Page 39 of Tributary

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Diana

THE ELEVATOR DOOR opens into my suite and I start peeling off the high heeled shoes. I don’t mean to let Asa see the relief when I shed the unfamiliar shell, but I can’t help it. The skin in between my toes is aching, not to mention the balls of my feet. I don’t want to let Asa see any of that—I’ve already given him too much, let him know too much about me. I don’t know how to make sense of anything that’s happening this weekend. Why I didn’t just walk the hell out of his parents’ house. Why I agreed to let him come up to my room at all. And yet, here he is with his tie loosened and his suit jacket slung over one shoulder, looking like Rhett Butler without the mustache.

“Look,” I tell him. “I’m going to change out of this rig. Help yourself to something from the bar. I know the guy who’s paying for it.”

He laughs as I hurry from the room. I slither out of the dress and drape it neatly over a chair. My feelings for him, about tonight, are so conflicting. On the one hand my body seems magnetically attracted to him. His touch hypnotizes me, summons some sort of feral response from deep within my marrow.

But he also was untruthful—twice!—and I’m never going to recover enough to get past that. I slide into jeans and a t-shirt, feeling much more in control in my everyday uniform, and pad back out to the front room, where Asa has rolled his shirt sleeves up and spread out on the couch. Fuck, he’s sexy.

I fold myself into the corner of the couch opposite him, and he hands me a bottle of water. “The conference and the dinner,” I begin, waving my hand around the room. “The hotel room…these aren’t nice treats or surprises for me. They felt like deceptions, another way to trick me somehow.”

“Trick you? Diana, I’m giving you everything I’ve got here. I want to hear every idea in that huge brain of yours and I want to shower you with all the gifts I can. There’s no trick. Except darts. I cheated at darts.” He runs his hand through his hair and grins at me, hopefully.

I wish I were drunk from the wine at his parents’ house, but between the meat and the cab ride, the moon, and the hours of listening to Uncle Mordy sing in another language, somewhere along the way I sobered up. I close my eyes. “You lied to me, Asa, and I just can’t overcome that.”

“I see how you see it that way, Diana, I do. But it wasn’t my intent to mislead you. You have to know that. I just wanted to help you enjoy this conference.”

His voice drifts off.

“Did your files reveal that Jay was leading me on the whole time?” I take a swig from the water bottle, remembering how my stomach turned the day I found him copying the files from my computer onto a USB drive. “Our entire relationship was a ruse for him. A deception so he could slowly download all my research, create a history in his own computer so it looked like the ideas were both of ours. That he participated in the medical trials.”

Asa slides over closer to me as I talk, and I’m not sure why, but I let him. He doesn’t feel like he’s invading my space, especially when he picks up one of my aching feet and begins to rub.

“I caught him one day, transferring data, and he didn’t even try to lie about what he was doing. God, it must have been such a relief to him to be able to stop lying.” I’ve never told this part of the story to anyone, not even Indigo. My parents don’t know that Jay had his sights on me since the beginning of graduate school—that he pegged me as the unlovable genius who’d sing like a canary for the first guy who said I was beautiful. I start to tell Asa how, in the past few years, I’ve come to doubt every interaction I have with other people. I was so convinced what Jay and I had was real, and now I don’t know how to trust that I’m interpreting anything the right way.

As I spill all of this to Asa, he sits silently, rubbing my feet.

Finally, he asks, “How can nobody have told you that before him? You are objectively breathtaking.”

Ignoring this comment, I go on. “I was also an obnoxious know-it-all in class, with absolutely zero tolerance or patience for anyone who didn’t see what I saw when we worked with plants. Which was basically everyone. Somehow I never noticed that Jay was faking his way into the PhD program as a legacy kid whose dad made some calls.”

I drop my head back on the couch and tell Asa all of it, how I spent most of my five years at Princeton having mediocre sex and one-sided conversations with a man who seemingly attentively hung on my every word.

Asa eventually drops my feet and looks at me. “I don’t understand, though, how he got away with writing you out of the patent materials. Andrea can’t figure it out.”

He pulls a photocopied paper out of his shirt pocket and unfolds it. I don’t have to look very closely to know what it is. The document where I signed away my rights to Epi-D, where I swore that I had nothing to do with the development of that exclusive extraction, nothing to do with the cultivation of that plant. I feel the tears well up in my eyes, and the heat of shame overtakes me again. “How did you get that?” My voice comes out as a wavering half-cry. Why the hell did I ever break my rules and sleep with Asa to begin with? Everything inside me is screaming to just kick him the hell out of here, to run away and never look at him again.

But for some reason, I feel my mouth opening to tell him. “He slid the paper in with our lease,” I whisper. “I was running scans on the final strain of the plant, testing the different levels with the sensors from our partners in mechanical engineering. He told me it was the lease renewal and I just signed everywhere he had a sticky tab.”

“Diana.”

“Don’t!” I can’t bear for him to comfort me, or to shame me, or whatever was going to come out of his mouth. “Just don’t, Asa. He won, ok? He humiliated me in every possible way, and it’s done and I’ve spent the past few years just trying to move on with my life.”

“How’s that working out for you?” He drops my legs to the ground. “You won’t accept help from anyone, for anything. You’re growing illegal plants in the back of a houseplant hospital, and you’re pissed at me because I gave you surprise tickets to a botany conference. Sounds like you’ve really grown.”

“Fuck you! I never asked you to—”

“No, you wouldn’t. You’d never ask anyone for anything, Diana. The only reason you ask your brother for tax advice is because you have no other options in your tiny, insular town where everyone just lets you flounder and hide.”

“Flounder? What are you even doing here right now?”

“You are the most remarkable woman I’ve ever met in my life, Diana Crawford. I took you to Seder to shock my mom, but I also wanted her to meet the woman I’ve spent the past three months obsessed with. I want my parents to stop setting me up with yentas from temple because I want you. I wanted my father to know the woman who’s so dependable, her friends call her when they need to euthanize a chicken or make sure an impromptu celestial festival has decent beer.” He rakes his palms through his stubble, pulling them down his face. “Diana, if I knew half of what that fuckwit had done to deceive you, I would have bent over backwards to earn your trust.”

His face softens even as my lips begin to quiver. I will not cry in front of Asa Wexler. “You don’t even know what you’re saying.” My voice shakes. “I think you should leave.”

He doesn’t budge. “Let me loan you the money for your growing certification. I’ve got more than that liquid, Diana. I can have it in your bank account by morning.”

---