Crowne jewel, p.7
Crowne Jewel, page 7
part #1 of The Crowne Brothers Series
That went over like a pile of bricks.
Hellie, the nanny, comes over and takes the sleeping baby.
“I heard what happened to you.” Mandy leans back in her chair. “Any idea who did it?”
“Just an idea.”
“How are you surviving?”
“Meta’s working on it. I’ll get it back soon.” I pick up my phone and put it down. I’m using my old iPhone, but even if it was the Android, there wouldn’t be anything there. “I can still email, I guess? Texting works.”
My phone buzzes. Anton again.
—Correct. Texting works—
“What?” I say.
“I confirmed, ‘texting works.’” He’s right behind me, putting his phone in his pocket with that smirk I used to like so much—black clad from chin to foot, sleeves pushed above his forearms. Eyes dark and bright. Behind him, the vivid blue sky makes him look like a falling crow feather.
I’d set the light meter for the railing and shoot him with a tight aperture to really hit the contrast. Pan down on entry to give that dark-angel-falling-from-the-sky feeling.
“What are you doing here?”
“Anton had some things to review with me,” my dad says, coming from an entirely different direction as if they want to ambush me on two fronts. All I need now is Mom—
“Lyric!” Mom says, clearly surprised to see me. She holds out her skinny arms for me. I get up to kiss her. She’s frail and Parkinson’s makes her unstable. It’s not right to ask her to bend down. “You didn’t say you were coming.”
“Yeah. Just to… uh, I wanted to talk to Dad about something.”
“I’m intrigued,” Dad says.
“Later.” I try really hard not to look at Anton when I say it.
“You changed something.” Mom looks me up and down, then right in the face. She tips up my chin. “Not the hair. Makeup the same.”
“I didn’t change anything.”
“Ah, I know.” She wags her finger at me. “You’re not looking at your phone.”
I’m old enough to be emancipated from my mother’s care, but not too old to roll my eyes.
“She detached it from the end of her arm,” my brother Logan says, having appeared from nowhere like everyone else in this house, drying off with a bleach-white towel. “Alert the media.”
“Not willingly, in case you care.” I throw myself back onto the chair. “I was hacked.” I give up on not looking at Anton and shoot him a look that would burn holes in his turtleneck if there was any justice in the world, which there isn’t.
“Oh dear.” Mom sits in a chair beside me and puts her hand over mine. “Did they take anything?”
“Not the bank accounts or anything like that. Just the social.”
“Did they ask for a ransom yet?” Anton asks as if he isn’t the most likely suspect.
Mom rubs her arms, glancing from me to him and I don’t like it. I don’t want to hear the word tingle or lifemate or anything about her having a feeling about me and this man.
“No.” I shoot him a dirty look. He did this and I may not know why, but I’m not letting him get away with it.
“Anton,” Mom moves her attention his way, “is this something you can help with?”
“Hell, no,” I interject.
“Lyric and I already spoke about it,” he says before I can say hell no a hundred more times.
“And?” Dad asks him.
“She’s not interested in my help.”
“Lyric. This is serious,” Dad says.
“Meta’s working on it. If they don’t have it fixed by tomorrow, you can call Mark.”
“Today, it’s your social media,” Dad says in that patient dad-tone. “Tomorrow it could be something else.”
“Your financials,” Logan says, putting on his shirt. Thank God. No one needs to look at that. “Your passwords. Your camera roll.” When everyone’s heads snap toward Logan, he holds his hands out as if his suggestion was purely innocent. “None of you have ever taken a picture of a document to send to your accountant?”
“Your identity,” Anton adds.
“Dad,” I say, standing as if the chair just caught fire, “we need to talk.”
“Let’s eat first,” Mom says, reaching for Dad. “I need a hand getting to the table.”
He gently helps her up. I want to marry someone that devoted, but I also don’t want to stall.
“Anton,” Dad says as he helps Mom up, “come eat with us.”
Anton looks at his watch and my eyes are shooting him with so many don’t you dare even bullets, but all he does is drop his arm and say, “I have some time.”
“Excellent.” Dad claps Anton on the back as though he’s the sixth boy Dad never had but really wanted and walks him to the dining patio.
“Why do you look like someone took your housekeys too?” Logan asks. His hair is wet and his T-shirt sticks to him in the places he didn’t dry enough. It’s always weird when he doesn’t wear a suit.
“You came all the way here to swim? Don’t you have your own pool?”
“You came here to eat? Don’t you have DoorDash?”
“Whatever.” I snap a look at my phone. Nothing’s changed. I’m locked out of the office. Might as well get a flip-phone from Best Buy. And Anton’s still here, talking to Dad by the long table as if they have things in common.
“She has a right to be mad.” Mandy and Logan were friends before she married our brother, so she gets to defend me. “And frightened. Getting hacked is terrible.”
“Thank you,” I say to her before addressing Logan. “And fuck you.”
Mom is now chatting with Anton and Dad. Aren’t they all so very cozy?
They’re aware I know him from New York, and they never even asked if I can bear the sight of him. Not that it’s the sight of him that’s the problem. I can’t stop looking at him.
On the way to the table, Mandy pulls me aside. “You knew him, I hear?”
“In New York. It was nothing.”
“Are you okay with him?”
I’m not, but she’s not asking me if I like everyone at the table. She’s asking me if I feel threatened or unsafe. That’s a lie I won’t tell. “It’s fine. Why?”
“I just have this feeling.”
“What feeling? Not like Mom?”
“No,” she says definitively. “Wait. You mean Mom’s tingle? Right?”
My mother says she gets a tingly feeling whenever she sees a couple that’s going to get married. It’s horseshit, obviously, but she had it with my brothers and their current partners.
“Yes.”
“Why would you ask?”
“I don’t know. She was rubbing her arms. And since Dante and Ella aren’t here to make a tingle for you or Logan, I got a little freaked out. So…” I keep talking and talking. “…I’m just confirming Mom didn’t tell you she tingled and you’re not having the personal equivalent of a ‘feeling.’ Right?”
“It just seems like you’re not happy he’s here.”
“Whatever. Happy is relative. Fleeting. Who’s ever really happy?”
“Okay, Lyric.” She laughs. “I’ll take your word for it.”
We get to the table. When we were kids, Mom cooked a lot of our meals, but that’s not possible anymore, so they hired a whole staff to feed them and anyone else who happens to be around.
“Hey, Nellie,” I say to the kitchen staffer who’s bringing out a jug of jasmine iced tea. She’s been with us a long time. “How are you?”
“Very good, and you? You haven’t posted today.”
Nothing goes unnoticed. Nothing.
“I’ll get to it. How’s Marcus?”
“Big. Almost as tall as Byron.” She shakes her head.
“Hopefully he won’t be half the dick.”
She laughs as if my crudeness is in any way unusual. “Go sit. We’re serving in a minute.”
I’m annoyed that Anton’s here, but my family and everyone around us is really cool, and that throws water on the fire of hate I have for him. I figure I can wait to talk to Dad until after lunch.
CHAPTER 11
LYRIC
Logan holds out chairs for Mandy and me, one in each hand. He pushes his friend’s in first, so I do my own. He sits on the other side of the table, next to Anton, who’s planted himself right across from me. Dad’s at the head. Mom’s at the foot.
“So,” Dad starts, “you two knew each other in New York, then?”
Anton watches me as if I’m Twitter and he’s doomscrolling.
“Yeah.” I pick up my phone and look at nothing. Not even an email. I open the news as if I care. “We were friends. Then he left.”
“When was this?” Mom asks. We’re served layered salads and iced tea with jasmine.
“Three years,” Anton answers.
I scroll through the New York Times and I still don’t care about Congress, but it gives my brain and fingers something to do besides stare at the guy sitting across from me.
“Did you see the movie she made?” Mom asks. “What was it called?”
“Standard Deviation,” Dad answers.
And no. Just no. This is not a conversation I’m having right now. My family knows I made the movie, and they know it didn’t go anywhere. I told them the truth—that’s just what happens to movies. No big. I found the whole process more boring than I expected and moved on. The lie was that I got bored of directing. They don’t know about the string of humiliations or the fact that I quit trying, and I’m not going to sit here and let Anton tell them.
“Why’d you leave again, Anton?” I put down the phone and pick up my fork. “I forgot.”
He flicks his lettuce around. I hope he’s lost his appetite. “I had to go home to take care of some business.”
“Russia, home?” I ask.
“Ukraine.” He takes a mouthful of lettuce. “The money my father put aside for me before he died was in a Crimean bank. Since my mother’s Ukrainian and my father was Russian, I wasn’t trusted. I had seven days to arrive anywhere in Russia and stay for two years to establish full residency. Otherwise, they’d seize it and I’d have nothing.”
I can’t imagine him insolvent, but the way he swipes his hands across his chest and makes a zzzt sound means broke.
“They gave you seven days?” I say.
“I got the notice with ninety days.”
“Wait. You knew you were leaving for three months and didn’t tell anyone?”
He shrugs. “There were personal reasons.”
“We would have thrown you a party.” Nellie picks up my three-quarters-eaten salad and lays a chicken sandwich before me. “You could have just said—”
“He said it was personal, Lyric,” Logan reprimands me like a big brother.
Instead of being mad, I’m grateful, because he’s right. A girl Anton knew casually in New York wouldn’t be asking.
“It was a woman,” Anton says as if it doesn’t matter, which it wouldn’t if we were who we’re pretending to be.
“Oh, yeah. I remember her. Brenda Longbottom.”
He smirks. “She needed me.”
“Did she? She didn’t seem like the needy type.”
“She was the type who’d never admit she needed anyone, but I knew her, inside and out. She didn’t have to tell me what she needed, and I didn’t have to ask.”
“Wow.” For no reason other than free-floating discomfort, I pick up my phone, but put it right down when I remember there’s absolutely nothing to see there. “I never took you for such an egomaniac.”
“Lyric.” Dad, in the corner of my peripheral vision, pushes away his salad plate. “That’s a little—”
“It’s not a little anything.” My attention stays on Anton and the clench of his jaw. Neither of us wants to air our laundry over a Crowne lunch, but I’m not averse to airing out some imaginary person’s. “I was tight with Brenda. We were close. And your assumption that she would have broken without you is bullshit.”
“That’s not what—”
“She would have missed you, but she would have waited.”
“Maybe I didn’t want her to.” He looks at me coldly, as if he’s looking at Brenda and separating himself from his feelings so he can make a hard decision. That icy stare is for me. I have never wanted to punch him more.
“I’ll give you a thousand dollars to tell me the real reason.”
“This is getting weird,” Mandy murmurs.
But Anton acts as if he doesn’t hear or care. “She was very loyal. Stubbornly so. She would have insisted on coming with me.”
“So what if she did?”
“Give up her own life? Her career? No. I wasn’t letting her run away.”
Brenda had been getting hammered with rejection and might have followed him. The idea would have been so appealing, if only the choice had been offered. Spend two years far away so I didn’t have to admit to a massive lack of talent? Sold.
But if I did go with him, that wouldn’t have been why.
“What if she loved you?” A burning sensation rises in my eyes, but I keep them locked on his.
He folds his forearms together, right on top of left so I can see the trident tattoo on top of his hand, and leans toward me. “I was going to Russian-occupied Crimea, Lyric. I consider myself Ukrainian, and that wasn’t going to go over well. It wasn’t safe for her for two years or two minutes. I either went alone and got everything or stayed with her and lost everything.”
“So, you chose to go.”
“I would have stayed, but she chose to let me go.”
“You’re right.” Tearing my gaze away, I pick up my phone. “She did.”
What am I scrolling through? What’s on this screen? I try to focus on it so I don’t cry. I will not shed a single fucking tear in front of everyone and I won’t get up and leave so Mandy can follow me and ask what’s wrong.
“That sounds really complicated,” Mandy offers.
“Did you get your money?” Logan asks.
Typical. The seized assets were the only part of the story Logan heard. I don’t think I’ll be so lucky with Mom.
“I did.”
“A happy ending then,” Logan says before biting into his sandwich. “And Lyric owes you a grand.”
“I’ll Venmo it right over,” I say. Finding out where he’s been all this time and why he left is worth at least a thousand dollars.
A text comes in.
—You think ur better than me?—
Wait. What?
It’s from an unknown number. I look over at Anton. His hand isn’t anywhere near his phone. This text doesn’t sound like him anyway.
I send one back.
—Who is this?—
I navigate over to Venmo, but another message banner drops in.
—U like my exploit?—
“I think I have him,” I say softly.
“Me?” Anton asks. “I’m in your contacts.”
“No.”
I know I should hand over the phone, but I’m fearless and suddenly extremely angry.
—That all you got?—
—Once you see what I can make you
do, you’ll respect me—
“I don’t really want your money, Lyric,” Anton says.
Fuck Venmo right now.
—I can’t respect someone who
texts from an unknown number—
Three dots and then bang. Dick pic.
“Ugh!” I drop the phone on the table.
“What?” Dad asks at the same time as Mom and Mandy.
“Lyric?” Anton turns my name into a question.
The phone buzzes again. Logan grabs it.
“It’s just a gross dick pic,” I say.
“Excuse me?” Anton’s expression darkens.
“It’s like a regular weekday when you’re internet famous. I get this trash on my Insta all the time. Just not on my personal phone.”
“This is not a regular day.” Logan scrolls.
“Thanks for telling me what it’s like to be a woman in America, asshole.”
“She’s right,” Mandy adds. “If you seem even slightly available, you get them.”
“See?” I say, glancing at Anton’s darkened expression. I don’t know what’s setting him off—the dick pic or my ostensible availability… and I don’t even care.
“My God.” Mom’s practically clutching her pearls.
Instead of handing the phone to the actual owner, Logan passes it to Anton.
“What is it?” Dad asks.
“You don’t want to see it,” Logan says. “But, Anton, what do you think?”
“No,” he says, jaw set in a hard line. “No.”
“Why are you asking him?” I reach over to swipe away the phone, and I’m surprised at my success. “It’s mine.”
“How do you know this isn’t your hacker, Lyric?” Dad asks. Before I can get in a word edgewise, he turns to Anton. “I need this taken care of.”
“It will be.”
“I’m deleting this.” I stand.
“Wait,” Anton says, reaching for phone.
I step back. He misses. Attempting to delete the pic, I get one last look at the text that came in after it.
—If it were u and me in the
blue sea of august, I’d fuck you while
you still looked good—
I cover my mouth with both hands, dropping the phone.
I never want to touch it again.
CHAPTER 12
LYRIC
Swept Away By An Unusual Destiny In The Blue Sea of August - Italy, 1974. Directed by Lina Wertmüler.
A callous socialite and a working-class brute are trapped on an island. He starts to rape her, bellowing, “Shut up and let me fuck you while you still look good!” But he only goes through with the beating, leaving penetration for the day she begs for it.
I shouldn’t have explained the reference to everyone. I should have let them think it was just some weird half-poem, half-joke.
Dad’s on the warpath now, and I can’t say I blame him. Some vague, could-have-happened-to-anyone hack is one thing. The hack followed by a direct threat of sexual violence is an escalation he’s going to address whether I like it or not.
Hellie, the nanny, comes over and takes the sleeping baby.
“I heard what happened to you.” Mandy leans back in her chair. “Any idea who did it?”
“Just an idea.”
“How are you surviving?”
“Meta’s working on it. I’ll get it back soon.” I pick up my phone and put it down. I’m using my old iPhone, but even if it was the Android, there wouldn’t be anything there. “I can still email, I guess? Texting works.”
My phone buzzes. Anton again.
—Correct. Texting works—
“What?” I say.
“I confirmed, ‘texting works.’” He’s right behind me, putting his phone in his pocket with that smirk I used to like so much—black clad from chin to foot, sleeves pushed above his forearms. Eyes dark and bright. Behind him, the vivid blue sky makes him look like a falling crow feather.
I’d set the light meter for the railing and shoot him with a tight aperture to really hit the contrast. Pan down on entry to give that dark-angel-falling-from-the-sky feeling.
“What are you doing here?”
“Anton had some things to review with me,” my dad says, coming from an entirely different direction as if they want to ambush me on two fronts. All I need now is Mom—
“Lyric!” Mom says, clearly surprised to see me. She holds out her skinny arms for me. I get up to kiss her. She’s frail and Parkinson’s makes her unstable. It’s not right to ask her to bend down. “You didn’t say you were coming.”
“Yeah. Just to… uh, I wanted to talk to Dad about something.”
“I’m intrigued,” Dad says.
“Later.” I try really hard not to look at Anton when I say it.
“You changed something.” Mom looks me up and down, then right in the face. She tips up my chin. “Not the hair. Makeup the same.”
“I didn’t change anything.”
“Ah, I know.” She wags her finger at me. “You’re not looking at your phone.”
I’m old enough to be emancipated from my mother’s care, but not too old to roll my eyes.
“She detached it from the end of her arm,” my brother Logan says, having appeared from nowhere like everyone else in this house, drying off with a bleach-white towel. “Alert the media.”
“Not willingly, in case you care.” I throw myself back onto the chair. “I was hacked.” I give up on not looking at Anton and shoot him a look that would burn holes in his turtleneck if there was any justice in the world, which there isn’t.
“Oh dear.” Mom sits in a chair beside me and puts her hand over mine. “Did they take anything?”
“Not the bank accounts or anything like that. Just the social.”
“Did they ask for a ransom yet?” Anton asks as if he isn’t the most likely suspect.
Mom rubs her arms, glancing from me to him and I don’t like it. I don’t want to hear the word tingle or lifemate or anything about her having a feeling about me and this man.
“No.” I shoot him a dirty look. He did this and I may not know why, but I’m not letting him get away with it.
“Anton,” Mom moves her attention his way, “is this something you can help with?”
“Hell, no,” I interject.
“Lyric and I already spoke about it,” he says before I can say hell no a hundred more times.
“And?” Dad asks him.
“She’s not interested in my help.”
“Lyric. This is serious,” Dad says.
“Meta’s working on it. If they don’t have it fixed by tomorrow, you can call Mark.”
“Today, it’s your social media,” Dad says in that patient dad-tone. “Tomorrow it could be something else.”
“Your financials,” Logan says, putting on his shirt. Thank God. No one needs to look at that. “Your passwords. Your camera roll.” When everyone’s heads snap toward Logan, he holds his hands out as if his suggestion was purely innocent. “None of you have ever taken a picture of a document to send to your accountant?”
“Your identity,” Anton adds.
“Dad,” I say, standing as if the chair just caught fire, “we need to talk.”
“Let’s eat first,” Mom says, reaching for Dad. “I need a hand getting to the table.”
He gently helps her up. I want to marry someone that devoted, but I also don’t want to stall.
“Anton,” Dad says as he helps Mom up, “come eat with us.”
Anton looks at his watch and my eyes are shooting him with so many don’t you dare even bullets, but all he does is drop his arm and say, “I have some time.”
“Excellent.” Dad claps Anton on the back as though he’s the sixth boy Dad never had but really wanted and walks him to the dining patio.
“Why do you look like someone took your housekeys too?” Logan asks. His hair is wet and his T-shirt sticks to him in the places he didn’t dry enough. It’s always weird when he doesn’t wear a suit.
“You came all the way here to swim? Don’t you have your own pool?”
“You came here to eat? Don’t you have DoorDash?”
“Whatever.” I snap a look at my phone. Nothing’s changed. I’m locked out of the office. Might as well get a flip-phone from Best Buy. And Anton’s still here, talking to Dad by the long table as if they have things in common.
“She has a right to be mad.” Mandy and Logan were friends before she married our brother, so she gets to defend me. “And frightened. Getting hacked is terrible.”
“Thank you,” I say to her before addressing Logan. “And fuck you.”
Mom is now chatting with Anton and Dad. Aren’t they all so very cozy?
They’re aware I know him from New York, and they never even asked if I can bear the sight of him. Not that it’s the sight of him that’s the problem. I can’t stop looking at him.
On the way to the table, Mandy pulls me aside. “You knew him, I hear?”
“In New York. It was nothing.”
“Are you okay with him?”
I’m not, but she’s not asking me if I like everyone at the table. She’s asking me if I feel threatened or unsafe. That’s a lie I won’t tell. “It’s fine. Why?”
“I just have this feeling.”
“What feeling? Not like Mom?”
“No,” she says definitively. “Wait. You mean Mom’s tingle? Right?”
My mother says she gets a tingly feeling whenever she sees a couple that’s going to get married. It’s horseshit, obviously, but she had it with my brothers and their current partners.
“Yes.”
“Why would you ask?”
“I don’t know. She was rubbing her arms. And since Dante and Ella aren’t here to make a tingle for you or Logan, I got a little freaked out. So…” I keep talking and talking. “…I’m just confirming Mom didn’t tell you she tingled and you’re not having the personal equivalent of a ‘feeling.’ Right?”
“It just seems like you’re not happy he’s here.”
“Whatever. Happy is relative. Fleeting. Who’s ever really happy?”
“Okay, Lyric.” She laughs. “I’ll take your word for it.”
We get to the table. When we were kids, Mom cooked a lot of our meals, but that’s not possible anymore, so they hired a whole staff to feed them and anyone else who happens to be around.
“Hey, Nellie,” I say to the kitchen staffer who’s bringing out a jug of jasmine iced tea. She’s been with us a long time. “How are you?”
“Very good, and you? You haven’t posted today.”
Nothing goes unnoticed. Nothing.
“I’ll get to it. How’s Marcus?”
“Big. Almost as tall as Byron.” She shakes her head.
“Hopefully he won’t be half the dick.”
She laughs as if my crudeness is in any way unusual. “Go sit. We’re serving in a minute.”
I’m annoyed that Anton’s here, but my family and everyone around us is really cool, and that throws water on the fire of hate I have for him. I figure I can wait to talk to Dad until after lunch.
CHAPTER 11
LYRIC
Logan holds out chairs for Mandy and me, one in each hand. He pushes his friend’s in first, so I do my own. He sits on the other side of the table, next to Anton, who’s planted himself right across from me. Dad’s at the head. Mom’s at the foot.
“So,” Dad starts, “you two knew each other in New York, then?”
Anton watches me as if I’m Twitter and he’s doomscrolling.
“Yeah.” I pick up my phone and look at nothing. Not even an email. I open the news as if I care. “We were friends. Then he left.”
“When was this?” Mom asks. We’re served layered salads and iced tea with jasmine.
“Three years,” Anton answers.
I scroll through the New York Times and I still don’t care about Congress, but it gives my brain and fingers something to do besides stare at the guy sitting across from me.
“Did you see the movie she made?” Mom asks. “What was it called?”
“Standard Deviation,” Dad answers.
And no. Just no. This is not a conversation I’m having right now. My family knows I made the movie, and they know it didn’t go anywhere. I told them the truth—that’s just what happens to movies. No big. I found the whole process more boring than I expected and moved on. The lie was that I got bored of directing. They don’t know about the string of humiliations or the fact that I quit trying, and I’m not going to sit here and let Anton tell them.
“Why’d you leave again, Anton?” I put down the phone and pick up my fork. “I forgot.”
He flicks his lettuce around. I hope he’s lost his appetite. “I had to go home to take care of some business.”
“Russia, home?” I ask.
“Ukraine.” He takes a mouthful of lettuce. “The money my father put aside for me before he died was in a Crimean bank. Since my mother’s Ukrainian and my father was Russian, I wasn’t trusted. I had seven days to arrive anywhere in Russia and stay for two years to establish full residency. Otherwise, they’d seize it and I’d have nothing.”
I can’t imagine him insolvent, but the way he swipes his hands across his chest and makes a zzzt sound means broke.
“They gave you seven days?” I say.
“I got the notice with ninety days.”
“Wait. You knew you were leaving for three months and didn’t tell anyone?”
He shrugs. “There were personal reasons.”
“We would have thrown you a party.” Nellie picks up my three-quarters-eaten salad and lays a chicken sandwich before me. “You could have just said—”
“He said it was personal, Lyric,” Logan reprimands me like a big brother.
Instead of being mad, I’m grateful, because he’s right. A girl Anton knew casually in New York wouldn’t be asking.
“It was a woman,” Anton says as if it doesn’t matter, which it wouldn’t if we were who we’re pretending to be.
“Oh, yeah. I remember her. Brenda Longbottom.”
He smirks. “She needed me.”
“Did she? She didn’t seem like the needy type.”
“She was the type who’d never admit she needed anyone, but I knew her, inside and out. She didn’t have to tell me what she needed, and I didn’t have to ask.”
“Wow.” For no reason other than free-floating discomfort, I pick up my phone, but put it right down when I remember there’s absolutely nothing to see there. “I never took you for such an egomaniac.”
“Lyric.” Dad, in the corner of my peripheral vision, pushes away his salad plate. “That’s a little—”
“It’s not a little anything.” My attention stays on Anton and the clench of his jaw. Neither of us wants to air our laundry over a Crowne lunch, but I’m not averse to airing out some imaginary person’s. “I was tight with Brenda. We were close. And your assumption that she would have broken without you is bullshit.”
“That’s not what—”
“She would have missed you, but she would have waited.”
“Maybe I didn’t want her to.” He looks at me coldly, as if he’s looking at Brenda and separating himself from his feelings so he can make a hard decision. That icy stare is for me. I have never wanted to punch him more.
“I’ll give you a thousand dollars to tell me the real reason.”
“This is getting weird,” Mandy murmurs.
But Anton acts as if he doesn’t hear or care. “She was very loyal. Stubbornly so. She would have insisted on coming with me.”
“So what if she did?”
“Give up her own life? Her career? No. I wasn’t letting her run away.”
Brenda had been getting hammered with rejection and might have followed him. The idea would have been so appealing, if only the choice had been offered. Spend two years far away so I didn’t have to admit to a massive lack of talent? Sold.
But if I did go with him, that wouldn’t have been why.
“What if she loved you?” A burning sensation rises in my eyes, but I keep them locked on his.
He folds his forearms together, right on top of left so I can see the trident tattoo on top of his hand, and leans toward me. “I was going to Russian-occupied Crimea, Lyric. I consider myself Ukrainian, and that wasn’t going to go over well. It wasn’t safe for her for two years or two minutes. I either went alone and got everything or stayed with her and lost everything.”
“So, you chose to go.”
“I would have stayed, but she chose to let me go.”
“You’re right.” Tearing my gaze away, I pick up my phone. “She did.”
What am I scrolling through? What’s on this screen? I try to focus on it so I don’t cry. I will not shed a single fucking tear in front of everyone and I won’t get up and leave so Mandy can follow me and ask what’s wrong.
“That sounds really complicated,” Mandy offers.
“Did you get your money?” Logan asks.
Typical. The seized assets were the only part of the story Logan heard. I don’t think I’ll be so lucky with Mom.
“I did.”
“A happy ending then,” Logan says before biting into his sandwich. “And Lyric owes you a grand.”
“I’ll Venmo it right over,” I say. Finding out where he’s been all this time and why he left is worth at least a thousand dollars.
A text comes in.
—You think ur better than me?—
Wait. What?
It’s from an unknown number. I look over at Anton. His hand isn’t anywhere near his phone. This text doesn’t sound like him anyway.
I send one back.
—Who is this?—
I navigate over to Venmo, but another message banner drops in.
—U like my exploit?—
“I think I have him,” I say softly.
“Me?” Anton asks. “I’m in your contacts.”
“No.”
I know I should hand over the phone, but I’m fearless and suddenly extremely angry.
—That all you got?—
—Once you see what I can make you
do, you’ll respect me—
“I don’t really want your money, Lyric,” Anton says.
Fuck Venmo right now.
—I can’t respect someone who
texts from an unknown number—
Three dots and then bang. Dick pic.
“Ugh!” I drop the phone on the table.
“What?” Dad asks at the same time as Mom and Mandy.
“Lyric?” Anton turns my name into a question.
The phone buzzes again. Logan grabs it.
“It’s just a gross dick pic,” I say.
“Excuse me?” Anton’s expression darkens.
“It’s like a regular weekday when you’re internet famous. I get this trash on my Insta all the time. Just not on my personal phone.”
“This is not a regular day.” Logan scrolls.
“Thanks for telling me what it’s like to be a woman in America, asshole.”
“She’s right,” Mandy adds. “If you seem even slightly available, you get them.”
“See?” I say, glancing at Anton’s darkened expression. I don’t know what’s setting him off—the dick pic or my ostensible availability… and I don’t even care.
“My God.” Mom’s practically clutching her pearls.
Instead of handing the phone to the actual owner, Logan passes it to Anton.
“What is it?” Dad asks.
“You don’t want to see it,” Logan says. “But, Anton, what do you think?”
“No,” he says, jaw set in a hard line. “No.”
“Why are you asking him?” I reach over to swipe away the phone, and I’m surprised at my success. “It’s mine.”
“How do you know this isn’t your hacker, Lyric?” Dad asks. Before I can get in a word edgewise, he turns to Anton. “I need this taken care of.”
“It will be.”
“I’m deleting this.” I stand.
“Wait,” Anton says, reaching for phone.
I step back. He misses. Attempting to delete the pic, I get one last look at the text that came in after it.
—If it were u and me in the
blue sea of august, I’d fuck you while
you still looked good—
I cover my mouth with both hands, dropping the phone.
I never want to touch it again.
CHAPTER 12
LYRIC
Swept Away By An Unusual Destiny In The Blue Sea of August - Italy, 1974. Directed by Lina Wertmüler.
A callous socialite and a working-class brute are trapped on an island. He starts to rape her, bellowing, “Shut up and let me fuck you while you still look good!” But he only goes through with the beating, leaving penetration for the day she begs for it.
I shouldn’t have explained the reference to everyone. I should have let them think it was just some weird half-poem, half-joke.
Dad’s on the warpath now, and I can’t say I blame him. Some vague, could-have-happened-to-anyone hack is one thing. The hack followed by a direct threat of sexual violence is an escalation he’s going to address whether I like it or not.
