LITMIR.BIZ

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not terribly sure of herself, would of course agree and hope that there was nothing seriously wrong, and Jack would assure her that they would be back as soon as possible. Then he and Robynn would drive up the coast, stay in San Simeon, and rendezvous with Dani, and live like a happy family...until he got caught.

      And worrying about getting caught was tomorrow’s problem.

      CHAPTER EIGHT

      Even when seated in first class, Elley Gorman Hayden hated flying. Over the years she had learned effective techniques for hiding her fear, but every time the plane banked to one side or took a sudden lurch or bounce, her heart leapt up into her throat and her hands broke out in a sweat. This trip had been particularly bad, with almost non-stop turbulence from the point they had reached cruising altitude. The turbulence wasn’t that violent, but it was constant and unnerving. She turned to Blaise Micelli, her boss, and said: “I feel like a martini.”

      Blaise Micelli looked up from his Adweek. “Easy enough,” he said. “I’ll signal the flight attendant.”

      “No, Blaise, I being metaphoric. I don’t want a martini, I feel like one. I feel like I’ve been shaken for the last two-and-a-half hours.”

      “What a coincidence,” he said, grinning. “I feel like an olive on a long swizzle stick that’s pretty eager to get dunked in a martini.”

      Elley grimaced back at him. Normally when he made juvenile comments, accompanied by that Tom Cruise smirk, she would raise an eyebrow and cock one side of her mouth upwards, and threaten to spank him. Today she could not even muster that. “I just want to rest a bit,” she said, leaning the seat further back and closing her eyes, and absently fingering the tiny silver charms on the bracelet Jack had given her representing characters from The Wizard of Oz, which was her favorite film, one she completely identified with as a girl, stuck in a home life from which she desperately wanted to escape, complete with her own personal Wicked Witch in the form of her mother. It was time for her to stop lying to herself. Her sick feeling had started even before airplane began bouncing. It had come on in the limo on the way to the airport, a tiny burning ache in her chest that would not go away. At first she feared that she was starting to come down with something, but the longer she had the dull ache, the more she realized that it was like nothing she had ever felt. Maybe it was worry. Maybe she was actually worried about her marriage.

      She knew Jack had been fucking up at work lately. That was easy to gauge: his increasingly vehement rants against Marcus Broarty implied that he had been incurring his boss’s displeasure more frequently than usual. She had little reason to doubt that Broarty was a horse’s ass, but he nevertheless represented authority at Jack’s office, and respect for authority was not on her husband’s asset sheet. Jack’s saving grace had always been how he dealt with Robynn, but the sight of all those empties on the counter last night had sent sirens through her brain. If he was drinking that much around the child, then something was deeply wrong.

      And then that phone call from a woman with a sexy voice.

      Sure, it could have been taken at face value. Sure, the relationship between Jack and this woman could be completely innocent. Elvis could still be alive, too, and space aliens might have shot JFK.

      But Elley knew bullshit, knew it by sight, sound, touch, smell, and, yes, taste. She sold it to thousands of idiots on silver plates every day of her life. That was her job. And with that phone call her bullshit detector hit the red zone.

      She knew what was going on. The man who refused to do half the things she wanted him to do with her in bed had to go somewhere else to get what little gratification he needed. That explained everything else: the drinking, the argumentativeness, the trouble at the office. Explained it nicely, neatly, color-coded and with a slogan.

      Elley felt a dry, warm weight on her fingers. It was Blaise’s hand, casually sliding onto hers, so casually that anyone watching would simply have assumed they were a married couple. After all, they were both wearing wedding rings. “Please don’t,” she said, without opening her eyes. His hand slid back off.

      Actually feeling hurt by Jack’s infidelity threw conflict and confusion into her status quo existence. It was not as though she was guiltless. She and Blaise had been screwing around for a couple of years now, but in her mind, it was not an affair; certainly not a love affair. Blaise was conducting a love affair with himself, with which no woman could possibly compete. Her opening up for him was a business arrangement, nothing more. For a woman, sleeping with the boss was the modern equivalent of paying union dues: you did it to keep your job. And that was imperative since Jack was not making so much that she could jeopardize her employment. And now that he was clearly antagonizing his boss, she had to be particularly vigilant.

      Hell, she doubted Jack had any idea it was going on. He was too attuned to his own problems, real, imagined, or bottled.

      So then, why did she feel so shitty?

      Maybe because her impractical, sometimes impossible, increasingly toasted, but basically decent husband meant more to her than she had stopped to consider for a long, long time.

      Maybe because getting that phone call was like a sharp slap in the face.

      Maybe because she didn’t want to be a forty-year-old divorcee in a couple of years.

      “Fuck,” Elley uttered.

      “Later, later,” Blaise whispered.

      Elley opened her eyes and looked at him. Blaise Micelli was good looking enough. He was a well-preserved forty-nine, vigorous and wielding that kind of in-born sexiness that you either have or you don’t, no matter how your facial features are arranged. But looking at him, she could only think of him in the past tense.

      Somehow, she would work things out with Jack. Somehow, she had to.

      The plane suddenly bucked and Elley groaned. “Could you get me a headset, please?” she asked.

      “Sure.” Blaise signaled for the flight attendant and got the cheap headset. “I hope whatever you’re coming down with isn’t going to impact our business.” She was not sure which business he was referencing. As she plugged the headset into the plane’s music channel she said: “I’m sorry, Blaise, I’ll try to get it together for the meetings.” Slipping it on, she closed her eyes again.

      And damned if Jack’s smiling face wasn’t the first thing she saw out of the darkness.

      * * * * * * *

      “But how come Mommy’s not going to be there?” Robynn asked her father as they sped up the Pacific Coast Highway.

      “Punkin, like I said, Mommy went on a trip,” Jack replied. “We’ll see her when we get back home.”

      Robynn frowned. “I wish she were with us.”

      “I know you do.”

      They were three hours up the coast from L.A. and traffic was good, which was a rare treat. They were zipping past miles of crop fields, beans and strawberries, mostly, punctuated by an occasional vineyard. Aside from missing her mother, which was understandable, Robynn’s behavior in the car had been far, far better than Jack expected, given the black mood in which she had arisen that morning. She had remained calm while strapped into the car seat beside him in the pickup truck—something she did not always take so placidly—and she had spent most of the trip playing with a plush monkey that she had named “Mr. Booty,” because its white feet made it look like it was wearing boots.

      “Daddy, I have to go,” she said, as they zoomed past the green highway sign promising a town called Tarelton to be the next exit.

      Her timing was better than usual. Normally Robynn waited until they were just past a turn-off to declare her needs. “Okay, I’ll pull off in this next town and we’ll find a place, and maybe we can get a soda or some ice cream or something while we’re there,” Jack said.

      “Okay!”

      Robynn sang softly to Mr. Booty for the few miles it took to arrive in downtown Tarelton, which was three blocks long and looked like the Western

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