Her Nightly Embrace Page 12

  I often wondered why writers wrote, and now I had a case study in George Rexton. He seemed to write to assert his ego, a sense of control over a world he considered a cesspit of socialists, foreigners, and homosexuals taking power away from him. Underneath it all, stronger than his other hatreds, was his issues with women. His bewilderment that women were beyond his grasp, beyond his understanding, refusing to do what he said. He cultivated the persona of a man’s man, writing for men, men like him, or teenage boys who didn’t know any better. That probably accounted for the six-figure sales his books earned regularly for his publisher.

  Did his publisher know about his shenanigans, trolling other authors, harassing women online? If they did, they were turning a blind eye to it. That must have outraged Delia McCarthy as much as his personal attacks against her. When he wasn’t looking, Julia hid several of Benjamin’s webcams all over Rexton’s house. They were the size of shirt buttons and fed the footage back to the servers at Golden Sentinels.

  In bed that night, I watched the footage of Julia and Rexton on my phone—Benjamin had installed an app for streaming it.

  “I hope I didn’t lay it on too thick,” Julia said.

  “Nah. All you had to do was show up. You were just unattainable enough, yet seemingly within his grasp. Blokes like him are like greedy little boys who just had to lick that lolly.”

  “Right old lollypop bait, me.” She laughed, cuddling me contentedly like a cat.

  As Julia played her role to subtly hook Rexton in and wrap him around her little finger, I considered her ability to disappear and become another version of herself that people wanted, needed, or fantasized about. This was risky, thrill-seeking behavior. I didn’t want this to trigger her sex addiction. She had thrown herself into different roles throughout her life, as a model daughter, a model student, a loving sister who would do anything to protect her transsexual sister. I saw that clear as day when she had no moral qualms about breaking into that flat in Paris with me to steal those photos of Louise. Was that tied to the abuse she had suffered early in life that she had never told her parents about? Did that damage the wiring of her psyche to create the Julia I now loved? She said she had been feeling empty and rudderless since Louise’s death, and meeting me gave her a new sense of purpose, and that made her decide to come work for Roger. I didn’t believe in destiny. I always thought it was a naff concept, but Julia’s journey made me think it might have been Fate after all. Maybe it was the Asian in me. We had a tendency to think too much about Fate.

  I realized that Julia was as much of a lost soul as the rest of us in Roger’s firm, only the newest addition to his menagerie of brilliant fuckups with nowhere to go.

  In the corner of the bedroom, Bagalamukhi, the goddess of truth and deception, sat in my chair and observed us with a half smile whose meaning I couldn’t read.

  TWELVE

  During their small talk, Julia “innocently” brought up Delia McCarthy, and that set Rexton off, as we hoped. He began ranting and raving about Delia being a “talentless cow who should stay in the kitchen and stop sticking it to us men.”

  “She’s just taking our power away! As every woman in the media is out to do, and I’m going to do everything in my power to bring her down!”

  “Bring her down?” Julia asked in her high-pitched dolly-bird persona voice. “How?”

  “Oh, I have my people. Just you wait. I have legions of fans out there at my beck and call who will rise up into an army when I give the signal.”

  Bingo. Bang to rights. Of course, this could be dismissed in court as bluff and bluster, exaggerations of a drunken prat, but we weren’t going to use this in a court of law. For us, this was further confirmation of Rexton’s vendetta against Delia.

  “Gosh,” Julia said. “How exciting!”

  Unsurprisingly, Rexton took Julia at face value because it was inconceivable to him that a woman could be smart enough to be playing him like a fiddle. If Julia knew anything, it was playing men without them even noticing.

  “Have a drink with me,” he pleaded. “Go on.”

  “Oh, but I can’t,” she giggled, and wriggled out of his grasp. Back at the office, I sat in dread that he might cross the line into assault.

  “You really have to get on with your novel,” Julia said.

  “I can’t write while you’re here,” he said. “You’re driving me insane!”

  “Then I ought to leave.”

  “No! Stay! I need you!”

  Thus began the negotiations. She told him her job was to make sure he finished his novel on time. He was notoriously cagey and only handed in a complete manuscript. What was it worth to her to see him back at work? He wanted a fuck. She refused. He wanted her to show him her tits. She refused.

  In the end, she gave him a hand job.

  And our cameras recorded it.

  THIRTEEN

  You have to admit she drove a hard bargain,” Olivia said. “She even got to wear rubber gloves before she wanked him off.”

  “I do not need to know my girlfriend is giving handies to a fat fucker who’s halfway to going full-on rapist.”

  I hadn’t watch the monitors when it happened.

  The gods, however, took a keen interest, huddling behind Mark and Benjamin to watch the monitors keenly.

  This went on for another three days. Julia would go to Rexton’s flat after lunch. He would plead for sex. She would finally agree to pull on the rubber gloves and toss him off. Then he would zip up and begin typing at his computer while she went to strip off the gloves and leave. Every time I glanced at him through his computer’s webcam, I felt an overwhelming urge to drive my fist into his increasingly punchable face.

  “For fuck’s sake! How much longer does this have to go on?”

  “Let me check in with Delia,” Marcie said.

  All in all, I was building up quite the psychosexual profile of George Rexton, not that anyone at the office really cared. Marcie was happy to present my profile to Delia McCarthy.

  I never met Delia face-to-face, so she stayed a somewhat abstract presence throughout this case. That was fine by me, since she was Marcie’s client, and it was Marcie she trusted for advice, information, and hand-holding. They agreed that any information on this case should be presented to Delia in person rather than online because of the risk of her computer and accounts getting hacked, even with Olivia and Benjamin monitoring them. Marcie would go off and meet Delia, either at her production company offices, the TV studio, or for a drink. No one was going to suspect Marcie, since everyone remembered her from her days in PR and simply assumed she was catching up with her old friend and client Delia McCarthy. They were very adept at looking like two girlfriends doing lunch as Marcie presented her with all the dirt we had dug up in a thumb drive, including the footage from Rexton’s house.

  Delia got back to Marcie and said it was time to release the Kraken.

  “The Kraken” was the virus Olivia had written up for this special occasion.

  FOURTEEN

  Did you feel you were degrading yourself as part of your addiction or if you were taking control of a repulsive man?” I asked Julia when she came over to my flat at night.

  Rudra, many-headed, god of rage, god of storms, was hovering over my shoulder, howling in my ear, waving his ax, driving my rage.

  “Don’t make this about you, Ravi,” Julia said. “I didn’t fuck him, because I knew how you would feel about it.”

  “That’s just a technicality and you know it.”

  “I didn’t get any of him on me.”

  “He could have attacked you.”

  “He didn’t. I could read him. Are you disgusted? Do I disappoint you? What do you suppose this makes me? A slut? A whore?”

  “I’m worried that this would trigger your sex addiction! You put yourself at risk! And for what? Are you doing this because things were getting too peaceful for you?”

  Rudra’s howling slowly stopped. Rudra stopped raging, calmed down, became warm, conc
iliatory.

  “You acted like a professional,” I said. “You did what was needed to be done for the cameras.”

  “Why are you dialing back? Come on! Have it out! Rage at me! Hate me!”

  “I don’t hate you!”

  “Fuck me, then,” she said.

  We exhausted each other, spending all our pent-up aggression in makeup sex. Rudra meditated in the corner of the room and eventually left. It felt like he mediated the peace between us.

  I told Julia about the gods.

  “They show up in times of distress, and they’re popping up for the first time in years.”

  She was amazingly calm about it.

  “And all this time you had me thinking you were perfect,” she said.

  “I never said I was perfect. I just gave you the impression that I wasn’t mentally unstable.”

  “You’re mentally unstable?” she said in mock alarm. “I hadn’t noticed.”

  “Well, neither of us is exactly the picture of sanity.”

  “Too right,” she laughed. “Are any gods here with us right now? Were they watching us all this time?”

  “Don’t tell me that turns you on,” I said.

  “We all have our crosses to bear,” she said. “Now I know yours. Thank you, love.”

  “For what?”

  “For sharing your gods with me.”

  She kissed me, and we held each other like we never wanted to let go.

  FIFTEEN

  Rexton didn’t know his computer had been at Olivia’s mercy for days, and we could all watch him via its webcam. Julia had told us he was making progress on his novel, her presence in his life having given him the shot of energy he needed to write the rest of it, basing the sexy new love interest on her. Rexton always gave his hero a different love interest in each book, inspired by whichever new woman he had become infatuated with at the time. All three of his wives had appeared in his novels during the honeymoon period of the marriage before his drinking, roving eye, misogyny, and, well, him being him eventually drove them away. He would then go through a dark period of bitterness before the next object of desire came along. I’d skimmed through his books, all twelve of them to date, and found he seemed incapable of describing a woman in any terms beyond her hair, her tits, her hips, and her legs. I would guess the ones who refused to sleep with him in real life showed up as the ones who died bloodily. The love interest always ended up as damsels in distress for the hero to rescue, after which they happily shed their knickers and threw themselves at him like a lustful missile. Rexton’s books were a veritable map of his mind. The nights in my flat where I waited for Julia to get back from cock-teasing Rexton became a book club for the gods. I could say I was reading his books to profile him, but I was really being masochistic and the gods would show up and read them with me, smiling and shaking their heads in amusement at the catalogues of human folly I had brought to their attention.

  My pills were not keeping the gods at bay.

  When she got home, Julia could sense something was up with me, but I just shrugged it off by saying I was worried about her spending time with a potentially violent arsehole like Rexton.

  Olivia waited for Rexton to get further along with his novel before she recorded the video. It began with him typing away, taking the occasional swig of whiskey from a glass as he composed his magnum opus, mumbling dialogue and sentences to himself. The keylogger that had been installed let Olivia know he was on the final quarter of the novel. It was at the 4:27 mark when he paused to read the screen that Olivia unleashed her virus. You could see full-on the disbelief and confusion on his face as the words he had typed began to disappear from the screen in reverse order. Confusion turned to horror when the words didn’t stop disappearing. The novel appeared to be self-erasing. Cue frantic tapping of the keys as he tried in vain to stop it. You could say the video was a portrait of the futility of man’s struggle against death, that classic existential dilemma boiled down to a succinct ten minutes.

  The video of Rexton losing his novel went viral in the most spectacular fashion. “Novelist Watches His Book Vanish” was posted via a proxy account linked to a disposable email address. This was Schadenfreude at its spiciest. In three days, the video had been viewed two million times. Then the copies and remixes began. Someone posted the video with Yakety Sax playing over it to enhance the slapstick vibe of it all. Gifs were created of Rexton’s face howling in horror like Munch’s The Scream. Other videos were posted with a viewer’s commentary track over it. By the end of the week, the original video and its copies had amassed ten million views.

  And this was only the first stage of the revenge Delia McCarthy had planned for George Rexton.

  SIXTEEN

  The next day, Rexton posted this on his blog:

  I can’t go on. The loss of my latest novel, the best book I’ve ever written, and the humiliation of that video is too much for me. My life has been a long, bitter struggle against the forces that would control us. The bastards got me good this time. I’m not letting them take the rest of my dignity. Therefore, this is goodbye. Do not look for me. I am ending it all, on my terms, as befits a man.

  “Oh no,” cried Julia. “We went too far.”

  “Oh, that is utter bullshit,” Marcie said. “He’s not going to kill himself. He loves himself too much. This is a cry for attention.”

  “How can you be sure?” Julia asked.

  “This asshole’s written more than ten books. He can’t pick himself up, talk to his publisher about getting a new deadline, and write it all over again? This is for his ego. Look at the comments. Only his fans bother to read his blog.”

  And us, actually, but only because this was work.

  The comments were from fans begging him not to kill himself, to get help, full of dismay and disappointment that this most macho of authors should decide to top himself just because he had lost a manuscript. Some of them even said his books had saved their lives.

  We looked at the video feed. Rexton was just sitting around sipping whiskey, not much different from when he wasn’t writing. Julia was getting quite distraught, though.

  “Where are you going?” I asked.

  “I have to make sure,” she said.

  “That’s what he wants. It’s a manipulation, a cry for attention.”

  “How do you know? Look, it’ll just look like one of my regular visits. If I find he’s all right, I’ll leave straightaway.”

  “Fuck that. I’m coming with you.”

  “Ravi!” She was getting exasperated.

  “I’ll drive.”

  Cheryl passed me the keys to the BMW.

  SEVENTEEN

  Kali rode with us, lounging majestically in the backseat while Julia and I continued to bicker in the front.

  “I just feel responsible,” Julia said.

  “You’re not. Rexton’s gotta Rexton.”

  “I really don’t need you to play knight in shining armor.

  “How about just ‘good boyfriend,’ then?”

  “I can handle him.”

  “He weighs at least fourteen stone more than you. If he gets coercive or violent, you’re going to have a big fucking problem.”

  We arrived at Rexton’s flat, and Julia let herself in with a spare key. Of course he’d given her a spare key. We found him slumped in his armchair in the living room. The place had an overwhelming stench of musk, stale booze, and spent cigarettes.

  Behind me, I could feel Kali watching in anticipation. I didn’t turn around to look at her.

  “George? I just wanted to check on you. I saw your blog post.”

  “I hoped you’d come,” he said, and got up to walk towards us. Then he saw me for the first time. “Who the hell is this?”

  “I’m Ravi, from editorial. I’m here to tell you that we understand the situation. It’s not your fault, and we can work something out with your novel. If you have any notes or handwritten drafts, we can help get them typed up—”

  “They had to send
a Paki to reassure me now?” he muttered.

  He loomed over us, the darkness he was radiating was almost smothering. Anything could kick off now.

  “Would, would you like me to wank you off?” Julia asked.

  “Julia?! What is this? Are you suffering from some kind of Stockholm syndrome with this prick?”

  “I don’t feel we should leave him like this,” she said.

  “I want to fuck you,” he muttered. “This would never have happened if you’d agreed to fuck at the beginning. The stars were aligned. That was supposed to happen. Now it’s come to this. I’m buggered.”

  “Christ!” I cried. “Not that again! This is the most solipsistic, irrational bollocks I’ve ever heard!”

  I was losing it, and I didn’t care. I didn’t care that the gods were watching, I didn’t care that I was breaking Roger’s Golden Rule: Don’t make it personal, don’t insert yourself into the case.

  “It’s none of your business,” Rexton said. “This is between her and me.”

  “It is absolutely my business, arsehole! I’m her boyfriend!”

  “You? I should have known. You lot, you come over here, take our jobs, sleep with our women—”

  I’d stopped thinking at that point, I just reacted, reared back, and punched him straight in the face with all my weight behind it. I felt the crack! of his jaw against my fist, and he flew across the room, a lot farther than I expected. Ken and Clive were excellent boxing instructors, after all. Time slowed as Julia and I watched Rexton flip arse-over-tit across his table and crash through his TV set, landing on the carpet with his head through the screen.

  Now I knew why Kali had showed up. She had known this was coming and just had to witness it.

  Rexton lay there like a beached whale.

  “Oh, dear,” Julia said.

  Kali filmed all this on her phone.