He paused, tugging at his lower lip. I couldn’t see his eyes through his sunglasses. “They test us regularly, you know.”
“Who’s ‘they’?”
“Management. They have to do it for insurance purposes.”
“Well, good for them. They can sleep with you, then.”
He laughed. “All right, you’ve made your point.”
I scooted back in the seat then. The elephant in the room. The idea that he was randomly hooking up with other people. That I had tacitly accepted it. I had thought the less I knew, the better. But maybe not.
“Fuck.”
I thought I said it under my breath, but he heard.
“I’m sorry.”
“No, you’re not.”
Desmond stepped out of the pharmacy just then and started toward the car. The stocky, tattooed ginger fellow in head-to-toe black. Desmond stood out in the Hamptons.
“Can we discuss this later?” Hayes asked.
I did not respond. Later we would have sex again and again and again, and he would manage to make me forget that at this moment I was angry.
* * *
By midafternoon we were out by the pool drinking sangria in the heat. The D’Amatos’ cook had mixed a few more pitchers at our request, and Hayes, Ol, and I plowed through them with ease, while Desmond and Fergus played video games inside and Charlotte napped.
“I think I could be happy with a house in the Hamptons,” Oliver said at one point. We were all three sitting in the spa, and the millennials were discussing multimillion-dollar real estate like middle-aged men in Brentwood.
“You’d never get to use it. I’m thinking London, New York, Barbados, Los Angeles,” Hayes said. His pronunciation of Angelees always made me smile.
“I might just move in here with Dominic and Mrs. D’Amato,” Oliver teased. “I like what she’s done with the place. Solène, did you see the Hirst in the dining room?”
“I did.”
Hayes’s eyes traveled back and forth between the two of us. “How did you know that?”
“Because my mother collects art, you idiot. What does your mother collect? Right, ponies.”
“Fuck you, HK,” Hayes laughed, splashing Oliver on the far side of the spa.
“Hayes Philip Campbell is not the culture vulture he makes himself out to be.”
“Solène”—Hayes tightened his grip around my waist—“do I make myself out to be a culture vulture? Or do I mostly just sit in awe when you talk about art?”
“You mostly just sit in awe.”