by Amelia Wilde
“Look at me, Skylar,” he commanded, and my eyes, which were squeezed shut, opened to find his bright blue pools blazing with love and passion.
“Touch yourself, baby,” he commanded softly. “Make yourself come.”
Without breaking our eye contact, I slipped two fingers down to massage that sensitive spot. The combination of his slow, forceful movements with the flutter of my fingers was instantaneous.
“Aaah!” I cried out, unable to keep my eyes open any more. “Brandon!”
“Not yet, baby,” he cooed. “Hold it, just a little bit more.” He started to pick up the pace, just slightly, and I could tell by the minor shaking of his body he was having just as hard of a time holding back. “Just. A little. Bit. More.”
I moaned even louder, pushing off the wall behind me to meet his thrusts. Unable to control myself any longer, I tightened suddenly around him, which ultimately was both our undoing as he lost his control and started to move faster and more erratically. My hand fell away, but I didn’t need it anymore. I was lost.
“Oh fuck, Skylar!” Brandon groaned, an animal in the throes of pain and pleasure, slamming back into me against the wall, where my head banged with a satisfying clunk. I couldn’t have cared less.
We fell apart together, biting hard into each other’s shoulders as we quaked through muscle and bone. Brandon’s powerful legs finally buckled, and as we came down from our mutual high, he slid down to his knees, keeping me securely wrapping around his waist while the water poured over us.
“Please,” he croaked through long, drawn breaths. He kissed me, so tenderly it almost hurt. It seemed I wasn’t the only one still reeling from our conversation. “All I have...all I have...it’s yours, I promise. Just let me...let me try. Let me love you the way you deserve.”
I gripped him tightly and threaded my fingers through the wet curls gathering at the nape of his neck. Even under running water, he smelled so good. How could someone who felt so good be wrong for me?
“Please,” Brandon whispered again huskily. His arms were still wrapped around my waist, holding me in a viselike grip. He was scared, I realized, to let me go like he knew all the doubt that I’d been feeling.
In my heart, I knew I was never going to leave him anyway. I whispered back: “Okay.”
40
Jane’s absence allowed Brandon and me to share a bottle of cheap wine and greasy Chinese food in between two more bouts of cathartic, soul-searing sex. He didn’t try to convince me to go back to Beacon Street although I imagined he missed his bed. His feet hung at least six inches off my college-issued double mattress. But whether it was because Miranda was still there or because he knew it would just make me uncomfortable, the question of leaving never once came up. There was no checking his messages, no conference calls. For the first time since we’d become involved, Brandon’s undivided attention was focused only on me.
Sometime just past 6 a.m., I slipped my robe back on and left Brandon again snoring in my bed, a pillow clutched endearingly over his stomach like an oversized teddy bear. But I had to get up. My stomach was still in knots that no boring deposition would be able to untie. I brewed a cup of tea and sat quietly on the couch.
I wanted things to be resolved quickly, but that definitely wasn’t in the cards. Brandon’s divorce papers still lay crumpled on the coffee table. I set my mug and reached for the wrinkled pages. It was time to face what I was getting into.
They were standard court documents, one packet laying out the terms of the separation and the official filing for divorce. Miranda had been given a princely monthly maintenance, along with the residencies of their New York apartment and a different house in Cape Cod. The other packet was a copy of the most recent terms, which, I noted, Brandon had signed, but Miranda had not. I wasn’t sure why he had brought them—perhaps to prove to me how close he really was to being finished with the whole tawdry business.
I hesitated. Brandon’s entire life was in these pages. Was this really something I should be looking at? My fingers toyed with the paper. He had brought them here for me to see. I had every right to look.
It was a fairly standard agreement, its length only accounted for by the sheer volume of assets the two of them shared. It was also incredibly generous, granting Miranda more than seventy percent of their liquid assets and property, almost all of their mutual stock portfolio, and all of their properties, including the house on Beacon Street. I paged through the assets, wondering why Brandon was offering so much, but the reason was soon clear. He was giving her everything in exchange for sole ownership of Sterling Ventures and the law firm. He meant what he said: he didn’t want her anywhere near his companies.
Why didn’t she want to take the deal? She’d end up richer than Brandon, although they’d both still be extremely wealthy. Was it just to mess with him? Or was she still trying to stay connected to put off the inevitable? As I flipped through the rest, I continued to ruminate on that unpleasant yet unfortunately understandable possibility until I saw a name that made my entire brain stop.
The end of the agreement included a set amount of their assets to be paid into five different trusts, separate from the money that would be split between them. The first two trustees’ names were familiar enough: Ray and Susan Petersen. Douglas Murphy and Michael Larsen were clearly the formal names of the men who had gone to prison in Brandon’s stead, causing a permanent stain on their records that would follow them and their job prospects for the rest of their lives. They might not want to know him anymore, but Brandon was still making sure they would be taken care of once they were released.
It was the fifth name on the list that stopped me. Victor Salvaturi Messina.
Brandon was making payments into a trust for the gangster who had nearly cost my father his life. My heart froze as I realized he had explicitly broken another promise he’d made to me. And lied about it along with everything else he’s hidden.
I thought he understood how desperate I was to get me and mine away from this man, from that kind of life. The last thing I wanted to do was give the keys to a piggy bank to a criminal who would never get enough. Who would never, ever leave my family or me alone.
The jingle of keys shook me out of my stupor, and I dropped the papers on the table like they burned. Jane entered, slow and sluggish. Apparently, the library had turned into a night out.
“Good morning,” she greeted, but stopped when she saw my expression. She shucked her coat and approached like she was cornering a stray cat. “Everything okay?”
I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. With a shaky hand, I pointed a finger at the papers.
“Oh,” Jane said knowingly, following my gesture. “You looked. Yeah, it’s a shitload of assets, isn’t it? You know these kinds of people are loaded, but it doesn’t really hit you what that means until you find out they could buy Nicaragua if they wanted to, does it? The good news is that if you ever do marry the guy, you’ll be able to negotiate one hell of a prenup.”
“It’s not that,” I replied.
I grasped at the papers and held up the one with the trust agreements on it. I pointed to the name that had me quaking with bad memories.
“Vicomte Slughead Meshuggena?” Jane joked as she leaned over the couch, squinting before she stood up. “Goddamn it, I should have brought my glasses with me. The guy wasn’t even worth taking them off anyway. What does it say?”
“Victor Salvaturi Messina,” I said slowly as I rubbed the bridge of my nose. “He’s the guy who beat the shit out of my dad, and for some reason, Brandon is giving him money. A lot of it.”
Jane nodded slowly. She didn’t know that much about my family’s entire history with the Messina crime syndicate, but she knew about the most recent events, enough to comprehend the consequences of this particular revelation. She set a cautious hand on my shoulder.
“What do you want to do, Sky?” she asked quietly, checking toward the bedroom where Brandon’s light snores filtered out every few seconds.
My voice had become almost soundless. My chest constricted, and I pushed my hands roughly over my face. When I pulled them back through my hair, sudden clarity came over me.
It didn’t matter what Brandon’s intentions were or whether or not we were desperately in love. It didn’t matter that I had never felt like this for anyone and suspected I never would again. I absolutely could not allow my family anywhere near this kind of mess. And I could not be with someone who wasn’t honest.
Brandon had lied. Not once, but multiple times. That wasn’t something I could overlook.
“Do you want me to ask him to leave?” Jane asked. “Say the word, Sky, and I’ll march back there and kick his naked ass to the curb. You know I will.”
I groaned into my hands. I loved Brandon. But I didn’t want to end up like these women I met at the clinic, who threw their lives away for a man because of “love,” and I certainly couldn’t be indebted millions of dollars on account of Victor fucking Messina.
I turned to Jane, full of decision. “No,” I said, quietly yet definitively. A deep mixture of resolve and regret throbbed in my heart. This was going to be hard, but I knew I had to do it. “Jane?”
She looked at me with sympathy, as if she already knew what I would ask.
“Can you help me out with one thing?”
“Need me to call the security guard?”
I shook my head. “No, no. Just…can I borrow some clothes? I’m going to leave a note saying I’ve gone to the library or something and will be tied up all day. He’ll go, I’m sure of it. Just…tell him that’s where I went, okay? And that I didn’t want to wake him up.”
She looked uneasy. “Skylar…”
“Please, Jane. If I see him right now…I don’t think I’ll be able to do this. And he won’t just let me go. I know him.”
All of a sudden, I couldn’t move fast enough. I darted quickly and quietly about the apartment, gathering books and papers, my cell phone, keys, and wallet. I flipped efficiently through my messenger bag to make sure everything else was in order. When I stopped, Jane was still standing by the couch, watching me with sadness.
“Jane! Clothes!” I said, my tone bordering on a bark. “I can’t leave the apartment dressed in nothing but a bathrobe.”
Jane blinked. “Right. I’ll go find you something to wear.”
She re-emerged from her room a few minutes later carrying a pair of stretchy leggings and a black concert sweatshirt for a death metal band. I looked at the logo, which was a blended graphic of Cthulhu and a zombie, and back up with a raised eyebrow, which only made her laugh.
“Hey, you like black. Give me a break, it’s laundry day.”
I gave her a quick hug. “Thanks, Janey. It’s perfect.”
I slipped into the bathroom to change, brush my teeth, and tie my hair up before reemerging in the all-black ensemble, over which I pulled my black rain boots and my favorite gray knit hat. I shoved on my glasses before putting on gloves, a scarf, and then buttoning my black trench coat over it all.
“You look like a bad ass,” Jane said with a sad smile. “Like a sexy Inspector Gadget. He’s going to freak when he wakes up, you know. You sure you can’t just ask him what this is all about?”
I shook my head. My mind was made. It didn’t really matter what Brandon would say—this was way beyond the scope of what I could handle. Our age and income disparities? I was just coming around on that. His obvious abandonment and childhood insecurities? Perhaps. Even his divorce I probably could have managed eventually, despite the secrecy. But the Mafia on top of all of it? As much as I felt his presence pulling me back to the bedroom, I had to—had to—think with my head on this one.
“I’m going to go to New York for the rest of the weekend,” I said. “Just tell him I forgot about a project and I went to the library. Tell him…tell him I’ll call him later. And that I love him.”
My voice cracked on the last word. It was the only thing I’d said that wasn’t a lie, and Jane knew it. She reached out and squeezed my hand.
“Sure, Sky, whatever you say,” she said softly. “But if he throws a fit...”
“He won’t,” I replied. “I think he only does that around me. Will you let me know when he’s gone?”
Jane nodded. “No problem.”
I opened the front door as quietly as I could. “All right,” I said, suddenly lowering my voice to a whisper. “Later.”
“Be safe,” Jane said and shut the door.
I stood for as long as it took to take five deep breaths, sucking in the air and exhaling it long and slow. It was physically painful to be standing there, doing what I was about to do. But there was no alternative. As I let out the last breath, I turned down the long, deserted corridor, and walked away from the man I loved.
Three hours later, I was about halfway to New York on the train, having opted for a more expensive mode of travel in the event Brandon pulled another stunt and showed up again in Chinatown. I was curled up in a seat by the window, watching the cloudy New England seashore pass by as I enjoyed the relative solitude of the early Saturday express line.
My phone buzzed in my pocket, and I pulled it out to find a text from Jane.
Jane: Finally woke up. Told him u were at the library without cell service but I don’t think he believed me.
Me: Why not?
Jane’s response was almost instantaneous.
Jane: He saw the divorce papers scattered around. Pretty sure he thinks u were mad abt something.
I paused, unsure of what to write back. My phone buzzed again before I could reply.
Jane: He’s not stupid.
It was too easy to imagine him, looking for me eagerly after what must have seemed like a night of hard-won reconciliation and finding nothing but my uncharacteristically sober roommate and the scattered divorce agreement. Of course, he knew what had happened. Deep down, I knew he would—it’s why I had skipped town like a coward. Brandon would have seen everything on my glass face the minute he woke up.
I blinked away tears as I thought about what we had shared together, all the times he begged me to love him. And God, I did.
My phone vibrated with another text.
Jane: He’s standing outside the building. I think he’s waiting for u to come back. Do u want me to talk to him?
Jane: He’s freezing down there. It’s actually hailing outside.
Waiting, always waiting. He’s so scared to miss me that he would literally wait through a hailstorm. I closed my eyes and saw him at the bus stop, outside the theater, striding into the club in New York, and leaning against my building just last night. His eyes were always slightly nervous, but eager all the same. He said he would never stop chasing me. Unfortunately, this time I wasn’t going to let myself be chased.
I tapped a quick, final message:
Me: U can tell him I’m not coming back. Thx.
I powered off my phone and put it in my bag. Then I tucked my legs under me and pressed my face against the cold glass of the train window. I imagined Brandon’s face as Jane told him the truth. And silently, I began to cry as I finally allowed myself to feel the pain of what I was losing.
41
“Bubbela!”
My grandmother’s sharp, gravelly voice woke me from a night of thrashing around my bed, twisted up in dreams of mournful blue eyes and rainstorms. If I hadn’t known I was in Brooklyn, that word took me straight back to Flatbush. Maybe if I wished hard enough, Bubbe could take me back months, before this mess began.
“Get your tuchus down here for breakfast!”
Maybe not.
I squinted into
the stale light that peeked through the blinds. “Go away, Bubbe!”
As I sat up, the mattress creaked loudly, as if it had had as hard a time with sleep as I had. I had a full day of studying ahead of me, considering I still had to catch up on the work I’d missed last week. With everything that had been going on, my focus was slipping, something I just couldn’t afford so close to the end.
Unfortunately, the small light on my phone that signaled messages was right next to my face. I had managed, with helpful distractions in the forms of liquor, music, and my dad, to ignore all notifications after I’d finally turned the phone back on.
Now, however, was a different story. With a sinking feeling in my stomach, I swiped the screen, which revealed five new voicemails, twenty-eight new text messages, and a whopping forty-three missed calls. All were from a certain frantic businessman.
I deleted all of the voicemails, knowing that if I heard the sound of Brandon’s deep voice, my resolve would melt faster than ice cream in August. The messages began innocently enough.
Brandon: Missed u when u left.
Then with more mischief:
Brandon: Was hoping to take u out for breakfast. Of course, you’d taste better.
When I didn’t reply, they became more inquisitive and frustrated:
Brandon: When do u think u’ll be finished at the library?
Brandon: It would b nice if u could actually check ur messages.
After he had been told that my trip to the library was a farce, they turned confused and frantic.
Brandon: what did i do?
Brandon: im freaking out here. pls call asap.