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“I have no idea how much money is mine. I don’t know anything. He’s closed my credit cards, or he said he would. And emptied my account of his money. And I owe him for the cost of the mess I caused today.” The sun sank into the horizon. “I’m dead to him. He’s done with me.”
Zeke stroked a finger down the edge of my cheek, and I shivered but not from cold. Was it possible heat could do that? Make you shiver with want? “He’s not done with you. He hasn’t even begun to know how not done with you he is.
I’m going to let you in on a little secret.”
I swallowed. “What’s that?”
“He didn’t mean that when he said it. Angry men make stupid mistakes. I’m counting on your father’s temper to explode. There is nothing he’ll hate more in the universe thanthe sight of you with me. So that is just what we’re going to give him.”
7
Zeke did like to eat really fine food. I was halfway through a steak I knew I wasn’t going to be able to finish, a glass of red wine that he’d informed me when he poured was going to be it for me on the alcohol front, and thepomme frites, as he called them before he switched back to saying French fries and leaving it at that. I knew the wordpomme frites. They were on some menus in English like that. Plus, he over-exaggerated how he said it, which actually I found helpful instead of obnoxious because I at least knew I hadn’t misheard.
It was awful always having to say ‘what’ only to realize you hadn’t not heard, you’d just not understood.
I set down my fork, and this time, he didn’t try to feed me more. We sat at his dining room table, fortunately, next to one another instead of across the table, which would have made me feel like we were playing at royalty in his pretend Versailles.
Zeke was so infallible in many ways, the fact that he’d hired a bad decorator gave me the smallest amount of pleasure. No one was perfect. Not even someone who looked like he did and had been as successful in life as he had been.
“Okay. Talk to me now.” He sat back in his seat and sipped his wine, obviously not cutting himself off as he had done to me. I didn’t mind. I was a lightweight, and we had to figure out how to have a conversation that didn’t end with him having to carry me somewhere.
I tilted my head. This was late for eating. When we lived in Europe, my father had kept us on American eating times. He didn’t like to eat past eight o’clock at the very latest. A ten o’clock dinner? It seemed almost obscene.
I was twenty-two years old. I could eat whenever the hell I wanted to, damnit.
“About what?” I’d told him all of my issues. I didn’t think I had any more. As far as I knew, all of my debt was familial, and no one was going to come looking to collect with a gun pointed. Of course, now knowing what I knew, I supposed that was possible.
“About what you want to do with your life.”
And there was the ten-million-dollar question. “I don’t know.” Same answer I’d been giving since they started to ask that in grade school. No idea. None.
“You’re an influencer, right?”
I almost spit out my drink. “Look at you, knowing that word.”
“I’m not that old, Layla. I know what an influencer is. You put on makeup and tell people what to buy. It’s like a new take on old marketing. And that’s what you do.”
I hated to tell him the truth. “I don’t actually post on my own Instagram account. That was—”
He held up his hand in that way I’d already discovered he did when he wanted me to stop speaking. “The company. Motherfucker.” He crossed his hands in front of him. “Well, we can take that back from them, and you can stop being a walking advertisement for whatever they think you should be. Pick yourown products. That’ll be an income revenue for you, since you’ve already got that set up.”
Zeke was going to want to kill me in a matter of minutes. “I don’t want to be an influencer. I never did. It was just sort of something that got set up because of the book. And it kept going because it was good for public image to see me places.”
He leaned forward. “What do you mean you don’t want to do it? You’re already doing it.”
“I never wanted to.”
“Then why…” He held up his hand, but I hadn’t said anything. It was like he was stopping himself from speaking. “Okay. Not that.” I waited for the yelling. This was when my father would probably start doing that. Zeke wasn’t my father, thank goodness, considering the direction my thoughts often took with him, but he seemed like he might be the hollering type. Only he didn’t. “You wrote a book.”
He already knew I’d collaborated on it. “Yes.”
“Did you like that?”
One of the staff I hadn’t seen before came in, took our plates, and exited again quickly. “Why do they tiptoe around like they don’t want to be seen?”
Zeke took a long sip of his wine. “I don’t like people around. I’m easy to work with, in the sense that I leave people alone to do the things I hire them to do. But I don’t want anyone under foot while I’m at home. It’s totally a ridiculous problem to have. So when I hire them, they understand that they’ll get paid very well with a lot of autonomy to make me feel like I’m alone at my house, even though there’s a full staff here.”
That was interesting. I sat forward. “How do you even have that conversation?”
