Chapter 34
Chapter Thirty-Four
brUNO
We soak our feet in the hot tub after the yacht starts going again.
Nobody ever asked me how it feels to work on watches. Nobody ever really cared about that part of it.
Good, I told her. But it’s more. It feels like peace. Just for a little while.
She has brought down the presents from last night and set them on the decking between us alongside a cheese plate and a glass of something with a cherry in it and plain water for me.
“Adrian’s first,” she says. “That’s the only one I don’t know what it is.”
She hands me the card.
Prove me wrong. —A.
“What does that mean?”
“It’s a dig,” I say. “And also a command. Obviously, he thinks this relationship is a performance I staged to get him off my back about the documentary. But ‘Prove me wrong’ is his way of saying ‘Be in a real one.’”
“That’s...sweet, maybe?”
“It’s insufferable.”
“What will you do if they extend shooting some more?”
“When is your show back in session?” I ask.
“Very funny.”
“They won’t extend it. The crew is due overseas.”
She starts unwrapping the gift Adrian brought. “A box.”
I take it from her. “It’s a puzzle box. He loves these.” I work out how to open it and show her.
She tries it for herself. She likes it. “Do you ever think they sense something more is going on with your refusal to appear in that thing than just you being mega-private?”
That’s not really her question. She’s curious about the family secret I’m trying to protect.
I grab another present, look at the tag. “For me?” I shake it. Something’s rattling around in there.
“Don’t shake it too hard!”
I unwrap it. “Cookies?”
“It’s a cookie-of-the-month club. Twelve months of cookies, delivered to an address of my choosing, starting in July,” she says.
“Is this some sort of commentary on my dining habits?”
“It’s one hundred percent commentary on your dining habits!”
“And do they deliver by helicopter?”
“Don’t worry about it. The cookies will find you.” She takes one and eats it. Then she opens up her present, which of course she got for herself. It turns out to be a Roadrunner watch.
“What is that?” I close my eyes. “I can’t even look at that.”
“Bruno! This is the most thoughtful gift anybody’s ever given me!”
“You can’t wear it.”
“Put it on me. Please?” She gives me her wrist.
“I hope you know, this is against everything I stand for. It’s a symbol of disorder, a disregard for precision and exactitude and time itself...”
“But he’s so cute with his little legs!”
I take her hand and I turn it. Her pulse is right there under my thumb, steady, a little faster than resting. I set the watch on her wrist. I buckle it. I thread the strap. I want her already. What is this woman doing to me?
We barely make it to the stateroom. She buries her hands into my hair against the wall in the entrance of the stateroom. Then we’re a few feet in and she’s trying to pull off her shirt while I unbuckle my pants.
“Hurry,” she says.
She’s so open with what she wants. What she needs, never worrying that people will say no. It makes her so vulnerable because they could say no. They have said no to her—in the most hurtful of ways.
I pick her up, half undressed, and bring her to the bed.
“Oh, it’s going to be that kind of fucking, is it?”
I run fingers along the edge of her lacy bra. “What kind is that?”
“Nice. Polite. Where I don’t have to hang on to anything.”
I gaze down at her. I want to tell her she can hang onto me as long as she wants, and she’ll never be too much.
I want to tell her that I’m falling for her, but the falling part is easy.
What do I do after that? I’m not that man and I don’t even know how to play the part.
I’m not even qualified for the part. I live on a fucking yacht that I ran like the inside of a watch until a couple days ago.
I told her I’d see her again and I want to.
But what does that even look like?
“Turn over,” I say. Her eyes sparkle as she complies with my command. I kiss her beautiful ass and then I give it a little slap. “Higher.”
“Bossy!” she says, wiggling her ass a little bit for me.
“You’re so wet for me.” I press into her warm, wet pussy, like a piece of fucking heaven. I grab her hand and put her fingers to her clit. “I want to feel you do yourself while I fuck you like this.”
“That’s funny,” she hisses, panting, “because that’s the only thing in the world that I want to do right now.”
I drive into her, losing myself, losing my mind, losing time. At some point I detect the telltale sign of her rising pleasure. I keep everything going, focused on making this good for her. I can’t do much for her, but I can do this.
Afterward, she settles back against my chest. I put my hand in her hair, smoothing it, and her breathing slows.
The light shifts. A gull calls again, far off.
I lie there with her on my chest, and I think about the cookie certificate folded in my robe pocket, and about the PI file sitting in a secure inbox I am never going to open, and about the bus in New Mexico, and about my brother’s card that said prove me wrong.
The sea moves under us, quiet and dark.
Her phone buzzes once on the table.
She grabs it and snorts. “My friend Francine. Alive Y/N—that’s her text.”
“Very direct.”
“I’m texting back ‘very.’”
I feel inordinately happy about this.
She takes a bite of the halibut and makes a face of bliss. “This fish. And the butter. Wow.”
She’s in one of the dresses Margot chose for her based on the “Kelsey mood board” I put together, as Margot called it. This dress is a shimmery violet that goes with the streak in her hair and really shows off her body. She wore the Roadrunner watch, of course, and now with the sex face. Goddamn.
She finally opens her eyes. “Is there a name for this butter?”
“We’ll ask.”
She eats some more. And the way that she’s eyeing the fish on my plate, I wouldn’t be surprised if she has designs on that, too, and I’ll give it to her. What is it about this woman that has me so swept up in her pleasure?
“The asparagus?” She points to my plate with her fork. “Have you tried it?”
I spear a tip and put it in my mouth. “Delicious.”
She’s grinning. “Right?”
The apparently very-exclusive Bailey Cliffside dining room is at the base of a functioning lighthouse.
There are only six tables on this floor, but tonight it’s just us.
Out the window, clouds linger over the Atlantic in hues of pale rose and ash, and the lantern above us sweeps its cold white beam across the darkening water at timed intervals.
“So is this what you would do with a girl on your real anniversary?”
“No, this was for Adrian.”
“What would you do for your real anniversary?”
“It depends on the woman.” A cop-out. It seems to be beyond my powers of imagination to envision myself in such a situation.
“Can I ask you something?”
“Of course.”
She sets her fork down and looks at me across the candlelit table. “What’s up with Adrian’s whole golden-cage thing? Is that really how he views your father living in Switzerland? Like it’s a cage?”
“Our father isn’t worth talking about. He’s a terrible person who shipped us off to military boarding school and now he’s in a home across the ocean.”
“Do you think he misses your mom?”
“No,” I say.
She watches my face, waiting for more. “I’m so sorry,” she says finally.
“They’re not important,” I say, in perhaps too much of a clipped tone. But I’m not in the mood for this conversation.
“I bet she loved you a lot.”
That would be a no, I think. The boy I was back then thought his mother loved him.
The man I am knows I got scammed.
I motion for the waiter to refill my glass and then tell her a fact I dug up about lighthouses, how they decided how fast to rotate the light.
She goes along with the change of subject. For a while, anyway.
“Can I ask you another thing?”
“Mm.”
“I totally respect that you don’t want to divulge this family secret. I totally get it, considering the cannibalism and all.”
“Of course,” I say, not loving this subject.
She taps her fork on her plate. “But don’t your brothers have a right to know?”
“It would change everything about what they understand about themselves.”
“A lot of things change what we understand about ourselves. Isn’t that kind of the point of life?”
“The point of life?”
“It can’t be ignorant bliss,” she says. “That can’t be the point.
You told me a really hard thing about my family being fake to me.
It was a horrible thing to learn, but I’m really grateful to know it.
I would rather go through life knowing awful things that make me unhappy than believing in bullshit like an idiot. Going around in ignorant bliss.”
“I see where this is going, but it’s different.”
“Is it? You think that your brothers would take ignorant bliss instead of the truth?”
“I think they would.”
“Would you?”