BLAKE
thirty minutes earlier
Blake’s bail bondsman was a big native Hawaiian man with a neck tattoo. Blake had actually met him about a year ago when he and Bria had staged a public use scene. The guy played under the name Luther, but his business card said “Sam Turillo Bail Bonds.”
Because, apparently, the legal system was a hall of mirrors. Blake’s crush and client was the judge, and a guy who’d once paddled his ass was the bail bondsman? What were the goddamn chances?
“Normally, I try to act all intimidating,” Luther/Sam Turillo said from across the table. They were in a meeting room in part of the jail, a squat building across the alley from the courthouse. The meeting room was nothing more than cinder block walls, a rickety table with two chairs, and a bookshelf filled with empty binders.
The real-life version of Luther was softer-spoken than the fet-life version. Or maybe it was just that he was as unpleasantly surprised as Blake that they’d bumped into each other in this context. The orange polo shirt with a company logo did not flatter his complexion or his barrel chest at all, and was in general a very different look from leather pants and a studded belt. “It feels weird to throw my weight around with you, y’know?”
Blake didn’t really know, actually, but he was too tired for snark. His latest migraine had been one of those freaky bastards where he hadn’t been able to see for a few hours, though not as painful as he’d feared. And his vision had cleared up all the way just in time for him to realize that one of the voices he’d been tuning out in the courtroom was deeply familiar, at which point he’d peered toward the judge to find that he was none other than Oliver Grayson.
Shrugging off that memory, he forced a smile for Luther. Sam Turillo. Whoever he was. “It’s no problem.” Blake felt like he’d been falling deeper down Alice’s rabbit hole all weekend long. The shoot had been amazing, migraine notwithstanding. The arrest had been a shock, but it wasn’t like it was his first. It had taken the weekend of lock-up, his first time spending more than a couple of hours in a cell, to cement the unreality of what his life had come to.
He had no one to blame but himself, he remembered bitterly. He’d known the risks and gone to the factory with three joints in his pocket, anyway.
“So,” Luther was saying, “don’t fuck up, or we will come after you for the whole amount, even if it takes the rest of your life to bleed it out of you. Got it?”
Blake nodded obediently. “I’ll do all the things I’m supposed to,” he promised. He must have sounded especially meek, because Luther winced, looking him up and down.
“You okay, kid?”
It had been a while since someone had called him a kid. Did he still qualify? He hoped so. After his first arrest for fighting—disorderly conduct had been the charge—his mother had hired him a scary and actually super-hot lawyer, if you were into bossy older guys with chiseled jaws, which Blake totally was. Even more clearly than his lawyer’s face, Blake remembered the lecture he’d gotten.
The gist of it had been that people were way more forgiving of your bullshit if they thought of you as a kid, full of youth and promise. The reserves of forgiveness were practically limitless for a kid. But that all ended as soon as you reached some ambiguous point in life where you were supposed to be grown up and have your shit together. Scary, hot lawyer-guy had strongly implied that Blake’s time for fucking up and getting away with shit was near its end. That had been three years ago. Now, he was twenty five instead of twenty-two. Now, his deadline for growing the fuck up had to be closer than ever—if he hadn’t passed it already.
“Yeah,” he said. “I’m okay.”
“You should find somebody to help you hire a real lawyer. Maybe your parents?”
Blake shook his head. “I already have a lawyer.” Blake had one parent, and he was definitely not going to call her and ask her for help. He’d learned his lesson last time. Yeah, hot lawyer-guy had been very effective, but getting him back wasn’t worth Blake’s mom figuring out that his life was going absolutely nowhere.
But she’s going to find out eventually, he thought grimly. A criminal record isn’t the kind of thing you can keep secret from anyone, let alone her.
“They gave you one of those free ones,” Luther protested. “Everybody knows the free ones are shit.” He glanced at his watch, the band straining around his thick bronze wrist, and cursed. “I’ve gotta go. Gotta be in the next county in an hour. You want a folder for all your paperwork?”
“Sure.”
Luther put all of the documents they’d gone over into a folder he pulled out of his backpack. It was a lot of paper and ink to make what Blake thought was a pretty basic point. Blake had paid the bond company $1,000, and the bond company had paid the court $10,000. If Blake showed up to all of his hearings, then the bond company got their $10,000 back. If he didn’t, the bond company would, as Luther had put it, “bleed it out of” him. At least, Blake hoped that was all he was supposed to get from the past twenty minutes spent sitting there and signing his name, because it was all he could remember.
“Good luck, kid,” Luther said grimly, and then he left the room.
Blake picked up his folder. He felt the phantom stricture of the cuffs even though he’d only worn them while being transported from the jail. That had been more than enough time for him to wonder if he’d ever be able to enjoy them again when someone was hitting or fucking him.
The hidden costs of getting arrested.
When he checked out of jail they gave him all of his confiscated property back. That included his phone, wallet, three quarters, two lube packets, a condom, and two tubes of black paint. The woman processing him blushed while she went through the written inventory aloud.
They gave him his clothes back, too, in their own bag. He’d worn them most of the day on Saturday before finally asking for one of the inmate uniforms, tired of smelling like sour sweat, dried paint, and the weed that had gotten him into this mess.
Now, he changed back into the jeans and crewneck, but left the socks and underwear in the bag.
Blake’s phone displayed a low battery symbol and dozens of notifications—mostly missed calls and texts. He didn’t check them yet, but texted Bria. Their last contact had been by phone, but he’d told Colin to answer her questions about his case if she called.
He texted her back to say he was ready and would wait out front, then cautiously skimmed the rest of the backlog. Fortunately, he had only three messages and a missed call from his mother, and her tone in the messages was irritated, not panicked. He quickly texted her that he’d been having issues with his phone and would call later.
Within five seconds, the three dots at the bottom of the screen told him she was typing a reply.
Blake shoved his phone in his pocket and went to meet Bria, his bag of socks and underwear dangling from his hand.
When he got outside, Bria was already waiting for him. She’d parked on the curb and was leaning against the passenger door of her beat-up Camaro, wearing jeans, a sweatshirt, and her ever-present ballet flats, with her hair wound up in a messy knot. It was a stark contrast to the way he’d seen her last, but she still looked good. She always did.
Once, when they’d both been high for fun and not medicinal purposes, she’d told him that what she liked about her work was becoming someone else. He’d never had a chance to tell her that she was damn good at it. When she was working, she was a shapeshifter, with no trace left of the person she was in everyday life.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hey.” He glanced down at the plastic bag, hoping she wouldn’t ask what was in there. “Thanks for the ride.” She shrugged and circled the car to her side.
Blake slid into the passenger seat, oddly comforted by the familiar, low angle of the seat and the smell of old cloth upholstery. The floor vibrated alarmingly under the soles of his shoes as she put the car into gear and pulled away from the curb.
Ignoring the text message under his mother’s name, Blake opened the thread from Jay, Bria’s childhood friend whom Blake had hired the year before to help him walk dogs. Usually they checked in on Mondays about the schedule for the week, but there were no new texts from Jay, which surprised Blake until he remembered that Jay was some kind of throwback to the previous century and left voicemail. He swiped over to his virtually unused voicemail inbox and, sure enough, there were three from Jay.
The silence in the car began to feel stifling.
“Are you…” Blake glanced at Bria with a frown. “Are you pissed or something?”
She shot him a cool look, then slipped on a pair of oversized sunglasses.
Blake tried to remember the end of the night on Friday, but everything was hazy through the headache.
“So, what’s your problem?” he asked. “And if you have a problem, why did you pick me up?”
She took in a deep breath through her nose. “I have an inexplicable urge not to let you rot in jail, I guess, dumbass,” she muttered. “And yeah, I have a problem. You were high on Friday night. And had that shit on you.”
“Jesus. It was two joints,” Blake muttered, quickly looking out his window. Of course, it would have been three if he hadn’t smoked one of them before getting caught. “It’s not like it was a pound of meth.”
“It was stupid. We were working.”
Blake didn’t really have anything to say to that.
Well, he could tell her why he’d been high. In theory. But the theoretical telling and the actual telling were a million miles apart.
“If it makes you feel better,” he said, “I’m in deep shit.”
For a while, Bria just drove. A few full minutes had passed and they were nearly across town, close to his apartment, when she finally let out a loud sigh and relented. “Why is that, exactly? Lots of people get busted for a little weed, and it’s usually not a big deal. But you were just in jail for, like, almost three days.”
Blake shrugged. He didn’t know what to say. That’s what he’d thought, too—that it was just “a little weed.” That was part of the reason he’d been willing to take the risk.
Apparently, they were both wrong.
She pulled up to his place and put the car in park. “So, are you going to ask?”
He squinted at her. “Ask what?”
Her expression didn’t shift. “How it went.”
“I know how it went. I was there.”
She gave him a hard look. “You know that what matters most is what people say.”
He rolled his neck, looking forward to getting into a real bed instead of a glorified cot. He tried not to look longingly out the window at his apartment, focusing on Bria instead. “Okay. How did it go?”
She held his eye for a long second, and then a slow smile tipped up one side of her mouth. “It was great. Just like Tish predicted. It was great for Tish and great for me, and great for you.”
“That’s just what Tish needs,” Blake said, trying to ignore the skittish excitement that was gathering in his chest, “to be proven right. Egotistical bastard. We’ll see if it translates to actual work before we get too excited, yeah?” Blake opened the car door and got out before she could answer.
When he walked into his apartment, he smelled the overripe bananas he’d planned to eat on Saturday. He took a second to wish that he’d been there to slice them into his raisin bran, and that it was just another ordinary Monday after a weekend spent courting a migraine, and then sleeping it off.
He put Colin and Luther’s cards on the kitchen table and looked at them for a while, then read his mom’s texts.
Mom: I’m not interrogating you. I’m just wondering where you could go in 2020 that wouldn’t have at least intermittent cell phone reception. All I’m coming up with is “middle of the ocean” and/or “deserted island.” Both suggest you’ve been trafficked.
Mom: If you could tell me exactly where you’ve been, I would appreciate it and will ask no more than three follow-up questions.
Blake: it’s private.
Blake winced at his own message as soon as it transmitted. He knew how it sounded. He knew she’d wince when she read it, too. A few years ago, when they’d still been one another’s closest confidantes, she might have laughed it off—assumed he was just giving her a hard time.
But, now, the strain between them gave all of their text communication a distinct, unpleasant tone.
While he waited for her to respond, his screen lit up. Jay was calling.
Blake ignored the call, and then the next one, and was finally satisfied to see a text appear instead. Just like training a dog, really.
An eager but thick-skulled dog, like a Golden Retriever.
J: Hi! Just wondering if you want me to walk dogs today! Let me know
Blake: No
Jay called again, and Blake almost instantly sent it to voicemail.
J: Don’t know what’s up but my calls are going straight to your VM!
J: It would be quicker to talk than text
Blake: Talk about what?
J: Whether u need me today
Blake: I already said no
J: …
J: K.
Great, now he was imagining Jay as a Golden Retriever that had just been kicked. He tossed his phone on his nightstand and eyed his bed with longing. He wanted nothing more than to dive under the comforter. But he couldn’t bear the thought of getting in bed in his filthy clothes. He stripped, but could still smell the weird herbal shampoo from the jail, and swore there was an undercurrent of iron and concrete, too. He went into the bathroom and turned on the shower, all without flipping on the lights.
The dark made him feel safe; he didn’t have to brace himself for the unforeseen moment when the light would go from innocuous to causing a shooting pain in his head. He was so used to keeping his apartment dark, in fact, that he could move around easily by feel, sometimes going an entire day without realizing he’d never touched the light switch.
While the hot water sluiced over his head, he felt like he was shedding more than just a layer of grime. And the thought of his bed was more tempting with each passing second. Maybe he had time for a nap.
He’d have to squeeze it in before he went to walk dogs. The last of his Monday stops was out on the outskirts of town in Oliver’s fancy neighborhood.
Oliver was also Judge Grayson.
None of the information was new, but it shocked him all over again anyway.
Maybe Oliver wouldn’t be home. Ordinarily, he wouldn’t be, but nothing about today was ordinary. Could Blake really expect Oliver to just pretend that morning hadn’t happened? That Blake the dog walker and Carson VanPelt the pothead were two different people?
Probably wishful thinking. Even Luther and Sam Turillo merged into the same person when you snatched off Luther’s mask, no matter how badly you wanted to keep them separate. He doubted that Oliver would be willing to pretend.
Though, he had in court. Hadn’t he?
Blake hadn’t studied the law or anything, but he was pretty sure it was unusual for someone who you knew to be the judge in your case. In fact, there had to be some kind of rule against it.
Or was he thinking about doctors?
But even if there were rules, maybe he didn’t have enough significance in Oliver’s life for them to apply. Maybe he didn’t matter enough to jeopardize Oliver’s objectivity. Maybe, to Oliver, he might as well have been a stranger.
Blake forced himself out from under the shower’s hot spray and toweled off quickly, getting into his clothes before he could collapse on his bed, hide under the blankets, and send Jay in his place.
He had another text, and this one wasn’t from Mom or Jay, but from Bria. The preview was half of a website address—something about the shoot, he guessed. He didn’t want to risk looking at the screen long enough to check it out, though. His head was still out of balance.
A joint would make him feel a lot better, but he couldn’t bring himself to go from being in jail for possession of marijuana to smoking marijuana all in one day. He wasn’t that self-destructive. He found his aviator sunglasses and headed out to start his route.