35. Lance
Chapter thirty-five
Lance
“An albatross,” Rex says reverently. “Once in a lifetime.”
The word sits in my stomach like a stone.
Albatross. The vanity press. The twenty thousand dollars.
The man across the table from me, cutting into his filet mignon, fathered the person I love and doesn’t know it.
Or does know it, and has spent twenty-seven years pretending he doesn’t.
I’m not sure if that’s better or worse. It doesn’t make him less of a slimeball.
“You know, Lance, I see real potential in you,” Rex says, switching topics the way powerful men do—without transition, assuming you’ll keep up.
“The Comptroller’s office is a stepping stone.
I’ve had three people come through that position and move on to very good things in the university administration and beyond.
It’s about making the right connections.
Fairhaven University seems like a little world, but local money is a broader world, and that bridges onto a very large stage.
So you’re not on Pebble Beach yet, but if you stay at par and swing right, you’ll be on the back nine before you know it. ”
Oh my God, that was three golf metaphors in a row. I don’t know if I can do this. I take a bite of my steak and think about Jonny’s curtains.
The lunch is never-ending. Every third bite is punctuated by Harlow acknowledging someone from across the room or pointing them out to me.
The only name I recognize is Henry Drumm from the Phoenixes, who’s having lunch with his wife.
Everybody else is a list of people he namedrops as if he thinks I should already know them.
The Kirkfields, for example, are spoken of with enthusiasm, and the Bellamies are met with derision for being eccentric.
I glance over my shoulder. The Bellamies in question are a middle-aged couple, clearly enraptured with each other.
The woman murmurs something, and the man laughs too loud, causing the diners nearby to look over their shoulders at them.
“Proof that money can’t buy class,” Harlow mutters, glaring over his whiskey at them.
“Which is a lesson to you,” he says, switching his attention back to me.
“If you want to get ahead in this game, you need to be very attentive to your public image. It means more than you think.”
“Yes, sir,” I say, which is a Marine Corps reaction I still haven’t been able to break myself of.
A waiter approaches and clears his throat. “Sir, there is someone at the front desk who wishes to speak to you,” he tells me. “He’s very insistent.”
“Let him wait,” Harlow says.
My pulse spikes. There’s only one person who could know where I am right now. “Did he give a name?”
“A Mr. Bishop, sir,” the waiter says.
The fork goes down on the plate with a clatter. I’m already standing. “I’ll be right back.”
I stride back to the front room. Jonny is sitting on a padded leather bench looking like he’s just been scolded by the concierge, who is looking at him with the aggrieved expression of a man defending civilization from the barbarians.
“Thank you,” I say. “I’ll take it from here.”
Jonny stands up. “Hi,” he says. He curls and uncurls his fingers. “Joe told me where you were.”
I take his arm and steer him into the first door I can find—a billiard room with green-shaded lamps and a smell of leather and cigar smoke. I close the door behind us.
“Are you okay?” I ask.
“I have to talk to you.”
“And it has to be now?” I sigh and lean against the door. Part of me thinks he’s come to twist the knife further. Part of me thinks I should just follow his lead and walk away, the way he told me to. But I can’t. I have never been able to walk away from this man. “Okay. Have a seat.”
He doesn’t take a chair. He sits on the edge of the pool table. It feels rebellious, and when he looks at me, we’re almost at eye level.
“You were right,” he says. “About all of it.”
I don’t answer. I’m afraid to. If I open my mouth, I’ll either apologize or beg, and neither of those will help.
“About India,” he says. “I ran there so I could lose myself. About my job, and how I tried to erase who I was. About what you were really offering me when you asked me to be your partner.” He steals a glance at my face, and whatever he sees there seems to make his eyes sting, because he blinks rapidly, takes a deep breath, and looks away.
“And about my mom. About my family. About how I was raised. You were right about all of it.”
I’m almost too afraid to hear this. It’s what I’ve longed for most. I grip the edge of the pool table on either side of him to keep my hands from shaking.
“I thought you wanted to turn me back into what I was when she was alive,” he continues. “But you weren’t doing that. You were trying to show me what she’d done to me, and I wasn’t ready to hear it.” His voice breaks. “I’m so sorry. You are nothing like her.”
“Why are you here?” I manage. “What is it you really want to say?”
He looks at me directly. “What I realized wasn’t really about you. It was about me. I was living a lie for most of my life, because I believed in lies. But the truth is that the only place I ever felt at home was with you.”
“I don’t know what to say. Because if that were true, you wouldn’t have left me. Again.”
“I know, Lance. And I’m sorry. I came here because I love you, and if there is some way that we can be together, I want to do it, no matter what the cost.”
I fold. “You know I’ll say yes.”
“You don’t have to.”
I brace against the pool table and lower my head. My breath comes in hard gasps. “I just—I’m afraid.”
“Of what?” he asks.
“How long I get before I fuck it up again.” My voice isn’t steady. “Because I’m pretty sure I will.”
“Then let’s future-proof this,” he says.
I look up. “What do you mean?”
“Lance, I love you, but you still dream of fires. You were sent into life-threatening situations as a Marine. You were in a toxic, abusive marriage. You need counseling or therapy or something that specifically helps you deal with all that trauma.” He pauses.
“That’s my condition for us getting back together. ”
I want to make him promises. It’s so easy, it’s already loaded in my mouth. And I don’t let it out, because agreeing that fast is the reflex that got us here—me promising to fix the problem, secure the objective. Jonny isn’t an objective.
“What if it doesn’t work?” I say instead, and my voice isn’t steady. “What if I do all of it—the fires, the Corps, Nash—and I’m still the man who almost killed someone with you standing three feet away? What if that’s just what I am now, and no amount of talking scrapes it out?”
He doesn’t rush to tell me it’ll be fine. He just holds my eyes. “Then we’ll know,” he says. “And we’ll deal with what’s true instead of what we’re scared of. But you don’t get to decide right now that it won’t work and call that protecting me. That’s just protecting yourself from hoping.”
It lands under my sternum, because it’s the one position I never admitted I was holding—the one where I don’t have to want this and lose it.
“Okay,” I say. “I’ll try. I don’t know if it’ll be enough. But I’ll try.”
He lets out a long breath, like he’d been holding it since he walked in. “That’s the one I needed to hear,” he says, unsteady. “Not done. That.” He wipes his eyes. “Okay. Now you. What do you need from me?”
He’s asking me to set a boundary. He’s trusting me to name what I need. Nobody has ever done that.
“I want you to enroll in a martial art of my choosing,” I say.
He looks at me suspiciously. “Why of your choosing?”
“Because I know what works and what doesn’t, and most of it doesn’t.
Half the places in this town will sell you a black belt in eighteen months and a whole lot of confidence you can’t cash.
” I make myself say the rest of it. “We can find it together. But if somebody comes at you and I’m not there, I have to know you can put him on the ground. That’s all. That’s the whole thing.”
He takes a beat to mull over it. “Okay,” he says.
I feel encouraged enough to continue. “And also: about living together. Here’s what I want: I want you to move back in today, but I’m sick of you making the call that you need to leave without talking to me. So if you say you’re in, you have to be in unless we talk about it first.”
“You deserve that much.”
I smile. “Well, I got two. Your turn for one.”
“I actually don’t have any that really matter.”
“Then bank it for when you need it. I trust you. We’re really doing this?” I ask.
“Yes. I guess we are.”
He hesitates. “And I’m not going to do anything about Rex Harlow,” he says.
“Jonny—”
“No, listen. I’ve been sitting with it for three days and I’m done.
” He turns his hands over on his knees. “If he had wanted me, he had twenty-seven years and my mother’s telephone number.
He didn’t want me when I was a baby. He didn’t want me when there was a boy with special needs on the news for a week.
He didn’t want me last Monday when you said my name to him across a desk and told him I’d lost my whole family in that fire. ”
“You could still—”
“What? Make him?” He almost laughs. “I have lived my entire life without a father and I turned out all right. I’m not starting one now because a bank statement says I should.”
He looks up at me.
“He can keep his twenty thousand dollars and I’ll keep the rest of my life. That’s the trade. I’m happy with it.”
I reach out and pull him against me. No words.
Just the warmth of him, the scent of his shampoo, the roughness of his linen shirt, the feel of his muscles underneath.
I hold him and he holds me and the billiard room with its green-shaded lamps and leather chairs might as well be the only room in the world.
When we finally pull apart, something has shifted.
The hostilities are over. A bridge has been crossed.
“This is just an anniversary argument, right?” I say, letting my voice lighten.
He blinks at me. “What?”
“If we’d been married for nine years, we would have had a lot of arguments like this. Some even worse.”
A glimmer of a smile. His head tilts in wry amusement. “Like?”
“Like that time you lost the car payment playing poker with your buddies. And the time you got drunk and threw up on our brand new sofa. You ruined that sofa.”
Jonny shakes his head. “It was orange. I hated that sofa.”
“And then there was that time in Japan—”
“We will not talk about Japan.”
“When you abandoned me in a karaoke bar for four hours.”
“That was for a good cause.”
I lace my fingers together around his hips and he puts his arms around my neck. “Honey, a zombie movie marathon is not a good cause.”
“But they were Japanese zombies,” he says. “They knew karate.”
I laugh. I actually laugh. It comes up from somewhere deep and real, and it’s the first time I’ve laughed in days, and it sounds like coming home. I step back, bow my head slightly, and put my palms together. “Shukriya,” I say.
“How did you—Yes! Well done. Aapka swagat hai. That means you’re welcome. It’s very formal.”
“Yeah, there’s no way I’m going to remember that.”
He puts his hands on either side of my prayer hands and rests his forehead against mine. His relief washes over into me. I realize, with some shock, that I’m just as glad to have said it as he was to hear it.
He stands up and palms his face clean, then grabs my hand. “Come on, then.”
He pulls me through the billiard room door and into the lobby, where the concierge scowls. Rex is crossing toward the front entrance in his golfing gear, his buddy beside him. He looks up and I see the surprise on his face at the way Jonny is holding my hand.
“Gentlemen?” Rex says. “Lance, our tee time is in five minutes.” He glances at Jonny and then pointedly dismisses him.
The old reflex fires the second Rex’s eyes find our hands—step in, introduce him, put my body between them, manage the room. I feel every word of it load. And I let it go unfired, because this shot was never mine.
Jonny doesn’t let go of my hand. “We never got a chance to be properly introduced,” he says, pleasant as spring weather.
“I’m your son.” He lets it sit—one beat, in the middle of that bright, crowded room—and then he smiles.
“But, don’t worry about it. I don’t claim you.
I do, however, claim him because I locked myself out of our apartment and it’s definitely laundry day.
” He turns and looks at Rex’s friend, who is standing, jaw hanging open.
“Have a good game,” he says. “Kick his ass.”