Riley: A Secret World
We stand in silence and no one answers.
Caleb hates it when things aren’t spelled out for him in clear directions. He’s not big on intuition. I can see him processing, wishing his dad were here to do it for him. Finally, he clears his throat and says, “Hello? We’re here for the…uh…thing?”
There’s a long pause and then the slot on the door opens. I can only see shadows on the other side.
“Step closer,” a woman’s voice says coolly. Caleb stands in front of the slot. After a moment the voice says, “The girl, too.” I step up to the door. There’s another long pause and the door swings open. A gorgeous blond woman in a crimson velvet dress stands in the shadows. A slit runs all the way up one side to her waist, revealing a flawless expanse of pale skin.
We step through the door and it swings shut behind us. She turns and walks away, and we follow her down a twisting, silent, shadowed hallway. I can tell Caleb is sweating, but my heart is racing in the most delightful excitement. It feels like entering a secret faerie world from one of my books. We reach another door of blue and gold and the woman opens it with a golden key. Sound floods out and we follow her through.
We’re standing in a bar. Smoke fills the air, along with notes from a type of jazz I’ve never heard before. All the colors are rich: mahogany, ebony, deep reds, and dark golds. The room is full of glamorous, perfectly dressed men and women. All the men are in tailored suits. The women have ornate, elegant dresses—some of them are very, very revealing.
Caleb's wearing slacks and a white button-down shirt, and I have a simple black summer dress. I feel another flood of embarrassment and inadequacy.
“If the gentleman would like to wait at the bar, the game has not yet begun,” the woman says, indicating with an elegant wave of her hand. Caleb acknowledges her with a grunt and makes a beeline for the alcohol.
The woman starts to turn away. “I shouldn’t be here,” I blurt. Then I snap my mouth shut, embarrassed.
“You have everything you need to be here. You just don’t realize it yet, darling.” She gives me the faintest hint of a smile and disappears back through the blue door before I can manage a response. I wasn’t expecting that. I was expecting something snide and biting.
Caleb is saying to the bartender, “…no, that one works. Run it again. You have a problem with your machine.”
The bartender is shaking his head.
“Here, use mine,” I offer. I have a debit card with the money from my freelance work on it. It’s usually not enough to buy anything that Caleb wants, but I can afford a few drinks at least.
“Babe, I got it!” he snaps. He’s going to lay into me later. Caleb has a pretty cliched view of masculinity and himself as a man—he’s not very good at living up to his own standards, though, and he gets annoyed when he doesn’t and blames it on me. What, does he not want to be able to pay for the drinks? I’m already offering my card and the bartender takes it with a gracious and appreciative smile.
“Thank you, miss. And for you?”
Caleb and I speak at the same time.
“She’ll have a Cosmo.”
“Whiskey neat.”
“Cosmo,” he insists. Caleb doesn’t actually know drinks very well—he’s ordered a light beer—but I know he likes to order for me and I acquiesce with a nod of my head when the bartender hesitates. I sip my drink and we sit in silence for a while. I want to talk about the play, but Caleb has zero interest in theater.
I get lonely sometimes because of that—because of his lack of interest in, well, just about everything. Since we moved for Caleb's job, I’ve started to feel my friends slipping away. We still stay in touch over Facebook and texts, but it's not the same as having them near me. All through college we'd meet over coffee and talk about plays and language and everything in the world. We'd talk about books most of all.
In college, I was drawn to girls like me, who were interested in reading everything under the sun: the latest high-brow literature, spy thrillers, mysteries, even fantasy and science fiction, and—when we really wanted to indulge—romances. We read all kinds: Regency romances, romantic mysteries, contemporary romance, and a dozen others, old and new. We'd each excitedly go over our favorite scenes and moments. We'd read new ones on our phones waiting in line for coffee and to get through especially boring lectures. I love going to the library and picking out old classics, too—their pages worn from all the readers before me.
I have a slim volume stuffed in my bag tonight, and I spent the minutes before the play racing through the thrilling opening. Yeah, sitting and reading a book right before a play that I went to alone. I’m a real winner. I already know what Caleb’s going to say, but I can’t help myself—I just want someone to talk to about books sometimes.
“I started a new book today—it’s called The Rogue Prince.”
Caleb is checking football scores on his phone again.
"I think you might like it—it's got an adventure story, too, along with the romance. This girl from a poor family's been betrothed to a wealthy merchant, but when they're sailing back to his home port for their wedding, they're attacked by pirates, and there's a standoff, and the merchant trades her to this violent pirate captain in exchange for his own life! So she's taken and kidnapped, but the pirate—"
“Babe, you know I don’t like fiction.”
I bite my lip. Conversations with Caleb sometimes feel like making little pieces of origami, handing them to him, and having him spit his gum into them and toss them away. It’s not that I want to force Caleb to talk about only the books I like. It’s just…sometimes it seems like there’s not anything he’s interested in at all. Even when I ask him about sports, he gets annoyed if he has to discuss them with any complexity. He likes to sit back and passively binge things. I try to remember, for a moment, why we ever got together in the first place.
Thankfully, the bartender keeps bringing us refills —including several complimentary glasses of whiskey—and although I only sip mine, Caleb sucks his down.
I give up on conversation and get lost in the thrill of people-watching. The men all seem rough, muscled, and tattooed, which makes a surprisingly appealing contrast with their exquisite suits. One even has a scar running straight down his face, over one of his eyes. The women are all gorgeous—ranging from their twenties to at least their fifties—and they all hold themselves with a poise that I feel incapable of even understanding, much less imitating. I try to square my shoulders and straighten my back, but I just feel awkward and rigid.
We sit and drink for nearly an hour. Caleb looks around, on edge. There's a small window at the back of the room with bars over it—like the teller window at some banks—and he keeps glancing at it. He’s usually laid back. He usually has the ease that only a tall, strong, wealthy white guy can have. But tonight he’s off.
Finally, his eye catches something and I follow his gaze. There's a plain young man slouching behind the window now. Caleb seems to relax a little. "That's the guy who told me about this place." He turns to me slyly. "I let him take me for nearly two thousand yesterday—we were just playing for fun. He thinks I don’t know what I’m doing.” The thought of throwing away two thousand dollars gives me a tightness in my chest. I can’t believe he did that.
Caleb goes to him and they talk for a while. The man shows him something in a briefcase and Caleb signs a slip to buy into the game. The amount he spends on poker and bets always makes me a little queasy, but money is nothing for Caleb and his family—his dad could probably buy this place several times over. I tell myself to relax and enjoy the experience. I feel a little like I’m in an old James Bond novel, and for fun I pretend I'm one of the femme fatales that James would seduce and ravish sometime in the second act, although when I glance over to the mirror behind the bar, all I see is a bookworm.
I keep staring at the man behind the counter. He has rounded shoulders, and his hair falls down in front of his face so he has to brush it out of his eyes. He seems familiar, but I have no idea where I would've seen him. When Caleb met him and played the casual game yesterday, I was off exploring a museum on my own. Did I cross paths with him in the city somewhere? Did Caleb show me a picture? No, he wouldn't have. Something about the boy unnerves me but I push the feeling aside. You’re just a little drunk, that’s all.
When Caleb's done talking, I tip the bartender and go to him, and we pass through a third door in the very back corner of the bar. The frame and door both are pure ivory. It gleams dully in the low light of the bar and gives me the strangest sensation; I feel like I'm stepping through a portal to another world. The door leads to a hallway with a brown door that opens into a small room with a circular green table at its center.
The man from the front is sitting on the opposite side of the table and six other men sit around it. This feels more and more wrong. They all look rough and dangerous. And they don't look rough like the men I usually see at Caleb's bars—rich guys playing at being tough. There’s something about them—a grit and hardness—that makes me feel like these are actual dangerous men.
Relax. Caleb knows what he’s doing. It’s just a poker game. Caleb's dad could buy every guy at this table, anyway. But something deep in me keeps insisting that I'm in danger. It keeps yelling to run, to flee black to the populated land of tourists on Broadway. You’re being stupid. You don’t know what you’re talking about. This isn’t an action movie.
And there’s something else: along with the fear, I still feel that strange excitement. A part of me doesn’t want to run. If I run, I’m running back to a boring, frustrating life. Somewhere, deep inside, I want something extraordinary to happen—I almost don’t care what it is.
“Okay if my girl’s here?” Caleb blurts out.
“No, why don’t you kick her out onto the street,” the plain man says.
Caleb stares at him with his mouth open, trying to figure out what to say, then actually turns to tell me to go.
“He’s joking, dickhead. Sit down and let’s get started,” says a broad man next to the first.
Caleb slips into the last seat at the table and I start to go for a chair in the corner, but the plain man slouches over to it first. “I’ve got it,” I say, but he ignores me and drags it up behind Caleb so I can look over his shoulder.
"I'm Riley," I blurt out stupidly—as if this is some kind of meet and greet. He doesn’t care, you idiot.
But he takes the name in as if he actually does. “Jack. Nice to meet you, Riley.”
I nod to the chair. “Thanks.”
“Have a seat.” He holds it until I sit, and I feel an unexpected amount of gratitude for the small, decent gesture. Too bad he’s an incompetent card player and not a… What was Caleb, exactly? What was it about him that I’d liked, all those years ago? At the moment, I almost feel like I’d take the plain, incompetent card player. If he was willing to go to a play with me or talk about even one book—any book at all—I’d be head over heels. I shake my head to clear the ridiculous thought.
Jack slouches back to his chair and clumsily shuffles and deals the cards. It seems like it takes forever, and midway through he drops the deck and the cards spill out across the table, faces up. He has to restart. I see a faint, confident sneer play out across Caleb’s face.
“You need some help there, bud?”
“I’ve got it,” Jack says. I realize that he reeks of alcohol—whiskey—I can smell it wafting off of him even across the table. I feel pity rising up for him—an incompetent card player and a drunk. I hope Caleb doesn’t take too much of his money. I sense something shattered in the man—somewhere deep, deep inside—and it breaks my heart just a little.
They start the game and I quickly get lost; I tried learning poker, but it didn't make sense to me. Caleb had seemed more annoyed than charmed when I asked questions about it. I told myself it was good for him to have time to pursue his own interests—that it would keep our relationship fresh and healthy over the years. He goes off to play some evenings and I stay home and read. Or he has casual card nights for his new work friends at our place and I do snacks. Caleb’s kind of good at it—he won six thousand dollars on a weekend trip to Vegas a few months ago—but sometimes I worry that he thinks he’s a lot better than he actually is. He brags that he could make a living with poker if he wasn’t part of his dad’s firm.
“How come all of my hobbies make money and all of your hobbies are just for fun?” he had teased me once. I’d burned with anger at it, but I hadn't said anything back. He was right—I don't make as much money as him. Plus, he supports me and I owe him for that. If I help stroke his ego, well, that can be part of my job. That's what I try to tell myself, anyway.
The room's warm, and after a half hour, I feel sticky with sweat. Half the men are smoking—some cigarettes and some cigars—and they’ve filled the air with a heavy haze.
I entertain myself by studying the players. Next to Jack is an enormous, pale, hairless man, Victor. I can tell they don't get along. For some reason, Victor reminds me of a snake swallowing bird eggs—like something horrifying you'd see on the National Geographic channel. To Jack's right is the broad man, Wyatt. He has flecks of gray in his hair and unexpectedly kind eyes. His face is rough and craggy and his posture is straight, like a soldier's. Next to him is a man in his early twenties, Benjy. He's big and friendly looking, and his curly hair's drawn back in a ponytail. He looks like Hurley from Lost to me.
There's a black man on the other side of Jack, Darien. I would've been sure he was a model if I'd just passed him out on the street, but there's a glimmer of hardness around his eyes that tells me how wrong that assumption would've been. He's in an especially perfectly tailored, gray, three-piece suit. He smokes a slim cigarette.
The table’s filled out by two more white guys. Both of them are muscled but with a little extra softness than the rest. They’re older, maybe in their mid-forties, and have a crudeness to their movement and speech. I think their names are O’Bannon and Rackham.
For some reason, though, I keep looking back to Jack. His chin is almost trembling and his face is twisted in focus as he tries to follow the game. But there’s a glimmer about him—like a flash of fire in the night, right at the edge of your vision. What’s wrong with him? What am I seeing?
I spend the next hour looking between the man and the game. Since I can’t interrupt to ask questions, I try to study it like a puzzle and pick out patterns. I sort of like the challenge, although it’s frustrating, too. I wish Caleb would let me whisper in his ear to get clarification on what I think I’m seeing, but I know he’d be furious if I tried. He doesn’t like being distracted during poker.
The woman from the front entrance comes in to serve the men occasionally. She takes drink orders and brings appetizers and fresh cigarettes and cigars. She’s different with these men; softer, submissive, almost sexual. It’s an act—I’m sure—for their sake, but she’s a very good actor. There’s something unbelievably sultry and appealing about her. She carries herself like some creature out of an old Humphrey Bogart movie. I wouldn’t even know where to begin to start imitating her.
“Drink, sir?” she says to Caleb.
“There was something wrong with your machine—it wasn’t taking my cards,” Caleb says.
Jack waves it away. “It’s on the house. Get him and the lady what they want, Christie.”
I fall into another James Bond fantasy. Espionage thrillers aren’t my absolute favorite genre, but I get a guilty pleasure from picturing myself in the arms of the brutish, misogynistic spy. Fantasies are harmless, right? It doesn’t mean I try to live them. And this smoky backroom is the perfect fodder for a spy fantasy. All of the men at the table look close enough to gangsters or supervillains for the daydream to work.
Any good fantasy needs a brooding hero, though. I immediately edit Caleb out of the table and look around for another contender. Maybe Wyatt, the rough man with the gray-flecked hair? Or the ethereally handsome Darien? No, I'm not interested in them. I want Jack. I take him into my mind, straighten his shoulders, and brush his hair back. Lucky you, kid. You don’t even know it, but you get to be my James Bond tonight.
I pretend that Jack and I are gambling against international criminals in order to get into their organization and take it down. My mind spins out the fantasy over the next hour of gambling. We infiltrate the syndicate. Jack rises through the organization. I have to do a striptease to entice a roguish smuggler, also played, in my head, by Jack. We attend a glamorous ball then escape from an island ambush. I get taken prisoner and dropped at the villain's secret ocean base. Jack wipes it out and saves me. We end up in Casablanca—because where else would you go in a fantasy?—making passionate love in the warm, African night. It makes me blush, but hey, I’m free to do what I like in my own mind.
The players slowly drop off as the game progresses. The two older ones—Matt and Tom—are the first to go, to my surprise. They sit back in a corner and chat as they watch the game. Then Benjy, who leaves with a laugh and sits back to watch, too. Then Darien, who swings his coat on debonairly and walks out to, presumably, break the heart of every woman he meets. The remaining group lasts for a while, but finally, Wyatt loses a hand and lets out a curse.
He throws his cards down, strides to the corner, and slams his fist into the wall. “Damn. Okay, I’m good. That’s a fuck of a lot of money to lose.”
They're using chips and I realize that I have no idea how much they're actually playing for. It could be thousands if I know Caleb. The thought makes my stomach turn again. Even with all the money he has at his disposal, it seems like such a waste to just throw it away. Except Caleb’s not going to throw it away, he’s going to win, I try to tell myself.
The game is left with Caleb, Jack, and the pale, hairless giant, Victor. They keep going for a while and I drift back into my fantasy, wandering around in it and revisiting my favorite scenes. I’m particularly delighted with Jack as the roguish smuggler who I have to debase myself so delectably to seduce. I decide that section of the daydream needs far more detail. Lately I’ve found myself engaging in dirtier and dirtier fantasies more and more often; Caleb and I haven’t slept together for weeks. Sometimes I despair at how disinterested in me he seems, but if I’m honest with myself, I don’t crave the passionless minutes of Caleb’s grunting our sex life has devolved into.
I try to tell myself long-term relationships are built on other things, but I'm not always very convinced by my own arguments. I drift off from the poker game and become immersed in an embarrassingly lurid sex scene between me and Jack. The roguish smuggler he's playing discovers my secret identity and tells me it's going to cost me everything to keep him quiet. He tears my panties off and takes me very roughly in a gilded, extravagant hotel penthouse where the superspy version of me is staying.
Suddenly I’m yanked out of the fantasy.
Victor’s pulled out a gun.
A real gun. He has it out and aimed at the room. He looks furious. Adrenaline floods me and my heart jumps into my throat. My mind screams for me to dive for the floor, run, fight, but I’m frozen. It’s like a dream where a monster’s chasing you and you can’t move. All I manage is to grab Caleb’s arm in silent terror.
He shrugs away from me. No shot goes off. No bullets pulverize our bodies.
“…custom made, modified for extra rounds, gold enameling—there’s one gun like this in the world,” Victor says. He holds it up for inspection, waiting for a response.
I release the breath I’ve been holding as I realize he’s offering the gun in lieu of money to buy his way into the next round. No one’s getting shot.
Jack looks at the gun. His face changes for just a moment—a flash of annoyance and something else that I can’t recognize—and then it melts back into his dull, nervous pallor. He gazes at Victor but the pale man doesn’t put the gun away. He shrugs.
“Eh, I don’t care. You care, boss?” he says to Caleb.
Caleb pretends to examine the gun then grunts manfully. “Eh, looks like good stuff. I’ll take it.”
Jack shrugs again and waves a hand, acquiescing. The pale man lays the gun on the table and they keep playing.
I try to tell myself I’m just nervous having a gun out, but there’s something else. What else? What could be worse than being at a poker game with armed men? And why the fuck do I still feel excited about this? I’m sure something’s wrong but I don’t know how to communicate that with Caleb—I don’t even know what it is that I want to communicate.
They play another hand and the pale man loses again and spits out a string of violent, disgusting curses.
“Why don’t you relax, man,” Wyatt says.
“Go fuck yourself,” Victor replies. “Fuck.” He knocks his chair back and sits in another, back against the wall.
“You staying?” Jack asks.
“Yeah, you got a problem with that?”
Jack shrugs.
The pale man starts arguing with him about the game and I take the chance to lean close to Caleb and whisper urgently in his ear.
"Caleb, how much are you playing for?" He waves me away in annoyance but I press him. "Caleb, who are these guys? Something's wrong. I mean really, really wrong. Can’t you feel it?”
Finally, he turns to me and hisses bitingly back, “Babe, chill out. Jack’s dad owns an oil company. He’s a fucking amateur. I asked the bartender about him at the place we were last night. He filled me all in. His dad just lets him do this to keep him entertained. Look at him—he can barely hold his cards. He looks like he’s going to piss himself. He doesn’t know what he’s doing.”
My heart eases down from my throat and I feel a little dumb. Of course Caleb knows what he's doing. You don't get to where his family’s gotten by being stupid with money…right?
“Sorry,” I mumble, and he waves me away as the next round starts. They play for a while longer, and even with only two people in the game I can’t figure out what’s going on. Jack keeps fumbling his cards, but somehow he manages to hang on each round.
“You’ve reached your limit. You wanna do more?” he asks Caleb.
He seems to be hoping that Caleb will decline but Caleb says, “Yeah, I’ll go higher.” Jack shrugs, doing a terrible job of trying to play it cool. He produces a form, fills out a few lines, and hands it over. Why does Caleb need to sign something to hand over his own money? I try to see what it says, but Caleb leans over it and his body blocks my view. He signs more money over to the game, from what I can tell, and they keep playing.
Caleb’s sweating profusely. There are pit stains spreading out on his shirt, his hands are trembling, and he actually drops his cards once. I’m sweating, too. I tell myself it’s just warm in the room.
I look at Jack again. Something teases at the edge of my mind, and for some reason, I feel sick to my stomach.
“Call,” Caleb says.
Jack lays out his cards. They don’t mean anything to me, but Caleb goes as pale as a corpse. I’ve never seen a man so utterly colorless. I feel like I’m going to actually throw up and I don’t know why. I was right; something’s wrong.
Then Jack stands up and unfolds himself, and the illusion falls away.
His jaw emerges from where it was tucked and his shoulders ripple out. He looms over the room. It’s practically a magic trick; he’s taller and broader than every other man there, and suddenly I can’t even picture the plain, hunched man he’d been just moments before. He has the strongest jawline that I’ve ever seen. He passes a hand through his long, dark hair and brushes it up and back over his head. Without the locks of hair hanging down and without his chin tucked in, I can see how angular his face is. It’s as striking a transformation as a sorcerer in an old story dropping his glamour and revealing his true, terrible form. I notice his clothes now, too. They’re all dark colors and simple, but something about the perfect elegance of their lines tells me they’re very, very expensive. Every piece is tailored perfectly to him.
He is the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen. Like an ancient, perfect statue come to life.
I am terrified.
It has something to do with his beauty and how he was able to conceal and transform himself. But mainly it’s his eyes. They’re all cold and vicious intelligence. There’s a darkness in his gaze like I’ve never seen—like looking into a starless night. I can see cruelty in his face, too. Disdain. Like an emperor who knows everyone in the world is below him.
I want to scream and run out of this nightmare, but I'm frozen. Somehow I know that I am staring at a monster. As true a monster as any you could encounter on earth. My mouth is so dry that I’m struggling to breathe.
All of this flashes through my mind in a moment. And then he speaks, gazing at Caleb and me both with those disdainful, cruel eyes.
“Caleb Montcrest, you owe the mob eleven million dollars. And you don’t have the money to pay.”