Dinner had started. Daniel was at his table with an empty seat next to him. He hadn’t mentioned the seating arrangements, but they shouldn’t have surprised me. Forgiveness didn’t sit across the room. He stood as I took my seat.
“Thank you,” I said. When our eyes met, I was sure he knew what I’d just done.
twelve.
The next morning, two things happened simultaneously. One. A dozen red roses on Pam’s desk.
“Wow, these from Bobby?” I asked.
“They’re for you.” She tapped a pen to the desk blotter, as if writing a song in her head.
Before I could open the paper flap of the card, the second thing happened. I caught the image on my assistant’s screen of Antonio and me in the hallway. It had been shot through the window the moment before we kissed. Next to that image was one of Daniel and me sitting together at dinner.
I’d feared looking weak. I’d feared the op ed pieces about my neediness and desperation, about Daniel’s ambition and mindless drive for power. The inevitable comparisons to greater women’s choices about cheating political mates. Maybe I should have worried about looking like a whore.
“Who’s that?” Pam asked.
Who was he? I ran the question over and over in my mind, and I didn’t have an acceptable answer. He was a man I’d met the other day. He was a magnet for my sexual hunger.
“He’s being investigated for fraud,” Pam said, as if he was just a guy on the screen and not someone I had been standing so close to I could feel his heat. “Is he the same guy with the cars?”
“Same,” I choked. “What’s the article say?” I opened the envelope so I wouldn’t have to look at the screen. I figured the flowers were from Daniel, asking for another reprieve.
“Says you and Antonio Spinelli are friends through WDE. And you’re reconciling with Daniel Brower.”
“They used that word? Reconciling?” I looked at the card.
One more question.
No name. An arrogant avoidance of redundancy. I folded it back into the envelope.
“Yeppers,” Pam said. “Right next to that picture with the hot Italian guy. Sneaky.”
“Journalist. In Latin it means ‘to say everything while saying nothing.’”
“Really?”
“No. But if the ancients had known anything at all, it would.”
I’d gotten up and dressed like any other morning, expecting nothing more than the usual inconveniences. Traffic. Runny stockings. Coffee too hot/cold. Daniel and I had parted amicably the previous night, with him whispering “think about it,” in my ear. I promised to, and I would, but it was hard to think of Daniel when I woke up with a soaked, sore pussy courtesy of Antonio.
I relieved myself, fingers stroking the soreness. I loved the pain of remembrance. He’d been so good, so hard, and talking during sex was something new. I whispered to myself fuck me fuck me fuck me hard until I came, ass tightening, hips twisting, balancing my whole body on the top of my head and the balls of my feet.
Only when I took my first panting breaths, cupping myself in my palm, did I consider how poorly we’d parted. I couldn’t be with someone so closed off. Later at work, when Pam told me he was under investigation, I knew why he didn’t like being interrogated. I had her hold my calls for an hour.
One more question.
What would it be? More about Nella? Another reason to land in Los Angeles besides easy Bar exams? No. All that was too facile and obviously loaded for him.
I locked my office door. I had a million things to do, but none would happen while those pictures sat in my mind. I needed to solve all of it immediately with an internet search.
If I could have bottled the next hour in a fragrance, it would have been called frustration. If the size of the bottle contained the amount of information I found on Antonio Spinelli, it would be one ounce, not a drop more, and the contents would be worth less than the vessel.
In other words, one sidebar article in Fortune had not one undigested word. I found one professional photograph in which he looked gorgeous, an unsubstantiated complaint in the comment section of a real estate blog bitching about how many cars he had and how much property he owned, a short fluff piece about Zia Giovanna in the San Pedro Sun, and an investigative piece in the same paper from two years later.
The investigative piece was recent enough to matter. Antonio Spinelli, owner and proprietor of Zia’s restaurant, was under investigation for laundering millions through the establishment. The claim was absolutely impossible to prove, and apparently the money trail died before the reporter’s deadline.
Pam texted me.
—Mister Brower is on the line—
—I have another twenty minutes—
—He’s pretty insistent—
Pam knew me, and she knew my ex-fiancé. She wouldn’t interrupt for nonsense. I picked up the phone.
“Hi,” I said.
He started before I had the chance to take another breath. “What are you doing?”
“What?”
“With a known criminal. What are you doing with him?”
I was shocked into speechlessness.
“Tink? Answer me. It was in the LA Times.”
“I’m not with anyone. Not that it’s your business.”
“Your safety is my business. I’m sorry. That’s not negotiable now or ever.”
His voice seemed physically present, coming through not just the phone but the walls, and I realized he was right outside my locked door.
“Let me in,” he said.
I hung up and opened the door. “You have to relax.” It was barely out of my mouth before he slammed the door and shut out his bodyguards, who seemed to be holding back Pam.
“Daniel, really—”
“Really? Really, Theresa? Where did you pick him up?”
I put my hands on my hips. I had to bite my lips to keep in all the pointless recrimination. We didn’t need more of it. Daniel knew things.
“Do you want to take it easy and talk to me?” I said.
“No,” he said, taking my shoulders. “I don’t.” He kissed me, pushing me back against my desk.
I kept my mouth closed not out of anger, but confusion. By the time he pulled back, we’d both calmed down.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Sit down.” I indicated the chair across from my desk, and I sat next to it.
He pulled his chair close to mine as if he was still entitled to breathe my air, as if I’d agreed to the newspaper’s reconciliation in real life. “I need you to tell me everything,” he said, gathering my hands.
“There’s nothing to tell.”
“How did he approach you?”
I pulled my hands away. “This is not fair. You’re not exactly entitled to any information about me or my love life anymore. If I tell you it’s nothing, you’re going to think I’m lying. If I tell you it’s something, it’s like I’m trying to hurt you. I’m just trying to live my life, okay? I’m just trying to get through my days and nights.”
“You’re stumbling into a place where you can get hurt.”
“All roads lead to hurt, trust me.”
“I deserved that.”
“It wasn’t directed at you.” I threw his hands off me. “Can I just talk to you without all the baggage?”
“No, because you’ve forgotten who you are.”
“I’m not yours anymore.”
“You’re an heiress. A socialite. You run one of the biggest accounting departments in Hollywood. You funnel millions of dollars a day. You have access to the district attorney.”