The Nest Part 4

"You always did have great recall for anything that made you feel superior."

"What can I say? I'm not a hat and cravat guy."

"Turns out we have that in common."

Leo removed his damp shoes and put them close to the hearth to dry a little. He put his feet up on the coffee table. She sat down opposite him. "You always knew how to pick them," Leo said.

"I had some great picks."

"Like who?" Leo said, encouraged by what could have been a slightly flirtatious turn in her tone.

"Will Peck."

"The firefighter?"

"Yes, the firefighter. That guy was great. Easy."

Leo was genuinely stunned. He'd met the firefighter once, remembered him as being disturbingly good-looking and fit. An ex-marine or something equally stalwart. "Setting aside physical strength, which I will cede to the marine-"

"Don't be such a sn.o.b. Will's an intellectual, a Renaissance man."

"A Renaissance man?" Leo couldn't keep the mockery from his tone.

"Yes. He traveled. He read. He cooked. He made things."

"What? He whittled? No, no, I forgot, we're in Brooklyn. He knitted? Did he knit you that sweater?"

"Hardly," Stephanie said. "This sweater is Italian cashmere." She pointed to a custom bookcase lining the opposite wall, one Leo had admired earlier for its graceful economy. "He built that."

"Okay. I give," he said. "It's a nice bookcase."

"It's a fantastic bookcase."

"So why isn't he here if he's so great?"

"Probably because his wife hasn't kicked him out of his apartment yet."

"Right," Leo said. He deserved that one. He couldn't stop looking at the bookcase, which was, he had to admit, pretty fantastic.

"And he wanted other things." Stephanie was quiet for a minute, thinking about what good company Will was and how she hadn't been able, ultimately, to make him happy. She still ran into him sometimes with his new wife. She didn't think they had kids, yet. She looked up and thought: Leo!

And then, Careful.

The storm outside was intensifying. The streets were quiet, devoid of pedestrians and traffic. The whole city seemed to be huddling against the weather. The fire cracked and hissed and warmed the room. Leo started to relax for the first time in weeks, for the first time since the accident, really. He missed Stephanie, the ease between them, her solid and comforting presence. Sitting across from him, in the light of the fire, she blazed with health and well-being and good humor.

"I can't believe you sold your business," he said.

"I can't believe what a hypocrite you are."

"I'm not a hypocrite, I speak from experience. I never should have sold out."

"You're just saying that now. I remember those days. You were thrilled by that fat check. Also, I'm not selling out. I was acquired. My life is just going to get a lot easier. I can't wait."

"I'm telling you," Leo said. "That was the start of the end for me."

Stephanie shrugged and took a clementine from a bowl on the table, started peeling it. "You could have stayed. Nathan wanted you to stay." Nathan Chowdhury had been Leo's business partner at SpeakEasyMedia. He'd worked behind the scenes, running the money side of things, and had stayed after the acquisition; now he was CFO for the entire conglomerate. As far as Stephanie was concerned, the beginning of the end for Leo wasn't selling SpeakEasy, it was acquiring Victoria and all that came after-namely, nothing.

She still remembered the day he'd told her he was planning to sell, the day she'd visited him at work during a period when they were trying-and nearly managing-to be "just friends." Victoria had walked into his office. "Hey," she'd said to Leo, lifting her eyebrows a bit, her smile even and smug. Stephanie heard it all in that one word: hey. The intimate monotone of Victoria's low register. A kind of hey that said they'd woken up in the same bed that morning, probably could still smell each other on their hands. The hey wasn't inquisitive or demure or apologetic; it was territorial. Stephanie had heard that hey before, coming from her very own foolishly c.o.c.ksure mouth. After Leo sold SpeakEasy and married Victoria, he'd practically fallen off the face of the earth. The last thing in the world she needed from him was life-or business-advice.

"You should have called me," Leo said.

"Why would I have called you, Leo? When was the last time we spoke?" Stephanie wouldn't give him the satisfaction of telling him that she had called. She'd left a message on his cell and someone identifying herself as Leo's personal a.s.sistant had called back. "a.s.sisting what exactly," Stephanie had asked the girl, who sounded sixteen. "Does Leo have a job?"

"Leo has a number of projects in the works," the girl had said. She sounded ridiculously tentative and nervous. Stephanie suspected she was using the a.s.sistant ruse to discover the ident.i.ties of all the women on Leo's incoming call list. Well, good luck to her, she thought. "Can I tell Leo what this is in reference to?" the girl had asked. Stephanie had hung up and never called back.

"I've called you," Leo said.

"Before today? Two years ago."

"That's not true."

"Two years."

"Christ," Leo said. "Sorry." He laughed a little. "If it makes you feel any better, I stopped being interesting about two years ago."

"I didn't feel particularly bad about it to begin with, but thanks."

He frowned and looked at her, still unbelieving and a little pained. "Two years? Really?"

"Really," she said.

"So come over here and tell me what else you've been up to," he said, patting the place next to him on the sofa.

HOURS LATER, after they'd eaten the lamb and replenished the firewood and she filled him in on the recent publis.h.i.+ng news and gossip, after he'd finished clearing the table and loading the dishwasher (poorly) and rinsing some pots (even worse), he opened another bottle of wine and she dished out bowls of ice cream and they moved back into the living room.

"Are you supposed to be drinking that?" she asked him, pointing to the gla.s.s of cabernet.

"Technically, I guess not," he said. "But booze is not my issue. You know that."

"I don't know anything, Leo. You could be shooting heroin for all I know. In fact, I think I did hear something about heroin at some point."

"Completely false," he said. "Was there excess? Yes. Do I realize I should probably steer clear of speed? Yes. This"-he raised the gla.s.s-"is not my problem."

"So are you going to tell me what happened? Do you want to talk about it?"

"Not really," Leo said. He wasn't sure what Stephanie had heard that she might not be telling him. George a.s.sured him everything was sealed tighter than a drum. He'd paid a fortune to keep Victoria quiet, but he didn't trust anyone. Stephanie let the silence gather some momentum. Out the front window the snow acc.u.mulated, a pile six inches deep balanced precariously on the rail of a neighboring stoop. A lone car crept down the snowy street, fishtailing a little as it went. She could hear the kids in the house behind her out in their yard screeching and laughing. Their dad was yelling: "Don't eat the snow! It's dirty."

"We don't have to talk about it, Leo, but I'm a good secret keeper."

He felt the images from that night starting to surface: the sound of the car's brakes, the bite of salt air, the incongruous voice of Marvin Gaye coming from the SUV that hit them, urging him to get it on. He wondered if he should talk about it. He hadn't even tried at fake rehab. He wondered what Stephanie would say if he just unloaded the whole story, right then and there. At one time, they'd told each other everything or-he mentally corrected himself-she told him everything and he told her what he thought she needed to hear. That hadn't gone very well.

"Leo?"

Leo didn't even know how to start talking about it. He stared at the carved face on the marble mantel and realized why it was familiar, the swoop of hair, the slender patrician nose, the appraising gaze. "She looks like Bea," he said.

"Who does?"

"Lillian. Your stone companion. She looks like Bea."

"Bea." Stephanie groaned and covered her eyes.

"She's not bad looking. Bea."

"No, it's not that. She's called me a few times and I've been avoiding her. Something about new work."

"G.o.d. Not the novel."

"No, no, no. I told her a long time ago that I wouldn't ever read that novel again. I told her, in fact, that she needed to find a new agent. Her message said something about a new project but-I just can't." Stephanie stood and started picking up their empty bowls of ice cream, the tranquil mood broken. "This is one of many reasons I'm happy to be part of a bigger operation," she said. "I can't stand feeling responsible for the formerly talented. It's too upsetting. I can pa.s.s her off to someone else who won't have any qualms about shutting her down."

Thinking about Bea being shut down by some unnamed a.s.sistant made Leo feel unexpectedly wistful. He wasn't surprised when her first stories ended up being some anomaly of youth and fearlessness (thanks to him), but she had to be at the end of her rope by now. And she'd been Stephanie's first notable client, the person who'd made editors and other new writers take a very young Stephanie very seriously. He didn't like to think of Bea stuck working with Paul Underwood at some obscure literary journal, living in that apartment uptown by herself. It was hard to think about all his siblings for different reasons, so he didn't. Right now, it felt like there was nowhere for his thoughts to alight that wasn't rife with land mines of regret or anger or guilt.

"You're right," Stephanie said, standing and staring at the mantel. "She does look like Bea. s.h.i.+t."

"Don't go," Leo said.

"I'm just going to the kitchen."

"Stay here," he said. He didn't like the sound of his voice, how it wavered a little. He really didn't like the sudden, rapid acceleration of his heartbeat, which prior to this moment he'd a.s.sociated with a certain cla.s.s of stimulants, not a living room in Brooklyn in front of the fire with Stephanie.

"I'll be right back," Stephanie said. Leo seemed to go slightly pale and for a moment he looked lost, almost frightened, which briefly alarmed her. "Leo?"

"I'm fine." He shook his head a little and stood. "Is that your old turntable?"

"Yes," she said. "Put something on. I'm just going to rinse these."

In the kitchen Stephanie could hear Leo flipping through her record alb.u.ms. He yelled to her from the living room. "Your taste in music still totally sucks."

"Like everyone else in America, my music is on my computer. That's the old stuff. I just brought the turntable up from the bas.e.m.e.nt a few months ago."

Leo was reciting from the alb.u.m covers: "Cyndi Lauper, Pat Benatar, Huey Lewis, Paula Abdul? This is like a bad MTV segment of 'Where Are They Now?'"

"More like, guess who joined the Columbia House Record Club when she was eighteen."

Leo flinched a little hearing Columbia Records. He shook it off. "Ah, here we go," he said.

Stephanie heard the turntable start to spin and the familiar scratch, scratch of the needle hitting the alb.u.m grooves. Then the weirdly dissonant first notes of a piano and the slurry, graveled voice of Tom Waits filled the house.

The piano has been drinking My necktie is asleep Stephanie hadn't heard that song in years. Probably not since she and Leo were together. The alb.u.m was probably Leo's. He would wake her up on his hungover mornings (many mornings; most mornings) singing that song. He would pull her sleeping self into his arms, his semierection pressing into her back. She would halfheartedly try to burrow farther down into the bed, clinging to sleep and the rea.s.suring feel of Leo's limbs holding her close.

"You stink," she would groan, feigning more irritation than she felt, not even really minding his funky breath. "You smell like my uncle Howie after a night at the bar."

He would sing into her ear, his voice pockmarked from whiskey: The piano has been drinking Not me, not me, not me AT THE SINK, she started to rewash the roasting pan that Leo had left with a film of grease on the counter and tried to reconcile the Leo in her living room with the Leo she'd last seen almost two years ago, out one night with Victoria; they'd both seemed hammered. This Leo was slimmer and in spite of what she'd heard-and occasionally witnessed-about his recent years of late nights and marital troubles and general rabble-rousing, he somehow looked younger. He was quieter, more subdued. Still funny. Still quick. Still beautiful.

She shook her head. She was not, absolutely was not, going to get swept into Leo's...o...b..t again. In fact, she'd better set down some hard and fast rules about how long he could stay. And she needed to run upstairs and make up the pullout sofa in her office.

Then, Leo was behind her. A hand on her shoulder. "Want to dance?" he said.

She laughed at him. "No," she said. "I most definitely do not want to dance with you. Also? You are terrible at was.h.i.+ng dishes. Look at this."

"I'm serious," he said. He lifted her hands out of the soapy water in the sink.

"Leo"-she held herself rigid-"I was clear." Her posture was combative, but he could hear something new in her voice, a fleeting hesitancy.

He inched closer. "You said no f.u.c.king. I respect the no-f.u.c.king rule." Leo was entirely focused on her. His desire was physical, yes (it had been twelve weeks, not counting a couple of breezy flings with the rehab physician's a.s.sistant in the weight room), but he also remembered how much he'd loved this part, getting past her p.r.i.c.kly exterior, cracking her wide open like unhinging an oyster. He hadn't thought about it in a long time, how satisfying it was to watch her steely carriage collapse a little, hear her breath catch. How good it felt to win. f.u.c.k the firefighter.

She sighed and looked past him, out the rear windows, into the Brooklyn night and the snowflakes ecstatically spinning in the beam of the floodlight on her back deck. Her hands were wet and cold and the warmth of Leo's fingers around her wrists was disorienting.

Leo couldn't read her expression. Resigned? Hopeful? Defeated? He didn't see desire yet, but he remembered how to summon it. "Steph?" he said. She smiled a little, but the smile was sad.

"I swear, Leo," she said quietly, nearly pleading. "I'm happy."

He was close enough now to lower his face to her neck and breathe in her skin, which smelled as it always had, faintly of chlorine, making him feel as if he could swim into her, a.s.sured and buoyant. They stood like that for a minute. He could feel his racing pulse gradually slow and align with the reliable rhythm of her constant heart. He pulled back a little to look at her. He ran his thumb along her lower lip, the same way he had with the marble carving earlier, only this time the lip yielded.

And then, from the backyard, an enormous crash splitting the outdoor quiet like a clap of thunder. Then flickering lights. Then darkness.

CHAPTER SEVEN.

When Leo arrived at the Oyster Bar, he worked some magic with the surly matre d'. Within minutes the Plumbs were seated and had unconsciously arranged themselves around the red-checkered tablecloth according to birth order: Leo, Jack, Bea, Melody. They shed coats and hats and made a little too much of ordering "just water and coffee." Leo apologized for running late and explained how he was staying with a friend in Brooklyn (Stephanie! Bea realized), and he'd taken the wrong train and had to retrace his steps. Obligatory chatter about how Brooklyn had become so crowded and expensive and why was the subway so unreliable on the weekends anyway and, well, the weather certainly didn't help, snow in October! Then they all fell uncomfortably silent-except Leo, who seemed utterly calm while appraising his brother and sisters, who all looked back at him, ill at ease.

The three of them wondered how he did it, how he always managed to be unruffled while putting everyone else on edge, how even in this moment, at this lunch, where Leo should be abashed, laid bare, and the balance of power could have, should have, s.h.i.+fted against him, he still commanded their focus and exuded strength. Even now, they were deferentially waiting, hoping, he would speak first.

But he just sat, watching them, curiously attentive.

"It's good to see you," Bea finally said. "You look well. Healthy." Her light affection made Jack's shoulders relax, Melody's face unclench.

Leo smiled. "I'm happy to see you all. I am."

Melody felt herself blush. Embarra.s.sed, she put her hands to her cheeks.

"I guess we should get right to it," Leo said. In the taxi down from Central Park, he'd decided to address the unpleasantness head-on. He realized, somewhat surprisingly, that he'd given precious little thought to this moment during his long weeks at Bridges. He'd been so focused on Victoria and the dissolution of their marriage that he'd failed to consider the repercussions of Francie's actions. To be fair, he hadn't entirely understood Francie's actions until a couple of weeks ago. When George first told him that his mother was funding the Rodriguez payout, Leo'd had a brief moment of hope that she was using her own-or Harold's-considerable resources. Alas.