Borderline (The Arcadia Project, #1)(74)

“I wish I knew. I went over to his place, and was trying to get him to talk to me about what was bothering him, and then suddenly we were—” I stopped and shook my head.

“You were what?”

My hands went cold. “Please don’t make me talk about this.”

“I am not making you,” she said. “Though I can. Would you like me to?”

I leaned over the table; the words spilled from my mouth like bile. “I was in his room, trying to get him to open up and—we kissed and he pushed me down on the bed and—we had sex.” I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction of the details: his strange, bleak urgency, the scratchy afghan against my cheek.

“Why were you alone with him at his place to begin with?” she asked, with the precision of someone locating a paralyzing nerve cluster.

Dr. Davis’s voice said, Your guilt is disproportionate. You were both consenting adults. He initiated sex; you were only there out of concern for him.

Another voice answered: the same inner voice I’d tried to drown with expensive scotch. Then why did you shave your legs and put on lacy underwear? Why did you wear his favorite perfume to class? Why did you spend weeks finding all the cracks in his armor so that you could painstakingly pry it open? Even a year later the guilt was noxious, strangling.

“It was just—” I faltered. “It was the end of a long process of— It was like the frog in the boiling water.”

Vivian looked at me blankly.

“I mean, our relationship escalated slowly. Got more and more inappropriate without our quite realizing it. He had some emotional problems too, though he was better at hiding them. I thought I could help him. I thought we were—” And then I couldn’t talk anymore.

“Friends?” Vivian finished for me, with a slow smile.

I nodded. This was not what I’d hoped for in a job interview.

“Losing him made you want to end your life?”

“It wasn’t the first time I’d thought of suicide. I guess it was just the first time I’d been drunk enough to do it.”

“Fabulous,” she said brightly, and finally picked up a fork to address her slice of chocolate cake. “Next topic.”

I felt light-headed. I wished I had ordered a drink, even a soda, so I’d have something to do besides stare at the table, feeling my hands going numb. “The next topic is?”

“Why David wants to hire you.”

I tried to find my footing in the conversation again. “He, uh, he seems to think I show—”

“It wasn’t a question.”

I sat back boneless in my chair while Vivian took a bite of cake. It was just like with Gloria. I should have fought. I would have, a year ago, or at least showed some spine. But I wasn’t that girl anymore. Nor did I have that exact spine, not to put too fine a point on it.

Vivian slid the fork from her mouth, then studied the gory smear of red lipstick she’d left on it. “David’s a horrible romantic,” she said. “He can’t resist the lure of a broken-winged bird. I’m not sure if it’s about his immortal soul or about PR, but either way, you’re like a steak dinner to him. A talented director with a tragic past who just needs a bit of inspiration. . . .”

“You think I’m talented?” Millie. Sadistic vampire interrogating you. Focus.

“I could care less,” she said, attacking the cake again. “It’s David who wants an apprentice, not me. I just want someone to lie to the Arcadia Project when they come calling.”

I stared at her in disbelief. “And why is it you think I’d do that for you?”

Vivian laid down her fork and lowered her voice until it was almost inaudible. “You know what I do, right?” she said. “What I am.”

I leaned forward to hear her, despite myself. “A bloodsucking vampire,” I said.

She laughed. “There are no such things as vampires.”

“But you drink blood.”

“Listen, darling. I live here, but I maintain . . . connections in Arcadia. I use those connections to match actors with their Echoes and turn them into stars. In exchange, I request regular donations of the fey partner’s essence.”

“So . . . you drink blood.”

Vivian rolled her eyes. “Anyone could do it. You could. If you were to have a little sip from a fey’s wrist, you could hop right up and make the next Reservoir Dogs in a week. But something tells me they don’t put this in the Arcadia Project employee manual.”

“I wouldn’t know,” I said, not without bitterness.

“Anyhow, I don’t drink the stuff to make art, I drink it to stay me, to stay fey. Humans are adorable, but their lifespans depress me. Without my Plan B, I’d have been rotting in the dirt for nearly a century now.”

“Tragic.”

“But listen. I’m at the point where I have more essence coming in than I need. Now, what if everyone who worked at Valiant Studios had access to it? Diluted, of course, just a little taste—but can you imagine the films that would come out of a studio like that?”

“Can you imagine the massive shattering of the Code of Silence?” I said. “Are you looking for war with Arcadia?”

“Arcadia aside, darling, I don’t want war with every teenager who thinks she’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Which is why none of our employees will have the faintest idea why they find our office environment so inspiring.”