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His phone was ringing. Why was his phone ringing? Wilford realised he was still in his jeans, and is phone was in his pocket. He managed to dig his phone out without moving too much. It was his lawyer. His lawyer was calling him. Why was his lawyer calling him?
Wilford hit the green button, and then the speaker button. “Yep?” he said.
“Were you asleep?” Steve asked.
“Yep.” Wilford yawned.
Steve laughed. It must have been later than Wilford realised. “Okay, well. Everything’s been filed. Come out today so we can discuss what comes next.”
Wilford tapped his phone a few times, until he could get the clock to show up for him. It was after 9am. Not terribly late, but a lot later than he usually slept in, even since his surgery.
“Yep,” he said again. He hung up and went back to sleep.
That creepy butler was handing out his cocaine cocktails by the time Wilford stumbled out of the room he’d passed out in. He at least had everything he’d come with this time, and didn’t seem to have picked up any additional injuries along the way. Trying to avoid getting blackout drunk seemed to help with that, for some reason.
He didn’t stay to wait for everyone else to drag themselves out of bed. If Steve wanted to talk to him in person, the topic of the day was probably court dates. Wilford needed to get into Vinewood. He made sure he was put together and snuck out the front door, assuming nobody would care or notice that he’d snuck out early. Damien, it seemed, was on the same path. Or trying to be. He stood beside his car, looking at it, and then turning a baffled expression to the sky. Wilford looked up as well, and could see why Damien was baffled. Someone managed to throw a stone lion onto Damien’s car. Presumably from the roof, but it was one hell of a throw to have hit the bullseye as perfectly as it did. It looked like other stone lions on the property, so it probably hadn’t come from a random fly-over during the night. The entire roof of Damien’s car was caved in, the windshield shattered, and the crumpled hood was almost certainly hiding serious engine damage.
The two of them studied the damage in a confused silence. The more Wilford looked at it, the less sense it made.
“Hop in,” Wilford said finally. “I’m heading that way today.”
“You’re going to set on hangover day?” Damien asked, following Wilford over to his car.
“Gotta see my lawyer.” Wilford unlocked the car so they could both get in. For a moment, Damien seemed like he had a question, until he glanced into the back seat.
“Oh. About the kid?” he asked.
Wilford started the car and made his way down the winding driveway to the road. “Yeah, I need to get his name changed. Which is a whole other can of worms.”
In less than six months, he’d gone from demanding paternity tests to petitioning for adoption. What the hell had his life become?
“The whole thing, or just his last name?” Damien asked.
“Just his last name. His first name’s common enough, and there’s no point in confusing him all over again,” Wilford said. He rolled down his window a lit a cigarette.
“Yeah, that’s probably best. My mom remarried when I was about two, and I never understood why my name wasn’t the same as everyone else’s.” Damien took a cigarette as Wilford offered the pack. “But then Celine got married, and our names were all different.”
Wilford almost didn’t catch exactly what Damien had said. “She’s your sister?” he asked. “That how you know Mark?”
“No, I knew Mark first. I wasn’t exactly expecting them to start dating after he got divorced.” Damien rolled his window down as well, trading cigarette smoke for more wildfire smoke in the car.
“You’re not divorced, are you?” Wilford asked.
Damien laughed. “No, I’ve managed to dodge that bullet. And the pre-requisite.”
“I think that’s the right idea,” Wilford said. Almost everyone he knew was scrambling to get married, or trying to find a way to stop being married. It all seemed like a lot of hassle to him.
“I know she likes to keep things professional, but has Celine said anything to you?” Damien asked suddenly.
“About what?” She’d said a lot of stuff about a lot of things to him.
Damien didn’t answer right away. He took a deep breath, and shook his head. “She… They’ve both changed. You wouldn’t know that, obviously, but… I see something in both of them that wasn’t there before. It’s not my place, but I worry.”
Wilford shook his head. He almost answered that neither of them had ever said anything, but that wasn’t exactly correct. “I’ve seen her get real pissed off at him a few times. I always figured it was regular relationship shit.”
Damien nodded. “She’s not the biggest fan of Mark’s parties. That much is true.”
“You’d think with that kind of fuck-you money, he could rent a place for the weekend,” Wilford said. He may have been single, but that didn’t mean he didn’t understand that it wasn’t that hard to keep your woman happy.
“He’s done two movies in the last six years. I don’t think he has as much money as he lets on.” Damien sounded like he was sharing gossip he shouldn’t have been sharing. But if Wilford had bothered to pay attention to anything that went on in the industry, he’d have probably been able to figure out as much for himself.
“I was wondering why she charged,” Wilford realised suddenly. “I thought it was a hobby until we started talking.”
“It used to be.”
There was a lot more going on in that house than Wilford had ever even considered thinking about. A lot of things started to make a little more sense. They’d probably combined assets, and now Celine needed to build herself a way out. Mark had little good to say about her, but his relationship with Damien kept him from pulling the plug and becoming the bad guy. It was up to Celine to walk out, and psychics in Vinewood were a dime a dozen. She probably couldn’t keep her head above water long enough to even think about court fees.
“What are you going to do about your car?” Wilford asked, changing the subject.
Damien sighed and rolled his eyes. “Hire a crane,” he said.
That was probably a good place to start.
He didn’t like having people in his space. First there were all the landscapers over the summer. Then the house was swarming with contractors. And now a woman with a judgemental makeup was standing in the middle of the room, watching Michael grind crackers into the carpet.
“He’s autistic?” she asked, checking the screen on her small tablet.
“They don’t think so,” Wilford said. “He’s just delayed.”
She nodded and crouched down onto the floor next to Michael. “What have you got there?” she asked.
Michael looked up at offered her a dinosaur. Its mouth was full of ground-up cracker. “Ba ba ba ba,” he said.
“Oh, he was hungry, wasn’t he?” the social worker asked. She took the dinosaur and turned it over in her hands a few times before handing it back. “He’s scary.”
Michael continued to babble on, apparently not having any more words he wanted to say. Apparently content with whatever interaction just occurred between them, the social worker stood back up and nodded.
“With situations like this, most of the process is just a formality,” she said. She checked her tablet again, and then looked around the room. “I don’t think we need to go much farther here. You’re going through your lawyer, right?”
Wilford nodded. “Yeah. Seemed the best way to do it.”
The social worker nodded. “Then someone will be in contact with him soon. You’ll hear from us through him.”
“How soon?” Wilford asked.
She shrugged. “I couldn’t say. We expedite kinship cases, but you’re not the first one in the queue.”
Wilford wasn’t even a little bit surprised. “I figured as much,” he said. “Anything else you guys need from me?”
“Not today,” the social worker said. “The next step is paperwork and your hearing. You’ll get a call when we’re ready for that.”
Wilford showed her out, glad to have her out of his space. It was a constant, never-ending stream of people in his space lately. Getting everything over and done with would be a goddamn blessing.
Finding weird things in the car was becoming just another fact of life. Usually the weird things were something one of the dogs had snuck in, or something the kid had suck in, and it all stayed more or less contained to the back seat. Finding something in the front seat that didn’t belong to him was less expected. Finding the Mayor of Los Santos’ wallet under the front seat was even less expected.
Wilford resisted the urge to snoop for about three seconds, but being a professional snoop practically made it his responsibility to see what Damien kept in it. It was surprisingly boring. Driving license, a few business cards with old area codes — numbers to his city office, then; not his personal line — cash and credit cards. No clutter or old receipts. Absolutely nothing that could be used against him. Damien was either the only politician who was clean as a whistle, or more likely, he made a habit out of losing his wallet and took precautions by keeping it as empty as possible. If nothing else, that made him the only smart politician in town.
Not having any direct way of getting in touch with Damien, Wilford was left with a few less-than-stellar choices. He could call the offices downtown, and deal with that mess, or he could take it out to Banham Canyon. Downtown traffic was always an awful idea. At least the drive out to the canyon was pleasant.
“You want to go on a drive, pal?” He asked as he pulled out his phone to check the traffic.
“Yeh.” Michael was always ready to go for a drive. Sometimes getting him into that damn car seat was a struggle and a half, but once he was strapped in with nowhere else to go, anything probably sounded good.
Wilford plugged his phone into the car’s stereo and pulled out of the parking lot. Downtown Vinewood traffic wasn't much better than downtown Los Santos, but at least this way he only had to do it once, and soon enough they were on the freeway headed out of the city. Michael had picked up a new game for himself that involved pointing out all the cars they saw on the roads, jabbing his finger against the window and shouting each time. As they left town, cars became less and less plentiful, sparking indignation as he started to run out of cars to shout at.
“Hey,” Wilford called back at him. “None of that.”
“No!” Michael shouted back.
“Yeah, yeah,” Wilford grumbled. Everything was becoming ’No.’ Apparently it was supposed to be a sign of progress. It was irritating was what it was.
Eventually he got off the main road and onto the winding private drive that led to Mark’s place. Damien’s crushed car was no longer parked out front, giving Wilford plenty of space to get close. The garage had been left open, with Mark’s Patriot conspicuously absent. Still, Wilford parked next to the little sports car out front and got out to free Michael before he started to mutiny. Once inside, he could let the kid run around for a few minutes before strapping him back in for the ride home. Wilford carried him to the front door, startled by it flying open before he could even reach for the bell.
“Christ,” he said, trying not to fall backwards down the steps. There was plenty of room behind him before that happened, but everything always felt more precarious when he was carrying the kid around.
Celine took a moment to look at the two of them with confusion. Cutting to the chase since he could sense something unwelcoming around the place, Wilford pulled Damien’s wallet out of his inventory and handed it over.
“He left that in my car,” he said.
Celine looked at it and sighed. “Oh, thank god,” she said. She turned back toward the still-opened door. “Benjamin! We found it!” she shouted, closing the door on his response. She shoved Damien’s wallet into her purse and grabbed Wilford by the arm, awkwardly spinning him around.
“Take me somewhere,” she demanded. There was a hard edge to her voice that Wilford had never heard before, and didn’t dare question. Curious enough to comply, he walked with her back to the car. Before he even got to the back seat to open the door, Michael slid from fussy to full nuclear meltdown without warning. He tried to fling himself onto the ground, kicking and swinging his fists like his life was in danger.
“No. Let’s not,” Wilford said, not really sure how to handle the situation. “Come on.”
“I’m sorry,” Celine said, sighing. “I project. I’m not the best at keeping it under control.”
Between Michael screaming, and the oddness of what Celine was saying, it took Wilford a long moment to realise what she actually meant.
“Oh,” he said suddenly. Yeah, the kid was definitely pissed about something. The situation hadn’t got any easier to deal with, but it definitely made more sense. “I thought he’s just mad at all the driving.”
“He might be. But I probably didn’t help.” She opened the passenger door and let herself into Wilford’s car, leaving him to figure out how to progress.
“Come on, pal. You want to go get dinner? You’re probably hungry aren’t you?” Wilford asked, twisting around to open the door without dropping the kid onto the pavement.
Michael didn’t stop crying, but he did nod. The idea of dinner calmed him down enough that Wilford was able to get him strapped into his seat before he could start fighting again.
“I’m sorry,” Celine said as Wilford got behind the wheel. “I just can’t be in this house right now.”
Wilford wasn’t sure what that had to do with him. Glancing around as he started the car, he realised Mark’s Patriot wasn’t the only car missing. “Where’s your Banshee?” he asked, turning on the radio hoping the music would help settle the kid down.
Celine made a sound that wasn’t quite a grumble, but close. “Rear-ended,” she said. “In my own driveway.”
It was definitely time to get the hell out of there. Wilford didn’t know where they were going, so he pulled out of the driveway and turned to head back into town.
“What the hell is this?” Celine asked suddenly, picking up his phone from its dash mount to see what was playing through the speakers.
“Jazzotron,” Wilford said. He didn’t expect her to understand that word, and judging by the scrunched up look on her face, he was right.
“What?” she asked. She quickly shook her head and tried to unlock the phone, only to be thwarted by the password. “Get me the map,” she said, handing it back over.
Wilford held the phone up to his face long enough for it to recognise him and unlock, before passing it right back. Celine tapped at his phone for a few seconds, and put it back in its mount with the GPS pointing to Pacific Bluffs. It wasn’t quite ‘in town,’ but it was more or less in the right direction for the time being.
“I like this place,” Celine said. “It’s next to a little park on the beach.”
Wilford glanced into the mirror, ignoring Michael’s diminishing protests about being strapped back into his seat. “Sounds like a good idea,” he said. “So what’s going on?”
Asking was risking another meltdown, but it was his experience that married women didn’t often throw themselves into the first functional car they saw. They also didn’t tend to make that grumbly noise Celine made again.
“Mark…” she started, before shaking her head. She tried again several times before finally finding the words she wanted to say. “He knows I project. And he knows I can’t control it very well. So when he wants an excuse to be mad at me, he does shit to piss me off so that he can get pissed off and walk out guilt-free.”
It wasn’t exactly what Wilford was expecting. “What’d he do?”
“He rear-ended my car.”
“Seriously?” Wilford felt no loyalty toward the man one way or another; he threw good parties, and had extended a standing invitation to them. But that kind of thing was just low. “When’d he do that?”
“Last night,” Celine said. “After his agent dropped his ass.”
Wilford tried to follow that precise line of thought. He’d definitely engaged in petty vandalism while pissed off. But basic self-preservation generally meant directing the consequences away from yourself, rather than loading the gun and pointing it right at your own face.
“Your brother said he’d been out of work for a while,” he said, easily connecting the two.
“Out of work. And when he does work, it bombs. There’s good money and good work on the B-list, but he won’t take it until the bank starts making threatening calls.” Celine shook her head and took a deep breath. She glanced to the back seat, and then leaned back in her own seat and closed her eyes for a moment. Whatever she was doing, Michael was definitely picking up on it. That, or he’d just run out of crying energy.
“I’d kill for the B-list,” Wilford said. “I don’t know what list I’m on, but if the B-list can afford a castle in the Canyon, it can’t be that bad.”
Celine laughed, an ironic, mirthless sound. “Could you tell him that?”
“Yeah, sure,” Wilford said. He had no intention of doing any such thing.
“Sorry. You’re his friend. You probably don’t want to hear this,” Celine said. She flipped down the visor and fiddled with the mirror so she could refresh her lipstick.
Wilford thought about that. He certainly didn’t consider Mark a friend. He liked Mark well enough, but he hardly knew the guy. “I don’t think he’s said more than two full sentences to me since my teeth wound up in your pool,” he realised aloud.
“Oh.” Celine hung on that for a moment. “You’re always at the house. I thought…”
“He invites me,” Wilford pointed out. “Any excuse to get away from Legos and the Super Pals is a good one.”
Celine laughed, almost bitterly. “I wish I knew what that was like,” she said. “I wanted kids. He already has two I’ve never met, and he doesn’t want any more. And that’s that.”
“You’ve never met your own stepkids?” Wilford asked. Granted, he’d never met his own biological child, but somehow that didn’t seem as odd.
“I don’t think Mark’s talked to them since I’ve known him.” Celine did not sound amused about this. For some reason, Wilford found himself wondering if this was a universal thing she detested, or if Mark made it a special case.
Wilford wanted to ask why she hadn’t walked out on the marriage yet, but it didn’t seem like the best question to be asking his psychic while they sped down the highway.
“Same mother?” he asked instead.
Celine nodded. “His first wife, yeah.”
Which meant unless they were twins, he’d been there when at least one of them was born. It wasn’t an area Wilford had many opinions on, but even he knew what a deadbeat dad was.
“You want this one for the week?” Wilford asked, nodding back toward Michael. The kid had calmed down again finally, and was watching the world pass by out the window.
“It almost sounds like you're trying to get rid of him,” Celine said.
“He’s a nightmare. Complete pain in the ass,” Wilford said. He shrugged. “But so was I, so I’m probably not allowed to complain.”
“You’re allowed to complain a little bit,” Celine said with an absolutely wicked smile.
Mark was a fucking idiot to drive this woman away. Granting her request and letting her into his car was the biggest mistake Wilford had made in a very long time, and he already knew it. He didn’t have to do a damn thing more than he already had to fuck everything up. She’d spent twenty minutes complaining about her husband — a man who was supposed to be Wilford’s friend — and he couldn’t find a single reason to disagree with her.
He’d fucked up the second he talked to her outside of one of the parties.
“So what kind of psychic are you, anyway?” he asked, realising he was several months too late with the question.
“I’m a medium,” she said. “I can’t read minds or solve crimes, unless someone’s spirit can tell me something. It comes with emotional telepathy I could really do without.”
Wilford nodded, having a pretty good guess at why she might find something like that unpleasant. “Sounds to me like you two don’t like each other much,” he said, knowing just how stupid it was before he finished the sentence.
“I hate him,” Celine said plainly. “And he knows it. And I was dumb enough, and star-struck enough to sign a pre-nup.”
“What do you mean?” Wilford asked. “What was in it?”
“I can’t leave him,” Celine says. “If I do, he gets everything.”
“Even the money you make?” Wilford asked. Well, that sure as hell couldn’t be right.
“Even my business.” She took a deep breath, glancing into the back seat again. She was obviously trying to keep everything to herself until they could get out of the car and put some distance away from the kid.
Wilford shook his head. “I don’t think that’s legal. I’ll hook you up with my lawyer. He can probably nullify it for you in an afternoon.”
“I’ve talked to lawyers,” Celine said.
“You’ve talked to Vinewood lawyers. They got loyalty, and it ain’t to you. I’ve got the kind of lawyer that has to fight off those fuckers when I say something one of their clients or their cults doesn’t like,” Wilford says.
“I keep forgetting you’re one of the bad guys,” Celine said.
“What? You think I’d rather be playing by the rules?” Wilford asked. “The only reason I’m not a super villain is I didn’t have the grades in science for it.”
“Maybe I should try it some time,” Celine said. It was impossible to ignore the way she grinned at him. With a grin like that, she didn’t need anything else at all to be a super villain.
Wilford turned off the Great Ocean Highway toward the ocean itself. There was a little line of houses and quaint little restaurants up against the beach, flying bright flags shaped like birds and fish. It was the sort of town the locals went to go to be tourists, where everything was just fake enough to be comfortable, but real enough to be familiar.
“Never been out here before,” he said, checking building numbers against the address Celine had punched into his phone. It was somewhere close, so he slowed down to keep from missing it.
“We used to come out here every weekend,” Celine said. “One time Damien found this little raft that probably belonged to somebody, and started paddling around this little river with it. He had a blast, until the tide started going out.”
“Did he drown?” Wilford asked. He wished he could have been there to see that disaster.
“He said he managed to paddle back a few miles down shore,” Celine said. “I think there’s a respawn point somewhere I’ve never been able to find.”
Wilford laughed. He found the right place, and pulled off into a parking space. “I’ll have to ask him about it,” he said. “I like the faces he makes when things don’t go his way.”
Celine laughed and shook her head. “You really are one of the bad guys.”
Wilford glanced at her as he was grabbing his phone, just long enough to wink before he got out of the car. He shouldn’t have done that. Maybe he could escape it by trying to wrangle the kid out of his seat and into the little diner.
“Come on, pal,” he said. “You hungry?”
Michael nodded, and started to whine. He was worse than hungry. He was also tired and bored, and probably needed to get inside before he had an accident. As he unhooked Michael from his seat, Wilford reached down to pick up the backpack from the floor, just in case a pair of clean briefs were required. He got smacked in the side of his face for his troubles, but he probably deserved it, fucking with their routine like this.
With a good grip on Michael and the bag, Wilford stood up to close the doors and lock up the car. Getting bossed around by a toddler had done absolutely nothing to discourage any attention. If anything, Celine only seemed further encouraged. It would have been very easy to put her off the path. Instead, he bounced Michael in his arms for a few moments, giving ht e kid his full attention as he tried to calm him down. He let Celine lead the way in, hoping that with Mark’s complete lack of a career, they’d be able to avoid causing any more trouble for themselves. At least not being dragged out to red carpet events meant she wasn’t as likely to get recognised outside of the city.
Once inside, Wilford headed off to find the men’s room while Celine picked a table. As soon as he put Michael down on the floor, the kid rushed off to the nearest stall. And immediately started crying when he couldn’t unzip his own pants.
“Hang on a second,” Wilford said tiredly, just glad that the urgency meant there wasn’t likely to be an emergency change of wardrobe in their future. On the list of things Wilford did not see in his future six months earlier, helping a toddler pee without falling into the toilet or getting it on the ceiling was at the top of that list. And yet here he was.
With that crisis averted, Wilford got him cleaned up in the sink and released him to the wild so he could move around a little bit before he had to sit right back down. The diner wasn’t that big, but still they found themselves a bit lost somehow.
“Will!” Celine called.
Wilford looked over toward her voice, finding her a step ahead of him. There was an open patio at the back of the old, converted house, with a few stairs leading down to the beach and a nearby playground. It was all the encouragement Michael needed. He ran outside, tumbled down the stairs into the sand, and got back up as if he hadn’t even noticed. There were seagulls out in on the beach, picking up whatever scraps were out there, and Michael immediately ran straight toward them.
“Hey!” Wilford shouted after him. “Get closer!”
Michael looked up at Wilford for about a second before running after the birds again.
“Let him play,” Celine said. “He deserves it. I really pissed him off back there.”
Wilford nodded vaguely and sat down, not taking his attention off of Michael.
“Mark said he’s adopted?” Celine asked.
“In the process,” Wilford said, paying less attention to her than she probably wanted.
“You sure got that moving fast. I’ve seen it take years for some people,” Celine said, also watching Michael play with the birds.
“They speed it up when it’s family,” Wilford said. Michael wasn’t going any closer to the surf, but he was still a little too far out for comfort.
“Family?” Celine asked.
Wilford nodded, looking back at Celine for just a moment. He didn’t like this nervous feeling the kid seemed to constantly give him, and he wished it would go away. “He’s my grandson.”
There was that absolute look of confusion Wilford was getting so used to seeing. “Oh my god, I’m sorry,” she said, laughing nervously now. “I thought… he doesn’t speak English…” She covered her mouth with one hand, as if to stop herself from going any further.
Wilford shook his head at returned his attention to the kid. “I’d be offended if this were the first time I heard that,” he said. He looked up again to find an older woman trying not to butt in on a conversation she clearly regretted walking in on.
“Hi,” she said awkwardly, putting a couple of menus down on the table. “I’ll give you two a few minutes,” she said before scurrying away. Wilford watched her go and picked up the menu with a shrug.
Celine still had her had over her mouth, looking everywhere, like she wasn’t sure where she wanted to look. Eventually, she settled on the menu, reading it far too intently for someone who came here often enough to know the address.
“So. Your grandson?” she asked. “That’s…”
“My daughter,” Wilford said, cutting straight to the chase. “She’s in prison. I was the teenage fuck-up.”
He picked up the menu and scanned over it, finding it entirely predictable. Pasta with sauces he couldn’t eat, chowders he couldn’t eat. Some fried stuff he probably already ate too much of. It was just as boring as the fare his neighbours in Del Perro were pushing.
“I had no idea,” Celine said, distracted enough from her menu to actually look at him again.
“We haven’t been very open about it.” He put his menu down and looked back out at the beach again. The birds seemed to know where the food was, barely moving out of the way even as Michael charged at them. Whatever scraps they were digging out of the sand were clearly more important. “It took about two seconds for it to get out that I suddenly had a little kid, but that’s all anyone got with it before it got boring. Once we get his name changed, it should make it a little easier to keep him hidden.”
Celine seemed confused for a moment. “Wouldn’t she be able…” she cut herself off as a visible thought crossed her mind. “Oh. She doesn’t know you?”
She clearly wasn’t very pleased to hear this. Wilford wasn’t sure why that bothered him. “I found out about her the day he showed up at my front door.” He shook his head and shrugged. “I guess it’s a testament to how much her mother hates me that nobody came forward when I was starting to make some money.”
“How old were you?” Celine asked.
“Fourteen.”
She nodded. “Oh, yeah. She definitely hates you,” she agreed.
Whatever Wilford was about to say next vanished from his thoughts in an instant. Michael started screaming bloody murder, finally scattering the seagulls. Wilford jumped to his feet and ran down to the beach, acutely aware of the rising panic he couldn’t clamp down. Michael dropped down into the sand, screaming and flailing his hand. All of the worst thoughts managed to get chased away then. It was small, and difficult to see as it was flung through the air at half the speed of sound, but impossible to miss all the same.
“Oh, you pissed him off,” Wilford said as he crouched down and grabbed the kid’s arm to keep him still. The tiny crab held onto Michael’s finger with a tiny, clawed death grip. As Michael screamed, Wilford managed to annoy it enough into letting go and scurrying away into the dry sand. With Michael still crying, Wilford picked him up and took him back to the table. As Wilford got him settled into the seat next to him, the awkward waitress returned. Wilford still had no idea what he wanted to order.
The dogs knew not to jump, but even with them firmly on the ground, Wilford had to fight not to fall over or wake the kid up.
“Get away,” he scolded, trying to push through them toward the stairs. But he wasn’t actually who they were excited to see. He was simply in the way, and as soon as he got past them, they both crowded around Celine as she tried to follow Wilford in from the garage. Wilford was about to scold them again, but Celine was quick to undermine him by crouching down to give them both excited scratchings. Letting that scene play out, Wilford carried the kid up the stairs and carefully dropped him off in his bed. Once he got the kid settled, he turned to leave, only to find Celine already waiting for him in the door.
“This wasn’t here last time, was it?” she asked quietly.
Wilford shook his head and guided her out, shutting the door behind him, not quite letting it latch. “No, it’s all new.” He kicked his shoes off at the landing and headed out toward the kitchen.
“Most people just move,” Celine pointed out. “Or at least move their office out to the garage.” She followed his lead in taking off her shoes before walking through the rest of the house.
“I make too much money to work out of my garage,” Wilford said plainly. He grabbed a few beers from the back of the fridge, and paused. “Do you want a glass?” he asked.
Celine looked up from examining his record collection. “No, the bottle’s fine,” she said.
Nodding, Wilford popped the caps on the bottles and brought them out to the coffee table. He sat down on the sofa, watching as Celine picked an album and carefully put it on the turntable. Like most people who took liberties with his vinyl, she picked Glenn Miller. Unlike most people, she picked one of the jazz albums, starting on the B-side.
“You didn’t go for the big band?” he asked.
Celine shook her head. “It’s a little late for swing.”
She wasn’t wrong. Wilford watched her curiously as she made her way over to the sofa. She sat entirely too close to be proper. She picked up her beer and leaned back lazily into the cushions, being about as subtle as a brick. She was there to make some mistakes, and the only thing stopping it from happening was Wilford being a complete wreck. He didn’t think he could make a move if he had to. He was once again paralysed by his own stupid fear, and he hated himself for it. Before Celine could see any of it he leaned back as well, shifting into the corner to face her a little better, and took a drink of his beer.
“What happens if he leaves you?” he asked.
Celine shook her head. “You want to know the power he had over me?” she asked. “It was never stipulated.”
Wilford mulled that over for a moment. “I’ll talk to my lawyer,” he said eventually. “He’ll have some kind of magic trick up his sleeve.”
“I want a divorce,” she said plainly. “I want it to be messy, and I want it to hurt, and I want it to be humiliating. I want him to feel as stupid as he me feel.”
Wilford nodded and tapped on his watch to check the time. It was still early enough that if he really wanted to, he could make a few calls and kick things off right then and there. But he didn’t want to. There were easier, less-precise and more obvious ways, so he just nodded instead. He didn’t know if she was doing this on purpose, or if he was just bored and stir-crazy enough to see something that wasn’t there. He’d been so focused on the kid, and before that getting his own ducks in a row for so long that he hadn’t taken the time to just play and have fun for far too long. And Celine was handing him the opportunity on a silver platter. He let his eyes wander completely unprofessionally for the first time since he’d met her. He’d looked, and he’d seen, but he’d never taken a moment to just appreciate until that moment as she spilled her sadistic desires on his sofa.
Finally, he nodded. “How bad do you want it to hurt?” he asked.
Celine moved toward him, leaning against him and getting close enough for him to see the red in her hair under the light. He hated it. He wanted to jump up and get away, but there was another part of him that he usually managed to keep clamped down. The part of him that still craved this.
“I want him to wish he was dead,” Celine said. She was dead serious. How the hell could Wilford pass that up? He hadn’t indulged this hobby outside of work in far too long.
She got even closer, pressing her body against his, holding her beer at an awkward angle that kept her weight even heavier against him. She leaned in to kiss him, and Wilford didn’t stop it. Worse, he was already hard, like some fucking pathetic teenager. Worse still, he was too goddamn terrified to do a damn thing about it. He was still stunned he’d let things go as far as they had. He was starting to wonder how far he’d let things go before he flew into a full-blown panic. But the Universe wasn’t that cruel; or perhaps not that kind. Juts when he thought he might get brave enough to find out, the unmistakable sound of his barely-verbal toddler waking up from a nightmare filled the back of the house. Wilford had never experienced such a confusing collection of emotions before. He was relieved to have an escape route. But he surprised himself by also being annoyed. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, hoping whatever was bothering Michael would work itself out.
“Dada!” he whined from his bed.
It was clearly not going to work itself out. Celine sat back up, letting Wilford get to his feet to go see what the problem was. Wilford found him sitting up in bed, crying and unmistakably wet.
“Oh, jeez, pal,” Wilford said, already resigned to what came next. He picked up the kid, not even caring for a second about his shirt. Whatever the nightmare had been, it must have been a real doozy to get him crying as loud as he was.
“Hey, man. You’re cool,” Wilford said, taking him into the bathroom to get him cleaned up. “Let’s take a bath. You’ll feel better.”
As he started to get Michael’s dirty beach clothes off, he looked up to see Celine watching from the doorway.
“I’m sorry,” she said, shaking her head. “I’m not used to being around kids.”
It took a few seconds for Wilford to realise what she was talking about. “No,” he said, shaking his head. “We do this a few times a week. We’re working on getting used to sleeping in his own bed, but he’s not a fan.”
“Oh.” Celine nodded. She stood in the doorway for a few moments longer. “I’ll call a car.”
Wilford looked up, surprised she was already leaving. It should have been ideal. “No, stay. This’ll take ten minutes,” he said. He’d had the perfect opportunity to escape without any awkward excuses, and he’d just told her to stay. What the hell was wrong with him?
“Are you sure?” Celine asked.
“Yeah. Just hang out.” Why couldn’t he stop talking? As soon as Celine left to go make herself at home, Wilford shook his head and cursed himself under his breath. Somewhere along the line he’d lost all his self-preservation skills. That was not going to end well for anybody.
He put that problem aside for later and quickly worked on getting Michael in the bath and cleaned up. The absurd collection of squeaky rubber ducks provided a good distraction from whatever had scared the kid this time, and soon enough he was just tired instead of tired and grumpy. He got Michael dressed and parked him out on the recliner with Buster. It gave him just enough time to strip the bed down to the plastic cover and change into a clean shirt before Michael started getting upset again. As soon as Wilford returned to the front room, Michael settled back down and cuddled up with the dog. Just being in the same room was enough for him, but it also created a unique solution to a stupid problem.
Wilford returned to the sofa, feeling more tired than he had just twenty minutes earlier. Celine wasted no time in cosying up again, this time more relaxed and with less intent. This… this was safe. It wasn’t completely comfortable, but it wasn’t scary enough either to distract him from how much he’d starved himself of even this level of intimacy. He thought he could stay like this for a long time. And he was tried enough to just enjoy it in silence until Celine finally had something to say.
“So this is parenthood, huh?” she asked.
Wilford snorted. “This is the easy stuff,” he said.
Celine nodded strangely. “I’m not surprised,” she said.
“What do you mean?” He tried to lean and bend away to look at her properly, but they were too close.
“There’s a darkness around him,” she said plainly. “I don’t think it’s his, but he’s carrying it.”
Wilford thought about it. He hadn’t considered it like that before. “Yeah there is,” he agreed. “But we’re working on it.”
“Be careful,” she said. She reached for his hand, turning it around to look at the ring she’d given him ages ago. He still wore it because he felt like now more than ever, he needed all the protection he could get. “It can be dangerous if you pick up too much of it.”
This wasn’t a revelation. The potential for everything to go catastrophically wrong was always in some dark corner of Wilford’s mind. “I’m trying not to,” he said.
Celine seemed content with that answer. She rested her head against his shoulder, freeing him to move his arm from between them and over her waist. It was entirely too comfortable to be safe. But that threshold had already been crossed and left far behind. She’d dangled that temptation in front of him, and he was not a strong enough man to ignore it. He might go down in flames with the rest of them, but the broken part of his brain that made all his decisions wanted to be let out to play, and it was too late to stop it. She wanted him to ruin someone’s life, and that was exactly what he was going to do.
The sun was in his face. That was the first thing that he noticed wen he woke up. Second was the record player hissing through the 7.1 system.
Third was that he was not alone on the sofa. Celine had never called a car. She was still there, half leaning against him, half on top of him, holding his hair up and letting it fall. Confused and startled, Wilford tried to sit up. He was too old to pass out on the sofa with someone else, and every bone in his back protested trying to move.
“Is that red or purple?” Celine asked, holding up his hair again.
Wilford realised she was holding it up in the light. “Kind of in between,” he said. He yanwed, tried to stretch again, and gave up. “I used to bleach it in school and it would turn this weird orange colour if I did it too much.”
“I’ve been thinking about lightening mine out,” Celine said.
It was Wilford’s turn to reach out and play with her hair. The angle was completely wrong for him to get the light to play off the colours properly, but he could still see the red tones she had under the black. “You’d look good with red hair,” he said.
“Maybe I will,” she said. She grinned at him, and then glanced over at his watch. She tilted her head one way, and tried to twist his wrist the other, and then her eyes went wide. “I really need to call a car,” she said, getting up suddenly.
Wilford checked the time, quickly realising why she was panicking. It was past eight already. She’d definitely have been missed. He sat up, watching her pick up her bag from where she’d left it by the stereo and dig through it for her phone.
“Shit,” she hissed, scrolling through what looked like a considerable amount of messages even from where Wilford sat across the room.
“How bad?” he asked.
“Triple digits,” she said, tapping furiously at the screen for a few moments before she shoved it back into her bag.
Wilford already knew what was coming next, even if it wasn’t immediate. But this was a familiar feeling that he didn’t miss. The hectic morning after when mistakes feel more like mistakes. Celine stuck around long enough to give Wilford a chaste kiss before collecting her shoes and heading downstairs. It would take a while for any car to get up there to pick her up, but Wilford knew she wasn’t going downstairs to wait. She was going downstairs to sound like she was alone. Figuring he’d help her out, Wilford got up to turn off the stereo. As he stood there, looking at the stack of records they’d gone through the night before, he picked up his phone from the dock and scrolled through his contacts. Finding the right one, he sent a simple text message.
Damage control
Wilford hit the green button, and then the speaker button. “Yep?” he said.
“Were you asleep?” Steve asked.
“Yep.” Wilford yawned.
Steve laughed. It must have been later than Wilford realised. “Okay, well. Everything’s been filed. Come out today so we can discuss what comes next.”
Wilford tapped his phone a few times, until he could get the clock to show up for him. It was after 9am. Not terribly late, but a lot later than he usually slept in, even since his surgery.
“Yep,” he said again. He hung up and went back to sleep.
That creepy butler was handing out his cocaine cocktails by the time Wilford stumbled out of the room he’d passed out in. He at least had everything he’d come with this time, and didn’t seem to have picked up any additional injuries along the way. Trying to avoid getting blackout drunk seemed to help with that, for some reason.
He didn’t stay to wait for everyone else to drag themselves out of bed. If Steve wanted to talk to him in person, the topic of the day was probably court dates. Wilford needed to get into Vinewood. He made sure he was put together and snuck out the front door, assuming nobody would care or notice that he’d snuck out early. Damien, it seemed, was on the same path. Or trying to be. He stood beside his car, looking at it, and then turning a baffled expression to the sky. Wilford looked up as well, and could see why Damien was baffled. Someone managed to throw a stone lion onto Damien’s car. Presumably from the roof, but it was one hell of a throw to have hit the bullseye as perfectly as it did. It looked like other stone lions on the property, so it probably hadn’t come from a random fly-over during the night. The entire roof of Damien’s car was caved in, the windshield shattered, and the crumpled hood was almost certainly hiding serious engine damage.
The two of them studied the damage in a confused silence. The more Wilford looked at it, the less sense it made.
“Hop in,” Wilford said finally. “I’m heading that way today.”
“You’re going to set on hangover day?” Damien asked, following Wilford over to his car.
“Gotta see my lawyer.” Wilford unlocked the car so they could both get in. For a moment, Damien seemed like he had a question, until he glanced into the back seat.
“Oh. About the kid?” he asked.
Wilford started the car and made his way down the winding driveway to the road. “Yeah, I need to get his name changed. Which is a whole other can of worms.”
In less than six months, he’d gone from demanding paternity tests to petitioning for adoption. What the hell had his life become?
“The whole thing, or just his last name?” Damien asked.
“Just his last name. His first name’s common enough, and there’s no point in confusing him all over again,” Wilford said. He rolled down his window a lit a cigarette.
“Yeah, that’s probably best. My mom remarried when I was about two, and I never understood why my name wasn’t the same as everyone else’s.” Damien took a cigarette as Wilford offered the pack. “But then Celine got married, and our names were all different.”
Wilford almost didn’t catch exactly what Damien had said. “She’s your sister?” he asked. “That how you know Mark?”
“No, I knew Mark first. I wasn’t exactly expecting them to start dating after he got divorced.” Damien rolled his window down as well, trading cigarette smoke for more wildfire smoke in the car.
“You’re not divorced, are you?” Wilford asked.
Damien laughed. “No, I’ve managed to dodge that bullet. And the pre-requisite.”
“I think that’s the right idea,” Wilford said. Almost everyone he knew was scrambling to get married, or trying to find a way to stop being married. It all seemed like a lot of hassle to him.
“I know she likes to keep things professional, but has Celine said anything to you?” Damien asked suddenly.
“About what?” She’d said a lot of stuff about a lot of things to him.
Damien didn’t answer right away. He took a deep breath, and shook his head. “She… They’ve both changed. You wouldn’t know that, obviously, but… I see something in both of them that wasn’t there before. It’s not my place, but I worry.”
Wilford shook his head. He almost answered that neither of them had ever said anything, but that wasn’t exactly correct. “I’ve seen her get real pissed off at him a few times. I always figured it was regular relationship shit.”
Damien nodded. “She’s not the biggest fan of Mark’s parties. That much is true.”
“You’d think with that kind of fuck-you money, he could rent a place for the weekend,” Wilford said. He may have been single, but that didn’t mean he didn’t understand that it wasn’t that hard to keep your woman happy.
“He’s done two movies in the last six years. I don’t think he has as much money as he lets on.” Damien sounded like he was sharing gossip he shouldn’t have been sharing. But if Wilford had bothered to pay attention to anything that went on in the industry, he’d have probably been able to figure out as much for himself.
“I was wondering why she charged,” Wilford realised suddenly. “I thought it was a hobby until we started talking.”
“It used to be.”
There was a lot more going on in that house than Wilford had ever even considered thinking about. A lot of things started to make a little more sense. They’d probably combined assets, and now Celine needed to build herself a way out. Mark had little good to say about her, but his relationship with Damien kept him from pulling the plug and becoming the bad guy. It was up to Celine to walk out, and psychics in Vinewood were a dime a dozen. She probably couldn’t keep her head above water long enough to even think about court fees.
“What are you going to do about your car?” Wilford asked, changing the subject.
Damien sighed and rolled his eyes. “Hire a crane,” he said.
That was probably a good place to start.
He didn’t like having people in his space. First there were all the landscapers over the summer. Then the house was swarming with contractors. And now a woman with a judgemental makeup was standing in the middle of the room, watching Michael grind crackers into the carpet.
“He’s autistic?” she asked, checking the screen on her small tablet.
“They don’t think so,” Wilford said. “He’s just delayed.”
She nodded and crouched down onto the floor next to Michael. “What have you got there?” she asked.
Michael looked up at offered her a dinosaur. Its mouth was full of ground-up cracker. “Ba ba ba ba,” he said.
“Oh, he was hungry, wasn’t he?” the social worker asked. She took the dinosaur and turned it over in her hands a few times before handing it back. “He’s scary.”
Michael continued to babble on, apparently not having any more words he wanted to say. Apparently content with whatever interaction just occurred between them, the social worker stood back up and nodded.
“With situations like this, most of the process is just a formality,” she said. She checked her tablet again, and then looked around the room. “I don’t think we need to go much farther here. You’re going through your lawyer, right?”
Wilford nodded. “Yeah. Seemed the best way to do it.”
The social worker nodded. “Then someone will be in contact with him soon. You’ll hear from us through him.”
“How soon?” Wilford asked.
She shrugged. “I couldn’t say. We expedite kinship cases, but you’re not the first one in the queue.”
Wilford wasn’t even a little bit surprised. “I figured as much,” he said. “Anything else you guys need from me?”
“Not today,” the social worker said. “The next step is paperwork and your hearing. You’ll get a call when we’re ready for that.”
Wilford showed her out, glad to have her out of his space. It was a constant, never-ending stream of people in his space lately. Getting everything over and done with would be a goddamn blessing.
Finding weird things in the car was becoming just another fact of life. Usually the weird things were something one of the dogs had snuck in, or something the kid had suck in, and it all stayed more or less contained to the back seat. Finding something in the front seat that didn’t belong to him was less expected. Finding the Mayor of Los Santos’ wallet under the front seat was even less expected.
Wilford resisted the urge to snoop for about three seconds, but being a professional snoop practically made it his responsibility to see what Damien kept in it. It was surprisingly boring. Driving license, a few business cards with old area codes — numbers to his city office, then; not his personal line — cash and credit cards. No clutter or old receipts. Absolutely nothing that could be used against him. Damien was either the only politician who was clean as a whistle, or more likely, he made a habit out of losing his wallet and took precautions by keeping it as empty as possible. If nothing else, that made him the only smart politician in town.
Not having any direct way of getting in touch with Damien, Wilford was left with a few less-than-stellar choices. He could call the offices downtown, and deal with that mess, or he could take it out to Banham Canyon. Downtown traffic was always an awful idea. At least the drive out to the canyon was pleasant.
“You want to go on a drive, pal?” He asked as he pulled out his phone to check the traffic.
“Yeh.” Michael was always ready to go for a drive. Sometimes getting him into that damn car seat was a struggle and a half, but once he was strapped in with nowhere else to go, anything probably sounded good.
Wilford plugged his phone into the car’s stereo and pulled out of the parking lot. Downtown Vinewood traffic wasn't much better than downtown Los Santos, but at least this way he only had to do it once, and soon enough they were on the freeway headed out of the city. Michael had picked up a new game for himself that involved pointing out all the cars they saw on the roads, jabbing his finger against the window and shouting each time. As they left town, cars became less and less plentiful, sparking indignation as he started to run out of cars to shout at.
“Hey,” Wilford called back at him. “None of that.”
“No!” Michael shouted back.
“Yeah, yeah,” Wilford grumbled. Everything was becoming ’No.’ Apparently it was supposed to be a sign of progress. It was irritating was what it was.
Eventually he got off the main road and onto the winding private drive that led to Mark’s place. Damien’s crushed car was no longer parked out front, giving Wilford plenty of space to get close. The garage had been left open, with Mark’s Patriot conspicuously absent. Still, Wilford parked next to the little sports car out front and got out to free Michael before he started to mutiny. Once inside, he could let the kid run around for a few minutes before strapping him back in for the ride home. Wilford carried him to the front door, startled by it flying open before he could even reach for the bell.
“Christ,” he said, trying not to fall backwards down the steps. There was plenty of room behind him before that happened, but everything always felt more precarious when he was carrying the kid around.
Celine took a moment to look at the two of them with confusion. Cutting to the chase since he could sense something unwelcoming around the place, Wilford pulled Damien’s wallet out of his inventory and handed it over.
“He left that in my car,” he said.
Celine looked at it and sighed. “Oh, thank god,” she said. She turned back toward the still-opened door. “Benjamin! We found it!” she shouted, closing the door on his response. She shoved Damien’s wallet into her purse and grabbed Wilford by the arm, awkwardly spinning him around.
“Take me somewhere,” she demanded. There was a hard edge to her voice that Wilford had never heard before, and didn’t dare question. Curious enough to comply, he walked with her back to the car. Before he even got to the back seat to open the door, Michael slid from fussy to full nuclear meltdown without warning. He tried to fling himself onto the ground, kicking and swinging his fists like his life was in danger.
“No. Let’s not,” Wilford said, not really sure how to handle the situation. “Come on.”
“I’m sorry,” Celine said, sighing. “I project. I’m not the best at keeping it under control.”
Between Michael screaming, and the oddness of what Celine was saying, it took Wilford a long moment to realise what she actually meant.
“Oh,” he said suddenly. Yeah, the kid was definitely pissed about something. The situation hadn’t got any easier to deal with, but it definitely made more sense. “I thought he’s just mad at all the driving.”
“He might be. But I probably didn’t help.” She opened the passenger door and let herself into Wilford’s car, leaving him to figure out how to progress.
“Come on, pal. You want to go get dinner? You’re probably hungry aren’t you?” Wilford asked, twisting around to open the door without dropping the kid onto the pavement.
Michael didn’t stop crying, but he did nod. The idea of dinner calmed him down enough that Wilford was able to get him strapped into his seat before he could start fighting again.
“I’m sorry,” Celine said as Wilford got behind the wheel. “I just can’t be in this house right now.”
Wilford wasn’t sure what that had to do with him. Glancing around as he started the car, he realised Mark’s Patriot wasn’t the only car missing. “Where’s your Banshee?” he asked, turning on the radio hoping the music would help settle the kid down.
Celine made a sound that wasn’t quite a grumble, but close. “Rear-ended,” she said. “In my own driveway.”
It was definitely time to get the hell out of there. Wilford didn’t know where they were going, so he pulled out of the driveway and turned to head back into town.
“What the hell is this?” Celine asked suddenly, picking up his phone from its dash mount to see what was playing through the speakers.
“Jazzotron,” Wilford said. He didn’t expect her to understand that word, and judging by the scrunched up look on her face, he was right.
“What?” she asked. She quickly shook her head and tried to unlock the phone, only to be thwarted by the password. “Get me the map,” she said, handing it back over.
Wilford held the phone up to his face long enough for it to recognise him and unlock, before passing it right back. Celine tapped at his phone for a few seconds, and put it back in its mount with the GPS pointing to Pacific Bluffs. It wasn’t quite ‘in town,’ but it was more or less in the right direction for the time being.
“I like this place,” Celine said. “It’s next to a little park on the beach.”
Wilford glanced into the mirror, ignoring Michael’s diminishing protests about being strapped back into his seat. “Sounds like a good idea,” he said. “So what’s going on?”
Asking was risking another meltdown, but it was his experience that married women didn’t often throw themselves into the first functional car they saw. They also didn’t tend to make that grumbly noise Celine made again.
“Mark…” she started, before shaking her head. She tried again several times before finally finding the words she wanted to say. “He knows I project. And he knows I can’t control it very well. So when he wants an excuse to be mad at me, he does shit to piss me off so that he can get pissed off and walk out guilt-free.”
It wasn’t exactly what Wilford was expecting. “What’d he do?”
“He rear-ended my car.”
“Seriously?” Wilford felt no loyalty toward the man one way or another; he threw good parties, and had extended a standing invitation to them. But that kind of thing was just low. “When’d he do that?”
“Last night,” Celine said. “After his agent dropped his ass.”
Wilford tried to follow that precise line of thought. He’d definitely engaged in petty vandalism while pissed off. But basic self-preservation generally meant directing the consequences away from yourself, rather than loading the gun and pointing it right at your own face.
“Your brother said he’d been out of work for a while,” he said, easily connecting the two.
“Out of work. And when he does work, it bombs. There’s good money and good work on the B-list, but he won’t take it until the bank starts making threatening calls.” Celine shook her head and took a deep breath. She glanced to the back seat, and then leaned back in her own seat and closed her eyes for a moment. Whatever she was doing, Michael was definitely picking up on it. That, or he’d just run out of crying energy.
“I’d kill for the B-list,” Wilford said. “I don’t know what list I’m on, but if the B-list can afford a castle in the Canyon, it can’t be that bad.”
Celine laughed, an ironic, mirthless sound. “Could you tell him that?”
“Yeah, sure,” Wilford said. He had no intention of doing any such thing.
“Sorry. You’re his friend. You probably don’t want to hear this,” Celine said. She flipped down the visor and fiddled with the mirror so she could refresh her lipstick.
Wilford thought about that. He certainly didn’t consider Mark a friend. He liked Mark well enough, but he hardly knew the guy. “I don’t think he’s said more than two full sentences to me since my teeth wound up in your pool,” he realised aloud.
“Oh.” Celine hung on that for a moment. “You’re always at the house. I thought…”
“He invites me,” Wilford pointed out. “Any excuse to get away from Legos and the Super Pals is a good one.”
Celine laughed, almost bitterly. “I wish I knew what that was like,” she said. “I wanted kids. He already has two I’ve never met, and he doesn’t want any more. And that’s that.”
“You’ve never met your own stepkids?” Wilford asked. Granted, he’d never met his own biological child, but somehow that didn’t seem as odd.
“I don’t think Mark’s talked to them since I’ve known him.” Celine did not sound amused about this. For some reason, Wilford found himself wondering if this was a universal thing she detested, or if Mark made it a special case.
Wilford wanted to ask why she hadn’t walked out on the marriage yet, but it didn’t seem like the best question to be asking his psychic while they sped down the highway.
“Same mother?” he asked instead.
Celine nodded. “His first wife, yeah.”
Which meant unless they were twins, he’d been there when at least one of them was born. It wasn’t an area Wilford had many opinions on, but even he knew what a deadbeat dad was.
“You want this one for the week?” Wilford asked, nodding back toward Michael. The kid had calmed down again finally, and was watching the world pass by out the window.
“It almost sounds like you're trying to get rid of him,” Celine said.
“He’s a nightmare. Complete pain in the ass,” Wilford said. He shrugged. “But so was I, so I’m probably not allowed to complain.”
“You’re allowed to complain a little bit,” Celine said with an absolutely wicked smile.
Mark was a fucking idiot to drive this woman away. Granting her request and letting her into his car was the biggest mistake Wilford had made in a very long time, and he already knew it. He didn’t have to do a damn thing more than he already had to fuck everything up. She’d spent twenty minutes complaining about her husband — a man who was supposed to be Wilford’s friend — and he couldn’t find a single reason to disagree with her.
He’d fucked up the second he talked to her outside of one of the parties.
“So what kind of psychic are you, anyway?” he asked, realising he was several months too late with the question.
“I’m a medium,” she said. “I can’t read minds or solve crimes, unless someone’s spirit can tell me something. It comes with emotional telepathy I could really do without.”
Wilford nodded, having a pretty good guess at why she might find something like that unpleasant. “Sounds to me like you two don’t like each other much,” he said, knowing just how stupid it was before he finished the sentence.
“I hate him,” Celine said plainly. “And he knows it. And I was dumb enough, and star-struck enough to sign a pre-nup.”
“What do you mean?” Wilford asked. “What was in it?”
“I can’t leave him,” Celine says. “If I do, he gets everything.”
“Even the money you make?” Wilford asked. Well, that sure as hell couldn’t be right.
“Even my business.” She took a deep breath, glancing into the back seat again. She was obviously trying to keep everything to herself until they could get out of the car and put some distance away from the kid.
Wilford shook his head. “I don’t think that’s legal. I’ll hook you up with my lawyer. He can probably nullify it for you in an afternoon.”
“I’ve talked to lawyers,” Celine said.
“You’ve talked to Vinewood lawyers. They got loyalty, and it ain’t to you. I’ve got the kind of lawyer that has to fight off those fuckers when I say something one of their clients or their cults doesn’t like,” Wilford says.
“I keep forgetting you’re one of the bad guys,” Celine said.
“What? You think I’d rather be playing by the rules?” Wilford asked. “The only reason I’m not a super villain is I didn’t have the grades in science for it.”
“Maybe I should try it some time,” Celine said. It was impossible to ignore the way she grinned at him. With a grin like that, she didn’t need anything else at all to be a super villain.
Wilford turned off the Great Ocean Highway toward the ocean itself. There was a little line of houses and quaint little restaurants up against the beach, flying bright flags shaped like birds and fish. It was the sort of town the locals went to go to be tourists, where everything was just fake enough to be comfortable, but real enough to be familiar.
“Never been out here before,” he said, checking building numbers against the address Celine had punched into his phone. It was somewhere close, so he slowed down to keep from missing it.
“We used to come out here every weekend,” Celine said. “One time Damien found this little raft that probably belonged to somebody, and started paddling around this little river with it. He had a blast, until the tide started going out.”
“Did he drown?” Wilford asked. He wished he could have been there to see that disaster.
“He said he managed to paddle back a few miles down shore,” Celine said. “I think there’s a respawn point somewhere I’ve never been able to find.”
Wilford laughed. He found the right place, and pulled off into a parking space. “I’ll have to ask him about it,” he said. “I like the faces he makes when things don’t go his way.”
Celine laughed and shook her head. “You really are one of the bad guys.”
Wilford glanced at her as he was grabbing his phone, just long enough to wink before he got out of the car. He shouldn’t have done that. Maybe he could escape it by trying to wrangle the kid out of his seat and into the little diner.
“Come on, pal,” he said. “You hungry?”
Michael nodded, and started to whine. He was worse than hungry. He was also tired and bored, and probably needed to get inside before he had an accident. As he unhooked Michael from his seat, Wilford reached down to pick up the backpack from the floor, just in case a pair of clean briefs were required. He got smacked in the side of his face for his troubles, but he probably deserved it, fucking with their routine like this.
With a good grip on Michael and the bag, Wilford stood up to close the doors and lock up the car. Getting bossed around by a toddler had done absolutely nothing to discourage any attention. If anything, Celine only seemed further encouraged. It would have been very easy to put her off the path. Instead, he bounced Michael in his arms for a few moments, giving ht e kid his full attention as he tried to calm him down. He let Celine lead the way in, hoping that with Mark’s complete lack of a career, they’d be able to avoid causing any more trouble for themselves. At least not being dragged out to red carpet events meant she wasn’t as likely to get recognised outside of the city.
Once inside, Wilford headed off to find the men’s room while Celine picked a table. As soon as he put Michael down on the floor, the kid rushed off to the nearest stall. And immediately started crying when he couldn’t unzip his own pants.
“Hang on a second,” Wilford said tiredly, just glad that the urgency meant there wasn’t likely to be an emergency change of wardrobe in their future. On the list of things Wilford did not see in his future six months earlier, helping a toddler pee without falling into the toilet or getting it on the ceiling was at the top of that list. And yet here he was.
With that crisis averted, Wilford got him cleaned up in the sink and released him to the wild so he could move around a little bit before he had to sit right back down. The diner wasn’t that big, but still they found themselves a bit lost somehow.
“Will!” Celine called.
Wilford looked over toward her voice, finding her a step ahead of him. There was an open patio at the back of the old, converted house, with a few stairs leading down to the beach and a nearby playground. It was all the encouragement Michael needed. He ran outside, tumbled down the stairs into the sand, and got back up as if he hadn’t even noticed. There were seagulls out in on the beach, picking up whatever scraps were out there, and Michael immediately ran straight toward them.
“Hey!” Wilford shouted after him. “Get closer!”
Michael looked up at Wilford for about a second before running after the birds again.
“Let him play,” Celine said. “He deserves it. I really pissed him off back there.”
Wilford nodded vaguely and sat down, not taking his attention off of Michael.
“Mark said he’s adopted?” Celine asked.
“In the process,” Wilford said, paying less attention to her than she probably wanted.
“You sure got that moving fast. I’ve seen it take years for some people,” Celine said, also watching Michael play with the birds.
“They speed it up when it’s family,” Wilford said. Michael wasn’t going any closer to the surf, but he was still a little too far out for comfort.
“Family?” Celine asked.
Wilford nodded, looking back at Celine for just a moment. He didn’t like this nervous feeling the kid seemed to constantly give him, and he wished it would go away. “He’s my grandson.”
There was that absolute look of confusion Wilford was getting so used to seeing. “Oh my god, I’m sorry,” she said, laughing nervously now. “I thought… he doesn’t speak English…” She covered her mouth with one hand, as if to stop herself from going any further.
Wilford shook his head at returned his attention to the kid. “I’d be offended if this were the first time I heard that,” he said. He looked up again to find an older woman trying not to butt in on a conversation she clearly regretted walking in on.
“Hi,” she said awkwardly, putting a couple of menus down on the table. “I’ll give you two a few minutes,” she said before scurrying away. Wilford watched her go and picked up the menu with a shrug.
Celine still had her had over her mouth, looking everywhere, like she wasn’t sure where she wanted to look. Eventually, she settled on the menu, reading it far too intently for someone who came here often enough to know the address.
“So. Your grandson?” she asked. “That’s…”
“My daughter,” Wilford said, cutting straight to the chase. “She’s in prison. I was the teenage fuck-up.”
He picked up the menu and scanned over it, finding it entirely predictable. Pasta with sauces he couldn’t eat, chowders he couldn’t eat. Some fried stuff he probably already ate too much of. It was just as boring as the fare his neighbours in Del Perro were pushing.
“I had no idea,” Celine said, distracted enough from her menu to actually look at him again.
“We haven’t been very open about it.” He put his menu down and looked back out at the beach again. The birds seemed to know where the food was, barely moving out of the way even as Michael charged at them. Whatever scraps they were digging out of the sand were clearly more important. “It took about two seconds for it to get out that I suddenly had a little kid, but that’s all anyone got with it before it got boring. Once we get his name changed, it should make it a little easier to keep him hidden.”
Celine seemed confused for a moment. “Wouldn’t she be able…” she cut herself off as a visible thought crossed her mind. “Oh. She doesn’t know you?”
She clearly wasn’t very pleased to hear this. Wilford wasn’t sure why that bothered him. “I found out about her the day he showed up at my front door.” He shook his head and shrugged. “I guess it’s a testament to how much her mother hates me that nobody came forward when I was starting to make some money.”
“How old were you?” Celine asked.
“Fourteen.”
She nodded. “Oh, yeah. She definitely hates you,” she agreed.
Whatever Wilford was about to say next vanished from his thoughts in an instant. Michael started screaming bloody murder, finally scattering the seagulls. Wilford jumped to his feet and ran down to the beach, acutely aware of the rising panic he couldn’t clamp down. Michael dropped down into the sand, screaming and flailing his hand. All of the worst thoughts managed to get chased away then. It was small, and difficult to see as it was flung through the air at half the speed of sound, but impossible to miss all the same.
“Oh, you pissed him off,” Wilford said as he crouched down and grabbed the kid’s arm to keep him still. The tiny crab held onto Michael’s finger with a tiny, clawed death grip. As Michael screamed, Wilford managed to annoy it enough into letting go and scurrying away into the dry sand. With Michael still crying, Wilford picked him up and took him back to the table. As Wilford got him settled into the seat next to him, the awkward waitress returned. Wilford still had no idea what he wanted to order.
The dogs knew not to jump, but even with them firmly on the ground, Wilford had to fight not to fall over or wake the kid up.
“Get away,” he scolded, trying to push through them toward the stairs. But he wasn’t actually who they were excited to see. He was simply in the way, and as soon as he got past them, they both crowded around Celine as she tried to follow Wilford in from the garage. Wilford was about to scold them again, but Celine was quick to undermine him by crouching down to give them both excited scratchings. Letting that scene play out, Wilford carried the kid up the stairs and carefully dropped him off in his bed. Once he got the kid settled, he turned to leave, only to find Celine already waiting for him in the door.
“This wasn’t here last time, was it?” she asked quietly.
Wilford shook his head and guided her out, shutting the door behind him, not quite letting it latch. “No, it’s all new.” He kicked his shoes off at the landing and headed out toward the kitchen.
“Most people just move,” Celine pointed out. “Or at least move their office out to the garage.” She followed his lead in taking off her shoes before walking through the rest of the house.
“I make too much money to work out of my garage,” Wilford said plainly. He grabbed a few beers from the back of the fridge, and paused. “Do you want a glass?” he asked.
Celine looked up from examining his record collection. “No, the bottle’s fine,” she said.
Nodding, Wilford popped the caps on the bottles and brought them out to the coffee table. He sat down on the sofa, watching as Celine picked an album and carefully put it on the turntable. Like most people who took liberties with his vinyl, she picked Glenn Miller. Unlike most people, she picked one of the jazz albums, starting on the B-side.
“You didn’t go for the big band?” he asked.
Celine shook her head. “It’s a little late for swing.”
She wasn’t wrong. Wilford watched her curiously as she made her way over to the sofa. She sat entirely too close to be proper. She picked up her beer and leaned back lazily into the cushions, being about as subtle as a brick. She was there to make some mistakes, and the only thing stopping it from happening was Wilford being a complete wreck. He didn’t think he could make a move if he had to. He was once again paralysed by his own stupid fear, and he hated himself for it. Before Celine could see any of it he leaned back as well, shifting into the corner to face her a little better, and took a drink of his beer.
“What happens if he leaves you?” he asked.
Celine shook her head. “You want to know the power he had over me?” she asked. “It was never stipulated.”
Wilford mulled that over for a moment. “I’ll talk to my lawyer,” he said eventually. “He’ll have some kind of magic trick up his sleeve.”
“I want a divorce,” she said plainly. “I want it to be messy, and I want it to hurt, and I want it to be humiliating. I want him to feel as stupid as he me feel.”
Wilford nodded and tapped on his watch to check the time. It was still early enough that if he really wanted to, he could make a few calls and kick things off right then and there. But he didn’t want to. There were easier, less-precise and more obvious ways, so he just nodded instead. He didn’t know if she was doing this on purpose, or if he was just bored and stir-crazy enough to see something that wasn’t there. He’d been so focused on the kid, and before that getting his own ducks in a row for so long that he hadn’t taken the time to just play and have fun for far too long. And Celine was handing him the opportunity on a silver platter. He let his eyes wander completely unprofessionally for the first time since he’d met her. He’d looked, and he’d seen, but he’d never taken a moment to just appreciate until that moment as she spilled her sadistic desires on his sofa.
Finally, he nodded. “How bad do you want it to hurt?” he asked.
Celine moved toward him, leaning against him and getting close enough for him to see the red in her hair under the light. He hated it. He wanted to jump up and get away, but there was another part of him that he usually managed to keep clamped down. The part of him that still craved this.
“I want him to wish he was dead,” Celine said. She was dead serious. How the hell could Wilford pass that up? He hadn’t indulged this hobby outside of work in far too long.
She got even closer, pressing her body against his, holding her beer at an awkward angle that kept her weight even heavier against him. She leaned in to kiss him, and Wilford didn’t stop it. Worse, he was already hard, like some fucking pathetic teenager. Worse still, he was too goddamn terrified to do a damn thing about it. He was still stunned he’d let things go as far as they had. He was starting to wonder how far he’d let things go before he flew into a full-blown panic. But the Universe wasn’t that cruel; or perhaps not that kind. Juts when he thought he might get brave enough to find out, the unmistakable sound of his barely-verbal toddler waking up from a nightmare filled the back of the house. Wilford had never experienced such a confusing collection of emotions before. He was relieved to have an escape route. But he surprised himself by also being annoyed. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, hoping whatever was bothering Michael would work itself out.
“Dada!” he whined from his bed.
It was clearly not going to work itself out. Celine sat back up, letting Wilford get to his feet to go see what the problem was. Wilford found him sitting up in bed, crying and unmistakably wet.
“Oh, jeez, pal,” Wilford said, already resigned to what came next. He picked up the kid, not even caring for a second about his shirt. Whatever the nightmare had been, it must have been a real doozy to get him crying as loud as he was.
“Hey, man. You’re cool,” Wilford said, taking him into the bathroom to get him cleaned up. “Let’s take a bath. You’ll feel better.”
As he started to get Michael’s dirty beach clothes off, he looked up to see Celine watching from the doorway.
“I’m sorry,” she said, shaking her head. “I’m not used to being around kids.”
It took a few seconds for Wilford to realise what she was talking about. “No,” he said, shaking his head. “We do this a few times a week. We’re working on getting used to sleeping in his own bed, but he’s not a fan.”
“Oh.” Celine nodded. She stood in the doorway for a few moments longer. “I’ll call a car.”
Wilford looked up, surprised she was already leaving. It should have been ideal. “No, stay. This’ll take ten minutes,” he said. He’d had the perfect opportunity to escape without any awkward excuses, and he’d just told her to stay. What the hell was wrong with him?
“Are you sure?” Celine asked.
“Yeah. Just hang out.” Why couldn’t he stop talking? As soon as Celine left to go make herself at home, Wilford shook his head and cursed himself under his breath. Somewhere along the line he’d lost all his self-preservation skills. That was not going to end well for anybody.
He put that problem aside for later and quickly worked on getting Michael in the bath and cleaned up. The absurd collection of squeaky rubber ducks provided a good distraction from whatever had scared the kid this time, and soon enough he was just tired instead of tired and grumpy. He got Michael dressed and parked him out on the recliner with Buster. It gave him just enough time to strip the bed down to the plastic cover and change into a clean shirt before Michael started getting upset again. As soon as Wilford returned to the front room, Michael settled back down and cuddled up with the dog. Just being in the same room was enough for him, but it also created a unique solution to a stupid problem.
Wilford returned to the sofa, feeling more tired than he had just twenty minutes earlier. Celine wasted no time in cosying up again, this time more relaxed and with less intent. This… this was safe. It wasn’t completely comfortable, but it wasn’t scary enough either to distract him from how much he’d starved himself of even this level of intimacy. He thought he could stay like this for a long time. And he was tried enough to just enjoy it in silence until Celine finally had something to say.
“So this is parenthood, huh?” she asked.
Wilford snorted. “This is the easy stuff,” he said.
Celine nodded strangely. “I’m not surprised,” she said.
“What do you mean?” He tried to lean and bend away to look at her properly, but they were too close.
“There’s a darkness around him,” she said plainly. “I don’t think it’s his, but he’s carrying it.”
Wilford thought about it. He hadn’t considered it like that before. “Yeah there is,” he agreed. “But we’re working on it.”
“Be careful,” she said. She reached for his hand, turning it around to look at the ring she’d given him ages ago. He still wore it because he felt like now more than ever, he needed all the protection he could get. “It can be dangerous if you pick up too much of it.”
This wasn’t a revelation. The potential for everything to go catastrophically wrong was always in some dark corner of Wilford’s mind. “I’m trying not to,” he said.
Celine seemed content with that answer. She rested her head against his shoulder, freeing him to move his arm from between them and over her waist. It was entirely too comfortable to be safe. But that threshold had already been crossed and left far behind. She’d dangled that temptation in front of him, and he was not a strong enough man to ignore it. He might go down in flames with the rest of them, but the broken part of his brain that made all his decisions wanted to be let out to play, and it was too late to stop it. She wanted him to ruin someone’s life, and that was exactly what he was going to do.
The sun was in his face. That was the first thing that he noticed wen he woke up. Second was the record player hissing through the 7.1 system.
Third was that he was not alone on the sofa. Celine had never called a car. She was still there, half leaning against him, half on top of him, holding his hair up and letting it fall. Confused and startled, Wilford tried to sit up. He was too old to pass out on the sofa with someone else, and every bone in his back protested trying to move.
“Is that red or purple?” Celine asked, holding up his hair again.
Wilford realised she was holding it up in the light. “Kind of in between,” he said. He yanwed, tried to stretch again, and gave up. “I used to bleach it in school and it would turn this weird orange colour if I did it too much.”
“I’ve been thinking about lightening mine out,” Celine said.
It was Wilford’s turn to reach out and play with her hair. The angle was completely wrong for him to get the light to play off the colours properly, but he could still see the red tones she had under the black. “You’d look good with red hair,” he said.
“Maybe I will,” she said. She grinned at him, and then glanced over at his watch. She tilted her head one way, and tried to twist his wrist the other, and then her eyes went wide. “I really need to call a car,” she said, getting up suddenly.
Wilford checked the time, quickly realising why she was panicking. It was past eight already. She’d definitely have been missed. He sat up, watching her pick up her bag from where she’d left it by the stereo and dig through it for her phone.
“Shit,” she hissed, scrolling through what looked like a considerable amount of messages even from where Wilford sat across the room.
“How bad?” he asked.
“Triple digits,” she said, tapping furiously at the screen for a few moments before she shoved it back into her bag.
Wilford already knew what was coming next, even if it wasn’t immediate. But this was a familiar feeling that he didn’t miss. The hectic morning after when mistakes feel more like mistakes. Celine stuck around long enough to give Wilford a chaste kiss before collecting her shoes and heading downstairs. It would take a while for any car to get up there to pick her up, but Wilford knew she wasn’t going downstairs to wait. She was going downstairs to sound like she was alone. Figuring he’d help her out, Wilford got up to turn off the stereo. As he stood there, looking at the stack of records they’d gone through the night before, he picked up his phone from the dock and scrolled through his contacts. Finding the right one, he sent a simple text message.
Damage control
