18. Ladies, You Can’t Fix Him
LADIES, YOU CAN’T FIX HIM
AFTER JUDE LEFT ME on that beach in Malibu, I woke up to the familiar view of my bedroom ceiling with a hollow feeling in my stomach.
Not sadness. I wish it had been sadness.
Worse, it was hunger, desperation for answers.
Despite everything I believed about myself and my laudable maturity, it turned out that the most enticing thing a man could possibly do was ditch me in the night.
You’d think an adolescence spent on social media might clue me in to something—protect me from the collective mistakes of all the women before me who’d loved a man that lied to their faces.
But in the end, I thought the same thing everyone thinks: Maybe if I knew why he did what he did, I could fix him. I could make him domestic, docile, demure, hardly demonic at all.
The trouble was my faith in him. The illogical, unshakable certainty I had that Jude was lying, but not to me.
It was why I couldn’t dismiss the knowledge that this entanglement in what I knew to be toxicity—in what I understood to be real, actual evil—would bite me in the end, but only sweetly.
Jude had asked me if I believed that evil existed and I did, I really did now.
At the same time, I felt the unearned absurdity of relief. Yes, there was a demon, and I’d already seen its face. How many women had missed the signs? But with Jude, it was all right there in front of me.
(Could I Survive It?)
(Did I really want to know?)
I was starting to get used to not having a phone; my work phone had been discarded by my demon lover somewhere in the Hollywood hills and my personal one was still locked up at the de Witt villa, but fortunately I lived in an era of barbarous, unrelenting connectivity.
I used my laptop to message Teddy, apologizing for my mishap the night previous and asking if he wanted to get dinner tonight.
He replied, extensively. I didn’t read his messages very closely, as they were mostly his complaints about mismanagement at Ara, the mess of paperwork that was being thrown in his lap, his superiors who were all incredibly bad at their jobs.
The whole thing was such a shitshow he was starting to wonder if it was some kind of tax shelter.
Some weird way of stashing all that investment money away or some shit like that.
“Mm,” I said, thinking about why Jude would abandon me on a beach in Malibu. Well, I was thinking about the feeling of his body pressed to mine, and the rare welcome moment of heat.
At dinner that night, Teddy and I elected to sit on the patio, which was a mistake.
The winds were at it again, hot gasps like an endless cry for help.
We were at one of those trendy high street places and the retail windows nearby all featured must-have sweaters and knits.
I wondered which fashion brand was going to be brave enough to alter their patterns and acknowledge the existence of endless, apocalypse summer.
Tell the truth, I thought with a shiver, tasting salt. It’ll be fire season forever.
I slid down in my seat, loosening my feet from my flip-flops and resting them lightly on the inseam of Teddy’s shorts. He looked at me.
“You’re not listening to me.” He removed my feet from his lap.
“Sorry. Thinking about other things.” I nudged his knee suggestively with mine.
“Other people, you mean.” He looked harder at me then, like he was daring me to confess. I might have been an idiot broadly speaking, but even I wasn’t that stupid.
“What are you talking about?”
“You’re not going to bother explaining why your phone was in the middle of the fucking canyons?”
It was only with very concerted effort that I managed not to react. “What?” I asked, dredging a fry in garlic butter jus. One wouldn’t kill me, especially not if my demon lover got there first.
Teddy shook his head at me. “You know, Anya, I really didn’t take you for a liar.”
“I’m not a liar. I’m asking what you’re talking about.” I was trying my best not to react too explosively, but I was less than thrilled to learn the guy I was casually sleeping with had the means to track my location. “I was at work.”
“What exactly do you do at work?” He leaned toward me. “You never talk about it.”
I felt the dull, beleaguered pain of every woman who’d ever lived. “You don’t ask about my job, Teddy.”
“No. Don’t pin that shit on me.” His voice had dropped to a hiss. “We work for the same family, Anya. You think I don’t know their schedules? I run William de Witt’s fucking life.”
“And apparently have access to his devices.” I found that to be a very strange slip by the de Witts, whose paranoia I’d considered to be informed by skill despite some awareness that they didn’t actually need to be good at any of it.
Just because a person is rich doesn’t mean they’re any smarter than you are, but I digress.
What I said at the time was: “What exactly is your job, Teddy?”
“Wow.” Teddy looked disgusted with me, sitting back in his seat with an air of disbelief. I gave him that one, after recalling that I’d spent the last hour only pretending to listen to his various work complaints. “I think we’re done here.”
I breathed a sigh of relief, thinking he meant the royal we, the romantic we. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe we’re just not that suited for each other. And my life right now is really unpredict—”
“You’re sleeping with him, aren’t you? Will’s son.” Teddy’s mouth soured as he threw his black card on the table, signaling listlessly to our waiter.
“We can split it,” I said. He waved me away.
“Is that a yes?” He arched a brow. I realized then, in a way I hadn’t allowed myself to notice before, that his entire face was irritating.
The arrangement of it was so … I don’t know.
Smug. There was an eternal air of knowing more than I did, of understanding more about the world than I possibly could.
“No, it’s not.” By technical terms this was fair to say: I wasn’t (yet) sleeping with Jude.
“I’m his—” Fuck. Fuck. No words came to mind.
Nurse? Companion? “I’m supposed to watch him.
It’s my job to follow him around.” And, I thought abruptly, I signed an NDA!
“I legally can’t tell you what I do at work,” I said.
Belatedly, I clocked an air of triumph that was probably unwise, but I kept going.
“It’s not like I don’t want to talk about it. Jude’s insane.”
I felt a prick of disloyalty talking about him like that. Though it was true, and even Jude would be hard-pressed to deny it.
“He’s dangerous is what he is.” Teddy seemed to have softened, forgiving me by virtue of the knife I’d casually tossed in Jude’s back. “You know they had to pull him off of Will the other day?”
“They did?” I certainly had my suspicions that Jude had been the one to give William the black eye, but it was interesting to hear their antagonism confirmed by Teddy.
“It was right after Teresa … you know.” The woman who disappeared, the one directly connected to Ara. A death that might have tipped off anyone paying attention after Valerie Nguyen.
I thought of the conversation I’d overheard between William and his partner Fred. The mention of a ritual. The blood’s not right. She was a mistake, I freely admit that—
“That guy is fucked up.” Teddy looked sharply at me and I realized he was still talking about Jude, who remained the eternal question, the piece that didn’t fit. “I really think you should quit. Especially if he’s taking you up in the canyons in the middle of the night.”
I pointedly said nothing while the waiter came by to pick up Teddy’s card.
“Teddy, I’m fine.” I sipped my water, realizing there was no way I could now ask Teddy to take me to work. “Can I borrow your phone?”
“Why?” The suspicion was endless, exhausting. Boring, actually, is what it was. I was hit with a sudden, mouthwatering desire to see Jude, to wonder whether this time Jude would abandon me again or force me back onto the ledge of his roof.
I remember that I thought, very specifically: I wish I was about to die with Jude instead of sitting half alive with you.
Which was approximately when I embraced it, the knowledge that I wasn’t a smart person or a good one. I was down bad for the devil. All I could do, then, was count my sins, and ask myself whether I’d be cleaning blood off his hands or mine tonight.
“I need to get a ride to work. My car’s still at the villa.” I held out my hand, but Teddy’s mouth curled in something like a grimace.
“I’ll drive you.” The waiter brought us the check and Teddy bent to sign it, a flourish of a signature, the mark of an industry prince. “Let’s go.”
He took my arm, though the last place I wanted to be was in an enclosed space with Teddy. “You don’t have to do me any favors. You’ve already made it very clear what you think of me.” I felt like he was perp-walking me to the front of the restaurant.
“You say you’re not sleeping with him, and I believe you.” There was a trace of something on his face, a ticking time bomb I couldn’t clock. “Get in,” he added, throwing open the passenger side door.
I felt more endangered in that moment than I had when Jude left me for dead; when he closed his hand around my throat. Something was wrong with my metric for behavior, I certainly understood that much. This was Teddy, I reminded myself. He was harmless.
(And if he wasn’t, I thought in an even quieter font, JR would tell the cops he’d come to my house. The lamest version of my usual prayer: If I fail, let my pigeon-breeding cousin avenge me.)
Thinking sarcastic thoughts reassured me, reasserted my reality. Wisely or not, I climbed into the seat.
“I saw the article about your family,” Teddy said.
“Mm.” I looked out the window, hoping Jude was awake. I thought of his eyes in the dark, his hand on the steering wheel, the quiet of the canyon roads.
“Did you fuck the reporter?”
I turned to blink at Teddy, who was half smiling.
“What?”
“He certainly had a lot to say about you.” Teddy’s expression didn’t falter.