Fix You (33 page)

             
“Then go get the boys and we’ll leave now.”

             
She retreated a step.

             
He felt his jaw set; a coldness washed through his chest. “Dad can drive you home. The bastard likes
you
.”

             
He gave her every chance, as he turned for the Denali and climbed inside, to come after him again.

             
She didn’t.

             
He left.

**

              Dylan was renting an apartment not far from the home in Buckhead that he and Jess had sold. That was where Walt headed, needing the company of a kindred spirit. Years ago, he’d been the one to introduce his sister to Dylan Beaumont. He’d observed his friend with detached objectivity, had seen in him the intelligence, the drive, the sophistication and class that Jess had deserved, and had set them up on their first date. The divorce was beyond his comprehension; it was almost as confounding as the slow realization that his own marriage was crumbling out from under him.

             
Dylan’s apartment was on the third floor, so Walt parked at the curb and made the walk up, winded by the time he reached the door. He knocked, and waited, and wasn’t prepared for the sight that greeted him when the door opened.

             
There was a girl in the threshold: a young blonde with regular features and watery blue eyes that she blinked slowly. His gaze touched her face, and then was pulled down her body, momentary shock rendering him speechless. She wore a dog collar around her throat, a thick black leather number with a heavy buckle. Snapped to it, a chain trailed down to the floor, falling between breasts encased in a black leather bustier. She was a little thick in the middle, but the bustier had been laced tight. He took in the black boyshorts, the fishnets, the stilettos, went back to her face and noted the thick rings of black liner caked around her eyes, the darkening bruise at the corner of her mouth.

             
“I…”

             
“Are you here to see Dylan?” she asked, reaching with red-lacquered nails to toy with the chain where it rested against her stomach.

             
“Um…yeah.”

             
“Won’t you come in?” She stepped back, heels clipping against the tile, chain dragging with an obscene, metallic sound, and opened the door wide.

             
Walt stepped from an ordinary Buckhead night into
Pulp Fiction
. The living area of the apartment was small and open concept to the kitchen, all of it stainless steel against a tastefully bland backdrop. He registered ordinary couches and chairs, ordinary window dressings, ordinary kitchen counter littered with a butcher block, cutting board and bowl of apples…and this very out of the ordinary girl trussed up like a porn star standing beside him.

             
Dylan appeared from a back hallway while Walt was still trying to get his bearings. He was dressed as normally as if he didn’t have a chained woman answering the door for him: khakis and a Polo. “Walt,” he said with a smile. “Good to see you. What brings you by?”

             
Throat dry as paper, Walt swallowed and finally managed to force words across his tongue. “Bad dinner night with the family,” he said, and Dylan nodded in understanding.

             
“Just Gwen and the kids? Or all the rest of them?”

             
“Mom and Dad, too.” His eyes were tugged against his will to the girl again; she was still playing with her chain, eyes on the floor, swaying slowly back and forth on her skyscraper heels.

             
“Ah,” Dylan said, coming closer. “Introductions. Walt, you remember Kim, don’t you?”

             
He’d seen her, lingering silent as a shadow at Dylan’s elbow the afternoon he’d arrived at Jess’s new house. “We didn’t actually meet, no.”

             
As Walt looked on, Dylan stepped up to his new girlfriend and took a loose hold on her chain. He wound three of the links around his finger and studied her with predatory attention while her gaze remained downcast. “This is Kim,” he might have said to Walt, or to no one. “She’s a very good girl.”

             
A hundred different alarms went off in Walt’s head at once, screaming and bleating and wailing.

             
Dylan tipped the girl’s chin up with a fingertip, gazed at her face a long moment, then stepped away from her, crossed to the kitchen. “Can I get you a drink? You want a Scotch?”

             
“Sure.” The sirens were so loud in his mind, Walt couldn’t hear his own voice.

             
“Neat? Or rocks?”

             
He mumbled something that Dylan answered with a nod.

             
What did you expect?
Walt asked himself as he stared, unseeing, at the far wall. He’d known that Dylan was seeing – sleeping with – someone else, that his infidelity was the source of Jess’s bitterness. But he’d told himself that it wasn’t so much a betrayal as a drifting apart, like what he was experiencing with Gwen. That, frustrated and shunned, Dylan had turned elsewhere for comfort, but that he was remorseful. That he wanted to reconcile. Never in his imaginings had Walt envisioned a submissive, barely-legal blonde luring Dylan out of his marriage for sex alone. A man didn’t throw away everything for kinky strange…did he?

             
He thought of the wounded sheen in Gwen’s eyes this afternoon, about how different it was from the semi-drunk wonder of their younger years. They had changed. Dylan and Jessica had, clearly, changed. Is that what marriage was? A stage that was outgrown? The naïve belief that love was a real thing that mattered to people? If that was true, then what was
this
? How was this the logical alternative?

             
“Here.” Dylan was standing in front of him now, thrusting a warm glass of Scotch into his palm. It was neat. It was the exact color of Gwen’s honeyed amber eyes. Walt threw it down in two swallows, fighting the burn.

             
“You can’t let it get to you,” Dylan said. “Your folks are just…” he made a sympathetic face, “well, they’re easily fooled. They don’t value what you’ve done with your life because they can’t.” He took a sip of his Scotch rocks, twitched his brows. “I’m just glad I’m out of that fucking mess.”

             
Walt rolled his tumbler between his palms, feeling three mental steps behind. “What do you mean ‘out’?”

             
“Come on.” Dylan flashed a tight grin and turned away, pacing slowly back toward his girl – Kim. “You don’t think I’ll willingly submit myself to that white trash circus anymore, do you?”

             
“But…when you reconcile with Jess -  ”

             
Dylan snorted. “Your sister, as it turns out, is just as antiquated as the rest of them.”

             
“You cheated on her. How did you expect that to go well?”

             
“I sought elsewhere,” Dylan corrected, voice tightening, “what she would never be able to give me. Jess cares about Jess. She wasn’t hurt by what I did – she was embarrassed. There’s a difference.”

             
There was, and Walt knew it well. What he’d seen glimmering in his sister’s green eyes, what had rattled her head-to-toe and left her teeth chattering, had been hurt, and not embarrassment. It was pain that had spurred her into such sudden action, not shame. However ineffective the outcome, Jess buying an inn had been all about the wounds Dylan had inflicted.

             
“You have no intention of patching things up between the two of you,” Walt said.

             
Dylan sipped his Scotch.

             
“Then why are you dragging your feet with the divorce?”

             
He gave an eyebrow shrug. “She’s a bitch.”

             
Had the man telling him such things been anyone but Dylan, he would have already decked him. The realization shocked him: threats of physical violence were his dad’s game. Mike’s game.
Tam’s
game. He shuddered at the thought. “What about Tyler?”

             
“What about him?”

             
“Do you care how this is affecting your son at all?”

             
“He had to learn the truth about women sometime.”

             
Surely…
surely
he’d had an accident on the way over here, gone through the windshield, and this was all the product of some massive brain hemorrhage nightmare.

             
Dylan went back to the bar that separated kitchen from living room and set his glass down. “You’re too tense, Walt: that’s your problem. The last few months, throwing off the shackles…my stress has evaporated.” He turned and folded his arms, propped a shoulder back against the bar. “How are things with Gwen? Did she turn frigid on you?”

             
Not a week before, he’d rolled over sometime after two in the morning, reaching through the sheets for her. Gwen had ducked from beneath the hand he’d settled on her hip, murmuring that she was tired, not even able to look at him.

             
He felt a frown tug at the corners of his mouth. “That’s none of your business.”

             
“Which means yes, she has.” Dylan quirked a smile. “It’s good you came by, then. Kim can take care of you.”

             
Before Walt could gather his startled wits and ask what that meant, Dylan snapped his fingers and the silent blonde moved. She came toward him, head still downturned, watching him through her lashes.

             
“She’ll be happy to, won’t you, Kimmie?”

             
“Yes,” her voice was just the slightest purr of sound.

             
Walt watched in stunned horror as she stopped in front of him and eased down to her knees. She reached behind her and there was a silken rustling as she unlaced the ties of her bustier. Loosened, the leather halves gapped, and then her hands came forward again and she peeled the bustier down. Her breasts were heavy, as tanned as the rest of her, and her nipples were pierced.

             
Then she reached for him – for his fly – and Walt realized, with a horror that threatened to bring his mother’s meat loaf back up, that she intended to blow him right here in the middle of Dylan’s living room while Dylan watched.

             
“
Christ
.” He staggered back, out of reach, eyes tearing from the topless girl to the man who was so clearly serving as her master. “What in the holy fuck is wrong with you?” he asked in a strangled whisper. “Dylan…what…?”

             
“Don’t get your panties in a wad,” Dylan said with a sigh. “You know you’re not getting any at home.”

             
Walt swallowed the urge to retch. The stupefied chick sitting on the floor with her tits out was what Dylan had traded a wife and a son and a home for. Everything Walt had always been so sure about was suddenly blasted apart – the components were reshaped, reformed, sharper and clearer than he’d ever thought them. He felt like a green kid again: breathless and unsteady. And he had to get out of this apartment before he puked.

             
“Aw, come on, Walt,” he heard Dylan as he bolted for the door, but he didn’t look back.

**

              Through the steamed panes of a cottage window, Walt watched a family share a box of crayons at a thrift store kitchen table. Bathed in yellow lamplight, surrounded by a tiny home of hand-me-down furniture, mismatched glasses of tea at their elbows, they were totally oblivious to the splendor their world lacked.

             
Joanna, pretty in her shimmering, natural way, had her hair loose down her back and reached to tuck a stray lock behind her ear, a smile curling the corners of her mouth. She was in baggy sweatpants and a white t-shirt, her toes bare where they curled around the rung of her chair. She worked one half of a coloring book page with a blue crayon. Beside her, in her father’s lap, accepting his color choices eagerly, Willa worked the opposite page with big, messy, toddler strokes; Tam rested his chin on top of her dark head, their eyes and hair matching with startling perfection.

             
Dylan was spending the night in bound debauchery with his mistress. Tam was coloring My Little Pony pages with his wife and kid. The contrast wasn’t lost on Walt. He watched them, lurking in the dark, and tried to settle his heaving stomach; he tried to tell himself he wasn’t the fool he felt like.

             
Finally, he walked around to their front door; there was no porch, only a concrete slab and a single wooden step beneath the narrow portico canopy. There was a welcome mat, and two electric coach lamps. It was the picture of quaint hominess. Walt knocked and prepared himself to be turned away.