten reflexively around my bourbon glass. “I’d argue the exact opposite.”
Harrison laughs. “Are we talking about the same girl?” He mimes an hourglass figure.
That’s when it hits me that Harrison has no idea who he’s talking about. Like the idiot he is, he has her confused for someone else. Lainey never had an hourglass figure, and certainly not when she was barely thirteen.
Collette doesn’t care that he’s wrong—she still groans in disgust. “She was a kid, sicko.”
Completely unbothered, Harrison goes right back to puffing on his joint, and I’m left with the same questions as before.
I want to ask Collette more about Lainey, but I hold my tongue and let my bourbon sink in while my friends continue to talk. I have no interest in joining in. I have a single-track mind when I get ahold of something that interests me. It works well in my line of business, but it can be overwhelming too. I’ve always been like this, my brain constantly whirring. It’s why I like to swim. More than any other activity, swimming has the capacity to quiet my mind. If I go long enough and hard enough in a pool or a lake, like I did back at St. John’s, exhaustion never fails to drown out the noise.
It’s almost funny to look back at that time in my life and realize very little has changed since then. Sure, I’ve grown up in a lot of ways. I’ve put my nose to the grindstone for over twelve years, and I have the accolades and accomplishments to show for it. The stench of nepotism no longer clings to me the way it once did when I was younger.
And yet, at my core, the same issue that vexed me then vexes me now.
There’s not a man on earth more tightly bound by expectations than I am. I never was able to escape that feeling even when my passion for pleasing my father morphed into passion for growing GHV. I love the company outside of him, but still, there is no doubt I am chained to it in ways other men aren’t. I’ve learned to live with it, to compensate for it in a multitude of unhealthy ways.
In any area of my life where I’m allowed freedom, I go overboard.
Take relationships, for instance: commitment makes my skin crawl. The idea of someone owning my time outside of the office is enough to make me want to delete every female contact from my phone. I’ll be damned if anyone other than my fucking father is going to make demands of me.
