Chapter Eight

Harley

I touch up my makeup, outline my lips and apply Cam’s favorite color lipstick, then some shimmery gloss. I press my lips together, smacking them lightly, and appraise my appearance. He’ll be pleased, but he’s always been pleased. Fact is, I’m pleased. I like the way I look. My faux school uniform is like a power suit, my armor, a super hero’s costume that makes me feel on top of the world. Short skirt, white blouse, knee-highs and Mary Janes. When I wear this, I make the rules. My phone buzzes as I open my bedroom door. Trey’s calling. I’m supposed to go to the meeting with him.

I ignore the call.

Then a text message flashes by. Hey. Hope you’re OK. Sorry about last night. See you in fifteen minutes?

But I don’t want to go to the meeting.

I don’t want to be a recovered addict.

I want to be addicted. I want to take a hit. I want to inhale all this control.

I turn the phone on silent. I feel a strange mix of guilt and thrill from ignoring Trey for the first time ever. Guilt because I have no lies with him. Thrill because the rush of the game is starting and now I am toying with Trey—something I’ve never done with him. Even last night when I practically attacked him, I was all honesty and guts, laying it on the line for him, letting him know how I felt. Where did it get me? Rejected.

I look at the phone one more time, scrolling over the missed call, my fingers hovering over his name. I could call him back. I could text him. I could be honest. I could confess. I could stop what I’m going to do. This is like my lifeline. The universe giving me one more way out.

But I am beyond repair. He deserves more than me.

I hide the phone at the bottom of my purse.

Fuck lifelines.

I sail down the stairs in the apartment building, feeling the rush of anticipation, of flirtation, of sparks about to be ignited. I feel bubbly and alive in a way I haven’t felt in six months. It’s like someone hit a tuning fork against me and I am now vibrating at the perfect frequency again.

My frequency.

I hail a cab and though it’s still rush hour, one comes squealing by in a heartbeat. I’ve never had a problem catching taxis. I give the driver the address of Bliss on Sixtieth and Lexington, far enough away that I might as well be in another world.

Even Miranda isn’t an East Side gal.

When she had me followed, it was all West side operations.

The time Miranda confronted me I was walking to my mom’s for dinner and talking to Cam on my cell phone. I’d given him the rundown on one of his top-paying clients, and he was laughing deeply, then lining up another gig for me. I turned south on Central Park West and spotted Miranda marching toward me, her slightly pouchy chin the identifying mark along with her customary skirt that sat high on her waist, a sartorial attempt to mask the few extra pounds. She was chubby then. The next thing I noticed were those laser-like eyes, like an assassin’s zeroed in on a target.

Me. In her crosshairs.

I didn’t even have time to say goodbye to Cam. The next thing I knew, she’d slapped me, like in the movies, her palm smacking my cheek, my head careening to the right at impact. I dropped the cell phone, the battery spitting itself out onto the sidewalk of New York City.

“I bet you thought you were going to get away with screwing my husband,” she said.

“No,” I squeezed out, as I pressed my hand against my stinging cheek. That was true. I didn’t think I’d get away with it. I bent down to grab the phone and she kicked it farther away with her brown leather boot.

That pissed me off. I looked up at her. “Really? Did you have to do that?”

She laughed, but the sound was cold and hurt, so much hurt, rage and shame mashed together in her tangled voice as she tried to keep some semblance of control while I scrambled to pick up the phone parts. “That,” she said, hissing out the word, “is nothing compared to what I am going to do next. And you will be wishing for a broken cell phone for months, Harley Coleman. Months. Because you’re more than just a cheater. You’re a whore.”

A chill swept through me, as if icicles were breeding on my skin. She’d found out the whole truth. But I had it coming. Whatever she was going to do I would have to bend over and take it. Even though I never screwed her husband.

And maybe that’s another reason why I am in this cab tonight. Because I have been taking it from her for months. I want to take something for me again.

The driver makes small talk and I exchange pleasantries with him as I give my breasts a boost so my cleavage peeks out of the top of the lacy bra. He does his best to appear surreptitious as his eyes dart around for a peek. I adjust my knee-high white socks making sure they fit just so.

“Excuse me for a sec,” I say, but I don’t move out of the way of the rearview mirror. Let him enjoy his job today. Let me be in charge. I undo two buttons on my blouse, making sure my boobs look good.

The driver breathes hard. I smile into the mirror, knowing I’ve just given him his happy ending for when he gets off work. When he pulls up to Bliss I thank him. He turns around and says, “No, thank you.”

I press a twenty into his hand and hop out.

When my heels hit the sidewalk, I am officially in Trey’s territory since he grew up on the upper east side. But I won’t run into him here because he lives downtown now. Besides, I’m not thinking about him, or about the cell phone stuffed at the bottom of my bag, nor the fact that I’m crazy certain he’s called again and texted again. I always answer for him. I’m available all the time for him. I rely on his friendship more than anything.

He knows all this, and so he’ll know I’m up to something.

But I don’t care right now.

Hugo, the muscly dude at the Bliss door knows me well, but still asks for my ID. He hasn’t seen me in six months. I show him the one that says I’m twenty-two.

“Been a while, Layla,” he says, using the name on my ID.

“Missed you too, Hugo,” I say with a wink. He blushes, waves me in and gives me a kiss on the cheek as I go by. I blow him one back.

Then I’m inside. Just as easy as it’s always been.

Cam’s waiting by the bar, tall and sturdy and five-o-clock-shadow-stubbly, with the biggest shit-eating grin you’ve ever seen pinned across his face. He wears pressed black pants and a silk shirt the shade of raspberry. He’s ridiculously tall with wavy, receding brown hair. Gelled, of course. He looks like Vince Vaughn. He talks like Vince Vaughn.

Just like the day I met him two years ago, thanks to my mom.

But here’s the best part. She doesn’t know he’s in my back pocket. She doesn’t know one of her sources is now mine. That I set myself up for my new job, my other life, because of someone I met through her. She didn’t intend to hook me up with Cam. She was simply meeting him for a tip on a story, and when she stepped away to answer a call, we got to chatting, and then we got to exchanging numbers, and then I got to know more about him than she ever did.

I learned something he never told her.

I learned about his moonlighting job.

“You and I could go places,” he said to me that day.

He’s a lawyer and he was one of my mom’s sources on a huge story she broke uncovering the sexting senator. Cam had all sorts of shady clients, but that also meant he knew all sorts of shady things – things she wanted to know to bust the senator. He’d played a role in prosecuting the guy, but yet he also ran a high-class call girl ring on the side.

Call Cam morally ambiguous. Call him a hypocrite. Call him the best fucking time I ever had.

“Hey babydoll! You look so fucking beautiful,” he says as I sit on the bar stool next to him. I barely have time to say hello, because he continues, “How could you let me go this long without seeing you? I’ve been starving. I’m like a dying man in a desert and you walk in and I can drink again.”

“You’re mixing metaphors. When you’re starving you’re hungry. When you’re in the desert you’re thirsty,” I say playfully, wagging my index finger as I correct him.

“When it comes to you I’m starving and I’m thirsty,” he says, inching closer, so I can smell his cologne, a cool, forest-y scent that’s both sexy and sleazy at the same time.

“Looks like you already started.” I tip my forehead to his martini.

“I couldn’t help myself. I was waiting for you, babydoll.” Then he leans in for a kiss. I turn my face so his lips brush my cheek.

I loved teasing him then. Turns out it still rocks. It still sends a tingle from my toes to my nose. God, this feels so good. It’s the opposite of being blackmailed. It’s the other side of my mom setting me up with boys.

It’s my side. My turn. My time.

“The cheek? Six months and I get the cheek? It’s been a long six months. C’mon, just one kiss for your old man Cam.”

I shake my head. Cam’s never been about the kissing. Cam’s about the access for me. An entree into a world of power, into my very own war games.

“How about a drink then?”

“You don’t remember?” I give Cam a pointed look.

He leans in to whisper. “Course I do. But you’ve got your ID. And Tom —” Cam nods to the bartender at the other end “— has always believed you were twenty-two, my babydoll.”

“Cam! I’m not talking about my age. I’m talking about the fact that I don’t drink.”

He holds up his hands and shrugs. “You changed everything else. How’m I to know you didn’t change that too?”

“Touché,” I say.

Drinking has never been my thing. You could surround me with trays of cocktails, with tables full of sexy, little frothy drinks, sugared on the rim, and I wouldn’t even notice them. I wouldn’t even touch them.

“A Diet Coke for my babydoll, Tom,” Cam says to the bartender, then winks at me.

“Hey, Layla,” Tom says and I flash him a bright smile. Then to Cam, “You remembered.”

“I remember everything about you. I remember you’re a junkie for your diet pop. And maybe for what I got going on again too?” He raises an eyebrow.

I give him a coquettish shrug. This is what I miss most. The banter, the back and forth, the chase.

“C’mon. You miss the biz, don’t you? You miss the way we played them all. You wore my favorite outfit after all. You wore the outfit they all wanted you in,” he says and trails off to look me up and down.

He holds me tight with his dark blue eyes, the color of the early-morning dawn before the sun breaks. His eyes are like a tractor beam and I can’t let go. I know I shouldn’t be looking at him like this, or letting him look at me like he’s doing, reeling me in with reminders of power, of playing, of the game being on our terms. But I’ve taken the pill, I’ve swallowed it once again, and now the effects are kicking in.

I finger the hem of my skirt — my admission that I came to play.

Then the low whistle from between his lips, the shake of his head, the grin that won’t stop. I’ve been ignited again, a sweet rush of what once was is now draped over me, and the past is no longer the past. It’s the present once more. I am back in time and it’s all so familiar and safe in its own way.

“You were easy,” I say. “You always liked the schoolgirl in me.”

He cocks his head to the side. “So I’m easy, babydoll. So sue me.”

“I know a good lawyer,” I tease.

“I couldn’t represent you. Conflict of interest.”

I laugh as Tom plunks down my glass of Diet Coke. I tell him thanks, then take a drink. “That’s a good way to describe me.”

“I like conflicts of interest,” he says. “But somehow we found the loopholes, baby.”

“We were all loopholes,” I say because Cam and I covered ourselves in secrets. Like pulling a blanket over our heads, we were huddled in our fort, never letting anyone know we were running the numbers, making a mint, playing all the strange men in Manhattan who wanted a pretty young thing to look at them, talk to them, spank them, or tell them how big they were even when they were tiny little men.

Never more than that. He kept me clean. He never wanted anything to happen to me. Never wanted anyone to touch me below the waist. One of his clients tried to slip a hand up my skirt when I met him at a bar, and Cam made sure the guy had trouble walking the next few days. He protected me.

“Look at you,” Cam says, his eyes gliding over me, cataloguing every curve, every shape. “Back here at Bliss with me.” This was our spot and no one ever knew we were here. The place where I was Layla, Cam’s top earner, not my mother’s daughter, not the pretty pony she pawned off on her suitor’s sons. I was the player, I was the one who decided. I could say yes or no to anyone Cam brought to me. I could turn down the clothes he picked up for me at Bloomingdale’s. I had veto power over everything. He gave me choices.