7. It’s 11 am, Doesn’t Anyone Here Go To Work? #2
No. Narrative.
There’s a devil on your back.
“These are—” I cleared my throat. “Really good. Really cool, Ro.”
“Yeah, yeah, we’ll see how it turns out, or if I get paid on time, or at all.
How’s JR doing?” Roro asked with barely concealed eagerness, after taking her phone back from me.
Despite her move, Roro seemed only able to exist if she had a clear view into the world of the apartment complex.
“Your mom make him sell that pigeon yet?”
“He’s working on Alistair’s doocot as we speak,” I replied absently. I was thinking about dead girls and demon eyes. About buses and bruises and pills, and about how close I seemed to be to death these days. Death and violence, interwoven by devil winds and maddening heat.
Obviously I had to quit. There was nothing for it, really.
I thought of Julian’s face, the sound of crunching bone. The animal way his eyes met mine.
The way it gave me a thrill of something.
A thrill, period.
But obviously, I would be quitting. I wasn’t an idiot and any alternative decision would be deranged. It was just past eleven then, and I considered the likelihood of catching Emmanuelle, wondering if it was late enough yet in the day for someone who clearly liked to party.
Given the crowd at this trendy place, which seemed full of Emmanuelle’s type of person, it seemed a fair shot.
“What the fuck is a doocot?” said Roro.
When the conversation was over, I left for the villa. It had taken a long time to explain.
When I arrived at the de Witt house, I parked in the guest driveway, opting for the front entrance rather than the landing on the side of the house where I’d been the previous day.
I didn’t want Emmanuelle to think I was coming there to work.
When I knocked on the door, though, nobody came to answer it.
I paused, meandering around to the side of the house, and heard voices from the courtyard down below.
“—shouldn’t wake him, his flight got in late. You do realize he’ll be furious when he finds out what you’ve done.” It was Genesis, the housekeeper. “I take no responsibility for this. This is entirely your doing.”
Emmanuelle’s reply seemed cattily disinterested. “I’ve told William a thousand times; the whole thing is getting out of hand. He just needs to be sedated or something, I don’t know, he was never like this before.” She paused to cough, then added, “I can’t be expected to watch him all the time.”
“Someone has to.” Genesis’s reply was a hiss. “And he is sedated.”
Emmanuelle appeared not to be listening.
“This was supposed to be an improvement. The whole point of that fucking partnership was to restore Killian’s glamour, not let someone else call the shots.
” Emmanuelle sighed heavily, long-sufferingly, and coughed again.
“But William’s always off doing god knows what with that technofascist grifter, and what am I supposed to do in the meantime? I can’t be with him every night—”
Genesis cut in, irritated. A bit hastily, too, or so it sounded to me. “Then you’d better make sure your little actress keeps her mouth shut. And by the way, she’s at the front door—the security alert went off five minutes ago.”
My heart skipped a beat, as if they might suddenly look up and spot me. Instinctively, my brain whispered: Could I Survive It?
Of course. There was nothing to survive. I told myself the pounding in my chest was normal.
“Then answer it, Genesis—”
I tried pacing my breaths, four seconds in, four seconds out, while I slipped back to wait on the front step. I wished I could have scrolled my phone, done something that looked normal, uninterested, bored. Safely ignorant.
When the door finally opened, Genesis seemed unchanged from the night before. “Yes?”
I thought about what Roro said about the de Witts hunting their staff for sport. Not Genesis, I determined grimly. She’d be at the front of the pack.
“I was wondering if I could talk to Emmanuelle?” Why, I asked myself idiotically, had I chosen to phrase this like a question? Like I was playing the role of the ingenue, the one who’d inevitably die first. “I left my phone with her last night.”
Genesis flicked a disapproving glance over me and gestured for me to follow her.
I did, this time taking in the villa in its midday glory.
There were a multitude of staff around this time, unlike the night previous.
The mess from the party had already been cleared away.
It seemed alive, a small functioning village, like an eco-resort in Tulum.
I couldn’t understand what I’d felt panicked by moments earlier.
The lingering smell of fresh paint was a swift hit of context. No ghosts here.
“Anya darling!” Emmanuelle met me in the oversized living room, the floaty hem of a fresh beachy caftan alighting in her wake.
“What a pleasure to see you so early! I didn’t expect you back until tonight.
” She leaned forward to kiss me on both cheeks, and for reasons of personal ease, I allowed it.
Her lips seemed fuller, her eyes clear. Conversely, the smell on her breath was more rancid than usual, like its usual overripe sweetness had started to ferment.
“I needed my phone,” I said when I faced her again. Her smile didn’t falter.
“Of course. You really shouldn’t have left here without it.” She gestured for me to follow her down the steps to the courtyard, the lower level where the party had been.
“Well, exigent circumstances.” My voice was a bit brusque. I instructed myself to soften it.
“Yes. You had a difficult first night, didn’t you? It’ll get easier.”
“I don’t think so.” Emmanuelle had reached the bottom of the stairs and paused, so I did, too. “I don’t really think I’m up for the job, Emmanuelle. I’m really sorry.”
“Hm. A pity.” She shaded her eyes, peering up at me. For a moment her face was frozen, expressionless. “William just got a marvelous script in his inbox last night. I think you’d be perfect for the lead.”
“I’d be happy to audition.” There was a tightness in my throat. “But as far as Julian—and truthfully, the matter of Julian’s well-being—”
A masculine voice cut in from somewhere inside the house’s lower level. “What about Jude?”
I caught his components before I saw him: a gleaming head of gold, a few threads of silver woven in along the temples. A beautiful blue suit, neither navy nor cobalt. The shirt underneath was parted insouciantly, the picture of movie star luxury.
My breath caught in my throat. The name William rolled around on my tongue, a rustle of crisp white sheets.
When he looked at me, he was wearing sunglasses. He pushed them up to meet my eyes.
“Mr. de Witt,” I breathed in recognition.
As I’d told Roro that morning, it didn’t seem possible for him to be as old as he was.
At my age, growing up in the cosmetic mecca of Los Angeles, I didn’t technically know a thing about what people were supposed to look like, but William de Witt transcended normal human qualities to land somewhere near divine.
Certainly he was much older than me, visibly twice my age, but it didn’t translate as it should have, as a barrier or even a reasonable deterrent.
Even now, I struggle to define what made him so attractive. His eyes? Something about his presence? He was thinner in person, and taller. Ironically, less real—as if the grain of the camera really was necessary, if only to compromise that unattainable Hollywood sheen.
“You must be Anya.” His gaze was arresting. I felt physically rooted to the spot. “I understand you came to the rescue last night.”
“Oh, I … don’t know about that.” I caught the flicker of Emmanuelle’s smile in my periphery. She held something in her hand—my phone. She’d produced it from her pocket. She must have been holding it the whole time.
“Yes, William, Anya was just telling me she wasn’t feeling up to the task.” Emmanuelle’s tone had a slippery quality to it, like liquid being poured into a cup. “It seems Julian was a bit too much for her,” she purred, and offered my phone to me, a subtle negotiation.
My hesitation then was a fatal shot. Just say it, I told myself. Just quit.
(But, as always, a prayer: If I fail, it won’t be because I looked opportunity in its ocean eyes and turned it down.)
I reached for the phone. The screen flashed with notifications, a glimpse of reality to lure me back. My hand closed around it, words finding me. “It’s just that I don’t know if—”
“I know that Jude can be … difficult.” William’s gaze was fixed on me when he interjected, to the point where I felt he was ignoring Emmanuelle.
There was a resonance between them, something I couldn’t interpret, tension pulled taut like a guitar string.
At the time, though, all I could think about was the weight of his attention, which fell like a warm body over mine.
“All this renovation hasn’t been easy on him.
All the change … you see, he’s very ill. ”
I opened my mouth to say yes, exactly, and about that so-called illness—
“Dr. Hodel says you acted quickly,” William continued.
Reassuringly, with a hint of praise. “Thanks to you, Jude is recovering in private, here at home, just as we’d hoped.
The attention on him, if they’d caught wind of him in the ER…
” William trailed off. “The paparazzi can be relentless. I’ve done my best to protect his privacy, but I’m sure you can understand.
The media scrutiny is part of how we’ve gotten to this point to begin with.
And now, with the house, all the changes …
the adjustment to the new environment is taking its toll.