“Hey, Bruno! Did you wait long?” Annie asked, jogging up behind him.
“Hhhk… Why, Annie? Why?!” Cattleya demanded under her breath. She started crying again but kept her voice down so nobody would hear.
Cattleya could be a bit prickly and a bit angry—it would be fair to say Annie had been her only real friend.
They’d met about five years before, when Annie, the successful athlete, had trotted up to Cattleya, who was reading on one of their breaks, and said, “Wow! Cattleya, you like that book? It’s one of my favorites!”
“I-it is?” Cattleya had asked, shock and joy mingling in her expression.
She remembered it like it was yesterday. She had never gelled well with the rest of her class, and this was the first time she’d ever had a real conversation with one of the other girls.
“You knew me way before you knew Bruno!” she said now. And yet today, it was Bruno with whom Annie joked and chatted. Cattleya was jealous, plain and simple. “Give me a break!” she grumbled. “How could someone like Bruno be better than me?”
Bruno was the ideal student; his reputation was spotless, and there was nothing about him to criticize. Not a person in the whole school had a bad word to say about him.
Except Cattleya.
“Why do you even care about sludge like him?”
For you see, Cattleya had known Bruno for a long time, too. They were, to coin a phrase, childhood friends. And for that reason, Cattleya knew a side of Bruno that no one else at school was aware of.
“Ha-ha-ha! You’re so cute, Annie,” Bruno said, grinning. But that smile was just the mask he put on for the world. Bruno had another face, dark and hidden, that only those who were closest to him ever saw.
One day, Bruno had invited Cattleya to his house, and when she saw the maids serving there, she’d given them a good look. “Is it just me, or are all the maids in your house…really pretty?”
All of them were almost suspiciously young and beautiful. Not to mention their outfits all showed more skin than was typical for servants, and they exuded an eroticism Cattleya didn’t normally associate with people hard at work.
“Oh, it’s not just you. We do all our hiring based on looks.”
“Yikes…”
“To me, you see, women are like beautiful flowers.”
He always wanted to be surrounded by lovely women, he said.
Bruno made no effort to hide his appetite. Cattleya sighed, disbelieving. “If you’re really that twisted, believe me, you’ll never have a girlfriend as long as you live.”
“Heh,” Bruno said, and then he put on the cool-guy look he so often wore around school. “That’s all right. I only need to appreciate flowers, not pick them.”
Cattleya didn’t understand what he meant.
“That’s gross,” she grumbled, and at the same time, she sent out a prayer: Please don’t let my dear friend Annie fall for this jerk.
But her prayer went unheard.
“Bruno…”
“Annie…”
They were already exchanging passionate gazes. They simply oozed affection for one another. If so much as a single pebble gave way, their friendship would avalanche straight into love, and everybody knew it.
“That’s why I want you to shred their little romance,” said Cattleya, shutting her sketchbook with a whack and hiding the intensely creative pictures within.
It was a fairly straightforward story, not too long and not too short. To summarize: “Your best friend is falling into the clutches of a total creep, and you want us to tear her out of them?”
“That’s about the size of it.”
Oh, okay.
I nodded. “That’s very transparent reasoning.”
“It’s such a cliché story, I’m almost a little shocked,” agreed Riviere with a nod.
We were starting to feel silly for listening so seriously.
“Hey! I poured my heart and soul into this sketchbook so I could explain this to you!”
Yeah, not our problem.
“Either way, it is a very common situation. And I don’t think it’s a good thing to tear people apart,” I said, in a way that I hoped implied, Don’t do anything people are going to hate you for later.
Riviere nodded again. “Don’t you think they’ll naturally drift apart when Annie finds out what he’s really like?”
It was a sincere question. The two of us were the very picture of mature adults. But Cattleya only gave us an exasperated shrug—kids these days!
“I hate to say it, but I don’t think it’s that simple,” she said.
Riviere and I responded at almost the same time:
“Why not?”
“Explain, please.”
Cattleya replied, “I think there’s a very low likelihood that Annie will leave Bruno, even if she finds out what he’s like.”
“Why not?”
“Explain, please.”
All right, so we felt sort of silly repeating ourselves like that. We were the very picture of inconsistent adults.
Then Cattleya related to us a conversation she’d had with Annie not long ago:
“Say, Annie?”
“Yeah? What is it, Cattleya?”
“If the boy you liked pushed you to, like…do stuff, how far would you go?”
“Huh? I’m cool with pretty much anything.”
“Well…what if he wanted you to wear weird, revealing clothes?”
“Sure! Not a problem. Bring it on.”
(Here Cattleya mimicked the choked noise she had made.)
It was then, five years after they’d first met, that Cattleya discovered Annie was the open-minded type.
“And that’s why I want to break them up,” she said, leaning back on the sofa. “I’ll pay anything you ask. My dad has lots of money.” She tossed a sack on the table.
This was not the behavior of someone who wanted to rescue a helpless young woman.
“What a very interesting story you’ve brought us,” said a young woman who swooped in from the side to collect the bag. She had gray hair and eyes of lapis lazuli. Our assistant, an on-again, off-again presence at Riviere Antiques.
Now, who could that be?
“It’s me,” said Elaina, looking like this was her moment to shine. “I came running when I smelled money.”
Ah, Elaina, nothing if not unashamed of her desires.
“Oh? Then should we three take this request on together?” Riviere said, clapping her hands as if to suggest the discussion was over.
“By the way, what kind of request is it? I showed up in the middle, so I’ve got no idea,” Elaina said.
Long pause from me. Somehow having to explain this ourselves…it seemed like a lot of trouble. Instead I looked at Cattleya. “Think you could go over all that again?”
“Oh, what the shit!”
“Gosh. That mouth…”
Anyway, so it was that we took on the grave responsibility of saving an unsuspecting young damsel from her no-account paramour.
“Ha-ha-ha!” Bruno laughed.
“Tee-hee-hee!” Annie giggled beside him.