Owned: A Mafia Menage Romance(93)
Luckily, I didn’t have to wait long for my opportunity to confess. I swear Bridget sleeps with her phone under her pillow just for me.
“What’s up, Buttercup?” came her voice over the line, gravelly with sleep. I heard the small gasp that meant she was lighting up her first cigarette of the day.
“I need you to tell me if I’m crazy.”
“You are for sure crazy.”
“No, seriously, Bridget. I need you to hear this.”
I recounted the whole story to her in a low voice, talking right into the phone’s mic. She didn’t even interrupt me once, which was my first hint that I had really crossed the line this time.
When I finished, she didn’t say anything.
“Are you still there?”
She sighed.
“Seriously, Bridget. Have I freaked you out completely?”
“Completely?” she finally answered. “No. Are they both still alive?”
“Alive? Yes, of course,” I stammered.
“Not chopped up in pieces in the dumpster behind the gallery?”
“Bridget, come on.”
“Well, if they are alive then I am not freaked out completely. There is still room for more freak, is what I am saying.”
I could picture her face clearly in my mind. She was probably still half dressed, having fallen unconscious on her sheets sometime after three am. I imagined her eyebrows knit into a straight line across her nose in disapproval as she smoked her dark brown cigarette.
“OK,” I sighed.
“So let me get this absolutely clear. I sent you to pick up a couple of collectors…”
“Yes.”
“Correction: a couple of whales. I sent you to pick up a couple of fucking whales…”
“Um.”
“And you thought it would be cool to fuck them both…”
“Bridge…”
“Inside a gallery exhibit. Which for all you know was live-streamed onto Twitter.”
“Oh my god, Bridget, was it??”
“How the fuck would I know!” she spat, and I heard her gasp through a choking drag on her smoke. “I don’t keep track of what those art school idiots do with their fucking installation art bullshit! Fuck!”
“OK, OK, sorry,” I said quickly while my mind raced through a fast-forward version of the whole episode. Please, by all that is byzantine and baroque, let them have run out of NEA money.
“OK, what?” she said irritably.
“OK, I know what you’re thinking!”
She laughed, that hard barking sound she made when something was either funny or really not funny.
“Margot, girl, you don’t know what I’m thinking. I don’t even know what I’m thinking.”
“Oh,” I said. I’d never heard that one before.
There was a pause. I heard her flicking the tips of her long acrylic nails against each other.
I waited as long as I could. “I just need you to tell me that I am not crazy.”
She sighed. I vividly imagined the long cone of cigarette smoke shooting up to the ceiling. Man, did I miss smoking.
“I can’t do that,” she said finally. “You may very well be crazy. Or you may be the luckiest bitch I know. The jury is still out.”
I chuckled with relief. “You’re a jerk.”
“No, you’re a jerk. Can I get me some of that? Can I come over?”
“What? Shut up.”
“I could be there in 20. Are they still there?”
I buried my face in the pillow so no one could hear me laughing, then remembered there was no one to hear me anyway. So she wasn’t entirely convinced of my sanity, but she wasn’t writing me off either… Well it could be worse, right?
“No, no... I left them at the gallery, hopefully never to be seen again.”
“Yeah well… That’s too bad. The Burkes are beyond loaded. That could have been just the patronage you needed.”
I shrugged even though she couldn’t see me and tried to form a response that didn’t sound sour-grapey at all. “You know, Declan really enjoyed that carnival installation. They probably wouldn’t have been a fit for me anyway. But I think he was seriously interested in the Tilt-A-Skull.”
“The what?”
“Um, you know… The Tilt-A-Whirl ride with the skulls painted on the backs of the cars or whatever?”
“Ohhh, right… Actually that’s called Still Life With Tangerines And Ennui.”
There was a long sigh as she exhaled what must have been a beautiful vesuvius of smoke.
“You’re kidding me.”
“Nope,” she chuckled. “And that thing where you got the double-P? Landscape After A Cleansing Fog.”
“Oh come on.”
“I can’t even make this shit up, Margot.”