How to get even, p.8
How to Get Even, page 8
Bella followed him as he found his way to the racks housing the section he was looking for.
Every gallery had one. He’d first discovered it as an intern at the Tate Modern in London and it had made him both sad and angry: the art that was ‘shelved’. And ever since then, he’d made a point of visiting similar works whenever and wherever he could.
And he wanted Bella to see it too. Because he wanted her to understand what he wanted for Nayak. Because he was going to need her help to achieve it. But for that, he was going to have to trust her and just the thought of it made his gut clench.
She waited patiently behind him, unaware of his mental wrangling, as he pulled out a rack that looked just like any other rack in here.
He stood back, inviting Bella forward.
‘What do you see?’ he asked, feeling a little like a school teacher with his student, which just led his dirty, sex-starved mind down a path he had absolutely no intention of following.
‘Expressionism, but early. On the cusp with Impressionism. I don’t… I don’t recognise the artist,’ she said, sounding defeated, as if she’d failed a test, rather than passing it.
‘That’s not surprising. While some of her work is kept here, none of it ever made it into a gallery.’
Bella frowned as if not quite liking what she heard.
‘Not even here?’ Bella asked.
Chase shook his head.
‘That’s a shame. It’s good. Bold, powerful. Physical.’ She smiled up at him, as if having forgotten herself for a moment. ‘Not relentlessly, but still. I… like it,’ she said as if making up her mind. ‘Why is it here?’
‘It’s part of a collection on loan to the gallery, but as it failed to reach critical acclaim at the time, lack of interest led to lack of awareness and it’s not considered part of the acceptable cannon of Expressionism.’
Bella frowned, little angry lines between her brows. ‘She was a female artist at a time when there were enough powerful men shaping the tastes and appetites for others,’ she said, coming to the explanation herself. ‘Could Nayak loan it out?’
‘This one, quite possibly. But all the rest? There isn’t enough money or time in the world,’ Chase said bitterly.
She looked up, querying what he meant by ‘all the rest’.
‘Look around you. Rack after rack after rack. Each containing any number of three to thirty paintings, depending on size. How many artists do you think have work here? And how many do you think get to be the chosen few to be seen? Of those paintings, which will make enough money for the gallery to justify wall space?’ he asked, his voice heated enough to betray the passion he felt about this. About marketeers and money makers deciding what was art and what wasn’t. What would sell tickets and what wouldn’t. What would make patrons and board members big fat bonuses, and what would cast an artist into the invisible pages of history.
‘Who are these people to control who gets to see these paintings? Why is it up to an art critic or a professor to decide what is art, what is beautiful? Why aren’t these paintings as accessible to everyone, from a child to a grandparent? Why aren’t these incredible pieces of work as accessible to a mechanic and a school teacher as they are to—’
He bit his teeth together but it was too late.
‘Me and my family,’ Bella finished, unable to hide the hurt in her gaze.
He turned away guiltily. He’d taken his frustration out on her and Bella deserved better than that.
‘You want to show what other people don’t,’ she said, circling back to the conversation they’d had in his office, her voice soft from behind him. ‘In Nayak, you want to show the kinds of art that other galleries won’t.’
He nodded, once. Definitively.
‘You want to give the artists who don’t get wall space a chance.’
‘Yes,’ Chase confessed, pleased that she understood. ‘Not solely. I know Nayak has to garner enough financial and professional attention to make it work as a business, I’m not a complete novice. But I want people to experience what you did when you first came in here. The feeling that you were seeing something that not everyone else gets to see.’
‘Exclusivity,’ she tried.
‘No, not quite that,’ he said, struggling to define what it was he wanted the gallery to be. ‘Something intimate,’ he tried. ‘Something gratifying, something near sexual, something individual,’ he said, trying to put into words what he’d seen across her face as she’d delved deeper into the warehouse.
He looked to her to see if she understood what he was getting at. There she was, staring up at him with those big grey eyes, a tendril of hair having escaped somewhere along the way, her eyes flicking back and forth between his. He wondered if she knew they did that, eyes moving back and forth as if wanting to capture everything all at once.
His phone beeped, breaking the moment.
While he checked the message from Maurice, he saw her check her watch.
‘Well, I have a better understanding of what you want for Nayak now, so thank you for that,’ she said with a brightness that seemed more determined than real. ‘I should probably get home.’
Chase winced and rubbed the corner of his eyebrow with his thumb.
‘About that,’ he said, somewhat regretfully because he actually did want her to go home in that moment.
7
Pretend to be weak, that he may grow arrogant.
THE ART OF WAR, SUN TZU
‘I don’t see why you couldn’t have just told me,’ Bella groused, trying to keep up with the furious pace Chase had set.
‘I thought you might try and back out of it,’ Chase replied, his gaze on the street ahead of him as, once again, the pedestrians parted for him as if he were Moses.
‘I wouldn’t dream of such a thing. Team bonding is an integral part of best working practices,’ Bella said hotly, even though she really did want to back out of it.
Chase pulled to a sudden and rather dramatic stop, flustering the flow of pedestrians around him, while she yanked herself back to stop herself from ploughing into him.
‘It was Ali’s turn to pick the location,’ he said with a sigh.
‘Why? Where is it?’
Chase pulled a pained face, making her laugh. Not because Chase was in actual pain, but he was clearly uncomfortable and that was amusing to her.
He looked boyish and rueful.
And then she stopped laughing.
‘No, seriously. Where is it?’
Oh. My. God.
‘Told you,’ Chase whispered into her ear as he swept past her, taking off his coat and sliding into the booth ahead of her.
‘This place is…’ She trailed off, moving in a daze to the booth where the team sat under bright red and neon pink signage that took her right back to Just Desserts. But if Just Desserts had been her heaven, what was this? It was like Chinese New Year had thrown up in an American-style diner and no one had bothered to clean it up.
Ali leaned forward, sheer delight in her eyes. ‘There’s karaoke upstairs.’
Bella’s mouth dropped open and nothing came out.
She was in shock, she decided, glaring up at the biggest Lucky Cat she’d ever seen. Gold against the lipstick-red painted wall, its paw waving up and down.
‘I thought that was Japanese,’ she said to herself.
‘It is. But I don’t think the designers of this place particularly minded that much,’ Chase replied, surprising her that he’d heard.
‘Because they’re American.’
‘Because they’re American,’ Chase replied, nodding.
Giant beautifully decorated fans were pinned to the walls while paper Chinese dragons hung from the ceiling. Somewhere a slot machines bounced and pinged, and servers yelled, everything working so hard that Bella felt her brain short-circuit as she gazed in half fear and half irrational excitement, curious as to what she’d find next.
‘Oh,’ Chase said in surprise, calling her gaze back to him, only to find him looking right at her. ‘You like it,’ he accused. ‘You actually like it,’ he said on a laugh.
Bella glared a warning at him and he did that damned smirk again that pulled on something in her chest. Something she didn’t want to think about because… of Astrid, because Bella couldn’t, because he was absolutely everything she hated about men. Lying, cheating, charming snakes.
‘Full of surprises,’ Chase said to himself, turning to the menu in his hands.
Bella did the same, having to look again at the menu, half of which was all American diner food, and the other half a list of Chinese takeouts’ greatest hits.
This was pure guilty pleasure.
And yes, Chase was right. She actually did kind of love it.
Immediately she thought of the girls and she wanted them here so much her heart thudded. She wanted to take pictures, but Good Bella would never be so crass.
But… she wasn’t Good Bella any more, was she? She was someone who had got a job with the sole purpose of taking down her lying, cheating boss. That was most definitely not Good Bella behaviour. So maybe she could take pictures because she was Bad Bella now?
I’ve been such a bad…
Bella cleared her throat, the line from Delia’s book dragged from the recesses of her mind without warning.
‘You okay? You look a little… flushed,’ Chase asked.
‘Do you need some water?’ Ali said beside her, pouring her water anyway.
Bella nodded and gratefully took the glass, downing half the contents.
Where had she put that book?
A waitress came by to take their drinks order.
‘Margaritas,’ Ali cried.
‘Frozen,’ added Maurice.
Chase nodded his head in agreement and Bella thought, Why not?
Before long, four frozen margaritas were raised in a toast.
‘Your official welcome to Nayak New York,’ Chase declared.
Cheers turned into appreciative moans as everyone took a sip of exceedingly excellent margaritas.
‘One week down and how do you feel? Ready to run for the hills yet?’ Maurice asked.
‘Not at all. I’m just getting started,’ she said with a confidence she finally felt.
‘So where did you to get to this afternoon?’ he asked, his gaze curious.
‘Market research,’ Chase replied without taking his eyes off the menu.
Bella bit her lip as she felt Maurice’s gaze on her.
‘More market research,’ she clarified, having already told Maurice about the galleries she’d visited yesterday.
Chase’s eyebrow crinkled, but she doubted anyone noticed.
It then took nearly twenty minutes to wrangle everyone’s food order and what ended up coming to the table was a mishmash of fried fabulousness, the likes of which Bella would never normally let herself anywhere near, let alone eat.
Bella asked Maurice about growing up in Martinique and what had brought him to New York.
‘A man, darling. Isn’t it always a man?’ he replied with a knowing smile.
‘And what happened to the man?’ Bella asked.
‘Lord only knows. That was nearly twenty years ago now.’
Ali started to tell Maurice a funny story about Ye-Joon, Bella smiling at the obviousness of her crush and more than a little envious of how uninhibited Ali was. She was free in just about every way, her expressions wild and wonderful, her enthusiasm seemingly endless. What would it be like to live like that? she wondered.
Ali tried to steal an onion ring from Maurice’s plate, but he playfully slapped her hand away, causing her to scream. Bella flinched, but laughed along with the team, surprised when Chase donated his last ring to Ali.
Chase eyed her spring roll.
‘No way,’ Bella replied passively, causing Chase to narrow his eyes.
‘I’d trade you.’
‘Nope,’ she said, shaking her head and biting into the delicious layers of flaky pastry, visibly relishing the garlicky pork and ginger-coated vegetables inside.
‘Cruel woman,’ Chase complained as the plates were taken away.
Dessert menus were placed on the table and Bella stared longingly at the red velvet cake. There was no way she should be even considering it, but…
‘Tempted?’ Chase asked, his gaze on her finger tapping beside the cake’s description.
She’d be running off this dinner for at least a week as it was. ‘I’m good, thank you,’ she said, sitting back in the red vinyl seat full, reasonably happy, and very tired.
‘And now for the best bit!’ exclaimed Ali, jumping up and down and making the vinyl squeak. ‘Kara—’
‘Nope,’ Chase said. ‘I’m out.’
‘Me too,’ Bella said with a smile at the look of miserable disappointment on Ali’s face. She turned to Maurice, her gaze pleading for him to say yes.
‘Please, Maurice, please.’
Maurice peered down at her, eyebrow raised and Bella was fully prepared for him to flat out refuse when he instead said, ‘Only if you agree to let me do at least one Madonna, one Kylie and one Celine.’
‘Of course,’ Ali replied with such seriousness that it was clear they had done this before.
And just like that, Bella and Chase were being rushed out of the booths with, ‘Have a good night,’ being yelled at them as Maurice and Ali disappeared upstairs to where the karaoke rooms were.
‘Well, that was abrupt,’ Bella observed as she picked up her coat. ‘You don’t seem surprised.’
‘We’ve been here before. And I had to learn the hard way. You got off easy,’ he accused, turning to pick up the end of her coat sleeve so that she could slip her arm into it more easily. Caught a little off guard, she shrugged into the coat and for a second she thought he might try and settle it around her shoulders, but he stepped back.
It was that precise moment that Bella realised she and Chase lived opposite each other and that they would basically be going home together.
No. Not home!
Just back. To the complex.
She swallowed, wondering if he was thinking the same thing or whether he’d realised just a little sooner than she had.
‘Do you want to share a cab?’ he asked, hesitating.
Did she want to be in an enclosed space with him, in the dark, late at night?
‘I’d like to walk some of that meal off, but if you—’
‘No, a walk would be good,’ he said, nodding, not meeting her eye. ‘Unless you had somewhere else you needed to be?’
‘Yes, that’s me. The secret party girl of Upstate New York,’ she said wryly.
‘I reckon the papers would have done an exposé on that already, had that been the case.’
Bella smiled, bitterness pulling at her lips. ‘They’ve managed to do so much with what they’ve already had.’
Given what he’d read when he was looking her up online, Chase knew what she meant. He pushed open the door to the restaurant and waited for her to pass him before following her out into the cold.
‘Though it’s not a bad image,’ he admitted as they came onto a quiet sidewalk, now that most people were already where they wanted to be.
‘What?’ Bella asked, the word a puff of white in the darkness of the evening.
‘You as a secret party girl,’ he said, smiling at what he saw in his mind’s eye. ‘I bet you wait until everyone’s in bed, pull on a load of black clothing, some Doc Martens and go raving.’
Bella let out a laugh that half sounded as if it were against her will, and he was slightly delighted. He plunged his hands into the pockets of his long wool coat and tried to ignore the way that warmth began to spread from somewhere that had been cold for a very long time.
‘Raving?’
‘Yeah, you know. Sweaty club, angry music, full rage against the machine,’ he growled out into the night.
She laughed again and she really had to stop doing that because…
‘Dye my hair black? Never.’ She shuddered as if the thought were more appalling than the current frigid temperature of a New York winter’s night.
‘I don’t know. I can see it,’ he said, tilting his head to find the angle to make it work. And he could. Startlingly pale skin, raven’s-wing black hair and eyes like silver moons.
She looked at him as if trying to see what he saw. Trying to see that image of herself in his eyes and he knew he should shut it down.
They turned their backs on Harlem and Fifth Avenue, hugging the side of Central Park, and a comfortable silence settled between them.
‘So, you don’t have any messy stories about getting into trouble as a kid after raiding your parents’ alcohol cupboard?’ he asked, hoping that the tease in his tone softened the jibe.
A shadow passed across her gaze before disappearing.
‘Ahh, no. No, that wasn’t really… That wasn’t what my childhood was like.’
‘So what was it like?’
‘When I was nine, my sister was diagnosed with Non-Hodgkins.’
His stride faltered for a second, his heart suspended in that moment for her, for all that could mean.
‘Cancer?’ he asked carefully.
Bella nodded, her gaze on the sidewalk, maintaining her pace.
‘Things were tough for her and my parents, so it was easier for me to go and stay with my grandma in Massachusetts until she got better.’
Chase frowned. She’d been sent away? Like she had been last year following her wedding, he realised. An inconvenience to be removed.
‘It’s okay,’ she said with a smile. ‘They needed to focus on her, and Grandma could focus on me. She used to take me to galleries.’
‘Hence the love of art.’
‘Hence the love of art,’ she confirmed. ‘And of course, there were afternoon teas.’
‘Of course,’ Chase duly repeated. ‘How long was your sister in hospital?’ he asked, instead of, How long were you sent away for?
‘A year and a half. And Bea got better, and I went home,’ Bella concluded with a dazzling smile.
A smile Chase was seriously beginning to dislike. It was as if she used it as a distraction. But he saw the hurt beneath the glitter in her eye. He knew that hurt.
