22. Cali
CALI
The banquet hall in Brighton Beach looks like it's from another century. Gold crown molding, red velvet drapes, columns that hold up nothing.
Ronan opens my door and holds out his hand. "Ready?"
"God, no. Not even a little."
"Good. Neither am I, and I've been to a hundred of these."
We walk in together. As we cross over the threshold, I can literally feel him change.
It's not Clark Kent turning into Superman or anything nearly that dramatic.
He doesn't puff up or square his shoulders or don a big, red cape flapping in the wind.
In fact, he kind of does less. All the little wrinkles and quirks I've come to see in him over the weeks get shaved down and locked away.
In his place is somebody else. Somebody the whole room turns toward without seeming to.
Conversations don't stop, per se, but they change. Every eye in the place finds him and then slides off him onto me. Curiosity follows. So this is the woman, hm? I wonder what she's made of.
His hand settles on my lower back. More and more lately, it feels like the only thing holding me up.
"Chin up," he murmurs. "You're the most dangerous thing in the room."
"That's a dirty lie and you know it. I nearly tripped on the way in."
He winks. "Good thing I'm here to catch you then."
A woman in emerald sequins descends on us before we've cleared the entryway. She's beautiful in an intimidating way, like the mean girl in a high school movie, and I'm not quite sure if she intends to Regina George me or if Ronan's presence will keep me safe.
"Ronan," she purrs. "We were beginning to think you'd forgotten how to be one of us."
"Never, Marisha. Just busy."
"So I hear." Her eyes cut to me and then through me. "And this is what's been keeping you so busy, hm?"
"This is my wife," he confirms. "Calista, this is Marisha. Semyon's cousin."
I put out my hand. "It's lovely to meet you."
She takes it. "You're smaller than the photographs suggested."
That's a test if I've ever heard one. She's fishing to see how I'll react. I get the feeling that Ronan would've told me if there were pictures of me floating around, whether good or bad—but then again, maybe not. I could see him deciding to protect my peace of mind.
Either way, the only route available to me is the obvious one: Play it cool.
"Photographs never get me right," I reassure her. "I'm better in person. Or so I'm told."
She chuckles, which lets me breathe a sigh of relief. Test passed, I hope. Curtsying elegantly, she drifts off toward a knot of men by the bar, and Ronan's thumb draws a slow line against my spine, the barest, silent good job.
I almost tell him not to do that. I think I just like it too much.
Not only the praise—though yes, I'm a filthy, greedy praise-whore; sue me—but also the fact that he stays there to balance me if I ever need to reach out for him.
That's one of his most lovable attributes, I decide.
He's always, always there for me. But he doesn't force himself on me.
He lets me decide when I do and don't need him.
Maybe that's why I tortured him a little bit when he invited me here in the first place.
I wanted to come, because reaching for him and reminding myself he's still there is a pleasure I'll never get tired of. Whether under cover of night or at breakfast time, I like knowing I can do it whenever I want.
Plus, there's the added perk of seeing him in his element. The competence porn of it. Ronan is at home in every room he enters, but this one especially. The aura of respect that surrounds him is like a cloud of cologne, and I keep taking sneaky little inhales.
"Alright," I mumble out of the side of my mouth. "Give me the scouting report. Who do I need to be afraid of?"
"As long as you're with me? None of them."
"You better not go taking any sudden bathroom breaks then," I joke.
He laughs. "Like I said: I'm here to catch you, darling." He winks, then adds, "Besides, I'm more interested in your take on these people."
I press a hand to my chest. "Me? What would I know? This is your world, not mine."
"But you've got sharp eyes and they're not as jaded as mine." He pokes me in the side playfully. "Go ahead then. Tell me what you think."
We do a slow lap. He steers me deeper into the room, past columns and through little thickets of people enjoying the cocktail hour. I rattle off observations as they occur to me.
"Marisha likes me, I think. Those men by the bar think I'm either your weakness or your best decision, they can't tell which. That pretty woman by the window has been watching you the whole time we've been talking."
Ronan doesn't look. "Which one?"
"Blue dress. Pearls. Big hair, full of secrets."
"That's Vera. Semyon's sister. She watches everyone. Don't take it personally."
"She's not watching everyone. She's watching you."
He's quiet a second. "Huh. Interesting." He steers me around a waiter carrying a tray of little pastries. "Anything else?"
I keep going. "The tall guy with the scar. He doesn't like you."
"That's probably because it's my fault he got the scar in the first place."
"No, I mean it. He's smiling but it's not real. It doesn't get to his eyes."
Ronan's hand goes still on my back for just a second, then keeps moving.
"You should keep an eye on that one," I advise.
"Yeah," he growls. "I intend to."
We stop near a column. A server offers me champagne and I take it, mostly to have something to do with my hands. Ronan doesn't take one.
"You want anything?" I ask.
"No. Somebody in this family should stay sober and alert." He looks at me. "Might as well be me."
"Unexpected," I remark.
Ronan arches a brow. "That I'm not drinking?"
I nod. "Yeah. I thought you'd want to blame your handsiness on the alcohol. If you keep touching me while you're sober, I'm going to start to think you mean it."
His hand on my waist doesn't move. If anything, it presses in. "That's because I do."
I shiver and squirm. "That wasn't in the deal."
"No," he agrees. "A lot of things haven't been in the deal lately."
I look up at him. The gone-by-morning rule is dead and buried somewhere down the hall of my house and neither of us has held a funeral for it. He knows it. I know it. We just keep circling the grave, refusing to lay flowers.
"Not here," I whisper.
"Why not?"
"Not with all of them watching."
He nods, slow, and lifts my hand to his mouth. "Later, then."
Later.
What a delicious promise.
What a very bad idea.
I take a sip of my champagne and remind myself why I'm here. It's not for the dancing. Nor is it for the way his hand feels on my back. I'm here because it's useful, like I said. And I have a job to do tonight, one I set for myself in the car on the way over.
The job is this: get through this whole thing without letting anyone see what I'm hiding.
I know it's in there. But if I don't even have the courage to say it under cover of darkness (and Ronan's bedsheets), then I definitely don't have the courage to say it out loud in the real world.
It's that age-old balance between standing on your own two feet as a proud, independent woman of the world versus the terrifying vulnerability of admitting you want, crave, maybe even need another person.
I've spent a whole life reaching for people and getting nothing back.
Then I spent months learning I don't need to reach at all.
It's hard to split the difference.
But I'm getting better at it. Protecting my peace, as the kids say. Little by little, I feel myself settling into the evening, worrying less and less about how I look in this dress or what these people think of me.
So of course, that's when Vera decides to make her move.
She peels away from the window, blue silk floating ethereally around a frame that's supermodel-skinny. She's stunning, truly. High cheekbones, flawless makeup, porn star curves. She can't be more than thirty. I find myself developing an immediate girl crush.
But then, just as quickly, I fall right back out of love with her.
Because she came over here with an agenda.
"Ronan, sweetheart," she says, her voice like a warm, dark tidepool I would not trust to be free of eels. "There you are! You always find the darkest corner and stand in it. Just like Igor."
His hand tightens fractionally on my hip. "Vera," he says stiffly. "You look well. Blue suits you."
"Oh, this old thing? Hardly. But you're kind.
" She reaches up and touches his cheek, her thumb grazing the line of his jaw with a little too much familiarity.
"Look at you. It's been too long. Igor's little protege, all grown into the biggest man in the room.
Why don't you ever come to see me anymore?
I used to have to kick you out of my apartment! " She laughs with obvious implication.
I get a pang of that punched-in-the-stomach feeling.
She came sashaying over here just to lob that exact grenade, I'm sure.
Well, mission accomplished, girlfriend. Damage done. It hurts way more than I'd ever admit out loud.
What I'm not sure about is whether I trust it.
I have one observation—a beautiful woman touching my husband's face and referencing a past that involves her bedroom—and from that single point I could build any curve I want.
I could decide they were lovers. Or that she's lying.
I could decide Ronan is squirming because he's guilty, or because he's uncomfortable, or simply because n=1 and I'm doing bad science again, denying him the benefit of the doubt.
So I do the only thing that's ever worked for me. I stay very still and I gather.
Observation the first: Ronan hasn't leaned into her touch. His jaw is a slab of granite under her thumb, and his weight has actually shifted a half-inch toward me.
Observation the second: he called her Semyon's sister. Does that make her off-limits, sexually speaking? What are the rules of this world?
Observation the third, and the important one: Vera keeps checking me. Every time she says something loaded, her eyes flick over to see if it blew up in my face like she wanted it to do.
So that's how I decide: It's a test.
Same as Marisha's little stunt when I walked in. This whole room is one long entrance exam, and Vera is the essay portion.
Knowing that doesn't help as much as it should.
Because knowing a thing is a test doesn't stop it from hurting, and it does indeed hurt.
The image assembles itself whether I like it or not.
Young Ronan, gorgeous and dangerous, in some moodily-lit apartment with this gorgeous creature draped over him and moaning.
It presents a question: What kind of woman am I?
Do I yield?
Do I fight?
Do I own him?
Does he own me?
"You must have a wonderful memory, Vera," I say, warm as I can make it. "Ronan barely tells me anything about his life before me. It's like pulling teeth. So I'm always grateful when someone fills in the picture."
Vera's smile falters by a degree. "Oh, there's plenty of picture to fill you in on," she says, recovering. "Whole galleries."
"I'm sure." I tilt my head, friendly, curious, entirely unbothered, a woman who is not remotely threatened because she has nothing to be threatened by.
"He was young once. So was I. We've all got apartments we kicked people out of.
" I lean, just slightly, into Ronan's side—a claiming so light it could be an accident.
"The nice part is getting to decide who you keep the sheets warm for now. "
Vera's eyes tick between us. She purses her plump lips. "He's lucky," she says finally. "You're not at all what I expected."
"I keep hearing that," I laugh. "Maybe one day, Ronan's friends will get a better set of expectations for me. In the meantime, I guess I'll keep surprising."
She eyes me for another few taut seconds. And then she floats off into the room the same way she came, a mirage of blue silk and secrets, and I let out a breath I've been holding since she first approached.
Ronan's thumb resumes its slow line up my spine.
"You didn't need me for that one," he murmurs with obvious pride.
"No," I say. My hand isn't quite steady around the flute, so I give it up to a passing server. "I handled it myself."
But my heart is still going too fast, and I hate that it is, because I can't tell anymore which part was the performance and which part was the truth, and I have a horrible feeling they've stopped being two different things.
The night proceeds, and I try to shake the encounter off. I really do.
But Vera's thumb on his jaw keeps replaying in my head. I used to have to kick you out of my apartment. The tinkling little laugh after. It's stuck in my throat like a bad shrimp, poisoning me with every breath I take.
I remind myself I handled it. I passed the test. I don't care.
Except I do.
I'm jealous.
"You okay?" Ronan asks.
"Fine. Just warm."
He doesn't believe me. I can tell. But he lets it go, thank God.
I need a minute. I tell him I'm going to find the ladies' room, and he offers to walk me. I tell him no, I can find a bathroom by myself, thank you. With a shrug, he lets me go.
I don't make it far.
A woman catches my elbow near the coat check. She's older, maybe fifty, in a gray dress and good pearls. I don't recognize her.
"You're Ronan's wife," she says. She doesn't wait for me to confirm. "Walk with me a moment."
I don't want to. But there's something in her face that isn't a test. It isn't Marisha or Vera. It's something else. So I walk.
She keeps her voice down as she starts to whisper at a breakneck pace. "The women hear things. More than the men think. They talk in front of us like we're invisible, and sometimes, we end up getting information that's truer and more recent than theirs."
I shudder. "Uh, okay…"
"You should know what they're saying." She glances over her shoulder, then back. "Lev has been making promises. He tells the ones who are thinking about leaving that soon, he is going to get 'the operator.' Then he'll have both the machine and the money-man. Do you know what I mean?"
This is all happening so fast that I'm a little confused. "The operator…?"
She pinches my arm hard, which makes me yelp in surprise. "The one who runs the machine." She looks at me with pity. "That's you, dear. You're the operator."
Oh, shit.
"Why are you telling me this?" I rasp.
"Because you look at Ronan the way I used to look at my husband, before I learned better. So look after yourself, girl. Nobody else in this room is going to."
She lets go of my elbow and walks away. I stand there by the coats, jaw on the floor, once again asking myself just how willing I am to trust the man who brought me here.