CHAPTER 14
Once Jane had uttered the sentence “Nick Dawes was over last night and things got weird,” it took less than an hour for Ally and Cecily to show up at the penthouse.
With food on its way, along with some exotic spirits from a booze delivery service, the girls were willing to wait no longer. At least no longer than the three undersize Negronis Cecily fixed up for them at Mr. Dawes’s bar cart.
“Will you please explain yourself,” Ally said, curling her legs up in the very spot where Mr. Dawes had sat eating Nana’s sandwiches.
Jane took a chair next to Cecily and casually snagged a Vogue India from the pile Ally had stacked on the coffee table. Another nice perk of Ally’s job was the month-old fashion magazines from around the world. “Last night Nick Dawes came to the house looking like somebody’s target practice. I’m sure he had a concussion. I kept waking him up every couple hours just to be sure he was okay. In the morning when I came back from running, he was gone. And now it turns out he doesn’t remember it getting . . . well, intense.”
Jane’s two friends sat up straight. “Intense?” Cecily confirmed. “Angry intense or sexy intense?”
“Definitely more sexy than angry,” Jane said, taking a sip of her drink. “He really wasn’t angry. Maybe he should have been more angry, considering how screwed up he looked.”
Ally and Cecily looked riveted. “I mean, it was no big deal,” Jane continued, waving the whole issue away with her hand so that it would look as no-big-dealish as she was claiming. “It’s just that he didn’t even remember.”
Ally looked at Jane. “How do you know he doesn’t remember?”
“Because I talked to him this morning, and he doesn’t remember. And I’m . . . well, I suppose I’m just a little . . . bothered by that, I guess. I’m feeling strangely bothered by a lot of things about Nick . . . Dawes.”
Ally snorted Negroni out her nose and Cecily full out laughed. It was getting harder to remember to call him Mr. Dawes and not Nick. Still, Jane persevered: “Maybe before I saw him rolling around all loosened up on the floor with an adorable puppy I was a little more cavalier about things. But he’s in trouble. And he can’t come home. He can’t come home and order lobster rolls and make drinks and dance around his apartment like he doesn’t have a care in the world.” She looked her friends in the eyes. “And I just don’t feel good about that. It was kind of a relief when for a second there I thought he was this sort of plastic and superficial investment guy who’d buy a puppy without acknowledging it was, you know, alive and required some inputs like food and love. I think he’s really trapped. I can tell by the way he talks on the phone. It’s between every line.”
There was a pointed pause as Ally and Cecily processed this speech.
“How often do you talk to him?” Cecily asked.
Jane resolutely focused on an article about the new best way to apply blush. “I think we’ve spoken basically every day since I started. I don’t know. Time blurs. He likes to check on the kids.”
“The what?” Cecily asked.
“The kids. The fish. And Rochester. The dog. That’s what we call them.”
“Every day,” Ally said, her face the picture of disbelief. “To check on ‘the kids.’ Is he flirting with you on a semiregular, nobody’s-admitting-that’s-what-it-is basis?”
“Yeah,” Jane said.
“Has it occurred to you that maybe that means something?”
“No.”
“Seriously?” Cecily asked. “Why not?”
Jane gave up on Vogue India and traded it in for Elle Croatia. “Because men who look like models don’t date fat girls like me. They date other models.”
There was a massive silence. So massive that Jane looked up to make sure her friends were still breathing. Ally’s face looked like thunder; Cecily just looked extremely unhappy.
“You’re not fat,” Cecily said.
“Oh, come on,” Jane said, licking her index finger to get the pages to turn easier. “Ask Ally.”
Ally’s eyes narrowed. “You’re not fat. You’re plus-size. But leaving it at that isn’t saying the facts. A Mercedes is a Mercedes whether it looks like a motorcycle, a sedan, or—”
“A van,” Jane suggested.
“I know what beauty is,” Ally snapped. “I have to think about it every day at work. You have one of the most beautiful faces I’ve ever seen.”
Jane felt a pang then. She finished Ally’s sentence in her mind: “Too bad your body is built like a boom box from the eighties.” Yeah, she’d inherited some good stuff from her parents facewise, but apparently when it was time to dole out DNA, a carb-loading football linebacker somewhere up the family tree had raised his hand.
“It doesn’t matter anyway; since we’re mostly just on the phone it’s perfect,” Jane said. “He can have his cake and eat it too, ha ha. He can talk to me but doesn’t have to see me. I’m sure after the second call, he already had me down to a size six.”
“That’s hideous, what you’re saying,” Cecily said.
Jane gave Cecily a smile. “You know I love you, but you’re a size two. You have no idea what I’m saying.”
“Okay, yes, you are a substantive woman, but—”
Jane gave her a look and tossed her magazine back on the coffee table. “That’s weirder than saying ‘fat,’ although very nice and PC. Don’t think I don’t appreciate your delicacy, pal.”
“Stop interrupting me. I’m trying to point out that if you think your size is actually an issue, you should think back to Nick and be reminded that the men of the Hudson Kings aren’t just superhot. They are also extremely large. Extremely large, superhot.”
“True,” agreed Ally, crunching on ice. “Compared to them, we’re like elves. Cecily’s barely visible; she’s practically microscopic.”
“Look, I don’t have a thing here. I don’t sit up nights thinking I’m not good enough for whatever and whoever. I’m merely pointing out the fact that insanely rich, hot men can choose whoever they want. And they don’t generally choose women who look like me. It’s a fact of life, baby. Besides, he’s not my type,” Jane said. “He doesn’t even own a spatula.”
“For the record, Nick isn’t the type to put up with a model without a brain. He isn’t superficial,” Cecily said.
“And I’m not fat,” Jane said. Although she wasn’t sure she meant either of those things.
“I think we need to drink more,” Ally said. “Especially because I think this is supposed to be an after-dinner drink, and since we haven’t eaten yet it can’t possibly count.”
“I don’t think it counts anyway,” Jane said. “Cecily makes tiny drinks suitable for gatherings of tiny people.”
“You make the next round,” Cecily said to Ally with a grin.
Ally nodded. “After we drink more, I think we need to snoop around Nick’s apartment to solve the mystery. Is Nick superficial? Or is he simply . . . extremely clean?”
“Is Ally drunk?” Jane asked. “Or is she simply insane? We’re on camera, you know.”
Cecily groaned, and Ally rolled her eyes in a way that felt like “Oh, not that again.” Like this happened all the time, this video camera business. Huh.
“Watch this,” Ally said, all sass. She took a lipstick out of her purse, and then jumped up and grabbed a free chair, pulling it up to the camera in the living room.
Jane looked at Cecily in alarm as Ally climbed on the chair and smeared her lipstick over the lens. Then she got down and carried the chair to the kitchen and dining room to do the same thing with those cameras. “As long as we don’t go in the bedroom, I think we’re safe. There’s no camera in the bathroom,” Jane called.
“There’s one in the bedroom?” Ally asked, coming back out.
Jane suddenly felt defensive. “If someone wanted to kill you, I think the easiest time would be while you’re sleeping. It seems perfectly reasonable to me. It’s not like he didn’t point it out.”
Ally’s mouth twisted in amusement. “I drew the line at my bedroom. Rothgar can kiss my sweet naked ass.”
“I’m starting to wonder if you actually like the sound of that,” Cecily murmured, which got her a sharp look from Ally.
“Did you and Rothgar ever have a thing?” Jane asked. She just couldn’t help it.
Her friend looked totally confused. “What kind of thing?”
Jane stared at her. “Were you in love with him?”
Cecily failed to suppress a gasp.
“I was a kid. I had a boyfriend,” Ally said. “Missy’s brother. Apollo was my boyfriend. Rothgar’s a . . . man.”
Okay, now Ally was blushing. As if she just realized she’d grown up and turned into a woman, so Rothgar being a man didn’t actually count as a negative. Ally blinked rapidly, still trying to process what should have been a totally simple question. Finally, she picked up her drink, tossed her hair, and said, “I hate Rothgar with a white-hot passion.”
Jane did not mention that the sentence still included the phrase “white-hot passion.” She also did not suggest to Ally—an excellent linguist, who actually got to use her French at her day job—that there was probably a foreign dialect somewhere in which the word for “denial” was pronounced “Rothgar.”
But Ally looked a little ill, and it was Jane’s fault. “I’m sorry, Ally. I shouldn’t be so flip about this stuff. I know you also lost Apollo. I won’t bring it up again.”
Ally stared into her empty lowball glass, then her head swung up and she stared Jane right in the eyes. “I was about to break up with him,” she blurted. Then she took a huge breath and spent a long time releasing it. “Wow. I’ve never actually said that out loud before. I hope Nick has good mixers,” she added too brightly, heading to the bar cart to rifle through the bottles.
Taking the cue, Jane got up; she ducked into the bedroom to give Rochester a belly rub. He was pleased by the attention but also made it clear he was dedicated to the idea of not getting out of bed. Just checkin’ on the kids, Mr. Dawes.
The doorbell rang followed by the sound of Cecily’s voice taking care of the delivery. Jane returned to the living room, where she pushed aside Ally’s magazine stash and helped unload dinner along with paper plates, plastic forks, and napkins. “I ordered lobster rolls and a pound of fresh crabmeat. And stuff to go with it.” Ally collected the exotic-booze bottles and went back to the bar, presumably to make something involving elderflower syrup.
“Nice.” Cecily went for the stereo system, where she picked up the remote and scrolled through the music for a while before settling on a melancholy British band from the ’80s that apparently did not have a memorable name. “Ally, do you have the cards?”
Ally turned around, her hands clasping two bottles of booze. “In my purse. Two decks.”
Jane sat down and unwrapped one of the lobster rolls but didn’t take a bite. “I’m having a crisis of conscience,” she said.
“Why?” Cecily asked.
Jane stared around the penthouse and then back at the spread on the table, and then back at Ally’s fine work ongoing at the bar cart. “Dunno. It’s his stuff. His money.” She frowned, trying to parse her thoughts.
Ally got that belligerent look in her eyes Jane now recognized as the look she always got when she wanted to not care about the men of the Hudson Kings. She walked up to Jane, swapped one of the fresh elderflower cocktails for Jane’s lobster roll, and stole a bite. In a barely intelligible lobster roll–chewing voice, she said, “When he solves his problem and moves home, he can throw a party of his own.”
“What else do you know about Mr. Dawes?” Jane asked, figuring that if she’d been thoroughly vetted by Missy, then turnaround with Ally was fair play. She took a gulp of the fruity-floral drink. Yeah, that’ll work.
“More than I should,” Ally said, giving the roll back. “I remember Graham talking about Nick early on. He said that there was this guy who had the Midas touch, who Rothgar was interested in. The team needed some serious equipment, and it was a constant battle trying to fund the missions before the paydays came in. So, Rothgar set out to find a guy who could make money for the team. Like, that would be his job. And he’d also be useful working with Cecily’s brother, Dex, messing with finances online, using his knowledge of the behind-the-scenes stuff with banks. I don’t know what Rothgar gave Nick to join, but I think Nick was happy with his side of the deal.”
“So, what happens if he doesn’t solve his problem?” Jane asked.
“Then he dies,” Ally said, chewing. “Just like my brother did. Okay, so I’m calling the first game. Five-card stud. Let’s do this. Cecily, look at Jane’s face; this music is making her depressed and sympathetic. Can we put on something else?”
Cecily immediately went to change the music.
Jane dug into her food while Ally dealt. She decided to stop thinking about Mr. Dawes, because her friend was absolutely right. I’m just a fish sitter. I’m nobody to him. And I’ve got plenty of problems without being sad about my boss, who wouldn’t look at me twice if he weren’t so trapped in his own life. He probably doesn’t actually get to talk to a lot of people in a given day. And even fewer women. That’s why he calls me. Once he solves his problem—and he will solve it, because if anyone can solve it, it’s gotta be a man like Nick Dawes—and starts feeding his own fish again, he won’t remember my name.
At the bottom of the tiny Negroni, Jane had successfully convinced herself that Mr. Dawes did not need or want her sympathy.
At the bottom of the elderflower cocktail, Jane tried to remember why it seemed plausible that her boss called her so often to discuss the welfare of his fish.
At the bottom of a third drink that really could have been anything, Jane couldn’t seem to hold an image in her head beyond that of Mr. Dawes’s smile as he ran his finger down her leg.
And that’s when Ally mixed a fourth.
By the end of some number of hours that Jane couldn’t keep track of, Cecily had won most of the money. Granted, they were playing low stakes, but still. Cecily apparently felt bad enough about taking all their change that she insisted on giving them tarot card readings.
Never mind that it was sort of difficult not to keep knocking the cards on the floor, and Cecily was slurring quite a lot, and Ally kept interrupting the proceedings to make her own dirty interpretation about the illustrations on the cards.
Ally was, in fact, doing a fake reading about Jane and Nick that involved a naked star goddess and a bunch of cards with a lot of phallic symbols or wands or whatever they were, when every light in the apartment extinguished at the same time.