Love Beyond Words (City Lights: San Francisco Book 1) (27 page)

“I’ll go to the cops. I will, Cliff, I swear it.”

He expected threats or refusals. He didn’t expect laughter. Cliff leaned back farther in his chair until he was in danger of falling out of it. Tears of mirth streamed from the corners of his eyes to become lost in flabby folds of his cheeks.

“Aww,” he huffed, “isn’t that adorable? Is that just fucking
precious
?”

David’s cheeks burned. “You think I’m bluffing? Watch me, Cliff. This ends now.”

He turned and opened the door. It jerked to a stop and slammed shut again—Jesse’s hand splayed flat on the door, his arm barred David’s way.

“Jesse—”

With speed that belied his huge size, Cliff was out of his chair and slamming David against the wall, one meaty hand wrapped around his neck.

“You don’t talk to Jesse, you talk to me.”

Pain radiated up David’s skull and he gasped frantically for breath, clawing at the hands that held him.

“You think I’m stupid? You must think I’m stupid to barge in here like this and make demands you have no business making.”

His hand abruptly withdrew. David slid to the ground, gasping. Cliff leaned against the front of his desk, looming over him.

“I’m going to clarify a few things for you, Dave, so that you’ll know better next time you to try to fuck with me.” He counted off on his fat fingers. “First of all, you’re not going to the police. Not now. Not ever. You’d be incriminating yourself as an accessory and you’ll go to jail. That’s a fact. Secondly, you’re not going to go to the police because if any one of us—Jesse, Garrett or myself—get nabbed, your writer friend dies. You get me? You think I don’t have other guys? Guys who, with a word from me, wouldn’t put a bullet through his eye? It’d be pretty easy to do, once he reveals himself and all. Real easy.”

David shook his head, whimpering. “No, no, no.”

“Yes, yes, yes.” Cliff chuckled. “If I get pinched, Mendón is
dead.
Are you picking up what I’m putting down, Dave?”

David nodded miserably.

“And thirdly, because you come in here, causing all this trouble…next month I want thirty thousand dollars.”

“Cliff…I can’t! It’s too much…And you don’t understand,” David cried. “He’s selling the stock. He won’t get the checks and then I can’t—”

“Again, not my problem. I don’t care what you do or what it takes, but I want my thirty thousand dollars on the first of every month your boyfriend’s going to wind up with a hole in his head, you read? Now, get out.”

#

Jesse watched David shuffle out of the office like a sick old man. After he was gone, Cliff’s fierce expression and clenched fists relaxed. He chuckled and resumed his seat behind his desk.

Jesse shuffled his feet. “You haven’t told anyone else about our deal, have you?”

“Of course not,” Cliff sniffed. He knocked a cigarette out of battered pack on his desk and lit it. “Dave doesn’t need to know that. But how else am I going to keep him in line?” He snorted a laugh. “Right now, I got him thinking we’re the fucking mob.”

Jesse jammed his hands in his pockets. “Why don’t you cut the guy some slack? He looks like he’s on the edge already. All nervy and twitchy. I don’t like it.”

“No, but you like the money, don’t you, Jess?” Cliff was smiling through a haze of blue smoke. “You didn’t seem all that concerned about poor Dave’s mental health when I cut you your share last month.”

Jesse shrugged. “Just think it’s getting a little out of hand is all.” He glanced at Cliff from the corner of his eye. “You really going to off this writer guy?”

Cliff blew smoke out through his nose. “It’ll never come to that.”

“How do you know? Thirty grand?” Jesse blew air out of his cheeks. “What if Mendón catches him taking it?”

“Then the party’s over, fun while it lasted, no harm, no foul. Dave wouldn’t tattle on us after the fact. He wouldn’t want to put Mendón ‘in danger.’ You saw him, right? The fag’s obviously in love with the guy.”

Jesse opened his mouth to say more but Cliff was getting that look in his eye—the one he usually got right before he called in his ‘little’ brother to crack some skulls.

“All right, you’re the boss,” Jesse said, holding up his hands. He turned to go.

“How’s Marietta feeling? Better?”

Jesse stopped, his back to Cliff. “Yeah, better. Thanks.”

“That extra money is helping to pay down some of those medical bills, yes?”

“Yeah, Cliff. It is.”

“Yeah, I thought so. Your cut of thirty grand would help even more, I’m guessing.”

“Yeah, boss. Thanks.” Jesse went out and held the door as it closed. Sometimes it slammed shut if one wasn’t careful and that pissed Cliff off.

He made sure it didn’t.

The sun was warm on Julian’s face; his immense windows were streaming with sunlight. Dust motes danced, and in his hand the velvet box turned over and over. He smiled. All of the pieces in his life were coming together, converging on one point in the not-too-distant future. He couldn’t see it clearly yet; it was a starburst on a vast horizon. The new book, the end of his anonymity, and Natalie…His hand holding the box squeezed.

It was so easy, it was almost frightening. He had only to do his work and love her and the rest would fall into place. He could hear her laughter, taste her on his lips, and he marveled that she was his.

Julian opened the box. The sunlight was caught and refracted in a thousand tiny prisms that seemed to have no end to their depth. His pulse quickened and he snapped the box shut again, turned over and over in his hand. He rested his chin on the other, his fingers concealing the pensive smile.

I already asked and she said yes.

It didn’t count, of course. A whim. His love for her had prompted the words to pour out, and she’d been half asleep and unaware, not comprehending. But she’d said yes, and it had thrilled his heart, and solidified the certainty he’d had almost since the first night they’d spoken: that he wanted to spend the rest of his life with her. He’d bought the ring half-wondering why he hadn’t bought it sooner, and cherished the hope she’d say yes when he asked again, properly.

The front door beeped and then opened, pulling Julian from his thoughts. David came in, carrying some small parcels and two coffees, the white cups branded with the familiar green mermaid.

“Morning, Julian,” David said, and gave a quick glance around. “Natalie here?”

Julian could hear him strain to sound casual. “No, David. She’s not. She’s in class.”

“Okay,” David said. “I just didn’t want to intrude.”

“You’re not. You never are.” Julian felt warm all over. “I think you know by now that I plan on going public. Everything will change when the new book is published, but please don’t fear you’ll be lost in the shuffle. I want you to remain a part of my life, as employee and friend. I mean that.”

A flicker of a smile came and went on David’s face. “It’s just going to take some time to get used to, I suppose. When, uh…when do you think the book will be finished? A couple months?”

“I thought so,” Julian said. He extricated himself from the sunbeam with a stretch and went to his desk in the library. He flipped open the first page of the first of five composition books. “But now I’m thinking it might be sooner.” He bit his lip, reading over the first lines. “At the risk of sounding arrogant, I think this is my best work yet.”                           

“Sooner?”

Julian shut the book. “I think so. I don’t believe it’s going to take me as long to polish it up as I had thought. It sort of…flooded out of me in a rush and I don’t believe there’s too much I want to change.”

“That’s nice,” David said and busied himself with something behind the kitchen counter.

Julian smiled. David had never cared for the particulars of his writing beyond handling the income it generated. He hadn’t an artist’s heart. Not like Natalie. Natalie who loved her numbers, who could order the world with their exactness and yet see infinities between them. His hand found the box he had stuffed into his pocket.

“It’s all Natalie’s doing. She was my muse, if you could call it that. Just being in her presence made it so easy to connect to the part of me that produces all this.” He waved his hand at the stack of books.

Julian took out the box and opened it, holding it up even though David was too far away to see much more than the glitter of diamonds.

David stopped whatever he was doing. His face was colorless, his mouth hung open like a door torn half off its hinges.

“I know it’s another adjustment,” Julian said, “but I’m showing this to you first. I want you to understand that your inclusion in the new life that is about to begin is not a fluke or lip service.”

David seemed to recover himself. He traversed the space between the kitchen and living room, carrying the two coffees. He handed one to Julian and peered into the box.             

“It’s a beaut.”

“Do you think she will like it?”

“I don’t think she’ll be able to help herself. Look at that rock!” David chuckled and took a sip of his coffee. “Mmm, that’s good stuff.”

“It’s not too much?” Julian inspected the ring again. “She has such delicate hands…”

“She’ll love it.” And then Julian found himself engulfed in David’s embrace. “Congratulations.”

Julian was careful not to show his discomfort. He had never minded David’s physically exuberant manner before, not even after David had confessed he was attracted to him a year earlier. But now David’s embraces hummed with a strange tension, and Julian had the notion that his friend would just as soon strike him as he would hug him. He recalled the night of David’s confession, and a pang of guilt dimmed his joy.
Is it still hard on him? To see me with someone else?
He started to ask David if perhaps it was too much; if it would be better if David worked elsewhere, as he had asked that night a year ago. But David retreated to his office with a broad, parting smile.

Julian retired the ring to his pocket. He had only the faintest idea about how he would propose to Natalie and it wasn’t in San Francisco. There was a lot planning left to do but that would come later. His book waited.

He sat at his desk in the library and started up his laptop to begin the work of transcribing the hand-written work into the electronic, editing it as he went. He had toyed with the notion of doing this at the café but he needed to focus. It was well and good to have the buzz of the city around him—and Natalie’s intoxicating presence—as he put his story down for the first time, but now he needed silence and to look at it with a critical eye. He drank the coffee David had bought—a vanilla-flavored latte—and set to work.

The digital clock on his desk showed eleven-thirty when Julian’s stomach churned uncomfortably and drew him out of his story. He took several deep breaths but the nausea came fast and quick. He hadn’t even time to run for the bathroom, but scrambled for the wastebasket under his desk. He got it just in time. A second, violent surge immediately followed the first, and dizziness assailed him. Blood rushed to his face with pressure as his stomach clenched to empty itself. He gasped for air and then swallowed—a mistake as his stomach wouldn’t tolerate even his own saliva.

Julian fell to the floor and rolled his weak, jelly-like limbs into a ball to wait until the nausea passed. For ten minutes he lay still, willing his body to right itself and settle from the vicious episode. When he thought it was safe to move, he stumbled to the sofa and hauled himself on it. Unthinking, he swallowed again—the acrid flavor of soured vanilla. With shocking immediacy, he vomited again but there was nothing left in him, only air and bile and saliva that dribbled off his lip. His heart galloped in his chest and his hands shook as if electric current ran through them.

“David,” he called when he could. “Help me.”

#

David laid a cold compress on Julian’s forehead and dabbed his mouth with a washcloth. “The flu is still going around,” he said. “That must be it. You have all the symptoms.”

Julian nodded weakly. He lay on his bed, one arm flung over his face. Earlier, David had watched the effects of the ipecac syrup take hold from the cover of the hallway. Of course, Julian had called for him, and David rushed in; the valiant hero who could stand the sight and smell of vomit—anything for his beloved.