17. Cali
CALI
The third date is when you stop being nervous about the wrong things.
I'm standing in my closet at five forty-five on Saturday, and I've picked a dress. On the first try, no less. It's a deep navy thing with a low back, a little bit bolder than I'd normally opt for.
But the dress itself is less shocking than when I freeze with the hanger in my hand and realize what I'm doing.
Or, more precisely, what I'm not doing.
Last time—Chapter Thirteen of the ongoing tragicomedy that is my life—I tried on four outfits and gave each one a thorough scrutinizing from all possible angles.
Does this say "hostile experiment" or does this say "please find me irresistible"?
Tonight, there's none of that. That irritating little internal auditor has been muzzled and shoved into an unlit box.
I don't like what that means. I don't like it one bit.
It means you're comfortable, explains the traitor in my chest, the same gleeful goblin who did cartwheels when a man made a stranger wet himself.
"Shut up," I tell her, and put the dress on.
My phone buzzes on the dresser while I'm busy dropping my earring backs until they roll under the vanity and I have to lie on the floor in a nice dress like a foraging raccoon.
It's Mom. I put her on speaker from the carpet.
"They're fed, they're watered, and Isabella has informed me that narwhals are 'the unicorns of the deep.' Hayden does not agree."
"Seems like all is well in the world then," I say with a laugh. "Thanks again for taking them on such short notice."
"Not a problem, darling." She pauses. "You sound different."
"I sound rested."
"No," she retorts. "Different."
Mom's radar has always been the best in the family, better than any predictive engine I could build, honed over sixty-one years and one bad marriage of her own she doesn't talk about. I've been dodging it my whole life.
With mixed results.
"I'm going out," I say to the underside of my dresser. "That's all. Adult beverages. A change of scenery."
"Mm." I can hear her deciding whether to press, but she evidently opts against it. "Well, have fun, Cali Bear. Call me if you need me. Don't call me if you don't."
"Will do. Thanks, Mom."
I locate the earring back and clip it on.
And then it's time to go.
It seems that Ronan has given tonight's driver explicit instructions not to tell me where we're going.
Obviously, that just means I have to keep guessing until I get it right.
"A speakeasy," I announce to the back of the driver's head. "One of those ones with a phone booth and a secret password."
The driver's eyes flick to the mirror. He says nothing.
"A rooftop. No—a helicopter. Does he own a helicopter now? Is that where this is going? I have to be back by eleven. I hope everyone involved understands that a helicopter does not change the fact that I have children."
We cross a bridge. The buildings shrink to two stories, then to parking lots, and a Ferris wheel swings up black against the last of the daylight.
I sit up. "Are we— Is that Coney Island? Are we getting hot dogs?"
The car stops in front of a building I've been to once, on a school trip in the fourth grade, back when I was the kind of kid who liked facts. Hayden's kind of kid. I press my face nearly to the glass like a child.
The New York Aquarium.
Dark.
Closed.
But when the driver comes around and opens my door and a man in a suit unlocks the glass entrance from the inside without a word, I understand that it is not closed for me.
Ronan is waiting past the doors, in the blue. Everything is blue. The whole building glows with it, that underwater aquarium light that comes from the tanks and turns the air itself the color of deep water.
He's standing in the middle of it in a dark suit with no tie, hands in his pockets.
"You rented the aquarium," I say in awe.
He nods. "I did."
"The whole thing?"
"It's easier than renting half."
The tanks slide past on either side as I approach him. In them swim rays, a slow patrol of silver fish, a jellyfish column pulsing pink and gold like the world's most tasteful lava lamp. It's eerily beautiful.
"Why," I ask, when I reach him, "are we here?"
"The octopus," he says.
I blink.
"I was told by a very reliable source," he continues, hands still in his pockets, "that they have eight brains. I wanted a second opinion."
As it turns out, I happen to know exactly which "very reliable" source he's talking about. Because that source shares half my DNA.
Ronan was standing on my front stoop, holding out a napkin.
I had half an ear cocked toward my kids like every mother always does, but I never thought he'd be listening.
Men never are. Todd could look me dead in the eye across a dinner table and retain nothing, could ask me the next morning about a thing I'd told him the night before as if I'd never said it.
Ronan heard a random fact that my son shouted through a doorway and built an entire date around it.
The realization hits my bloodstream like something you'd get arrested for. A warm illegal flood, up the back of the neck, into the face. I have to look away from him and pretend to be fascinated by a moray eel, who eyes me back with open contempt.
"That's—" I clear my throat. "That's a very elaborate way to fact-check a six-year-old."
"I don't do things halfway, Ms. Meadows." He turns and starts walking, and I follow. "Follow me. He's shy. We shouldn't keep him waiting."
The octopus is right where Ronan promised, packed into the corner of his tank, one eye rolling toward us and away.
"There," Ronan says. "Eight brains. Or one central brain and eight semi-autonomous nervous systems, depending which paper you read. He can taste with his skin. He can open jars. He escaped once, allegedly, and made it almost all of the way to the drain before they caught him."
"You did your homework, I see."
His face glows ethereally blue in profile. "I like a thing that's smarter than it looks and wants out of its container." He glances at me, and I decide very firmly not to examine that sentence for a decade or so.
Dinner is set up in front of the kelp forest. It's a two-person table with linen and candles, situated at the foot of a two-story wall of gently waving green.
There's enough wine for a table of ten, a first course already plated, and no one else in the building except us and a staff so discreet they might as well be ghosts.
"Sit," he suggests, pulling out my chair. "You've had a week."
I have indeed had a week. I drop into the offered seat gratefully.
The food is extraordinary in the way everything with Ronan is extraordinary. I've stopped being surprised by it, which is in itself a little unnerving. Some small back-office corner of my brain has flagged the not-being-surprised for review.
We eat while the kelp sways and a shark makes his slow circuit, a patient loop at the edge of the candlelight.
"So," I say, around a bite of something with brown butter in it. "Business, before I forget I'm mad at you on principle. The filing."
"Handled." He refills my glass without being asked. "The response went in Thursday morning. There's a hearing on the calendar for the twelfth. It won't survive contact."
"You sound very sure."
"The attempt was sloppy," he says, not cockily but just matter-of-fact.
"The provision they're trying to exercise requires notice that was never properly given.
There are half a dozen procedural errors in the first page alone.
Whoever drafted it wanted it done fast and cheap.
" He shrugs one shoulder. "Fast and cheap is easy to unmake. "
I squint at him. "You're enjoying this, aren't you? You actually are."
"I enjoy competence," he says. "I resent its absence. This is the latter, so no, I wouldn't say I'm enjoying it. I'm merely relieved on your behalf."
I set my fork down. "How relieved should I be? On a scale of throw a party to sell a kidney?"
"Keep both kidneys, Ms. Meadows. I like you put together just the way you are." His dangerous smile surfaces and swims away, just like the shark.
I choke on my wine, but he pretends not to see and pours me water like nothing ever happened.
We're most of the way through the second course when a man appears at the far end of the hall. One of the discreet ghosts, except this one isn't a waiter.
This one is in a dark coat and stands at the edge of the blue light where the tanks glow behind him. He doesn't approach.
Ronan has already seen him. The fork settles on the plate, unhurried, and his attention leaves the table entirely.
"Excuse me a moment," Ronan says, rising. "One thing."
He goes over. They speak low, the man's head bent, Ronan's face unreadable in profile against the enormous glass. It lasts ninety seconds, maybe less. Then the man is gone, folded back into the dark, and Ronan is walking back to me at the same unhurried pace he left at.
"Sorry," he says, sitting. "A matter that couldn't wait."
"It couldn't wait until we finished the branzino?" I tease.
Ronan laughs. "I can only hope the branzino will forgive me."
"But will I?"
"That remains the open question of the evening." He picks up his fork again and resumes eating.
After a moment, unable to help myself, I ask, "Who was that?"
"An employee."
"Your employees wear coats like extras from a Cold War movie?"
"There's a dress code," he says. "I'm a serious man."
"Ain't that the truth," I mutter.
The shark drifts past again on his patient loop. I point my wine glass at it.
"That's you," I inform him. "That's your whole personality, right there. Circling. Unhurried. Waiting for something to bleed."
"Interesting." He leans back and considers the creature. "I'd have said that one's you."
"Excuse me?"
"Sand tiger shark. Looks terrifying. Rows of visible teeth. Almost never attacks unprovoked." He turns the full weight of his attention back to me. "But when provoked, she is entirely without mercy. I have a conference room full of witnesses who'd agree."
Is that a compliment? I mean, it walks like a compliment and it quacks like a compliment. But should I really be flattered by being compared to a shark?
Jury's still out.
"Fine," I say, reaching for composure and mostly finding wine instead. "Then what are you, in this metaphor? And do not say the octopus. The octopus is charming and I'm not sure what you are yet."
He thinks about it for so long that I'm wondering if I said something wrong. Then:
"The kelp," Ronan says finally.
"The kelp?!”
"It looks decorative." He tips his glass toward the swaying green wall behind him, two stories of it, dense and dark at the roots. "But most people never look closely enough to see what it's hiding."
When we finish, the waiters clear our plates, but we don't get up quite yet. It's nice to linger in place, in comfortable silence, and sip my wine as the kelp sways and the shark circles.
Eventually, Ronan stands and holds out a hand. "There's one more tank I want to show you," he says.
I take the hand and let him pull me to my feet.
He leads me past the octopus—who has migrated to the far corner, perhaps contemplating another break for the drain—and into a private elevator.
I bite back the urge to ask where we're going now. I'm glad I did, too, because the wow factor of the view that awaits us at the top is worth every bit of suspense.
I don't fully understand the architecture of it, whether it's part of the building or on top of it or somewhere I've lost the thread of geographically, but the walls are glass and the ceiling is glass and the floor along one whole side is also glass, because the floor on that side is water.
It's a pool.
A glass-bottomed, glass-walled pool that hangs out past the edge of the building and over the drop, so that the water and the lights and the Ferris wheel and the whole enormous black shine of the ocean all seem to pour into each other with nothing to hold them apart.
"This is the last tank," Ronan says behind me. "I'll get us something to drink."
He moves off toward a bar built into the far wall. I hear ice clinking as I gaze at the pool.
I look at the water.
Somewhere in the back of my skull there's a voice, and I know exactly whose it is, because I spent ten years married to it.
Isabella left some stretch marks on her way out, huh?
You're curvy, Cal.
Maybe you shouldn't wear that one.
A decade of a man teaching me to subtract myself, to fold down, to make myself smaller and quieter and, ultimately, easier to leave.
The voice is there. It's just not loud enough anymore.
Not tonight.
Not in this blue.
By the time Ronan turns back around with a glass in each hand, my dress is on the lounge chair and I'm naked in the water.
It's warm. It holds me. The city drops away under the glass beneath my feet and I tread there in the middle of all of it, weightless, free.
Ronan stands where he stopped. His jaw hasn't quite dropped, but I can sense that, for once, I'm the one surprising him.
"Are you getting in, Mr. Akov?" I taunt. "Or are you scared?"