Chapter 16 #2
"—so uptight," James Hartley is saying, with the petulant authority of someone who has never been told no by anyone who mattered. "She should be more generous. I mean if she's going to be my wife she could at least—"
"Forget her," Alana says. "I can treat you so much better."
I hear a giggle and then the sound of kisses and soft moans. I step back from the door and I take my phone out of my clutch.
I look at it for a moment and I think about my father's hand finding mine for the cameras. I think about Senator Hartley saying "welcome to the family" like I was a transaction being completed.
I kick the door open pointing my camera and recording Alana springs back from James Hartley with a sound that is half gasp and half shriek and James Hartley stumbles against the sink and I stand in the doorway with my phone raised and I film.
"What are you doing?" Alana screams. "Nathalie what are you—"
"Oh did I interrupt?" I say pleasantly. "I'm so sorry." I keep filming. "Please, carry on. Don't mind me."
James Hartley lunges for my phone.
I step to the side and he falls past me and he falls. I bring my shoes down onto the back of his hand as it hits the floor. I lean my weight into it and he makes a sound of pain.
"Stop!" Alana is screaming. "Stop it, you're insane, stop—"
I press down slightly harder and she tries to push me away.
I take my heel off his hand and scramble upright making sounds that he will not want anyone to know he made and Alana rushes to him and puts her hand on his arm and he shakes her off and points at me and says, "Just wait. Just you wait until you're my wife. I'll deal with you properly."
I look at him.
I laugh and I can see that this bothers him more than anything else I have done in the last three minutes.
"Now don't say that," I tell him pleasantly. "You were about to sleep with my cousin and you're already planning our marriage. That's very dedicated of you."
"It's not what you think," Alana says immediately, to me.
"Delete the recording," James says. His voice has found its authority again. Maybe he thinks that what just happened can still be controlled if he applies the right pressure.
I look at my phone. "Not a chance."
He takes a step toward me but I don't move. I don't adjust or shift my stance or give him anything to read as retreat so he stops.
I realize that he is spineless, completely and utterly spineless. The lunge for the phone had been the only decisive thing he had done since I kicked the door open and even that ended with him on the floor.
Alana puts herself between us. "James," she says, her voice dropping into something soft and reasonable, "let me talk to her. She's a bit stubborn, alright? Just give me a minute."
James looks at me over her shoulder. "I'll deal with you," he says again, because apparently it is the only threat he has and he intends to get his money's worth from it.
"Looking forward to it," I reply.
He turns and walks out, cradling his hand against his chest, and the door swings behind him and then it is just Alana and me and the sound of a tap dripping somewhere.
Alana looks at me.
She straightens her dress and she looks at me and she says, "I know you feel a certain way about this. But it isn't my fault that he wants me." She tilts her head with the patience of someone explaining something to a child.
"Nathalie, you really should learn to be more likable. You're too—"
I slap her. The sound of it is very loud in the tiled room.
Alana's head falls to the side and she stands there for a moment with her hand coming up slowly to her face and she turns back to me with an expression I have never seen on her before.
"How dare you—"
I slap her again.
"Fuck you!" she screams at me, hands first. I grab her by the hair, a fistful of it, and I walk her backward to the sink, I push her head down and I turn the tap on.
I hold her there while she yells and struggles and the water runs over the back of her head and down her neck and she is shrieking something that I don't particularly listen to.
I let her up and she comes up gasping and coughing. Her hair is plastered to her face and her dress is wet across the shoulders and she raises her hand and I kick her before it gets anywhere. She falls to a sitting position on the bathroom floor and looks up at me with water running down her face.
The shock is gone and there is now hatred and I find I don't mind it at all.
I crouch down in front of her.
I open my phone and I find the video and I press play and I hold it out so she can see herself in it, so she can see exactly what it caught them doing, and I watch her watch it.
"I could have this everywhere in New York by tomorrow morning," I tell her.
Her eyes come up to mine. They are fierce and furious. "You wouldn't dare," she says.
I lean in. "Try me."
Her hand shoots out and closes around my wrist, both hands gripping hard. "Nat." Her voice has completely changed, the performance stripped out of it. Now it was genuinely frightened. "Nat, please. I'm sorry. I shouldn't have— I got carried away, he was flirting and I just—" She swallows.
"Please. My father will kill me. You know he will. Please."
I look at her hands on my wrist.
"Don't touch me," I tell her. "I don't know where you've been."
Her hands drop and I laugh.
She stares at me and I stand up and I look down at her on the wet bathroom floor in her expensive dress and I say , "Don't look so serious. I would never show the world that my cousin is a conniving woman who tried to sleep with her cousin's fiancé." I pause. "Why would I do something like that?"
She stares at me.
I crouch back down and I get very close to her face and I say, very quietly, "I'll keep it safe though. Just in case." I smile. "You never know when these things become useful."
I stand up and smooth my dress.
"Don't stay in here too long," I tell her, at the door. "People will notice."
I walk out and behind me I hear her scream, a short frustrated sound that she cuts off almost immediately because we are at a party and someone might hear.
It's the kind of calculation Alana has been making her whole life and will keep making regardless of what happens to her dignity.
I walk back into the party and I take a fresh glass of champagne from a passing tray and I drink it and I feel, for the first time in a week, something other than numb.
It isn't happiness exactly. But it is something. And something, right now, is enough.