His Banana Read online

  I was attracted to her, against all reason. She had chestnut brown hair that complimented those hazel eyes and tanned skin of hers. She also had a way of dipping her chin toward her chest when I was reaming her out, which made her big eyes seem even bigger and full of mischief as she was forced to look up at me. Her lips would curve up on one side, like pissing me off actually amused her.

  The fucking woman was going to make me lose my mind.

  “You, uh… Good?”

  I spun, ready to throat-punch whoever had just walked into the break room. I was still clutching the banana peel that was more green than yellow. It was my brother.

  I sighed. William was the last person I wanted to talk to when I was feeling on edge. I didn’t even want to see him. He had a way of wearing his hair in a kind of perpetual mess and keeping a few days’ stubble on his face. He rarely wore a tie, choosing to leave a couple buttons undone so he could more easily scout out women who were hungry enough to be his next one-night-stand.

  Looking at him made me itch for a comb. He was my mirror image, except he was what I might've been if I didn't have obsessive-compulsive tendencies with a heavy dose of perfectionism. He was me without control. The definition of a loose cannon. Most of all, he was what I could've been if Valerie had never happened. Minus the ridiculously messy hair, at least.

  I threw the banana peel in the trash. “Yes. I’m, ‘uh’ good.”

  He crossed his arms, watching me with a twinkle of amusement in his eyes. “Then why does it look like someone just took a shit in your banana pudding? And since when do you eat anything but perfectly yellow bananas? That one looked more like a cucumber.”

  “Since the intern from hell arrived.” Figuring she could find a suitable banana had been a mistake, and it wasn’t one I’d repeat.

  “I assume it’s a stupid question to ask why you don’t fire her?”

  “You assume correctly. I can’t fire her. Not yet.”

  “I see.” William scrunched his forehead up skeptically. “So she’s hot?”

  I gave him a suffering look. “Really? You do realize we only look identical, right? One of us is able to keep his cock in his pants, especially at work.”

  “Hey, I’m not the one taking my cock out of my pants at work. Those women were very persistent. Besides, I know you aren’t opposed to getting your dick wet. There was that one woman… Shit, what was her name?”

  “Valerie.” I tried not to grate her name out. Maybe there had been something close to real feelings for her inside me once. Now, I just felt an empty sense of loss, not because she was gone but because I’d given up part of myself I wish I could have back.

  “Right,” said William. “What a raging bitch. You know, I once thought about framing her for some kind of petty crime as your birthday present? Nothing too serious, obviously, but I thought a couple nights in jail would be good for her.”

  “Please tell me you’re joking.”

  “Yeah, totally joking,” he said in a way that told me he wasn’t.

  “I gotta say. I hated her before she cheated on you. Imagine how I feel about her now, right?" he grinned, punching my shoulder like it was all a good joke. "And then there was that phase you went through with the whole secretary thing. Remember?" He asked, his face split with a grin. "I swear, you would only fuck women if they had to wear pantsuits and pencil skirts to work. I was starting to think you had a fetish."

  I took a deep, controlled breath in through my nose. William always managed to make just about any conversation about sex, and he never had any problem talking about my sex life.

  “Yes, I have been in relationships. And no, I don’t have a fetish.”

  With what I had already diagnosed as chronically bad timing, the intern came stumbling into the room. Literally. Her heel caught on the carpet and she nearly spilled coffee on me again.

  William raised his eyebrows at her, scanning her body and no doubt taking in her pencil skirt. He grinned. “Speaking of fetishes…”

  Natasha looked up at William and nearly spilled the coffee again. She looked to me again, then to William, confusion written all over her face. She must’ve known I had a twin though, because a look of realization settled over her more quickly than it did on most people who saw us together for the first time.

  “Twins,” said William. He stepped closer to her, putting a hand on the small of her back as if she needed to be steadied. To be fair, I guess, she probably did. From the little I knew of the intern, she likely fell on her face without warning from time to time.

  “So you’re the polite one,” she said to William. “I guess that makes you the evil twin, Bruce?”

  William smirked at that. “Hey. Can we keep her? I like her already. No wonder you’ve got a hard-on for her.”

  “I’m the one without STDs,” I growled, ignoring him as much as I could.

  William put his hands up, which thankfully meant he wasn’t groping her anymore. “Easy there, killer. I always use protection. I’m clean as a whistle.”

  “Thanks,” I said roughly, snatching the coffee from her hand and hoping she’d leave. I didn’t want my brother to have any more chances to try to fuck her. Because she had a pulse, she was pretty, and most importantly, he suspected I wanted her for myself. In William’s recipe book, that was as close to an aphrodisiac as mother nature could ever hope to provide.

  The intern stayed put, still looking between us like she expected us to reveal it had been an optical illusion all along. “It’s uncanny,” she said.

  “Not really. It’s genetics,” I said.

  "Ignore him." William followed her to the fridge as she rummaged for God-knew-what. "He has a chronic condition. They found the stick up his ass when we were just kids and the doctors said we couldn't remove it without killing him. Naturally, we all tried as hard as we could to pull it out, but the stubborn bastard never gave us an inch. See, he's a tight-ass, too. It's tragic, really, when you think about it. Sometimes I lay awake at night trying to figure out which came first… The stick, or the tight ass."

  The intern was trying to cover a smile by ducking her head behind the refrigerator door, but I could hear her choppy breaths as she bit down laughter.

  “Out,” I said to William.

  He took a step toward the door as if he’d been planning on leaving anyway. “By the way. Keep wearing the pencil skirts. The whole secretary look. It’s like a fetish for him. Really gets him excited. He’s like an old car. Hard to start up, but once you get him going he really goes. Just keep at it, kid.”

  She looked down, smoothing the ruffles from her skirt, cheeks burning red. How many hours had I known her and how many times had she already blushed? I'd never admitted it to a living soul, but it was possible that I did have a little bit of a preference for the secretary look. I also might have always enjoyed women who blush easily.

  None of that was important, though, because the list of things I did not enjoy about the woman was so long. She was the disaster to my perfection, the wrecking ball that would smash through every carefully built wall and comfort I’d spent my life building up. She was absolutely one hundred percent wrong for me in almost every sense of the word, and yet I still didn’t fire her. I knew I wouldn’t, either. I’d keep her on until…

  Until what?

  I spent the rest of the afternoon wondering what exactly it was. What the hell was I waiting for?

  I was sitting at a table in Seasons 12 later that evening. It was a white tablecloth, candles, and jackets and ties type of place. There was a huge fish tank in the center of the dining room filled with exotic, expensive breeds, including a shark and a large moray eel that kept peeking out from a cluster of rocks, mouth flapping soundlessly as it seemed to taste the water. I absently wondered if the captivity ever made fish go crazy as I watched the eel. Humans would lose their mind in a box like that in a matter of weeks, maybe days.

  I thought about how Natasha had called me a robot. Maybe she wasn’t entirely wrong, at least in some
respects. It wasn’t that I didn’t feel or crave all the things most people did. The difference was that I’d learned to suppress it all. I’d trained myself to. I guess William and I each had our own defense mechanisms for the shit we grew up in the middle of. He taught himself not to care about anything. I taught myself to wrestle control even from the most uncontrollable situations. I learned to take chaos and make order.

  It hadn’t all happened at once. Life had thrown most of what it could at me, and bit by bit, I’d shut myself off. I guess the problem was that burying the things you want to protect will keep them safe, but it also keeps them out of reach. Somewhere along the way, I think I had walled away too much of myself and ended up with nothing to show the world except professional competence and a face women liked to look at. I could almost laugh. Natasha had known me all of two days and seemed to already have hit the nail on the head. I wasn’t much better than a robot.

  My mother and father arrived ten minutes late. My mother was in her fifties. William and I had her eyes and eyebrows, while we had my father’s square jaw and broad shoulders. God knew where we got our height, though, because both my parents were a few inches shy of six feet.

  My father had a way of walking that managed to disrespect any environment with a sort of casual ease you couldn't teach. It was something between a waddle and a swagger, with a constantly swiveling head and a sour smirk on his lips. He looked at the world like he was unimpressed, even though the most impressive thing he had ever done was bring William and me into the world. He seemed to think so too, which was why we had to endure monthly "get-togethers" which were little more than thinly veiled money grabs.

  Agreeing to even meet them at this point was the last shred of respect I showed them for raising me. I’d more than paid any debts I could’ve possibly owed them, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to cut them off completely. Not yet, at least.

  My mother was an unassuming woman. Frail with a permanently surprised look on her face and an inability to evenly apply her lipstick, which always made her upper lip look lopsided.

  “Where’s your brother?” asked my father as he sat himself down.

  “He couldn’t make it.” Actually, I had told William to meet me at a restaurant on the other side of the city. He was probably figuring out I misled him by now, but he’d get over it. The dumbass was always giving our parents money instead of realizing it just made things worse.

  My mother looked nervously to my father. She knew their chances of getting money out of me were about as good as squeezing water from a rock.

  “Son,” said my father. He leaned back and flicked his tongue across his lips in a way that reminded me of a reptile. “We’re not asking about a hand-out. We’re looking for a business partner.”

  I didn’t dignify that with a response. I let my eyes stay cold, my face expressionless.

  He cleared his throat, doubling down on his nonchalance by spreading his arms across the back of my mother’s chair and making a kind of "oh come on face." "It's pennies to you, Bruce. Fucking pennies. Did I raise you to be a selfish asshole, or was that your mother's fault?"

  “I’ve more than paid my debt to you for raising me.”

  “Brucie,” said my mother. “You don’t owe us for raising you. You were our baby. We’re just looking for some help since you’re doing so well for yourself. Think about it. Your pocket change is our lottery ticket.”

  “A lottery ticket I’ve already given you two. Multiple times. And what do you have to show for it? Gambling losses, a boat you crashed because you were drunk off your asses, and all the plastic you’ve pumped into your faces? Money to pay off all the DUIs?”

  They both stiffened at that. “You want to get on your high horse?” My father leaned in and planted his elbows on the table, lowering his voice slightly when his tone drew the eyes of nearby diners. “I’m not going to sit here and let you talk down to me. I changed your fucking diapers when you were shitting yourself, tough guy.”

  “Right,” I said. “And now you want me to change yours? Take some of the money William and I have already given you and hire a nanny. I’m not your ATM.”

  I was surprised and more than a little relieved when they both got up and hurried out of the restaurant in a huff of indignation. They did have a breaking point, and I was happy to say I had become more and more able to find it quickly as the years had gone by. I could have refused their offers to meet all together, but the truth was I was waiting for something with them, too, just like with the intern. Trouble was, I didn’t know what I was waiting for with them, either.

  Maybe it was a side-effect of shutting myself down emotionally for so long. I couldn’t even understand myself, anymore.

  5

  Natasha

  I woke up extra early to check in at Business Insights. Hank sat on his corner desk with crossed arms and those intimidating mustaches masquerading as eyebrows looming high on his forehead.

  “So you’re in?” he asked. “That’s good. I’m actually impressed, Nat.”

  Pride swelled up in me. Hank had looked at me with pity for as long as I could remember. Maybe he did appreciate my writing, to some extent, but he had always treated me like a charity case. I was the one he felt too bad to cut loose. Hearing him say he was impressed felt like much-needed medicine, and I already craved more. I wanted to make him proud. I wanted to blow him away with an awesome story. "I'm in," I agreed.

  “How’d you do it? Nail the interview?”

  I made a kinda-sorta gesture by rocking my hand from side to side.

  He gave me a confused look.

  “All that matters is I got the job. Right?”

  He chuckled. “Sure, Nat. Come to think of it, I don’t think I want to know how you got the job. Knowing you, it probably involved a series of highly unlikely and borderline impossible coincidences.”

  I smiled, hoping he didn’t see the red creeping into my cheeks. Technically, it involved me putting his banana in my mouth. "I wanted to warn you though. He wants me to work for him pretty much around the clock. I may not be able to check in too often."

  Hank waved that off. “Then don’t. All that matters is I have a story. I don’t care if it takes you months to get it. You get dirt on him, and you’ll get the payday of your life. Weinstead put a king’s ransom on Bruce Chamberson’s dirt, so we’re going to get it.”

  “Weinstead wants it?” I asked. “What makes him want it so badly? And why is he so sure it’s Bruce and not his brother? From what I’ve already learned, his brother seems like a much more likely suspect.”

  Hank shrugged. “Does it matter?”

  That was Hank-eeze for “I don’t know,” which I knew better than to question. Hank was the big-wig, and he liked it that way. He didn’t appreciate admitting when he wasn’t in the loop on something.

  I stopped by Candace’s desk on my way out. She grinned knowingly. I had no idea what she thought it was she knew, but she was ready for me to spill it.

  “Tell me everything,” she said.

  “There’s nothing to tell. I interviewed. I got the job. Simple as that.” I was stalling, and we both knew it. The truth was, I enjoyed teasing Candace. She was like a feisty little dog, and I enjoyed seeing her get riled up when I dangled something she wanted in front of her.

  She folded her arms and fixed with me with a death glare. “Nat. I know you. Bullshit me and I’ll kneecap you.” She grabbed her umbrella and started taking little exploratory stabs at my knees, making me jump back, laughing.

  “Jesus! Okay. Okay!" I said, having to grab the umbrella and rip it from her hands. I moved a little closer and lowered my voice. "I ate Bruce Chamberson's banana. And not in the innuendo sense. Like a yellow banana that he wrote his name on with Sharpie. Obviously, I didn't see his name on it or—" I trailed off at the dumbfounded look on her face.

  She watched me for a few seconds before she burst out laughing. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just such a you thing to do. It's a testament to yo
ur track record that I'm not even questioning if you're joking with me. Of course, you ate his banana. I'm not exactly making the connection here on how nibbling on his banana got you a job, though."

  “I’m trying to figure that one out, too.”

  "Did he like that you ate it or something? Maybe he's a perv. Reading between the lines or something. You know?" She lowered her voice in a horrible male impression. "Oh, Natasha. I'm bananas for those lips. A little faster and I'll split. Oh… oh…"

  “Candace!” I hissed, grinning but looking around to make sure no one was listening. “One, those were the worst puns I’ve ever heard. Two, no. Just no. He’s not like that. I mean, if he liked it, he’s a really good actor. It looked more like he wanted to rip my head off and drop kick it out the window.”

  She raised her eyebrows and narrowed her eyes. “So he’s kind of barbaric? Sexy.”

  “More like robotic. Sexy, yes, but he’s like a microwaved burrito. Scalding hot on the outside and cold as ice on the inside.”

  “Please tell me you just compared a man to a burrito, because I love that.”

  “I can confirm,” I said, grinning.

  She sighed. “Listen, Nat. I don’t care if he’s frozen on the inside or not. You need to tap that. Forget the story. Forget everything. Something is going on there. You eat the guy’s banana, he hires you? Come on. There’s your story. That is not an ‘everything is as it seems’ scenario. Not by a long shot.”

  “I mean, he did pretty specifically say he wanted to hire me to punish me.”

  Candace spread her hands like I just confirmed her theory. “See? The guy is kinky as hell. He wants to take you to his sex dungeon or something. Think about it. You need to sleep with him to get him to open up. It’s part of your job. It’s goddamn journalistic integrity. You’d be in breach if you don’t sleep with him.”

  I laughed, even though the ideas of Bruce and sex made my whole body throb with heat. At the same time, the thought of Bruce and a relationship made me feel cold on the inside. “I kind of hate him...” I said.