Chapter Forty-Three Los Angeles
Vivienne called at eleven on Wednesday morning.
“What do you want from Erewhon?”
“Chicken Salad,” Piper replied.
“What the fuck, did Bethenny Frankel review it, is that why you want it?”
“Just get me the fucking chicken salad, please.”
“Good. At least you are eating. I’m running late. The traffic on La Cienega is a real fucking situation. Be there in forty minutes.”
“Okay.”
“I’ll see you soon.”
She hung up. Tank was in the living room watching ESPN on mute. The house was the quietest it had been for days, it was the quiet underneath the sound of three generators at the curb and multiple camera vans still outside.
Piper walked to the living room.
“Tank.”
Tank looked up.
“Vivienne’s coming over.”
“When?”
“She said forty minutes,” Piper replied.
Tank looked at him.
“She will be here in an hour and a half, then,” Tank said with side eye, turning the television off, and setting the remote on the coffee table. “Stay in the kitchen. Do not open the door to anyone. I need to go take a shower.”
He went upstairs.
***
The bell rang twenty minutes later.
Piper was at the kitchen island. Tank was in the shower. Real Housewives of Atlanta paused on the TV in the kitchen, paused on Shereé Whitfield mid-sentence during the season one reunion.
The intercom panel clicked.
Then the knock came at the front door. Hard. Not a cameraman, they would not try to come in, and not Tank, who had just gone upstairs.
Piper knew the knock before his brain finished processing it. He had heard it before.
He walked to the door and opened it.
Jayson was on the other side. Alone.
Just Jayson in a Brunello Cucinelli cream cashmere sweater that Piper had given him for Christmas the previous year, both hands in his pockets, a leather portfolio under his left arm. Piper noticed the portfolio first. A portfolio with legal documents was like a weapon to Jayson.
“Piper. We have a situation I see.”
Jayson just stood there, cold and knowing. He did not ask to come in. He waited. Piper stepped back. Jayson stepped in. He closed the door behind him.
“We are going to have a conversation,” Jayson said. “In your kitchen.” He looked around at the space the Baccarat vases used to sit. “Piper, where are the vases I gave you?” he asked.
“I needed to release some tension,” Piper answered as he walked to the kitchen, and Jayson followed, shaking his head in disapproval.
Jayson looked around the kitchen. “You have become a child,” he said as he set the portfolio on the marble.
“Sit down, is anyone here?” Jayson said.
“Tank is upstairs in the shower,” Piper said, but did not sit down.
Jayson noticed it. Piper had spent nine years doing what he was told, and at this moment he was sick and tired of being sick and tired of it all. He had lost the game, the guy of his dreams, and his privacy.
“Riley Dane,” Jayson said, “is, as you may now understand, an instrument at my disposal, and has served the function I needed served.”
Piper said, “What function, fucking outing me?”
“The arrangement was showing cracks and you needed to learn a lesson, Piper. You refused to sign the amendment, your performance in front of my friends was an embarrassment to me. Nine years of being my perfect golden boy and this Noah fucking Reyes swoops in and takes you from me.”
Piper froze.
“Do you know how that feels, Piper, to be rejected by someone you have spent years caring for?”
Jayson opened the portfolio. He took out the document Piper had read on the jet to Atherton and set it on the Italian marble counter.
“I have been waiting,” Jayson said, “for nine years for you to understand, on your own, the shape of this thing. You have never understood it. I have decided I will give you one more opportunity to demonstrate that you understand before there are consequences.”
“And if I do not sign?” Piper finally broke his silence.
“Then I will take every structure you have mistaken for your life. Your career. Your friends. Your agent. Your mother. Your twin sister. Your precious Noah. Your money. At the end you will be a human stain standing in some condo in Silver Lake with a mediocre OnlyFans account, sucking off obese CPA’s for two-hundred dollars an hour. ”
He didn’t raise his voice.
Piper looked at the document on the marble.
“I am not going to sign that fucking contract, Jayson. I would rather live in the sewer with Pennywise The Clown than keep fucking you and your friends.”
Jayson was annoyed now, and his face was turning a shade of crimson Piper had never seen before.
Piper let his statement sit in the room.
Jayson was looking at him now the way he had looked at him at twenty-one in the ballroom at the Montage. He was trying to disarm Piper.
Piper held the look. He did not care about the outcome.
“There was a boy at a pool house when I was twenty-one.”
Jayson let the statement sit.
“I never knew his name, but after we met, he was dead. You did to him what you have been doing to me.”
Something in Jayson’s face moved.
Jayson’s hand went into his coat pocket.
Piper saw the gun in the corner of his eye approaching his temple.
“You have taken everything from me, just fucking kill me!” Piper shouted. “Do it, Jayson, do it, I would rather be dead than owned.”
Jayson held the gun to Piper’s head, pressing in hard. His face turned a darker shade of red as he unlocked the safety. His hand showed the slightest tremble as he squeezed the gun.
“Piper, you brought this upon yourself. You are just like others. I gave you everything. You would be fucking nothing without me!” Jayson yelled as the tremor in his hand increased.
Piper thought this was theater, that Jayson was teaching him another lesson.
Piper felt a surge of adrenaline in his system. With his forehead pressed against the gun, he leaned back and thrust forward catching Jayson off guard.
The gun dropped to the ground. Piper’s eyes went straight to the floor and he knew in that split second that it was his turn.
Piper grabbed the gun, the safety still off and pointed it at Jayson. His hand shook as he held the gun tightly.
“You would never shoot me, Piper,” Jayson said as he stared at his gun now in Piper’s hands.
Piper raised the gun to the Lalique chandelier overhead, and fired. The shot pierced the base and the entire chandelier came crashing down to the floor, shattering across the marble. Piper didn’t flinch as the crystal spread.
“No. But I’ll shoot that fucking chandelier you gave me for my 27th birthday. Now get the fuck out of my house. I am not signing.”
“Piper, I’m not afraid of you,” Jayson said, half his body buried beneath glittering crystal shards worth thousands.
Piper heard it first, the side door slowly opened. Christian Louboutin hitting Italian marble like a chorus. Vivienne had a Glock and pressed it against the back of Jayson’s head.
“Look, I have no problem fucking killing the most famous tech billionaire on earth, but I would rather destroy you when you are still breathing. That’s my game, girlfriend, not lights out,” she said, pressing the gun harder.
“You know there is a rather large file on you, that is just waiting to be released. Money can only buy your creepy ass so much protection,” Vivienne said, twisting her Glock into the back of Jayson’s head.
“Vivienne, you are playing way above your weight class here. I will find whatever this file is and it will never see the light of day,” Jayson replied.
“The world loves to burn a sexual predator, Jayson, and it will be my pleasure watching you get burned at the stake.” She pressed the gun deeper into the back of his head.
Vivienne pointed to the door with her free hand.
Jayson looked into Piper's eyes and then at the gun he pointed back at his face. “This conversation is not over. I hope you both know what you have started.”
Vivienne set her Birkin down on the floor, which she would never normally do.
“You heard Piper…get the fuck out.”
Jayson slowly backed up as Vivienne held the gun at him. Piper held the gun steady at Jayson.
“You never owned me, Jayson. You rented,” Piper said, squeezing the gun tighter in his hands.
Jayson gave Piper a sinister smile and slowly walked out of the house without saying another word.
Tank ran downstairs in a towel toward Piper.
“Are you hurt? I should have been down here!” Tank said, grabbing Piper.
“Guys, I’m fine.”
“Look at me, Piper,” Vivienne demanded.
“We will handle this.”
Vivienne grabbed Piper and walked him to the kitchen. She put both hands against the edge of the counter.
Vivienne Cross did not cry. She hadn’t cried at her father’s funeral and was not going to start now.
She took a deep breath and lifted her head. She turned around. She was Vivienne again.
“Okay,” she said.
Piper looked at her.
“Viv.”
“Yeah.”
“How long have you known?”
She didn’t pretend to misunderstand the question.“Since the day I signed you.”
Piper closed his eyes.
“All of it?”
“Most of it. The contract, the structure, the fact that he was paying for the apparatus around you. I didn’t know what was specifically going on in Atherton. I knew about the men. I have known the financial architecture from the day I opened your file.”
“You took me anyway.”
“I took you because if I didn’t take you, somebody worse would. Somebody he picked and I made sure I was the one in the room he could not buy and could not move. That was the deal I made with myself. I have not been proud of it.”
“Why didn’t you ever say that?”
“Because you would’ve left me. You would’ve left anybody who knew. You would’ve closed the circle around yourself and Jayson, and you would’ve signed the next thing he put in front of you alone. I have watched so many people do that. I was not going to be the woman who pushed you into doing it.”
“You were waiting.”
“I was.”
“For what?”
“For you to have something to leave for.”
Piper went quiet.
“Noah,” she said. “I have been waiting for a reason that you would survive seeing yourself walk out of this life that was built around you.”
“And tonight?” Piper replied.
“Tonight Jayson came into your kitchen with a gun in his pocket, and you saved your own ass. I am sorry for all these years of complacency.”
Piper looked at the marble and said “Viv.”
“Yeah.”
“Thank you. Thank you for representing me and also for being on time for fucking once!”
Then she said, “Don’t thank me yet, Piper. I have spent years failing to do my job. I am about to do my job now. Thank me on the other side of what comes next.”
Tank turned to Vivienne. “Plan still in place? We need to go. Now.”
Vivienne said, “I know, Tank. I’m calling the car.”
Piper sat down on the stool. He went quiet for a moment. Then he said, quietly, mostly to himself, “I don’t feel saved.”
Vivienne was already on the phone. She paused. She held the phone to her shoulder. “What did you fucking say?”
“I said I don’t feel saved.”
She looked at him.
“What do you feel? You just stood up to one of the most powerful men in the world.”
“I just feel like a victim,” Piper said.
“Piper, my mother always told me victims die young, now get the fuck up, we need to get you the fuck out of Los Angeles.”