Entry-Level Mistress (9 page)

I leaned closer to him, reached out and slid the leather tongue of his belt out from under the metal. He didn’t stop me so I pushed him backward until he was flat on the bed.

“If you don’t want me to get dressed,” I whispered, unzipping his pants, “then you’re just going to have to get naked instead.”

•  •  •

By Sunday, I was exhausted, sore and happy. We sat in his living room like a couple that’d known each other for longer than two weeks. He was reading some sort of a report and I, in one of his shirts, had plucked a collection of Hemingway’s journalism off of a pile.

It was all so domestic, so peaceful. As if there were nothing between us that might cause strife. And maybe there wasn’t. Maybe it was all some huge misunderstanding. Half-truths and distorted perspectives. Fallible narrators simply trying to do what was best.

Daniel and I had some sort of unspoken agreement to not talk about the past, but if we didn’t, how would I ever reconcile the two versions of him I knew?

“Why did you hate my father?” I asked before I could stop myself and then waited breathlessly for his answer.

He glanced over at me, at my naked legs. I smiled at that despite the seriousness of the conversation.

“Are we going to fight about this?” He placed the stack of papers on the coffee table. Moved over to the side of the sectional on which I was lounging. I stretched out, lifting my legs and he took them into his lap, stroking them.

“I just want to know.” I wanted to figure out how the Daniel I was getting to know could be the same as the mythic one I had resented my whole life. “Is it because your mother turned to him … after … ?”

“My father killed himself.”

I stilled in shock, yet Daniel’s hands still stroked my legs, rhythmically, but almost by rote, as if all of his emotion, personality, had fled his body.

“Kidney failure,” I said, shaking my head. “That’s what the paper said. That’s what my father thinks.”

Daniel’s hands tightened briefly on me before they relaxed and I realized then how tense he was beneath the casual exterior. “Everybody lied because it was an insurance issue and so many people depended on him for their livelihood. I learned by accident much later.”

A ripple of unease ran through me but I forced it away.

“I know,” he said, his voice low, answering my unspoken doubt, my discomfort with the deception.

“So what does that have to do with my father? It was suicide, not murder.” I felt completely insensitive saying that but I needed to understand.

He looked away. “He found out about the affair. “

“I don’t understand,” I pressed. I only knew pieces of the story, and it wasn’t fitting with what he’d said. Daniel’s father had died, and in his wake his mother had turned to my father.

Daniel faced me again, raised an eyebrow silently. I didn’t like what he was suggesting. It made my father seem rather immoral. But then again, there was my mother to testify to Mark Anderson’s womanizing ways.

“On that I’ve evened the score.” His expression was dark, almost frightening. Surely, he meant the past, destroying the company, sending my father to jail, but maybe he meant this. After all, sex as a revenge for sex was a far better analogy than money for sex. I formulated the question in my mind. Imagined asking him to clarify just how he had evened the score. He slid my legs apart, shifting so that he was crawling between them, covering me with his body. The weight was welcome, familiar, and strange all at once. I could feel him hard against me through the thin barrier of his cotton pajamas.

“Are you using me?” I whispered, struggling to stay strong, to remember what I wanted to ask even as his mouth found skin.

“Are you using
me
?” he returned, his voice a breath against my ear.

I didn’t answer because I didn’t know. And maybe he didn’t know. Maybe we were both simply drawn together because of the past and because of this attraction.

It might be wrong, terribly, terribly wrong, but it felt so ridiculously good.

“I don’t want to talk about the past,” he whispered, which of course made me want to do exactly that.

But the tip of his tongue was trailing across my neck and I was nearly gasping as I prodded. “But the past is everything that’s between us. If you take that away, what’s left?”

“An enjoyment of each other’s company.”

I laughed. More likely, he was simply enjoying the nipple he was now sucking on through the thin barrier of his shirt. “You talk with world leaders and celebrities. I still don’t understand what you can find interesting about anything I have to say.”

“Sex.” There was humor in his tone and I knew he was teasing me, but hearing it said aloud still hurt. I struggled to cover my emotions.

“Which you could have with anyone,” I said lightly. Not that that was exactly true. This kinetic desire between us wasn’t something that happened every day. But was it that charged because of the past? “So it’s not enough.”

“I disagree.” With what he was doing to me, I had to disagree as well. “I need to start keeping condoms in every room in this house,” he said, the words a bit muffled by the fact that his mouth was now in the vicinity of my hipbone. I sucked in a sharp breath.

“My purse,” I said, waving a hand vaguely to the left where the pink bag sat on the floor.

He was naked and back between my legs in a moment, pulling me down by my hips so that my head rested flat on the cushions. It was strange to be doing this right after discussing, or barely discussing, the old history, but that was our relationship: strange. I reached for him and at the sharp surge of pleasure as his body filled mine, I wrapped my legs around him and welcomed him in.

It was odd going to work the following day knowing that Daniel was nowhere in the building. He’d left on an early flight to make some sort of dinner meeting in Paris. I didn’t know what and he hadn’t elaborated. A secret part of me had almost hoped he’d invite me. One of those last-minute romantic gestures one always sees in movies.
We can shop when we land.

It took a full quarter hour of silent lecturing to rid my mind of backward thoughts like that. I was not some kept woman. If I
were
, I wouldn’t be sitting here in the morning marketing meeting in my stupid sweater set. All of this, Hartmann Enterprises, my affair with Hartmann himself, was only temporary. Come August I’d be in upstate New York starting my real life. After that, maybe Manhattan or London. If I managed to save the excess money from the next few paychecks, instead of squandering it on lingerie, I could even take a month and travel sooner than later, visit friends. There really weren’t any limits to what I could do.

“For me, global means round.” Jillian was pointing to the easel where she’d placed a poster with six circular logos. “When I worked for Balson, we always underscored the importance of finding a theme.”

There was a flurry of nodding and a chorus of assenting murmurs. Jillian had apparently been stolen away from Balson Designs, Boston’s premier branding consultants and she liked to remind everyone of her experience. But for me, round just didn’t seem big enough. Not for what they said Daniel was trying to do. Neither did an arrow, or a cube or a bunch of interlocking squares in primary colors.

“Yes, Emily?”

Lance, Jillian, James, and everyone else were staring at me. Startled, I lowered the hand I’d raised as if I was in high school.

“I was thinking that maybe it would be interesting to do a skyline for the logo.” I heard a snicker from somewhere to my left. Yeah, just like high school. “Something futuristic though, like buildings that don’t even exist yet.”

There was an uncomfortable silence. I realized abruptly that they all knew I was sleeping with the boss.

The heat of embarrassment flooded my body.

“Logos need to be simple, elegant,” Jillian said, almost as if I hadn’t spoken. “The classics, the ones that stay in people’s minds, have real meaning. They need to be translatable across a wide range of mediums.”

I looked down at the yellow legal pad on the table before me, my shame still painfully present. Jillian was right. I knew nothing about logos, and of all the people here, I was the last who should be giving suggestions. I had no investment in the success of the company, in Daniel’s success. In fact, I should be doing exactly the opposite. I should be trying to tear him down.

“Good point,” I said with a fake, bright smile. I caught Lance staring at me and he raised an eyebrow. I looked down, focusing my attention on crossing out a daisy I’d doodled a minute earlier.

“Futuristic is a good word to think of.” My hand stilled at Lance’s voice. “But not sci-fi, we don’t want to go too far. How can we make Hartmann Enterprises look like it knows where the world is heading?”

Did the company know where the world was heading? Did Daniel? Or was it all really a show, an attempt to make everything simply appear “as if”?

Like me …
as if
I knew what I was doing working a desk job … and a night job. The thought that had been meant to chastise me made me smirk instead.

I forced myself to be serious, to look around the room, study the faces of people who had chosen their positions as real careers, not as whimsical excursions.

Simply three weeks earlier, I had thought I knew where my world was going, what all the experiences in my life arrowed toward. But where did this tangent lead? How would I ever bring it back around to the idea I once had of myself as a visionary artist? The only vision that was filling my head these days was Daniel’s naked body.

As if …

As if by the cool light of early morning that body was drawn by watercolors, and by the yellow glow of interior lamps it was painted in oils, darker and richer. Sometimes, between my legs, I felt him as a living sculpture, marveled at the places his hard, taut body curved, melded, into long bows of muscle.

He was beautiful and I could have easily spent hours watching him, studying him.

That night, back in my own apartment, on a night I would not see him, those images of him tortured me. As if I hadn’t had a life before him, almost didn’t know what to do with myself.

Flat on the futon, with my head to the side, I watched the images of a reality TV show flicker across the screen and thought about what he had said. About how his father had supposedly committed suicide because of my father. If Daniel truly believed that story, no wonder he hated my father. But it wasn’t the truth. Had his mother or someone else lied to him? Or was it Daniel who was lying? Lying to himself even?

Leanna’s laugh dragged me out of my contemplation.

“To see you now, one would have no idea they were looking at a future Barrows Farm Fellow,” she commented dryly.

I couldn’t take offense at that because Leanna was right. Not once in our two years of living together had I ever simply sat down and watched television. In fact, there had been a time or two that Lee had yelled at me for getting clay or ink or some other substance all over the living room. I was losing my artistic edge and I most likely should be worried. This wasn’t the time in my life or career to lose myself in a man. Especially this man. But in two months I’d be at Barrows Farm. I’d get back in the groove, surely. I needed life experience to create, didn’t I? This was definitely life experience.

“There’s a party tonight for some new blue jeans company. My boss gave me her invitation. You could be my date?”

I thought about it. Glanced back at the television on which three bikini-clad women were jumping into a pool.

“There will likely be gift bags,” Leanna added.

“OK,” I agreed, standing and stretching. I’d seen Leanna bring back enough bags packed with cool products to know the perk was worth my time. “Should I assume it is verboten to wear jeans by any other brand? And for real? There is a jeans company based out of Boston?”

“I think you can wear whatever you want,” Leanna said. “But this isn’t Los Angeles, so I’d skip the jeans anyway.”

The party was in a converted warehouse space. Rough concrete and exposed pipes. It felt like a strange mix between corporate, art school, and club. Whispering that there would be a few models and minor celebrities there for sure, Leanna pulled me past the blinding lights of the red carpet and photographers. A DJ booth and dance floor took up one-third of the room. There were tables and a buffet. Three bars. The space wasn’t very crowded yet. Against one wall were two racks full of jeans and hiding behind that, I could see the gift bags Lee had advertised.

I didn’t see anyone I knew as we made our way across the floor to one of the bars. We did, however, know the bartender. Scott worked weekends at the dive we had frequented the most in college. Apparently he moonlighted as a catering bartender the rest of the nights.

The bar had five special denim-themed cocktails and I settled on the Original Blue, which tasted suspiciously similar to a Blue Hawaiian. I peered over the rim of my carefully held martini glass and scanned the room. Froze.

“Lee?” I leaned closer to her. “Is that Tatiana over there?” I didn’t point but Leanna followed my line of sight to where two of the photographers were flashing non-stop at a tight knot of tall, well-dressed people.