The Kiss Plot by Nicole French

Twelve

Isat up on my bed and blew at the bright purple polish on my toes. What had that lecture said again? Divorce law wasn’t my strong suit. Never had been.

The question on my computer’s screen flickered like a strobe light, waiting for my response. I really needed to stop staring at my computer.

I closed my eyes to focus. Profiting from matrimonial disgrace was really Skylar’s area, not mine. I hadn’t thought about this stuff since law school, and going through these questions for hours a day was making my brain bleed from boredom. I blew again, inhaled the fumes from the polish, then opened my eyes with triumph before I clicked on the correct answer.

“Ha!” I crowed when the screen blinked the green confirmation. I’d take my victories where I could get them these days.

In the last week, I’d thrown myself into studying for the December test date for the NYLE—the New York State Law Exam—followed by the February general bar in the event I wasn’t able to get the second part waived. I might have had money coming my way, but I wasn’t interested in being a layabout. And really, I had to do something to pass the time while I lived with the equivalent of a knife stabbing me in the chest every damn day.

Maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad either if the knife in question wasn’t such an impassive prick. Eric bowing to John Carson cut to the bone—but not nearly as much as his feigned indifference.

Eric made good on his original promise. We lived together, but just barely. He was gone almost every morning before I woke up, usually arrived at the apartment after ten or eleven, and headed straight for the shower, then bed. Gone were the easy nights where we bickered over someone’s latest culinary experiment and recounted our days. Even his books of poetry had disappeared from the two shelves in the living room. He’d done his best to erase himself from my life.

It only made me angrier. And more likely to act out during the scant hours when he was there.

The last seven days had turned me into a jealous teenager. I had reapplied my red lipstick so often I’d already replaced the tube. I had paraded around the apartment in my tightest jeans and called him Petri dish every chance I got. I even left porn running with my bedroom door open for a solid hour before bed one night—not that I got anything out of it other than a headache. There are only so many times you can listen to silicon-trussed women whining fake orgasms in ear-splitting falsettos before you lose your sex drive completely. At the end, Eric just walked out and didn’t return until two a.m. One guess where he went.

I was being petty and I knew it, but it quickly started to feel pathetic too. Like it hurt me more than him.

And did I get anything for my sacrifices? Not even a groin adjustment, my friends. Nothing. Nada. Zip.

The crazy thing was, I wasn’t even sure I wanted to be a lawyer anymore. But every time I considered the alternative—potentially fulfilling my secret childhood dream of designing clothes—all I could see was Eric’s stupid smile whenever he suggested the idea.

Well, fuck that. I was a damn good prosecutor before I got canned for my boss’s change in politics. I could be one again.

Just as I was getting into the next section of the online lecture, the opening bars of “Rock the Casbah” tinkled at me from my nightstand. Yeah, I’d have to change that ASAP. I grabbed it, but the name on the screen made me grimace.

Yu Na, still making one of a million efforts to call me since that day.

Okay, yes. This conversation was overdue. We’d been playing phone tag since Carson’s ultimatums—now it was she who had been playing hard-to-get.

Leave it alone, Jane, begged all her voicemails. Please, just leave it be.

Yeah. No.

I swiped right. “Eomma, I don’t want to talk unless you’re going to answer my questions.”

“You picked up the phone, Jane. Maybe you do want to talk.”

I ground my teeth. Our conversations always had to be arguments, didn’t they? Apparently, she wasn’t going to let a little thing like lifelong deception get in the way of that.

“Eomma, what do you want?”

“What do I want? I want to talk to my daughter, that’s what I want. I want to know she’s okay. You stayed in New York. Why, Jane?”

“Because…I…” I didn’t know how to tell her. I didn’t want to admit that yet again, I’d agreed to a bribe—a really, really big bribe—to live in this stupid fucking apartment for two months to save Eric’s skin, his family’s, and if Carson’s threats were real, mine.

“Because this is where I live,” was all I could come up with. “For now, anyway.”

“What does that mean?”

“Nothing.”

“Jane!”

“You know what?” I sprang off my bed and started pacing around the room like an awkward penguin, toes arched uncomfortably to keep from spoiling. “How about we hold the third degree from now on? It’s really inappropriate considering you’re a complete liar.”

“I am your mother, Jane! I have a right to know if my daughter is okay. I have a right to know what she is doing!”

“I am living my life!” I shouted louder than I wanted, letting out weeks—no, months—of frustration and buttoned-up rage at the one person who was basically offering herself as my scapegoat. “I am trying to recover from the fact that my mother lied to me my entire life and that my biological father is basically Darth Vader with a nice suit. I am reeling, and I needed some fucking space to do it!”

There was a long silence, so deep that it seemed to consume the constant hum of noise that surrounded me in this city.

Then:

“Your father would not like the way you are talking to me,” Yu Na said in a quiet, though bitter voice.

“Which one?” I replied nastily.

“The only one you have!” she practically shrieked.

I cowered, even though I couldn’t see her. On some level, I could feel her laser stare all the way from Chicago.

“Carol was your father,” she continued. “I never wanted you to think any different. He raised you, he loved you, he cared for you. He was your daddy, Jane. You know that!”

Hastily, I swiped a tear that escaped down one cheek. Goddammit. I hadn’t really taken a second to internalize all of this, but now the pain was really sinking in. I had loved Carol Lefferts with my whole heart. He had been a wonderful father. Kind. Supportive. So much that even more than a year after his death, his voice still spoke from memories past, an avatar for my conscience.

Family’s more than blood and bones, kiddo. Takes sweat too.

I shook my head. I had shoved that voice aside for weeks now because I couldn’t bear to think of it as a lie.

But it was. He was.

“Except he wasn’t my dad, was he?” I said stubbornly, though my voice quaked. “He was just playacting, right? Pretending for the sake of the poor fatherless baby and her wench of a mother.”

“Jane!”

“I just want to know one thing,” I continued. “Did he at least want to tell me?”

“Who?”

I shook my head. “Daddy.” The word cracked on my tongue.

There was a long pause, and for a second, I thought she might have hung up. But at last, she spoke again.

“He wanted to tell you every day, Jane.” She took a deep breath. “He always said you deserve to know. He was right.”

There was a long pause as both of us digested that fact. I nurtured both sadness and relief—at least he had loved me enough to want to tell the truth. Even if it was just another lie to protect me, I wasn’t sure I cared anymore. I still needed the father I knew to exist, even if only as a memory.

“And I…the man who…John. It is John Carson, right?”

She paused for several beats. “That is what he told me.”

I frowned. “Eomma, let’s not play games. Was it that asshole at the wedding or not? Because he is kind of screwing up my life, so if there’s a chance the paternity test might come out negative, I’d really like to know.”

I could practically hear her shrug. Shit.

“What did he say to you back then?” I found myself asking. “You said he threatened you. What did he say he would do?”

Another long pause. But again, she answered. “He say…he just said I would regret if I ever told anyone about him.”

I sank to the corner of my bed. My anger still simmered, but the obvious fear in her voice dampened it some. “Eomma. Come on.”

It took a minute of wheedling and guilt-tripping—a skill I had learned from her, as it were—but eventually she told me why she had been so terrified to tell me or anyone else about the true paternity of her daughter.

She had a friend, she said. Another flight attendant. The one who had actually invited her to participate in the low-key prostitution ring that had brought her face-to-face with John Carson and instigated my birth. Seo-hyeon, who called herself Adele to westerners, had started the ring when another rich American propositioned her. She was entrepreneurial and had quickly roped several of the other girls into her scheme, including Yu Na.

It all went well. Until it didn’t. Until the Seoul police started sniffing around, and one night, Seo-hyeon disappeared.

“They found her two weeks later in a storage ditch by a melon field. Strangled with her clothes—that red dress she always loved—and wrapped in a plastic bag. Maybe it was him. Maybe not. No one knew.”

My mother spoke like she was reading off a police report. I, however, had no problem imagining the scene. Although I worked mostly on petty crimes in Chicago, I’d seen my fair share of real violence in the police reports that filtered around the Cook County SA’s office. I shuddered, considering what it must have been like to learn a friend had been killed that way.

“When I tell him I was pregnant,” Yu Na continued, “he tell me not to say anything. He give me money if I stay quiet. Or else, he said, I would end up like her. Me and my baby. Like Seo-hyeon.” The combination of mourning and fear in her voice was palpable.

“You never thought to speak to the police?” I asked. “In Seoul or in Chicago?”

“What would I say?” my mother replied. “A man named John told me I have to pretend he is not the father of my child? I didn’t even know his last name until his friend told me, Jane. Years later.”

“Then how did he send you money?”

I didn’t actually need her to answer. Cash, money order, wire transfer. There were all sorts of ways to send funds anonymously if you really wanted to do it.

I swallowed. The longer she spoke, the more the fear in her voice assuaged the anger in my heart. I was still mad, of course, but I could—kind of—understand why she had kept her secret. Maybe I would have too if I thought some terrifying American businessman was going to send me to the fishes.

But then I had to wonder: just how many people had my kingpin of a sperm donor (I refused to think the word “father” about the man) threatened over the years? And, if he was actually responsible for murders…just how many?

“Promise you will stay away from him, Jane,” my mother kept saying again and again.

I couldn’t do it. Because the more she told me, the more I wanted to chase the bad guy. I had these skills once. Contacts. Investigative methods. It seemed a shame to let them go to waste.

“Jane!”

“Hmm? What? Oh, sure. I don’t want anything to do with him. I promise.”

She exhaled, like the words actually meant something. Well, for now they did. “You will come home soon to visit?”

“I…” I pulled at my sweater. I honestly wasn’t sure I could handle being around her right now. “I’ll think about it, Eomma, okay?”

There was a long pause. Then: “Okay.”

I blinked. It was so unlike my mother to take my first response as a final offer. But then again, we had never been in this predicament before.

“You will come home for Thanksgiving?” she asked.

I cringed. “I…I have to study for the bar, Eomma. I have to stay here.” I had no idea if this was true, but I wasn’t going back to Chicago.

She emitted a long sigh, but before she could respond, there was a knock on my door.

Eric, actually being useful for once. And early.

He gave a shy wave and carried in a large cardboard box.

“Eomma, I have to go. Talk soon.”

Eric loitered awkwardly around the door until I hung up.

“Got a minute?” he asked.

I set my phone on my nightstand. “Oh. Hi.”

“Um, hi. How are you doing?” Eric leaned against the doorframe and looked me over like he was searching for scratches.

I frowned. We’d barely spoken for a week, and now he wanted to check in? He set the box down by the door, then aimlessly toyed with the gold coin hanging over the open collar of his shirt.

I glared at it. “I’m fine. What is it?”

Eric blinked, apparently completely adapted to my terse syntax. Then he scanned the study materials scattered across the bed and frowned. “What are you doing?”

I closed my laptop. “Preparing for an acrobatics career. What does it look like I’m doing, Petri dish?”

He walked in to get a better look at the materials, ignoring the daggers I was shooting him. Aside from the double bed on one side, this room was otherwise cluttered with my sewing machine, bolts of fabric, boxes and bins of trim, buttons, zippers, and anything else I needed to make my clothes. It was my creative space, my sanctuary. Prince Spineless Manwhore had not been invited, nor was he welcome.

Not that he cared. The vintage mannequin wobbled on its stand as he nudged it upon approach.

“You’re really studying for the bar again?” he asked. “Why?”

I rolled my eyes. “God, you’re really getting brainwashed. Did you think I want to spend my days at pastel-colored luncheons and serving on the boards of a million charities? Just because I planned a wedding with your family doesn’t mean I want to be like them.”

My throat hurt, like the word “wedding” was actually a weapon that could cut on the way out. A muscle in Eric’s jaw ticked.

“I didn’t say that.” He fingered one of the pamphlets bearing the exam deadlines. “I just thought—”

“You thought what?”

He dropped the pamphlet. “I thought you were more interested in this”—he waved a hand toward my mess of a studio—“than going back to law. I thought the plan was that you were going to take some classes at FIT or something like that.”

I picked up the NYLE pamphlets protectively and held them in my lap. I hated that he was fairly correct in that assumption. I hated that every time in the last week I’d even considered sketching, his approving face had come to mind. But most of all, I hated that he thought he knew me well enough to say these things. Like he had the right.

“I’ll have you know I was an excellent assistant prosecutor,” I said as I reopened my computer.

“I never said you weren’t—”

I just held up a hand. “Don’t bother, Petri dish.” The thin silver bracelets on my wrist jangled. “Don’t you have some chlamydia to spread? Just because I’m your roommate doesn’t mean I have to play ball and chain. Go do what you do best and leave me alone.”

Eric opened his mouth—the full mouth that a part of me still wanted to suck on like a freaking Jolly Rancher, dammit—and watched as I purposefully grabbed the lipstick from my nightstand and proceeded to draw it over my lips for the fifth time that day. With every passing second, his gaze grew darker, until at last he turned abruptly. I watched his irritatingly perfect ass as he strode away, fighting the urge to call him back and apologize. But what for? He was the one who was basically extorting me to live here. He had no right to be angry.

Did he?

It wasn’t until Eric had swiped his coat off the couch and left, apparently to do exactly what I had suggested, that I finally tiptoed over to the box and peered inside.

YSL. Pucci. Mary Quant. It was a box full of psychedelic originals from the 1960s, stuff that would fetch thousands in a vintage shop, but which Eric had brought here—apparently for me.

I pulled out one particularly gorgeous mini-dress with a swirling blue and green pattern so specific to that time. In a second, I could easily imagine how to style it with a highlight aesthetic. Tease my hair into a beehive. Find a killer pair of black thigh-high boots. Lean into the cat-eyed makeup that basically rendered me feline.

I could do it and then wait at the counter with a martini, ready to pounce on my prey as soon as he walked back through the door. This box said he wanted it, right? He was practically begging for me to meow the apathy right out of him.

Instead, I shoved the box under my work table and returned to my study materials. That was the smart thing to do. The practical thing to do. The path of action that wouldn’t continue breaking my stupid heart.