Entry-Level Mistress (17 page)

“It doesn’t matter though, because, even if he acknowledges that, we’re just too different, have different lives. He’s a decade older than me for goodness’ sakes!”

“Are you trying to talk yourself into breaking up or into staying with him?” Leanna said curtly. “Fill me in so I know what my line is supposed to be here.”

I smiled ruefully at the ridiculousness of it. Then I felt the smile fade.

“This weekend, Lee, I was willing to play the mistress. I was willing to be his little dress-up toy just for … I don’t know.” I looked up, trying to blink back the tears. “But being in love, it changes that. Because how can he really love me when that’s not who I want to be?”

I slept in Monday, and then still in my night clothes, exchanged bed for the futon and the fan. I lay there, with only the loud whirring as backdrop, and wondered about the morning marketing meeting. Imagined Daniel in his office, doing his work, taking meetings, making phone calls. I pictured the dimly lit thirtieth floor and a deep, nostalgic longing rushed through me.

The day passed without a text, a phone call, or an email even. If this were last week and I was still working there, he would have texted me a half dozen times. I would have seen him at least once already. Made love.

I scrolled to his name in my contacts list a dozen times at least but each time I pressed cancel and flipped my phone closed.

And then it rang.

Leanna.

“I can’t believe this!” Leanna’s voice was difficult to hear amidst all the background noise. “At work, what are people talking about? About you! And Daniel! There are pictures of the two of you on the Internet. You haven’t even debriefed to me yet and I already know you were at some socialite’s party, ate at an Italian restaurant and were making out on the beach.”

“There are pictures of us making out on the Internet?”

“Um … ” I was scared to ask what that hesitation meant. Then I didn’t have to. “I don’t think anyone will have any doubts about the level of intimacy between the two of you. And Emily, I … I think maybe you were right.”

“Right about what?” I held the phone between my ear and shoulder as I pulled my laptop onto the futon and flipped it open. I was terrified to see if I was naked, or if the paparazzi or whoever had taken the pictures had gotten some sort of money shot.

The gossip website was taking a ridiculously long time to load.

“The way he’s looking at you, Em. It’s like a movie or something.”

I pressed reload three times even though I knew it wouldn’t make the page show up any faster.

Then the glitzy, photo-heavy site came up.

There were six pictures there, one big one and five thumbnailed below. Of course, in the largest, my dress was halfway up my thighs, Daniel’s hands right below that line. And his expression— It was just as I had remembered it and, even as it hurt to see it, that crazy joy welled up within me.

“Heh, I’m just an unknown woman, Lee,” I said with a forced laugh. “A nobody.”

“Un unh, honey, read below.”

The paragraph of text had apparently been updated after the first caption was written.

Mystery woman identified! Emily Anderson,

Someone had identified me. Which one of the dozens of wealthy Hamptonites had taken time to gossip to the press? I kept reading.

daughter of disgraced Rocklyn Corp Exec, Mark Anderson, makes her first appearance on the New York social scene in ten years on the arm of Daniel Hartmann. Their fathers used to be business partners; is this another partnership in the making? The young sculptress will be a Barrows Farm Fellow in the fall, so expect to see more of her around. Welcome to the party, Emily.

Partnership in the making. Like marriage? The thought freaked me out enough that I shut the lid.

“Em?” Leanna’s voice came over the phone, startling me into realizing I was still clutching the thing between ear and shoulder. I grabbed it with my hand and stretched. “You there? Or have you fallen to the ground or something?”

“I’m here.” I flipped the computer open again, stared at the picture of Daniel and me.
Partnership
. “Lee, how do they know so much about me?”

“I have no clue.”

Daniel certainly wasn’t thinking about marriage, and at twenty-one, I shouldn’t be. Wouldn’t be under normal circumstances. Artists don’t just settle down. Artists … I stopped there. I was full of all sorts of mythologies about what artists should or shouldn’t do. Had Picasso or Rodin or Van Gogh worried about those things?

No, they did whatever they wanted and let the pieces of everyone else’s lives fall where they would.

So
would
I? Marry Daniel? The question in my mind was a whisper. I was embarrassed to even be thinking such a thing.

But … on the off chance that there was more to us? That this crazy thing we had led to something permanent? The very, very, very off chance.

“Ok, I better go,” Leanna said, dragging me back to our conversation. “But I wonder if your boy has seen this yet!”

As the phone line clicked silent, I wondered too. And if he had seen it, had it freaked him out as much as me? Of course, for me to find out he’d have to call me, and it was entirely possible that, even without those photos, having gained some space, he had rethought our relationship again.

Our relationship … I stared at the photo of us on the beach as if it had the answers to all of life’s mysteries. Or, perhaps, just this one.

•  •  •

When the doorbell rang, I thought maybe it would be the postman. Or maybe it would be the next-door neighbor, or maybe it would be … Daniel, taking a midday break from work because he couldn’t bear to be away from me. I laughed at myself for the last thought. It was none of those though. Instead, it was my father, two days early and looking more pissed than I’d seen him in years.

“That two-bit son of a bitch,” he said, storming in. “What the hell were you doing with him?”

Heat flooded my cheeks. This was so much worse than knowing those pictures were out there for anyone to see because this wasn’t just anyone. I closed the door and slowly followed him into the living room.

“I guess you saw.”

“I’m going to rip him apart.”

A vision of my father storming into Daniel’s office, of security and police and blood, horrified me. My dad should never have found out, or at least, not this way.

“It’s not his fault.”

“Not his fault!” He was raging now.

I stepped back. In the face of this fury, everything I had ever done seemed like a horrible idea. All those thoughts of love seemed tawdry, like a betrayal.

Which they were.

“Dad, I’m the one who approached him. I was curious about him. There was a job opening, and I thought, maybe I could get back at him for everything he did to you.”

The rage in my father’s face flickered and then came back full force. His mouth worked, frothed almost at the corner and I realized suddenly how like a bull my father could look.

“So you slept with him?” He was looking at me as if I were a stranger, a horrible creature. “What kind of job opening is that? Prostitute?”

I flinched. Why was that word so much worse than mistress?

“I wanted to get back at him,” I whispered.

“He used you, sweetheart.” He said it the way he had always told me things when I was a child. That patronizing adult tone, as if I knew nothing about the world and never could.

“I was planning to use him,” I protested, knowing even as I said so, that it wasn’t true, that it never had been. I’d simply been insatiably curious, and tempting fate, wanting to fill in the pieces of the history that had torn my childhood apart.

He laughed. “No, honey, I’m sorry. Your Daniel Hartmann knew very well that by sleeping with you he’d be hurting me. And by making certain the world knows? He played you.”

I wanted to protest, deny that everything was about my father. What was between Daniel and me was—

“I was excited to come up here this week, Emmy, because I had news. Finally had a good offer. Business opportunity. But I’m a felon. That’s all I am. That’s what that story in newsprint reduces me to. Tavis backed out the minute the old dirt hit the rounds.”

“You think Daniel took me to the Hamptons to be photographed just to stop you from getting a business deal?”

He nodded. I stared at my father in disbelief. “Are you sure? How … how do we know he knew?”

“My God, you’re so naïve, Emmy,” my father said, shaking his head. Embarrassment knifed through me at my father’s judgment. I wanted to hide. I’d always wanted his approval and now, this was the farthest thing from it. “But at some point you have to grow up and face the hard facts of the world. Men like Hartmann don’t ‘fall in love.’” My father spoke through his teeth, the words deliberate and punctuated by angry breath. “He planned this.”

My heart fell to knees. When had Daniel learned about my father’s plans? Had he known before?

But he couldn’t have planned my coming to work for him. That thought gave me hope.

“Why would he? Wasn’t it enough, all those years ago?”

My father shrugged. “I thought he was through, that we were even.”

“And I got involved and gave him another chance.” But there was so much more he was clearly not saying and the overwhelming guilt made it difficult to breathe.

Even without words, the tight set of my father’s jaw was answer enough. I wanted to disappear. Throw myself off the bridge and let the strong Charles River current sweep me down and out to sea.

I was an idiot. Maybe Daniel wouldn’t have ever done anything if left to his own devices but why shouldn’t he have taken the opportunity that I presented? After all, I’d gone to him under false pretenses. I’d planned my own revenge.

I wanted to sink into a hole and disappear.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered, the apology hopelessly futile.

My dad took a few deep breaths, paced the room. I retreated to the futon, sat cross-legged and pulled a pillow into my lap.

“He asked me out because of you, I know,” I admitted, wishing my father would stop looking at me, that he’d leave the apartment, leave Boston. I wanted to return to my insular world, where nothing real mattered. “I just thought, stupidly thought, things had changed.”

If only I had actually used my relationship to hurt Daniel first. If only I had never given him a chance to use me as a weapon.

I should have broken up with him on Friday, never gone to the Hamptons, never let myself love him. I should have thought of the potential consequences of my actions. I wished I’d never taken that stupid job in the first place.

“Maybe we can fix this.”

“How?” I laughed bitterly. “He didn’t do anything illegal this time.” In fact, he didn’t do anything that was wrong, per se, at all. He’d just seduced me, manipulated me easily, and then used the moment to his advantage. I’d even enjoyed the seduction part. God, I needed to stop. I needed to just tear my head apart so I didn’t have to think. And maybe tear my chest apart, too, so I wouldn’t have to feel.

“Emily.” There was a note of intensity in my father’s voice that made me finally really look at him again, realize he was calmer now and sitting in the other chair, the one that was so rarely used because Leanna always liked the papasan and I, the futon. I had the sudden understanding that this expression I was seeing now on my father’s face was the one he had used for business all those years ago. That he could be as ruthless as Daniel.

Zen was gone. Had it ever truly been there? Was inner peace so easy to shake?

“You must have learned something in all these weeks that we can use.”

Oh no. Nonononono.

“Emily?” In the past weeks I’d learned so much about Daniel, about his quirks and his passions, what interested him and what made him angry. I’d spent hours in his office, watching him at work. I’d loved Daniel and he
trusted
me. Of course, I knew ways to hurt him.

And now I had the chance to really take revenge. For my father. For myself.

I went cold.

The persistent knocking woke me out of the fever dreams of depression. I didn’t want to move from under the cocoon of the covers. Didn’t want to see my father, or face the reality of life.

Every moment that went by in which Daniel didn’t call or text seemed to confirm the nefariousness of his actions. I wanted to find some way to forgive him, to say: his dad committed suicide, his mom chose a lover and a slow death by pills over him. Of course Daniel had issues. If he called, told me he loved me, made me not feel this horrible, devastating pain, I could forgive him. But the silence hurt worse.

I’d finally fallen in love and everything about it had been one big cliché.

“Em, it’s me.”

Leanna. Who I didn’t particularly want to see either, but I pushed the covers aside, slid out of bed and padded across the floor. As I turned the lock, I fought back the dizziness of sudden movement.