Henry

I’m having drinks with Smitty, an old college friend, at one of the posh bars that cater to the Wall Street large-assets crowd.

The bar is translucent green with hip lighting and successful, viciously beautiful men and women all around.

The place is filling up. People come up to us now and then to say a quick hello. Locke is stronger than ever.

It’s something.

Smitty has his eye on a woman across the way at the booths. She has a friend for me. Things are pretty clear, let’s just say, but my heart’s not in it.

“Henry,” Smitty says. “We could at least have a drink with them.”

“You go.”

“I can’t fuck them both. I mean, I could, but don’t think it’ll fly.”

I point my finger into my empty glass, lit from the bottom from the glowing bar. If this place was any hipper—I don’t even know.

The bartender comes over and fills it up.

“When was the last time you had any?”

“A minute ago, and it tasted fucking amazing,” I say.

“You know what I mean,” Smitty says.

The answer is a year and twenty-one days. It’s been a year and twenty-one days since I had sex. A year and twenty-one days since Vicky disappeared. Literally, she disappeared along with her sister.

I try not to think what she’d say about my sex hiatus, how she’d rib me about losing my Most Eligible Bastard status.

I’d do anything to get it back. To get back that invulnerability I had before Vicky came into my life. That time when everything with women was a game and I controlled the field.

My PI hasn’t turned up jack. It’s a lot easier to hack through somebody’s fake identity than to scour the planet for a person who knows how to disappear.

Last I heard, Denny was up to his eyeballs in debt, drinking heavily and trying to borrow money from the people he once snubbed for being beneath him.

A spate of Where is Vonda? articles came out, but nobody ever found her.

I still scour the jewelry collections, but nothing I see ever comes close to what she’d make. Nothing feels like her. Or maybe I'm just getting further away.

So it's a year and twenty-one days, and I’m with Smitty, who really, really wants me to get with these two women—junior brokers, from the way they’re drinking.

I give him my final answer. No. He groans and turns back to me, letting the two of them off the hook to troll for other guys.

We talk a little bit more business, and then he asks me a strange question. “You put a bid in for that London thing?”

“What London thing?”

“The huge warehouse share studio—Redmond or something?”

“I haven’t ever heard of it,” I say.

“That’s weird. You have a UK presence. I would think Locke would be the first firm they’d invite to bid. It’s the kind of shit you guys have been getting off on lately. It’s some big cooperative makers space. Fucking huge. Reclaimed urban ruin, neighborhood integration…” He goes on to outline more features…familiar features. “We bid it, and it’s not even our thing.”

I sit up. “Are there places to eat, sleep?” I describe the ideas I had for the Southfield Place Studio.

He nods his head. “So you do know about it.”

“The owner’s not named?”

He gives me a funny look. “No.”

“You have access to the RFP?” Request for proposal. I nod at his phone.

“What? And let you bid against us if you weren’t even invited?”

I nudge his phone toward him. “Forward me the RFP.”