A Bitter Man (Special Forces: Operation Alpha), page 11
He sits back in his chair and sighs. “Big house in Pacific Palisades.” I guess I’ve got a stupid look on my face because he adds, “Los Angeles. Not far from Beverly Hills.” I know where that is, and now I know why they call him Hollywood. Besides, he’s easily the most sophisticated one of the bunch. “Grew up there and built a house there.”
“A big house?”
“A really big house.”
“And what did you do?”
“Big family business in tech. My great-grandfather was one of the first to develop the pocket-sized transistor radio. My grandfather helped to develop the first pocket-sized calculators. And my dad helped with the implementation and design of solar-powered calculators.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah. A lot of money. I had five cars, big house, vacation home, the whole thing.”
“I guess you miss it all?”
He sits there for a minute, a far-away look in his eyes, before he says, “No. I mean, I thought I did. Yeah, I did while I was in prison, but when I got here, I realized that everything I had was really a trap. I worked for what I had, and I had to keep working to keep what I had. Here, I get to do something creative, I’m around people I actually like, none of the worries of human resources, and insurance, and vehicles, and marketing, and research and development, and profit and loss. And the company is publicly traded, so I had a board of directors to deal with. None of that here. Just Patch and our benefactors.” I have no idea what any of that means. “So no. I don’t miss it that much. I miss the beach, but that’s about it.”
“The beach?”
“Yeah. My house was right on the beach.”
Without thinking, I say, “I’ve never seen the ocean.” The look on his face makes me feel very embarrassed, like he can’t imagine anyone never seeing the ocean. I’ve got news for him. I’d say probably ninety percent of the people who live here have never seen the ocean.
But what he says surprises me. “Well, we’ll have to fix that. Wonder what Taylor would think about Disney World?”
Never before in my life did I think my child would ever have a chance to go somewhere like that, but I realize that this time, it might actually happen. In my mind, I’ve always been a nobody, an invisible person, somebody that nothing good happened to, not because I didn’t deserve it, but because no one could even see me and no one remembered I was alive, not even God. What marginally decent thing did I managed to do that allowed this to happen?
“Audrey? Honey, why are you crying?” I didn’t realize I was, but he’s right. Tears are streaming down my face, and I didn’t even know it.
“I guess because … I never thought Taylor would ever get to go there.”
“Oh, he’s going. I went to Disneyland two or three times a year when I was growing up. Every kid should get to do that at some point in their life, and Disney World is even better. We’ll take him. Universal Studios and Sea World too. Bet he’d love the Harry Potter stuff at Universal.”
“He doesn’t know who Harry Potter is unless somebody at school told him. He’s never seen the movies or read the books. I couldn’t afford them.”
“We’ll fix that too.” He reaches out his hand and when I take it, my heart flutters with hope. “And just think―next week you’ll get your first paycheck. Exciting, huh?” As he speaks, his thumb is stroking the back of my fingers, and I find it very soothing.
“Yeah. I don’t know what to expect. I know what Patch told me, but taxes will take a chunk out, I know.”
“Patch said he’d like to get a car for you to drive too.”
“Will I have enough money to buy a car?”
“Yes, but no. He wants to buy one through the organization. He figured you’d like that better than driving one of the SUVs.”
“They’re so big.”
“Exactly. I think a car would be better for you, maybe something like Penny’s.”
“Hers is cute.”
“Yeah. We can find something like that.”
All of a sudden, I know exactly what I want, and I don’t mean in the way of a car. “Porter, about tonight and how we’re going to spend it?”
That smile of his lights up the room. “Yeah?”
“If you’ll help me make breakfast in the morning, you can stay in my room. If you want. I mean, if you don’t want to, you don’t―”
“I do want to. And yes, I’ll help you cook breakfast.”
“I figured that way, maybe the guys wouldn’t notice―”
“Honey, they’re going to notice!” he says, laughing. “They’ve got eagle eyes. They’re watching. They can’t help themselves. Nosy as a bunch of old ladies. Not kidding.”
“Think Taylor will notice?”
“Nope. I’ll tell Patch what we’re planning and he can keep Taylor busy until breakfast is ready.”
“Sounds good.” I hope I didn’t just fuck up royally, but I like this guy a lot. “If this doesn’t work out …”
He pats my hand. “Oh, I think it’ll work out. Even so, we’re grownups. No matter what, we’ll be friends.”
“Good.” Friends. I like it. I’d rather have him as a friend than not at all. After all, a girl can’t have too many friends.
As we roll into the parking lot, we find that Patch has started dragging all kinds of camping crap out and piling it up by the lodge door. I’m guessing he’s waiting for his truck, so Porter parks it right by the pile. “Going somewhere?” Porter asks Taylor as we get out of the truck.
“Yeah! I’m going camping!”
I give him a stern look. “Oh, is that right?”
“Mom, please? Please, can I go? I’ll be good, I promise. And I’ll do what I’m told. And Patch and Paddy are going with me, so I’ll be safe, okay? Please?”
“Of course. You can go. Hollywood needs to talk to Patch for a minute before you go.”
“He’s not gonna try to talk Patch out of taking me, is he? Please, Hollywood, please don’t. Please?”
“No, bud. I wouldn’t do that. Just want to make sure you get home in time for breakfast in the morning,” Porter says and tousles his hair as he walks by on his way inside.
“Oh, no! We’re having camping breakfast! Bacon and eggs and stuff. Like over the fire. In a pan. It’ll smell soooooo good. I can’t wait.” He’s hopping from one foot to the other, and it’s cute to watch. I haven’t seen him this excited in … never. I’ve never seen him this excited. He’s never had any reason to be.
Porter spins and smiles at me. “Well, I guess I don’t need to talk to Patch after all.”
I nod. “Yes. You still do.”
“Yeah. Guess I do. Be right back.” I watch him disappear into the lodge and it makes me tingly in all the right places.
As soon as they’re gone, I get Porter to help me make chicken wraps to put in the refrigerator so the guys can have them later to snack on―us too. Everybody will get hungry about nine or so, and that way there’s something tasty they can just pick up and eat. We try one out while we’re standing there and it’s good.
When that’s finished, he takes my hand and leads me out of the building and toward the creek. Patch, Paddy, and Taylor have already gone. I didn’t bother to try to make Taylor give me a goodbye kiss. I knew he wouldn’t want to, so there was no point. He’ll be fine, and I’m trying not to worry.
The creek is nothing like it was a while back when the flooding was happening. That was scary as hell. I was far enough away from a creek that I didn’t have to worry about it, but I remember trying to walk into town and not being able to because there’s a dip in our road and there was nowhere to cross. We didn’t have much to eat, and we were about to run out of water, but the flooding started to go down before we completely ran out. When we were able to get to town, there were relief organizations giving away all kinds of food and water, so we were able to get a bunch of stuff that we normally wouldn’t have had. When one of the relief workers realized we were going to have to carry everything, they offered to drive us home, and when we got there, they carried it all in for us. I can’t even imagine what they must’ve thought about that house.
I hadn’t realized it, but somebody built a bench down here with cinder blocks and landscape timbers, and it’s really nice, plus there’s no way it could float away. Porter sits down and drapes his arm across the back of the bench. When I sit down beside him, his hand falls onto my shoulder, and it feels good to just sit there like that.
We’ve been sitting there for a while when I finally ask him, “So, you haven’t been married before.”
“Nope.”
“Been engaged?”
“Nope.”
“Had a girlfriend?”
He snickers. “Had a few. And a few times I had several at the same time.”
“Oh, one of those, huh?” I ask, laughing.
“Yeah. At one time, I was seeing an actress, a pop star, and a world-famous model, and I was seeing all of them at the same time.”
“Did they know about each other?”
“Yep.”
“And they didn’t care?”
“Nah. They didn’t want anything permanent. We were all just playing around. My brother was flying all over the world, sleeping around, drinking, drugging, doing anything and everything. Me seeing three women at once seemed pretty tame.”
“Did you do drugs?”
“No. Never. And I didn’t fly all over the place either. I had a company to run. I always knew that would fall to me. Harper was never responsible enough to take care of anything, even himself.”
It gets quiet again before I manage to squeeze out, “I suppose they never would’ve guessed that you’d settle for somebody like me.”
His free hand rises and comes to rest gently on my cheek. “Settle? No settling going on here. Don’t say that about yourself. Don’t ever, ever say that about yourself. It looks like I passed up the duds for the real deal.”
“What makes me the real deal?”
Porter throws his head back and laughs loudly. “Oh, girl, you have no idea! I wish I could tell you about all the makeup and plastic surgery and fake shit I’ve seen. There was one woman I dated … I picked her up and she said, ‘Now, Porter, no funny business. I just had my lips done.’ I stared at her mouth and I said, ‘They don’t look any different.’ And she said …” He’s laughing even harder. “She said, ‘Not those lips!’ It took me a few seconds and then I busted out laughing. She was somewhat offended, but I thought the whole thing was absolutely ludicrous. I mean, who cares what their twat looks like, as long as it works?”
“What in the … People do that?”
He’s still laughing. “Oh, yeah, that and more. And then there’s anal bleaching. Totally ridiculous.”
“Anal bleaching?” Is he kidding? He has to be kidding. “You mean, people bleaching their … down there and behind …”
“Oh, yeah. It was all the rage for a while there. Ridiculous.”
“Boy, I’ll say. Sounds painful.”
“I’m sure it is. But that’s what I’m talking about, babe. You’re real.”
“Well, if being real means I haven’t bleached my butthole, then yeah. I’m as real as they come.” I can’t wrap my brain around that. Who does that? Sounds horrible.
“Good. I hate fake. That’s all my life was about for so long, and I’m tired of it.”
“I kept trying to remember to ask you … Do you and your brother look much alike?”
“We’re identicals but we always tried so hard to be different. When we were growing up, Mom tried to dress us alike, but we fought it constantly. We wanted different haircuts, different clothes, different shoes. When we got old enough to drive, I wanted a luxury car and he wanted a sports car. Very different. And the weird part? We went off to separate colleges and when we came home that first Christmas, we had the same haircut. Hadn’t talked about it. It just happened.”
“That’s kinda creepy.”
“Yeah, well, you should be me, sitting in a prison cell, knowing that the person who did the crime you were convicted of was out there living your life. It was maddening.”
“You’re still pretty bitter about it, aren’t you?”
“I’ll always be bitter about those years and the way he betrayed me. The one person in the whole world whose love and loyalty I never should’ve had to question and the last person in the world I would’ve ever believed could do something like that to me.” He sits there for a minute before he says, “You know, thinking about how you grew up and what you’ve been through, all of that seems sort of petty.”
“No. It’s your experience. That means there’s nothing petty about it. It affected you in horrible ways.”
“Hell of an experience, my parents’ dead bodies found in our family home and me as the prime suspect. My brother was supposedly out of the country. He even had stuff he’d concocted to prove he was gone, but he was right there. He told the police that he’d heard my dad and me arguing over a baseball game. A baseball game. Who kills their father over a baseball game? And then I was tried and convicted in the press. ‘Porter Winthrop, heir to the Winthrop Technologies fortune, kills his parents to ensure his inheritance.’ ‘Porter Winthrop, former tech mogul, is sentenced to forty years for the murder of his parents, Lawrence and Judith Winthrop.’ At that point, it didn’t matter what I said. Nobody believed me.”
“And how did they find out it was him?”
“My attorney. She just wouldn’t give up, even after I was sent to prison. She managed to get the California Bureau of Investigation involved, and they started digging around. In the meantime, Max―”
“Max?”
“Yeah. My cousin who’s running the company. Anyway, he stumbled onto some charges on a company credit card that nobody had been using and started checking into it. One of the charges was used to place some bets on the ponies at the Santa Anita Park, which Harper loved. That was two days before the murders. But Harper had said he’d been in Florida for two weeks. They couldn’t find any evidence that he’d been in Florida. He was even caught on video gassing up his car at the station closest to his house that morning using that credit card. He got really sloppy because he thought he was smarter than everybody else. Truth is, the police didn’t try very hard. To them, it was an open and shut case, so they didn’t bother.”
“Wow. Have you talked to him?”
“No, and I don’t care if I never see him again as long as I live. He can rot in prison for all I care.”
“I feel that way about Damien. Worthless son of a bitch.”
“You don’t have to deal with him anymore. He’s gone.” His finger is trailing up and down my upper arm, and it makes little goosebumps pop out on my skin.
“Thank goodness. He’s the biggest piece of crap ever.”
“So,” he says, smiling, “do you think you’re going to like it here?”
“I already love it. All the guys are nice, and Taylor likes it, and Patch and Penny have been very kind to me. It’s comfortable. And …” I stop, not quite knowing how to say what I’m thinking.
“And?”
“And there’s you.”
“Look, I want to explain something.” Why do I get the feeling he’s going to say that it’s just for fun and I shouldn’t take it too seriously? That’s all I need, my heart broken before I even get a chance to fall in love. “Patch warned us from the beginning that we couldn’t just sleep our way through the female residents of the area. He said if we hurt somebody, really did them wrong, it would poison the whole area against us, and we can’t afford to have that happen. He’s right, of course. So just know that whatever happens between us, this isn’t a drill for me. If I go, I go all in. No one night stands, no hit it and break away clean. Nope. Not interested. I’m too damn old to go through all that kind of mess. If I don’t get my shit together this time, there’s no more opportunities for me.”
“How old are you?” As soon as the words slip out, I throw my hand up over my mouth. “Oh, god, I’m sorry. That was so rude. I shouldn’t be asking personal stuff like that.”
He just grins. “I don’t consider it terribly personal. I’m forty-one. And I know you’re a lot younger than me.”
“Not by a lot. I’ll be thirty on my birthday.”
“Eh, what’s that? A number. A date on a calendar. On a birth certificate. I don’t think it’s about your age. I think it’s about the amount of life you’ve lived, and you’ve lived enough for five women.”
“In some ways. And in some ways, I haven’t had a life at all.”
“We can change that.”
We both get quiet, and the sounds of the peepers and crickets is almost deafening. Occasionally, I’ll hear the swell of cicadas, and I remember how much I hate those things. I don’t know how much time goes by, but it has started to get chilly here by the water, and I guess I shiver a little. Porter leans in close. “Babe, you cold?”
“Eh. Maybe a bit.”
“Come on. Let’s go inside.” Porter stands and reaches for my hand, so I slip it into his and enjoy the feeling of his fingers closing around it. Our footsteps make crunching sounds in the gravel of the little road as we walk along, our clasped hands swinging between us. My mind wanders and I wonder how Taylor’s doing, if he’s having fun, if he’s afraid out there in the dark. I’m sure he is a little, but with Patch and Paddy there, he’s not going to say a word.
That reminds me of something I wanted to ask. “I’ve never heard, but how did Paddy wind up here? He seems like such a nice man.”
“He is. Really sad. He and a friend owned a tower company. Paddy was the supervisor, and he was supposed to run an equipment check every morning before they went out. He insists he ran his check that morning, but he didn’t mark anything or sign it. They got almost all the way to the top of the tower, and his friend’s harness broke.”
