“You certainly look like you’ve had a relaxing evening,” he says.
I can only imagine the hot mess I look like. If my clothing looks this bad, my hair must be—
Oh, God.
I start patting down the mess of curls, which feels absurdly lopsided and tangled from having slept on one side without the benefit of my usual satin bonnet.
“I’m sorry I’m late. I fell asleep.”
“And apparently you already ate,” he says, reaching out one thumb to slide along the corner of my mouth. The touch of his thumb feels like pure sin gliding across my skin. He pulls it back to inspect the potato chip crumb on the tip before sticking it in his mouth to suck on. He leaves it there, mesmerizing me with the way his jaw and tongue work around it…until I snap out of my daze in irritation.
“Do you mind waiting while I get changed?”
“There’s no dress code, Vanessa. I own the damn island, I make the damn rules, especially while we’re here. I’m actually kind of digging this casual look of yours.”
“Well, I own this damn body, and I make the damn rules as far as how it’s dressed,” I say with my mouth twisted in a smirk. “So I’m going to change.”
Seriously! Hell, if I’m going to look like this walking disaster over dinner. There’s no way I’d be able to maintain my dignity. And I have a feeling tonight I’m going to need more of it than ever.
I swing the door open and wave my hand toward the sitting area with a couch facing that amazing private pool.
“Won’t you please come in and have a seat? Feel free to help yourself to something from the mini bar…all on me, of course.”
That gets a hearty laugh out of him as he walks in, and even I chuckle a little.
There’s the old Vanessa I know and love.
Chapter Twenty-One
Dylan
At least now I know what Vanessa probably looks like the morning after.
Not too shabby.
I would have been at the very least amused to enjoy a world-class meal sitting across from the version of her that answered the door.
The woman that makes an appearance just ten minutes later throws that idea out the window. If I didn’t know any better, I’d have thought she stopped time while she put herself together, considering how damn fine she looks now. It only confirms my suspicions that women don’t need nearly as long as they claim to in order to get ready. Then again, most women aren’t working with the same raw materials as Vanessa Paige.
She’s wearing a red dress that hangs from her shoulders by two thin straps. One smooth leg makes a continuous appearance with every step she takes through a ruffled slit created by the wrap skirt. Her hair has been fluffed out and pushed to one side with a comb making her look like some mixture between disco-era Donna Summer and a Spanish dancer.
“So are we going to have dinner, or are you planning on making a meal out of me with your eyes all night?” she sasses with a smirk, resting a hand on one hip.
“Yes?” I say with a grin, making her laugh.
I stand up and offer my arm, which she takes.
She’s wearing flat sandals so easily keeps up with me as I walk her down the winding path to the next villa.
“Right next door. How convenient.”
“Only if you want it to be,” I say. “Feel free to stop by any time to borrow some sugar.”
She just laughs and shakes her head at my gall.
No, Vanessa, I don’t ever turn off.
A table for two has been set up on my veranda. Since night has already come, it’s been lit up with tiny lanterns hanging from the overhead beams and strategically placed on the ground and around the pool.
“I hope you’re not trying to seduce me. This is supposed to be a work trip.”
“You have a very warped idea of work, Vanessa,” I say as I pull out her chair for her.
“Is this the part where you say something blithe about mixing work and pleasure?”
“This is the part where I say let’s at least order drinks before you get too…professional on me.”
The menus already placed on the table are a limited version of the full menu from the Latin-themed restaurant I’ve picked for tonight’s meal. With just two of us on the island, I didn’t want too much going to waste in order to cater to us while we’re here.
Vanessa’s brow rises as she looks over the drink menu, which most certainly hasn’t been limited.
“Oh, this is too tempting.”
“Giving in to temptation is what this island is for.”
Her eyes roll up to mine above the menu, and she smirks.
We have a dedicated waiter who makes an appearance to take our drink orders, and then after a long moment of exploring the menu, our food orders. When he’s gone, she sits back in her chair and looks out over the view, which is surprisingly visible thanks to the full moon.
“So how did a boy selling tennis shoes on the streets of New York end up owning a paradise like this?”
“Drinks first.”
She turns her attention back to me. “I already know the story.”
I consider her for a moment. “You only think you know the story.”
That seems to pique her interest, but she stays quiet until our drinks arrive. She’s ordered something called a Mango Pimentón Margarita, a mix of mango purée, tequila, a splash of orange juice, and Cointreau rimmed with a blend of sugar and cayenne pepper. I’ve gone with a basic mojito. He’s also brought back homemade tortilla chips with scallop and shrimp ceviche we ordered.
“Mmm,” she hums, taking a sip of her drink. “That’s yummy.”
“I certainly hope so, I plan on charging way too much for it.”
She laughs over her glass before setting it down. “Okay…will the real Dylan Sexton please stand up now?”
I continue to sip my drink as she takes a heaping bite of the ceviche on a chip. I allow her to savor it for a moment, rolling her eyes with pleasure before I set my glass down to get started.
“Sneakers were only a tiny part of my success. There’s slightly more…panache in that story than the real story of me working back kitchens of restaurants or hawking friend’s CD’s or…some of my slightly more illegal activities.”
Her eyebrows rise. “Illegal?”
“Selling loosies—individual cigarettes on corners, a bit of underground fighting, selling watered-down liquor at events. Small-time stuff, but I did what I had to. New York ain’t cheap.”
She nods, as though she’s beginning to appreciate the somber reality of what it’s like being dead broke.
Not that I was completely broke when I arrived.
I feel my body instinctively go tense before continuing. “Everything but drugs. That’s the one thing I wouldn’t do.”
“It’s important to have some morals, I suppose,” she says with a hint of a wry smile.
“I had my reasons,” I say with a humorless smile before continuing. “I’ve never made excuses for what I did, even to myself. But all of it helped me get where I am today, sometimes in unexpected ways. I got free meals from the leftover food at the buffet restaurant I worked at. I ate, drank, slept…and got laid at house parties I conned my way into,” I grin as Vanessa rolls her eyes at that bit. “Mostly, I learned the hard way how to avoid getting suckered from the lowest of the low. All in all, it certainly made me a good salesman. You ever try getting a stranger to buy a CD on the street for some unknown artist?” I laugh, thinking of some of the looks I got. “I had to be inventive.”
“How so?”
“I discovered later on that some of it was straight out of business school 101. Pretend the real price is one thing but sell it at a supposedly deep one-time-only discount. Throw in something cheap like a key chain or decal sticker.” I laugh again. “One kid, he had a picture he’d got with him next to Biggie Smalls before he died. I suggested we use that for the cover instead of whatever shit he was using, which certainly wasn’t selling.”
Vanessa nearly spit
s out her drink. “Isn’t that a bit...?”
“Disingenuous?”
“I was going to say fraudulent. Distasteful? Immoral?”
I nod, then shrug. “I did a lot of unethical things in those days, and you’re probably right on all three of those adjectives. It wasn’t as though either of us didn’t eventually get shit for it either if it makes you feel better. ”
She shakes her head. “You really were a bad boy, weren’t you?”
“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. The person who coined the phrase, don’t judge a book by its cover wasn’t a salesman. The cover is the only thing that sells a book, at least when you’re still unknown. Even when you aren’t, it’s all about the brand, not the product.”
She considers me for a moment before speaking. “I suppose this hardly makes you any worse than most corporations.”
I shrug again and eat some of the ceviche.
“But the question remains. How the hell did you manage to level up to all this?” She waves a hand around us.
I take a moment to brace myself, taking a long sip of my drink before I answer.
“That one would take me back to Detroit. Back to a moment in my life that no one knows about, not even the bottom feeders I’ve had to pay off to keep quiet about my past.”
If Vanessa wasn’t interested before, the look on her face as she stops mid-sip into her drink certainly indicates she is now.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Dylan
Before I can continue, the waiter comes back with our food. I’ve ordered carne asada, and she went with the cilantro fish tacos. I wait for him to leave before I continue.
“Are you sure you want to tell me all of this?” she asks after taking a moment to admire her meal.
I think back to my visit with Lionel, who promised to keep all of this secret for my sake. Since it had nothing to do with what he’s currently in jail for, I trust him, if only for the fact that it wouldn’t do anything to help his probation if it came to light.
But it’s time for me to come clean, though I fully plan on keeping his name out of it.
“I should start with my beginnings. Everyone knows I come from Detroit. Slightly fewer people know I was born to a single mom. After that, I’ve had to work to keep my past quiet, offering a bigger payday to gossip chasers who learn the details, threatening to sue publications that might publish anything about it.”
Vanessa is staring at me with rapt attention.
“Go ahead and eat your food before it gets cold. No sense in it going to waste.” I cut into my meat if only to encourage her. Only when she picks up one taco, do I continue.
“My real name is Dylan Serafin, my mother is—was Mallory Serafin. I don’t know who my father is. By the time I was old enough to press her for the truth, she was usually on a heroin-induced cloud of elation, not even cognizant enough to recognize who I was.
“It started the usual way with that particular addiction. She was hit by a car. Broke her leg in I don’t know how many places. Enough for her to lose her job waitressing. But his insurance at least paid the medical bills since we had laughable coverage. This included the pain killer prescription. An end to the prescription led her down the path of bigger and better hits as she slowly built an immunity.”
I take a bite of my meat before continuing, even though my appetite has suddenly dulled. Vanessa is eating almost in a trance, her eyes glued to me.
I reach one finger up and trace the thin scar across my chin. “This right here? That’s what first caught the attention of child protective services.”
Vanessa swallows hard. “What happened?”
I stare down at my plate, feeling a wry smile come to my face. “Baby boy, that’s what she always called me when she was feeling sentimental. Before the shit hit the fan, we’d be walking home after her shift at the restaurant, and on the rare occasions we managed to see any stars, she’d point up and say ‘That’s us, baby boy. Each one of those stars is an angel, just like you and me.’” I look up into the sky above us where faint stars are visible, far more than I ever saw on the streets of Detroit. “Then she’d tell me, as though she hadn’t told me a million times before, that our last name meant ‘angel.’”
A smile comes to Vanessa’s face.
“Baby boy,” I say again, still with a hint of a smile on my face, though I don’t feel it reaching my eyes. “She also said it the day she pushed me hard enough for me to hit my chin against the edge of the coffee table.”
Vanessa stops chewing.
“I’d blown up at her over something. I think it was a permission slip she hadn’t signed, some final straw of her being too out of it to function. She found enough energy left in her to snap right back at me after a long tirade. We couldn’t stop the blood flow, and that was enough to scare her straight long enough to get me to the ER. They knew what was up the moment they saw the state she was in.
“Thus began my twisted relationship with the system. I wish I could say that it motivated her to quit so she could get me back, but all it did was give her the freedom to sink even further into the abyss. By the time I was eleven, she’d lost all rights to me, doing things I don’t want to think about to pay for her habit.
“The only reason why it never came to light when I became famous is that she was never caught and arrested for any of it, and when she finally died, it was from an overdose. Another junkie, another day, hardly newsworthy. I got the notice when I was fourteen.”
“Dylan,” Vanessa says, falling back in her chair as the gravity of everything I’ve said hits her.
I give her a reassuring smile and shrug as I finally dig into my meal. “My story is the same as about a thousand other kids. I’m nothing more than a statistic. One who made it despite the odds, sure, but a statistic all the same. That’s why I give so much, mostly to charities for kids in need or to fight drug abuse. Whatever I can do to lower those statistics.”
Vanessa smiles appreciatively around the bite of taco in her mouth. I use the pause to take a few bites of my own dinner.
“Well, at least some good has come out of all of that,” she says after chewing and swallowing.
My own mouth being currently full, I just nod.
“But…”
“How did I go from there to here?” I say, finishing the sentence for her.
She nods and takes another bite.
“When I was in one of several boys’ homes, I met another boy. He deserves his anonymity, so I won’t mention his name, but he had a similar background. No dad, mom addicted to something or another, bounced around from home to home. At first, we hated each other.”
I laugh before continuing. “It’s that same old story. One fight on the playground, actually maybe a few fights, now that I think about it. Anyway, there was a man who worked at the home. He was one of those let’s all get along, hold hands, and sing kumbaya types that we were merciless with. He never let it get to him, though, and after yet another fight, he forced us to sit together. Just sit. It seemed like forever, but I guess the guy knew what he was doing since we managed to start talking. You can imagine how it went from there.
“He was like my brother from that point on. We stuck together, for better or for worse, mostly worse.” I get serious before continuing. “When we turned eighteen, we got into the usual trouble, shoplifting, tagging, everything except drugs. Both of us made a pact never to go there.”
I pause before detouring. “The thing is, I always wanted more. One thing I have to hand it to my mother for is getting me into reading early on, mostly biographies. Before she succumbed to the oxy and then the needle, she’d make me read these children’s books about these great men, Lincoln, Martin Luther King, the usual icons. I continued long after she stopped caring, devouring them, just because I couldn’t get enough of it. Everything from fashion designers to famous authors to that guy who walked on a tightrope across the twin towers. I think I liked reading them so much because most of them started from basic beginnings, sometim
es even worse off than I had it. So I always had this idea that there was more for me if I wanted it. It was always in the back of my mind, even as I was stealing a beer from the corner store or making minimum wage at some fast food joint.”
Once again, I pause. Something in my eyes must alert her to the fact that I’m shifting gears again because her tiny smile disappears.
“One night my friend and I were hanging out in some empty lot, drinking beer from a six-pack I’d convinced someone to buy for us. We got to talking about our moms—we were both still bitter. Growing up the way we did, naturally we know who was who in the business, and we got it into our heads that we could get back at them. That was the beer talking, but…it sure enough empowered us.
“There was this guy, Smokey—he always had a cigarette in his mouth. Creative nickname, I know.” A humorless smile touches my lips. “He was the bag man. Somehow we conjured up this idea that we could screw up the whole operation, at least for a while, if we interrupted that little cog in the machine.”
I pause for a moment before laughing, finding it morbidly humorous in retrospect.
“During one of his collections, we tripped him up with nothing more than rags covering half our faces and baseball caps on our heads, and a couple of razor blades pointed his way. I don’t know what was special about that night—or maybe we just underestimated how much was brought in daily—but when we got the bag back to my friend’s place, we thought maybe there’d be at best a couple G’s.” I pause to exhale, still astounded at what happened. “Instead, there was close to a hundred.”
“Thousand?” Vanessa asks, her eyes wide.
I nod, a grim smile coming to my face. “That scared us into thinking about giving it the hell back. In the end, we realized how stupid that idea was and just divided it up between us. We waited for the inevitable to come; for our doors to be kicked in by either the police or the people we’d stolen from. When nothing happened, I didn’t trust it and got the hell out of Detroit, which I’d always dreamed about doing anyway. New York was the only place I ever wanted to be. I packed my half, almost fifty-thousand, into a backpack with a few clothes, and that’s it. The first thing I did was learn how to change my name, just in case.”
Dylan: Ex-Bad Boy: An Ex-Club Romance Page 10