Page 19

I hear his voice say mon cœur through the speaker, and there it is, that hot ugly thing under my ribs that I get whenever someone has a piece of her I don't. Jealousy. Of a sixty-three-year-old man. Of her own father. He calls her that. He's always called her that, and I have a recording of him saying it from a tapped call eighteen months ago that I've listened to more times than a sane person would, because I wanted to know what it sounded like when somebody spoke to her with that kind of warmth. And also because I am not, by any clinical definition, a sane person.

"Saturday, Papa. Yes or no?"

"Manon—"

"Yes or no."

"Yes."

I turn half away and fix my stare on the cranes. Not because I'm being polite, but if I watch her face right now I'll see her pain, I'll see her breaking, and fuck, I don't like seeing her upset. I have watched her handle worse than this. I have watched her take phone calls at three in the morning that would have put most people in a state of hysteria or numbness, crumbling to the floor. Even if those things happened to others, they had to take a toll, but she has never once let anyone hear it in her voice. I know… I had no right to hear those things. I have no right to know her this way, but I do.

She's talking to her father now. I catch pieces.

"You asked me for three days."

His voice, tinny through the speaker, said something about roads and her brother in the ground.

"You asked him for a longer engagement."

"Manon—" No endearment this time, but he used the same tone.

"I bought Julien's life and drove home thinking you'd at least let me get on with it. Get the show on the road asap so it’ll be done quicker. But no. You had to go and negotiate my marriage contract instead so you can save face."

Her voice doesn't rise, but I can tell this is the tone of a woman who's given up on the man on the other end of the line.

He changes the subject abruptly to Sunday lunch and flowers. She hangs up.

I keep staring at the cranes. There's a container swinging out over the water, green, forty feet, and I count slowly to three before I turn back.

"You could have let me find that out when I go there on Sunday."

"You'd have spent more days trying to figure out the way out of it, and I don't enjoy watching people wait for things that aren't coming. Also, I'm not a nice man and I wanted you to hear it from me."

She turns on me with her whole body, her eyes wet and furious, and she's shaking, so fucking beautiful that I actually lose my train of thought, which hasn't happened since I was fifteen and Aurelie De Luca bent over in front of me in chemistry class.

Except this is worse than Aurelie De Luca. This is worse than anything. Because this woman is about to insult me and I already know I'm going to enjoy it. My cock is halfway to hard, which is extremely inconvenient timing, because the last thing I want is for her to see how she's affecting me, and I'm standing outside in the kind of wind that doesn't hide a single fucking thing.

"Do you want to know what you are? You're a textbook narcissist with a God complex and a good tailor. I work with men like you every day. I just usually get to cut them open. You're not complicated, Novak. You're a man who presses his own shirts and thinks that makes him interesting."

"Dolores presses them, actually⁠—"

"Everyone in your life is either scared of you or paid by you. You've been obeyed for so long you've started mistaking it for being loved. That's not power, Novak. That's just a very expensive way to be lonely."

Right.

Right, okay.

I should be offended. I should be doing the thing I do when somebody speaks to me like that, which is going very quiet and watching them realize what they've done. Except what I'm actually doing is standing here with a hard-on that could pummel a gourd to dust, grinning like a lunatic because nobody has dared to speak to me like that practically ever. Apparently I've decided that being psychologically dismantled by a five-foot-seven woman in hospital scrubs is the most attractive thing that has ever happened to me.

I need to get a fucking grip. Literally and figuratively.

She's still going. She hasn't even paused for breath. And she's moved closer somehow, right up into it instead of backing off. Anyone with sense would take a step back from me. Every Valmont I've ever met walks straight at the thing that could hurt them, and she's no different, whatever she tells herself.

She's very close now. Close enough that I can smell her. Hospital soap, and then just skin, just her, warm and a bit sweet, like apricots, and it’s making me dizzy. Pathetic, but I don't care.

She's looking at my hands.

"I've heard that you work on the bodies yourself, even though you have people for it."