by Emilia Finn
It takes two full minutes for the dots to show up on my screen to tell me she’s typing. The dots wiggle… then they stop. They wiggle, and Soph grins. Then they stop, and she sighs.
Cam: You kissed me for the first time in your uncle’s office. You touched me for the first time in the forest outside your family’s estate. We had sex in the octagon of your family’s gym.
Me: Nope. Wrong. You lose.
More dots. Fast, furious. And then a flurry of replies.
Cam: Wrong?
Cam: What the hell do you mean I’m wrong?
Cam: I was there! I know damn well where, when, and what we did!
Cam: You stupid ass! I’m not wrong. Make the fucking statement before someone knocks on my door and does something you can never fix.
It’s her. I know it is. I knew it from her very first text, but seeing her chew me out again feels better than it should.
I should be furious. I’ve held onto my anger for years, but now I smile despite myself. I can’t help it, because I’m talking to her and it makes me want to weep.
Me: Wrong. Because what we did was called lovemaking. Not sex. Sex is so… boring.
Cam: Are you seriously arguing semantics with me right now? Goddammit, Jamie Kincaid. It’s been ten minutes since your stupid stunt. Folks will have already started searching. Do you wanna be the reason I get abducted in the fucking street?
Me: Nope. I really don’t. But I’m gonna need you to take my call to prove it’s you.
Cam: You’re out of your damn mind. It’s fine. Forget it. Send me my half a million – since I helped you get in contact with that chick you thought you knew. With that cash, I’ll get myself a new nose, I’ll fill in my chin, and I’ll buy a new name. Problem solved.
Me: I’ll give you a new name for free. I’ll pay for the whole wedding, no questions asked. You just have to be at the chapel on time.
Soph snorts. God knows how she does the things she does, but she has my chat screen enlarged on her laptop, so now everyone in my family can see the bit about the forest, the octagon… the quasi proposal. “Smooth, kid. But I feel like she’s gonna say no.”
Cam: No!
Instead of replying via text, I swallow my nerves and dial. Fuck it. At this point, I don’t have a hell of a lot to lose, so I toss all my cards down and lean against the counter while the call rings.
And rings.
And rings.
“Pick it up,” Soph murmurs. “Pick it up, pick it up, pick it up.”
Finally, right when I think the call will cut out, and her answering machine will greet me, the line clicks, and every single person in my family freezes. My call isn’t even on speaker, but they see me, they feel my nerves in the air.
“Cam?” I whisper. “Tell me it’s you.”
“He’s innocent,” she whimpers. Her sweet voice, the rasp in her words, the desperation that follows, it all coils in my belly and threatens to strangle me. “He’s not a murderer, Jamie. But until we can prove it, we have no choice but to stay hidden. Your stunt tonight put us both at risk.”
“You sound older.” I walk as far as the cord will allow me. “You sound good. Strong.”
“I’m four years older. And I’m angry. Make the statement. I’m begging you to undo what you did.”
“That first time we made love,” I murmur. I turn my back to my family and try for even a semblance of privacy. “That time at the gym—”
“I don’t have the strength to skip down memory lane with you,” she whispers. “I’m hurting, okay? I’ve been hurting, but you’re cruelly picking at a scab and won’t let me heal.”
“Our first time was without protection,” I push on and ignore my mom’s shocked gasp. “We were young, we were dumb, we were impulsive, and we were in love. So we made grown-up choices.”
“Jamie! Just stop it already.”
“Did you take my baby?”
“Oh god.” Mom pushes away from our group and walks laps into the tile floor. “Oh god. Oh god.”
“Cam?” I turn away and close my eyes. “Did you pee on a stick and get a positive? Did you run away and never tell me?”
“That’s why you wanted to contact me?” she spits out. “You’re worried I took your baby and kept a secret from you? Are you fucking serious right now?”
“Yes, I’m–”
“Here I was, thinking you were in love with me. Unable to get over me. Yearning for me, mourning my loss. But noooo,” she drags the word out. “God forbid there be a Kincaid baby out in the wild without you standing over it and raising it to be a famous brat, just like you.”
“Did you take my fucking baby?”
“Add in the fact that my brother can fight. He’s damn good at it too. So then you have double the fighter potential there. Name our baby James Kincaid the third, cash in on some endorsement deals, shove him into the octagon when he’s four. Which, I guess would be this year, right? Just in time for baby classes and lucrative commercials.”
“We had a son?” I whisper past the grief in my throat. “Are you saying we had a son, Cam?”
“Oh god!” my mom cries. “Oh no.”
“Only you would be arrogant enough to assume this. And then to assume you have some kind of right to blast us all over the television to get your own way.”
“Did we have a fucking son?” I roar. “Answer me, Quinn!”
“No!” she screams right back. “We did not have a child. I have never in my life had a positive pee test. I did not hide an heir from you, nor would I, you self-serving, arrogant douchebag. I’ve been sitting here in my apartment for four fucking years trying my damned best to stop loving a boy that stole my heart, but you’re over there worried that I lied about a child.”
She pauses for a moment, as though to catch her breath, to school her thoughts.
“You and me…” she murmurs. “We’re not the same. We’re not thinking or feeling the same thing. But there you go. You got what you wanted; your stunt got you access to me, it got you a phone call after I was able to leave you behind for all these years, you know the truth about this hypothetical child, and now you can go on with your life like we never met. Call off the fucking dogs before you get me killed.”
And then she hangs up. Gone, in a cloud of rage, and when I try to redial a second later, I get the same message I’ve gotten a million times before. “The number you are calling is switched off or out of range. Please hang up and try again.”
“You thought you could be a father?” Mom grabs my bad arm and spins me around when I set my phone on the counter. She has tears in her eyes and shaking hands. “And you never said anything?”
I look over my mom’s shoulder to Soph. “Did it work?”
She nods. That’s all she does, because we made a deal, and she’s a businesswoman at her core.
“Jamie!” Mom shouts. “Answer me. All this time, you thought you might be a dad? And you didn’t say anything?”
“No.” I sniff and try to pull myself under control. Because maybe Cam thinks she’s alone in her grief, but she’s dead fucking wrong. “The risk was there, since we didn’t use protection that one time. But no, I didn’t think she would hide a child from me. That’s not who she is.”
I walk around Mom and go to Soph. “She said he’s innocent. What’s Oz got on that file?”
She gives a small shake of her head. “He doesn’t have much of anything. He had a fax, an order handed down from a different office, that Will Quinn is Jake Williams, and Jake was to be arrested. He did as he was told, he did it with a little extra oomph, since Will was talking to Liv. But it’s done now. It’s not a part of his workload at this point.”
“Good.”
I turn away from her and snatch up my phone once more. I have a promise to keep. A job to do. I also have hundreds, thousands, of texts and emails coming through from folks who want the cash reward, and are lying about knowing where Cam is.
I ignore them all, go to my social media, and, drafting up a respons
e, I show Soph before I hit post.
She nods, copies my wording verbatim, then she posts it to the gym website.
“The statement made by a Rollin On Gym and Stacked Deck representative this evening at 7:23pm is no longer valid. Jamie Kincaid has made contact with his friend, the reward has been transferred to the appropriate recipient, and the offer no longer applies. Any further contact or search done in regards to this person will not be honored with the finder’s fee. Thank you for your swift response. We’ll see you all at this year’s tournament.”
“That’s a shitty statement.” Evie glowers. “You just used our platform for your own personal gain. And you cost us half a million dollars to do it.”
“No.” I turn to her. “I found her, she came to me, and I didn’t pay a cent for it.” I snatch my phone from the cord connecting it to Soph’s computer, and cross the kitchen. “It worked exactly how I knew it would. Now I’m going home. I’ll see you guys at the gym tomorrow.”
Victoria
That Rat Bastard
“Did you see that thing on the news the other night?” Lita sits at her workstation a full week after Jamie’s bullshit television stunt, and peeks around our mirrors to catch my eyes. “I swear, I was sitting at home eating my dinner, and this cutie was on TV describing you!”
“Hm?” I apply a thick coat of lipstick and pretend that I’m not completely enthralled by her every word. “I don’t understand what you mean.”
She goes back to her own mirror to work. “I don’t mean you you, but the description he gave… Damn, Tori, I was half tempted to try my luck for the reward money.”
“Reward money?” Fake, fake, fake.
“Yeah. This hot fighter was on the TV, and he said how he was missing his ex-girlfriend. Blue eyes, dark hair, five-six. I was hardly paying attention until he mentioned the chin, and hell, I thought, ‘that sounds just like Tori’!”
“Ha.”
“Of course, I only thought it for a sec, because not so long after, there were breaking news banners saying he found his girl, and all was right with the world.” She peeks around the mirrors and sighs. “And since you’re right here, I guess that means it wasn’t you.”
“Mm. Wasn’t me.”
“Don’t you think he’s hot as hell, though?”
Yes. “Who?”
“The guy on the news. Jamie Kincaid! He had me fanning my face, standing there in shorts with all that moppy hair, and ink on his chest.”
“Oh. Nah. I didn’t catch the news, so I don’t know who—”
“I figure whoever she is, her name must start with Q. Because he had a Q on his chest.”
“Hm. Maybe.”
“Not a lot of name choices there. Quinn, Quisha, Quorra, which sounds like Cora, right? Unless it’s more of a nickname thing, like maybe he calls her his queen.” She shrugs. “But no matter which way we slice it, you, my darling, are not a Q. Which means, I, unfortunately, was not getting my hands on that reward money.”
“You’d have sold me, just like that?” I fake a laugh and go to work on my mascara. “So much for loyalty.”
“Girl,” she snickers. “I was tempted to dress you up and see if he’d notice you weren’t her. Dance for that handsome man once, and he’d have no recollection of who his Q was.”
I roll my eyes and drawl, “I’m flattered. Are you doing the fourth routine tonight?” Change the subject. Move the hell on with your life. “With the silks?”
“I was thinking of the one we practiced to Britney. The one with the ass. Every time I bend over, it sends the guys crazy, and I need a new hot water heater, so mama’s gotta work it tonight.”
I snort. “Make that ass work for you, girlfriend. That’s why God gave it to you.”
I slide the wand back into my tube of mascara and drop the whole thing onto my table. Standing, I run a hand over my flat stomach and try to forget the ache in my heart after hearing Jamie’s words. The rage in his voice. The dismissal, when I realized I was nothing more to him than an incubator.
I thought what we had was real, but after all these years, all of that searching, I was only as valuable as the hypothetical baby he thought I had carried for him.
I’ve been broke all of my life. But not once have I ever felt so cheap. Not until Jamie.
“I’m ready to go on.” Lita bounces up from her stool and hustles her way around to stop in front of me.
She has the best boobs money could buy, the best ass that came without injections, but to tie it all together, her waist is so beautifully narrow, it creates the perfect hourglass, the most erotic shape that we know men obsess over. It’ll take one single set tonight, one dance, for her to afford a new hot water heater.
“Are you okay?” Lita leans a little closer, bending her neck to close the couple inches of height she has over me. Then she reaches up and cups my jaw, allowing the universe to fuck with me some more, as she runs the pad of her thumb over the dimple in my chin the way Jamie used to. “You seem nervous.”
I drag a lungful of air down my throat, then let it out again on a sigh. “I’m tired. I’ve been run off my feet trying to make the rent.”
“You should sleep more, sweetpea. It’s not healthy to never take a minute to rest.”
“Someday.” I take her hand and hold it for just a moment. “Someday I’ll be able to rest. But not right now. I’m too busy.”
She scoffs. “And at the end of your busy day as a fancy dance teacher, you take your fancy-pants dance education, and put it to good use here at Zeus’, shaking your ass for a little cash and a pat on the rump.” She makes the tsk noise with her tongue. “That doesn’t sound right, does it?”
“Sounds perfectly fine to me.” I release her hand and step around her in nothing more than cheeky, boyleg panties, a matching bra, and heels that are so tall, they would almost – almost – bring me eye-to-eye with Jamie Kincaid. “Beggars can’t be choosers, Lita. I want to dance, I want to choreograph, and this way, I get to do both.”
“But when you planned to dance, you didn’t mean for men. When you say you want to choreograph, you didn’t mean for toddlers.”
“I get to choreograph our routines,” I counter fruitlessly. “That counts.”
“No, it doesn’t.” She laughs. “Because we come back to the dancing for men thing. Come on.” She heads to the door that opens to the balcony overlooking the club. “McGrady has us on together again tonight, so there’ll be hell to pay if we’re both late.”
She opens the door and pastes on her “showgirl” smile for the men milling around only feet away. They act like it’s coincidence they’re nearby. Like, “oh wow, I had no clue you ladies were in there! Also, since you’re here, do you wanna give me five minutes of your time, free of charge?”
Pulling me through the door and closing it up behind us, Lita slides my arm around hers so we link, and with nothing more than a flirty smile for the loitering men, she leads us to the top of the stairs and down.
A gritty, dark song plays through the club so loud that the bass thumps inside my chest. The artist sings of love and chains, of heartbreak and filthy sex, so while she does that, my brain compartmentalizes. In one corner, I think about Will, about Nate Hardy, our invisible witness, and the bullshit charges that will send my brother away for decades if the police ever find him. Another part of my brain considers Evan’s offer; be with him, and he could potentially make this go away.
I mean, what’s sex, really, when it’s not my virginity? I already gave that away. I gave it to who I wanted to give it to, so Evan can have me now, and he can believe he was the first and only. I won’t ever have to tell him different, and with that power, I’ll have access to information that could potentially free my brother from the prison we call home.
Another slice of my brain choreographs a routine to the music playing through the speakers. In my mind, I see the steps, the movements. The sensuality. The romance laced with filthy, filthy sex.
And because I couldn’t stop it fast eno
ugh, the thought of sex leads to Jamie Kincaid.
Fuck him for letting me steal his watch. It was a battle I won. A small victory. A false sense of accomplishment. Because he stole my virginity, my heart, my soul, and just a week ago, instead of giving them back, he shattered them in the most horrifying way.
That asshole broke my heart, four years after the first time I thought it was broken.
“Tori?” Lita tugs my arm and draws my eyes around as we approach the bottom of the stairs and move onto the main floor. “Did you hear anything I just said?”
“Huh?” I look around. At the customers that fill every seat. Every table. Every inch of space in this shadowed room. “What?”
“I said that guy is here again.”
My heart speeds and sends ridiculous thoughts of Jamie spinning through my mind. Of course Jamie’s not here. It’s not possible. So I glance around until I find exactly who she means.
The cowboy gentleman watches us with smiling eyes and a wicked grin.
I groan. “Oh man.”
“You don’t like him?” Lita turns to me. “Seriously? Because he’s a sweetheart.”
“I do like him. That’s the damn problem. If he continues his chivalry act and keeps touching us, Evan’s going to take him out. And I really don’t want to be the reason that nice guy loses his face.”
I glance up to the guy and smile – a friendly smile, not a flirty smile – but that only spurs him on.
He flips to his feet, steps in our direction, and extends a hand as though to help us.
I shake my head. No longer smiling. No longer kind. I lock my hands in close to my body so he can’t take one, then I meet his eyes.
“Miss Tori?” He steps closer and frowns. “Um… you okay?”
“You can’t touch, sir.”
“I wasn’t… I didn’t…” I’ve hurt his damn feelings! “I meant no disrespect, ladies. I was only trying to help you up.”
“We appreciate it,” I speak for Lita and I both. “But you can’t keep doing that. There are signs everywhere that say no touching the dancers. I don’t want you to get in trouble, so…”