Domino (The Domino Trilogy) (10 page)

“Oh. My. God.”

I moved to sit across from her on one of our wooden barstools. “Well?”

“Looks like you’ve got quite the nose for news, Delaney. How on earth did you manage this?”

“Well, I didn’t manage the thing about the naked people screwing in public,” I said, conveniently leaving out the part about me, cable ties, and Peter Rostovich. “I just happened to be at the right place at the right time.”

“And that’s really the trick to being a
n ace reporter, isn’t it?” She scrolled back through the story, shaking her head in disbelief as she reread it. “Wow, don’t you have all the luck! My editor is going to kill me for missing this and pawning my assignment off on a freelancer. A
college student
freelancer, no less. No offense intended, of course.”

“None taken.
By the way, I should probably tell you not to expect much in terms of a review.”

She folded her arms across her chest and gave me a stern look. “Why? Because you already sold all the best information to the
Plain Dealer
behind my back?”

“Hannah, please don’t be mad.”

“If you were anybody else, I would be absolutely furious. But because you’re Nancy Delaney, my best friend and roommate, I’ll offer you my congratulations. Seriously, props to you. Selling an exclusive to the
Plain Dealer
on the fly like that? That takes balls.”

“
I’m a girl, I don’t have balls.”

“Whatever. Of course you also understand that I’m probably going to lose my job now.”

“Oh Hannah, you’re overreacting as usual. It’ll be fine.”

She slapped the countertop. “I’m
not
overreacting! You have no idea how much pressure I’m under at work. My assignment editor is a total bitch, especially since the quarterly ad revenue numbers came out last week.
Art News Now
is on the verge of bankruptcy. If I don’t deliver some good copy pronto, the magazine is going to fold.”

I reached across the counter to give her shoulder a sympathetic squeeze. Hannah could be very melodramatic sometimes. Both of her parents were
independently wealthy ER physicians with million-dollar trust funds who loved thrill-seeking activities like ziplines, African safaris, and Alpine skiing. High-stakes drama ran in her family. “Surely the fate of the entire magazine doesn’t just rest on you.”

“You’re right, it doesn’t. But the bulk of our remaining subscribers live in the Midwest, so of course it’s important that the Midwest section provide good coverage.” She closed out her browser window on the laptop and shut it down. “Please don’t abandon the assignment, Nancy. Put together whatever copy you can and email it to me by
Tuesday afternoon. You don’t even have to mention the public sex thing if you don’t want to, though I should tell you that my editors would absolutely love it. Especially if you could put a positive spin on it somehow.”

“I thought you said your editor was complaining that you guys published too many rave reviews.”
“She did, but she also loves anything racy. Play up the sex in your review, and rave or pan, she’s bound to be thrilled with it. And we need whatever opportunity to boost circulation we can get.”

“You know, I actually met a living, breathing subscriber to your magazine tonight. I was beginning to think that
they were rarer than Sasquatch.”

“Is that so? Who was it, pray tell?”

“None other than the artist himself. Peter Rostovich.”

Hannah’s jaw dropped. “Wow. So you actually got to meet him?”

I paused, thinking carefully about how I wanted to answer her. “Yes. Briefly.”

She smirked at me, gave me one of her typical don’t-give-me-that-bullshit looks. “Oh? Is that all?”

I felt my cheeks flame, but stayed silent. I didn’t want to go there with her. Not yet. There was still way too much to sort out.

“Well, I hope you at least got a decent quote,” she said, nursing her second beer. Given Hannah’s usual level of alcohol tolerance, I knew I’d have to get whatever else I needed
out of her now before she passed out from too much booze. The girl was a serious lightweight.

“I got quite a bit of him on tape,” I said, purposefully vague. “I’ll let you know what I’m able to pull together. But just so you know, the press photos weren’t at all representative of the exhibit. And I’m not sure if I even still have them. The place kind of went into chaos after the, um, incident, and
I think some stuff fell out of my press bag.”

“Can’t you just call the gallery and have them send some more photos over? They can upload print-quality files using our FTP site if they don’t want to mail glossies.” Hannah was always so efficient when it came to these things, I should have known I’d never be able to pull anything over on her.

“I’ll umm, I’ll see what I can do.” Best to stay as noncommittal as possible. “But I guarantee you that the exhibit was plenty racy. Maybe even a little too racy for your magazine.”

“I’m sure my editors will be willing to bend their usual standards for such a hot topic,
especially if the
Plain Dealer
story goes national,” Hannah replied drily, polishing off the rest of her beer. “We’ve been needing something like this for a long time. Who knows, you might even make the cover. We’ve never made a capsule review a cover story before, but there’s a first time for everything. Unless of course you’d like to turn it into a feature---“
“Ummm, I really don’t think so. I’m too busy with school right now to work on anything feature-length.” A total lie, of course. But I was technically still committed to write a feature for the
Plain Dealer
on the show and the artist---and unless I was prepared to go back on my word officially with Eric Burgess, I couldn’t well agree to write another one at a competing publication. Not that
Art News Now
actually competed with a major city newspaper of course, but it was the principle of the thing.

“Fair enough.” Hannah stretched and yawned. “I should really turn in, I’m beat. Plus Ted kind of made me feel like crap. Do you know what he said? Besides saying he wanted to see
---or rather, fuck---other people, I mean.”
“What?”

“He said that my life lacked direction. What the hell does that even mean? My life has
plenty
of direction. Unlike him, I have an actual job. Meanwhile, he’s mostly working as a fratboy beach bum living off his parents’ money. I mean, come
on
.”

I thought about remarking that Hannah still lived mostly on her parents’ money too, but I
bit my tongue. “Maybe you just outgrew each other,” I offered. “Or rather,
you
outgrew
him.
It’s his loss, not yours.
”

Hannah gave me a quick hug. “Thanks Nancy, that’s really sweet. I’m off to bed.”  She stood and tossed her two empty beer bottles into the recycling bin, then staggered a bit. She grabbed the edge of the counter to steady herself. “Whoa. When did the room start spinning?”

“You should know better than to drink two beers in ten minutes,” I scolded. “You weigh what, ninety-five pounds soaking wet? Here, I’ll help you walk to your room. By the way, Ginger died, so I’m going to need a ride to campus tomorrow.”

Hannah clapped her hand over her mouth. “What? Ginger who?”
“You know, Ginger. My car. She totally stalled out and died. The transmission is toast.”

“Ginger died?
Ohhhhhh. When’s the funeral?” Now she was slurring her words.  She staggered against me and then began to laugh uncontrollably.

Alas, I was too late.
Hannah was completely hammered and probably wouldn’t remember a word of this conversation tomorrow. “Just go to bed,” I ordered. “I’ll wake you up at six so you’ll have enough time to drop me off at campus on your way to work.” I guided her to her messy room, deposited her on her bed, and headed back to mine. I could hear her snoring by the time I was halfway down the hall.

I glanced at the clock. It was well past eleven
now, but I still wasn’t even remotely tired. Too much excitement today for that. I changed into my pajamas and decided to see about getting a little work done before falling asleep.

Against my better judgment I pulled my press bag
back out from under my desk where I’d stashed it and dumped its contents on the bed. Everything was as I expected---digital recorder, my reporter’s notebook, a few odds and ends----except for one thing I spied from the corner of my eye. A folded-over piece of paper with “Nancy” handwritten in block lettering of the type you’d typically see on architectural blueprints. The paper was thick and textured, a high-quality rag paper, the kind used for fine watercolors. It was sealed shut with a scrap of mounting tape, also artist-grade.

I broke the seal and opened the note. Something thin and white fluttered out from inside and landed on my bedspread.

A cable tie.

I stared at it for a moment. The white plastic thing stood out starkly against the dark-brown cotton duvet cover, just like the cable ties in the sharp-contrast black-and-white photos had. The effect on my body was almost immediate. The mere sight of that thin plastic strip brought back a rush of memories and sensations.
Racing heart, sweating palms, itchy wrists, burning crotch. Legs that felt heavy and a head that felt light. Sweat on the forehead. And a dull ache deep inside me that demanded relief, relief that could come from only one source, relief that I wasn’t even sure how to obtain, or what it would feel like.

Life as a horny
, naive virgin certainly wasn’t easy. Especially when the object of my desire was a piece of white plastic from a hardware store.

I turned my attention back to the note, which had also fluttered down to the bedspread after the initial shock of seeing the cable tie.
Written on the inside in the same block lettering, all caps, was a simple message:

CHECK YOUR EMAIL.
 

I stared at it
for a moment. Who had written this? Peter Rostovich, of course. What other explanation was there? He’d had possession of my press bag. He was an artist with access to fine watercolor paper, graphic-design-style lettering, and fine mounting adhesives. Oh, and cable ties. He had lots of those available, obviously. But where had he gotten my email address?

It struck me then. He’d gotten
it when he’d raided my press bag, of course. I had a business card taped to the back of my digital recorder with all my contact information on it, just in case I happened to lose it on assignment and someone found it. He must have taken everything down off that card while I was unconscious.

A cold shudder flowed through me. If
Peter Rostovich had taken down my email address, then he probably knew my phone number, and even where I lived. It felt creepy. But why should it be creepy? I’d been carrying that information around with me in my press bag for two years now, anybody could have found it. And if some stranger showed up at my door with my lost digital recorder in hand, I’d be immensely grateful. Would I feel the same way if Peter Rostovich did the same, only carrying a set of cable ties, or perhaps a leather collar and chain? Would he just hand them to me and go on his merry way, or would he want to put them to use?

The room spun around me and I fell backwards onto the bed. This was no attack of shock or hypoglycemia like had happened back at the gallery. I’d actually swooned
---
got
the vapors,
just like all those heroines of nineteenth-century English novels did when they became infatuated with a man. My classmates and I had all sat around in study groups laughing at those lightheaded waifs passing out over something as simple as a love letter bound with red sealing wax and presented by a servant on a silver tray, as frequently happened in Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte novels. My literature professors all said that the vapors were common in those days for reasons that had nothing to do with love and sex, and everything to do with corsets that had been drawn too tight, and arsenic-laden cosmetics aimed at lightening the skin, and poor nutrition, and things like that. But in one wild moment, with fuzzy black curtains creeping into my field of vision and my bed spinning through space underneath me, I knew that my literature professors were all wrong.

I settled back against the pillows, closing my eyes and breathing deeply as I willed my body back under control.
Even though my eyelids were growing heavy with fatigue, and even though my brain told me that the rational thing to do would be to forget about swooning Victorian virgins, Peter Rostovich, and plastic cable ties and instead go straight to sleep, I pulled myself upright, walked over to my computer desk, and fired up my desktop computer.

Hannah and I kept our
apartment wifi connection on at all times. Her dad was a computer hobbyist who enjoyed spending his weekends away from the hospital tinkering with servers and routers and makeshift internal networks, and he’d spent three whole days setting up a sophisticated wifi system for Hannah and me when we’d first moved into this apartment two and a half years ago. Hannah’s parents had paid for all the equipment, including the top-of-the-line wireless routers that featured super-fast connection speeds and nearly unbreakable encryption technology. None of our neighbors would ever be leeching off our wifi for free, that was for sure. You couldn’t get anywhere near our servers without a password, and Hannah’s dad had set up automatic logins for us that were modeled on a classified NASA algorithm. The system was so complicated I hadn’t even been able to log in to the network myself until Mr. Greeley installed some kind of workaround program that did it for me.