1. Carter
CHAPTER 1
CARTER
A soft, warm wind blew in from the ocean, bringing with it the salty tang of the sea. I sighed and took a deep breath. The breeze tasted like tears, like sadness, like the sorrow weighing heavy on my heart.
I pushed my laptop off my lap and leaned back in my chair. The ocean spread out far across to the horizon, melding into a blur. The sky was overcast, riddled with the grey clouds so typical of this time of year. Fall was my favorite season. Everything was so much softer and quieter and more peaceful. I looked forward to the cooler nights and lowering temperatures even when summer had only just begun, and missed them as soon as the harsher cold of winter erased all the joy that could be found.
This fall, however, I couldn’t really find it in me to enjoy the weather.
The door behind me opened and footsteps approached. My personal assistant and best friend, Brian, came to my side, carrying with him two steaming mugs of coffee. “You could have just said you wanted a few minutes alone.”
“Huh?” I glanced up at him, away from the ocean, confused. “What?”
Brian pressed one of the cups of coffee towards me. I took it and held it in both hands, breathing in the earthy sweetness of the brew. Brian said, “You said you needed coffee to give you a boost for what you were working on. But your screen is off.”
I looked back at my laptop and frowned. He was right. I hadn’t touched my computer in so long that it had fallen asleep on me. “Time got away from me, I suppose.”
“That seems to happen to you a lot these days.” Brian sat down on a chair close to mine, holding his coffee and sipping at it with relish.
A silence fell between the two of us as we sat there on the balcony outside my office, watching seagulls flutter in the air over the Lower New York Bay. Boats trundled over the restless gray waves, foamy white wakes tracking behind them. If I took a closer look, I knew I’d be able to identify all the smaller leisure vessels, since most, if not all of them, belonged to wealthy individuals I knew personally. Not many of those individuals lived on Staten Island, however.
Very few people of any significance lived on Staten Island, much to the annoyance of its citizens in the past. Of all New York City’s five boroughs, Staten Island was often left behind in favor of its more popular and dramatic brethren. Local government neglected its issues in favor of more pressing ones. Part of that could simply be chalked up to the borough’s status as an island, and its southern positioning. It could be hard to care about a place that wasn’t connected to the rest of the city. It could be hard to remember a place so far removed it didn’t resemble the rest of the city at all.
In some ways, a curse. In others, a blessing.
I was making changes to better the future of the island. In the past, sitting out on the balcony with the ocean in front and the NYC skyline to the left, I felt so powerful and important and significant, certain of the positive impact I was having. To a degree, I still felt that way. I knew my efforts had touched thousands of lives.
But lately, those numbers had begun to seem hollow. And the view left me wanting. I couldn’t see the trees for the forest. Rather, I couldn’t find the one specific tree I wanted.
“What’s on your mind, Carter?” Brian broke the stillness with a question I’d have preferred not to answer.
I tried to avoid doing so. “It’s just more of the same. Nothing’s changed, Brian.”
He scoffed. “You can’t convince me of that. Not when I know you as well as I do.”
I glanced over at him. He sat there in his charcoal-gray suit and tie and stared back at me with a more adult version of the childish exasperation he used to display when we were boys, whenever I didn’t want to play some game that he had created. A sudden pang of nostalgia gripped me. I grimaced and looked away, at the boats, and felt kinship with them, for they were surrounded by their own kind, yet doomed to be alone for their voyage, as it seemed I was in my own voyage called life.
Brian’s voice softened from its usual deep rasp. “What’s changed, Carter?”
I pushed my fingers back through my hair. “I have.”
He chuckled. “I’ll have to call bullshit on that one. You become more you with every year.”
I tried to smile and just barely managed it. “That’s the problem. The years that pass. I just turned 30, Brian. I’m finding gray hair in my beard. I’m making changes, making waves, inspiring all generations to take on their dreams. But I’m still alone.”
“I’m alone too, you know.” Brian lifted his eyebrows. “I’m not exactly married and settled down either.”
“It doesn’t bother you.”
“That is true,” he conceded. “I like my freedom. I’ve never understood that about you. Never. Why are you so eager to be trapped? You’ve always obeyed the rules and done the expected. Maybe it’s time you broke out of that mold. It’s the expectations you’ve put upon yourself that make you unhappy. You’re the one who controls that, you know. Your perceptions are your own to modify as you see fit.”
“Why are you suddenly a psychologist?” Brian was a lawyer before I hired him.
“I’m your personal assistant,” he responded. He drained the rest of his coffee and set the mug down on the ground. “If I don’t call you out on your bullshit, who will?”
“Dammit, it’s not bullshit!”
“Hey!” He looked alarmed. “I was only joking with you. I’m sorry. I pushed your buttons.”
The brief flare of anger died out and I flopped back in my chair again. “No, I’m the one who should be sorry. This is why we work so well together, since our minds are so different. I do value your thoughts, Brian. I think I’m just having a midlife crisis.” I rubbed my eyes hard with the heels of my hands. “I just wish that I had someone to go home to every evening. Maybe you’re okay with being alone and that’s fine for you, but the more time I spend alone, the more I get tired of it.”
Brian listened, his head tilted, his dark eyes locked on me, his boss, his employer, his friend.
I opened my eyes, my vision blurry from pushing my hands so hard against them. “I’m happy that I can do what I can for entire communities. I only wish I had someone to share my life with. Someone I could talk to and spoil with my money, and laugh and cry with.”
“So, you want… me?” Brian said.
I knew he was teasing me and rolled my eyes. “A woman, Brian.”
“But if I was a woman?”
I had to laugh. “Not even if you were a woman. You wouldn’t be my type.”
He chuckled. “Somewhere, in an alternate universe…”
I put down my cup of coffee, which had gone lukewarm at this point. I turned to him and frowned with as much severity as I could manage. “Is this what you do in your spare time? Write AU fanfiction about us?”
“The fact that you know what AU fanfiction is tells me you need to get out more.”
“I agree.” I grimaced. “It’s difficult, though. Making a name for myself means that too many people know me. It would be way too difficult to figure out what someone’s intentions are.”
“Hmm. If only there was a way for you to meet someone while not being yourself.”
“I don’t think committing identity theft is a viable option here.”
“Snap.” Brian snapped his fingers.
I picked up my laptop and tapped the screen to wake it up, and typed in my password. My email account jumped onto the screen, flooded with messages I needed to read and reply to. The sheer volume of the work filled me with a sort of dread, even though I really did love my job.
“Hold on,” Brian muttered. He got up and went back inside.
I figured he had just gotten a call and turned back to my computer. I opened up the most recent email and started reading, though it proved difficult. The words fluttered around in my vision like the seagulls out there riding the ocean winds, bobbing and spiraling in a messy swarm.
Brian returned a few seconds later, slamming the door shut.
“I think I’m onto something,” he announced.
“What?” Frowning, I swiveled around in my chair just in time for him to shove a very colorful piece of paper in my face. I leaned back and swatted at the page, trying to knock it out of his hand. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“Careful,” he scolded, clutching the paper tighter, denting the surface with his fingers. “I picked this up earlier and now I’m glad I did. Look at it.”
I took the piece of paper and scanned it, recognizing it for what it was right away. It was a flyer announcing a Halloween party at a community center next weekend. I looked up at stared blankly at Brian. “So?”
“ So , this is a Halloween party! Costumes! Geez, don’t you get it?” Brian gestured emphatically at the flyer in my hand, smacking the paper, which made little snapping sounds, like a miniature boat sail. “At a Halloween party, you and everyone else can be in costume. You won’t be strictly you. No one will be able to instantly judge you, or try to suck up to you.”
“Someone would still recognize me,” I pointed out, trying to ignore the treacherous niggling of hope in the pit of my gut.
“Would they?” Brian grinned and started pacing. “No one would be expecting you! No one would be looking out for you, thinking they might spot Carter Bryant at this random party. And if someone did eventually recognize you, maybe by that point you would have already gotten what you came for.”
I hesitated.
“I know it’s not a perfect plan, but it’s better than anything else you’ve got right now.”
“Not hard, when I don’t have any other plans.”
“Well then?”
“I don’t know,” I murmured. “There’s no guarantee.”
“When has there ever been?”
Brian was right about that, for sure, yet I couldn’t help but to think that there must be another way to go about this. I liked the anonymity, but there had to be something else I could do.
Slowly, an idea formed in my mind. I got up and went to the balcony railing, gripping it in my hands. The wood was damp from the ocean winds, and a little splintery. The prickles against my palms helped to center me. “What if we threw our own party?”
“Come again?”
“I’ll wear something to help disguise me. A mask, maybe.” I turned back to Brian, getting more excited the longer I thought about it. “And we’ll get lookalikes. Impersonators. No one will know who the real me is. But the whole point of the party will be to help me find my future wife. But I’ll be incognito, mingling with everyone else.”
“Holy shit,” Brian said. “That sounds like it’s just crazy enough to work.”
“We’ll have to plan fast. Halloween isn’t that far off.”
Brian grinned. “Leave that to me. I already have an idea.”
He left before I could ask him to elaborate. I shrugged and turned back to the ocean, clutching the railing and bracing all my weight against it, struggling with logic, but struggling more with hope.