16
Wesley
The old man’s reaction couldn’t have been more picture-perfect. A single tear crept down his cheek, almost cinematic—like he’d planned it. He bolted up from his chair and threw his arms around Rem, holding her cheek against his chest. He didn’t have questions for me. Not about how quickly this had all happened, nor about why I’d changed my mind. Rather, his only words were, “Hank would have been so happy for you two. He would have been thrilled.”
Of course, it always came back to Hank. But I guessed I couldn’t compete with the dead guy in the room, and I clapped the old man on the back with a moment of pure joy, or something kind of like it. “You’re going to have a grandkid,” I echoed again, still struggling to recognize the words as truth. “Gonna extend the family line, Pop. Just like you wanted.”
The rest of the night simmered with a kind of electricity I couldn’t have anticipated. Unconsciously, or perhaps not, I held Remy’s hand throughout, watching her glow as she told my dad about the ways her body had already begun to change. “I mean, I’m exhausted all the time,” she laughed lightly. “But then I give myself this excuse to eat a few too many cookies, and I perk back up immediately. This baby has a sweet tooth.”
My dad hung on her every word, inching his face toward her. His dessert remained untouched before him, his hands curled beneath his chin. Despite the nagging voice in the back of my head—the one reminding me that this wasn’t fucking real, that Rem wasn’t my fiancée and this child was more or less just a scheme to get some cash flow—I found myself interjecting with the occasional enthusiastic remark. Teasing my dad that we’d name the kid after him. Asking what I’d been like as a baby. My tongue wasn’t my own, in these moments. I felt wild. Paternal, even. Fuck, I needed to leech it from my system. But it was a game, and I had to play it.
“You really played that well in there,” Remy whispered to me in the car. Her skin glowed like porcelain from the light of the moon. “For a minute there, I almost imagined that we’d actually go through with it. With the marriage. The baby. The family.”
“Ha,” I said, drawing myself up in the car seat. “You’re just that good of an actress, Rem. All those years in the movies. You’re starting to even convince yourself of shit.”
That night, I itched to bring Remy home with me. My cock pulsed up, rock-hard and veiny, throbbing in my jeans. But I held back, knowing that diving down that road of sensuality and pleasure—especially as my heart quaked with some kind of anxious, lovey-dovey confusion—was dangerous. I pulled the car along the side of her place in the Mission, gazing at her. She’d fallen asleep, her cheek pressed lightly against the back of the seat and her lips parted just slightly. I eased forward, unable to stop myself.
My lips were just inches from hers when her eyes parted. I pulled back, caught in the act, cleared my throat, and pointed at the door. “We’re here, Rem.”
After dropping Remy off at her place, I scoured through the Mission on foot, before ducking in to see Quintin at the bar. Quintin sulked, his eyes hollow, showing his hangover. Just a few stragglers sat at the bar, their elbows atop the counter and their cheeks sagging. Despite a few of them being in their twenties or early thirties, their faces spoke of old age.
“Q,” I said, strutting through the bar, high on my own luck and the game Rem and I were playing. “Don’t suppose you can pour me one of those beers.”
Quintin gave me a crooked smile. He shook his head, cackling. “Well. If it isn’t the sad asshole who knocked up my sister.”
I rolled my eyes at him. “Don’t pretend you’re not kind of happy about it. Somewhere in that twisted brain of yours, you’re happy our families are linked for good now. Quintin, we’re brothers, man.”
“Fuck off,” Quintin said, his smile faltering slightly. “I know you’re just using her for the cash.”
“Sure. And she’s using me. And right now, I’m using you for a beer,” I said. “Who in this goddamn bar isn’t using someone right now, anyway?” I shifted my eyes across them, waiting for someone to interrupt, to stammer through with their own insecurities. But they held back, their eyes glazed. “That’s what I thought.”
“All right. So now that she’s knocked up, what’s next for you?” Quintin asked, filling a pint glass with beer, sparkling gold in the light. His voice grew more aggressive as he spoke, his eyes growing darker. “You’re probably out on the road now, aren’t you, Wes? All that cash money falling into your account. Means you can dart back over to New York and pick up a few of your favorite city girls and take them out on the town. Or back to your penthouse. While I have to deal with my pregnant sister, all the way back here, alone. Jesus.”
He set the pint in front of me, sizing me up. “Admit that you’re ready to go the minute your dad passes that money to you,” he stammered, waiting. “Admit that your time with my sister is already over.”
To be honest, I hadn’t even considered leaping on my bike till this very moment. I tilted my head at him, an arrogant smile twisting my lips—one that so often worked with Q. That let him in on my game. But this time, the game involved Rem. And his eyes sizzled with anger.
“Fuck, man. I don’t know. You know it’s my nature,” I said, shrugging. “Don’t know what I’ll do from one day to the next. But Rem, she’s gonna be fine. I got the money coming into her account the second it hits mine.”
Inwardly, my stomach twisted. I imagined blasting away from my kid on my bike, imagined Remy or some nanny caring for him, taking him to school and holding his hand to cross the street and shit. Wasn’t that all meant to be my job?
No. I pressed back at it, trying to align myself with what I knew as my truth. I was this very bastard Quintin spoke of. I didn’t have the capacity to stay.
“Sure. That money’s going to be great for mopping up the tears she’ll shed the minute she realizes you’re still not serious about her,” Quintin continued, railing into me. “The minute she remembers what a scumbag you are, man.”
“Hey,” I said, cutting back. My tongue ticked across my lips, hunting for what to say. Silence hung heavy between us. Finally, words fell out. Words I wasn’t sure I recognized. “Listen. I don’t know what I’m going to do yet, all right? It’s been a fucking whirlwind. One minute, I’m drawing up a contract, and the next, she’s actually pregnant, man. I’m still trying to figure out what the hell to think about all of it.”
Quintin’s eyes softened slightly. It had been years since we’d spoken actual truth to one another. We’d been the kind of friends to sit silently beside each other in rough times, rather than offer a single word of guidance or of emotion. Now, with Quintin’s eyes still on me, I brought the beer to my lips, glugging back almost half of it and then wiping my mouth with the back of my hand. “Shit. Shit, man,” I sighed.
“Just don’t let it be like last time,” Quintin said, strutting toward the back room. His eyes were dark as he curved his head around at the closet doorway. I felt them slice through my skin. “Maybe try, for a single second, to show you have a heart.”
After the pint, I walked back to the Chevrolet and drove the long way back to the cabin, blaring the radio. At a stop sign, I slid my eyes toward the car in the right lane, beside me. In the front seat was a pretty redhead, her hair slipping past her ears and her eyes shelled with large glasses. When she spotted me, she brought her glasses down over her nose, ogling me. But immediately, I felt my eyes fall back to the road, unconscious to her beauty. She was a specimen, sure. A woman I might have liked to take out, had I been on the road. But my mind still stirred with thoughts of Remy and my father. How he’d placed his hand on hers, over the table, and looked at her with more compassion and love than I’d seen since before Hank had died. “You’re going to be a remarkable mother, Remy,” he’d whispered. “I can’t imagine anyone better.”
Dad’s secretary dialed me up a few days later, informing me that the first meeting to sign the papers to make me partner would be the following day. “Pen it down in your calendar, as they say,” she said, her bright and chipper voice ripping through the phone. “I don’t imagine you’ll want to miss it.”
As if I had anything else.
Since the night with Dad, Remy’d come down with a bit of a cold. Unsure of the protocol about staying over—and very conscious that we needed to keep up that “barrier” we’d discussed—I’d stopped by only for a few hours at a time, bringing her soup and salad and making sure her feet were up and tucked beneath a crocheted blanket. “You’ll tell me if you need anything. Anything at all,” I’d said, my voice firm.
“Sam’s got me, too,” she cooed back, her eyes peering up at me, almost childlike, from the couch.
“Don’t you dare work too hard on your script.” I shook my finger, teasing. “Because it’ll just make you sicker, you know.”
“You sound like my brother,” Remy had said, rolling her eyes.
En route to the meeting with my father, I texted Remy. “I can’t believe I’m about to sign this. It’s all for us, baby. It’s finally happening.”
In response, she’d texted back, “I’m so proud of you.”
The words had seemed so genuine. They felt almost like a smack, making my eyes close. My head fell back in the taxi. Nobody had said the words to me before. Certainly not when I’d nearly had to drop out of high school for bad attendance. Not when I’d abandoned Remy and my first real chance at creating a life and a love. And not when I’d rushed out on all those gigs, those women, across the country, so sure that whatever lurked around the next corner would be better.
“Finally feeling better,” she typed back. “And good thing. I have these auditions for the movie today. Sam’s playing the lead, but I need a mother character. And, of course, the man she falls in love with.”
“Don’t tell me you’re going to hire some handsome devil,” I returned, my fingers typing furiously. “I can’t handle the jealousy.”
“Wesley, remember. I’m just a few months from becoming a whale. He won’t look at me twice.”
“He better not.”
The taxi dropped me at the front of my father’s office building. All glass, five stories high, it gleamed at the edge of a large, bright green field. Just a bit outside of the city, its parking lot offered a host of top-caliber sports cars, driven by the dweebs inside. The ones who “made the magic happen,” according to my father. They’d been the kind of guys I’d scorned in high school. Now, they ambled into the office in tweed suits, speaking wildly into Bluetooth headsets.
Their bank accounts were unbelievable, and their wives were big-titted and tight-waisted, wearing large, blonde curls. Of course, I’d heard that many of these gorgeous babes were also eager tech gurus themselves, or else surgeons, anesthesiologists, realtors, writers. “They’re fucking go-getters,” Hank had said once, when I’d scoffed that the women I’d seen were just after the skinny tech nerds for their cash flow. “They appreciate depth of conversation. They want a man who can see more than their bodies. They want, well, more.”
I hadn’t believed it. But now, as if I glowed with this kind of inner knowledge—now that I was poised to be a fucking father, maybe—I eyed the techies in the lobby earnestly. One poked a pen against his eyebrow, muttering to a coworker beside him about the social accounts. Slowly, the pen made light blue traces against his skin. “If we can’t keep up with social, man, we can’t keep up with the next generation of users.”
“Wesley!” The top secretary circled her swirly chair toward me, her eyes nearly popping from her skull. “Well, it’s been quite a few years since we saw you around here. I only recognize you from your father’s picture of you and dear Hank on his desk.”
A picture of me? Dad hadn’t had any mention of me, his black sheep son, in his office in all the years I’d popped by. After a small wrinkle formed in my forehead, I bucked forward and squeezed Monica’s hand, flashing her a smile. “It’s good to see you. Good to be here,” I said, nodding firmly.
“And such good news on your end?” Monica spewed. “I mean, I know that you’re having a little one of your own now. And getting married! It all happened so fast. Although, with my Michael, when we knew it was time for marriage and kids, we just knew. We didn’t want to waste a second.”
My heart felt pressed down with the lie, and my smile slowly curled to the floor. But within seconds, Monica had whirled her large apple bottom from the wheely chair and led me toward the far hallway, continuing to gab. “I’ve arranged all the paperwork for you, sir,” she continued. “I hope you don’t cramp easily, because it’s quite a bit of signing. Your father, making you a partner! I mean, I know he appreciates family more than anything else. I know that better than anyone. I’ve been working with him for almost ten years.”
My father, appreciating family better than anyone? Again, my stomach felt tight, twisted. I remembered the first days of the start-up, with my father speeding off at five in the morning, sometimes with nary an appearance that night. Sometimes, he slept off his boozy, business meetings at the office, his head sloshed against the desk.
The large boardroom at the end of the hall drew toward me. I swallowed sharply, my fingers itching. Within minutes, the lie—that this baby was something more than just a contractual obligation—would be in full swing. They money would surge into my account. I’d get my shares of the company stock. I’d feel a dramatic weight drop from my shoulders. And Remy, well… She’d have the cash flow to pay her actors, her film crew. And maybe, Jesus, she could get the hell out of that shit, smoggy-carpeted apartment. Maybe get the hell out of the Mission District and get a better place near the water. I wanted her to see the ocean, to breathe the salty air.
God, I needed to get her the hell out of that bar. If she so much as inhaled a lick of secondhand cigarette smoke from Quintin, I’d smack my fist against a wall.
Once the papers were signed, my fingers smudged with blue pen, I walked slowly down the hall with my father, my copartner. My leader. I felt a strange allegiance with him. Could even see the ways we spoke similarly, with our hands, emphasizing different words. At the edge of the lobby, he stopped short, his shoes skidding slightly against the hardwood floor. He turned eagle eyes toward me.
“That Remy. I’m curious. What changed? What made you think that you and her… That you could be…”
“Dad,” I said. “Haven’t you met her?”
The words eased so evenly from me, without hesitation. I realized, with a jolt, that this was all the information I needed to give. Remy was a stunner, a charmer—an artistic woman with a cunning business sense. She was every bit the person my father was. Perhaps better.
“You’re right,” my father chuckled, clapping me on the shoulder. “Just don’t fuck it up, OK? It can be so easy to fuck it up. You know I did it with your mother. Jesus, did I ever destroy our love.”
My dad’s words haunted me as I strutted back toward the road, hailing a taxi with a sweep of my hand. I slipped into the back and drew up my online banking on my phone. With careful fingers, I typed in Remy’s bank account details, dropping in the one million I owed her. A fucking million dollars. When all those years before, a buck or two had been enough for a milkshake, or a beer with a fake ID.
“Hey,” I called up to the driver, as he whirled me closer to the cabin. “Can you actually take me closer to the city center? I want to go to the Mission,” I said, a sudden wave of urgency making my stomach tighten. “Please,” I added, a word I was unaccustomed to using. Still, I swam through my father’s words. Don’t fuck it up. Don’t fuck it up.