Last time we’d had an actual conversation was when he’d tried to convince me to talk to my father about sending him packing to the Middle East. I’d said I’d try, and I sort of had, but in all honesty, I wasn’t convinced he deserved my sister. Also, I had no power over my father, especially when it came to Cam. He’d barely let me hang out with my own sister when we were kids, deeming me the troublemaker and her his princess.
The time we’d seen each other before that, Phoenix and I hadn’t really done much talking. I saw Camille upset after the entire doped-whore incident and had decided to rearrange the attributes of his face. A broken nose and three cuts in his eyebrows later, Phoenix had a pretty clear idea of my feelings toward him.
Consequently, he knew this was not a social call.
He shook his head, staring at the ceiling, his hands tucked under his head. “I never touched the prostitute. We scored some drugs together, yeah, but she was half-naked because she was an idiot and tried to seduce me. I never cheated on your sister. I was a fucked-up boyfriend, sure, but I never wronged her.”
“I’m sensing I should somehow be impressed by this revelation.” I yanked his fridge open again, this time trying the sugar-free, organic pink lemonade.
Spat it out.
Maybe sober life is punishment enough for Townley Jr.
“Not everything is a battle of words and power, Cel.”
He was the only person to call me that, and I’d never understood why. We weren’t close, before or after he’d dated Camille.
“You know, I tried to call you several times after she died,” he told me. “I couldn’t stop going over the last thing I said to her, the last thing she said to me, when we were about to meet in Turkey.”
I rubbed my jaw, moving it from side to side. I’d come here to warn him that my stay-the-fuck-away-from-Judith warning for Mathias extended to him. But somehow, we were now talking about Camille. It was the second time today I’d had to share her memory with someone else.
Not to be a sappy shit, but I really did miss my sister every single minute. She was the only thing that had resembled normal in my family. With Cam, things had been simple.
I loved her, and she’d loved me.
I’d had her back, and she’d had mine.
Mathias had fucked up, and I’d failed her, and then I’d chosen to tell her the truth when she was standing on the edge of the fucking street, like an idiot.
“Say it,” I spat.
I wanted to have that piece of Cam, too—a new piece that would make her feel alive, even if just for a second.
Phoenix sat forward on the couch, his elbows propped on his knees. He clutched his head, staring down at the floor.
“I told her I was clean, that I’d changed, and that I was crazy about her ass. She believed me. We talked about Istanbul, and she said she was going to wait for me until I came back from the Middle East, no matter when it was. Do you know what I said to her after that?”
He looked up to me, his eyes shimmering. I shook my head. I understood love as a concept, but every time people started talking like Phoenix, I automatically assumed they were reciting a Sarah Jessica Parker movie. It didn’t seem real.
“I told her I’d never wanted to give her up, that what we had wasn’t simple, but it was real. That I needed her. That I didn’t know if we could work it out, but I would damn well try my best.” He looked up at me. “I knew your dad had a bounty on my head, but I didn’t care.”
I filled in the rest in my head. And then Camille had talked to me and found out why Phoenix really left—that they were Romeo and Juliet. That they stood no chance, because their families—my family—would never let them be together.
He reached out to me, and I froze. If hugging it out was his way of getting over his feud, he was obviously still doing drugs. Then I looked down and noticed the tattoo: Camille laughing back at me—a familiar smile with too much teeth and the eye wrinkles that upset her every time she looked into a magnifying mirror but I thought only made her prettier.
“Why did you come here, Cel? I can’t bring her back, and you don’t want to patch things up between us.” He wiped his nose on his bare bicep.
“I didn’t come here for Camille. I came here because if I find you going anywhere near Judith Humphry, I will bash your head against the first available surface and get rid of the evidence in a way that would make it impossible to find you.”
I knew what I’d just had said could bite me so hard in the ass, I would have nowhere left to shit from. Still, I couldn’t help myself.
Phoenix stood, walked over to his open-plan kitchen, and poured himself some of the nasty lemonade. “That’s for Jude to decide.”
Had she told him about her father? About her debt? About her life? I inspected him with a frown as he swiveled to face me and continued.
“Jude is building a network of friends at work. I’m glad to be one of them. You, the Laurents, hold so much power that you sometimes forget you’re not real monarchs. People—your employees—are not your servants. Look at what happened to your father. He’s done everything he could to try to control me, and his staff, and even you. Where is he now? After multiple heart attacks, he’s professionally irrelevant. You’re the one calling the shots at LBC, and your mother—his divorcée—is the one controlling the board. He has nothing left. To maintain power, you have to distribute it, too.
“I won’t let the Laurents dictate my relationships with people anymore,” he added after a moment. “Just look at the state of your family. You hardly know what you’re doing.”
He wasn’t wrong. Regardless of Lily, I knew very well that I had nothing to offer Jude. I didn’t do love. I sucked hard at relationships, and harder at feelings. She deserved a lot more than me—something I would never admit out loud, but knew very well deep down. A decent man would take a step back and give her a chance to meet someone who could be there for her.
I wasn’t a decent man, though.
Not to Judith, and definitely not to Phoenix.
In one move I cornered him against his fridge, clamping my hand over his neck and squeezing until my knuckles whitened. My face was relaxed, my pulse steady, but the way Phoenix’s eyes bulged told me I looked the way I felt: lethal and beyond repair. I never used physical violence to get places. In fact, the last time I’d had my hands on someone, it was him, because of Cam. But Phoenix really needed to know Jude was off-limits.
“I will say this again, Townley, and this time, pay careful attention, because I wouldn’t mind throwing both you and your father’s ass out on the street. You messed things up with my sister, and you do not get a second chance with my employee. You want to sit in Judith’s friend zone? You’re welcome to rot there. But if you so much as touch one of her blond locks, brush your hand over her skin, it’s game over for you. And I’m not the king.”
I let go of his neck, and he gasped, crouching down and gripping his throat.
“I’m the goddamn God in this place. Fair warning: you’ve already proven to be a sinner, and no amount of Hail Marys is going to wipe clean the debt you have with me.”
I dashed out of his apartment, thinking tonight couldn’t possibly get much worse.
But of course, I was wrong.
Because Lily was waiting for me at my apartment building, ready to prove it.
Lily had lost her key privileges the day I caught her with my father’s dick in her mouth. Not an overreaction on my part, I think everyone would agree.
That was also the day I’d broken off our engagement, and even when she came crawling back, dangling Newsflash Corp in my face, I’d never bothered to return the spare key. Since my building employed enough security and receptionists to open a mall, Lily couldn’t waltz in and wait at my door. The staff knew people who came to visit regularly: Maman, Kate, and Elijah, a producer and fellow Yankees fan from work. For Lily, my instructions were clear and simple: if I wasn’t around, she was to wait in the lobby.