The Kissing Game Page 14

  “You know how much money I made before you got me fired?” He doesn’t wait for me to shake my head. “Four hundred fifty thousand a year … plus bonuses.”

  I wince.

  “You know how much it costs to keep my father in that home?”

  I shake my head.

  “You wouldn’t, would you?” he snaps. “You do things without thinking!” The absence of light on his face makes his blue eyes look as though they could manufacture bullets. Just then, a heavy truck rumbles angrily outside. Its brakes screech and then it roars to life again.

  “Coming here to apologize is about the smartest thing you’ve done,” he laughs. “Brilliant, because that solves everything, doesn’t it?”

  “Look,” I interject, “I’m trying to help get your job back. I mean, I think I might be able to.”

  “Get my job back?” He sours. “You know how much some of those partners hate me? They couldn’t wait to get me out of there. You think you can get my job back? With what? With your little friends?”

  “Well,” I sputter. “I think I might have a way to fix the problem.”

  “You can’t fix anything! There’s nothing in the world you can do. You should’ve realized the consequences of your actions beforehand. What kind of idiot ruins a man’s life without thinking about it beforehand?”

  He strides over to the couch and sits down at the edge, the anger rippling across his glorious face in shadows. Briefly he withdraws his eyes from me and turns them toward the wall, and I wonder if I should reach for my bag and leave. Now would be a good time to get out. Before he kills me. What a mistake it was to come here. What did I expect? I should’ve come when I already had his job back. I should’ve come when I knew what to say.

  Robert chuckles to himself, and I have an urge to ask him “What’s funny?” but I don’t. We sit there silently for several seconds that feel like minutes. Then he loosely wags his finger at me.

  “But there is something,” he suggests. “Remedies do exist.” He looks like a crazed fiend.

  “Remedies?”

  His movement alters the light on his cheek, covering his face with shadows.

  “Injured party, punitive damages. You know, tort law?” he slurs, and I wonder how much he’s been drinking. I dare not ask, however.

  “When the damages are extensive, irreparable.” He speaks as though he’s adrift in his own mind.

  Is he asking me for monetary compensation? Briefly I consider how much money I have in my bank account. Enough to buy him some socks. While I contemplate the quarters at the bottom of my purse, the leather couch screeches as Robert shifts toward me. I have a prickly feeling in my veins that he wants to hurt me, but then again, I always feel that way. His hand travels over me as though he plans to reach for something on the other side of me, but then he clutches my leg and pulls my feet toward him. At the coldness of his touch, I’m sixty percent shock and forty percent concerned. Finding my feet already in his lap, I lean away from him on one elbow. The leather couch beneath my elbows screeches.

  He looks at my shoes as if they’re worthy of destruction. Perhaps he plans to sell my shoes as compensation for ruining his life. Used, they can’t be worth more than ten dollars. One by one, he tugs them off and tosses them far across the room. They slap against the floor and lie there contorted. We both stare at them for several seconds before looking at each other.

  “There are the two basic types of damages,” he explains angrily to my bare feet. “One type involves payment for money lost, like wages, medical costs. Then there are emotional damages for pain and suffering.”

  He turns to look at my face and with both horror and shock I watch as he slides his hand up my leg. His fingers feel like static. Panic flapping in my throat, I grab his hand and squeeze it.

  “What’re you doing?” I ask urgently.

  “Of course, there’re also speculative damages, for all the losses I haven’t yet, but will no doubt incur in the future.” The ropelike muscles in his neck stand. What is he doing?

  “You’re scaring me,” I say calmly, feeling the tremendous heat of his hand on my bare leg.

  “Am I? Hmm. Good.” His hot hand forces itself out of my grip and returns to rising up my leg. Beneath me, the leather couch smells carnal. He leans toward me, his eyes looking thoroughly intoxicated close up. He’s close enough to reveal a small bead of sweat on his forehead. For a moment I think that there’s something wicked about his face. It’s just as beautiful as always, only he looks as though he’s pulled the pin out of the grenade inside his brain.

  “Then we mustn’t forget psychological damages for reckless conduct, the resulting distress, humiliation, and disappointment.” He clutches my calf with his other hand while his hot hand pushes my skirt up to my thighs. His eyes are busy evaluating my legs and then my face. And I’m frozen, trying to reconcile what he expects me to give him as compensation. I look back at the front door. Fifteen paces away from where I sit on the couch. I could just leave my shoes and make a run for it.

  “Robert, I—”

  “Damages have been extensive, but I’m much more interested in remedying the psychological torment.” He plucks a bit of lint off my skirt, which is so high that I’m sure he can see my underwear. The gesture is terrifying.

  “You’re being ridiculous… you’re not serious.”

  “Tort law is always serious. You’ve ruined my life. I just want payment. Nothing personal.” His hand feels larger as it rises slowly until it stops underneath my skirt. He’s still talking about tort law and damages and other crap I’m not listening to. Instead I grab his wrist with both hands but he’s like a drunken ox, but he moves it so effortlessly that he soon clutches the hip of my underwear. The look in his eyes as he does so reminds me of a duel, when two cowboys stand twenty feet away from each other, hands hovering over their holsters. This close up, the smell of alcohol is startling but mixes with his smell and hits my senses like a sledge-hammer of lust.

  “Robert!”

  I look at the bulge his arm makes under the fabric of my skirt. The dim lamplight bounces off his black-brown hair.

  “You can’t possibly think…?” I manage. Underneath my grip, his muscles are iron. He could pull off my underwear completely if he wants.

  “You’re a clever girl. It’s not complicated. What I want involves the fulfillment of a promise, albeit a deceitful one.”

  Suddenly I’m at that strange intersection, the same one I faced when I put the Xanax in the pina colada, when I put the tape of our kiss in the mailbox, when I broke in to the Chairman’s house. That now familiar crossroads. It’s no longer an exciting place but has become dreaded, like walking into a dark tunnel alone. My wrongs have piled up so high that now I must confront remedying those mistakes with sex? … … I can’t even formulate the thought. My mind can’t formulate what he’s asking of me. I wonder if Robert’s intoxicated state has pushed him beyond reason. I wonder if he’s intoxicated often. I wonder if he has a drinking problem. I wonder if I’ve given him a drinking problem. I wonder if sex will solve his drinking problem. Without giving me a chance to think further, he rises and tears off his t-shirt and throws it onto the floor. His skin is pale, muscled, his face emotionless.

  “You’re not being rational,” I manage. “What you’re asking for is ridiculous. It’s—”

  “Utterly rational. Makes perfect sense. Now take off your clothes,” he demands, pointing at my clothes. He scowls as he towers over me. Under different circumstances, if I didn’t know he was drunk, if he hadn’t been the mean boss who made me cry and ruined my life, the sight of him would have pummeled all defenses. Truly magnificent in that painfully glorious kind of way. In the present situation, the sight is like looking a beautiful dragon in the eye and saying, Okay, sure.

  “I will not take off anything.”

  He bends over me while I unknowingly hold the front of my skirt down with both hands. I don’t realize I’m doing this until he takes one look at my hands and smil
es, as if we’re joking. Then his lips are on me. While he kisses me, he removes my hands from my skirt so he can rest his entire weight on me. His jeans feel rough against my bare legs. My body wiggles beneath him. Am I kissing him back? I’m not sure this matters to him. All I can think is that ruining his life has given him a taste for mindless vengeance.

  “A little more effort would be appreciated.”

  “You’re drunk!”

  “I’m saner than I’ve ever been in my life.” He caresses my thigh as if he likes me, but his mouth feels bent on revenge. “I’ve had an epiphany, Caroline, enduring you for two years, listening to your ‘Yes Roberts’ and ‘What-do-you-need Roberts,’ forcing you to wear pants so I won’t have to suffer through your bare legs, treating you like chaff and finding fault so I won’t drag you into a vacant office and lose my job, all that--only to find out you think I’m some imbecile you can play, you can ruin.” I can see the vein that stretches from his temple to his scalp. So near to me, his stark black eyelashes can’t hide the lividness in his blue eyes.

  While I began to understand the fight-or-flight syndrome that so often causes bunny rabbits to flee, Robert fumbles with his jeans. And I begin to understand why he wants this. Revenge. He wants revenge sex. He wants to get even by screwing me.

  I’m sure he’s wearing underwear, but I can’t see them. His mouth comes back to mine; only this time my lips mumble, “Robert!” Wiggling underneath him is fighting a tidal wave. Without restraint, he kicks his pants to the floor and feels as though every muscle in his body tenses against me. He smells of salt and soap and alcohol.

  “Now, your clothes,” he demands, as if they are payment. He weighs a ton while fisting both sides of my skirt.

  “Stop!” I screech, launching my arm muscles to life. Bending one knee, I deadeye him in the groin and feel the soft fabric of his underwear on my bare knee, the yield of bare flesh beneath it. As if a trap-door opens, Robert topples off the couch onto the floor, an expression of wounded animal on his face.

  “You evil little tease!” he chokes.

  “You’re drunk!” I yell, standing and pulling down my skirt. Adjusting my sweater, I make a dash to pick up my shoes off the floor before Robert takes another go at me. I don’t even bother to put them on. I clutch them like little scraps of dignity and dash barefoot toward the front door, where I decide to turn around and say something to him, something really mean and awful, something so bitingly cruel that he’ll remember it while cringing on his deathbed. But when I see his blue eyes glowering up at me from the floor, I’m struck frozen.

  Even now, while he’s intoxicated and rendered harmless, one look from him has the power to reduce me to a girl who cries like a cow. Instead of speaking, I take two steps backward and grab the doorknob with one hand. Better to flee the scene as soon as possible. However, my shoulder grazes the light switch and I accidentally turn the light off, leaving him in darkness. A glimmer of courtesy tells me to turn the light back on, but then I think that leaving him in darkness is what he deserves.

  So I step out into the night and slam Robert’s front door behind me.

  Chapter 12

  “Del plato a la boca se cae la sopa.”

  There´s many a slip between the cup and the lip.

  Outside in front of Robert’s house, the fog makes misty orbs of lampposts on every corner and rolls thickly like thunder-heads above me. When the wind kicks in, my sweater can’t hide me from a cold beating. Since I was in a hurry to get out of Robert’s house, I haven’t fully put on my shoes. Instead I let them smack against my heels like flip flops as I cross the street, round the corner, and scurry past the hamburger place.

  On the train ride home, I don’t bother to sit down. I just hold onto the pole and watch lights in the dark tunnels streak past the window. My bus ride home is full of endless mental articulating in which I berate myself for having gone over to Robert’s. What was I thinking would come out of that? Did I think he would forgive me, shake my hand amicably, and ask me to come back for a game of chess sometime?

  From my bus stop to my apartment, I hear the interminable buzzing of the freeway growing nearer and feel the heaviness of trouble like smokestacks. The flog clips over the tops of tall apartment buildings in my neighborhood, leaving the upper lighted windows looking like hazy headlamps of oncoming vehicles. I pass new graffiti painted in black on a concrete fence outside of a small church. It reads The Devil owns you.

  Soon I stride across the grass toward my apartment. Ted’s apartment is dark, so I assume he is out for the night. For some reason, this is a relief. The darkness from Ted’s apartment makes my steps tenuous toward the stairwell, but just as I turn to ascend the stairs I hear a sound like footsteps and pause. The whole neighborhood remains perfectly still minus the constancy of cars on the freeway, and I gasp as I feel an arm come around my waist and I’m instantly rearranged, turned completely around. About to scream, I hear Ted’s whisper, “Come for a minute.”

  “Jesus, you scared the hell out of me,” I say, as he shushes me and swirls me into his apartment, closing the sliding glass door behind us and pulling the tan mesh curtain across the glass.

  “The police were at your apartment looking for you earlier,” he says. “They’ve been out in their car after pounding on your door. I think they’re waiting for you. Are you wanted by the law now?” He smiles in the dark, all white-toothed and tanned, and then peeks through the curtain to watch the street. His apartment is utterly black, aside from the vague outline of his furniture and kitchenette in the black.

  The thought slips like silver into my veins. They’ve come to arrest me for breaking into the Chairman’s house. “Oh no.”

  “What?”

  I put my backpack down on the floor and sit on the sofa, the compulsion to cry not connecting to my tear ducts but present nonetheless. “This is it. I’m going to jail. Can you believe it? Me, going to jail.”

  Ted looks at me as if I’m speaking a foreign language. “Back up a little here. What did you do?”

  And so I tell him. I explain the whole situation, how I wanted to ruin my boss’s life, how I conspired to make the tape, how I kissed Robert in the elevator, how I mailed the tape to the Chairman, how I broke into the Chairman’s house to get it back and failed, and how the Chairman likely now has security footage of my breaking into his house. Meanwhile, Ted leans on the wall near his sliding glass window, listening to me with increased intensity in his face.

  “Caroline,” he says after I finish, pacing over and sitting down on the couch next to me. “You’ve broken into a house and you’ve attempted to steal mail, which means you’ve broken both state and federal law. You could be charged in state and federal court. Do you realize what this means? The police probably didn’t come to just question you. They came to arrest you. You know how serious this is, don’t you?”

  “Of course I do.” While Ted looks around the room as if trying to piece me together, I contemplate the implications of my predicament. Initially, I embarked on this voyage like a passionate amateur on the seas of revenge. Now I’m stuck on an island, an imbecile with no hope of return. Can I run? Am I the type of person who packs her bags and runs?

  “You kissed your boss?” Ted asks, disbelief coloring his cheeks white. “You actually kissed him?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I thought you hated him. How could you kiss him?”

  “You know, that’s really not the point at the moment. The point is that I’m going to jail.” I stand up and put my trembling hand over my chest. My breath comes in short and I feel as though I’m choking. “I haven’t just lost my job. Now I’m … I’m a criminal. After they arrest me and I serve my time, I’ll have a criminal record. I’ll never be able to get a job again.”

  “Well, that’s not necessarily true. After seven years, you could get your records sealed, assuming you don’t break any other laws,” Ted says.

  I’m not sure if he’s joking. The room is too dark to tell, and I feel a l
ittle faint as if oxygen exists only on other planets.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I feel like I can’t breathe.”

  “You’re just having a panic attack. My mother used to get them all the time.”

  “How do you make them stop?” I try to swallow away the feeling.

  Ted stands and glides over to me like a missionary on a mission. He puts his hand on my back. “My mother had a therapist, cognitive behavioral therapy, but since we don’t have time for that, take deep breaths.”

  “I can’t.”

  “So you kissed him?” Ted asks as though still processing the thought.

  “What?” I gasp, the darkness only seeming to exacerbate my need for air. My mind isn’t focused on what Ted’s saying. The light from outside hits the door handle of Ted’s refrigerator, reminding me of bars in a jail cell, and suddenly I’m imagining the people in jail who have committed crimes like selling drugs, murdering their spouses, robbing banks. The people in prison run with a different crowd than I do. They speak a different language. I’m not part of that culture. It’s absurd to imagine myself living among criminals. Will I have to study up on prison etiquette? Is there a book for such a thing?

  “You kissed him,” Ted repeats, factually.

  “Yeah. Look, can I stay here for a few hours? I need to figure out what I’m gonna do. I can’t go to my apartment, not now at least.”

  “Sure, stay as long as you like. Or,” he says, pausing and tilting his head, as though some brilliant thought just lands in his brain. His voice rises a notch. “Or, we could go away together. There’s this bed and breakfast about three hours up the coast in Fort Bragg. It’s reasonable, and they have the best blueberry pancakes.”