Chapter 14: Tender Homecoming
The drive to Malibu was silent, but not empty. The space inside the car was thick with everything unsaid, the ghost of Simon’s fury a third passenger in the Tesla’s pristine interior. Matt drove with one hand on the wheel, the other holding Dee’s, her knuckles white under his grip. The city lights bled into the darkness of the Pacific Coast Highway, the ocean a black void to their left, whispering of endings.
He pushed the remote for the gate, the headlights cutting a swath through the cypress trees. The beach house emerged, all angular modern wood and glass, a fortress he’d built with the money Simon had helped him earn. The irony tasted bitter.
“He’ll call in the morning,” Dee said, finally breaking the silence as the car rolled to a stop. Her voice was calm, analytical, but it had a brittle edge. “He’ll have a plan. A statement for the press, a strategy to contain this.”
“I don’t want a strategy,” Matt said, killing the engine. The sudden quiet was immense. “I want you.”
She looked at him then, the dashboard lights painting her face in soft greens and blues. The poised woman from the dinner was gone, stripped away by her father’s dismissal. What remained was raw, exposed, and fiercely beautiful. “I know,” she whispered.
The house was cool and smelled of salt and the faint trace of the cleaning service’s lavender spray. They didn’t turn on the main lights. Moonlight filtered through the tall windows, painting the living room in slabs of silver and deep shadow. It felt like they were moving underwater, slow and deliberate.
In the bedroom, the world narrowed to sounds and sensations. The distant, rhythmic shush of the waves. The click of the door closing behind them. Their breathing, still not quite steady.
He turned to her, reaching for the delicate zipper at the back of her dress. His fingers trembled, just slightly. She didn’t move, just watched his face as the emerald silk sighed open. She shivered as the fabric pooled at her feet, the cool air meeting her skin.
“Your turn,” she said, her voice low.
Her hands went to the buttons of his shirt. Each one was a small, deliberate conquest. She pushed the linen from his shoulders, her palms smoothing over the muscles of his chest, his arms, as if relearning a map. Her touch was neither frantic nor shy. It was a reclamation.
When they were both bare, skin to skin in the moonglow, the urgency melted into something else. A profound, aching slowness. The events of the evening—the clatter of the fork, Simon’s frozen rage, the finality of that closed gate—hovered around them. This was the antidote.
She sank to her knees on the soft wool rug. The look she gave him was one of pure, undiluted focus. She took him into her mouth, and the world ceased to exist outside the heat of her, the wet velvet pressure of her tongue. There was no performance in it. It was a communion. A silent, ‘We are here. This is real.’ He let his head fall back, a groan tearing from his throat as his fingers tangled in the chestnut silk of her hair, not guiding, just anchoring.
He came with a shudder that started in his knees, his hand cupping the back of her head, holding her to him as the last pulses faded. She rested her forehead against his thigh for a long moment, her breath warm on his skin.
Then he lifted her, carrying her the few steps to the bed, laying her down amidst the crumpled linen. He followed her down, his mouth traveling the line of her sternum, over the curve of her stomach, lower. He kissed the inside of each thigh, feeling the tremor in her muscles.
When his mouth found her, she gasped, a sharp, broken sound that was swallowed by the pillow. He tasted her, the sharp, clean truth of her arousal. He licked with a leisurely dedication that made her fists clutch the sheets. He explored her with his tongue, learning the rhythms that made her hips lift, the pressure that had her whispering his name like a prayer. He felt her tighten, her whole body coiling, and he didn’t relent until she came apart with a muffled cry, her legs trembling around his shoulders.
He moved up her body, his skin slick against hers. He paused above her, his weight braced on his elbows, his face inches from hers. In the half-light, her eyes were dark pools, watching him. There were no more masks. No agent’s daughter. No movie star. Just them, and the wreckage they’d chosen.
He entered her with a slow, inexorable push that made them both catch their breath. He filled her completely, a deep, aching fit. For a minute, he didn’t move, just stayed buried inside her, their foreheads touching, sharing the same air.
“I’m not sorry,” he whispered, his voice rough.
“Neither am I,” she breathed back.
Then he began to move. It was not a frantic race, but a deep, rocking cadence. Each withdrawal was a question, each thrust an answer. It was an apology for the lies, and a promise for the chaos to come. It was solace and defiance spun together. Her legs wrapped around his hips, pulling him deeper, her mouth finding his in a kiss that was more breath than shape.
The tension built not in a sharp crescendo, but in a slow, gathering wave. It swelled from their joined centers, spreading through nerve and muscle until it became inevitable. She clenched around him, a silent cry against his neck. Her release pulled his from him, a long, warm unraveling that left him boneless, collapsing beside her, still intertwined.
They lay like that for a long time, slick with sweat, hearts hammering a slowing duet. The moon had moved, its light now falling across the foot of the bed.
Dee traced a faint scar on his shoulder, a remnant from a long-ago stunt. “He’s going to try to force you to choose,” she said, her pragmatic side resurfacing in the aftermath.
“I already chose.”
“It’s not that simple. Your next three projects are with studios he has ironclad relationships with. The publicity for ‘Echo Protocol’… he can make the press tours hell, or he can make them sing. He holds the levers.”
Matt turned his head to look at her. “So what’s your professional recommendation, Ms. Waldorf?”
A small, tired smile touched her lips. “Honestly? Damage control. We go public first, on our terms. A single, respectful statement. We take the narrative away from him before he can frame it as a betrayal.”
“And us?”
She rolled onto her side to face him. “We do this. We be us. And we see who’s still standing with us after the smoke clears.” She paused. “He might try to fire you, you know. As a client.”
“Let him try.”
But they both knew it wasn’t that easy. Simon Waldorf didn’t just fire clients. He erased them from the ecosystem, if he chose to. The beach house, the career, the life—it was all built on a foundation Simon had helped pour.
A phone buzzed, violently, on the nightstand. Not Matt’s. Dee’s.
They both looked at it. The screen lit up the darkness.
DAD.
It glowed, persistent and accusing.
“Don’t,” Matt said.
She watched it ring until it stopped. A moment later, a text notification chimed. Then another. They came in quick, staccato succession, the screen flashing relentlessly.
She didn’t reach for it. She just watched the light play across the ceiling, her body rigid against his. The sanctuary of the bedroom fractured, the outside world crashing back in with the insistent glow of a screen.
The war hadn’t started in the morning.
It had already begun.
It had already begun. The phone fell silent, but the silence it left was worse. It was a waiting silence. Dee exhaled, a slow release of breath she seemed to have been holding since the dining room. “He’ll just keep calling. Or he’ll send a car. Or he’ll show up.”
“He doesn’t have the gate code,” Matt said, but the statement felt flimsy.
“You think that matters? He’s Simon Waldorf.” She pushed back the sheets and stood, a pale silhouette against the window. She found his discarded shirt and pulled it on, the linen swallowing her frame. “I need water.”
He followed her to the kitchen, the cool polished concrete under his feet. She filled a glass, drank half, and leaned against the counter, staring into the black rectangle of the window that reflected their ghostly images back at them.
“We should draft something,” she said, her business voice a thin veneer over the tremor in her hands. “A joint statement. Short. ‘We have recently begun a relationship and request privacy for this private matter.’ It gives them nothing and everything.”
Matt took the glass from her, took a sip, and set it down. “It sounds like a corporate merger.”
“It is, in a way.” She managed a weak smile. “Merging our chaos.”
He pulled her to him, the shirt soft under his palms. He kissed her forehead. “We’ll do it tomorrow. We’ll call a publicist he hates. We’ll burn that bridge with gasoline.”
She laughed, a real one this time, muffled against his chest. “You’re terrible at strategy.”
“I’m great at grand gestures. You handle the strategy.”
The moment of lightness dissolved as headlight beams, harsh and white, swept across the kitchen ceiling from the driveway below. They froze. A car door thunked shut, solid and expensive.
Another door.
Footsteps, not on the path to the guest entrance, but crunching directly on the decomposed granite toward the main front door. A familiar, heavy tread.
“No,” Dee whispered, the color draining from her face.
A fist pounded on the front door. Not a knock. Three thunderous, demanding blows that shook the silence apart.
“Matthew! I know you’re in there! Open this goddamn door!” Simon’s voice was a roar, stripped of all its practiced Hollywood polish, raw and fraying at the edges.
Matt felt Dee’s entire body go rigid. Her strategic calm vanished, replaced by the wide-eyed fear of a teenager caught breaking curfew. “Don’t,” she breathed.
The pounding came again, more insistent. “Open it, or I’ll have my driver put his shoulder through it! This isn’t a discussion!”
Matt looked at Dee, at the fear in her eyes, and then at the door. The foundation of his career was on the other side of it, drunk on bourbon and betrayal. He saw the crumb on his lip, her thumb wiping it away. He made his choice.
He walked to the door, barefoot, and unlocked it.
Simon didn’t wait for an invitation. He shouldered his way in, bringing the night’s chill with him. He smelled of expensive bourbon and cold sweat. His tie was loosened, his hair uncharacteristically disheveled. His eyes, bloodshot and furious, scanned the dim living room and landed on Dee, standing in the kitchen archway drowning in Matt’s shirt.
The sight seemed to wind him. A physical blow. His jaw worked.
“Get in the car, Desiree,” he said, the words clipped and icy. “Now.”
“I’m not leaving,” she said. Her voice was small but clear.
“This?” Simon waved a contemptuous hand between her and Matt. “This is a vacation from reality. It ends tonight. You are coming home with me, and we are going to fix this.”
“There’s nothing to fix, Dad.”
Simon took a step forward, and Matt moved, placing himself squarely in the center of the space between them. “Simon. Stop.”
The agent’s gaze swung to him, and the full force of a decade’s worth of built-up paternalism and professional ownership focused into a glare. “You do not get to speak. You have forfeited that right. You lied to me. You manipulated her. In my house.”
“I didn’t manipulate anyone,” Matt said, keeping his voice low, even. “And she’s right here. You can talk to her.”
“I am talking to her!” Simon shouted, the cord of restraint snapping. Spittle flew. “I am trying to save her from a monumental mistake! From you! Do you think this is about love? It’s about proximity and obsession! You see something you were told you couldn’t have, and now you’ve convinced yourself you need it!”
Dee stepped forward then, coming to stand beside Matt. “You don’t get to decide what I need. Or what this is. You decided I was off-limits when I was a kid. I’m not a kid anymore. Your rule expired.”
Simon stared at her, his chest heaving. The anger seemed to bleed out of him for a second, revealing something horrifically vulnerable beneath. “You think I did that to punish you? To punish him? I was protecting you! From this exact… mess! The headlines, the speculation, the ‘is she pregnant’ gossip when you’re seen in a loose dress, the vitriol when it ends—”
“Who says it’s going to end?” Matt interjected.
Simon laughed, a harsh, broken sound. “It always ends. And then where is she? Tainted goods in this town. The agent’s daughter who failed to land the movie star. She has a career, Matthew. Or she could. She’s brilliant. And you’re turning her into a footnote in your biography.”
Dee flinched. Matt felt it.
“You’re reducing her to a trophy,” Simon pressed, seeing the hit land. “And you’re reducing yourself to a cliché. The actor who sleeps with his agent’s daughter. It’s pathetic. It’s weak. And the industry eats weakness for breakfast.”
The truth of it, the probable truth, hung in the air. It was the fear they hadn’t named. Simon weaponized it beautifully.
“Get out, Simon,” Matt said, his own anger finally surfacing, hot and quiet.
“Or what? You’ll call security? I am your security!” Simon took another step, ignoring Matt, his eyes locked on his daughter. “One last time. Come home. We will handle this quietly. We will tell the press it was a misunderstanding, a familial closeness misread. You will go back to Berlin for a while. He will focus on his premiere. This… interlude… will be forgotten.”
It was the perfect, professional solution. A neat erasure.
Dee looked at her father, then at Matt. She saw the future in both directions: a smooth, lonely path back into the gilded cage of her father’s world, or a chaotic, messy, uncertain road with a man she’d wanted for a decade. She thought of the crumb, and the silence that followed it. The choice had already been made, in that instant. Everything else was just noise.
She took Matt’s hand, lacing her fingers through his. They were both barefoot, in sleep clothes, facing a man in a thousand-dollar suit.
“No,” she said.
Simon stared at their joined hands. His face hardened into something unrecognizable, a mask of pure, cold business. He nodded, once. “Alright.” He straightened his cuffs, a habitual gesture of control. “Then we proceed accordingly.”