The Kiss Plot by Nicole French

Two

Iwasn’t the only one interested in playing Inspector Gadget that day. Tweedledee and Tweedledum—otherwise known as Skylar and Brandon—were hot on my tail. The doorman looked up as the three of us entered Eric’s building in the North End. I stormed into the lobby, shoving away the uncomfortable feeling of déjà vu.

The last time I was here, Eric and I had taken exactly two seconds to tear each other’s clothes off. He had reawakened a part of me I had forgotten, like a tree blooming after a long winter, though perhaps not as elegantly. I did kick him in the ass, after all. And right after that, I’d agreed to marry him. It wasn’t the most romantic night of my life per se, but it was certainly one of the hottest. And the memory of it made my chest squeeze.

Now the cherry trees in the churchyard across the street were bare-branched and trembling in the frigid November wind. And in jeans, my favorite Clash hoodie, and a leopard-print trench coat, I was wrapped up tighter than a pork sausage. These legs were closed for business, at least to this man.

“Paul,” I greeted the doorman. “Do you remember me? I’m Jane Lefferts. Eric’s…” I drifted off. I really didn’t even want to think the word “wife,” much less say it.

“Of course,” said the doorman with a slight tip of his head. “Congratulations on the nuptials, ma’am.”

Skylar and Brandon made faces at each other. Fantastic. Someone had bothered to tell the doorman Eric and I were getting married, but not that it had been spectacularly torpedoed.

“Eric just asked me to get something for him from the apartment,” I said as I pressed the elevator call button.

Behind me, Brandon snorted.

But Paul didn’t act like anything was out of order—after all, why should he?

I stared at the black diamond that flashed on my finger alongside the matching band I hadn’t bothered to take off. I couldn’t have told you why. I wasn’t ready to think about it.

We rode to the top floor in silence. Brandon and Skylar looked like they were waiting for me to pop as we rode to the top floor.

“Can you stop?” I said, if only to break the silence.

“Stop what?” Skylar asked.

“Stop looking at me like I’m a cardboard volcano about to blow over. This apartment isn’t a cup of baking soda, and I’m not made of vinegar.”

Brandon’s face twitched. He had been helping Jenny, his daughter, with said science experiment just last night.

“You’ve really never been here?” I asked them. “I thought you two were his best friends.”

Skylar shook her head. “He moved a few years ago, but he’s not really one to hold a housewarming party or anything. You know Eric.”

Brandon cleared his throat loudly. His meaning was clear. Did I know Eric? Did any of us?

“I know Eric doesn’t tell people shit,” I replied as the elevator doors opened. “If there is any information about my ‘father,’ this Janus society, or where Eric went, it would be here, not our place in New York. I decorated every square inch of that apartment. Eric left his personal crap in Boston. Clearly, I can’t trust the man. Considering there’s a good chance we’ll end up in court sooner rather than later, I need to know what I’ve gotten myself into.”

They followed me down the hall to Eric’s corner apartment, where I stared at the shiny silver number on the door for a good thirty seconds.

* * *

“Once upon a time,” I said as I slowly drifted my mouth around the edges of his lips, “you used to know how to quiet this crazy mind of mine. You knew how to own it. Did you forget?”

Eric was a statue, but his eyes were stars. “Absolutely not.”

My eyes closed, almost like I was meditating. But when they opened, Eric’s lips grazed mine.

“Then do it,” I murmured against his mouth. “Make me your pretty girl again…Mr. de Vries.”

* * *

I tooka deep breath and shook the memory away. Then I stuck the key in the lock, and turned.

Inside, it was just as sterile and crystalline as I remembered, all white and silver and glass. Skylar and Brandon looked around with curious distaste while I immediately scanned for…something. What was I looking for, anyway?

Brandon ran a finger over the stainless steel island. “This reminds me of—”

“Your place when we split up?” Skylar finished. “I know. It’s like a refrigerator.” She wrinkled her freckled nose. “Good thing you didn’t actually have to live here, Janey.”

I shrugged. I didn’t hate the apartment, exactly. The white, silver, and chrome decor was aesthetically pleasing and well put together, likely with the help of a decorator. It would have never been home, but there was more to a home than furniture.

Home.

Suddenly, I had a sharp, urgent hankering for the spacious apartment on the Upper West Side. I missed our big feather bed, the creamy prewar walls splashed with art, the eclectic mid-century furniture I had painstakingly collected for us. How many nights had we lain together in that bed, staring at the ceiling after giving with our bodies what had always been so much harder to give with our hearts? I had thought that in the end, we both finally let go of all those barriers. I had believed we were all out in the open. Bared. In love for the first time—it was always the first time with Eric—in my weird black sheep of a life.

How stupid was I?

After being left like that at the altar, I couldn’t bear to spend one more night in that false haven. I had stopped there only to pack my biggest suitcase before escaping to Boston with Skylar and Brandon. For a while, I thought that when Eric found me missing, he’d come looking. But one, two, ten days later, nothing. Until the lawyer called.

Stupid, stupid me.

“So, what are we looking for, exactly?” Brandon asked as he wandered through the sparse living room. “What is there to find?”

“Everyone keeps secrets somewhere,” I said, aimlessly pawing through the small bowl of keys and change by the door. “People are record keepers in the most random ways. Philanderers leave love notes. Serial killers have calling cards. Sam Berkowitz literally wrote letters to the police.”

“Eric’s not a serial killer.” Skylar opened the fridge, which currently only held a few bottles of unopened Perrier. “He’s been keeping his entire life buttoned up since we’ve known him, what, eight years now? You didn’t even know who his family was until six months ago.”

“I also never looked.”

Skylar looked at me like she didn’t believe me. I turned back to the key bowl.

“Two years ago we were working a case against this shark in Chicago,” I said. “An underground gambling ring downtown. I came in at the tail end because it took ten years to rack up enough evidence against him to prosecute. He was that good at keeping it hidden. But what really got him were the emails he sent to his ex-wife bragging about how much money he had made without her. The guy cared more that his wife remembered him than he did about his own freedom.”

Skylar scowled. “Idiot.”

I just shrugged. “Human, I think. I wouldn’t want my life’s work to be forgotten, even if it was a brilliant crime. Or a brilliant revenge on your ex-girlfriend.”

I really, really didn’t want that to be true. But I couldn’t help but wonder if this was supposed to happen the whole time. Eric never cared about his family before. What if he wasn’t the genuine, if guarded person I thought I knew? What if he saw a chance to punish me for what I did to him nearly six years ago…and took it?

* * *

“After the exam, I was thinking I should make some changes. I haven’t seen my family in a while. It’s time to check in.”

“Oh?” I asked as I popped a cherry in my mouth and examined a study question.

Eric watched its progress with an intense, distracted look.

“That sounds nice,” I said.

He blinked, like he’d just remembered the conversation we were having while studying for the bar exam. “I think you should come with me. Jane, I want to take you home. I want to do this for real.”

His hand clapped over mine on the table, covering my scraped black nails with his smooth, pale palm.

I took a deep breath and set down my pencil. I could say this. I had to. “I think we should stop this.”

Eric’s head snapped up. “What?”

I twisted and turned in my chair like a toddler who needed to pee. “I…I can’t, Eric, and you don’t want to bring me home, you know you don’t. Look at me…”

I gestured at my cropped hair with its four different colors, the ripped jeans, the chipped nail polish. Eric was a J. Crew catalog. I was a one-woman homage to Hot Topic.

“I am looking at you, pretty girl.”

I blushed. “Stop. Stop that. See, that’s what I mean. You call me that, but I’m not pretty. Not in the way everyone else will expect of someone with you. You said you’re from the Upper East Side, right? Well, I don’t know anything about your family, but I’ve been to that part of New York with Skylar, and… Well, let’s just say you don’t see a lot of women who look like me walking around.”

“The Village is only a few miles from there. And New Yorkers love black.”

“But do Upper Easter Siders love it with blue stripes through their hair or men’s boots?” I asked, pointing at two things that I was currently sporting.

Eric leaned forward over the table and took my hands. “I. Don’t. Care. When are you going to get it through that head of yours—I only want you.”

For a moment, I almost said yes. I almost believed his face would actually beam the way I imagined. I almost bought into the idea that in some weird way, I would belong in his perfect, pristine world.

But reality has a way of keeping those things from happening. It ruins everything.

“I’m sorry,” I said again. “It’s over.”

* * *

I meanderedinto the kitchen and started pulling open drawers. Perfectly sharpened knives, way too much coffee paraphernalia. Nothing of interest.

“Well, I did a little more digging last night,” Brandon said by the shelves in the living room. “Made a few calls. But I couldn’t get straight answers from anyone about the Janus society. No one would confirm anything beyond what I already knew. Most people had no idea what it even was.”

The way Skylar pressed her lips into a thin line told me she wasn’t very happy her husband was asking around about this issue.

“John Carson, on the other hand, is pretty well-known,” Brandon said. “The guy’s a phantom, but he’s the CEO of a major engineering firm. They make communication systems. Some combat equipment, but mostly munitions. Ray said they are a big recruiter at MIT, but John Carson is the kind of guy you can only reach if he wants to talk to you.”

“You’d think he’d at least resurface after he stole his daughter’s new husband,” I said dryly. “After all, it’s been thirty years, right? Don’t I, as the presumed heiress, deserve an audience?”

Skylar patted me on the arm sympathetically. I didn’t even want to think about the fact that I was turning thirty in a few weeks. I wanted to pretend this birthday wasn’t evening happening.

“I think it’s just leverage over Eric,” I continued, ignoring her pity. “If what you described is the truth, then it seems pretty clear that all this society is interested in is power, or at least the potential for it. I have neither. I was just a means to get to Eric.”

“Then maybe that’s why Eric went with him,” Skylar offered. “Maybe he was trying to shield you.”

“By jilting me at the altar? That was just mean.” I shook my head. “John Carson is welcome to keep me in the closet with the rest of his skeletons, especially if he’s responsible for Eric’s bullshit. They can marry each other for all I care.”

I yanked open another kitchen drawer with more force than was necessary. Ooh…even neat freak Eric de Vries had a kitchen junk drawer, eh? I rummaged through the half-used Post-its and a smattering of thumbtacks, loose twine, and other random items until I pulled out a worn Moleskine book lodged in the back. It was full of his jagged handwriting.

“What’s that?” Skylar asked.

I flipped through the book. “Looks like an old journal.”

It was a mix of prose and verse, with the latter dominating the pages. If the poems were dated at all, they were from about ten or eleven years ago, when Eric was at Dartmouth. That would have been around the end of his relationship with Penelope Kostas, his former fiancée, who had committed suicide just before they were supposed to get married.

“‘Oh, bloody night,’” I murmured, looking at a particularly intense one. It had no date, but the imagery, love soaked in blood, gave me the shivers.

I didn’t know much about poetry beyond my required college courses—I was more of a Vogue reader, to tell the truth—but I liked Eric’s style. It was kind of all over the place, but he had a blunt, honest way with words that I appreciated. It was almost like he could say with poetry what his careful decorum wouldn’t allow him otherwise. He had a tendency to use a lot of Greek and Latin allusions, which I guessed had to do with Penelope. She was Greek, he had told me.

“Nothing of use,” I said, handing it to Skylar. “I don’t know if he’d really want you to read that, but to be honest, I don’t give a shit what that horse’s ass thinks right now. Fuck him.”

Skylar shook her head, but Brandon plucked the book from her with relish.

“I could use some pleasure reading.” He flipped it to a page in the middle and read the first poem he saw:

Daedalus made his wings,

Sewn of white and wax.

And I, his son, first took them on,

Before I gave them back.

Still Icarus flew alone,

While I had her beside me,

She rained love, and her dewy body

Threatened no one but Titans.

Now I may be Icarus

Without the father to warn,

The folly of living

Against others’ sworn.

Fly too close to the sun

And you might drown.

But I’m not too high, Dad.

She’s just too far down.

Brandon grimaced. “Pretty corny, if you ask me.”

I reached out for the book. “You don’t have to read it.”

“Oh, no, no. I’m not passing up the chance to post Eric’s cheesy poems all over the office. That’s called karma. If he’s leaving me and Skylar to clean up his mess, the little fucker can deal with the consequences.”

I ignored the insinuation that I was the mess being cleaned up. Instead, I went back to the key bowl and plucked an unobtrusive coin from the bottom. I turned it back and forth in my hand. It was Greek, or maybe Roman, with a face carved into each side. It looked a little like that coin Eric had been wearing around his neck, but this was tarnished pretty badly.

“Hey, I found something else,” Brandon said. I turned to where he was paging through another thick book. He held it up. “Latin dictionary.”

Again, Skylar rolled her eyes. “Babe, that’s just for law stuff. Eric’s not going to hide his family secrets in a dictionary. He probably took a case home.”

Brandon just gave his wife a very long look. “How many times have you used a Latin dictionary in the past five years, Red?”

She shrugged. “That’s different. I’m not in con law. There isn’t much to use in family.”

“Eric’s not in con law either. I should know, since I’m helping with his caseload. And I don’t know a whole lot of lawyers who highlight the parts of speech for deus.” Brandon pointed a big finger to a section of the dictionary under the word deus—Latin for “god.”

Skylar and I both crowded next to him to examine it. Sure enough, the entire paragraph had been highlighted, with the word “deorum” underlined twice.

“That’s what—the guy, Carson—that’s what he said at the wedding. ‘Deorum vocas,’ right?”

I shook my head. “What does that even mean?”

“It’s bad grammar by itself, but roughly, it means, ‘the gods calling.’” When Skylar and I looked up in surprise, Brandon raised a brow. “What? I googled it on the way back up to Boston.”

“And you never thought to tell us this?” Skylar asked.

Brandon snapped the dictionary shut. “You didn’t ask, Red. And Jane was upset. I figured when she wanted to talk about it, she would.”

I perched on the corner of the couch. “I want to talk about it.”

Skylar sat down next to me. “Brandon, does this mean something to you?”

Brandon pushed a big hand through his hair, looking very much like he did not want to answer that question. Which, of course, would only make Skylar press that much harder. He seemed to know this, because just as she was opening her mouth again, he sank to the armchair next to the bookshelf and started talking.

“I don’t know much. Red, I already told you that. But Janus uses a lot of Latin and Greek code crap. Other than that…I know John Carson’s face, but the guy does not exist on the internet beyond a line on Chariot’s website.”

“Just think,” Skylar insisted. “You met John Carson before. What was he like? You didn’t join Janus for a reason. Was it him?”

Brandon looked very uncomfortable. “Look…”

“I don’t have time to beat around the bush here, Brandon,” I snapped. “And I can’t have daddy issues about a man I’ve barely met, so if Pater Noster is a bad egg, I need to know. Why didn’t you join?”

“Because John Carson is a terrible fuckin’ human being, all right?” The stress of Brandon’s statement brought out his Boston accent to the point where the name “Carson” sounded more like “Cah-son.” “I knew that the second I met him.”