Chapter Two #2
It’s my sweat and tears that he’s looking at, and I want to tell him so but it feels too revealing. Too…exposing. He might have taken me by surprise this morning, but that doesn’t mean I intend to roll over and show him my belly.
Though rolling around with him, maybe right here on the floor, and showing him my belly is suddenly all I can think about. And it turns out I don’t need to breathe for that, because he—
Stop it, I order myself. He’s a con man.
And he’s talking. “You should view this as an opportunity,” he tells me, and he sounds…something like serious. “For a little while, your Luc Garnier will be here, in the flesh. I’m certain that you can make use of that.”
I’m not sure I like the fact that I was thinking of writhing on the floor while he was thinking in terms of strategy. I feel like I’m letting myself down already.
That might be why I make a scoffing sound that definitely errs on the side of aggressive. “So you’re doing me a favor?”
“You can call it whatever you like. It will not make a difference. But this myth of yours is now a man.”
I might sound aggressive, but inside, I’m too aware it’s nothing but panic. How can he possibly know this? Maybe guessing the truth isn’t wholly surprising, but he’s not acting as if this is a guess. He’s acting as if he knows the truth as well as I do.
I don’t understand how.
Or why he’s so confident that he’s right, even in the face of my denials.
It’s like he can read my mind, and that doesn’t help. “Surely there must be a use for that. For you. Perhaps you should stop fighting the inevitable and think about what that use might be, Annagret.”
He turns back as he says that. This myth turned man, and I hate myself immediately for thinking of him in such terms. But how can I not?
Firstly, if ever a man looked like a myth, it’s him. Everything about him suggests that shrines should be constructed, statues carved of the finest bronze and marble, and all necessary sacrifices made to win his favor.
And secondly, he’s not wrong. But I deeply dislike being put in this position.
And I hate that he’s made me feel helpless when I haven’t felt like that in years.
Ten years, to be exact, since the night of my eighteenth birthday when my stepmother told me my birthday gift was that I had two weeks’ notice to leave and I said, why wait?
I decided, then and there, that the only way I would return to that house was in a coffin.
Just like I decide, here and now, that the last thing I need is to give this man more ammunition against me.
I blink at him. “I still can’t imagine why you think I’m going to just…go along with this delusion of yours.”
His face changes again, and I have the impression of that regal authority once more.
As if he is not used to his dictates being challenged in the slightest regard, but it’s not the baffled rage that my stepmother used to show me.
This is something else. As if it’s not a narcissistic wound of some kind that he wants to give voice to, but rather something he truly has no experience with.
As if he is used to reverence, not pushback.
I am intrigued despite myself, but then he simply looks at me seriously and I feel…breathless once again.
“I do not have any choice,” he says, and there is a quiet sort of heft to the way the words land. To the way he looks at me, steady and sure and something I might have called sorrowed, if this was another situation. “And I am sorry if that upsets you. Truly I am, but nothing can be done.”
“I can think of something that could be done. Right now, in fact.” I lift a brow and try to fill up with enough breath and bluster to ride this out. “You could leave.”
“I have already told you how and roughly when that will happen.” He shakes his head, and his expression changes again.
“Come now. There is no need to dwell on these things. Why don’t you and I put our heads together and come up with ways that you can use the appearance of Luc Garnier to bolster your position. ”
The last thing I need is a figment of my imagination patronizing me.
“You’re bribing me with your body?” I ask, my voice dry.
I don’t think it through. I just say it.
But then it is said.
And it seems to hang there between us in the space of this office. This gleaming, bright office that is all Manhattan skyline and the hustle of the street below. Inside these walls of glass, it is hushed. Intimate.
And it is very clear that he is taking what I said in a very specific way.
A way I don’t mean.
A way I don’t think I mean, but then again, I think of us rolling together on the floor, of blooming and breathlessness, and I am not so sure.
“There are other ways that I could use my body to please you, Annagret,” he tells me, his voice gone dark and low.
I hate myself for the heat that washes over me. I hate myself for the fact that I want to fidget . That I am perilously close to a betraying giggle . That I want to be immune to him, if not actively repulsed…yet can’t.
“I see,” he says, this dangerous, impossible man who should not be here.
And what I worry is that he really can see, all of me, all the places I am soft and hot and want things I don’t want to admit.
“You’d like a little bit of talk and some mythmaking, is that it?
But reality, it seems, confounds you. I will keep that in mind. ”
I become aware of a pain in my chest and it takes my palm pressed hard against the ache of it to realize it’s my heart. Pounding. Jackhammering against my ribs as if it’s trying to claw its way out.
At the same time, something seems to shift in the man before me. It’s as if he’s come to some kind of resolution and I can see him straighten his shoulders, just slightly, as he faces me fully.
“I took the liberty of looking at the office calendar,” he says, and it is a completely different tone from the one he was using before. Gone are any hints of mythmaking, or apology, or any recognition that I mentioned his body.
Gone, too, though slower, is the heat in my cheeks.
It feels like a relief. As if he’s released his grip on me and I can breathe—
But then his words penetrate. “Why on earth would you imagine you had access to proprietary information?” I demand.
Even as I say it, I realize how foolish it is. He doesn’t even need to aim that smile at me.
After all, if he is prepared to assume an identity not his own, how shocking can it really be that he intends to rifle through everything he finds, private or not?
“I will have to have a word with Tess,” I say coolly.
“What will you instruct her?” he asks, as if this is a matter of great interest to him. “You will perhaps tell her not to obey…her boss? The name on all her pay stubs? What reason will you give for such an extraordinary instruction?”
There is nothing to say to that, so I do not attempt it.
He only nods, as if he expects nothing else. As if that is close enough to obedience. “There is a charity event tonight, is there not? The sort of place, I imagine, that people in our line of work can easily pick up new clients. New clients with deep pockets to fund ongoing retainers, yes?”
There is a particularly challenging sort of gleam in his gaze, now.
I feel vulnerable and naked about all of this.
I don’t want him to see the vulnerability and I certainly don’t intend to use the word naked in his presence.
But in all these years, no one has strayed close to the truth.
No one has even questioned it, not really.
At most, clients might question what they consider my gatekeeping of the great man himself.
Luckily, in today’s world of technology, it is not so difficult to send people on endless loops without ever getting anywhere.
And without ever having to meet the people we’re speaking to.
I can’t say I like the fact that someone called my bluff.
Yet what I really don’t like is feeling as if this man has peeled me open.
As a child I learned that any hint of the real me was a weapon used to hurt me.
Any whisper of my real feelings an invitation to attack me.
I’ve made certain never to let anyone in, ever. No one gets to see inside. Not ever.
That this man even knows the way I operate at charity events in New York City that I know he has never attended with me makes me feel things I vowed I would never feel again.
I don’t like any of it.
It’s one thing to slide in and take over the role of a fictional person, surely. That’s a con man move, there’s no doubt about it, but it’s not… this . It feels as if he’s trying to get inside me, too, and I really, truly don’t like it.
I tell myself I don’t like it, again and again, because it seems as if that flush on my face has found its way inside, winding its way down deep.
I don’t like that, either.
“What I do or don’t do to drum up clients for this firm could not be less your business,” I tell him. “And are you going to tell me your name?”
His gaze heats a bit as he regards me. And I do too, in a response I can’t seem to control—and worse, I think he knows it. “You know my name. Feel free to use it.”
I don’t want to. Everything in me revolts at the very idea, but then again, as he keeps pointing out, I don’t have a lot of options.
Or really any options.
It occurs to me then, as it must surely have already occurred to him, that if he really wanted to he could fire me from my own firm.
I’m not sure why that didn’t occur to me immediately. But now it’s all I can think about.
“It seems to me that it is exactly the sort of event at which I should make my first appearance in New York,” he is saying, sounding perfectly unconcerned, as if he’s wholly unaware of the riot going on inside me. And if it were any other man, I might think he really didn’t know. Or care.
And I can’t say that I think he cares. But I feel certain that he knows.
That in some way, it’s deliberate.
It’s that thought that gets through the haze.