I made some tea and drafted a long email to Eduardo with the details and invited him to come over to the island tomorrow—if he was free—so we could search venues. I assumed they would want it at Stone Church, the old stone chapel perched against the rocky shoreline. Very stark, but reminiscent of the chapel on Cumberland Island where JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette married. It was going to be gorgeous.
It was just past ten when I picked up my phone to look at the pictures I’d taken of Herman and Nan. I saw the spaghetti and meatballs pictures, too. I don’t know why I decided to message Caleb. It was stupid really, but I wanted to reach out to him and apologize again. I felt badly with how our conversation had gone about west-side vs. south-end. Ouch. So bitchy on my part. My comments had been cringeworthy, despite the fact I couldn’t remember them exactly. Thank. God.
I did remember, however, that Caleb had said for me to think of him whenever I saw a meatball.
It was the least I could do to be accommodating, I told myself as I tapped out my text.
Thought of you tonight at dinner. –Brooke
I attached a picture of my plate of meatballs and pressed Send.
Caleb
Fuck!” Fuck, shit, cocksucker, motherfucker. What were the odds she would contact me now? I stared at Brooke’s text and wanted to call her so badly. I wanted to talk to her, mostly to hear her say my name in that beautiful, oh-so-proper voice of hers. “Is this Caleb calling?” I could hear her saying it. Knew exactly how she would sound when she did.
But I couldn’t call her right now no matter how badly I wanted to.
It would screw up my plans for Monday. She didn’t yet know I’d retained her services for my penthouse, and of course, had no knowledge my family employed her grandmother at Blackwater from the time before I was born, either. I had to set my plan for Blackwater in motion first, and then I’d tell Brooke who I really was, when we were at a point where the mistakes that’d been made were being set right. She’d never give me a chance otherwise. Brooke would tell me to fuck on off to my west-side mansion with the rest of the filthy-rich bastards who didn’t understand how things really worked.
I could hear her voice saying those words, too.
I wasn’t really concerned about my name because there were a lot of Blackstones in this area, probably distant relations, but it was still a common enough name to pull off anonymity when we met on Monday. I didn’t want her to know I was on the island this weekend, either, and if I called her back now, I knew I would cave and ask to meet her somewhere. She was too tantalizing to me and the temptation too immense for me to trust myself.
Her message made me fucking happy, though. Brooke thought about me at dinner tonight. She remembered the idiot with the black eye and the inability to be coherent—and she hadn’t ditched my number, either.
I stared at the picture she’d sent and wondered what time she’d been eating her dinner, and where she ate it, and with whom. I wanted to know every detail.
I suspected it was right about the same time I’d been jerking off in the shower to thoughts of her. Pretty pathetic. What would she think of me if she knew?
Lucas strolled back into his game room with a bottle of Lagavulin in one hand and two Cohiba Espléndidos in the other. “What was the f-bomb for?”
“I’m gonna need some of that Lag before I can go there, bro.”
“Brooke is why you came here. I figured out that much already.”
I looked pointedly at the bottle of Scotch in his hand as a reply.
“Okay, I got you,” he said, before plopping his ass down beside me, and started to pour.
I didn’t answer until I was on my second glass of Lag, and the Cohiba had been cut, toasted, and was burning properly. I didn’t indulge often but I enjoyed the hell out of it when I did. Smoking a cigar was a lot like tasting a fine wine, because you never inhaled with a cigar. You sipped it. Sipped the smoke and then blew it back out, leaving nothing behind but the flavor of ultrapure tobacco.
Smoking this fine Cuban cigar was perfect for my mood right now. I watched the white smoke swirl in front of me and slowly fade out. Lucas had a beautiful view of Black Bay from his game room. In fact, the whole house was amazing, and I was glad I had come to see my brother, regardless of what I’d discover tomorrow at Blackwater.
“Did you ever want something so badly that you were afraid for your future if you couldn’t have it?”
Lucas didn’t answer for a long time. He sipped on his Cohiba, and seemed to be far away in his own thoughts. My brother was probably lost in the past to a time when he didn’t have the scars that now marred much of the right side of his body, including his face. They looked mostly superficial to me, and always had, but I didn’t have to live in his skin, so I didn’t know how it was for him. Women didn’t seem to mind his scars. If anything it made him more attractive, his personal wealth notwithstanding, because he was a mystery. Pussy was never his problem.
“Yes.”
“What do you do about it?” I asked.
“You accept it for what it really is.”
“And what is that, exactly?”
He turned toward me and read me like a book. “You love her, Caleb.”
I shut up for a while and just let that idea roll around in my head for a bit. It seemed totally impossible for Lucas to be right, but no desperate urge to deny it as false came over me, either. And even weirder was the peaceful feeling of calm that settled in my chest. I felt relief for the first time in days.