Braden had stayed the night. Tuesday night I went on my first official required business dinner. A real one this time. What I hadn’t known was that Braden was selling his French restaurant and keeping the contemporary, upmarket Scottish seafood restaurant he owned down by the Shore. It was a private sale to a business friend. A private sale, but the local media had still found out and wrote a piece on the established La Cour changing hands, and speculating over the reason for Braden selling it.
“It’s too much,” Braden had explained after asking me to accompany him to the dinner, which was really just a celebratory thing between him and the guy who’d bought it. “The nightclub has become a much bigger success than I was expecting, the estate agency is always pulling me into some problem or another and away from the property development which is what I enjoy, and I’m just spread too thin. La Cour was my dad’s. There’s not anything about it that has my stamp on it. So I sold it.”
We met Thomas Prendergast and his wife Julie at Tigerlily. I wore a new dress and tried to be as charming as possible. Well, charming in the only way I know how. Thomas was older than Braden and much more serious, but he was friendly and clearly respected Braden. Julie was like her husband, sedate, quiet, but friendly. Friendly enough to ask personal questions. Personal questions Braden helped me deflect.
I rewarded him well for that later.
Overall, the dinner was nice. Braden seemed more relaxed now that he didn’t have La Cour resting on his shoulders, and for some reason I found that him being relaxed made me relaxed. We hung out at his apartment Wednesday night, mostly because we had to be quiet at my apartment, and that took some of the fun out of the sex. So we had sex loudly on the couch, on the floor and in his bed.
Replete, I lay in the tangled sheets of his bed, staring at his ceiling. His bedroom was as contemporary as the rest of the duplex. Low, Japanese bed, wardrobes built into the walls so they didn’t take up space. An armchair in the corner by the window. Two bedside cabinets. Nothing else. He needed some pictures at least.
“Why don’t you talk about your family?”
My whole body tensed, the breath whooshing out of me at the question I was completely unprepared for. My head twisted on my pillow to stare at him incredulously. He wasn’t looking at me warily, like he was waiting on me freaking out. He just looked determined. I sucked in my breath and looked away. “I just don’t.”
“That’s not really an answer, babe.”
I threw up my hands. “They’re gone. There’s nothing to talk about.”
“Not true. You could talk about who they were as people. What you were like as a family. How they died…”
I struggled for a moment with my anger, trying to hold it in. He wasn’t meaning to be cruel, I knew that. He was curious, he wanted to know. It wasn’t unreasonable. But I thought we understood each other. I thought he understood me.
And then I realized that he couldn’t possibly understand. “Braden, I know your life hasn’t been easy, but you can’t possibly understand how messed up my past is. It’s shit. And that’s not a place I want to take you.”
He sat up, pushing his pillow up against the headboard and I twisted onto my side to look up at him as he looked down at me, a pain in his eyes I had never seen before. “I understand messed up, Jocelyn. Believe me.”
I waited, sensing more on the horizon.
And he sighed, his eyes drifting over me to look out the window. “My mum is the most selfish woman I’ve ever known. And I don’t even know her that well. I was forced to stay with her during the summer holidays, travelling around Europe, living off of whatever sad fuck she’d managed to manipulate into being with her. During the school year, I lived with my dad in Edinburgh. Douglas Carmichael could be a harsh, distant bastard, but he was a bastard who loved me, and that was more than my mother ever did. And dad gave me Ellie and Elodie. Elodie was the one thing I had issues with my father over. She’s a sweet person, a good woman, and he never should have chased after her and treated her like all the others.