Daddy's Sweet Obsession

Jake is your son?

We agreed on a wine bar in SoHo, neutral ground, public. I told myself this was sensible and not at all the behavior of someone who didn't trust herself alone with him in a hotel room again.

I wore something simple, dark jeans, a silk top Dana had left at my apartment three months ago and never reclaimed, heels that were practical by my standards. I looked good without looking like I was trying to look good.

Dana texted as I was leaving: report back immediately, My dear. I sent back a thumbs up and went downstairs.

✦ ✦ ✦

He was already there when I arrived, which I hadn't expected. He was at a corner table with two glasses of red wine already poured, jacket on, looking like a man who had never once been late to anything in his life. He stood when he saw me. I blushed, nobody has ever done that. Which should not have affected me as much as it did, and handed me the purse before I'd even sat down.

'The notebook is inside,' he said. 'Unread.'

I looked at him.

'I want credit for that,' he said with a side of his mouth lifted. 'It was a significant exercise of restraint.'

I laughed at myself and sat down and tucked the purse under my chair and picked up my wine, and we were off again, easy, immediate, like the conversation had just been paused, and we were picking it back up.

An hour in, I'd almost forgotten I was supposed to be careful. Two hours in I'd definitely forgotten.

I was mid-sentence, something about a difficult client at work, something that had been annoying me all week, when I registered movement at the door. New people coming in, the bar filling up, the ordinary Saturday night shuffle of the city.I didn't look up and just kept talking.

And then I heard a laugh. I knew that laugh, I thought. I'd been hearing it for four years. It was the fake laugh that bastard, Jake, used in public, the one that was half a performance, louder than his real laugh, the one that said Look at me, I'm having a good time, look at everyone looking at me. My sentence stopped in the middle of a word, my body already trembling.

Jason noticed immediately. 'You okay?'

I looked toward the door.

That son of a b***h was there. Of course, he was there in SoHo on a Saturday. Of course, in a jacket I'd helped him pick out, his hair the way he always wore it, his hand on the lower back of a woman I'd never seen before. I see he still has a thing for blonde. Small, pretty, laughing at something he'd said, looking at him the way women looked at Jake Calloway when they didn't yet know better.

My wine glass stopped halfway to my lips. The world did something strange, a kind of lurch, like the ground had shifted a half inch to the left and then back again. I watched Jake scan the bar the way he always did when he entered a room, cataloging, and I watched the exact moment he found me. His face went through three things very fast: surprise, discomfort, and then, because he was Jake, a kind of lazy confidence, like he'd already decided how this was going to go.

He hadn't looked at who I was sitting with yet.

His father had.

Jason had gone very still across the table from me. I could feel it without looking at him, a change in the quality of his attention, a new kind of silence. I made myself turn and look at him.

He was watching Jake. Something unreadable moved across his face.

Then he looked at me.

I didn't know what my face was doing. I had no idea. My brain had stopped cooperating entirely, and I was operating on something below thought, some animal-level processing that was doing its best and failing.

'Mara.' Jake's voice, closer now. He'd crossed the bar. Of course, he had. Because Jake Calloway had never once in his life walked away from an opportunity to be the main character. 'Hey. Didn't expect to see you here.'

I put my wine glass down. Very carefully. 'Jake.'

'This is Sienna.' He gestured to the woman beside him, who smiled with the particular brightness of someone who didn't know they were walking into something. 'We were just...' He stopped.

He'd seen his father.

The silence that followed was the loudest thing I'd ever heard. His eyes went from his father to me to his father to me and I could see the exact moment he got there.

'Dad,' Jake said. His voice had gone flat. 'What are you...'

'Jake.' Jason's voice was calm. Completely, unnervingly calm. 'This is a surprise.'

'Yeah.' Jake looked at me. Something ugly moving behind his eyes. 'I bet it is.'

Sienna looked between all of us with the expression of someone who had arrived at a party and slowly realized it was not the kind of party they'd been told it was.

I stood up. I didn't plan to. My body just made the decision without consulting the rest of me, legs straightening, hand finding the back of my chair, spine pulling itself upright. Four years of learning how to move through rooms like this, and muscle memory was apparently still functional even when my brain wasn't.

I looked at Jake. At the flat ugly thing in his eyes. At Sienna, who didn't deserve to be standing in the middle of this. At Jason, who was watching me with an expression I couldn't read but felt like a question. I stepped around the table and put my hand on Jason's arm, light, easy, like I'd done it a hundred times, and felt him go very still under my fingers. 'We were just about to leave anyway,' I said. My voice came out steady. I was proud of it. 'It was good to see you, Jake.' I smiled.

It was the most enormous lie I had ever told and it came out perfectly.

Jake's jaw tightened. His eyes dropped to my hand on his father's arm and then came back up to my face and I held his gaze and did not flinch, and after a moment that lasted approximately ten thousand years, he looked away first.

'Yeah,' he said. 'Sure.'

✦ ✦ ✦

Jason paid the bill while I was in the bathroom which I'd gone to, because I needed ninety seconds alone to breathe and splash cold water on my face and look at myself in the mirror and have a very brief and very intense internal conversation.

The internal conversation went: What are you doing?

And then: okay, but you just grabbed his arm in front of his son, who is your ex who cheated on you, and now you have to go back out there.

And then: yes. I know. Going now.

He was waiting outside the bar when I came out, hands in his pockets. The night was cold and clear and the city was doing its Saturday thing all around us, and he turned when he heard my heels on the pavement. We looked at each other.

'So,' he said.

'So,' I said.

'Jake is your son,' I said. Not a question.

'Jake is my son,' he confirmed. Still that unreadable calm. 'And Jake is, I'm assuming, the floor that dropped out.'

I closed my eyes for one second. I had slept with a father and son. I'm a real slut, I thought. I opened my eyes and said 'Yes.'

He nodded slowly. He didn't look angry. I wasn't sure what he looked like... like he was thinking, maybe, like he was turning something over carefully before he decided what to do with it.

'I didn't know,' I said. 'I need you to know that I didn't know. When we matched, when we met, I had no idea who you were. I found out tonight when I saw you walk in with him and I...'

'I believe you,' he said. I stopped.

'I believe you,' he said again, quieter. 'Jake mentioned he'd ended things with someone recently. He didn't tell me your name.' A pause. 'He didn't tell me much.'

I didn't know what to do with that. With the gentleness of it, the lack of accusation. I'd been braced for something — anger, weirdness, the reasonable and justified reaction of a man who had just discovered he'd slept with his son's ex-girlfriend — and instead he was standing on a sidewalk in SoHo looking at me like I was still the most interesting thing in his surroundings.

'This is insane,' I said.

'It is,' he agreed.

'We should probably...' I stopped. I didn't know how to finish that sentence. Probably what. Probably pretend this didn't happen. Probably not see each other again. Probably be sensible adults about the completely unhinged situation we have accidentally stumbled into.

'Come on,' he said. He'd stepped off the curb and raised his hand for his phone to call his driver. 'Let's go somewhere and talk.'

'Jason...'

'Just to talk, Mara.' He looked at me over his shoulder. That steady attention, that patience that had been undoing me since the first night. 'You left your purse last time. I'd like to make sure you leave with everything you came with.'

I told myself it was just to talk. I told myself this was the sensible thing, close it out properly, acknowledge the impossibility, walk away clean. I told myself a lot of things on the way to the hotel. His car arrived and we drove out. The air between us was thick with approximately forty things neither of us had said yet.

That came later, in the quiet of his room, when he handed me a glass of water and sat across from me and I looked at him, really looked, took in the man, the money, the power, the fact that he was Jake Calloway's father, and felt something cold and bright and very deliberate begin to form in the back of my mind.

'I want you, Mara, I don't care about what you had with my son.'