The Guest Room(44)

“I only f*cked the blonde. But I had the other one naked on my lap, and it’s not like I was sitting on my hands. That could be a problem if it turns out she’s a kid. Besides, that’s only part of the nightmare.”

“Only part? God. Can’t wait to hear the rest, man.”

“My legal fees are going to be…costly. You would not believe what I had to plunk down. Scary big. And I may be looking at some very costly civil crap.”

“Civil crap?”

“My lawyer has already gotten…overtures…from Chuck’s lawyers. And Brandon’s.”

“Are you kidding me? What the f*ck is that about?”

“It’s all just preliminary right now. But he’s hearing words like ‘emotional distress.’ ‘Mental anguish.’ All, of course, caused by my ‘reckless’ conduct.”

“Those pricks! Those gutless bastards! Look, I’ll call them right now and—”

“Don’t. It’s Brandon’s wife. And I don’t know what the deal is with Chuck. It may be nothing at all. This all may go nowhere. But your calling them won’t make it better and could make it worse.”

“Bottom line, you’re not looking at jail time, right?” Philip said, both hands silencing an imaginary percussion section.

“God, no. Can you imagine? Holy f*ck, that would be crazy awful. Still, even my legal fees are going to be astronomical. I wonder…”

“Go on,” Philip encouraged him.

“Do you think your friends at the party would kick in some dough to cover my lawyer?”

“Yeah, I don’t see that happening. Didn’t everyone already give you a few hundred bucks each for the girls?”

“Most of the guys did. Not all. But this isn’t about that. We’re not talking a few hundred bucks each. My legal bills are going to be batshit crazy.”

“We’re all dealing with fallout,” Philip told him. “I have a fiancée that is still royally pissed. I mean, I have a sick feeling any minute now she is going to call off the wedding.”

“Are you serious?” Richard asked. He had been so appalled at the conversation around him—it was like dining with sexist (and sexually voracious) seventh graders—that he hadn’t spoken in a few minutes, and the sound of his voice surprised him.

“I am. And you have to really f*ck up to get someone like Nicole so pissed off at you that she calls off a wedding.”

“I am really sorry, Philip.”

His brother rolled his eyes and put out his hands palms up, the universal sign for what-the-f*ck. Then Philip turned to Spencer and continued. “Meanwhile, my brother here? Leave of absence from work. Not kidding. His company is making him take a leave of absence. How messed up is that? And I think he’s going to have to burn his f*cking house down and rebuild it. He’ll have to salt the dirt and the ashes. I mean, you saw the living room. You saw the front hall. You saw—”

“Spencer?” Richard asked, interrupting his brother and turning toward his brother’s friend.

Spencer swallowed the last of the beer in his mug and waited.

“You’re younger than me,” Richard began.

“Oh, but I aged in the last two days, man. I have aged a lot.”

“Do you guys just naturally bring hookers to bachelor parties? These days, is that a thing? Is that just…done?”

“These were party girls. Not hookers.”

“You just said you were paying for girls who were down for whatever.”

“Well, yes. But it’s a fine line. An escort—a real high-class chick—can cost a lot more than what I was paying. Given what I’d forked over and what I’d told them, I kind of assumed they were going to f*ck Philip and f*ck you. I did. I mean, I would never admit that in a deposition or a courtroom. But even that was just an assumption. It’s not like there was a legal expectation. It’s not like I was paying a housekeeper and we laid out precisely what she was supposed to clean—or not clean. And I had no idea that the blonde would let me f*ck her. That was just a happy little treat. And, man, it was a treat. Wow…”

Philip clapped those hands of his. “I know, I know, I know. It was like f*cking a porn star—but real!”

“Spencer said he had sex with the blonde,” Richard pressed his brother. “And obviously I saw you with her. We all did. But what about Alexandra? Did you have sex with her, too?”

“God, she has a name,” Philip said, his grin a little mordant. “Nope, I only f*cked the blonde. Why, my older brother? Do you have a proprietary interest in this Alexandra?”

“No. Of course not.”

“I was just giving you shit. But seriously, what do you think her real name is? I guess we’ll find out when they arrest her.”

“Or when they find her corpse,” Spencer added. “Which would, I must admit, decrease dramatically that whole underage issue thing they’re holding over my head.”

Philip sat back in his chair and dropped his hands into his lap. “You know, I kind of prefer just viewing them as the blonde and the one with the black hair. It makes this all easier.”

Philip continued to talk, but Richard stopped listening. He was exasperated and had to shut them out.

Still, a part of him was relieved that neither Philip nor Spencer had been with Alexandra. She wasn’t his daughter—after the party, he could never view her as a daughter—but he had felt a fatherly pang spring from his chest when he had imagined her with his brother or a creep like Spencer. And the idea of her…dead? Or hiding? Or hurt? It left him woozy. He recalled that moment when she had taken his arm on the stairs in his home, and there in the restaurant he looked down at the spot near his elbow. She was just a kid. It just wasn’t fair.