11. Imogen
Imogen
“Iwon’t do it,” I tell him again, because the man apparently needs it delivered twice. “I am not going to stand on a beach so a roomful of people in good shoes can feel warm about where their money’s parked.”
“I heard you the first time.” Ashton hasn’t backed out of my space, and I haven’t given him the satisfaction of backing out of his, which is a problem we are both working very hard to treat as not a problem. “I’m not going to fight you on the principle, but I will ask you what it takes.”
“What it takes?”
“Everyone has a price. A condition. A thing they want in trade for the thing you want.” He says it like he’s closed a thousand of these across a table with the lights low, except the cold has drained out of his eyes and something has come up underneath it, fast, near the surface, and it takes me a second to place because I’ve never once seen it on his face.
It’s desperation. Tamped down, held on a short leash, but burning.
“Name yours,” he tells me.
That’s the thing that gets me. Not the question.
The flicker under it. The man who walks into a room and bends it around himself is standing in the kitchen asking the hired help what it would cost to save the thing he spent his whole life building, and for one truly stupid second the wall in me gives a quarter inch.
I shove it back into place, because I am not in the business of melting at this man at midnight over a cracked look I probably imagined.
“Okay. Here’s my price.” I lift my chin so he doesn’t get to enjoy the height difference. “You don’t get to buy me. I’m not for sale, and I’m especially not for sale to a guy who’d write it off on his taxes. But I’ll stand in your ridiculous photo if you change the story underneath it.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning that Luke comes first. Not the IPO or the board or even the heartwarming tale of the rebuilt man you’ve got everybody rehearsing.
” I tap the counter between us, once, like the terms are scratched into the stone.
“Every frame on that beach, you think about him before you think about the numbers. If he has a rough morning, we don’t shoot.
If he starts to come apart, the cameras disappear and I won’t care one bit what it does to your valuation.
He doesn’t get turned into a stage prop in his own father’s comeback.
That’s the deal. Either you take it or leave it. ”
He goes still, but not the chilly and calculated still I’ve gotten used to from him. This is a different one, like I’ve laid down a card he had no idea was in the deck and now he has to look at it.
“That’s the condition?” he asks. “Better terms. For a six-year-old.”
“That’s the whole list. I’m an extremely cheap date with one very specific cause.”
“Most people ask for money.”
“Most people haven’t met your kid.” I keep my eyes on his and refuse to let them do anything but stay there. “Enjoy it, by the way. I’m only going to be this reasonable one time, and you’re spending it on a photograph.”
“You’re serious.”
“I’m always serious. I just hide it behind the personality.”
We’re still inches apart. The argument’s gone quiet as he thinks it over. The air’s gone thick with a current that keeps surfacing between us and that we keep shoving into the folder marked anger because anger is the only way to stay in control and away from each other.
But then he leans in. Half an inch as if he’s testing me, checking whether I’ll give him the ground. I don’t. Instead, I lean right back into it, because the day I let Ashton Fraser win a staring contest is the day I mail in my entire personality and ask for a refund.
“You’re not going to back down?” he asks though it doesn’t sound like a question.
“I never back down. It’s my one marketable skill. That and convincing small children that vegetables are a treat invented just for them.”
“It’s a problem.”
“For you, maybe.” My heart is slamming around my ribs like it’s trying to file a complaint, but I keep every bit of it off my face. “Personally I’m having the time of my life.”
His eyes drop to my mouth and climb back up, slow, and he catches the hitch in my breath when they do.
I know he catches it, because his jaw goes tight at the corner.
But I still hold my ground. Whatever my body’s doing, the heat crawling up the side of my neck, the want I am absolutely not going to name in a rented beach house at midnight, I am not going to be the one who breaks the line.
Not with him. Not when I’ve finally got my heels dug into something solid.
Then he does the thing I’m not prepared for.
He backs down. Just barely though. An inch, but it’s enough for the fight to bleed out of his shoulders. When he speaks it sounds like it’s coming out of him sideways, against his own grain.
“Fine,” he says. “Luke comes first. You have my word.”
“That’s it? No counter? No addendum?”
“No addendum.”
“You didn’t even try to negotiate.”
“You didn’t leave me anything to negotiate.” He says it almost like a compliment. “You came in with the one thing I can’t say no to and you knew it.”
And here is the thing that genuinely rattles me, standing there with my pulse making a fool of me.
It isn’t his anger. I know what to do with his anger.
I’ve survived his coldness, the wall, the cruelty he threw at me in the hallway like a man swinging a door shut.
What I don’t know what to do with is the give.
I pushed, and the immovable object moved, and somewhere in the moving it became clear that I have a pull on this man I never applied for and have no idea how to set down without it going off.
Power isn’t supposed to run uphill, from the broke grad student to the billionaire.
It isn’t supposed to run this direction at all.
So I do the only sane thing left in the building.
“I’ll see you later, Mr. Fraser,” I say, sweet as anything, and I leave him standing alone in his own kitchen, and I will be honest, it is the finest exit I have executed in my entire life. I feel his eyes on my back the whole way down the hall and I do not give him the satisfaction of speeding up.
I spend the rest of the day on the beach with Luke, and it turns out to be the best run of hours I’ve had since I set foot in this arrangement, for the simple reason that there are no cameras, no clauses, no man in a half-buttoned shirt watching me from a doorway with his armor coming off in pieces.
We build a fortress with a moat that actually holds water, which Luke treats as a personal scientific triumph. We name three crabs and assign them military ranks, and the smallest, meanest one gets promoted to general by unanimous vote of the two of us.
“You can’t keep a great white in a tank,” he informs me, packing wet sand into a turret. “People tried. It doesn’t work.”
“Why not?”
“Because they have to keep swimming the whole time or they can’t breathe.
They never stop, not even asleep. So if you put one in a tank it just gets sad and stops eating, and the longest one ever survived was three days.
” He looks up at me, delighted by the tragedy of it. “Three days. Then it died.”
“That’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard.”
“It’s so sad,” he agrees, beaming, packing another turret.
“So what’s the lesson?” I ask.
He thinks about it, patting the sand flat. “Don’t put things in boxes they don’t fit in.”
“Deep,” I say.
“It’s just biology,” he says, and goes back to the turret.
I think about a shark that has to keep moving or it drowns, a shark you can’t put in a box without killing it, and I don’t let myself look up the beach toward the house while I’m thinking it.
By the time the tide comes in and chases us back up the sand, salt-crusted and sunburned across the nose, I’ve nearly talked myself all the way back into believing Ashton giving in to my conditions was nothing.
We’re two stubborn people with a cause we happened to land on the same side of.
That’s all. I’m getting very good at telling myself things.
I get Luke fed, bathed, and into bed with the door cracked to the exact width he can stand and his stuffed rabbit positioned in the same place where his dad always sets it or so I’ve been told. He goes under fast, worn down to nothing by sun, seawater, and the entire emotional life of three crabs.
“Imogen,” he says, right at the edge of sleep.
“Yeah.”
“The general crab. Do you think she’s still out there?”
“Absolutely. Running the whole beach by now.”
“Good.” A pause. “That’s good.”
I’m in my own bed an hour later, most of the way under myself, the surf working at the rocks past the window in the dark, when the knock comes.
Two low and quiet raps. It’s not a child’s hand, and not a child’s hour.
I’m at the door before I’ve decided my legs should carry me there, which is a habit in this house I’m going to have to sit down and have a serious conversation with myself about.
When I pull it open, Ashton’s standing in the black hallway in a T-shirt and the same low pants from the night he caught me eating cake in the kitchen.
His jaw’s set hard, and there’s something burning behind his eyes that wasn’t in the kitchen this afternoon.
“Hi,” I say.
“Hi.” He doesn’t move. “Can I come in?”
I step back from the door. He comes in.
“We need to talk,” he says. “Now.”