“So you’ll both need fake identities,” Arthur says. Now that they’re discussing business, he tries to straighten himself amidst his cocoon of pillows. The giant headphones he was using when they first entered the bedroom slide off his blanket-covered lap, still emitting soft tinkles of flutes and violin. But just these limited movements trigger a massive coughing fit. It’s so severe Emily reaches out and grips his shoulder gently, feeling his bones etched under her touch.
Arthur tries to give them a sheepish, embarrassed smile. When he speaks again, his voice is thin as a reed. “If Ry— If my son is involved in the administration of this…group, then we must take every precaution to make sure you all can’t be traced back to me. The only lead we’ve managed to turn up in years has been this one and it’s very circumstantial. Whatever identity he’s been maintaining, it’s entirely off the grid, I can assure you. If he runs—” I’ll probably die before we can find him again, Arthur doesn’t say, but the thought knifes through all three of them at once. “—So whatever this process is, I don’t want you applying as some sort of couple. We’ll give you different identities. And they won’t…they won’t be based here. Close, but outside New Orleans.”
It’s only been twenty-four hours since they made love for the first time; the thought of being separated from Jonathan makes her feel frightened and helpless suddenly. Jonathan starts to speak, then stops.
Is he feeling something similar? She’s willing to bet his insistence that he accompany her is more than a protective instinct. Maybe he views The Desire Exchange as a chance to—how did he put it the night before?— do more research into this new aspect of their relationship. But if they’re separated…?
“I’m sorry,” Arthur says, studying their reaction as best he can through the haze of his medications. “I don’t have much time, and I can’t risk this falling apart.”
“Mr. Benoit—” Jonathan begins, but the older man raises his hand to silence him.
“Please, Jonathan. Call me by my first name. If it were truly a comfort to be seen as an authority figure while staring death in the face, I would welcome it. But it is not. It is not a comfort at all.”
“Arthur,” Emily says quietly. “It isn’t just the background check that we have to pass. Dugas says there will be a test of some sort.”
“Lord, and he’s given no more information than this?” Arthur asks.
“I’m afraid not,” Emily says quietly. “Maybe we could get him to meet with us.”
“Oh, that’ll never work,” Jonathan mutters.
“No,” Arthur says, and for a second Emily’s not sure whom the man is disagreeing with. “Dugas—I’ve had run-ins with him over the years. And we’ve no idea how deeply embedded he is with this organization. I can’t risk having him squeal on us. I could always find a way to threaten him, but no…it’s too risky.”
When he sees Emily’s worried expression, Arthur offers her a gentle smile.
“Dearest Emily,” he says. “You don’t need to manage my expectations, darling. I know you’ll do your best. Both of you.” His smile seems to take all of his strength. But then, he surprises her by reaching out and gripping each of their hands in turn. “But please, do it quickly. As quickly as you can. There is only so much that can be made right with a simple letter. And there is so much I need to make right with my son.”
They’re both speechless as Arthur reaches for a file folder on the nightstand. Handing it to her will force him to contort his precarious position in bed, so Emily reaches for it as soon as she realizes what he’s trying to do.
“I figured it would be helpful for you to know as much as you could about Ryan before you meet. If he refuses to take the letter, perhaps there’s something in there you can…use. Don’t threaten him, of course. But if you can appeal to…I don’t know….his better nature then perhaps…”
“Of course,” Emily whispers.
6
After fifteen minutes of watching Emily study old photographs of Ryan Benoit, Jonathan thrusts his hand across the table and makes a sound like he just swallowed a mouthful of dry lettuce. The contents of Arthur’s file are spread across the wooden table between them. The two of them look like house hunters perusing real estate listings they’ve printed off the Internet.
At first it bothered her, the way Jonathan dumped out the trappings of Prince Benoit’s former life right out in the open, before she realized Ryan’s old report cards, academic files, and e-mails home from summer camp wouldn’t mean a thing to any of the strangers crowding the coffee shop on Magazine Street. True, some of the other patrons might have noticed Ryan Benoit was a stunningly handsome nineteen-year-old, but that’s not the reason Emily’s trying to keep the pictures to herself.
As she relents, sliding the stack of glossy photographs carefully into Jonathan’s open hand, Emily finds herself studying every tic in her best friend’s facial expression. He leafs through the images; she studies his eyes, the set of his mouth, even the steadiness of his fingers as they slip and slide across the photo paper. The night before, Jonathan was desperate to convince her they should add a sexual component to their relationship. Will he still react in the usual manner when confronted with a gorgeous male specimen like young Ryan Benoit?
“Golly,” Jonathan whispers.
Not quite the same, Emily thinks. More like a toned-down version of his usual exclamations of lust, which typically include such gems as Day-uhm, Da-dee, and gurl, to name a few. But there’s no doubt about it. Her best friend, the one who devoured her from head to toe just the night before, still blushes and loses his breath at the sight of male perfection.
“I’m calling this one Come Sail Away,” Jonathan says with a smile. He’s holding up a glossy eight-by-ten of nineteen-year-old Ryan, shirtless on the deck of a sailboat beneath a dome of blue sky. There’s a slight curl to his dirty blond hair, and dark sunglasses offset his generous, easy smile. The first hints of muscle give light definition to his sun-kissed torso, almost like a pencil-sketch of a man in the making inside of his otherwise perfect frame. But it’s the finely etched jawline, the button nose, and the broad shoulders that make him model perfect.
And Jonathan is just as aroused by all of it as she is.
“Indeed,” Emily says.
“Indeed? Oh, come on, Em. I never said I wasn’t attracted to men anymore.”
“You never said you were attracted to women either.”
“Nope. Just you,” he adds. His devilish smirk sends a spike of fear through her.
So this whole thing is a joke now?
Maybe, maybe not, she tells herself.
But one thing is clear: she’s doing exactly what she promised herself she wouldn’t do before she drifted off to sleep in his arms the night before—lassoing her heart to his every turn of phrase like some simpering teenager.
Now she realizes she watched him so closely as he studied Ryan’s photograph because she was protecting herself, looking for evidence that the old rules still applied. Because that’s what she always does when she feels vulnerable and afraid. Looks for the rules, opens the handbook. Any handbook, it doesn’t matter, as long as people who appear to be more put together than she feels wrote it. Although, she’d be hard-pressed to come up with a rule book that included a FAQ on What To Expect When You Unexpectedly Sleep With Your Gay Best Friend…Twice.
“Let’s focus,” Emily says.
“On what? The fact that we don’t know what The Desire Exchange actually is? Or the fact that we don’t know if Ryan Benoit really works there? Or we could spend a few hours obsessing on the fact that we don’t know which cities Arthur’s going to relocate us to or what identities he’s going to give us? Take your pick.”
“You’re free to back out at any time. You know that, right?’
“I’m not complaining, Em. I’m just saying. Kinda feels like we’re more in a wait and see mode right now, rather than an Emily makes a bunch of to-do lists mode.”
“I love it when you use air quotes.
It makes you seem so sophisticated.”
“So now we’re in an Emily gets really sarcastic ’cause she’s freaked out about not having to fake her orgasms mode. Why don’t—”
“Alright, that’s enough, Snarky Snarkerson!”
“Snarky what?”
“Whatever. Look, I’m very touched that you want to go along with me, but let’s not start pretending this little trip needs to be tailored to meet your needs, alright? The mission here is very simple—”
“Yes! Of course it is! Assume fake identities so we can infiltrate a secret sex club about which we know next to nothing and which costs literally a million dollars to gain access to, oh and, also in the course of that, somehow slip a dying man’s letter to one of their employees who may or may not work there and who may or may not look like one of the ten computer generated photographs we have of him. You’re right. I mean, really. I can’t think of anything that simple. I mean, not since Kleenex was invented has there—”
She hits the side of his face with the file folder with a loud enough whack for several jittery coffee drinkers nearby to jump and shoot them baffled looks. By then, Emily has retracted her makeshift weapon and all they see is Jonathan rubbing his left cheek and chin, wearing the pouty expression of a chastised ten-year-old.
“Ow.”
“What do you want me to say, Jonathan? Do you have any idea how weird this is for me?”
“If you’d like me to stop giving you orgasms, I’ll be happy—”
“Or,” she says in a harsh whisper. “You could stop acting like giving me an orgasm entitles you to a Nobel Peace Prize. I know you haven’t been in the lady pond for a while but they’re not exactly that hard to come by if you have a showerhead and an imagination, okay? How does that sound?”
“Like you need another one.”
“Maybe for five minutes, you could stop talking or thinking about sex.”
“Sure thing, girl who’s going to infiltrate a sex club so she can—”
This time she just picks up the file folder instead of hitting him with it. Jonathan goes silent, lips pursed, cheeks puffing as if the words he wants to keep speaking are a literal pressure inside of his mouth.
“He’s leaving me everything, Jonathan. Everything. That house. Everything in it. His holdings, his companies.”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”
“Because I don’t deserve it. Sure, he and my dad were close. But my dad was just his employee and he’s been gone for two years. Which means I have no idea why Arthur would pick me for this.”
“Because you’re an amazing person?” Jonathan asks.
“You say that like it’s a question.”
“Sorry. You’re an amazing person!”
“I’m not, but thank you.”
“I don’t know,” he mutters. “I think you’re pretty great.”
“I appreciate that, but it’s not the point.”
“Okay… So what’s the point?”
“The point is I have to do something for Arthur to…justify all of this or else I can’t…I can’t even make sense of any of it.”
“What about that thing you said to Dugas?” Jonathan asks.
“Lord. Which thing?”
“What if you find Ryan and they make up and Arthur changes his mind and leaves everything to him?”
“Honestly, at this point, I’d feel better about that.”
“Emily, you can’t be serious! Come on!”
“It’s just…it’s too much. I don’t…”
“Well, if my having sex with you screws with your head so badly that you’re going to give up an enormous fortune, I promise to stop immediately.”
“I’m going to start carrying a stun gun whenever I’m with you. I swear to God.”
“Not my fetish, but thanks.”
“It’s not mine either.”
“Alright, so why not just go to Arthur now and say all this to him? Ask him to take you out of his will… Oh, my God. I need to lie down.”
“I’ve thought about it.”
“But instead you agreed to find his son.”
“Yes,” she answers.
“Okay… Why?”
“Because if Ryan doesn’t agree to come back, the least I can do is tell Arthur that he’s alive. That he’s okay.”
“And that’ll make you feel better about inheriting his money. Which you apparently don’t even want.”
“Something like that,” she says.
But she’s dizzy, and Jonathan’s right. Her obsessive belief that she’s unworthy of Arthur’s fortune has tied her in knots. And the memory of Jonathan’s powerful grip on her hips isn’t helping her focus.
“Just say what you’re thinking, Jonathan. But just, please. Try to say it without making me want to throw you into traffic.”
“Also not my fetish,” he says.
“Jonathan…”
“You want to go, Emily.”
“Well, of course, I want to go. I mean, I just got through—”
“No, no, no,” Jonathan barks. “I saw your face when Dugas was describing it. You want to know what it is. It’s an experience and you want to have it. And that’s okay. You’re allowed, Em. You’re allowed to have fantasies and you’re allowed to act them out. I know you don’t like talking about him, but ever since Charles—”
“Oh, please. Charles? Really? We have to drag Charles into this?”
“I’m not dragging Charles anywhere. I wouldn’t slow down for the guy if I saw him in a crosswalk.”
“Alright, come on,” Emily mutters. “He wasn’t that bad. It’s not like he cheated on me or something.”
“No. He just spent months trying to get you to open up about your fantasies and when you finally did he slammed the door in your face and walked out on you. I can’t think of anything worse to do to your partner.”
“Jonathan, we’d been dating for less than six months. We weren’t partners.”
“He was your boyfriend and he punished you for being honest. And Christ, it’s not like you flipped out when he told you he got off on some kind of weird Girl Scout role-play with—”
“Alright, alright. I was there. I don’t need to relive that part.”
“But…what? You go and tell him you fantasize about hospitals and doctors and…what? He just walks out on you?”
Because it wasn’t about hospitals or doctors, Emily doesn’t say. I told him about that night on the dance floor with you and that hot dancer you were dating, that night when you both pinned me in between your hard bodies and I wanted the dance to go on for hours after the music stopped, wanted you both to probe and taste and grip and pinch. But she says none of this to Jonathan. And oddly enough, now that they’ve actually slept together, now that one half of the fantasy has essentially come true, the omission feels less like a betrayal than it used to.
“Don’t run over Charles in a crosswalk. He’s not worth it.”
“Emily, you don’t need permission to live out your fantasies.”
“Don’t run over Charles in a crosswalk. He’s not—”
“Yeah. I got it the first time. I promise. But don’t dismiss—”
“I’m not dismissing you, Jonathan, but….”
“But what?”
“Isn’t the best part of a fantasy the fact that you don’t have to live it out?” Emily asks. “Isn’t that what makes it a fantasy?”
“I don’t know,” Jonathan says. Then, in his best impersonation of George Dugas’s drawl, he bends forward and says, “Maybe that’s one of the questions you’ll be forced to answer at The Desire Exchange.”
With a broad smile, she extends her hand, and after a few seconds of confusion, Jonathan realizes what she’s asking for and returns the glossy photographs of a beautiful young man named Ryan Benoit to her eager grip.
* * * *
Bad idea, Emily thinks, to let Jonathan drive.
That morning, when he’d followed her home so she could shower and change clothes before
they met with Arthur, she’d been exhausted, under-caffeinated, and grateful to have anyone chauffeur her to Magnolia Gate, let alone the man with whom she’d just spent a night of impossible passion. But she should have known the long ride back to her place would come right at the time when the afterglow would start to dim, leaving them with looming shadows of doubt and worry.
Her apartment is on the second floor of a purple duplex with screened-in front porches on both levels. When Jonathan slows the BMW in front of a driveway clogged by her downstairs neighbor’s SUV, she finds herself at a loss for words. A block away, Bayou St. John’s flat, dark surface reflects the wavering halos of the streetlights that line its grassy banks.
“Want me to come up?” Jonathan asks. He sounds nervous, like they’re concluding their third date and not their fifteenth year of being best friends.
“I think…I think I need a night to myself, you know, before everything gets crazy.”
“Gets crazy?”
“Maybe five minutes without sarcasm?”
“Sorry.” And he sounds like he means it. “Although, that was actually kinda sarcastic.”
“I know. But it’ll probably be easier for both of us to hit the mark, if we, you know, take a night off or something. What do you think?”
“Yeah. Okay.”
Chastened, he grips the top of the steering wheel with both hands, his jaw working as if he were chewing a piece of gum. But he hates gum. He also hates introspection and limits and rules and anything that encourages him not to follow the dictates of his desire. She’s often considered this a fault of his, a side effect of staying in the closet for most of high school, for feeling like the entire world had always told him no and for suspect reasons. But before she let him taste her from head to toe, none of this was a real problem. None of it seemed like a threat. Now there are parts of Jonathan—hard edges, hot appetites—that no longer feel contained and removed from the tenderest parts of her heart. And she knows if she’s going to make good on her promise to herself, it’s her responsibility to get out of the car. Now.