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When I entered the hotel suite, I heard Eric moving around.
“Hey, girl,” he said. He came into the living room of the suite holding an old-fashioned glass. He’d already changed into his trademark starched white shirt and dark dress pants. Eric liked to look the part of an executive. He’d been an artist before he’d made his power grab at FC Comics. He was aware of how looks played a role in how he was perceived, and how much power a suit could convey. Since his acne-scarred face would never be conventionally handsome, he compensated by accentuating his danger quotient. He’d never gone Hollywood and tried high-end casual clothes. For him, the retro Frank Sinatra look, the loosened tie against the white shirt, was perfect. I could have jumped his bones right then, except for one tiny little thing. He’d betrayed me.
“What the hell was all that BS you fed me about canceling Swoonie and killing her off?” I asked, fire in my eye.
“Plans changed,” he replied, cool to my heat. He sat in an easy chair and watched me pace toward him to stand over him with arms akimbo.
“When did your plans change? Why did they change? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Leslie became available.”
“So?”
Eric looked at me with dispassion. “She’s high profile in the business. She has movie chops, too.”
Implying that I was nobody, which was the truth.
Eric continued, “There’s free publicity in snatching her from Kane.”
“Most of all, you get to score him off,” I said. Of course that mattered to Eric. He always kept score.
He nodded. His eyes glittered. “He’s got to lose sometime. Why not while he’s celebrating CP’s seventy-fifth anniversary?”
I cocked my head, my anger forgotten. This was more for Eric than merely keeping score. “What do you have against CP? I’ve been talking to people who have issues with CP Comics stemming from the 1940s. What did CP Comics do to you?”
His expression darkened. He took a sip of his drink. “A long time ago, I was a new boy in town. Went with my portfolio to all the comics companies. Showed my idea for a certain comic book character.”
“They didn’t. Oh, Eric,” I said. I knelt by his chair and tried to touch his face. He shook me off. I sat back on my knees.
“Tell me,” I urged. “Have you ever told anybody?”
He surged up from the chair. He ran a hand through his hair. “Why not?” He put his glass on a table. He took a turn around the area between the couch and the chair. “It’s the same ugly story you’ve heard in this business forever. They bought my character, all rights, for the dollar equivalent of one night in this hotel. Then they showed me the door.”
“Which character?” I didn’t know all the names, but I would recognize the big ones.
“The Sidewalker.”
“Oh, no.” Even I knew that name. CP Comics had a TV show with him this year. Eric had been cheated out of a fortune.
“I lived on that fee for six months,” he said. “Couch surfed, ate a lot of ramen noodles, and every day I pounded the pavement, looking for art jobs, inking, backgrounds, even coloring, anything. Finally, after some assistant work, I got my own assignment from FC. When they hadn’t fired me after the second issue, I took the risk of using my hoarded income from that gig to go in on an apartment with three other guys.”
Strange that he told me this now, when we both knew our relationship was ending. Or maybe not so odd, because Eric and I had only one main point of contact.
I stood. “I’m so sorry that happened.” I went over to him and caressed his neck, pressing my body against his. “So sorry.”
The harsh angles of his face were more sharklike than ever. He leaned down as I tilted my head up. Our lips touched and clung. He hoisted me in his strong arms and carried me to the bedroom.
*
Afterward, I lay in the bed and watched him dress again. His expression had closed up. I sighed. I couldn’t soothe the troubles he held tightly within his heart, although I’d done a fairly good job of soothing some other aches, and he mine. Why had I? I could have made love, real love, with Roland earlier today and I’d turned him down. Roland loved me. Eric didn’t.
“Was it Jeff Kane himself?” I asked.
Eric knew exactly what I meant. “Makes no difference. It’s a corporation. It lives forever.” He raised his head, a cold look in his eyes, “Until you take it down.”
“Eric,” I cried, but he walked out of the room. I heard the door to the suite slam a few seconds later.
Did Eric intend violence? Or would it be enough to outwit Jeff Kane in one business deal after another? There was something so nineteenth century about suffering an injustice, becoming powerful, and then delivering cold vengeance. Eric had probably read The Count of Monte Cristo, the ultimate Dumas revenge novel, as a teenager. It was exactly the kind of adventure book a comics fan and would-be comics artist would have devoured.
Would Eric be satisfied with merely giving Jeff Kane the metaphorical finger at his own party tonight? That Eric intended to flaunt Leslie’s dramatic change of allegiance in front of a rival I could be sure of, but what else had he in mind?
How linked in was Jeff Kane, anyway? Did he even know about Leslie yet? It had been on Twitter for hours, but lots of older people didn't do Twitter. Maybe Eric was counting on surprising the head of CP Comics. Nasty.
Was our relationship collateral damage in Eric’s drive to one-up, or alternatively destroy, CP Comics? If I was honest, no. I couldn’t reach him and he chose not to reach out to me. At the start, I’d thought what we found together was amazing and special. As it turned out, fantastically in tune sex wasn’t enough for a lifetime. It hadn’t even sustained us for a year.