Page 35 of Omega
I shook my head. “I don’t know, Layla. He’s a guy. Guys do weird things.”
Layla turned to Harris. “Do you collect porn?”
He just stared at her from behind his sunglasses. “The only thing I’ve ever collected is scars, Miss Campari. And the memories that go with them.”
“Well shit, Harris,” Layla said, “way to just take the fun right out of the conversation. Also, that was the most badass comeback I’ve ever heard.”
“I aim to please, Miss Campari.”
She stared at him. “I swear to god, you call me that just because you know it irritates me.”
“Buttons are meant to be pushed,” Harris said.
“I feel like maybe you understand me on a spiritual level, Harry.”
“And I feel like maybe I heard a slight flutter in one of the engines, and if you fly prop planes, you should have a basic understanding of how to fix them.”
“I better not get any grease under my fingernails.”
“Haven’t you heard? Engine grease is the newest thing in beauty care.”
“Wait? Was that a joke?” Layla laughed. “You’d better be careful, Harry, or I might start thinking you’re a human after all.”
“As opposed to what, exactly?”
“Um. A Terminator?”
Harris actually laughed, a smile cracking his features. And even with the black Oakleys hiding his eyes, his features were transformed by the smile. “You haven’t met Thresh yet.He’sa real-life Terminator.”
And then, to my intense surprise, Harris helped Layla climb up onto the wing, showed her how to open the cowl over the engine, and pointed at various parts of the engine with a wrench, explaining while Layla watched and listened carefully, asking questions every now and then.
Layla, working on an airplane engine?
Would wonders never cease?
* * *
It was well past midnight. We had a bonfire going on the beach, lighting up a circle of sand and dimming some of the stars directly overhead. Beyond the firelight, however, the night was huge and dark, the moon new, a black circle visible only by its absence, stars scattered overhead in countless millions, a glittering, winking, twinkling, scintillating fall of silver light arcing from horizon to horizon and down to the edge of the sea.
I was drunk.
Valentine was drunk, and I was on his lap, wrapped up in his arms.
Harris was…well, not drunk, but loose. Telling stories, laughing at jokes, sunglasses gone, wearing black board shorts and a white short-sleeve button-down, unbuttoned to show a hard, lean, well-muscled torso with a scattering of dark hair. He had a beer in one hand and a long stick in the other with which he ceaselessly poked at the fire, stirring it, moving the logs around, turning them, prodding the coals.
Cal was on the sand beside Valentine and me, and he too was drunk, and god, he was hysterical. He was, honestly, the life of our little party, making us all laugh with stories of his and his friends’ ridiculous antics as wild college boys cut loose on unsuspecting Chicago. It struck me how little I knew about Cal, about the twenty-one-year-old man he was now. He’d been so young when Dad was killed, and I’d been responsible for him. I took care of him, made his lunches and got him to school and made sure he did his homework, made him dinner when he got home, made sure he had clean clothes. Gave him money when I had some to spare. Dropped him off at the mall with friends, sniffed his breath for pot and alcohol when he got home. But then he graduated at seventeen and got a scholarship to Columbia College, and I’d made sure to keep tabs on him. I’d paid for the tuition his scholarship didn’t cover, and we got together for Christmas and Thanksgiving, visited Mom together.
At least until everything with Valentine happened. And then I’d sort of, as Cal had insinuated, fallen off the face of the earth. Valentine had made sure both Cal and Mom were taken care of, financially, and I’d sent an email to Cal explaining that I’d started dating a guy who was “well off”, as I’d put it. Just to throw him off the scent, I guess. I mean, how do you explain a man like Valentine Roth to a nineteen-year-old kid? And, since then, I’d called Cal every once in a while.
Mom? Not so much. Mom didn’t talk on the phone. Didn’t send or receive letters or email. I’m not sure Mom ever even noticed that I’d stopped visiting. I still felt guilty, though. But…I couldn’t exactly visit her, for her own sake. If I showed up at her hospice, it would have given Vitaly a bullseye to aim for. Harris had people checking in on her, making sure no one bothered her. But that was about all I could do.
I tuned back in to the story Cal was telling that involved his roommate, a two-hundred-pound potbelly pig, and the last day of classes at Columbia last year.
“…And I swear to god, that pig was faster than a damn cheetah! You should have seen the security guard trying to catch it! Funniest thing I’ve ever fucking seen.”
Layla was—I wasn’t really surewhatshe was. She was drinking, but slowly, and I would guess that she’d nursed one drink all night. She was laughing at the stories, but there was something subdued about her. But the thing I noticed most was that she was watching Harris’s every move. Hanging onto his every word. It was weird. Beyond weird. She had very little to say, occasionally offering a comment or cracking a joke, but she was mostly quiet—which was entirely unlike her. At any party, any gathering of people where alcohol was involved, Layla was usually in the thick of it, driving the energy, and typically getting, as she puts it, naked-wasted.
I tried to keep up with Cal’s story, which had morphed from something about the pig prank to an adventure he and his roommate had experienced involving a misplaced bag of pot and an undercover narc. It sounded like the kind of story that was funny now, but wasn’t all that funny while it was happening.