Carrie Blake - The Woman Before You - An intense, addictive love story with an unexpected twist...

A few years later, Ansel was the one who got to go to Dartmouth. Having a bad boy as an older brother wasn’t a stain on his permanent record.

My high school friends graduated from good schools, got jobs on Wall Street. Against all odds, we stayed friends.

One Friday night those same friends and I were drinking at a downtown dive bar we liked, despite the bar’s newly acquired hipster chic. Even though a few of the guys had girlfriends and were moving on in the direction of separate, grown-up lives, our partying had gotten more intense—more desperate, maybe—now that we sensed that our stay-out-all-night years might be drawing to a close.

That night we saw, at a table across the bar, Val Morton.

We looked and tried not to look, and we looked again. Was it or wasn’t it him? Those clean sharp features, that cool confidence, that authority, those looks—all pretty impressive in a man pushing sixty—were hard to mistake. But still… When we finally decided that it was him, and not someone else who looked like him, we felt that charge in the air, that fizzy vibe, the way that someone famous changes the atmosphere in a room.

It was Valentine Morton, the craggy movie star turned politician turned one-term Governor of New York, defeated in a run for re-election after the newspapers broke the story of how Val Morton and his wife were never in Albany. They stayed there at most four days a month.

At the table with Val and a few guys around my age was Val’s wife Heidi, a tall former supermodel who had spent her twenties watching her rock star boyfriends snort coke and destroy hotel rooms. Then she grew up, scaled back on the runway appearances, appeared in a couple of straight-to-video movies, married Val, and settled down. She’d traded the thrill of watching flat screens fly out of hotel windows for the comfort (and the thrill) of traveling the world in Val Morton’s private jet.

What did the Mortons do now? In the past few years, Val had become a high-profile Manhattan real estate developer. His name appeared quite often in the papers, mostly in connection with some battle that his real estate development company (named The Prairie Foundation, as if it were some public-interest group dedicated to helping Midwestern farmers) was waging with the city or the Landmarks Commission or the residents of the neighborhoods which his projects were about the destroy. For some time, he’d been fighting to develop a huge stretch of the waterfront in Long Island City, overlooking the Manhattan skyline. A lot of people hated Val Morton, a lot of people tried to stop him, but he always won. The Prairie Foundation had more than enough lawyers, time and money to beat the local block associations. And Val seemed to enjoy these fights; that is, he enjoyed winning.

When Val wasn’t too busy razing brownstones or throwing a block of mom and pop stores out of business, he and Heidi went to parties. They appeared in People and the other celebrity magazines. If you got your hair cut or went to the supermarket, you saw Val and Heidi hanging out with Hollywood stars and the Clintons. The Prairie Foundation did give to some worthy liberal causes: literacy, the public library, prisoners’ rights, rebuilding disaster sites. Val still acted in films every few years, mostly sequels to pictures he’d made when he was young. It didn’t matter if the films did well or not. He had lifetime celebrity status. Lifetime celebrity money.

The dive bar got warmer and brighter. Across the table from Val, who was playing to his entourage of young guys in suits, Heidi sat checking her phone and grabbing waiters who passed by, pulling them down to whisper drink orders in their ears.

Val was doing all the talking. His boys all laughed explosively at everything he said.

Meanwhile Val kept looking over at me, the way a girl would look at you in a bar. Was he gay? You heard that rumor about every actor, but I hadn’t heard it about him. I’d been cruised by guys before, but this didn’t feel like that.

My friend Simon said, ‘I think the governor likes you, Matthew.’

‘Ex-governor,’ I said.

One of our guys swung by Val’s table en route to the men’s room and came back and said, Yeah, definitely him .

Duh. No one else looked like him: the aging, handsome, slightly debauched Hollywood warrior. His eyes kept tracking to me.

Fine with me. I was straight. I’d had two serious girlfriends and lost count of the not-so-serious ones. I’d slept with all my female friends. They’d slept with each other’s boyfriends.

But hey, I’m a practical guy. Open-minded. Finding an aging sugar daddy before I got too old seemed better than taking orders at Fries and Thighs. I didn’t much want to get fucked in the ass, but we could work around that.

Val Morton was handsome and rich.

I went and stood by his table. He watched me walk across the room.

I said, ‘Mr Morton, I’m sorry to bother you, and I know how creepy it is to say I’m your number one fan, but…’ My voice trailed off.

I laughed. He didn’t. He’d heard it before. There was nothing to do but go on. He was listening.

‘I’m a huge fan. I’ve seen all your films. I voted for you for governor.’ That last part wasn’t true. I hadn’t voted in that election.

‘Guys, give us a minute.’ His posse rose obediently and left. He put one hand on Heidi’s arm, meaning stay . She was staying anyhow. She was poring over the cocktail menu. She didn’t even look at me.

He motioned for me to sit down but not get too comfortable.

He said, ‘Do you know that sorry was the fourth word out of your mouth? Don’t start off apologizing, okay? Not to me, not to anyone.’

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Sorry.’ I laughed. He didn’t. He’d heard that before too.

‘Valentine Morton.’ He put out his hand.

‘Walker Frazier,’ I said.

‘What kind of parents name their kid Walker?’

‘A photography fan and his bullied wife,’ I said. He watched me deciding not to ask what kind of parents name their son Valentine.

‘Guess what lovers’ holiday in February I was born on,’ Val said, answering my unspoken question for me. ‘So what do your friends call you? Walk?’

‘Matthew. My middle name. My friends call me Matthew,’ I said.

‘Ah, right,’ said Val. ‘The friends. I can see them from here. So let me describe your evening to you … Matthew. You’re going to drink quite a bit more than your friends, and when someone pays, or when they split the bill, you’re not going to be putting your credit card in with the rest. Am I correct? In the ballpark, maybe?’

‘More or less in the ballpark.’ Fuck you , I thought.

‘More,’ he said. ‘More than less. But that’s not a problem. For me. From my point of view, it’s the opposite of a problem. It’s actually an advantage. I’m looking for someone like you.’

‘To do what?’ Somehow I could tell that this was about business, not sex. If it was a sex thing, Heidi would at least have checked me out.

‘What do you think I want you to do?’ he said. ‘Blow me? Christ. Don’t flatter yourself. You think you’re hotter than Heidi?’

At the sound of her name, Heidi looked up, then went back to the cocktail menu.

‘To work for me. To do stuff.’

‘Stuff?’

‘A range of stuff,’ he said. ‘For which you’ll get paid in cash, if I may. No boring tedious social security and tax deductions. No problem. And no record of your having worked for me. At the end of the day, should we decide to part company, no fulsome recommendation letter. No bright spot on your CV. How does that sound?’

It sounded great, but I kept waiting for more … for some sense of the weird ‘stuff’ he would be paying me to do.