33. Emmy
Damien Ellis is clasping my hand between both of his. “The woman in the red dress,” he says, leaning close so he can be heard over the noise of the party. “We meet at last.”
“Emerson Hughes,” I begin, “with—”
“With Inspired Building,” he says with a smile. “Believe me, I know. I looked you up after Austin. Very impressive stuff you’ve done so far. That area south of Charleston seems to be doing well.”
“Thank you,” I reply with faux modesty because it’s not doing well—it’s amazing. “I’m pleased with how it turned out.”
“And what did you think of my restaurant?”
“Very nice,” I reply. “I didn’t try the food, but the service was impeccable.”
“I thought it looked like every fucking steakhouse,” he says, and I laugh. “You thought so too.”
One of his assistants is pulling him to meet someone, but his hand wraps around my elbow. “I have the penthouse upstairs. A few of us are coming up to have drinks. Join us. We’ll talk some more.”
It’s the precise opening I’ve been waiting for—my chance to tell him about opportunities Inspired Building has missed, how much more we could do with smarter management. I’m a little unnerved by the idea of going up to his suite—these group things have a way of turning out to be one rich guy and the stupid girl who didn’t know they’d be alone. But it’s not an opportunity I can pass up.
“I need to talk to a few people here first,” I tell him.
He smiles as if I’ve just agreed to something more. I hate that. There was a time when I’d have said that there were worse things than sleeping with Damien Ellis to get my way. Right now, though, I can’t quite think what they’d be.
I circle the room until I’m out of view and pull out my phone, stalling, trying to plot out my next move. Hoping Liam has texted something so obnoxious or so amazing that the decision is made for me. But the only text is from Chloe.
Chloe
Interesting scoop for you.
If this is another story about employees having sex at Cuts-n-Stuff, I don’t want to know.
It has more to do with employees having sex in the back of the grocery store.
My stomach drops. It’s not too hard to picture a worst-case scenario here. Liam and I have had sex in the office twice now. Maybe he told his guys. Maybe we weren’t as quiet as I thought.
What are you talking about?
Chloe
Paul Bellamy just talked shit about you and Liam smashed his face into the bar. And then he said, and I quote, “You think this is bad? Say one more word about her, motherfucker, and you’ll see how bad it can get.” His friends had to pull him away.
Something warms in the center of my chest. It’s pretty easy to imagine what Paul said, and while I hate that Liam heard it, I love that he did something about it. I spent most of my adolescence with no one defending me. Bradley would make some crack about how my desk was creaking too much for her to concentrate and Mr. Green, our bio teacher, would snicker before he scolded her. When I got tripped walking to the podium at that awards ceremony and my dress ripped, my mother blamed me. “You were about to bust out of it anyway.”
No one ever took my fucking side, and finally someone has. For the first time in eighteen years, I long to be in Elliott Springs, just so I can show him how grateful I am. I suppose I’ll have to settle for texting him instead.
Hey.
Yard Boy
Wow. A text from you that isn’t pretending to be about work?
I can ask you if you got the fixtures in if that makes you more comfortable.
I liked it better the first way. What are you doing? Are you at your party?
I look around me. Damien Ellis and his posse are gone. It’s my big chance to press for the things I want. I know he’s going to hit on me and I’ll struggle to escape unscathed, but how many opportunities like this will fall in my lap? I press the button for the elevator to the penthouse.
I’m leaving now.
Yard Boy
If I promise that I don’t think I’m your boyfriend, can I call you?
It sounds boyfriend-ish. I’d probably bitch at you about the store just so you knew where things stand.
I would expect nothing less.
I press the button for the fourth floor at the last moment, and he calls just as I walk into my room. I put him on speaker while I kick off my heels and walk toward the sink.
“What are you doing?” he asks.
“I’m getting ready to brush my teeth,” I reply, squeezing out the toothpaste. “Tired Emmy is not my most exciting persona.”
“I’ll brush mine too,” he replies.
On the other end of the line, I hear the creak of a door hinge. An electric toothbrush turns on. “I always figured if we were going to be doing something at the same time over the phone,” I say as I brush, “it would be slightly sexier than this.”
“I can make this sexy,” he replies. His voice drops an octave. “I bet your mouth is so full right now, isn’t it, Em? Are you going to swallow it for me like a good girl?”
I laugh so hard I start to choke and have to spit the toothpaste out. “I’m not sure you’re supposed to swallow it.”
“It’s full of protein,” he says as he spits. “Just take my word for it the next time I tell you to swallow.”
I could easily make this conversation sexual—well, more sexual—but I don’t. I shrug off the rest of my clothes and climb into bed, unwilling to end the call just yet. I don’t ask him about what happened at the bar and he doesn’t mention it. Instead, we talk about a little of everything. About Mac’s wedding, about his sister getting pregnant at seventeen, about how weird and vague his friend Harrison’s been about some new mystery girlfriend.
He asks me about my dad—and I tell him about our secret missions, how we’d go for donuts or drive down to the wharf in Santa Cruz. How we’d watch Dr. Who and when I was terrified of the crying angels, my father helped me craft a plan to combat them if they ever showed up in real life. How for every ugly word he heard my mom saying, he’d find a way to make sure I knew she was wrong.
“He sounds like he was a pretty good dad,” Liam says.
“He was,” I reply, with a yawn. Those years with him were everything, and I don’t know how to reconcile them with the way he ended up leaving me behind. “Well, I guess I’d better get to sleep—”
“I want to take you on a date, Em,” he cuts in. “A real date. One you admit is a date before it begins.”
The conversation was going so well. I was pleased, but now I’m itchy, fragile, and I hate feeling either of those things. “You’re ridiculous. Are we going to sit around holding hands and talking about our feelings?”
“No,” he says softly. “But if you’d pull your head out of your ass, you’d realize I’ve already told you about mine.”
* * *
I leaveDallas for Nashville to check on our project there.
“We’re probably taking this whole phone thing too far,” I tell Liam when he calls that night, though I’m smiling. “What’s even left to discuss?”
“You love it,” he replies. “Let’s figure out where we’ll go on our first real date.”
“We’re not going on a first date.” I sink onto the edge of the bed and kick off my shoes.
“Yeah, we are. We’ll discuss it later. Or I’ll ask your mom for some pointers.”
My eyes fall closed. “Please promise you’ll never discuss me with my mom.”
“Because she wouldn’t approve of you dating a college dropout?” he asks. He phrases it like a joke, but there’s something tense in his tone.
Liam’s so confident all the time. It never occurred to me until now that he could feel otherwise.
“No, because my mother hates me, and she’ll say awful things to you and worse things to me if she knows.” I rise and walk to the bathroom, putting him on speaker as I go.
“Why does her opinion even matter anymore? Why haven’t you just washed your hands of the whole situation?”
“Because she’s the only parent I have.”
“That’s like saying ‘I only have one open sore.’ Sometimes it’s better to have zero of a thing than one. I suspect she falls into that category.”
“It still feels,” I say quietly, soaking a cotton ball with makeup remover, “as if I can do the right thing or say the right thing and I’ll finally win her over.”
“Em, parents are supposed to be the only people you don’t have to win over. They’re supposed to love you simply for existing. And if you have a parent who still needs to be persuaded about you after all this time, then you don’t have the parent you deserve and you never will.”
My stomach sinks. He’s right, of course. I’ve known that long before now. I mean, it would require total memory loss for my mother to no longer hate me, and I suspect even then, she’d quickly decide I was the enemy.
“When enough people hate you, Liam, you can be reasonably certain that you’re the problem.”
“Is this about high school?” he asks. “Are you ever going to tell me what happened?”
“No. You wouldn’t want to describe your most humiliating moment for me. I don’t want to describe mine for you, okay?”
“When I was fifteen, it was my first blow job, and I came all over the girl’s hair.”
I laugh, throwing the cotton ball in the trash. “That’s not even unusual. A lot of guys—”
“It happened when she was pulling my pants down,” he says. “And going forward, when we’re talking about sex, please don’t mention anything you’ve seen happen with a lot of guys. Anyway, that’s tied for the number-one spot with this night when I had the flu. I was driving to meet my friends and then I realized I was going to shit my pants. So I turned around to go home, driving like a maniac, and I got pulled over.”
“Oh no.”
“Yep. They thought I was drunk. They made me get out to take a sobriety test and I shit my pants during it. You know those cops are still laughing. So there you have it. Do you see me differently?”
“I don’t want you in my car if you’ve got the flu,” I reply.
He groans. “Em.”
“I just don’t understand why you need to know.”
“Because there’s this huge swath of your life you don’t want me to mention, but it’s driving everything you do in Elliott Springs,” he replies. “It’s sort of the elephant in the room.”
“Literal elephant,” I reply as I pad to the bed.
“Don’t do that,” he warns, suddenly harsh. “Don’t use the bullshit people once said about you against yourself.”
I’m on the cusp of arguing when I realize he’s right. I say the mean shit about myself now to beat other people to the punch when maybe what I should have done all along is not surrounded myself with the assholes who’d have said it in the first place.
Sure, I didn’t have a lot of choice as a teenager. But I’ve got all the choice in the world now.
“Fine,” I say warily. “What do you want to know?”
“I don’t understand why it happened,” he says.
“Why I gained weight?” I ask. “I don’t know. I think I was upset about my dad leaving and—”
“No,” he corrects, “I meant why they were so awful. Because kids are mean, but they’re not that mean, so consistently and for so long. And you couldn’t have been the only overweight kid in your school. So why’d they pick you as the target?”
He’s right. And no one was tormented the way I was. “It was Bradley. We were best friends growing up. She just turned on me after my dad left, and they all followed her lead.”
“You don’t think that’s weird?” Liam asks.
“Not especially,” I reply. “Little girls are bitches.”
“I have a sister. I have a niece who was bullied through middle school too. I know little girls can be bitches. But what you’re describing is kind of extreme, even for the worst of them.”
He has a point. I assumed it was because of my weight, because that was certainly what was the most upsetting part to my mother. And little girls are bitches.
But I guess it was still pretty fucking weird.
* * *
Liam callswhile I’m waiting at the Nashville airport. I tell him he’s pushing it but wind up talking to him until I’m already on the plane and they’re telling me, specifically, to turn off my phone.
I arrive in Atlanta, drop my bags at the hotel, and head out to meet with city officials about a tract of land we’d like to develop. The only difference between dealing with a big city versus a small town is that there are more asses to kiss and more people you’ve got to buy. It will take me a year or more to successfully get the land zoned for commercial use, and that’s what makes Elliott Springs the find of the century: there’s no delay. For very little investment, Inspired Building will soon be printing money off the businesses we’ve brought to town, whereas we’ll have invested a lot in Atlanta to get only a moderate return. Charles should have promoted me, and I’m angered anew by the fact that he hasn’t, that he’s done his best to keep me small so he can keep stealing credit for all my hard work.
God, I can’t wait to take his job, to watch him being escorted from the building with all his shit in a file box. It’s so close I can almost taste it. So is the destruction of Lucas Hall.
But when Liam calls as I get to my room that night, it hits me deep in the center of my stomach how empty it will be when I’ve gotten everything I want, but I no longer have his voice in my ear at the end of the day.