They’d have to pry the reins to JMCH from my father’s cold, dead hands, and I’d be close to sixty by the time that occurred. My life flashed before my eyes—the next three or four decades spent working for my father—a clear-cut, alternative future unlike anything I had ever imagined for myself. My pulse kicked up, and I had to remind myself to breathe. “Oh, I don’t think he, or I—”
“Unless you report directly to your old man, I bet the tension between you and your supervisor is too raw,” Kurt said. “I don’t know who I’d feel more sorry for. I guess the supervisor unless he’s a jackhole.” He shrugged. “But then you could probs just get him canned.”
I didn’t dare look at Isaac, but one glance at Rhys told me his gears were clicking into place, which would only mean one thing: Isaac had discussed me with him.
I was saved from replying when a girl in a banana suit strolled by our table and Kurt popped up and gave, I assume, a banana mating call—which she returned.
“Excuse me, my dudes. An a-peeling prospect appears to be ripe with promise.”
That earned facepalms and groans all around, but he ignored us and scrambled after her. Grateful for the reprieve from his cross-examination, I hoped no one else would take it up.
I side-eyed Isaac, who stood and said, “Gonna get another platter of quesadillas. Chicken this time? The tickets are for ten o’clock, but we have to get a couple of Ubers and then get there. So last round? Their website says no drunks allowed. I’ll add a round of waters.”
I had never heard Isaac say so many words at one time.
Rhys began to rise. From his eyes, wide with disbelief, I guessed he was thinking the same thing. “I’ll help you get that.”
Isaac nodded and the two of them strode off, capes flowing, crowds of people waiting for tables parting for the superhero nemeses and gazing after them. Heads together, they were talking—after Isaac glanced back to ascertain that no one had followed—and I had no doubt what they were discussing. Me.
• • • • • • • • • •
Just before we left the restaurant, Isaac offered to drive Mindi and Rhys to Rhys and Boone’s apartment.
“I’ll tag along so everyone else can pile into an XL,” I said. “No sense paying for two cars. If that’s okay with you.” I assessed Isaac’s reaction to my proposal, or tried to. The man was almost unreadable. Almost. His mind was spinning—abort! Abort!
“That way you guys won’t have to wait for Isaac,” Mindi said to the others. “He can go through with Erin when they get there and we’ll all rendezvous at the apartment later. This is perfect.” She clasped her hands and smiled.
“Sure. Great idea.” Isaac’s tight smile fooled everyone but Rhys—who angled a brow but said nothing—and me.
“Our ride will be here in five minutes,” Ava said. She scanned all of us as we began moving away from the table and another big group swooped in to claim it. “Where’s Kurt?”
We all turned, looking for our missing banana.
“There he is. I’ll get him and we’ll meet you guys out front.” Oliver strode off toward the patio.
We squeezed through the crowd and finalized plan details outside, and then the four of us broke off from the others. “I parked on Norwood,” Isaac said.
My bare arms and legs were covered with goose bumps before we were halfway there, and I felt dizzier than two drinks would normally leave me, especially with food. Next to me, Mindi had just commented about the hilarity that was Kurt taking off after a female banana, and I chuckled politely but was too busy concentrating on putting one foot in front of the other without tripping to reply. Hugging my arms across my chest and shivering, I jolted and stumbled when satiny fabric landed on my shoulders.
Isaac’s warm hands steadied my shoulders through his cape, which he’d just draped over me. “Didn’t mean to startle you. Sorry. It’s thin and won’t help much, but better than the bit of nothing you’re wearing.”
I bristled at the insinuation that I was dressed like a prostitute, but his gaze was open and considerate, not disparaging. I pulled the cape, which fell to my ankles, around me like a silk sheet. It wasn’t warm, but it cut the breeze a bit. “Thank you.”
I glanced back at Rhys and Mindi, who were walking behind us.
“Are you okay, Erin?” she asked. She was dressed as scantily as I was but didn’t seem bothered by the cold. In fact, no one around us looked cold. I felt like I was standing in a meat locker.
“I’m fine! No worries.”
“You sure you want to go to the thing?” Isaac asked. “We could skip it.”
“Yeah, sure thing. I’m fine,” I insisted.
Twenty minutes later, we’d dropped Mindi and Rhys at his place, making small talk on the way. Rhys’ curiosity about our nondisclosure of the fact that we worked together was palpable, but he only asked a couple of architect-relevant questions about JMCH—if we built outside of planned communities and whether our architectural and design support was exclusively in-house or delegated to subcontractors.
Once alone, Isaac and I listened to music without conversing until I couldn’t stand it.
“Rhys already knew where you work, I guess.”
Isaac nodded. “And you hadn’t told Mindi that you work for your father.”
I shrugged, staring out the window. “It’s not something I publicize.”
“Because you aren’t doing what you were trained to do, or because of what you said about failing to launch?”
“Ouch. And both.”
A song began and ended before he spoke again. “You acted like we’d never met.”
“So did you.”
We paid ten dollars to park in a field blocks from the haunted house. Isaac left his Batman cowl and cape in the trunk and handed me a dark gray hoodie.
“Th-thank you,” I said, pulling it on. “I d-don’t know why I’m so cold. It’s like sixty-five degrees.” The sleeves fell past my hands, but I didn’t care because that just kept me warmer.
He frowned but didn’t reply. Great. Even my being cold irritates him.
The speed passes were a godsend, though a collective murmur of animosity rose from the long line of patrons when we bypassed all of them. “We shouldn’t let any of those people waiting in line catch up to us inside or we might become gory displays of our own. It could take days for them to figure out that we aren’t part of the show.”
The acrid, sweat-drenched odor permeating the air overwhelmed all my other senses. Glued to Isaac’s solid arm, face pressed against his right shoulder blade, I barely noticed the pulsating, deafening music or shrill screams of other patrons and the chainsaw-wielding maniacs. The skeletons lunging out of the dark and psychotic clowns grabbing our ankles as we squeezed through confined spaces didn’t scare me much. I was too busy trying not to inhale too deeply.
I vaguely registered the butchered corpses on meat hooks swinging by on a mechanized conveyor belt, like the goriest dry cleaner ever, and tried to convince myself that the floor was damp with water—which was dripping down walls and misting out from nowhere—and not other liquids. The smell said other liquids were a distinct probability; I would be tossing these shoes in the garbage without a conclusive answer to that question, however.
We reached what looked like an unlit maze and were handed glow sticks to navigate the pitch-black and given instructions I couldn’t hear. The walls were too close to walk side by side. Isaac led, glow stick aloft, and took my hand behind his back.
After what felt like hours, we entered a room full of bubbles, higher than our heads, and my ability to deal passed peak containable level. I gasped and swallowed soapy foam, panic mounting. Unable to see, I whimpered and gagged, and even with the hoodie, the chills came back full force and evolved into violent tremors. Isaac turned, picked me up—front to front, my face against his shoulder like I was five—and walked straight outside.
Air had never tasted so sweet. I gulped mouthfuls. Before setting me down, Isaac had moved to the side s
o we wouldn’t block the exit where other patrons streamed out—some laughing, some crying, some screaming and flailing.
“That’s probably how Kurt looked,” he said.
I tried to laugh, hands on my thighs, and choked instead, realizing belatedly that I was going to puke. More horrified than I’d been at anything inside the haunted house, I ran to a large metal trash can and added the contents of my stomach to that of others, which made a second wave rise and gush forth.
The sleeve of his hoodie was the only thing available to wipe my mouth. I did not want to turn and face him. I wasn’t sure if the fact that he was my boss and not a date made the situation of vomiting in front of him—and being forced to wipe the final dribbles of it on his hoodie—better or worse. Possibly this rock bottom was so low that it no longer mattered.
“All done, or more coming?” he asked, just behind me.
I moved away from the noxious can, shivering again, and realized I was soaked to the skin from the misters inside the haunted house and the bubble room at the end. “Done, I think. My stomach actually feels better.”
He gestured toward the can. “Was that from the bubbles or the margaritas?”
“I felt a little nauseous before the bubbles, though they definitely didn’t help. Two margaritas have never laid me that low. Jesus, how embarrassing.”
He led us toward the food truck at the edge of the lot and asked for two bottles of water. The smell of barbeque wasn’t tempting, but it didn’t bother me either.
He handed me a bottle. “It’s no big deal.”
I gargled and spit into yet another huge trash can. “I, uh, ruined your hoodie.” My face prickled as it warmed. Hopefully it was too dark for him to see the hateful blotches. “I’ll have it cleaned and bring it to you Monday.”
He smirked. “No rush. I have others.”
At his car, he retrieved my bag from the trunk, stowed the stained hoodie, and grabbed a beach towel and a heather-gray blanket so our now-wet costumes wouldn’t wreck his leather seats. I wrapped myself up like a fuzzy mummy, belted in, and pulled out my phone to check my messages. I felt instantly better and worse.
“The good news is it wasn’t the margaritas. The bad news it was some questionable chicken salad only Mindi, Ava, and I had when I got to their place earlier. Madison and Claire and all the guys are fine. Mindi and Ava have both been throwing up.”
He started the car and switched on my seat heater, and I swore to myself that I would absolutely not fall asleep in his car again, no matter how cozy I was beginning to feel.
“How are you now?”
If he was worried about the risk of my puking in his car, I couldn’t blame him, but the combination of upchucking the offending chicken salad, rehydrating, and removing all the assaults on my senses—cold, flashing lights, vile smells, and noise—had done the trick.
“I think I’m okay.” Even so, I cringed at the idea of rejoining the partying crowds. Mindi and I could crash at her place as planned, just a lot earlier than intended. “But I don’t feel like going back out.”
Isaac was reading his texts. “Sounds like they got it even worse than you did. Rhys says it was like a live-action version of The Exorcist for the past hour. She’s asleep now. At his place.”
Great. I couldn’t stay at her place if she wasn’t there.
“Poor thing. She’s the size of a Barbie doll, and Ava ate twice as much because she’d missed lunch. I guess scarfing two of Ted’s frosted zombie cupcakes this afternoon saved me. I wasn’t hungry enough to eat much chicken salad, thank Christ.” I sighed. “My car’s parked in front of their house. If you could drop me there, I’ll just head home.”
He drove for a minute or two, passing under the freeway and navigating without his GPS. “We could hang at my place for a bit. If you want. You shouldn’t drive home right now. You’re still a little shaky.”
I was beat as hell and the thought of driving home was unappealing, but it was his hang at my place suggestion that had me shaking in my unidentified-liquid-dampened, landfill-bound wedges. “Don’t you want to meet up with the others? You’re not sick, and I’ve ruined enough of your night.”
We sat at a stoplight. In the dim light afforded by the streetlamps arcing far above the intersection, his gaze was steady. “You haven’t ruined anything.”
I wanted to see where he lived. What things he believed to be useful, beautiful, worthy of possessing. What style of art he preferred, what types of books he read, what sort of housekeeper he was. We would be alone, I assumed, but didn’t know. Would he offer me a drink? A candid conversation? A pillow for the sofa? A kiss?
“Okay,” I said.
chapter
Nineteen
He took a left, and after a few more turns, I recognized the area where we’d eaten lunch after the visit to Tuli’s studio.
Sheila Anderson had been overjoyed with her artistic fix to my brother’s debacle, and she’d acknowledged both the gifted rising artist and her “marvelous home builder” in a lavish multipage spread of the house that began on the cover of a local luxury magazine. Daddy had been triumphant. Leo had not. It had been a monumental effort not to HA! HA! straight to his insufferable face.
Isaac pulled into a parking lot and circled around to enter an underground garage where he had an assigned spot. A key fob accessed an elevator bank. When we entered a posh, gently lit hallway on the upper floor, he said, “I’ll need to take the dog out, but it shouldn’t take long.”
The dog?
My mother couldn’t leave Jack alone in the house all day, or he’d gnaw through a table leg, ingest the corner of a bedroom door, or chew half a loveseat into downy confetti. He had a variety of monogrammed dog beds throughout the house, a mechanized food bowl, a water bowl fountain, and as many toys as I had as a child, but if left alone for more than an hour he became an anguished cyclone of distress, bent on total destruction.
I steeled myself for a dejected, crated dog—Jack’s fate after the loveseat’s untimely slaughter—and the inevitable jumping, barking, and licking following its release from captivity. Luckily for Jack, my mother was seldom away from the house for very long. Isaac’s poor dog would be home alone for multiple hours per week.
The apartment extended, long and narrow, to wall-to-wall windows at the opposite end, through which the luminous skyline of downtown was visible. The ceiling was high and industrial, with imprinted concrete and exposed pipes curving just below, painted to maintain a cohesive look. Music played softly from somewhere inside, mixed with faint echoes of cars and patrons of restaurants and bars on the street below. I heard a joyful whine just before a canine face appeared from one of the doorways along the right.
“Hey, boy,” Isaac said, tapping his thigh. Nails clicked across the wood floors toward us, and he leaned to intercept his dog, which had a retriever’s build and chocolate-brown fur, light with age around the brows and muzzle.
“Pete, sit,” Isaac said, reaching to grab a leash from the coatrack mounted on the wall.
Spotting me, Pete sat. Head angled, he sized me up, maintaining eye contact as I stood there, wrapped head to toe in the now-dampish blanket, but he didn’t move from his appointed spot.
“Can I pet him?” I asked.
“Sure.” Isaac discarded his costume’s cowl and cape on a small table, clicked the leash into place, and said, “Up.”
Pete stood.
I smiled and offered a hand to be smelled. “Hi, Pete. You’re such a handsome boy.” He took a polite sniff, long tail wagging slowly, and looked to Isaac for reassurance or permission, I wasn’t sure which.
“This is Erin,” Isaac said, as though Pete might reply, “How do you do, Erin?”
Pete nuzzled his soft head into my hand and stared into my eyes as though soul-searching.
“How old is he? You’ve had him a while, I guess.”
Isaac cleared his throat. “The vet says he’s between ten and eleven. I adopted him about a year ago. His owner had passed on, and
he was dropped at the shelter.”
As I scratched behind his fluffy ears, I looked at Pete’s sweet face, incapable of reflecting on his fate if Isaac hadn’t come along. “That’s terrible.” I was positive Mom would haunt the unholy hell out of us if she died and we abandoned Jack at a shelter.
“Make yourself at home. There’s bottled water in the fridge. I’ll make some coffee when we get back from the dog run.” Pete’s ears perked at the final two words and he faced the door, tail wagging eagerly.
When the door snicked closed behind them, I was alone in Isaac Maat’s home.
I removed my grimy shoes and dropped them into the lidded garbage can in his utility room. The pale taupe ballerina flats in my car often rescued my feet from my more hostile stilettos at the end of a day. I would wear those to drive home after Isaac dropped me at my car.
At the doorway where Pete had emerged, tall, solid pocket doors were pushed wide to reveal a bedroom, softly lit by sconces on either side of the bed. I had eschewed the use of the haunted house’s porta potties, so I had a perfectly reasonable excuse to walk through Isaac’s bedroom to the bathroom. While there, I scrubbed the melted, smeared cosmetics from my face and used the folding toothbrush in my bag with a bit of Isaac’s cinnamon toothpaste.
I left the room more slowly than I’d entered it, fingers trailing across surfaces. A velvety plaid duvet, haphazardly tossed over the bed, matched the colors of Pete’s fur—by design, I’d guess. The smooth chestnut dresser displayed neatly arranged stacks of architecture and urban-planning books across its top, beneath a wall-mounted flat-screen.
There was one framed photo on the night table of a young boy and his parents, dressed for church or some semiformal event. Isaac, who couldn’t have been out of grade school with his say-cheese grin, full cheeks, and a bow tie only a parent could have chosen, was nevertheless recognizable. His father’s lean build and facial structure was so like present-day Isaac that I could have mistaken them for each other if not for the medium Afro and clean-shaven face. His mother, hair swept into a twisted updo and makeup on point, shared only her son’s arched brows. Her face was less angled—rounder, softer. Against her sleeveless pink blouse and a classic A-line skirt, high-waisted and powder blue, her skin was darker than husband and son. Her hand rested on Isaac’s shoulder; her husband’s arm encircled them both.