Chapter 4
Nowhere to retreat.
Crisis
“And that—” I say, smiling without letting on to even an ounce of the anxiety I feel, “—is why I believe the data supports you waking up at roughly seven o’clock and going to bed around midnight.”
Still as death, Viktor watches me across the private, curtained-off single dining space at his favorite restaurant—The Black Swan. The circular table between us does not omit the chill working its way into my blood as his relaxed amber brown eyes slip over the charts on my laptop screen, then return to me. Slow as frozen blood, he broaches, “You mean…” He pulls his reading glasses off, frees a breath, and tucks them in their case in his breast pocket. “…what I was doing before these past few weeks?”
Oh? Were you?
Silly me.
I hadn’t noticed.
Wounded , I lose all my joy as I say, quite feebly, “But…now we have the data to support it. Now we know this schedule is the most productive. We don’t have to spend energy thinking that any other schedule might be more productive. Which might even make this one more lucrative.”
His broad shoulders sag, and he swipes a hand over his groomed stubble, which defines the cut of his square jaw as a muscle pops in it. “Right.”
Very sad, I close my laptop, set it back in my computer case, and reach for a crepe cup housing a rich cheesy spinach concoction in a crisp layered pastry dough. I nibble on the delicacy. Just. So sad . With all the somber neglect of a woman who expected a raise for her thrilling spreadsheets, I lift my gaze to Viktor.
He hasn’t touched our appetizer.
He has drunk half a glass of water.
Stupid man.
I bet without me there today, he didn’t take any of the vitamins I spent hours researching and ordering. Without them to remind him to drink his water, he’s likely also dehydrated. Because the—stupid—man does not like water. He says water is boring . And then he bathes his teeth in sugar.
The only reason, I’ve told him, he’s not in dentures is because he can afford regular dentist visits. I used to have to guilt him into drinking water by suggesting he was squandering a gift that third-world countries do not have easy access to.
Now, defeated, he downs whatever I hand him—whether it’s water or whether it’s sludge.
Crimson’s right.
With that kind of power, it would be too easy to poison him and get myself in all kinds of trouble. Not that I would ever. After all, I don’t want him dead . I want him miserable . Death is easy. You just die. But misery ? Misery loves company, and I’m ever so lonely.
“Did you drink water today?” I ask.
He flinches. “I’m drinking water right now, aren’t I? ”
I hum, despondent. “That’s what I thought. You’re hopeless.”
“Without you, yes.”
That’s right. Very good. Glad we still know this after the great Ice Bucket Challenge.
Relief settles some of my nerves concerning whatever he wants to talk about tonight. I’m pretty good about weaseling. Even if he tries to upend my evil schemes, I’ll get back to them in a matter of weeks.
It’s classic abusive relationship tactics. The second your victim seems to become more aware, you love bomb them back into complacency.
When he starts to escape from my clutches, I say, You’ve been so good recently. Here. I brought you coffee this morning. A little treat once in a while is okay.
And there you have it. The questions. The doubts. The maybe she does care, in her own way .
Make no mistake, I accept that I’m a horrible person.
I am, in fact, so horrible that being horrible helps me sleep at night.
Getting back at people who have hurt me is what I’ve chosen in lieu of therapy.
If I’m not recalling the way Viktor’s whole body convulsed when I threw ice water on him, I’m plotting my next, worse move. Currently, my big scheme is very devious indeed.
I want to know how one might train a cat to leave a dead mouse gift on someone’s face while they’re sleeping.
Everyone knows Viktor is Ender’s second favorite.
He’s the only one other than Kyran who can call that cat’s name and get a response at least seventy percent of the time.
Even though most often Ender is hanging out with his master, the youngest Bachelor, a dead mouse gift on Viktor’s face equals feasible. Untraceable.
I’d remain blameless. Even if it happens every day .
Google has so far been utterly unhelpful in getting it to happen even once, much to my dismay. But that’s not important right this second.
Making sure I look pitiful, I prompt, “What did you want to talk about tonight, sir?”
Air fills Viktor’s chest, and he plucks a folded sheet of paper from his breast pocket, smoothing it out to reveal a pamphlet he seems to have printed off.
I have never seen the logo printed in the top corner of the extravagant advertisement before in my life. Heading the page, the flowing text for Writer’s Retreat draws my eye.
Under it, Sunset, WV .
There’s a writer’s retreat happening here ?
I know about everything happening here.
The man in front of me knows about everything happening here.
We run this town. Manage the businesses. Curate the neighborhoods.
If I don’t know about something, he’s intentionally kept it from me.
“When did you plan a writing retreat?” I ask.
His head shakes. “I didn’t.”
“How did this get approved?”
“I did approve it.”
I blink at him. He approved it? Without it going through me? Who was emailing after working hours, and why was he in the main email, intercepting things?
He continues, “It’s taking place at Canter Creek Ranch, about forty minutes from the heart of town.”
Yes, I know where Canter Creek Ranch is. We approve events there all the time. You know. We . As in, usually both of us . It takes an awful lot of energy to keep my eye from twitching.
He says, “It starts in May.”
“And lasts two weeks,” I add, because—you know what, Viktor? I can also read .
I am very used to the ten minute drive between my apartment and the Bachelors’ sprawling property. A forty minute commute to and from a writer’s retreat makes my nose scrunch. But Viktor wouldn’t be showing me this if he weren’t planning to go.
I’d know about it if he weren’t planning to go.
Because, yeah, intuition? It’s a thing. And he has to know—at least subconsciously—that I would have discouraged this entirely if he’d brought it up sooner.
People shouldn’t mark off their intuition. Benefit of the doubt is for strangers who stay strangers—not people you’re close to. People you’re close to you’re supposed to be able to talk about the doubts with and come to reasonable conclusions about.
If you can’t or if you feel like you can’t, run .
This is bad.
Annoying.
It’ll be hard to make his life miserable with other authors at a retreat watching. Particularly as I assume other authors have assistants who aren’t dead set on their bosses’ downfalls.
When all my scheming started, I reverse-engineered abusive relationships.
Step one is cutting off external support. Even though I haven’t exactly done that. Viktor’s brothers are great, super kind to me, and seem to find my antics funny. Probably because they are.
Despite my self-proclaimed title as the worst person in all of existence , I do have a line. And taking people who love you away is a level of cruelty that I actually don’t think I can manage.
That being the fact, the effort I’ll have to expend in order to make sure my attitude doesn’t shift between Viktor and I but also doesn’t make any of his new author buds say hey, um, your assistant’s very clearly a psycho …is not something I’m looking forward to.
So I up the sorrow in my eyes when I look at Viktor, who is focusing on tracing the rim of his water glass with his finger. I say, “I can’t go with you, if that’s what you’re asking.”
His finger freezes.
“I have a fish.”
His brow lowers.
“Potato. He needs me.”
Slowly, Viktor says, “You…have a fish…named Potato…who needs you?”
“Yes.” I nod, despondent. “He’s a pea puffer, which means feeding him is a bit of a thing each day. They’re carnivores, pufferfish, so I have to feed him teeny tiny pest snails and blood worms by hand.” I am positively weepy at the notion of being unable to go with him to this retreat. But I simply cannot abandon my Potato. “He’ll miss me too much. He might not eat. Two weeks is a long time to be without him.”
Concern for the—actually true—dependency I appear to have on my fish swells in Viktor’s expression. “Can’t a friend feed him if you show them how?”
“My only friend is an heiress.”
“Right,” he murmurs, lifting his water glass to his lips. “Crimson Nightingale.” He sips. “She keeps staff.”
My lashes flutter. “You want me to ask an heiress to add feeding my fish to any one of her staff’s daily duties?”
“Knowing Crimson, she’d be happy to do it herself,” he mumbles against the rim.
I bristle at the very suggestion that anyone knows Crimson besides me.
“This is very important to me, Crisis,” he says, looking deep into my eyes with an intensity I’m positive only a Bachelor brother can achieve. The Bachelor men are built like priceless sculptures. All dark hair and brooding backstories. Tall. Broad. Severe. Some of them do smile more than the others, but every last one of them can pull off looks that delve this deep into a soul at a moment’s notice.
I clear my throat. “It’s…very important to you that I be present at a writer summer camp?”
“May isn’t summer.”
I touch a finger to the listed events above a very specific and more! “There’s a bonfire advertised, right under swimming at a lake, and horseback riding. This is a summer camp, Mr. Bachelor. It’s only not happening in summer because it’s targeted at people out of school year-round.”
“While there are activities, there are also classes. And the intention is that members achieve writing goals during the two weeks. It’s a work trip, with scheduled movement, so the writers who go don’t lose their minds.”
I like when he loses his mind, though. Nothing brings me more pleasure than watching him drop his head to his desk in a fit of discouragement and agony, then begin gently knocking his skull against the wood as though he’s attempting a force restart of his brain.
Refraining from getting video evidence is the only downside.
To write is to suffer. And he deserves the pain of every word.
Just once I’d love to see the words he fights through blood and tears for get shot down like how he destroyed me ten years ago.
I finish my spinach crepe cup. “Will there be a workshop?”
“I believe so, yes. Possibly a few were listed on the website.”
Those things are vicious, no matter how good at writing you are.
I might get my dream.
My mind turns the idea over.
Yes, no, yes, no, fish. My fish. My dearly beloved fish.
Crimson would absolutely take care of Potato personally. His well-being is not even a concern. But I am somewhat emotionally dependent, in all truth. I love my fish. Fourteen days without my fish sounds like the kind of limit that might result in crime scenes.
It makes every muscle in me clench when Viktor dissects exactly what is going on in my brain to say, “Crisis, you can visit Potato. It’s only forty minutes out of town. The round trip would get exhausting every day, but there will be things I’ll need you to check on out here. That connection to business is one of the many reasons I think it’s important for you to come with me.”
That makes sense. But… “Why do you want to go on a writing retreat? It doesn’t quite seem like something you’d…do.”
“I have a lot of responsibility as the head of my family. You know that.” Freeing a tight breath, he leans back against the white leather of his chair. “Someone has to stay linked to Sunset, and since Kyran’s the baby, Lukas and Zakery are often on tour or at comic cons, and Kaleb has no interest in managing land, taking care of Sunset is my job. A writing retreat has never fallen this close to home before, so I’ve never had the opportunity to think about whether or not it would be something I’d do . ”
“Why didn’t I have a part to play in this sooner?” I ask. “Taking care of Sunset is also my job. I’m supposed to know about these things.”
“What you do and don’t know about is up to my discretion.”
I wince. “I’m sorry. I didn’t… I just mean, you aren’t alone in this responsibility, Mr. Bachelor.”
His eyes narrow, but he doesn’t challenge my statement, which is cheesier than the crepe cups if I do say so myself. I’m very proud of pulling a you’re not alone out of nowhere.
While I care about Sunset as my home, I could not care less about whether or not Viktor feels like he has to take care of his parents’ land all by himself.
So very sad, it is, that he must manage thousands of incomes from all the people paying rent to have their perfectly-curated and polished businesses or homes on Sunset property. Boo hoo.
If he’s lonely with four loving brothers, he should fill a pool with money like Scrooge McDuck and then cry in it.
“I’ll adjust your schedule,” I say, “and ask Crimson if she’ll take care of Potato.”
The tension in Viktor’s shoulders does not ease, even as he reaches for a crepe cup. “I can always count on you.”
I smile.
Yep. You just keep believing that, Mr. Bachelor.
It’s gonna be a long two weeks…