The Dangerous Seduction (18 page)

“It was Daisy’s favorite movie,” Ryan mumbles.

“Of course it was,” says Joseph and he does that twitching thing with his mouth. “Is there any beer left?”

“In the refrigerator. If you’re going, could you get me one?”

Joseph comes back with two beers. He sinks onto the end of the couch, dislodging Ryan’s feet. They fall to the floor with a thud. Ryan groans and struggles to pull himself into a half-sitting sort-of slouch, his toes brushing against Joseph’s thigh.

“Are you drunk?” Joseph asks.

He shrugs. “Not really. Only had four or five beers. Need more than that to get wasted.”

“Right, sure you do,” says Joseph, not looking convinced.

On the TV, Madame de Tourvel is breaking down, begging the Vicomte de Valmont to stop it, to stop breaking her heart. Ryan takes another deep pull on his beer.

“This is a great movie, though,” Joseph says.

“Yup.” He nods his head, listens to the dramatic rise of music, watches the Vicomte stride out of the room, his expression written in stone. “Tragic, though,” he mutters, remembering Daisy’s words on the subject.

“Not really,” says Joseph. “He got what he deserved. He let her beat him—the other one, Glen Close.”

“She gets her comeuppance in the end,” he says.

“Not in the book,” says Joseph.

Ryan squints at him. “Huh, really?”

“Uh-huh. Though, considering it’s supposed to be set right before the French Revolution, I imagine that her triumph would’ve been short-lived. You can’t do much scheming with no head.” He takes a pull on his beer and raises his eyebrows at Ryan in an uncharacteristically dorky fashion.

“I guess not,” he agrees.

Joseph plants his bottle on the coffee table and bends to retrieve the remote from the floor where Ryan let it fall hours earlier. He stops the DVD and flicks off the TV.

“Hey, I was watching that!”

“It will keep,” Joseph says. He lets his hand fall to his lap, cups himself through his black dress pants. “This won’t.”

“Oh.” Ryan grins, kinda goofy and definitely kinda drunk now. The movie, his tiredness, his guilt, and everything else immediately vanish as his eyes track greedily from where Joseph is blatantly fondling himself through his slacks, over the shape of his chest and shoulders in that expensive white shirt, to his face, and his half-parted lips and lidded eyes. He licks his lips, then surges forward, pushing Joseph’s hand away and flicking open the buttons on his pants with surprising dexterity.

He wakes up hours later and blinks at the digital alarm clock display: 3:36 a.m. He wonders fuzzily what woke him. Distantly, as if through a thick curtain, he hears the soft murmur of a man’s voice—Joseph’s voice—echoing around the huge bedroom. Joseph is standing in front of the huge arched window that looks onto the street. The panes of glass cast intricate shadows over his naked body. Ryan watches him sleepily, not bothering to try and listen in on the conversation. Joseph is speaking too quietly anyway, bowing his head as he speaks. He looks ethereal and distant; the bleak, stark light makes him look cold and faraway.
Untouchable
, Ryan thinks.
He’s untouchable.
He shivers, pulling the comforter closer and burrowing under the covers. He closes his eyes and he’s asleep a few moments later.

J
OSEPH
IS
gone by the time Ryan wakes up the next day. He showers, dresses, and goes to catch the subway. To his surprise, his local subway station is closed. A small group of people are standing outside, looking a mixture of angry, irritable, and resigned; some of them are arguing with the harassed-looking MTA dude standing in front of the closed gate.

“Fucking suicides.” A guy in a suit turns around, addressing his comment to Ryan, his eyes narrowed and face dark with anger. “It’s fucking rude is what it is. Okay, so you wanna kill yourself, how about you do it in a way that isn’t gonna ruin my day.”

Ryan gives him a wan smile and turns away. Sighing, he turns up his collar and starts to walk.

It takes him almost an hour to walk the forty blocks to midtown, taking a shortcut through Central Park, then getting held up in the crowds of commuters and traffic. It’s around 8:30 a.m. by the time he finally makes it to the office, and the place is eerily quiet. A couple of desk phones ring unanswered and desks sit empty. Even Estelle’s workstation is empty, and Joseph’s office door stands open with no Joseph in residence. The only other sound is the TV in the break room. Usually kept turned down low, it’s been turned up loud, the morning announcer delivering some local news story.

Almost everybody, Joseph among them, is standing in the break room staring up at the TV screen. Some of the women have red eyes and tear tracks on their faces.

“What’s going on?” Ryan whispers to Krista at the back of the crowd.

“That person this morning, on the subway,” she says, her voice cracking. She swallows, and a tear escapes and rolls down her face. “It was Fiona.”

Ryan’s blood runs cold. “What? No! No way. I can’t believe it.”

In front of him, Estelle turns around and regards him steadily. “It’s true.”

“But I only saw her last night! We worked on the brief together. She was… she seemed fine. When did it happen?”

This time it’s Joseph who turns around to look at him. “This morning. Early.”

“Oh God,” he whispers.

Joseph looks at him for what feels like a long time, his expression sympathetic, his face drawn. He looks older than he did last night, the harsh, bright light in the break room doing him no favors this morning. Joseph clears his throat, raises the remote in his hand, and turns down the volume on the TV. Everybody seems to stir, blinking and staring white-faced at each other.

“This is a truly horrible thing to have happened,” Joseph says. “And I know that you will all need to take some time to deal with it. Fiona was one of us, a trusted and valued member of this team. She will be missed, and she will be hard to replace.”

Ryan thinks of all the people who have come and gone in the four months he’s been working here, all of them so easily replaced. Fiona was good at her job, but really, she’s just like everybody else and she’ll be easily replaced too. But around him, everybody is swallowing the lie, nodding and sobbing quietly, tears flowing more freely, as if Joseph has finally given them leave to show emotion. Ryan’s own eyes are still dry, and his heart is beating fast. He’s still not processing it. The idea that Fiona—Fiona who last night had seemed so—so….

He thinks back to last night, to Fiona’s abrupt departure. She
had
left suddenly, and she’d—it’s obvious now in hindsight but he’d been too distracted at the time to really notice—but she must’ve found something, she must’ve seen something on one of those CDs they’d been given to look through. But he’d been so preoccupied with his own issues that he’d let her go, so busy wallowing in his own fuck-ups and getting hard over Joseph. And so Fiona had left, and gone home, and been killed by a subway train the next morning.

This is the second death since he’s been at this firm. Two people involved with the McNeil case are dead: Phil Cartwright hanging from a beam in his garage and Fiona under a subway train. Of course, they could be coincidences, and with Phil Cartwright there was plenty of evidence that he was unhinged enough to kill himself, but with Fiona….

“They’re calling it an accident,” Krista sobs. “That’s what they said on the news—an accident.”

“An accident? But I thought—people said a suicide.”

“No, it was an accident, Ryan.” Estelle glides into view. Even she looks shaken, her customary resolve and steeliness missing. “Witnesses reported her tripping and falling onto the line. It’s so terrible, just… just awful.”

“Hey, hey, it’s okay.” Joseph places a hand on her shoulder, cutting her off. He squeezes gently. “Don’t think about it. It’s okay.”

Estelle nods, turning a pale, shaken face to him. They exchange a look—something passes between them—and then she’s pulling away from Joseph and heading back to her desk. Ryan blinks and Joseph gives him a faint smile of acknowledgment before he’s turning away again and going to comfort some more people. He tells them all to go back to their desks; there’s still work to do, and that’s the best way to take their minds off things.

Ryan takes the advice and goes slowly back to his office. It’s in the same state as last night. The cleaners know better than to touch anything when they’re working a big case. The coffee mug Fiona was using last night is still sitting on the edge of his desk, the piles of CDs and papers she was working on are heaped up beside it. He stares down at them; there’s an empty CD case on top of the pile and he picks it up. This was the one she was looking at, the one she had in her laptop when she left.

A knock on the door has him spinning around. He quickly drops the empty CD case back onto the desk behind him and looks up to see Joseph standing in the doorway. Joseph comes inside and pushes the door closed behind him.

“I’m sorry, Ryan. I know you two were working on something together. I know you were probably one of the last people to see her alive.”

Ryan blinks back at him, not sure how to respond to that. Joseph looks genuinely sympathetic. He approaches Ryan slowly, almost tentatively. He raises his hand and cups the side of Ryan’s face. His thumb strokes over Ryan’s cheekbone. Ryan nuzzles into his hand, taking in the scent of Joseph’s skin. Joseph’s palm smells of soap and his skin feels dry. He turns his mouth into Joseph’s palm, opens his lips, and bites down on the heel of his hand. Joseph hisses and surges forward, pressing his body up against Ryan’s, falling between the V of his thighs. Ryan unclenches his teeth and slathers his tongue over the bitten flesh. Joseph’s hand is sticky and red and shiny from his saliva.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m not sure why I did that.”

“It’s okay. It doesn’t hurt,” Joseph says, dropping his hand.

“I can’t believe it. I mean, last night, everything was normal, and then—”

Joseph pulls away from him, taking a step backward and straightening his clothes. “Horrible things happen. They happen all the time. Accidents.” He trails off, and Ryan remembers Joseph’s father, the road accident that killed him.

“I guess,” he says slowly, “but I just think….”

“What?”

“There was something. Last night. I think she might’ve found something. I don’t know, but it’s kind of a big coincidence. Don’t you think?”

Joseph raises his head. “What do you mean?”

Ryan feels behind him for the empty CD case. “This,” he says, waving it between them. “Whatever was on this—and there was something. Her whole attitude changed all of a sudden, soon as she noticed it. We were just talking before, just talking normally, and then she noticed something and she just clammed up and practically ran out of here. Whatever it was, it shook her up.”

“But she didn’t say anything? Didn’t tell you what she’d noticed?”

“No,” he says regretfully. He blows out a breath and picks up Fiona’s coffee mug. “This was hers. She hadn’t even finished her coffee. She left so quickly she didn’t finish it. She loved coffee; she always finished it.”

“Ryan, what exactly are you suggesting here?” Joseph’s tone is that same careful one, his expression, shuttered and professional, giving nothing away.

“I don’t know. I mean, did they find her laptop? Was it… was it with her when she—”

“I don’t know, the police didn’t give me any details.” Joseph sighs. He comes forward again and lays one hand on Ryan’s arm. “Listen to me: don’t think about it. It was horrible and tragic, but dwelling on it isn’t going to help.”

“Joseph, she was crushed to death by a fucking subway train!”

“I know, I know that,” Joseph says and the expressionless façade is breaking. He sounds frustrated, worn-down. He licks his lips again, moves in close, letting his forehead rest against the side of Ryan’s face. He breathes in and out for a couple of beats and Ryan feels his own body loosen a little. “How about we do something tonight? Like, something normal… something normal people do. You want to catch a movie, Ryan?”

It’s so apropos of nothing that Ryan kind of wants to laugh. He can’t imagine the last time Joseph took time out for something as normal as going to see a movie.

“Uh, okay. Okay, that could be good.”

“Awesome.” Joseph sighs again, then pulls away from him. “I should go. So much to do.”

“But we are going to the movies, right? You’re not going to stand me up?”

“Count on it,” Joseph says, and he smiles, sudden and blinding and really out of place. “Man, it’s been freaking years since I went to the movies. Pick something good.”

He stares after Joseph’s retreating back as he goes, leaving the office door open behind him. He takes a seat at his desk, drops his head into his hands, and sighs heavily. He feels lost and confused, and he suddenly wants more than anything to call Daisy. When his mom broke her leg, when he failed the bar exam the first time, when his dad lost his job, whenever anything bad used to happen to him, his first port of call was always Daisy. Daisy with her soft, sympathetic voice and big brown eyes and warm unconditional love; Daisy who would cook and clean and look after him when he was killing himself with study; Daisy who always expected so much from him; Daisy who’d wanted a version of him that he knew he’d never be able to live up to; Daisy whose heart he’d ripped to shreds and stomped over; Daisy who’d destroyed every item of clothing he owned and hated his guts.

He feels a wave of grief, of loss—for Fiona, for Daisy, for what he and Daisy had—for his own stupid, horrible behavior.

Was it all worth it? Is being with Joseph that important to him? Joseph doesn’t know him. Joseph doesn’t love him or understand him or support him like Daisy did. He’s not even sure if Joseph likes him. Sure, Joseph likes fucking around with him. Joseph likes his body and his cock and seems happy to tolerate his company when he’s not working (which isn’t that often), but Joseph doesn’t
know
him. And sure, maybe things with Daisy weren’t as good as they used to be. Maybe he wasn’t ready for marriage or kids or all that commitment stuff that she’d been longing for; but right now—right now—when the shit’s hit the fan and he feels like crap and one of his coworkers has died in one of the most horrific ways possible—right now—he wants to call Daisy and have her reassure him and tell him everything’s okay and she forgives him.