"You are," Brody says. "But not as much of a mess as you should be. By rights, you should be seriously fucked up."
"Um, hello?" I point to myself. "Dictionary definition of fucked up sitting right here."
"You're not," Stacey insists. She's a small woman, so petite she makes me think of fairies. But she's fierce, and she's captured me with her pale gray eyes. "You're a survivor. Trust me. I know the type."
"She's right," Brody agrees. "And you deserve better."
"Better would be great," I agree. "How?"
Brody's eyes flick to his wife, then back to me. He exhales loudly, then stands up and starts to pace. "He's become this thing to you." He holds a hand out in front of him, as if in illustration. "Dallas Sykes is your Holy Grail."
I can hardly argue. "So?"
"Get rid of the expectation. Erase the fantasy." He sits beside me and leans forward so that we are eye to eye. Slowly, his mouth curves into a wicked grin. "Fuck him out of your system."
"What?" I say, even though I heard him perfectly well. So well that a little tremor runs through me simply from the suggestion. "All we've been doing for years is fighting this thing, because, hey, that road leads to stress, disinheritance, and a possible felony conviction."
Not that I'm really worried that sleeping with Dallas would land me behind bars. Technically it's criminal incest--I looked it up, and New York law treats adopted siblings the same as full-blooded--but I can't imagine anyone would enforce that since we're not biologically related. But the rest of it is all true.
And god forbid the media found out. That would be even worse than my father knowing.
Brody lifts a shoulder. "Then don't," he says casually, as if this is all just meaningless banter and not a huge barrier that I have to get over or under or around if I'm going to ever manage to move on emotionally.
"Don't?"
"Just keep trying what you did last night. Go to lunch. Go to the movies. Do all those things that friends do together, and maybe it'll get better and you two can just be normal siblings. Best friends. Whatever you want to call it."
I bite the inside of my cheek, anticipating where he's going next.
"But if you don't believe that will work..." He trails off. He really doesn't have to say the rest.
I glance up at Stacey. "He's serious. He really wants me--wants us--to do a complete flip?"
"Sounds like it to me," she says, as she hand-dries a wineglass.
"One hundred and eighty degrees, Janie." He nods with the certainty of a man who knows he's right. "You've been living with the memory of something that happened between you that saved you. You needed it then, and you're clinging to it now. And until you let yourselves relive those moments, you're not going to be able to get past the sex and move on to the friendship. Trust me, babe. Fucking Dallas is the elephant in the room, and there's no other way around it."
"I don't think it'll be that simple. I told you what happened in the cabana. The way he made me feel. All that did was make me want him more." And now I'm afraid that if I sleep with Dallas just to get him out of my system, it would be like a condemned prisoner having one last, perfect meal, and then dying.
I'm not sure I'd ever come alive again.
Brody is shaking his head. "No. No, that's because you opened a door and didn't go through it. Go, Janie. Walk through with him, and see if it isn't all better on the other side."
Stacey puts her hand on mine. "I think he's right. Besides, what have you got to lose?"
Nothing, I think. At this point I have absolutely nothing to lose, and potentially everything to gain.
Dallas watched as Damien Stark studied the schematic currently being projected onto the conference room whiteboard. He had, in fact, been studying the specs for a full ten minutes.
The plans provided for a device that could be set up externally, but would monitor conversations taking place in a building's interior by sending a series of pulses through the pre-existing electrical system. Theoretically, a single device could allow surveillance of a building as large as the one he was in right now, and he was on the forty-third floor.
It was a remarkable piece of engineering. And as far as the world of surveillance went, it was a game changer.
Considering how long Stark had been studying the specs, it was clear that he knew that.
Finally, he turned to face Dallas, then leaned casually against the wall. "I'm impressed," he said, and coming from Stark, that was high praise indeed. Unlike Dallas, the tech savvy billionaire hadn't inherited his fortune. He'd taken his winnings from the professional tennis circuit and built a multibillion dollar industry with fingers in all sorts of pies, including high tech.
The men had met a few years ago, and now Dallas was an investor in one of Stark's vacation resorts. Today, Dallas hoped to convince Stark to invest in the cutting edge listening device that Noah had designed.