Chapter Four
Kay

Friday morning is more or less the same as Thursday morning, without the unfortunate confrontation with my dad and his secretary. And Nicky vanishes into his classroom without so much as a glance over his shoulder. But other than that it’s all the same. Endless review of legal briefs. Endless research on boring precedent case. Endlessly feeling left out while the other interns snicker over the pussy they’re planning on scoring over the weekend. As far as I can tell, my reputation around the office is pretty much restricted to the boss’s gay son--try hiding case history from a bunch of people who work in law--so they don’t ask me for my opinions on the subject. And I’m not about to stand up and point out that yes, I do fuck girls occasionally, please note the picture of my son sitting on my desk. (Then again, they probably think I adopted him in a desperate bid to cement my relationship with some breeder-wannabe guy, a la Saint Angelina.) So I’m sitting in silence, doing way more work than my dad actually expects me to.

Nicky’s probably made more friends than I have. By lunchtime I’m getting so depressed that it’s a genuine relief to look up at a rap on the open door and see my sister’s familiar grin.

“Tara!” I get to my feet so eagerly you’d think I hadn’t seen her in years, holding my arms out welcomingly like I’m a fucking geisha. “What’re you doing here? Guys, this--” But of course they already know who she is, Tara’s been in here a million times since my dad opened the office. They hail her dazedly and she gives them both a saucy little smile I’d rather not have ever seen, then comes sauntering over to my desk. Her impossibly high heels tap loudly against the travertine. Both Steve and Jake are staring at her in a way I’d personally consider not entirely appropriate in front of a girl’s brother, and I sit back down in my chair heavily.

“Hi, Kay.” She smiles at me and leans over my desk to ruffle my hair a little. Obviously on purpose, since even in those shoes she has to stretch across it to do so. Her ass is probably on perfect display for my gawking coworkers.

“Quit being a slut,” I hiss under my breath. Still, it really is good to see her after a morning like this. “What’s up?”

My sister can’t ignore guys staring at her, though. Even if she is supposedly blissfully married. She keeps peeking over her shoulder at them and smiling. “Oh, I came to scold Daddy in person for not coming tomorrow night. Although he assures me you are. Said if you didn’t turn up he’d throw you out of the apartment.” Tara’s dimple appears in full-force. I roll my eyes, glancing at Steve and Jake to make sure they’re not listening. It probably looks paranoid, but I don’t want to remind them that I’m the boss’s kid any more than I actually have to.

“Yeah. Right. Like I want to be living with Dad.”

“You’ve only been doing it since Nicky was born,” Tara points out dismissively, which isn’t strictly true. I made it three months in my apartment before my dad moved me into his. “Anyway, while I was here I thought I’d take you to lunch. Unless you’re too busy,” she teases, as if she knows that’s impossible. Part of me rankles at her suggestion that I’m here freeloading. That’s her job, not mine.

“I don’t know. Are you gonna be a bitch the whole time?” I counter, but I still close the file in front of me and get to my feet. “Will you guys be okay if I go for lunch now?” It’s an unnecessary question, obviously; they’ve been here months without me. Still, I’m just being polite. It’s not like they have to make smartass comments under their breath as Tara and I walk out of the room.

“Wow, quite the fan club you’ve got in there,” Tara laughs lightly, tucking her arm through mine as we step into the elevator. I roll my eyes.

“Well, you know straight guys have always been my forte.”

“Yeah, I remember how popular with the guys you were in high school.” She giggles and gives her head a little shake, sending her blonde hair flying in a highlighted arc. “Speaking of high school, you are coming on Saturday, right?”

Instantly my guard goes up. Tara’s always going on about the fucking past, which makes me crazy. “What do you mean, speaking of high school?” I sound incredibly suspicious, even considering that I’m talking to Tara, and she gives me a cheerful little shove.

“Honestly, Kay. It’s a the-kids-are-back-in-school party, remember? I don’t know why you’re so defensive about the subject!” Her voice is way too light. I’m not buying.

“You don’t even have kids,” I point out in a mutter, not for the first time. She ignores me and steps briskly out into the lobby as the elevator doors open.

“Where do you want to go for lunch?”

“I don’t know.” I shuffle after her, suddenly noticing a smudge on one of my loafers. Is that why Steve and Jake have been snickering all morning? Oh, Christ. Now I’m just being ridiculous. “Subway?”

“Subway?” Tara stops and stares at me. “I’m wearing six hundred dollar shoes and you want to take me to Subway.”

Snob. I like Subway. “I thought you were taking me out to lunch,” I point out.

“Being gay doesn’t mean you don’t have to maintain any degree of chivalry, Kayton.”

“I’m not gay, for Christ’s sakes!” What the hell is going on with the world today, anyway? You’d think no one had ever heard of bisexuality. Like, what, sorry I lean a little to the gayer side of things, do they want me to start fucking a set quota of girls a month? Shit. I don’t even have time to fit in the odd hand-job lately.

“Well, excuse me. Isn’t there at least like an Olive Garden near here?” At my derisive snort she gives me a defensive look of her own, correctly interpreting my amusement. Apparently Olive Gardens are worthy of her Louboutins? Fine with me, though. I’ve got a standing date with their chicken scampi.

“Yeah. Good timing,” I say, glancing at my watch. It’s only eleven, which means the wait won’t be that painful yet. “Can you walk in those things?”

“Walk?”

I sigh.

--

Tara spent almost our entire lunch talking endlessly about her party’s guest list, which contains pretty much nobody I know. That’s Tara. Since she married Jack she’s started throwing parties practically every other week, and there’s rarely anyone I care to meet in attendance. This time Jack’s little brother Johnny will be there, though, which is something; I’ve always liked Johnny, and he hates these events about as much as I do, so at least I’ll have someone to commiserate with. I think he’s been in Liberia or Somalia or somewhere like that, too, which should make for some interesting conversation.

By the time I finally managed to get Tara onto a different subject, lunch was pretty much over, and I had to get back. My dad was on an epic rampage when I did. Some case he had scheduled for next Thursday got moved to Monday, so the rest of the afternoon ended up spent in a blurry haze of fulfilling every barked order that got thrown my way. We work almost through the night, stopping to grab a couple of hours of sleep on the couches, and then through most of Saturday--Nicky becomes best friends with Mrs. Rainey during all this--and just when I’m on the point of picking up my phone to tell Tara I won’t make it to her party after all, Jake hangs up the phone, leans back in his chair with a long, deep sigh, and gives me the first grin I’ve seen from him yet.

“That was your dad. The judge accepted the motion,” he says, loud so Steve can hear from the outer office, where he’s gone to find a file one of the secretaries had made off with. “It’s postponed again. We’re done. Shit, thank God.” He stretches and, with an audible pop of his spine, stands up and comes over to slap me hard on the back. “Great work, Marks. I won’t pretend, I didn’t think you’d do it, but you really busted your balls on this.”

“Yeah, I gotta hand it to you.” Steve comes back in and punches me on the shoulder. I feel mildly abused, and extremely short, for that matter, since I’m still sitting while both of them stand over me, but there’s a pathetic glow of smug happiness rising up inside me anyway. Apparently I managed to prove myself. “Nice job.”

“Thanks, guys.” I stand up and stretch too. My dad can buy me a massage after this. “I did fuck all compared to you two, though.”

Steve laughs. “Just you wait. You’ll be doing the same shit in a month’s time. You wanna come have a drink? We always get tanked after work like this.”

For a minute, I’m tempted. If I call Tara and tell her what had happened with Dad’s case, she’ll never know that I’d actually already finished. And I do want to go hang out with them, if only so that work is never as nerve-strainingly awkward as it was that first day and a half again. But then I remember that Johnny’s supposed to be there, and as much as I want to bail I can’t leave him to stand in a corner by himself all night.

“Really wish I could, guys, but my sister’s throwing some bullshit party I have to go to.” I rub a hand over my face. I still have to change. Shave. I’ve got a day worth of stubble on my jaw, and my suit looks pathetically crumpled and coffee-stained after the last fourteen hours. “My dad wussed out, but oh, one of us has to be there.” I roll my eyes.

“At least your sister’s hot,” Jake says cheerfully. Ew. “Next time. Have a good time, Marks. Bang some--er--well. Shark’s, Masterson?”

“You know it,” Steve grins. They head out a few minutes later and I let myself into my dad’s office to use his bathroom. I’ve already got a spare suit here I can wear--his suggestion--and he’s got a shower and razors and stuff. Christ, it’s like he’s a doctor.

It means I can get ready without having to go home and break Nicky’s heart by leaving again right after, though, so I guess I should be grateful. I grab the shaving cream out of the cupboard and squeeze a lather into my hand, exhaling. I’ll have to take him to, I don’t know, Chuck-e-cheese on Sunday.

Nicky, I mean. Not my dad.

--

I’ve been at Tara’s party for half an hour, which has given me just enough time to knock back a flute of champagne, espy incredibly kitschy strings of tiny twinkling lights in the men’s bathroom, and realize that my sister’s social events are still every bit as boring as they were when we were kids. Tara used to throw tea parties all the time when she was Nicky’s age, which was probably the only thing that ever got our Mom to pay attention to her. I was nine, forever hitting on her friends’ moms.

This is what I’m thinking of as I make my third lap in the hope of spotting someone I know, but so far both Johnny and Tara’s token queer-bait Friend-of-the-Month are MIA. Everyone in attendance seems weirdly gauche for Tara’s tastes; they all look hungry in a way their disregard of the canapés doesn’t quite account for. They look, I notice as I see some blonde-bobbed girl scribbling on a notepad, like the reporters that gather outside of the court house when my dad is doing a trial.

I don’t have time to dwell on this, even though I realize the girl is wearing a business suit and my precious little sister might seriously have invited members of the press to her party. Think of the devil and there she is, stepping onto a makeshift stage without the slightest wobble in her sky-high heels. Christ, they’re even spindlier than the ones she was wearing yesterday.

My attention to Tara’s shoes is probably among the reasons everyone thinks I’m full-on gay.

"Thanks to everyone for coming out tonight," Tara smiles out over the crowd, obviously glowing with pleasure at being the center of attention as usual. I glance at the guy on her left, but his face is obscured by her gesturing hands, so I start looking for an empty table to sit down at. There’s none that I can see. Which means I have to stand here, half-listening while I keep an eye out for one, mostly intently clutching my glass and looking completely retarded. But that’s de rigueur at Tara’s events. Tara’s just getting to her point and starting to introduce the guy when Johnny finally materializes at my side.

“Hi,” he says, wide hazel eyes all but eating me alive as usual.

“Hey, Johnny,” who happily looks nothing like either of his brothers. Well, he’s tall like Jack. Even taller than me, amazingly, but he’s so skinny and gawky that I can’t quite get a complex about it. Johnny smiles at me and nods towards my sister.

“So this is pretty crazy, huh?”

“Mhn,” I agree, not letting on that I have no clue what’s going on. Maybe Tara is sponsoring someone’s sabbatical or something. Or maybe the guy is foreign and she’d brought him over from some deprived third world country? I hadn’t looked all that closely, and now there’s too many people in front of us for me to get a good view.

“Maybe you—”

“I was surprised to hear you’d be here tonight,” I interrupt. “You’ve been away, haven’t you? And aren’t you heading off on that, uh, thing, soon?”

“The SAFE project, yeah. I came back from Yemen yesterday and I’m leaving day after tomorrow so it‘s pretty—oh, he’s starting.” Johnny looks intently in the direction of the makeshift stage, like we can actually see anything. He must realize this, because he gives me a half-wave and starts unobtrusively worming his way through the mini-crowd, disappearing before long. Well. That wasn’t quite the in-depth conversation I assumed we’d be having.

I tune back into Tara’s little show, but Johnny’s right. She’s stopped speaking, and the guy has begun. Not foreign after all, at least not from the lack of accent. I half-heartedly try to crane my neck. One assumes he’s done something noteworthy, if he’s giving a speech.

I still can’t see, though. Despite probably being taller than most of these people. So I walk over to the left of the crowd, catching a glimpse of Tara’s profile. Then a guy behind me catches my attention, laughing much louder than anyone else. His table’s empty, but he also has a hefty arrangement of empty glasses in front of him on it, so I guess his merriment is forgivable. I weave towards him a little and finally manage to see the speaker.

He’s no one I know, or at least no one that Tara’s introduced me to. Or so I think, until his eyes seek out the laughing guy behind me and the corner of his mouth crooks upwards in a privately affectionate grin.

I just dropped my fucking glass.

People are applauding now, so no one really notices. Stupidly I look over my shoulder at the guy, like he will clue me in to what the fuck is happening. He’s smiling back at the stage, looking drunk and happy and totally in love. This is not fucking normal.

The rational part of my mind starts trying to sort this out. All right, there is a guy standing up there next to my sister, a guy I would swear I’ve never seen before, but giving some other guy a smile I clearly remember from high school. Standing next to my sister. I look at her, and she is looking at me, and. Oh. She’s.

Smiling.

Fuck.

I zero in on her smile, the way her face is completely lit up with it, and even when she starts flickering her gaze between me and – him, I don't look away. Behind me all the laughter and crowd noises have quieted, and when I'm about ready to make sense of the words coming out of his mouth, he hands the microphone back to my sister and walks off.

I can barely think. Some part of me watches as he heads towards the table I’d moved past, now empty, and looks around. Most of me is focused on the noise inside my head. No real brain activity, just blaring static, things that feel like they should be thoughts but aren’t.

Then he’s out of sight, and Tara is beside me.

“Doesn’t he look amazing?”

I stare at her and my heart starts beating again. I notice suddenly how paralyzed my face feels, and my fucking ears are ringing.

“What did you do.” My lips are practically numb. Tara’s voice falters, her hand falling on my arm.

“Kay, you two needed to see each other. You need to—”

“Tara.” I shake off her touch and the buzzing in my ears. Now that my brain is starting to function again, I’m beginning to grasp the gravity of the situation. And exactly how fucked up my little sister is. She’s always been a pain in my ass, always talking about what happened back then when all I want is to forget it, but I never thought she would pull something like this. “What in the hell is your problem?”

“Kay, you don’t—”

“Tara, just stop.” Jack is there all of a sudden, looking less like a Ken doll than I’ve ever seen him. His lips are pressed together flat, and I suddenly remember the pensive look he’d given me when I ran into him in the bathroom earlier. He asked if I was sure Nicky was okay. Trying to warn me, probably. I should have gone home.

“Jack, we’ve talked about this,” Tara whines. I listen with growing disbelief, trying to spot Josh again in the crowd. I wonder if he knows about this. Probably not, if the calm smile he’d given that guy was anything to go by. That guy. And who was that? “They’re meant to—”

“Jesus Christ, Tara,” I practically bellow. “Were you not present at the fucking trial? Did you have your head in the goddamn clouds for the last six years? Jesus. Do you know now I’m going to have to fucking find that kid and fix the mess you’ve made of things, again?”

I don’t wait for her answer. I don’t even want to look at her. And as I stomp off in search of Jack’s brother, I can’t figure out what the hell she was thinking, since it’s obvious to me that she was planning on springing this on Josh totally out of the fucking blue. Does she remember what he is like? Why doesn’t she just get him a gift certificate for the fucking therapist right now?

The last thing I want to do is explain to Josh Courtland that my sister is trying to set us up again, for some reason clearly known only to her. I have no idea why this falls to me, when practically his entire fucking family is within two hundred feet of me, but one would assume that Jack’s balls have taken a spiritual retreat. A quick sweep of the location yields no one matching Josh’s general description, and I’d missed the details in the three-second look I’d gotten at his face. I didn’t notice what he was wearing, how he had styled his hair.

I might as well be looking for a needle in a haystack. Instead of finding Josh, I find Tara again. Getting sniped at by… oh.

He’s taller, and he’s thinner, and why is his hair black? go through my head, and then I see the drunk guy from before attached to Josh’s hip, a black sweater ridden up to show half an inch of skin that’s probably a few dropped society-hag jaws. I wonder if he’s figured it out, before I got the chance to warn him. But for all that he’s yelling at my sister, he doesn’t look particularly upset. He finishes ranting at Tara. Sweeps towards the door with Drunk Guy on his arm. There are people taking pictures of him, which makes me wonder again what it was that I’d missed. What were we all here for?

It occurs to me again that Tara hadn’t sent invitations to either me or our dad, which seemed weird before considering Tara all but sends engraved invitations when she wants me to bring Nicky for dinner. I hadn’t bothered to dwell long on why she hadn’t, because frankly that is not high on my list of priorities, but obviously now I know that she was trying to hide this. Whatever this is. Dad would have been all over her ass if he knew the shit she was planning on pulling.

They’re almost out the door, Josh and the guy with him. I follow without really thinking. The crystal clock over the doorway catches my eye, ticking loudly enough to give me an ominous sensation. The minute hand clicks forward just before I pass under it.

It's now exactly a quarter to nine. It took Tara forty-seven minutes to fuck up everything.