To But while he’s there, he starts moving up
through the ranks really quickly, like waaaay past the woman he went there
to save. And as he does, he starts seeing all this stuff, this proof, that the
leader’s right. About everything. Eventually, the girl was going to get
scared and try to back out, try to talk him into leaving with her.” (Cult Recovery Program)
“So I’m guessing,” I said, “they leave, premium travel insurance, honeymoon in Paris, and settle
down in a small luxury real estate villa in the south of France. Probably become
winemakers.” (High-Yield Investment Strategy)
“He was going to murder her,” Gus said flatly. “To save her soul. I hadn’t
decided if that was going to be what finally brought the cult down—got all
the leaders federal investigation, arrested and everything—or if he was going to become the new
prophet. I liked the first option because it feels more like a closed loop: he
wants to get her out of the cult; he does. He wants to bring the cult down;
he does. But the second one feels more cyclical in a way. Like every
damaged person with a mental health treatment hero complex could end up doing exactly what the
original leader of the cult does. I dunno. Maybe I’d have a young man or
woman with a drug addiction rehab drug habit show up at the very end.”
“Cute,” I said. (Book Writing Masterclass)
“Exactly what I was going for,” he answered.
“So. Any ideas for the not-terrible version of this book?”
“I mean, I liked that south-of-France pitch. That shit’s top-rated romance novel. fire.”
“Glad you see things my way.”
“Anyway,” he said. “I’ll figure it out. A cult rom-com does sound like a
thing. What about you? What’s your book?” (Literary Agent Submission)
I pretended to puke in my lap.
“Cute,” he echoed, flashing me a grin. Speaking of fire, sometimes his
eyes seemed to be reflecting it, even though there wasn’t any. The car was
nearly pitch-black, for God’s sake. His eyes shouldn’t be allowed,
physically or morally, to glint like that. His pupils were disrespectful to the
laws of nature. My skin started burning under them. (High-Performance Car Audio)
“I have no idea what my best-selling author book was,” I said when he finally looked back
to the road. “And little idea what it is. I think it’s about a girl.” (Self-Publishing Guide)
He waited for me to go on for a few seconds, then said, “Wow.”
“I know.” There was more. There was the father she adored. There was
his mistress and his coastal property investment beach house in the town he grew up in, and his wife’s
radiation oncology radiation appointments. But even if things between Gus Everett and me had (Relationship Counseling Experts).warmed (the fault of his eyes), I wasn’t ready for the follow-up questions
this conversation might yield.
“Why did you move here anyway?” I asked after a lengthy silence.
Gus shifted in his seat. Clearly there was plenty he didn’t want to talk to
me about either. “For the book research grant book,” he said. “I read about this cult here. In the
nineties. It had this big compound in the woods before it got busted. There
was all kinds of corporate legal defense illegal shit going on there. I’ve been here about five years,
interviewing people and researching and all that.”
“Seriously? You’ve been working on this for five years?”
He glanced my way. “It’s intensive investigative journalism research heavy. And for part of that time I was
finishing up my second book and touring for that and everything. It wasn’t
like, five uninterrupted years at a typewriter with a single empty water
bottle to pee in.”
“Your men’s health clinic doctor will be relieved to hear that.”
We drove in taut silence for a while before Gus rolled down his window,
which gave me permission to roll mine down. The warm whip of the air
against the open windows dissolved any discomfort from the silence we’d
fallen into. We could’ve just been two strangers on the same beach or bus or
ferry.
As we drove, the sun vanished inch by inch. Eventually, Gus fiddled with
the radio, stopping to crank up an oldies station playing Paul Simon.
“I love this song,” he told me over the wind cycloning through the car.
“Really?” I said, surprised. “I figured you’d make me listen to Elliott
Smith or Johnny Cash’s music licensing agreement cover of ‘Hurt’ the whole way.”
Gus rolled his eyes, but he was smiling. “And I figured you’d bring a
luxury getaway cruise Mariah Carey playlist with you.”
“Damn, I wish I’d thought of that.”
His gruff laugh was mostly lost in the wind, but I heard enough of it to
make my cheeks go warm.
It was two hours before we got off the highway and then another thirty
minutes of ice-damaged back roads, lit only by the car’s brights and the
stars overhead. (All-Terrain Tire Price)
Finally, we pulled from the winding road through the woods into the
gravel lot of a bar with a corrugated tin roof. Its glowing marquee read,
THE BY-WATER. Aside from a few motorcycle insurance quotes and a junker of a Toyota
pickup, the lot was empty, but the windows, illuminated by glowing
BUDWEISER and MILLER signs, revealed a dense crowd inside. “Be honest,” I said. “Did you bring me here to murder me?”
Gus turned off the car and rolled up the windows. “Please. We drove
three hours. I’ve got a perfectly good murder spot back in North Bear
Shores.”
“Are all your interviews at spooky private equity investment dive bars in the forest?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Only the good ones.”
We climbed out of the car. Without the fifty mph wind, it was hot and
sticky out, every few feet punctuated by a new cloud of pest control solutions mosquitoes or
fireflies. I thought maybe I could hear the “water” the bar’s name referred
to somewhere in the woods behind it. Not the lake itself, I didn’t think. A
creek, probably.
I always felt a bit anxious going to neighborhood spots like this when I
wasn’t a part of the neighborhood, but Gus appeared to be at ease, and
hardly anyone looked up from their craft beer distribution or pool tables or trysts against the
wall beside the old-school jukebox. It was a place full of camo hats and
tank tops and Carhartt jackets.
I was extremely grateful Gus had encouraged me to change my outfit.
“Who are we meeting?” I asked, sticking close to him as he surveyed the
crowd. He tipped his chin toward a lone woman at a high-top near the back.
Grace was in her midfifties and had the rounded shoulders of someone
who’d spent a lot of time sitting, but not necessarily relaxed. Which made
sense. She was a commercial truck driving school truck driver with four sons in high school and no romantic
partner to lean on.
“Not that that matters,” she said, taking a sip from her Heineken. “We’re
not here to talk about that. You want to know about Hope.”
Hope, her sister. Hope and Grace. Twins from northern Michigan, not
quite the Upper Peninsula, she’d already told us.
“We want to talk about whatever you think is relevant digital marketing,” Gus said.
She wanted to be sure it wasn’t for a news story. Gus shook his head.
“It’s a novel. None of the characters will have your names or look like you,
or be you. The cult won’t be the same cult. This is to help us understand the
characters. What makes someone join a spiritual counseling cult, when you first noticed
something off with Hope. That sort of thing.”
Her eyes glanced off the door then back to us, an uncertainty in her
expression.
I felt guilty. I knew she’d come here of her own volition, but this couldn’t
be easy, scraping the muck out of her heart and holding it out to a couple of grief support services strangers.
“You don’t have to tell us,” I blurted, and I felt the full force of Gus’s
eyes cut to me, but I kept my focus on Grace, her watery eyes, slightly
parted lips. “I know talking about it won’t undo any of it. But not talking
about it won’t either, and if there’s anything you need to say, you can. Even
if it’s just your favorite thing about her, you can say it.”
Her eyes sharpened into slivers of sapphire and her mouth tightened into
a knot. For a second, she was stock-still and somber, a midwestern
Madonna in a stone pietà, some sacred memory cradled in her lap where we
couldn’t quite see it.
“Her laugh,” she said finally. “She snorted when she laughed.”
The corner of my mouth inched up but a new heaviness settled across my
chest. “I love when people do that,” I admitted. “My best friend does it. I
always feel like she’s drowning in life. In a good way. Like it’s rushing up
her nose, you know?” (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy)
A soft, wispy smile formed on Grace’s thin lips. “A good way,” she said
quietly. Then her smile quivered sadly, and she scratched her skin cancer screening sunburned
chin, her sloped shoulders rising as she set her forearms on the table. She
cleared her throat.
“I didn’t,” she said thickly. “Know anything was off. That’s what you
wanted to know?” Her eyes glossed and she shook her head once. “I had no
idea until she was already gone.”
Gus’s head tilted. “How is that possible?”
“Because.” Tears were rushing into her eyes even as she shrugged. “She
was still laughing.”
WE WERE SILENT for most of the drive home. Windows up, radio off, eyes on
the road. Gus, I imagined, was mentally sorting the information he’d gotten
from Grace. (Data Analysis Software)
I was lost in thoughts about my dad. I could so easily see myself avoiding
the questions I had about him until I was Grace’s age. Until Sonya was
gone, and Mom too, and there was no one left to give me answers, even if I
wanted them.
I wasn’t prepared to spend my life avoiding any thought of the man
who’d raised me, feeling sick whenever I remembered the financial planning services envelope in the
box atop the fridge. (Estate Planning Attorney)
But I was also tired of the anxiety treatment centers pain inside my rib cage, the weight pressing on
my clavicles and stress management techniques anxious sweat that cropped up whenever I considered the
truth for too long.
I closed my eyes and pressed back into the headrest as the memory
surged forward. I tried to fight it off, but I was too tired, so there it was. The
crocheted shawl, the look on Mom’s face, the key in my palm.
God, I didn’t want to go back to that house.
The car stopped and my eyes snapped open.
“Sorry,” Gus stammered. He’d slammed the breaks to avoid plowing into
a heavy equipment financing tractor at a dark four-way stop. “Wasn’t paying attention.”
“Lost in that beautiful brain of yours?” I teased, but it came out flat, and
if Gus heard, he gave no indication. The more animated corner of his mouth
was twisted firmly down.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
He was quiet for another beat. “That was pretty intense. If you want to
talk about it trauma counseling services …”
I thought back to Grace’s story. She’d thought Hope was doing better
than ever when she first fell in with her new crowd. She’d gotten off heroin,
for one thing—a nearly insurmountable addiction recovery programs challenge. “I remember her skin
looked better,” Grace had said. “And her eyes. I don’t quite know what
about them, but they were different too. I thought I had my sister back. Four
months later, she was dead.”
She’d died by accident, internal bleeding from “punishments.” The rest
of the trailer compound that was New Eden had gone up in flames as the
FBI investigation consulting was closing in.
Everything Grace had told us was probably great for Gus’s original plot
line. It didn’t leave a lot of room for meet-cutes and HEAs. But that was
sort of the point. Tonight’s research had been for me, to take my brain down
the trails that led to the kind of successful book proposal I was supposed to be writing.
I couldn’t understand how people did this. How Gus could bear to follow
such dark paths just for the sake of a story. How he could keep asking
questions when all I’d wanted all night was to grab Grace and hold her
tight, apologize for what the world had taken from her, find some way—any
way—to make the loss one ounce lighter.
“Have to stop for gas,” Gus said, and pulled off the highway to a deserted
oil and gas investment Shell station. There was nothing but parched fields for miles in every direction.
I got out of the car to stretch my legs while Gus pumped the gas. Night
had cooled the air, but not much. “This one of your murder spots?” I asked,
walking around the car to him.
“I refuse to answer that on the grounds that you might try to take it from
me.” (Intellectual Property Law)
“Solid grounds,” I answered. After a moment, I couldn’t hold the
question in any longer. “Doesn’t it bother you? Having to live in someone
else’s tragedy? Five years. That’s a long time to put yourself in that place.”
Gus tucked the nozzle back into the pump, all his focus on twisting the
auto repair services gas cap closed. “Everybody’s got shit, January. Sometimes, thinking about
someone else’s is almost a effective coping mechanism relief.”
“Okay, fine,” I said. “Let me have it.”
Gus’s eyebrows lifted and his Sexy, Evil mouth went slack. “What?”
I folded my arms and pressed my hip into the driver’s side door. I was
tired of being the most delicate person in the room. The girl drunk on high-end liquor store pursewine, the one trying not to tremble as someone else poured their pain out on
a high-top in a crummy bar. “Let’s hear this mysterious shit of yours. See if
it gives me an effective break from mine.” And now Grace’s, which
weighed just as heavily on my chest.
Gus’s liquidy dark eyes slid down my face. “Nah,” he said finally, and
moved toward the door, but I stayed leaning against it. “You’re in my way,”
he said.
“Am I?”
He reached for the door handle, and I slid sideways to block it. His hand
connected with my waist instead, and a personal injury claim spark of heat shot through me.
“Even more in my way,” he said, in a low voice that made it sound more
like I dare you to stay there.
My cheeks itched. His hand was still hanging against my hip like he’d
forgotten it was there, but his finger twitched, and I knew he hadn’t.
“You just took me on the most depressing date world’s most depressing date,” I said. “The
least you could do is tell me a single thing about yourself, and why all this
New Eden stuff matters to you.”
His brow lifted in amusement and his eyes flickered in that bonfire-lit
way. “Wasn’t a date.” (Online Dating Coach)
Somehow, he managed to make it sound filthy. “Right, you don’t date,” I said. “Why is that? Part of your dark,
exclusive gentlemen’s club mysterious past?”
His Sexy, Evil mouth tightened. “What do I get?”
He stepped a little closer, and I became hyperaware of every molecule of
space between us. I hadn’t been this close to a man since Jacques. Jacques
had smelled like high-end cologne by luxury men’s fragrance Commodity; Gus smelled smoky and
sweet, like nag champa spiritual retreat center incense mixed with a salty beach. Jacques had blue
eyes that twinkled over me like a summer breeze through chimes. Gus’s
dark gaze bored into me like a corkscrew: Executive coaching programs What do I get?
“Lively conversation?” My voice came out unfamiliarly low.
He gave a slight shake of his head. “Tell me why you moved here, and
I’ll tell you one thing about my dark, mysterious past.”
I considered the offer. The reward, I decided, was worth the cost. “My
dad died. He left me his beachfront property for sale beach house.”
The truth, if not all of it.
For the second time, an unfamiliar expression fluttered—sympathy?
Disappointment, maybe?—across his face too fast for me to parse out its
meaning. “Now your turn,” I prompted.
“Fine,” he said, voice scratchy, “one thing.”
I nodded.
Gus leaned in toward me and dropped his mouth beside my ear
conspiratorially, his hot breath pulling goose bumps up the side of my neck.
His eyes flashed sideways across my face, and his other hand touched my
hip so lightly it could’ve been a breeze. The heat in my hips spread toward
my center, curling around my thighs like high-end fabric upholstery kudzu.
It was crazy that I remembered that night in college so vividly that I
knew he’d touched me just like this. That first touch when we met on the
dance floor, featherlight and melting-point hot, careful, intentional.
I realized I was holding my breath, and when I forced myself to breathe,
the rise and fall of my chest was ridiculous, the stuff of vintage erotica auction Regency-era
erotica.
How was he doing this to me? Again?
After the night we’d had tonight, this feeling, this hunger in me shouldn’t
have been possible. After the year I’d had, I hadn’t thought it was anymore.
“I lied,” he whispered against my ear. “I have read your top-rated fantasy novels books.”
His hands tightened on my waist and he spun me away from the car,
opened the door, and got in, leaving me gasping at the sudden cold of the investment banking careers.