False front, p.2
False Front, page 2
The charming, if neglected, arched, leaded-glass windows overlooked elevated train tracks where the subways emerged from Manhattan tunnels. His office, despite a huge cash infusion from one of the largest news media organizations in the country, had a gritty feel that Emma was sure Farrell loved. His desk was piled high with magazines, newspapers, and political pamphlets. Farrell, in his paranoia, felt that “lo-fi” was a safer way to research—Big Brother was watching online. A wall in the corner was tacked full of photos of congressmen, movie stars, news anchors, and athletes. There was a burial ground of outdated technology: fax machines, old laptops, and disk drives, some of which he still used. Farrell loved the looks on people’s faces when he showed up to an interview with a handheld analog recorder and asked if he could “tape” the meeting. Amid the chaos and the junk, Farrell sat behind his desk, black Adidas propped up dangerously close to a triple espresso, with a cutting-edge tablet nestled in his lap. His frizzy dark blond hair was pulled into a ponytail. He looked like a retired BMX racer. He glanced up with a warm smile, the eye of his office hurricane, and didn’t waste a second jumping in.
“Emma, take a seat. You may think you’re getting canned, but you’re not getting canned. No canning today. Just good news. Very, very good news.” Emma glanced over at his sideboard and spotted the nearly empty pot of coffee resting on the burner.
She often wondered if Farrell had a more serious undiagnosed mental disorder beyond his fixations. He rambled like a lunatic, but he said he had good news, so she just looked at him with a raised brow.
“Nathan Hamilton Bishop. Not Nathaniel, not Nate—Nathan. Born—Greenwich, Connecticut; age—twenty-eight; height—six-two; weight—185; hair—brown….”
She listened to Farrell rattle off Nathan’s stats and thought how incomplete the description sounded. He failed to mention that Nathan’s eyes were a captivating emerald green or that his eyelashes were so long that as a boy he had trimmed them. Farrell omitted that Nathan’s hair curled at the ends when he wore it long and that his crooked smile revealed a barely perceptible chipped incisor that he had never had repaired.
“Chestnut,” she murmured.
“Pardon?”
“His hair. Never mind.”
“Andover, Dartmouth, HBS. Current president, soon-to-be CEO of Knightsgrove-Bishop, arms dealer to the stars . . .”
“Defense contractor.”
“Tomato, tom-ah-to,” he continued as though she hadn’t chimed in. “Fuck buddy to the rich and famous, charlatan, bon vivant, womanizer . . .”
“I know who he is,” she snapped. Boy, did she know.
“Well then, grab a jacket because hell has frozen over.”
Emma waited.
“After routinely requesting an interview every month since he took office . . .”
“He’s the president of a company, not a country,” she corrected.
“My sweet, naive girl.” He smiled kindly and looked at her as though she had asked if Santa Claus were real. Emma mused that he would have patted her head if she hadn’t been sitting across the desk.
“Where was I? Ah, the interview.” Are you sitting down?”
“Sitting.”
“Seatbelt buckled?”
“Farrell.”
“Sorry. Nathan Bishop has agreed to not one, but a series of interviews, a six-week series on himself and the love of his life.”
She thought she might throw up for a second.
“Who?” she choked meekly, not wanting to know the answer.
“Nathan Bishop. Emma, are you even listening to me?”
“No, I mean the ‘love of his life’ part.”
“Oh, isn’t it obvious? The company. Not sure Bishop is capable of meaningful human interaction.”
She was too relieved to respond.
“He requested you.”
“He what?”
“He requested you. You’re doing the interview. I didn’t even question it. When an ungettable guy agrees to something like this after nearly two years of trying, I don’t care if he wants the Ghost of Christmas Past doing the interview.
No. Fucking. Way.
Her mind was going in a million different directions, so she kept it simple.
“Why?”
“I think it’s obvious.”
The color left her face. Normally, she was the first person to think her looks were the reason for something, but this was Nathan Bishop. The most recent photo on his image search was of him with the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition cover model. This wasn’t about Emma’s looks, but it couldn’t be . . . . She huffed a breath and sat back in the unsteady chair.
“Why?” she repeated, feeling ridiculous.
“Um, because he has eyes in his head. And if this were still just a nickel-and-dime blog, I would add ‘and a dick in his pants.’ But we aren’t, so I can’t.”
“So, no illusions that I’m a talented upstart,” she replied blandly. In a strange irony, sometimes her looks were a blow to her ego, something Caroline deftly referred to as “the problems of the pretty.” She usually added a dramatic boohoo to emphasize her point.
“You are talented, but I doubt Nathan Bishop read your piece on arsenic levels in Sheepshead Bay.”
Emma shrugged her acknowledgment.
“Look, everybody has a way of getting their foot in the door. Me? I’m willing to risk a restraining order. You? Well . . .” he trailed off.
“So, take advantage of the fact that I’m attractive and go get the story of the summer?”
“Attractive isn’t even close to the word I’d use, but yes, take advantage of . . . this.” He gestured to her from head-to-toe and turned to his tablet. “And if you want to sue me, I’ll add your lawsuit to the pile. He wants you at,” he paused as he scrolled through the email, “noon tomorrow. Lunch in his office. If tomorrow is like every Friday, he will just be back from his weekly squash game—no doubt sweating out a hangover and sabotaging some unwitting political campaign.”
“I’ll be there.” She ignored the rest of Farrell’s comments, not because they bothered her, or even because she thought they were absurd, but because the first thing he said was ringing in her ears so sweetly that she didn’t want to let the sound go: he wants you.
Nathan Bishop was a scoundrel. A pig. A shark. A wolf. A fox. A dog. He was the entire zoo. And Emma had been in love with him since she was a child. They had been next-door neighbors in Connecticut, and he was her first real memory. When Emma was four, she’d gotten stuck in his treehouse. She had climbed the rickety ladder and was too afraid to come back down. She’d sat up there, balled up in a corner until she’d smelled something strange. When she looked over the edge, Nathan was sitting under the tree smoking a huge cigar and coughing. He was nine.
“Nave.”
Her little voice scared the shit out of him, and he threw the cigar into the dirt and frantically looked around. Panic gave way to confusion. Then he looked up and saw her.
“Jesus, Em-em, get lost.”
“Nave?” she repeated. A fat tear hit him on the shirt.
He looked up again. This time, he smiled.
“You’re stuck, huh?”
She nodded. He climbed up and sat with her for a second. He pulled the sleeve of his Henley down over the heel of his hand and wiped her nose and cheeks.
“Climb aboard.” He patted his shoulder, and she climbed on, her small legs dangling down his back, arms around his neck. Slowly, he took her down. “Okay, you’re safe on the ground. Don’t go up there again, though. It’s really old. It might not even hold your ten pounds.”
She nodded at him and pushed at a loose tooth with her tongue. He was just so safe. He reached two fingers out, and she took hold of them. “You going back through the hole in the fence?”
She nodded, wide-eyed. He knew all her secrets.
“Okay, get going. Mariella is probably already wondering where you are.”
She released his fingers.
“Nave?”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t smoke again.” And with that gentle scolding and a reminder that she knew some of his secrets too, she ran across the lawn and slipped through the hole in the fence.
She saw him all the time. Their families spent holidays together and summers in Nantucket. She would wait for him to come home from school, and he would let her sit in his room sometimes while he studied. Their parents used to joke that they would get married, but a comment like that to a ten-year-old boy about a five-year-old girl was, well, ridiculous. To that five-year-old girl, though, it was heaven.
All of that changed the summer she turned nine. Emma hadn’t seen him since.
Back at her desk, Emma flipped through article after article on Nathan. He had so much media exposure, it was staggering; he deliberately wanted to put himself in the spotlight, which was not like the boy she remembered. These articles painted a picture of a man she didn’t know and didn’t particularly care for. He was on the cover of Rolling Stone after Knightsgrove-Bishop funded a huge multi-use stadium in Dubai. In the photo, Selena Gomez was shining his shoes, and Ariana Grande was filing his nails as he sat reclined in a spa chair; both women wore white lab coats with neon lingerie peeking through. New York Magazine did a feature on his arrest record: two counts of public indecency, one count of assault, one count of public intoxication. And of course, there were the women. There were stories of kink, infidelity, broken hearts, and public catfights. Models swore they were engaged to him, a movie star left her husband for him, a royal had claimed to be pregnant by him. All the stories were sourced through the women; Nathan had never once commented. On any of them.
Coming a close second to his sexcapades were his adrenaline rushes. He rode mountain bikes in Chang Mai, parachuted in Odessa, did a survival hike in Afghanistan, climbed K2, raced camels. His extracurriculars read like a rich playboy bucket list. As she scrolled down the posts, the man painted on the page felt wrong. Was this vapid, live-for-the-moment, roué what Nathan Bishop had become? Why? The thought made her feel . . . empty.
When Emma was eight, Nathan left for his first year of boarding school. She realized now that he was young to be going, but with his British mother and his much older brothers, it was understandable. That, and his mother had left his father shortly after, so she could only assume his departure had been calculated. None of that factored into the thoughts of an eight-year-old, however.
She was playing in the backyard—dolls were lined up, and she was teaching them state capitals. Nathan walked up and gave her an exaggerated wave.
“Nave, what’s the capital of California?”
He scratched his head and pretended to think.
“Is it Disneyland?”
She fell over laughing.
“No, silly. It’s Sacramento.”
“Sacramento? Okay, I will have to remember that. Em-em, I’m leaving for school.”
A frown marred her face. Something wasn’t right.
“It’s a new school.” He had a look on his face that spoke volumes. He should have prepared her. “I have to sleep there.”
“Oh. Okay.”
“Hey, no pouting.”
“You are supposed to take me on the boat today.”
“Damn, I forgot. I’m sorry, Em, I can’t today.”
Her lip began to quiver.
“Hey, hey, hey. I’m coming back in a few weeks. We’ll go then, okay?”
“Okay.”
“You sure?”
“Don’t forget.” She fiddled with the doll in her hand.
“You bet, Em-em. I will come back, and I will teach you to sail. You’ll be my first mate. Sound good?”
“No. You’re the first mate”
He laughed.
“Aye aye, captain. Kiss on the cheek?”
“Nope. You gotta marry me for us to kiss. Bye, Nave.” She punched him in the thigh as hard as she could and ran off.
Nathan’s absence hit her hard. She would stare out the window across the pristine lawn that separated their homes and quietly cry. She would sneak into his bedroom and hide in his closet. She wouldn’t eat for days. Her father was about to throw in the towel and take her to a psychologist for her understandable abandonment issues when Nathan came back for a one-week fall break. After that, things had gotten easier. Nathan always prepared her before he left and made her promise to do small tasks for him while he was gone. The Bishops had a chocolate lab named Winchester that Nathan needed her to brush once a day and, hopefully, teach a trick. He wanted her to find him a really good skipping stone. He asked her to learn a greeting and three essential phrases in four different languages. He kept her busy and came home enough that she was able to adjust to his absence that year.
After that, everything changed in her world. It was like she had moved to a different planet. Now, though, she realized that she was obviously in the same solar system because Nathan Bishop was still her sun.
She was jarred from her thoughts by her phone dancing across the desk. She rarely answered unknown numbers, but her daydreaming had put her in an uncharacteristically romantic mood, and she imagined Nathan’s urbane voice on the other end of the line.
“Hello?”
“Ms. Porter?”
“Yes?”
“This is Aggie, Mr. Bishop’s assistant.”
“Yes?”
“Mr. Bishop would like you to meet him at the back bar of the Gotham Hotel tonight at 9:30.”
“I thought we were meeting at noon tomorrow?”
“Mr. Bishop felt an introductory meeting was in order. You are to meet him tonight.”
No request, no option. No way.
“I’m sorry, Aggie. Tonight doesn’t work.”
Ha. Take that.
“Could you hold please?”
“Sure.”
As Emma held the silent phone to her ear, she felt a pang of dread. What was she doing? This was the guy every journalist in the city wanted to talk to. She had him for six weeks, and she was blowing him off? Her knee-jerk reaction was going to blow the entire interview.
“Ms. Porter?”
“Yes.”
“Mr. Bishop said to let you know he’s disappointed you’re otherwise occupied seeing as he canceled a dinner with the UN Secretary-General to free up this time.”
Time to suck it up.
“I’m sorry, Aggie. I’ve already canceled my other plans. Of course, I’m free.”
“I’ll let him know.”
Click.
So that’s how this was going to go.
The Gotham Hotel was the epitome of cool. It was edgy and chic, but with an Old New York history. The lobby was an intricate mix of contemporary art, all in black and white with an occasional splash of color, and classic photos of famous occupants over the years. The suited woman with a discreet headset manning the concierge desk looked more like an event planner managing a red-carpet event than a hotel employee. She eyed Emma for a moment. Assessing. Emma was wearing a black cashmere sleeveless turtleneck, black cropped jeans, and black Chanel ballet flats. Once the woman had satisfied herself that Emma was a nobody, she gave a cold smile.
“Yes?”
Emma met her frigid greeting with some ice of her own.
“Nathan Bishop?”
“Ah.”
She seemed to stop herself from adding, of course.
“Back bar. Down the hall.”
She gestured with the back of her hand dismissively. Emma wanted to clarify that she wasn’t some dessert he’d ordered, but she had no laptop or notebook to aid her in her quest to appear professional. This was just an introduction, after all, so she stuck out her chin and strode past.
As she moved cautiously down the empty hall, it suddenly hit her. She was about to have a drink with Nathan Bishop. She tried not to build him up too much, but she knew him—maybe better than anyone. The man she remembered was kind and thoughtful and caring and beautiful, and even though he didn’t know Emma Porter, surely their bond was still there. Her heart was racing, but as she took hesitant strides down the empty hallway, she noticed that wasn’t the only reaction she was having. There was a mist of perspiration forming at the back of her neck. Her nipples were straining against her lace bra, and between her legs, there was an unfamiliar warmth. She was aroused. It was a sensation she had never experienced before, but it was unmistakable. What the hell? It was like her body was anticipating the fairy tale that was waiting in the next room. She could picture it perfectly. He would be sitting in a booth gazing thoughtfully into his drink. Waiting. As she walked in, he would stand, and their eyes would lock. She could practically feel the electric zing as he would slowly walk toward her and take her hand in his . . . . She rounded the corner.
Record. Scratch.
Excitement turned to shock turned to dismay. Of course, Nathan saw none of this. He was talking on his phone in a small booth, laughing as if he’d just heard the funniest joke ever told. Crammed in across from him were two women, one of whom Emma immediately recognized as an infamous lingerie model, the other the face of a hip cosmetics brand. The lingerie model had one heeled gladiator sandal set gently on the seat of the opposite bench, between Nathan’s spread thighs. Cosmetics girl was sucking provocatively on the cherry from her cocktail. Nathan ended his call and pulled on the knot of his pink tie, then spread his thighs wider with a wink. All the while Emma stood dumbstruck. Who the fuck are you?
As if she’d spoken the question aloud, Nathan glanced up. Their eyes met, and for just a moment she saw a sweet, sincere look of recognition. Then it was gone, and a lascivious grin split his face. He waved her over with his tumbler, scotch splashing dangerously close to the rim. He then somehow dismissed his coterie, who pouted prettily and indicated they would be at the bar. Emma took their place in the booth. Nathan didn’t look up from his phone.
