“Hmm,” my mom said, “isn’t Eric the baby of his family?”
“Yeah, he’s the youngest of four. He has three older sisters.”
“Didn’t you say his mom had passed away, too?”
“Yeah,” I replied, feeling like none of this was relevant.
“What did Eric say?” my mom asked. “Was he there when she was being rude to you?”
I shook my head into the phone. “No, we were alone.”
“If I had to guess,” my mom said after a moment, “his sister is probably just overprotective of him. I wouldn’t let it bother you. She’ll come around.”
“I’m not sure she will,” I replied. “She was really snobby.”
I left out the revelations about Eric’s family being ridiculously rich and powerful. There was no way to share that information with my mom without a lot more explanation that I had faith in myself to share without spilling the beans on everything. Balancing the truth with all the lies was becoming so difficult.
“Well I hope you stood your ground with her,” my mom told me. “Nobody has the right to talk down to my little girl.”
Despite my misgivings, I fought a smirk. “I think I did alright.”
I heard her little chirp of answering laughter. “I shouldn’t have doubted it. You’ve inherited your father’s approach to rudeness.”
That was certainly true. New Yorkers in general didn’t suffer rudeness lightly, and my dad had been a cop to top it off. When pressed, I was perfectly able to push back against situations or people that I thought were unfair or discourteous.
“So, are you going to tell me about your date?” I asked my mom, thinking how bizarre it was even to say those words to her.
“Maybe afterwards,” she replied coquettishly. “I’m not sure if I want to talk about it yet.”
I decided to be the bigger person and let her have her privacy about her love life. She certainly never gave me that same space. I’d learned not to keep a diary in middle school when she read it and learned about the crush I had on a boy. I didn’t even keep a day planner anymore because she’d go through it and figure out where I was all the time. Everything was now safely locked behind a passcode on my phone.
“Give Eric the benefit of the doubt,” my mom said to me, bringing us back to my problem. “Eric’s not his sister. Talk to him and see how it goes. You might find he’s on your side.”
I hoped my mom was right. Because Mary Carter definitely was not on my side.
35
Faith
When I got back to my apartment, it was dark outside. I didn’t see Eric sitting on the steps until I was right up in front of him. I made a little frightened noise and stepped back.
“Hi,” he said, looking up from his phone in surprise. “I didn’t mean to startle you. I was starting to think I was going to need to get a sleeping bag.”
I blinked at him in shock. “How long have you been here?”
“A while.” He stretched, and I heard a few audible pops. I had a feeling he’d been there for hours. He looked tired, and his hair was a mess, like he’d been running his fingers through it repeatedly in frustration. “I’m happy to see you.”
I swallowed hard and the silence between us stretched. I’d called in sick and spent the afternoon driving around aimlessly. I was no closer to feeling better. I wasn’t sure if I was happy to see him or not.
“Can I come inside?” Eric asked after a moment.
I nodded. I wasn’t sure if it was a good idea to have him in my apartment or not, but the sight of him sitting dejectedly on my stairs was too much. Inside, Eric stood awkwardly next to the door as I my purse down. I flopped down on the couch and patted the cushion next to me and he joined me. He looked like he was trying to make himself look smaller, but it was a losing battle.
“Why didn’t you tell me about your family?” I asked. “After I talked to Mary, I looked you up. There’s an article on Wikipedia about your family.”
His green eyes swept over mine for a moment and the focused on the floor. “I didn’t want to make things more complicated.”
“So, are you freakishly rich?”
“Freakishly?” He smirked. “Yes. That’s actually a very good way of describing it. Freakishly rich.”
“Your sister had private investigators look at my finances.”
Eric winced. “I’m sorry.”
“Did she show you what she found out?”
He nodded guiltily. “She emailed it today after we fought on the phone. I haven’t looked at it though. It’s not my business.”
I shrugged. “It’s not that much of a secret. I’m broke. I support my mom and my grandparents who are in assisted living. I have a lot of debt. Like, a lot. So much, I don’t think I’ll ever see the bottom of it.”
Eric didn’t say anything for a moment. “I’ll send you what she sent me… I don’t want you to wonder. Look, Mary shouldn’t have done what she did today. She also shouldn’t have had you looked at by anybody.” He sighed. “I know it seems very invasive, but Mary really was trying to help me.”
“I suppose in a family like yours, it’s important to avoid parasitic working-class girls like me.” My voice was bitter. I hated the idea that someone in an office somewhere had typed up a report on me like I was threat.
He grabbed for my hand, but I snatched it away. “I don’t think you’re parasitic, Faith. Not at all.”
“Mary does.”
“Well, Mary’s wrong.”
I looked at him. “Why do you trust me when she doesn’t?”
“Because I know you’re not the type of person who marries for financial gain.”
“I am.” I frowned. “I am exactly the type who marries for financial gain. That’s what all this is about.” In a way, Mary had me dead to rights.
Eric didn’t seem to think so. “You know that’s not what I mean. Until today, you didn’t know there was any money in my family. But regardless, I had to convince you not to annul the marriage immediately, remember? Faith, I know you aren’t trying to get rich off this. I know you aren’t like that.”
“How?”
“I just do.” He reached for my hand again, and this time I let him hold it. It felt good to know that Eric didn’t think I was some kind of evil gold digger. I leaned my head against his shoulder a moment later.
“Is this why you’re so anti-marriage?” I asked him after a moment. “Because your family is freakishly rich?”
“It’s complicated.”
“Which part?” I looked up at him and saw in his expression the exact moment when he decided to open up and tell me.
“What Mary did today is exactly the sort of thing that people do in my family,” he began. Then he shook his head in what looked like frustration. “The fact that it was Mary who did it just makes it more messed up.”
“I don’t understand.”
Eric squeezed my hand. “When I was kid, my dad wanted to be governor of California. He had limited political experience, and in order to consolidate political power and win his party’s endorsement, he needed particular interest groups to like him. Some of those interest groups and endorsements he needed were from old, Catholic, conservative families like ours. But he had a problem. My mom wanted to divorce him. She wasn’t happy in their marriage, specifically, she wasn’t happy being married to a man at all. She preferred women, although she hadn’t known that until she met her partner Rosa about fifteen years and four kids into her marriage.”
He paused, but I didn’t know what to say. That sounded like a no-win scenario for both parties. “That must have been so hard on your family,” I finally said.
Eric nodded. “It was hard for my mom to get the guts to come out to her husband and her immediate family. Gay marriage was still illegal then, obviously. There were a lot of reasons it would have been difficult for my mom and Rosa to live the life they wanted to live. And then there was my dad’s political career. He was running as a family-values Catholic: anti-divorce, anti
-gay, yada, yada, yada.”
“The Wikipedia article didn’t mention any of this.”
Eric made a dismissive noise. “No, it doesn’t. Because they came up with arrangement.”
“An arrangement?” I questioned.
Eric nodded curtly. “Rosa’s sister and her parents were here illegally. My dad made a deal with Rosa and my mom. He promised not to call immigration on Rosa’s family, and to allow my mom and Rosa to have some semblance of a normal life together, but only if they did it on his terms. He couldn’t risk a divorce financially or reputationally. So, he came up with a solution that would keep his marriage together and his fortune in the family. My mom was put on what equated to house arrest. He told everybody that she had mental problems, and he spread rumors about her that made all her society friends back off. All to hide the problems with his marriage, so he would look like the perfect, devoted husband.”
I could barely comprehend what I was hearing. “That sounds like Munchausen’s by proxy.”
“Basically. Except he wasn’t making her sick for attention. He was just pretending like she was.”
“And blackmailing her into going along with it.”
“Exactly.”
I shook my head. That would make me dislike marriage too. If that was his primary model for how marriages and families worked, it was no wonder that Eric had developed a complex. Now, his entire perspective made sense to me. I didn’t agree with it, but it made sense.
“What about you and your sisters?”
“We didn’t really understand. At least, I didn’t. It wasn’t until I was much older that I realized why our family was so much different from other families.”
“Didn’t people think it was odd that your mom never left the house?”
“We always just said she was sick.” He frowned. “Honestly, people didn’t ask much. My dad had done a pretty thorough job of convincing everybody she was crazy and needed to be contained.”
“That is so fucked up.” I couldn’t imagine growing up in such a dysfunctional household.
Eric nodded. “Yeah.”
“What about Rosa?” I asked, thinking she got the worst deal of all. “What happened to her?”
“She and my mom lived together in our house. She actually still lives there since she outlived both my parents. My siblings and I gave her the house after mom died. It’s what she would have wanted.”
“And your dad?”
“He moved into the carriage house and quietly had affairs. He died in 2015.” Eric sounded totally unconcerned about his father’s death. I couldn’t say that I blamed him.
“What’s a carriage house?” I asked instead.
“It’s like a guest house for people too pretentious for a guest house.”
“And your dad never became governor.”
Eric smiled. “No. He never became governor.”
I shook my head. “So, he did all this for nothing.” It seemed like such a massive waste. And the cost to his family had been even higher. His son was still paying the price.
Eric’s smile faltered. “No. He saw it as a resounding success. Our extended family was very pleased with the outcome. There was no big, messy divorce. There were no tabloid stories about lesbians. Our reputation was saved. My sisters and I all hated our dad, but we couldn’t do anything about it.”
“I just don’t see how it was all worth it.”
He nodded. “Me neither.”
“I’m sorry you had to grow up in such a messed-up environment.” I paused. “I guess I understand, at least a little bit, why you’d hate the concept of marriage and why you wouldn’t want kids.”
Eric shrugged his shoulders like it didn’t matter, but I sensed gratitude in him. “What really seems insane to me is that Mary would go after you as if you were a family threat.”
“Like father like daughter, I suppose.”
“But she’s even more anti-marriage than I am. She literally dissolves marriages for a living. She’s a divorce attorney.”
“All the more reason for her to be suspicious.”
“I guess I just thought she’d hate the high-handed Carter family way of getting things done as much as I do.”
“I’m not defending her, trust me,” I told him. “I think what she did was super creepy and upsetting. But I understand a little bit why she would do something like that. She wouldn’t want you to be controlled through a marriage like your mom was.”
“I know she thought she was protecting me.” I could tell that Eric was angry at his sister. Possibly even more angry at her than I was. The thought made me feel slightly better.
“Well if I had been in it for the money, she would have scared me off,” I offered. “She was very intimidating.”
“I’ll tell her that.” He smirked. “She’ll like that.”
“Then don’t tell her.” I pouted. I didn’t want her happy.
“Are you going to forgive me for this?” Eric asked. He still had my hand in his and turned a little to face me better on the couch. “I don’t want this to drive a wedge between us.”
“I wasn’t ever angry at you,” I told him. I knew already that I was going to be completely unable to resist him. How could I blame him for his sister’s bad behavior? It wouldn’t be right or fair. Although I didn’t appreciate that he kept his family situation a secret from me, I also knew I’d have done the same in his situation. Hell, I had done the same. I didn’t exactly volunteer my debt-to-income ratio.
Now that he was sure I wasn’t angry, Eric’s regular personality returned in a rush. He arched a confident eyebrow at me. “Does that mean I can kiss you now?”
I smirked at him. “I haven’t made up my mind yet.”
36
Eric
I rolled my eyes and then kissed Faith with every ounce of persuasion I had in me, pinning her to the couch cushions. She smiled up at me when I broke away enough to tug at her shirt. It had become clear to me that Faith always viewed sex as a kind of friendly, naked power struggle. I could deal with that approach. Especially because my size and strength ensured that I always end up on top.
She was phenomenally beautiful. No matter how many times I peeled off her clothes, seeing what was under them surprised me. Her pale skin seemed to glow in the low light of the living room’s single lamp, and it took my breath away.
“Here or the bedroom?” I mumbled into her neck, working a hand around her back to find the clasp on her bra. I flicked it open and freed her from it.
“Bedroom,” she replied, and then immediately squealed when I scooped her up and put her over my shoulder. “Hey!”
“Hush.”
I swatted her firm, round ass in reply and her peal of laughter rang in my ears. After sitting for six hours on her doorstep, I was ready to get my mind off Mary and my family. Luckily, I had the perfect, topless distraction right in my arms.
Faith’s room was small and girlish, but also very much in line with the woman I was coming to know. I felt like getting to have her here, in her own private space, was an achievement of some sort. We’d spent a lot of nights at my house—she was practically living there now, but this was different. This was Faith’s house. Everything matched, everything was in tasteful, pastel colors, and everything was neat and clean. A pink and purple bedspread lay over her twin-sized mattress and I dropped her on top of it and went about pulling off her pants.
“You really sleep in this tiny bed every night?” I asked her, shaking my head in dismay. The bed was grossly undersized for someone my height. It was also quite a bit frillier than anything I was used to.
“Well it fits me,” she replied, reaching forward to drag me on top of her. I was still wearing most of my clothing, but I happily crawled on top of her anyway. “What more could I possibly need?”
I arched an eyebrow at her. “I’ll give you what you need.”
“That’s my line.” She grinned at me and angled us around so that she could get atop me. Now that I’d divested Faith of her virg
inity, we’d been exploring just about every sexual position and technique I knew, and a few I didn’t. She was completely insatiable, and so was I. It was heavenly.
Her hands made short work of my remaining lower clothing, and she fished the condom out of my pocket and rolled in on with a lot less clumsiness than the first time she’d done so. I gripped her narrow waist as she worked her hips down against mine, descending down the length of my cock with impossible tightness and warmth. Her back was arched, and her dark eyes were open wide.
She rode me eagerly, but at a leisurely pace. She moved herself up and down with an expression of pure, unadulterated bliss. I was more than happy to let her take charge; it freed me up to continue rolling her nipples between my fingers and working them into tighter, harder little peaks. If there was anything in the universe better than watching her bouncing like this, I couldn’t begin to imagine it.
Her breathing sped up, and with it, her tempo. I gripped her waist again, pushing her down more forcefully and getting rewarded by how her expression shifted to become vacant and desperate. I took control of us, somehow managing to roll us in the narrow bed so that I could pin her knees up to her shoulders and drive into her.
The noises she was making became increasingly loud and urgent. With her knees against her shoulders and her body bent double beneath me, she was no longer in control. I was barely in control, either. I drove home relentlessly, distantly registering that the metal bedframe was banging against the wall with enough force and noise to bother the neighbors. When coupled with Faith’s breathy whimpers, I could only imagine they were hearing this show in surround sound.
When she finally came, Faith’s body tightened around me and pulled me over the edge right along with her. My climax narrowed my focus to a singular, perfect second of pleasure. Any unease, worry, or tension was washed away. It was just me and Faith. When I held her in my arms like this, I couldn’t imagine anything better or more right.
When the moment passed, and Faith’s eyes cleared, I could see her misgivings return. I didn’t know how to make that look go away, but I knew I had to try.
A Bad Case of You Page 17