I’m breaking all my rules now. Sitting in the Slaughterhouse, waiting for the pitch meeting Wednesday morning as the other online writers file in, I watch the clips of Ethan’s interviews. Seven appearances in all, regurgitating the same generic version of the story. The camera loves him. On the bright living room sets of the morning shows, behind the shiny glass desks on cable news panels, he eats the audience. Ethan has that charisma you can’t teach. Even when the anchor pivots to a question about me, digging for some of that juicy tabloid gossip, Ethan is unflappable.
“Leave it to your boyfriend to make it all about him,” Cyle says, two seats down.
Cyle shovels chips into his mouth, licking the salt from his fingers, and I remind myself not to touch the door handle after him.
Ethan and I haven’t gotten much time alone over the last two days. He had to give me a rain check on dinner Monday night. Between taping his interviews and working twelve-hour days at the office, we haven’t spent more than a couple of hours together without witnesses. I admit, there’s a building sexual tension clouding my head. I keep thinking about Monday morning on the couch. His hands and his voice tearing down my hesitation. I’m a little edgy.
“Okay.” Cara walks in, cream silk shirt and a neutral pencil skirt. Every day in her life is a page out of Vogue. She opens her laptop and takes a seat at the head of the table. “Let’s get started. Avery, you’re up first.”
I’ve been itching for this. The last two days, reading the nonsense trotted out to prop up Phelps’s agenda. Totally ignoring the fact that he takes his philosophy from a convicted murderer who didn’t even believe his own dogma.
“Have you looked at the crowdfunding campaigns set up for Robert Phelps’s defense fund?” I begin. “The first one started five hours into the standoff. It raised nine thousand dollars before he’d even been arrested. As of this morning there are four more set up for Phelps and his accomplices. A combined seven hundred thousand dollars and counting. I can’t help wondering if, after the men who seized the bison range in Montana were acquitted, this supposed call to arms isn’t just a dangerous scheme to bilk gullible saps out of their money.”
“Isn’t everyone entitled to a defense?” Cyle says, chip dust in his beard. “What kind of representation is an anti-government activist going to get with a public defender?”
“That’s a pretty loose application of the term activist, but okay,” I say.
We go back and forth, the arrogant prick doing his best to shoot me down. I’m not sure where the fervor comes from; I can’t make myself shut up. Something about his face inspires rage.
“Cara, come on.” Cyle leans over the table to look past me. Around us, the other Cave dwellers stare down at their notes or laptops. He’s got them so whipped into submission they can’t even bare to look at him. “She shouldn’t have been on this story in the first place. We can’t let her use our magazine as her bully pulpit to sort out her daddy issues.”
“Shove it up your ass, Cyle.” I slap my laptop shut. “It is exactly this magazine’s job to aim a big bright spotlight on a con artist like Phelps and call bullshit. That is the chief purpose of the press. Not only to report what’s happening but to put it into context. Strip back every layer until only the naked facts are left. To stand by and let people like Phelps, people who want to follow in Patrick Turner Murphy’s footsteps, write their own undisputed narrative—it isn’t just negligent; it’s fucking criminal.”
Cyle stands from the table and pushes his chair in. “Cara, you need to send her home. Then we should have a talk about whether or not this experiment is working.”
Her icy blue eyes cut to me. For a moment, I hold my breath, ready to turn in my badge and walk out should she say the word. If this is the hill I have to die on, so be it. But I couldn’t live with myself if I sat back, watched this happen, and stayed silent.
“This is your next essay?” she asks me.
“Yes.”
“Fifteen hundred words on my desk by five.”
Suck it, Cyle.
* * *
When lunch rolls around, Ethan is out of the office and most everyone is up to their eyeballs in crunch time, so Addison and I pop over to the deli next door to grab a couple of to-go orders.
“I need to start going to these pitch meetings,” Addison says when I tell him about my not-so-private contretemps with Cyle.
“Not sure I’ll get away with too many more of those. But he had it coming.”
It felt pretty damn good to shut him down. Even better that it didn’t result in my being escorted from the premises with a restraining order. While we wait for our orders to come up, I check my phone and see I have a missed text from Ethan.
Ethan Ash
12:21 PM
How’d it go?
Avery Avalon
12:44 PM
Nailed it.
Ethan Ash
12:44 PM
That’s my girl.
Avery Avalon
12:44 PM
And Cyle tried to have me fired.
Ethan Ash
12:45 PM
Want me to kick his teeth in?
Avery Avalon
12:45 PM
I handled it.
Ethan Ash
12:46 PM
Tell him to suck your dick?
Avery Avalon
12:46 PM
No, that’s our special thing.
I put him in his place, though.
Ethan Ash
12:47 PM
Wish I’d been there to see it.
Avery Avalon
12:47 PM
It was pretty hot.
Ethan Ash
12:48 PM
You can’t say things like that.
Avery Avalon
12:48 PM
Why not?
Ethan Ash
12:49 PM
Because I’m sitting in Carter’s office trying not to get a hard-on.
And now he’s looking at me funny.
Avery Avalon
12:49 PM
On that note…
Ethan Ash
12:50 PM
Too much?
Avery Avalon
12:50
You’ve got to warn a girl before you decide we’ve reached the conspicuous public boner phase of the relationship.
Ethan Ash
12:51 PM
Noted.
“Care to share with the class?” Addison says.
I look up to see him staring at me much the way I suspect Carter is looking at Ethan.
“Sorry,” I say, sliding my phone back in my pocket. “Checking in with Ethan. He’s meeting with his FBI source to gather some more background for the article.”
“Mm-hmm.” Addison’s lips screw to one side of his face as he turns to watch the men in aprons behind the counter build our orders.
“What?”
A dramatic sigh escapes Addison as he crosses his arms, pointedly giving me the cold shoulder. “I couldn’t help overhearing that you two ran off to Montauk for the weekend.”
“It was sort of a spontaneous road trip. We weren’t sipping cocktails on the beach or anything.”
“So you two are a thing now.”
“What constitutes a thing?”
Honestly, I don’t know what we are. Ethan and I haven’t had much time to discuss what this is or where it’s going. If it’s anything at all. For the moment, what I know is I prefer being around him more than not. And when we’re in the same room, it’s difficult not to touch him. To not think about how it feels when he touches me.
“Are you sleeping with him?”
No. But also technically yes.
“We like each other,” I say. “What’s so awful about that?”
“Hey, I get it. I warned you it’d be like this. Getting involved with Ethan is like a Jurassic Park movie. Like the man said: it’s all ooh and ahh, then comes the running and screaming.”
“What do you have against him? What could Ethan possibly have done to make you want to sabotage him every chance you get?”
“Oh, all right.” Addison takes a step back. “That was uncalled for.”
I’m not sure what sets me off. Whether the residual angst of going another round with Cyle or the fact that Addison won’t let me have this, but it gets me riled. I’m already fending off daily phone calls from my mother asking me to quit and move in with her. I’m so sick of everyone pulling me in different directions.
“Look, I didn’t ask for your advice,” I say, grabbing my salad from the counter. “From now on, keep it to yourself.”
“Sure, girl. You do you.”
I leave Addison behind and take my food to my desk to bury myself in work. I’ve got to finish this essay for Cara, Ethan and I still have the print article to revise, plus I’ve got IAQ emails to sift through. That’s all on top of Cyle sending me bullshit fact-checking and research every fifteen minutes with URGENT in the subject line. Passive-aggressive little prick.
It’s not until I hit Send, emailing my essay to Cara at 4:55, that I realize I never touched my salad. That tends to happen when I go back on my meds. A sudden influx of chemicals soaking my bloodstream like mainlining the drugs. Getting snapped back on a bungee cord. They’re non-narcotic, but I still get the subtle rush of using. That artificial clarity and focus I’ve become addicted to. A gentle lift. Some find it in chocolate or cheese. But mine can send me into a four-hour trance, after which I barely remember what I’ve done.
“Hey there, gorgeous.” Ethan comes up behind me and rests two warm, firm hands on my shoulders. “You ready for a break?”
The clock on my screen now reads 5:17. Where the hell did twenty-two minutes go?
“Yeah.”
We grab some coffee from the snack room then go up to the roof. The smokers have put together a nice little patio with mismatched chairs lifted from the office and maybe Dumpster dives. A piece of artificial turf laid out like a rug and a metal bucket in the center where they dump their cigarette butts. There’s probably a month’s worth in there.
Ethan and I go to the side overlooking Liberty Street. It really isn’t much of a view; we’re surrounded and shadowed on all sides by taller buildings. But if you lean out over the northeast corner, you can glimpse the Federal Reserve building. The police tape is gone now. The barricades removed. Like it never happened. This city gets bored easily.
From the southeast corner, we peer into the windows of a high-rise apartment building. The kind where junior executives and new stockbrokers start inching their way up toward the penthouse suite.
“I don’t think I’ve said this since…everything”—Ethan catches my hair flying across my face and tucks it behind my ear—“but I am so proud of you.”
“Do you ever notice how you can’t say those words without sounding like someone’s parent after a grade school recital?”
“No, not until now. That makes me feel kind of creepy when you put it that way.”
“Right?”
Ethan looks good on a Manhattan rooftop. A magazine ad of a handsome, fashionable male contemplating his empire with the breeze blowing through his hair. If he were wearing a scarf and a camel coat, I might get the sudden urge to buy a Rolex or something.
“Attend a lot of grade school recitals, did you?” he asks with a smirk.
“Only on TV.”
“I can’t even imagine.” Shaking his head, he gazes out at the walls of glass, steel, and stone. “So many things the rest of us take for granted. All those stupid coming-of-age moments, and where you were when Ross and Rachel kissed.”
“Weren’t you like five years old?”
“Yeah, but I saw the reruns.”
He shouldn’t make me laugh when I’m standing at the edge of a building five stories up.
“But you did imagine it,” I say. “You wrote the book about it.”
“It’s not the same thing. Enderly walks off the page before she must grapple with the true, devastating reality of entering a world she doesn’t recognize. And she’s an adult by then. You were just a kid, shoved out into society, no idea what’s been going on around you.”
“I have to tell you, space travel came as a real shock.”
He freezes, eyes wide until he catches on.
“Ah, I see. That was a joke. I deserve that.”
“We did have books. I did have what you’d consider homeschooling, to a certain extent. It wasn’t that I was kept completely ignorant of the outside world, just taught that it was awful and corrupt and not a place that I should ever want to go.”
“Well, maybe Patrick wasn’t entirely wrong.”
In the apartment across the street, a woman is undressing a man in front of the floor-to-ceiling window. She pulls his tie from his neck, tugs his shirttails from his waistband. Apparently with no concern that anyone might be watching.
“There are times I miss it. The simplicity. My father built a beautiful world. But he was made of poison, and he tainted everything he touched.”
She pushes his shirt down his arms and lets it drop to the floor. Next, his belt is ripped from its loops. Then her fingers pull at the button on his pants while he stands there, watching, breathless with anticipation.
We put so much trust in each other. All of us. Trust that the guy standing next to you on the subway platform isn’t going to shove you in front of the train. Trust that the driver of the car in the next lane isn’t going to suddenly yank the wheel to the left and run you off the road. That when you order a plate of spaghetti, it isn’t laced with arsenic. What is that intangible quality? How are we born so trusting? Even when someone is crushed on the tracks, is sent careening into oncoming traffic, or chokes on the blood filling their lungs, we go on. We keep trusting.
“I want to take you on a real date,” he says. “Tonight. Dinner and a show. Give you the authentic Manhattan night-on-the-town experience.”
“You know, I’ve heard rumors there are cheaper ways to get me into bed.”
“Sue me. I’m a romantic.”
* * *
Kumi meets me at the apartment that night after work to help me get ready for Ethan’s version of a real date. Once she deems my entire wardrobe hopeless, she lends me a dress and spends the next half hour speeding through my hair and makeup. Right on time, Ethan knocks on our door. My lips tingle as I slide on a pair of Kumi’s shoes and she fusses with my hair. A knot forms in my gut. It’s not anxiety, exactly, but the rush of peering out over a very long drop. That nervous, mortal fear you get watching that guy jump out of the capsule in Earth’s stratosphere, freefalling toward certain death until the big, brilliant plume of a parachute jerks him upright and slows his fall.
“Remember…” Kumi hands me a clutch purse and wipes a lipstick smudge from my mouth. “Don’t get anything on the dress.”
“Thanks, Mom.”
When I open the door, the trepidation evaporates. Electricity and want, his soft lips and gentle hands—it all comes rushing back. The sight of Ethan now, with his hair swept back like he’s just hopped off a boat, ocean eyes peering at me from under thick, dark lashes—I start to forget why I ever thought we were a bad idea, or why I agreed to it at all.
“You clean up nice,” I tell him as I step into the hall to close the door because I’m pretty sure Kumi’s behind me making lewd hand gestures.
Ethan smiles, sort of. Regarding me, his hand goes to his jaw and fingers rub across his mouth. “You look incredible.”
“Yes, I put on a dress, and I’m transformed from a grotesque swamp monster.”
“No, no.” He gestures for me to walk ahead of him toward the stairs. “Just…Wow, that’s all. Very nice.”
We sort of match, too. He wears a tailored charcoal suit and crisp white shirt with a muted turquoise tie almost the same shade as my dress. We’re already fucking obnoxious.
Outside, Ethan opens the door of his truck for me and offers me his hand as I climb in. He pauses for a moment, staring at me. The muscle in his jaw flexes as he swallows. Something animal and instinctive skitters through my limbs. A creature that knows it’s been spotted by something vicious and hungry.
“You have to stop doing that,” I tell him.
He blinks and licks his lips.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
* * *
Ethan knows everyone. A guy on Broadway who stands waiting to park his truck and actually brings it back. The usher at the theater who escorts us to our seats before doors open to the hundreds waiting outside. The producer of the show who meets us after curtain call to give us a backstage tour and get my program signed by the cast. The chef-owner at the new Vietnamese restaurant our magazine’s food critics are raving about. Ethan shows up, and people drop what they’re doing to shake his hand, share a laugh. They look me in the eyes when they greet me and treat me like I’m someone, not just an ornament on Ethan’s arm.
“Please tell me you’re not blackmailing all these people,” I say, scraping the last bite off my plate.
He pauses, glass of wine at his lips, and tempers a subtle grin. “Not all of them, no.”
We sit in a corner booth, quiet and secluded from the capacity crowd. Dinner was delicious, the show spectacular. But it’s Ethan, the atmosphere he brings to a room; he walks in, and everything shines a little brighter. Colors more vivid. You didn’t know it till now, but you’ve been looking at the world through dirty, crusted glass. Ethan smashes out the window.
“How do you know all these people?”
“Mutual friends, mostly. Parties. That kind of thing.” Beside me, he shrugs, unimpressed with himself. “At one point it was very popular to know me.”
“Still is, I’d say.”
“It’s a particularly good week.”
The light fixture above our heads, woven wicker ball around a warm yellow bulb, casts tiny shards of light like fireflies across Ethan’s face that seem to dance as he talks.
“I had to call in some old favors. Bodies I helped dump. Couches I carried up four flights of stairs.”
“So don’t get used to it, is what you’re saying.”
“Avery, if this was the life you wanted, you’d have it.”
Heat rises over my face as I look down at my empty plate and reach for my water instead.
“But you’re not that girl.”
“Oh?” I say, propping my elbow on the table to rest my chin in my hand. “And what kind of girl am I?”
“You’re the Met on Sunday afternoon. The beach in winter. Jazz in the park and playing cards by candlelight during a storm.” His hand slides over my knee, fingertips skimming my skin with just the lightest teasing touch that sends static rolling through my body. “You are the woman men see in their dreams while they’re wondering how their lives became so empty and meaningless.”
“Ethan…”
“What?”
Looking into his eyes is like observing the Earth from space. And you think, how I can ever set foot on the ground again?
“You have this odd habit of speaking in wedding vows.”
“Do I?”
Back and forth, fingers tracing the curves of my knee, sowing madness.
“What would you say?” he asks.
“To marriage?”
“If I were to propose to you right now.”
His palm lies flat on my knee. Glancing over his shoulder, toward the dining room of tables and well-dressed people, he says, “If I told you that man there”—he nods toward a waiter across the room carrying a tray with two glasses of champagne—“was given a box, and in that box was a ring. That this man”—getting closer, coming toward us—“was instructed to put the ring in a glass”—eyes dead ahead, weaving through tables with expert balance, tray held high—“to fill that glass with the most expensive champagne money can buy”—Ethan’s hand slides to the inside of my knee—“and awaiting my signal”—he grips the back of my knee, firm and startling—“deliver it to you.”
My heart throbs against my ribs, anxious and terrified, the waiter coming closer.
Five feet.
Four feet.
“What would you say?”
He veers to the left, to the couple two tables away.
Air leaves my lungs in desperate relief.
“Christ, Avery.” Ethan smiles and takes his hand away.
Asshole.
“You have a deep, profound fear of commitment.”
“No.” I chug the rest of my water, pulse returning to normal. “I have a rational fear of being proposed to on a first date by a man I barely know.”
The humor leaves his face. He furrows his brow. “You keep saying that, but it isn’t true. You do know me.”
“Everything I know could fit on a Post-it Note.”
“Then ask me something.” He pushes our plates away, moves the utensils and glasses crowding the table between us. “Anything you want.”
“Is your mother the reason you weren’t at work last week?”
Ethan must have guessed I’d ask this question. It’s the one topic between us he’s thus far been unwilling to talk about. If the question affects him at all, he doesn’t show it. His perfect cheekbones and angular jaw stay steady, in place.
“Yes.”
“Tell me about it. Why?”
Leaning back, he grabs his wineglass and swigs the last of it. A sort of preparation happens: he runs his fingers through his hair, exhales, slides his gaze around the room before staring at his fingers drumming on the table.
“You met her,” he says, “so you know she’s sick.”
“Your dad said she had gone into remission, but now it’s back.”
The muscle in his jaw ticks.
“He smoked a pack a day. As long as I can remember, half the time my father was home, he spent it on the porch with a cigarette in his hand. Since he was a teenager. Then just before my brother died, my mother was diagnosed with lung cancer. Never smoked a day in her life, but you spend thirty years with a smoker and their lungs become yours.”
Ethan twists the stem of his empty wineglass between his fingers, drawing little circles on the table with the base.
“She was a brilliant surgeon. Loved to sail. Before cancer, my mother was full of energy. She’d put in twelve, fifteen hours at the hospital and still manage a smile when my father dragged her out for a dinner party for some asshole client. He quit smoking after they found out, as if it made a difference at that point.”
He clears his throat, eyes glassy. I reach out and take his hand in both of mine.
“Is that why you and your dad don’t get along?”
“One on a long list of reasons.”
“I’m sure he’s just as heartbroken as you are. He—”
Ethan snatches his hand from mine. “Please, don’t defend him. That man has smoked for two-thirds of his life, and he’s healthier than I am. Instead, he killed his wife.”
“Ethan—”
“Let’s not talk about this anymore, okay?” The darkness in his eyes recedes, voice softens. He trails his fingers along my temple and down my neck. “I don’t want to spoil the evening for you.”
I’d tell him he isn’t spoiling anything, that I’d rather he’d be honest and grim than pretend, but our waiter returns with a tray of desserts and a bottle of wine.
“Compliments of the chef,” he says, placing two dishes in front of us. “Here we have almond jelly with lychees, jackfruit, and strawberries, as well as mandarin sorbet with currant cookies.”
The waiter then sets out two new wineglasses and proceeds to pull the cork from the bottle. He offers to fill mine, but I put my hand over it.
“Thank you, no. I’m okay.”
“Are you sure?” Ethan asks, holding out his glass to the waiter. “I promise not to think less of you if I have to carry you home.”
“No, really, I’m good.”
Looking a bit offended, the waiter sets the bottle on the table and walks away. Before I can decide which dessert to try first, I notice Ethan studying me.
“Do you have a preference?” I ask.
“You don’t drink.”
Shit.
“Any particular reason?” he asks.
My hands go to my lap, fingers twisting until Ethan places his hand over mine. He closes in, arm across the table in front of me, shielding us.
“Avery, whatever it is, just say it.”
I wish it were that simple. But the answer isn’t an easy box to open. It’s boxes inside of boxes, unpacking and assembling a whole person. An entire life and the people and places that made her this way. How do I explain it to him when he can’t see Jenny’s nose ring or smell the ammonia soaked into her clothes? Can’t watch my shrink’s glass eye linger on the other side of the room, like it was watching a ghost in the corner. Echo, sweating and thrashing, screaming for mercy and ripping at her hair.
“Hey, hey,” he says, wiping his thumb across my cheek. “What’s wrong?”
“I don’t think I can stay here.”
My breath comes shorter, quicker. Fingers tingle.
“Okay. We can go.”
Pulling out his wallet, Ethan leaves cash on the table and takes my hand as we slide out of the booth. He takes off his jacket and places it over my shoulders, leading me through the restaurant and outside to the noise and throbbing activity.
“Tell me what you need,” he says, both hands cupping my face. Urgency forms creases at the corners of his eyes. “What can I do?”
This isn’t fair to him. Quiet mysteries and hiding in dark corners. I can’t expect total, unfettered honesty when I’m still concealing locked rooms behind mirrors and curtains. It’s about more than trust. It comes down to whether or not I want Ethan to know me. Not his imagined ideal or the character he pieced together with parts of himself. Beneath the person I’ve tried to portray since I got sober and dropped my first name. Me, and everyone that used to be.
So I make a choice, and hold out my hand.
“Take a walk with me.”