Discreet by Nicole French
4
Where are you, Flower?
Just four innocuous words, but they might as well have been bombs dropped through the clear morning light. I sat up in my bed, the old double mattress and creaky metal frame I had moved to a sleeping shack on the edge of the property. The shack, originally constructed as a shelter for ice fishermen in the thirties, had a sink, but no running water, and would heat up like a sauna by mid-July. But it was a quiet space of my own and allowed me to get a good night’s sleep when Mama stumbled in a 2 a.m., like she had the last three nights. People used to joke, even at church, that my mother was a bigger party animal than her teenage daughter. They had no idea.
It was a few minutes after five in the morning, and the lake was relatively silent. If I went outside, I might see deer in the garden, or maybe a family of wild turkeys scuttling around the property. Bass fishermen were the only people up at this hour, floating around the lake’s glassy perimeter.
I looked back at my phone. The screen still glowed with the message, sent from an unknown number. No. This couldn’t be him. Theo was in jail for what he’d done. He was supposed to be serving a full six months—a drop in the bucket, as far as I was concerned, but still something. Long enough that he was supposed to forget about me. Let me go. Move on with his life and let me try to recover mine.
It could be from a friend, one of the many members of his entourage. The kind of idiotic yes-men that only very rich people travel with. It wouldn’t have been the first time he’d gotten one of them to mess with me.
I breathed. That was all this was. A message sent through a visitor’s phone, a cheap prank meant to rile me up. But he wasn’t a danger to me anymore. I was safe here. As safe as I could be, anyway.
I dialed the first number I could think of, eager to erase the nasty gag. Calliope picked up on the second ring.
“You bitch.”
I exhaled and flopped back onto my pillow to stare at the open rafters. “Hey, Cal. You awake?”
“I am now, damn you. How’s the sticks? Bored yet?”
I chuckled. “Not at all. You’d be surprised how much there is to do. I get to strip wallpaper off two bathrooms today. Top that.”
“Well, I would be sleeping until ten if it wasn’t for you.”
“Shut up. You wake up at six every morning to go to the gym.”
“Weekdays, darling. Weekdays.”
I smiled. She was giving me a hard time, but if I knew my former manager, she’d been up for hours going to a daybreak SoulCycle session, making phone calls, and basically running half of New York. Calliope was the hardest-working woman on the eastern seaboard and had been since we first met in college. After getting her start doing music A&R right out of NYU, she was picked up by a much bigger firm just last year. Two pretty big clients followed her, and I was supposed to be her third…until I fucked it all up. Our professional relationship was over, but she was still my best friend.
“So what’s up?” Calliope asked. “I know you didn’t call to give me the goods on your mom’s remodeling. Is Eloise behaving herself?”
I thought back to last night, when Mama had gotten back around two thirty and parked the car sideways in her spot. The tires had slid against the gravel, causing a minor avalanche of gravel to shower the chicken coop and my shack, waking us all up. I’d gone up, straightened out the car so our neighbors could get by, and then put her to bed.
“She’s…fine,” I said. “Today. You know her. She’s pretty functional most of the time. Honestly, it’s the driving I worry about most.”
“Dude. She needs to get hooked up with Uber.”
“Dude yourself,” I retorted. “This is an unincorporated community forty-five minutes from the nearest city, not the five boroughs. We don’t have Uber, and taxis only exist if you’re willing to wait an hour or more. We have our own cars and the trucks of weird men at Curly’s.”
“Is there really a bar named Curly’s?” Calliope asked. “Just the name of that place sounds like I’d get hepatitis from a water glass.”
I snorted, rubbing my hand on my face. “Don’t knock it ’til you try it. I had my first gigs at Curly’s. They have a killer karaoke night, you know.”
“Is that where I’m losing your talent to? A fucking sing-a-long bar with wannabe cowboys?”
I sighed and rolled over. Even though she had helped me pack my car, Calliope made no secret of the fact that she thought I was making a mistake in leaving. She had wanted me to stay with her instead, go back to waitressing, save money, and keep trying to get my singing career off the ground.
But in the end, she hadn’t argued because she knew the truth too. She knew exactly what kind of power Theo’s family had in New York. Even if I wanted to come back, it would be that much harder with one of the biggest entertainment names bearing a personal grudge against me.
“He texted me this morning,” I said. “Or a lackey, maybe.”
The line went very quiet.
“Ah, shit,” muttered Calliope. “What did Psycho say?”
“He asked me where I was,” I said. “And he called me ‘Flower.’”
Calliope groaned. “That name was always creepy as fuck. It made him sound like a pedophile.”
I cringed—not because Theo was much older than me, but because Callie was right. Once, I had loved it. His attention. His obsession. I was his flower, he said, meant to make his life more beautiful, in every possible way.
I shuddered and closed my eyes, though I knew the refuge of darkness would only be temporary. It had been more than a year since our explosive ending, and three months since the verdict that had landed him in jail, but his face still haunted me whether I was asleep or awake. It winked, cajoled, sneered, threatened. I was beginning to accept that Theo was simply a ghost who would follow me around my whole life, for better or for worse.
Ironic, really. After all, marriage, the one thing he wanted, was never something I could give him no matter how many times as he demanded it. His proposals were orders, not requests. “Marry me,” he’d say, as if I didn’t have a choice. But always, always, there was something deep down that told me not to say yes. Maybe I should have. It was the last refusal that became his downfall and mine.
But this time, as I shut out the world, it was a pair of green eyes that flashed unbidden, instead of Theo’s dark brown. They’d been appearing all week since I’d crashed on the side of the road. Every time some part of Theo came to mind—the curl of his lip, the arrogant tip of his nose—some feature of that strange, curt man with the wild hair and angry eyes would immediately replace it. For the last seven days, his face was like a fly that wouldn’t buzz away, though it seemed to chase away the worst of my fears too.
When my heart rate slowed, I shook away the face. I didn’t need to be thinking about him, or any man right now. I needed to figure out how to be normal again. How to be me.
“Just…will you keep tabs on him for me, Cal? I know you two move in a lot of the same circles, and if—I don’t know, if he’s somehow out, you’ll hear about it. Just let me know, okay?”
Text messages I could tolerate. They were easy to delete. But Theo had the resources to find out where my mother lived or send someone to find me. He was lazy by nature, but I also knew not to underestimate him. There was nothing Theo del Conte loved more than nursing a grudge, and incarcerated or not, right now I was probably his number one nemesis.
“Of course,” Calliope said. “And in the meantime, tell me about the lake hotties. I am so over these metrosexual assholes in the Village. Give me some farm boys to fantasize about. I’ll even take a Curly cowboy. Have you run into luscious Lucas?”
I chuckled. “Well, yeah. But sadly, he’s not so luscious anymore.”
“For real? Oh that’s tragic. Let me guess: two babies and a beer gut.”
“No babies yet, but the beer gut is making progress. And I’ll raise you a bald spot.”
Okay, so I was being a little mean. Lucas still looked just fine—like you’d expect an average twenty-seven-year-old with a taste for Bud Light to look. I’d bet money he was on a lot of most eligible bachelor lists within the Newman Lake zip code.
“Don’t disappoint me here, babe. There’s got to be some hot mountain man who can fuel my fantasies. Give up the goods.”
I gulped. I didn’t want to think about him. No. I wouldn’t.
But there he was again, in the back of my mind. Green eyes scattered with sparks. A lean, muscled chest. That thick mane of wild hair. It wasn’t fair. I didn’t even know his freaking name.
“Who the fuck are you thinking about?” Calliope’s sharp voice cut through my quickly clouding thoughts.
I touched my suddenly heated cheeks. Christ, that escalated quickly. “No one,” I said. “I didn’t say anything.”
“Bullshit. Lady, your silence was so deafening it practically split my eardrum. Spill.”
I closed my eyes, and the tan, bearded face appeared, framed by a halo of unkempt gold. The breeze outside blew in the fresh scent of the lake water, and just as fast, I felt his arms under my legs and back again. The heat coming off his skin, his hands, his arms.
Shit. What was I doing? The guy—Goldilocks—was a complete and utter asshole.
“There’s no one,” I repeated again. “This place is just stacked with the same tired dudes who are always here. Pickup trucks and beer guts. That’s it.”
“Yeah, but I bet those dudes have filled out since high school, huh? Farm boys look good in them t-shirts.”
“Callie, what would you know about it? You’ve barely left Manhattan your entire life.”
I could practically hear my friend rolling her big brown eyes. But Calliope knew me better than anyone, which also meant she knew when I wouldn’t talk.
“I’ll get it out of you eventually,” she said. “In the meantime, use whoever he is to write more beautiful songs, all right? This is just a hiatus, kid. It’s not forever.”
I glanced at my guitars, propped in one corner of the shack. I still hadn’t taken them out. I wondered if I ever would.
* * *
After I gotoff the phone, I went up to the main house and grabbed some coffee and fruit, careful not to wake Mama while I got ready for a morning swim. It was better to go early, before the boaters came. My ankle still wasn’t a hundred percent yet, so I had to be disciplined about the other parts of my training if I still wanted to race by the Fourth, in just over three weeks. Today would be my longest swim—across the lake and back, which was about a mile, the same distance I’d need to do on race day.
When I strode out carrying my swimmer’s buoy, I practically ran right into Lucas, who was about to knock on the front door.
“Whoa!” he burst as he steadied the two of us on the threshold of the sliding glass door.
I took a step back, clasping the buoy to my chest. “Hey! What are you doing here so early?”
Lucas looked around and shrugged. “I thought I’d check to see if you had gotten any help with the outer cabins yet. If you haven’t, I can get started on some things until you do.”
I shook my head. “We haven’t, but it’s really okay. I’m chipping away at what I can, and eventually I’ll find a job so we can pay for it. We’re good.”
“Look…I wasn’t going to say anything.” Lucas rubbed the back of his neck. “But I ran into Ellie at the bar last night when I was, um, out. I told her I would come by, see what needs to be done and if I can help at all.”
I could just see it. Lucas hanging out at Curly’s with his posse, enjoying pitchers of cheap beer and the attention of local girls. Someone would have put Journey or Guns N’ Roses on the jukebox, or maybe some Garth Brooks, and then an impromptu dance party would have started in the space between the vinyl booths. And then Mama, with her loud, boisterous self, would wander up to a group of men half her age and make an ass of herself until Lucas, with his polite manner, would guide her back to her friends making all sorts of promises so she’d leave him alone.
Same story. Different time.
“Lucas, you don’t have to do this,” I said. “Really. She can’t pay you, and it’s not fair of her to take advantage. I’m here now, and I’m taking care of things, slowly but surely.”
“Hey. I told you too that I’d come.”
He gave me a look that I was so, so tired of seeing. I’d been on the receiving end of people’s pity for being Eloise Sharp’s daughter my entire life. Poor, sad Maggie. How adorably pathetic that I would actually consider myself competent.
But then that gaze, initially harmless, morphed as it floated over my body. My one-piece swimsuit wasn’t anywhere near what you would call revealing, but it definitely showed off a lot more of me than Lucas had seen the other day. He crossed his beefy arms, causing his biceps to stretch the sleeves of his t-shirt. Okay, so maybe I was giving him kind of a bad rap earlier. Soft gut or not, Lucas’s arms definitely weren’t anything to laugh about.
By the time he met my eyes again, he was blushing, his cheeks two cherry-red circles. I looked away.
“I, um. Right. I’m going to get started, then,” Lucas said and turned toward the back of the house.
I stood there for a moment, trying to figure out if I wanted to go after him or not. In the end, I went down the other stairs and jumped into the water feet first, trying to tell myself it was because I was eager to get moving and not because I needed to cool off.
* * *
I hadn’t swumin years, not since college. Pools took up space, and space was premium in a city like New York. Only the poshest athletic clubs had them, and considering I could never afford even the shittiest gym membership, my exercise regimen in the city had mostly consisted of jogging up and down the river when the weather wasn’t terrible.
But my muscles hadn’t forgotten the strokes, the even glide, the breathing work of swimming in open water. This early in the day, the lake was still enough that it was basically a pool of its own. I enjoyed the rhythm of the movement, the flicker of fish many feet below me, the alternating patches of cold and warmer water that gave me a slight thrill when I glided through. The feeling was back, the same one I had just before crashing my bike. Things felt natural again, after years of confinement and pressure. Always trying to be something I wasn’t.
I closed my eyes. Once again, I was free.
Until I wasn’t.
One stroke later, I was viciously jerked back as something tugged me under the translucent green, forcing water into my lungs and up my nose. I popped back up, coughing and sputtering, then twisted around to find the leash of my buoy completely tangled in a bunch of lily pads I had passed without realizing. Dammit. I really needed to shorten the leash.
“Shit!” I exclaimed. I pulled as hard as I could, but the leash wouldn’t come loose. I yanked at the stems of the lilies, but none of them broke, too strong and pliant in the late spring water. Fuck. I was seriously stuck here without a pair of scissors in sight. I was going to have to chew through some of the stems, which were looking more and more like tree roots.
I turned in the water, peering around for early morning fishermen. Of course, just when I needed them to be lurking around, they were nowhere to be seen. Of fucking course.
I turned onto my back and stared up at the clouds rushing across the sky. “Fuck,” I muttered. Then, I shouted it: “Fuuuuuccccccck!”
“What the fuck is wrong with you?”
I screamed at the sound of the deep voice echoing over the water. I kicked around, sinking for a second, swallowing more lake water before popping back up to find a man jogging out to the end of a long dock about fifty feet away, his hand perched over his brow like a visor as he glared at me.
His hair, just like yesterday, flew around his shoulders in a wild, wavy mess in the morning breeze. He wore nothing but a pair of shorts that sat low on his hips, and even from this far I could clearly see the square, cut edges of his deeply tanned chest and abs, and the two diagonal lines of muscle that followed his narrow hips and disappeared under his waistband. Jesus Christ. My imagination hadn’t done him any justice whatsoever. Even tangled up in a mess of lily pads and tule stems, frustrated to holy hell, I couldn’t ignore a sight like that.
“I’m—I got stuck,” I managed to call out. “Do you—can you bring me some scissors or something? My leash is tangled, and I can’t break the stems.”
Goldilocks shook his head and muttered something to himself that sounded like, “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” though it was hard to make it out from fifty feet away.
“What was that?” I asked, feeling more desperate and pathetic by the second.
“Hold on,” he called out, his deep voice skipping ominously over the water. “I’ll be right there.”
