Page 61 of Play Dirty

I grin. And then I chuckle. I don’t laugh, not on the outside, because I’m cool like that. Because I have always known this and he has always resisted, and yeah. Here this motherfucker is telling me I was right.

“Fine,” Alexander says. “I’ll say it. You had me at hello. You complete me, Jordan.”

Then I do laugh.

We both laugh.

“You’re a dumbass.”

He shrugs. He likes to do that these days, I guess. A very give-no-fucks gesture. “Guilty.” But then he sits up in his chair and leans forward on my desk. “But it’s true, OK? I’ve missed you too. Maybe not you you. Because I don’t really know you. Never did and still don’t. But what you brought to the relationship.”

“What did I bring?” I ask, acutely aware that this comes off as needy.

But he doesn’t laugh at me and I appreciate that. “Excitement, ya know? Back then you were a challenge. Something I had to deal with. And I’ll be honest with you, I didn’t have a lot of challenges before Augustine came into my life.”

Which makes me realize I never knew him either. Still don’t. So I say, “Who were you then? And who are you now?”

He looks down at his hands. It’s a moment of insecurity, I think. “Bartos, you know what that is, right?”

“Yeah,” I say. “Vaguely, at least.”

“A brand. Not so much in North America, but in Central Europe the name Bartos is synonymous with wealth.” Then he pauses to think for a moment. “And poverty. And wealth again. It was kind of a cycle with my family back in Hungary. That part of the story is long and sad. Lots of losses and few wins. But later, in the last half of the twentieth century, our luck changed and my father held a patent used for sound recording. Later he had more. Mostly film-making tech. And we were suddenly very, very wealthy. This was right around the time I was born, so I never knew the old version of my family. I grew up on a large, rambling country estate in Luxembourg. I went to school in the US, then university at Oxford, then back to the US for grad school. Which is how I ended up in LA sitting on that board when I met Augustine.”

“Hmm,” I say, picturing all this. Picturing little tow-headed Alexander running around in fancy European kid clothes playing croquet or something. “Interesting.”

“I was a privileged brat.”

“I can see that,” I say. Then I smile. Because actually, even though I always knew Alexander came from money, he never acted like he came from money. He was always just one of those strange artists. Of course, broke strange artists don’t live in Westwood lofts. It was kind of a shithole back then, but still. Three bedrooms, three baths, three thousand square feet.

He hit the trifecta with that place and we all knew it, even if we never talked about it.

“So I had it easy,” Alexander says, slipping into some kind of fake Hungarian accent. Although… is it fake? Maybe this part of him, the part I know, is fake?

He’s watching me try to figure this out.

“I had it easy,” he repeats, now in perfect English. “Augustine was my first real challenge in life. I fell in love with her the moment we met. She was in film school, I had just finished grad school the year before and was a consultant for an academic organization that gave out grants for film students. It wasn’t fair, I knew that. To dangle that money in front of Augustine. She needed it and…” He shrugs again. But this time he’s frowning. “I needed her.”

“And so she took your bait,” I say.

“Ixion was just her friend. He was no threat, I knew that immediately. They were partners, they had business plans, and he was not at all interested in a sexual relationship with her until…”

“Until I came along,” I finish for him.

“Yeah, well. You changed everything, Jordan. I knew it the moment we met as well. You were competition. So I had two choices, right? Let you in or chase you away. If I let you in, we share her. If I chase you away, I lose her. So what could I do?”

His accent is back and for some reason it throws me. It tilts my world a little. Because I don’t know Alexander Bartos with the thick Hungarian accent. I have no fucking idea who this guy is.

And he’s staring at me. Daring me to ask him this question. “What do you want?”

“Her,” he says. “So simple, right? I just want her.”

“And she wants me.”

“She doesn’t want you. She needs you, Jordan.”

I think about this for a few moments. “Your family,” I say. “They’re dangerous people?”

“All people are dangerous.”