Love Me With Lies 03 Thief (32 page)

“What the hell are you doing, Duchess?”

“Let me go,” she says. “I’m not going to do anything.” She’s still staring toward Leah and all I can see of her is the back of her head.

I let her go and she reaches across the space and slaps Leah again. Seth curses loudly. Luckily the parking lot is empty except for us.

“I’m going to sue you, you stupid bitch,” Leah screams.

Seth lets her go and she lunges for Olivia. Before she can get to her, I push Olivia behind my back and block Leah’s path.

“No,” I say. “You don’t touch her.”

Seth starts laughing. Leah spins on him. “You saw that, right? You saw her hit me?”

“Doesn’t matter,” I say. “It’s our word against yours. And I didn’t see anything.”

Leah pulls out her phone and takes a picture of the red mark on her face. I shake my head. Was I really married to this woman? I’m distracted enough for Olivia to get past me and snatch Leah’s phone out of her hand. She throws it on the ground and stomps on it with her heel, cracking the screen. Once … twice … three times — I grab her.

“You really have a death wish today, Olivia,” I say between my teeth.

Leah’s mouth is open. “I’m going to destroy you,” she says.

Olivia shrugs. I can’t believe she’s being so calm about this. “You already did. There is nothing more you could do to me. But, I swear to God, if you fuck with Caleb, I’m going to put you in prison for one of your
many
illegal activities. Then you won’t see your daughter.”

Leah closes her mouth. I open mine. I’m not sure who is more shocked by this fierce defense of me.

“I hate you,” Leah spits. “You’re still the same worthless piece of white trash you always were.”

“I don’t even hate you,” Olivia says. “You’re so pathetic, I can’t. But, don’t think for a minute that I won’t revive your indiscretions.”

“What are you talking about?” Leah’s eyes are shifty. I wonder what Olivia has on her. It must be pretty good if she thought she could get away with two good slaps.

“Christopher,” Olivia says quietly. Leah’s face drains of color. “You’re wondering how I know about that, yes?”

Leah doesn’t say anything, just continues to stare.

“It won’t get you locked up for pharmaceutical fraud, but boy would this be better…”

Seth looks at me and I shrug. The only Christopher I know is a thirty-year-old transgender who works — worked — for Steve.

“What do you want?” Leah says to Olivia.

Olivia swipes the dark hair out of her face and points a finger at me. Actually, she jabs a finger at me.

“You don’t mess with his custody. You mess with his custody; I mess with yours. Understand?”

Leah doesn’t nod, but she doesn’t fight it either.

“You’re a criminal,” Olivia says. “And you’re actually looking kind of chubby.”

With that last bit, she turns on her heels and marches the rest of the way to her car. I don’t know whether to stay and watch Leah’s mortified face, or chase after her. Leah
is
looking a little chubby.

Seth nods to me, then tugs at my ex-wife’s arm, pulling her toward their car. I watch them go. I watch Olivia go. I stand for thirty minutes after they’ve gone and watch the empty parking lot.

Who the fuck is Christopher?

“Who the fuck is Christopher, Duchess?”

I hear music on the other end of the line. She must turn off the radio because a second later it’s gone.

“You really want to know this?”

“You just made Leah’s face turn as red as her hair. Yeah, I want to know this.”

“All right,” she says. “Hold on, I’m in the drive-thru at Starbucks.”

I wait while she orders. When her voice comes back on the line it sounds professional, like she’s briefing a client.

“Leah was having sex with her housekeeper’s son.”

“Okay,” I said.

“He was seventeen at the time.”

I let go of the steering wheel to run ten fingers through my hair.

“How do you know?”

We’re heading in two different directions down the 95, but I can feel her smirking. See it.

“Her housekeeper came to see me. Actually, not me — Bernie. Bernie ran a couple billboards last year in Miami, urging sexual harassment victims to come see her. You know, one of those god-awful advertisements where the lawyer is looking all serious and there is a gavel in the far right corner to symbolize your coming justice?”

I know exactly the type.

“Anyway, Christopher’s mother — Shoshi — happened to see it and scheduled an appointment at the office. When she filled out her client information, I noticed that she listed your address as her own. So, I pulled her in before Bernie could get to her. She wanted to talk to someone about her teenage son. She’d sometimes take him with her to work and pay him to do some of the harder things. Apparently Leah was so impressed with his work ethic, she asked Shoshi to bring him on weekends and she paid him to do stuff around the house. After a few months of that, Shoshi found condoms in his wallet and a pair of panties that she said she’d seen a hundred times since she folded them.”

I groan. Olivia hears it and laughs into the phone. “What? Did you think she was normal after that little
Who’s my baby daddy?
stunt she pulled on you?”

“Okay, so why was this Shoshi character coming to you about sexual harassment? Why not call the police and get Leah jailed for statutory rape?”

“This is where it gets complicated, my friend. Shoshi said her son was denying the whole thing. He refused to get Leah in trouble for sleeping with a minor since he was over eighteen by the time she came to me, but his mother did get him to agree to nail her for sexual harassment.”

“What did you do, Olivia?”

Her eyebrow was up. I knew it was.

“Nothing. Before I could do anything, Shoshi changed her mind. Sounds like Leah paid them off. But I could still get him to testify and she knows it.”

“Ah,” I say. “Well, thank God you’re cunning.”

“Thank God,” she repeats.

“You slapped her, Duchess.”

“Mmmm,” she says. “And it felt so damn good.” We both laugh.

There is a long, awkward silence. Then she says, “Noah and I are divorced.”

The world freezes for one second … two seconds … three seconds …

“Remember that coffee shop? The one we went to after we ran into each other at the grocery store?”

“Yeah,” she says.

“I’ll meet you there in ten minutes.”

When I walk into the coffee shop, she’s already there. She’s sitting at the same table we sat at years earlier. In front of her are two cups.

“I got you a tea,” she says when I sit. I grin at the irony. This time it’s me asking about her breakup.

“So, what happened?”

She tucks the hair that has fallen into her face behind her ears and looks at me sadly.

“I got pregnant.”

I try to pretend that I’m unfazed by this little piece of news, but I can feel the awkwardness all over my face. I wait for her to go on.

“I lost it.”

Agh! So much pain in her face. Our hands are both resting on the table, so close, that I reach a finger out and stroke her pinkie with it.

“He agreed to have a baby with me, but when I lost it, he looked so relieved. Then-” she pauses to hide her watery eyes and take a sip of coffee, “-then he said maybe it was for the best.”

I flinch.

“We made it a few more months after that, then I asked him to leave.”

“Why?”

“He wanted to go back to life as he knew it. He was happy and laughing. In his mind, we tried and it wasn’t meant to be. I couldn’t go back after that. It was my second miscarriage.” She looks up at me and I nod.

“Whoever thought the cold, heartless Olivia Kaspen would want to have children?” She smiles bitterly.

“I knew you would,” I say. “It was just a matter of time and healing.”

We finish our drinks in silence. When we stand up, I stop a few feet away from the trashcan with my coffee cup in my hand.

“Olivia?”

“Yeah?”

“If I make this shot, will you go out with me?” I hold my cup like it’s a basketball and look from her to the trashcan.

“Yeah,” she says, smiling. “Yeah, I will.”

I make the shot.

This is the start of our life. This is our choice. We barely have our shit together. I terminated my contract in London, moved home and sold my condo. She sold hers too, and we moved into an apartment near both of our jobs. It’s not even a nice apartment — there is too much linoleum and our neighbors fight constantly. But, we don’t care. We just wanted to ditch the past and be together. We’ll figure it out. Might take some time. We don’t have a plan yet, we don’t even have furniture, but we are both okay with the surrender. We have little fights all the time. She hates that I don’t throw away my trash — water bottles, cookie bags, candy wrappers. She finds them all over the apartment and makes a big show of crinkling them up and throwing them in the trash. I hate the way she soaks the bathroom floor. The woman doesn’t dry herself. Goddamn if it’s nice to look at her soaking body as she walks from the bathroom to the bedroom, but use a fucking towel already. She always makes the bed. I always do the dishes. She drinks milk straight from the carton and that kind of pisses me off, but then she reminds me that she has to live with my snoring and I call it even. But, holy hell is she fun. How did I not know that we could laugh this much? Or sit in absolute silence and listen to music together? How did I live without this for so long? I watch her sit on one of our two chairs, one from her house, one from mine — her fingers clipping lightly across her keyboard. It still feels like I’m dreaming when I come home to her every night. I love this dream!

I lean over her neck as she works and kiss her on her sweet spot. She shivers. “Stop it, I’m trying to work.”

“I don’t really care, Duchess…”

I kiss her again, my hand sliding down the front of her shirt. Her breath catches. I can’t see her face, but I know her eyes are closed. I step around the front of her chair and I extend my hand to her. She looks at it for a long moment. The longest moment. Without looking away from me, she sets her computer down and stands up. We are still getting to know each other sexually. She’s a little timid, and I’m afraid of being too aggressive and chasing her away. But, here we are. I struck my match, she poured out her gasoline. We burn now. All the time.

I lead her to my bed, stopping at the foot to pull her against me. I kiss her for a long time. I kiss her until she’s leaning into me so much I have to hold her up.

“Do I make you feel weak?” I say this against her mouth.

“Yes.”

“How?”

“You take away my control.”

I unzip the back of her dress and slip the sleeves from her shoulders. Every single sexual encounter with Olivia is a balancing act; part seduction, part psychoanalysis. I have to wrestle with her demons to get her legs to open. I love it and I hate it.

“Why do you always need to have control?”

“So, I don’t get hurt.”

I don’t make a big deal of anything she’s saying. I work at taking off her clothes. When I reach her bra, I pull down the cups instead of taking it off completely. I hold one of her breasts with one hand. My other arm is wrapped around her waist so she can’t get away. Not that she would try. I think by now, I have her.