“Because I’ve moved all my shit enough times and I’m not doing it again. And there is no trouble, and there is no paradise, there’s just the life I’ve chosen. Some days I love it and some days I hate it. But I chose it, and that’s all.”
I looked at the melting ice in my glass.
“Come on,” she said, “you can’t tell me you’ve just been sitting at home, crying over my senior picture all this time.”
I laughed. It was a ridiculous thing to say, to act as if nothing had transpired between us since then, and she knew it. She said, “So who are you seeing?”
My thoughts flicked to Tom, and then to the smiling picture of Pamela Gregorio currently waiting for me in cyberspace. “No one,” I said.
“Lies.”
“No,” I said, “that’s the truth.”
She raised an eyebrow at me.
“For a while,” I said, “I was, ah, keeping company with my dad’s partner. I’m not sure if you ever met him.”
“Sure, yeah,” Catherine said, “Tom, right?”
I nodded.
“Sort of uptight, no?”
“No,” I said. “He’s different, when you get to know him. But that’s over with now anyway. He’s seeing somebody.”
“And what’s she like?”
“Haven’t met her.”
Another raised eyebrow. “And you’re not the least bit curious, either,” she said, and pantomimed typing on a keyboard.
“You just think you know everything there is to know about me, huh.”
She leaned closer to me. “Don’t I?”
I shook my head; I didn’t know what at. “She looks like a very nice person,” I said.
“Lies,” Catherine said again.
“Look, what’s it to you?”
“I like to know you’re out there, being okay.”
“Well, I’m not.”
Catherine looked at me like she wanted to kiss me and also like she wanted to get up and leave.
I said, “So what are you going to do about it?”
*
In the car, we fit together like we belonged that way, her knees over the arm rest, me balancing one hand on the doorframe, the other hand peeling away the layers of her clothes like flower petals. She loves me. She loves me not. Dress, cami, leggings, the black lacy nothing of her thong. The windows fogged up and it felt private, secluded, even though we were parked at a meter and every so often, footsteps passed. Catherine tasted how she always tasted, like the beginning of everything. Her hands gripped my shoulders and tugged my hair as I ran my tongue along the inside of her thigh and then back up into the sweetness of her. She came hard, a shuddering release, and then she sat up on her elbows and tipped her head back and laughed.
“You could have saved yourself sixty bucks,” she said, “and just invited me out for a ride.”
“Sixty bucks,” I said, “bitch, please.”
She laughed again. Some of the weariness was gone from her face. “I should just leave you here like this,” she said, nudging me with the toe of her boot. “All hot and bothered.”
“I dare you,” I said. She was still breathing hard underneath me, her cheeks flushed pink despite the cold air in the car.
She unzipped my leather jacket and grabbed the front of my shirt. “You know what,” she said.
“What.”
Catherine tipped her head to speak low into my ear. “I never feel quite as much like myself as I do when I’m with you.”
I kissed her hard. “Tell me about it,” I said. For the first time in a while, I felt all right.
*
The feeling only lasted so long, though. I walked up the sidewalk to my apartment in a good kind of fog and unlocked the door to the building. But I froze as soon as I stepped inside. My own door was half open, one of the glass panes next to the knob neatly punched out.
I stared at it for a second, not understanding.
“What?” I heard a voice say from somewhere in the apartment. “I can’t hear you, why are you whispering? She’s back? What?”
Then the owner of the voice leaned out of the doorway to my office and looked right at me.
It was Camo Jacket. His face, illuminated by the light of his phone, flooded with panic.
“Oh, shit,” he said.
“Stop right there,” I heard myself say, but he darted back into the office and went for the door that led out to my enclosed porch, a voice still yelling from his cell phone. I dashed into the apartment and lunged for him, grabbing the sleeve of his coat as he fumbled for a split second with the lock, but he shrugged out of the garment and banged out onto the porch, knocking my screen door off the hinges. The intruder then vaulted over the brick ledge of the porch and dropped five or so feet to the sidewalk, immediately yelling out in pain.
Breathing hard, I looked over the porch at him. He was clutching his knee and rolling around on the ground, his face twisted up in confused agony. “Who the fuck are you?” I snapped at him.
“Help me!” he groaned.
“Tell me who you are,” I said, “and then maybe I’ll help you.”
But a car door slammed and I heard another voice—this one a bit familiar—screaming, “What did you do to him!”
I turned to the source of the voice and nearly fell off the porch myself.
Cass Troyan.
She was dressed all in black, like she’d watched a Mission: Impossible movie as research for whatever gambit this was supposed to be. She ran over to him and knelt down. “Damon, baby, are you okay?” Then she glared up at me. “You hurt him. Look at him, he’s hurt really bad. Oh, baby—”
“What the fuck is going on here?” I said, loud enough to make them both shut up. “Cass. What is this?”
She glared up at me defiantly while Damon struggled up into a sitting position, subdued now. “You’re not a producer for a TV show,” she said.
Shit.
“You’re a liar. You lied right in my face. That’s so messed up. You’re a private investigator. Who do you work for?”
I ran a hand over my face, a rush of shame hitting me. I needed to retire that particular gimmick. I supposed it was bound to happen sometime, that someone caught me in that lie and tried to do something about it. But that knowledge did nothing for my racing heart. “Cass, you can’t—”
“Who?”
“Brad Stockton’s family,” I said after a minute.
Cass looked pissed, but not as pissed as I might have expected. They both just looked kind of busted. “I thought maybe you were working for my dad.”
“What?”
“My parents are getting divorced. It’s gonna be ugly.”
I shook my head. None of this made any sense. I said, “Someone needs to tell me what’s going on here.”
After a second, Cass spoke. “My mom said I was an idiot if I believed that we were going to be on some TV show. She said it was probably some scheme my dad cooked up. So I called that station, on your business card. They never heard of any Roxane Smith. And later, we were going to Taverna Athena for dinner, for our anniversary. And I saw your car. So we followed you, to that house on the north side. It was Damon’s idea.”
He nodded proudly. I thought of the minuscule diamond in Cass’s engagement ring. Clearly she’d found the man of her dreams here: money and brains.
“He got into your car while you were there, to find out your real name. But he couldn’t find anything with your name on it, so he went back to the house the next day and that old woman answered. She told him that you lived in Olde Town now.”