Shatter (Club Grit Trilogy) (4 page)

We definitely wouldn’t have gone any farther.

“You’re not on a diet, right?” he joked, but I didn’t get it until he laughed.

“N-no,” I lied. In truth, I was always on a diet, but I didn’t want to offend him.

“Good,” he said, placing one of the sugar cubes on each of our slotted spoons, before putting a glass under the carafe’s spigot, letting the water drip over the sugar, melting it and letting it run through the slotted spoon in a slurry, until it hit the absinthe, where it clouded the liquid faster than my eyes could process. What was once a glassy forest green was now a cloudy mint shade, and after a while, the glass was a bit less than full but now filled with a mixture of sugar, absinthe, and iced water. He did the same to the second glass, and then, he lifted it up. I grabbed at mine quickly, almost spilling it, and raised mine to meet his, our glasses kissing, even though we hadn’t yet.

I sipped at the liquid and was surprised at its strong taste. Even with the sugar and water, the strong herbal, almost medicinal taste of the absinthe came through. It tasted the way that the botanical gardens I’d visited on a school trip had smelled and it lingered in my mouth the way my first kiss at those same gardens had, with a boy whose name I’d forgotten but whose touch, as clumsy as the absinthe was sharp, as sweet as the sugar, was anything but.

“Is everything alright?” asked Lawrence gently, placing his half empty glass back down.

I looked at him, and at the space between us on the bed, the edge of which we were sitting on, and I had the sudden urge to fill the space, and to be filled by Lawrence, but only one of those needs was satisfied. I scooted over, our shoulders touching, and took another sip of my drink before answering, “Everything and nothing.”

“It sounds like maybe you need to relax,” said Lawrence, before pressing a button on a remote on another level of the cart. The lights dimmed and were replaced by another set of lights. I looked up and gasped: the ceiling of this section had been rigged so that it looked like the night sky. I don’t mean it was dark and there were pinpricks of light: it was as if I was under the stars in the middle of nowhere, except I’m pretty sure that there aren’t large beds and absinthe and dubstep remixes of pop songs playing in the middle of nowhere.

Lawrence leaned back, hands behind his head, and shimmied further on the bed. I followed his lead and we just looked up at the stars for a while. They were blinking, like real stars, and a few were in different colors, like dark red and bright orange, and every few minutes, a shooting star trailed across the ceiling.

“How does it work?” I asked. “Is it a TV or something?”

“Actually, it’s a lot cheaper. Each of those stars is part of a group, which blinks at the same time, operated by a single controller. The blinking is actually set to the beat of the music outside, and because something fast is playing, they’re blinking faster. If someone were to play something like a slow sonata, they’d pulsate much more slowly. The planets just have different LEDs hooked up to the fiber optics, and the shooting stars are their own groups, which are set to go off in set paths in a certain way. Because there’s just spaces that glow, like pixels, instead of a bunch of stuff glowing, like a television, where even a so-called dark screen still lets off light, the stars look more realistic because they’re against a matte black background,” explained Lawrence.

I turned to him. “You own the club, don’t you?”

He chuckled and took my hand in his, and I didn’t pull my hand away. “How did you guess?”

“I’ve never seen anyone up here before, someone called the bouncer to let us in, and you know a lot about that ceiling,” I said with a laugh of my own.

“I guess the jig is up. You’ve caught me. I do own Club Grit,” he said, pressing his palms up into the air as if he was putting his hands up, admitting that he was guilty of lying through omission, as if my eyes were guns that could shoot bullets of judgment.

I laughed and pressed my hands into his, pulling them down to our hips, and then, pressed the side of my body into the side of his. “It’s fine, Lawrence,” I said with a drunken giggle, a laugh steeped in vodka and good times. “It’s fine. I like the fact you have secrets, the fact that there are parts of you I don’t understand...yet. The fact that you aren’t boring, like the others.”

“What others?”

“The other others, the ones out there, the others out there, out there, the others,” I said sloppily, pointing out towards the crowd and staggering over to the sheer curtains. I pulled them back and looked out over the balcony, grateful for the handrails, because I knew that if I fell, it’d be fatal, from this high up in the air. Lawrence kept a hold of my hand and moved up behind me, placing his hands on my waist and pulling me close to him, his face grazing the top of my head.

“You smell so good,” he murmured, and he took in a large whiff.

I wriggled away but he just held onto me even more firmly. “You do,” he insisted.

“You mean I don’t smell like club rain?” I joked.

“Club rain?” he asked, confused.

“Like, the alcohol and sweat and other gross stuff that accumulates and then rains back down on the dancers,” I said with a giggle. “Haven’t you ever noticed that people smell gross after clubbing?”

“Not at Club Grit,” he said seriously, looking at me with his light blue eyes that practically glowed, even in the soft light of the VIP area, a stark contrast to the flashing bright lights of the dance floor, where everyone else was.

“Even at Club Grit,” I said, turning to face Lawrence and whisper this admission of his club’s flaw into his ear like a secret both about and between lovers, pulling him close as I did so and pressing my chin onto his shoulder.

“I like you, Kim,” he said as we watched over the dance floor, noticeably less full than it had been just minutes before. When the club started to clear out, it cleared out quickly, not slowly, and it was getting late. Time had flown by with Lawrence.

“Why?”

“For a lot of reasons. You call me out on my bullshit. You keep me wanting and waiting. You can actually hold a conversation with me. I know it sounds cliché, but you’re different from other people, and in a good way. You have secrets and don’t reveal too much about yourself, and I’m guessing this is true with your friends as well, but it means that those you share your most intimate parts with are people who have earned your trust and respect. I want to be one of those people, eventually, but I won’t be so presumptuous as to assume that I’m a member of your inner circle...yet,” he said, turning me around and pulling my hips into his lap. I could feel his firm package pressed into my ass crack, but I didn’t say anything about it, nor did I grind and rub and bump and try to push it further and further into me. I didn’t want to ruin the moment but I did want Lawrence. He’d spent hours with me and yet...he hadn’t done anything more sexual than what he was doing right now, and what we were doing wasn’t as sexual as it was intimate, just content with standing by one another and watching the crowd undulate like waves crashing against the shore. I hadn’t had anything like this with a man before, and Lawrence was unlike any other man I’d been with before, so it shouldn’t have surprised me as much as it did. Lawrence rested his head on my shoulder as he pulled me back and forth, not to stimulate his shaft but to rock with me like we were two boats bobbing on a pier, hitting each other gently, over and over, before inevitably, we had to sail away from one another, to sail, away, from one another, to sail, away.

I turned to kiss Lawrence but he turned away before my lips could reach his, instead, taking me by the hand and leading me back into the owner’s room. I was hoping he’d press me down onto the bed, that he would take me then and there, but instead, he lead me back to the spot where I had left my clutch and went to the cart, pouring me a drink. It was so weird: usually, it was nubile young women like me serving drinks to men like him, but it had been inverted, and here he was, playing the servant to me, pouring me a glass of ice water rather than alcohol, and insisting I drink, insisting I stay hydrated.

I licked away the cool beads of water from my lips as if I was licking off a patch of burst bubble gum from my upper lip, but it failed to seduce Lawrence, who was focused on my eyes, not my mouth, and I blushed, turning away. He pressed the back of his warm hand against

Talking to Lawrence should have been easier now that I knew what he did for a living, but it wasn’t. He owned the club I went to almost religiously. He wasn’t some random millionaire dropping in for a night of fun: he was as LA as I was, if not more, and knowing he was such an important man made my stomach churn, but I had stayed, talking with him about the Club until my phone buzzed. The limo was ready to leave and I was the only sorority sister they were missing, but I’d missed the texts I’d been sent because I’d set my phone to vibe and missed the sound of the vibe over the club’s music.

“When can I see you again?” asked Lawrence as he walked me out the club.

“Thursday night?” I said, biting my lip, before he pulled me in and pushed my chin up. I let out a small gasp and he pressed his mouth against mine, firmly, but without exploring my mouth or body further. I hadn’t expected this: something so sudden, so spontaneous, so unplanned. I was so used to being in control that having Lawrence randomly take what he wanted was a surprise, as was the fact that what he wanted was my body.

“I’ll be looking forward to it,” he said as he pulled away and I turned to enter the limo.

It turns out I’d told him a lie I hadn’t meant to tell.

T
HEY SAY NEVER TO GOOGLE THE PEOPLE YOU DATE, but technically? I wasn’t dating Lawrence, so I didn’t see what harm it would do. That was the worst decision I made on that Wednesday, the night before I was supposed to see the mysterious man again.

Sometimes, you’re better off not knowing about a person.

Sometimes, you’re better off in the dark, with only the knowledge they’ve shared with you.

Sometimes, you should shut off the computer, walk out of the room, and go do something, anything, to get your mind off them and their secrets and the things you might not want to know.

However, I didn’t know that at the time, so when I entered the name “Lawrence Lamont” into Google, I expected to maybe find an article or two about Club Grit.

I didn’t expect him to own a network of clubs, not just Club Grit.

I didn’t expect his LinkedIn profile to list him as a UCLA alum who went to Harvard Business School.

I didn’t expect there to be a Wikipedia article and for him to be in the category “American billionaires”.

Billionaire: someone with a net worth of at least a billion dollars. When I was writing this, I was lucky to have two thousand in my bank account at a given time. A billion dollars is a sum of money that I hear about all the time: industries are measured in billions spent yearly, companies lose billions, populations spend billions, but individuals? Individuals don’t have billions, at least, not very often, and not personally: they might invest billions for a corporation but they themselves don’t have a billion dollars.

Lawrence Lamont had twenty.

Twenty billion dollars is twenty times more than just a billion dollars. That’s forty million bottles of champagne at five hundred per bottle at Club Grit. That’s two hundred thousand mid-priced vehicles priced at a hundred thousand dollars each. Even divided by large numbers, twenty billion is a big number, the kind of number used to measure bacteria populations and molecules and maybe plankton or krill or stars.

But it’s not the kind of number I’d expect to see in a bank account; certainly not of anyone I met.

Certainly not Lawrence.

I heard a knock at my door. “Come in,” I said, closing the browser window and turning.

“Kim, I need a favor,” said the tall, leggy blonde in the plaid kilt: Pearl, the sorority president. She never went clubbing because, ostensibly, she had to focus on her thesis. I’d handled mine during the fall semester. As VP, I took over for her during the spring, and seeing as the sorority had a yearlong rush period rather than one that lasted a quarter or a semester, there was stuff that had to be done, like accompanying the pledges on sorority-organized “outings”, like our adventures to Club Grit. Things had escalated from the simple ice cream socials and mixers of the fall semester and each and every pledge was learning what it really mean to not only be a member of Omega Mu Gamma, but also to be a gorgeous woman living in Beverly Hills. Doors were opened and velvet ropes pulled aside for us, and it was our birthright, not due to money or skill or talent, but because we had been blessed, blessed with amazing genetics and good looks.

“Yes?” I said, not bothering to put on airs around Pearl.

“Can you take Emma out sometime? I’m worried she’s not spending enough time with the sisters,” she said, as if that was what the problem really was, as if she seriously cared about sisterhood.

“You mean you’re worried she’s not spending enough time with the sorority,” I said, raising an eyebrow. I’d heard rumors that Emma had been attending parties at other sororities and at fraternities that weren’t associated with Omega House.

“There’s a Pub Night at Beta Rho Omega tomorrow night, and if you’re free, can you take Emma? She doesn’t want to go to Club Grit for some reason, and I don’t exactly think she’s going to be studying in the library, if you catch my drift,” she said with a laugh, as if whether or not we controlled our freshman was a laughing matter.

I sighed. “Whatever, Pearl.”

“Excuse me?” she said, looking at me with wide eyes and tilting her head. “What was that?”

“I said, ‘whatever’, Pearl,” I said, knowing I should correct myself but I also knew that it didn’t matter anymore. It was my last semester in Omega Mu Gamma, because as a senior, it wasn’t like I’d be coming back, at least for a few years, but I didn’t exactly see myself becoming a lady who lunches with her ex sorority pals for the rest of her life. Aside from Becca, I didn’t really have anyone I’d bonded with here. What Omega Mu Gamma had provided me with was practice, as a sociologist, as the vice president this past year, as well as a shield. Walking through life invisible, like a ghost, I’d been stepped on, figuratively and literally, by people that didn’t know I existed. But at Omega Mu? I was important. I was somebody, and nobody messed with a somebody.