I looked her in the eye. “But it is my fault. She counted on me for her medicine.” I looked away. I couldn’t bear to have her see my face when I admitted how I’d failed. “I wasn’t getting regular work. And her medicine is expensive. I’d let weeks even months go by without filling her prescription. I failed her.” I stepped away from Greta, and her hand slid off my shoulder.
Gabriel put his hand on my arm and gently turned my back around to face him. “You’re being too hard on yourself, Jake.”
“Am I?”
He nodded. “You did more for her than anyone else ever tried.”
I shook my head.
“Now,” said Gabriel, “she’s in the hands of the State. Don’t worry. They’ll get her the help she needs.”
After dinner, Matty dropped me off at the workshop.
“I’ll get out here, too,” said Greta.
She didn’t want to go inside though but asked if we could walk a little and talk in private.
I walked her back to the lodge. After so many years of hiding and keeping secrets, now that I’d vowed to be transparent, it all came pouring out - sentence after sentence, an admission followed by a promise followed by a dream.
“We’ve got a good thing going, you and me,” I said.
She gave my hand a squeeze and smiled.
“I know it’s only the start,” I said, “but just imagine what we can do together. I know I have.”
“Believe me,” she said, “I’ve been imagining, too.”
I brushed the hair from her eyes and planted a kiss on her temple. “We make a good team, the two of us.”
She nudged me with her shoulder. “Not the two of us, the eight of us.”
She was right, though at the moment I didn’t grasp the full implications of what she was saying.
As we approached the lodge, I spotted a patch of woodland stars and bent down to pick a bushel. “For your brother. I want to pop in and say hi, and say thank you, of course.”
She looked at me quizzically. “And you’re going to bring him flowers?”
I lifted my shoulders. “Well, after all, he did just get out of the hospital.”
The following day, when Greta was on a shoot in the mountains, I went snow bike riding with my friends.
“I’m sorry I spoiled the weekend,” I said. “But at least we’ve got one day together before you have to go back.”
“No problem,” said Dalton. “Believe me, our weekend was far from spoiled.” The others chuckled at this, and I felt like I’d been left out of an inside joke.
Dalton’s expression changed. He looked at me seriously. “Greta didn’t tell you?”
“Tell me what?”
“Oh,” said Dalton, “she said she was going to talk to you about it.”
“Talk to me about what?”
Our snow bike riding excursion, which had started off so great, took a sudden and unexpected turn. It was all coming together, the whole picture becoming clear to me —how they were able to retain a lawyer for me; the surprising comfort and familiarity they all had with Greta over dinner; the jokes and innuendos.
“And all this time I thought you guys had my back!”
“We do,” Cameron said.
“Yeah, to drive a knife into it!”
“Jake.” Matty put a hand on my shoulder that I shrugged off. “We didn’t know there was anything serious between you two.”
“We never would have if we’d—” Dalton started.
“It wasn’t serious,” I said. “But it was going to be. We were going to be a team.”
“And us?” said Austin.
“What about you?”
“We don’t get to be a part of the team?”
I gritted my teeth and shook my head. “That’s not how teams work.”
“Why not?” said Cameron.
“Teams…” I was so emotional I couldn’t finish my sentence. “I don’t know, teams don’t do things behind each others’ back.”
“Jake,” said Matty, “you were in jail. We couldn’t contact you. What were we supposed to do?”
I threw my hands in the air. “So you had an orgy with my girl?”
“She’s your girl?” Erik said, but not as a question, more as him throwing my delusion back at me.
He was right, Greta wasn’t my girl. I should have been happy for them, happy for us, that we were all sharing. But I was not. Instead, I saw my plans for the future—Greta and I working side by side, conquering the world—reduced to a comical delusion.
25
Greta
I only had two nights left before we had to fly back to New York, two nights to reach the culmination of my adventure—taking all seven of my men at once. That was all I could think about during the shoot on the slopes.
We’ll start with a romantic scene, just me and Matty or maybe me and Cameron. Then Jake will bust in, wearing his devil mask, his chest smeared with streaks of oil and chains draped over his shoulder. At his heels will be his consort of demons, Austin, Erik, Dalton and Gabriel. Then maybe Matty or Cameron will fight Jake while his demon consorts ravish me. Then Matty will lose the fight and he’ll be transformed into a devil, too.