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Had I just masturbated to Robert? The man who was the bane of my existence? In this bathroom with my friend just outside the door? Jeremy never got this sort of reaction out of me.
I awkwardly walked to the sink and washed my hands, looking in the mirror at my flushed cheeks.
I laughed a little at my face, at the way I had acted, at the thoughts that were so intense that my body had needed a release. At what I had just done.
The guilt was strong, but it was also so dormant that I could push it away for just a moment. Jeremy would never know what I had thought or what I had done about it. No one would.
I found Kassandra sitting with a half-eaten salad, swishing her glass of champagne and orange juice and scrolling on her phone. She looked up when I approached and asked, “Hey, are you okay?”
“I’m just fine,” I told her as I slipped into the seat in front of my juicy steak.
I was going to eat every bite.
four
Robert
Almost a week later, I sat in the school car lane and drummed on the steering wheel.
I was waiting for my daughter to come rushing out the door the way she always did, a group of children pushing her out like they were at a concert.
I saw one of my lawyers calling and shot a look at the school doors before answering. I didn’t want to miss her, even if it meant missing a potentially important business call.
“Hey, Tanya, what’s up?” I asked absent-mindedly, as I watched the other grades come out.
We were up to third grade so far. Two more grades and my little fifth grader would come out. I scanned the heads I could see, looking for her crop of red curls.
“It’s about the self-defense weapons,” my lawyer said, her voice serious. She always got straight to the point, which I appreciated about her.
“What about them?” I asked, watching the fourth graders come out and run to their parents’ cars. They had to be reminded to wait for their parents, to not run away from their teachers into the road. It was like watching someone try to catch chickens.
“We can’t distribute them to the UK. The UK doesn’t allow the use of lethal or non-lethal weapons for self-defense in public. The keychain blades are too long, metal, and locking. There’s no way we can get around it. We can’t distribute them there.”
I felt that anger coming up, the anger that came from my past. Losing friends in the Navy had been difficult. Losing my late wife had been the hardest thing I’d ever gone through. Raising a daughter now sparked the pain and anger over her murder in the strangest ways.
I had started a company devoted to women’s self-defense so that I could keep everyone from going through what I had gone through. From losing what my daughter had lost. From what my wife had gone through.
“I’m not letting women be unprotected because of some bullsh—” My daughter opened the back door just then and climbed in, and I sing-songed, “Rin-Rin, how are you, my girl?”
“Got it. We can talk later, Rob,” Tanya said crisply, “but I’m not letting you catch a lawsuit because of yourprinciples.”
I hung up the phone and looked at Corinne with a forced smile. She was the spitting image of her mother, my late wife, at that age with frizzy red hair and brown eyes.
Every time I saw her, I felt this twinge as I realized that I’d forever see Quinn through my daughter.
It was a strange pain, seeing her as a young girl, only eleven years old, and so haunted. I often felt a twisting pain when Corinne cried, knowing what Quinn would have looked like crying as a child.
I swallowed it down, as I always did, and waited for her to throw her bookbag in the back and flop into the leather seats of my Range Rover.
That day, a sullen look passed her small face, and I shook her shoulder with one of my hands before returning it to the steering wheel. “What’s up?” I asked her, looking over quickly before looking back at the road.
“I don’t like it when you call me Rin-Rin. I’m not a kid.”
“What about Renaissance?” I asked, smiling wide at her.
She shook her head, but I could see a small smile tugging at her lips, even as she crossed her arms and peered out the window. “What’s wrong, Princess Corinne? Tell Daddy so he can fix it.”
She pouted but turned her body to me and asked, “Did you know Thanksgiving break is coming up in just a couple of weeks?”