“Can I get you some wine?” Claire asked.
“No, I don’t drink,” Serena said. She added deliberately, “Once I start, I can’t stop.”
“I understand. I’m sorry. How about some mineral water?”
“Sure.”
Claire disappeared into the kitchen, and Serena sat on the love seat. She knew she was playing a dangerous game. She was volunteering information, spilling secrets that gave up who she was. That was her strategy. Claire liked her. If she could balance their relationship on a high wire, close but not too close, Claire might do what she wanted. Call Boni.
But. she knew that high-wire artists sometimes took a long fall. She remembered what a divorced friend had told her about having an affair. You want to see how close you can get to the line without going across, and then one day you look back and realize the line is half a mile behind you. Serena wondered if she had made a mistake, believing she could get what she wanted from Claire and still hold on to herself.
Claire came back and offered her a champagne flute, filled with bubbling water. She had also refilled her own wineglass. Claire sat back down on the sofa and pulled her legs underneath her. She was relaxed and comfortable in her body, like a cat. She wore worn-out blue jeans and a black satin V-neck top. Her feet were bare.
“I owe you an apology,” Claire told her.
“Oh?”
“For coming on to you like I did. It’s not like me to be so forward. I must have seemed like a shark, and that’s not me.”
Serena wondered if that was true or if this was just phase two of the seduction. “You caught me unprepared, that’s all.”
“I’m sorry. Blame it on my romantic imagination. I thought there was something between us.” All the time she was talking, her blue eyes never left Serena and never even seemed to blink. Her voice, too, was mellow and inviting, like warm sake that went down smooth and washed away your defenses.
The ball was in her court, Serena knew. To say something. To deny it. Instead, she danced closer to the line. “You didn’t imagine it.”
Claire didn’t look surprised. She took a sip of wine. “I’m glad.”
“But nothing will ever happen between us,” Serena added.
“No?” Claire asked, giving her a mock pout.
“No.”
“Too bad.” She studied Serena thoughtfully, drumming her wineglass idly with her fingers. “Who was she?”
“What do you mean?”
“The girl I remind you of,” Claire said with a knowing smile. “Somewhere in your past, there has to be a girl. I don’t flatter myself that I’m so stunning that straight women suddenly climb the fence when they see me.”
“Okay, yes, there was someone else,” Serena admitted. “It was a long time ago.”
“Why don’t you tell me about it?”
Serena took a breath. This was what she wanted, the chance to draw Claire into her story, build a kinship between them-but it was easy to lose track of where her strategy ended and where her own catharsis began. She had wanted to talk about Deidre to someone for years, but she never had. Not to her therapist. Not even to Jonny. She had told him a little bit, but never the whole truth.
Serena put down her champagne glass, and the words spilled out. The memories were vivid, despite twenty years in between. She told Claire about meeting Deidre, who was two years older, at a diner in Phoenix where they were both waitresses. As the abuse from her mother and the drug dealer named Blue Dog became more horrific, Deidre became her lifeline, giving her a place where she could escape. Deidre held her hand when she got the abortion, an ugly one, far too late. They had talked about going back and killing them, her mother and Blue Dog, but freedom sounded better. Escape, go, get away. The two of them ran to Vegas and lived together, working and partying. They were best friends, and eventually more than friends.
Lovers. She had found ways to rationalize it over the years or pretend it was something other than what it was, but they were lovers. Serena realized, as she was telling the story, that she wanted to feel some of that sexual power again. She wanted to be the one to arouse Claire, and she knew, watching Claire shift her limbs on the sofa, that she was turning her on. She could have this woman. She could make Claire do anything to her. She could get back anything that she wanted.
It was a heady sensation, as if she were drinking again.
Even when she told her about leaving Deidre, and the destructive cycle that led to Deidre’s death, she no longer felt close to tears, as she usually did. She was strong, because she had to be.
“That’s a lot of guilt to carry around,” Claire said, when Serena was finished. “But I forgot, you’re tough.”
“I was cruel.”
“Do you think you can make it up to Deidre by making love to me?” Claire asked. She was too smart to be fooled. “Because you can’t. I don’t want that”
“What do you want?” Serena asked.
Claire didn’t miss a beat. “I want you to fall in love with me.”
“That’s not going to happen,” Serena said, although the fact that Claire could say it so calmly almost took her breath away. “I wasn’t in love with Deidre. We were lovers, but I was never in love with her.”
“I’m not Deidre.” Claire tossed her strawberry blond hair back, but it fell across her face anyway, covering one eye. “What do you want, Serena?”
“I want you to get me and Jonny in to see your father,” Serena said. “That’s what I want. That’s all I want.”
Claire looked like she had known that all along. “What if I do? Would you spend the night with me?”
Serena thought about Jonny and poker. She kept a stone face, even though a flutter of wind would have knocked her off the high wire and into Claire’s arms. “No. Besides, you said that’s not what you want.”
“I think maybe you’re not so tough,” Claire said. “I think if I kissed you now, we’d end up making love. You’re hoping I don’t try to find out.”
They were playing a game of chicken, and Serena tried to steel herself and not blink.
“I want you to call Boni,” Serena repeated.
Claire reached languidly down to the coffee table, and Serena saw a cell phone there. Claire flipped it open, tossed her hair again, and looked at Serena long and hard. “Do you know what a big deal this is for me?”
“Yes, I do.”
“You’ll never know what he did to me. How he betrayed me.”
“I understand. Maybe someday you’ll tell me.”
Claire punched one button on the phone. She still had Boni on speed dial. It was after midnight, but her father answered immediately. “It’s Claire,” she said, still staring at Serena on the opposite sofa. “I need you to do something for me.”
TWENTY-NINE
An express glass elevator-smoked windows, bulletproof glass-took them to the rooftop suite in the northernmost building of the Charlcombe Towers. To Boni’s lair.
Stride thought about MJ as they shot upward, watching the earth recede below them at a dizzying speed. MJ had lived in the same complex as Boni Fisso and looked out on the same casino where his father’s life had been destroyed. Where Walker Lane ’s lover had died under the glow of the Sheherezade sign. Stride wondered if MJ had ever met Boni, if he had even a glimmer of the titanic conflict between Boni and his father. It was little wonder that Walker was so desperate for his son to move.
He looked at Serena, who was quiet, staring out at the Strip. All the way home, listening to the hum of the Gulfstream’s engines, he had asked himself how he felt about her and Claire. He still didn’t know. He had half expected her to be gone, but she was in their bed, awake, when he arrived home in the middle of the night. Without him asking, she had blurted out that nothing happened. Then she made love to him, as intensely and passionately as he could ever remember, and he couldn’t help wondering if some of her attraction to Claire was spilling over into their bed.