The past two weeks had been different. We acted normal around the band, keeping to ourselves except for the few sarcastic remarks we’d lob at each other from one end of the bus to the other. But she came to “clean my wound” every morning, and sometimes at night, and sometimes on the bus when the guys weren’t there. I’d finger her while I listened to Jenika drone on about which concerts were coming up and which ones she was trying to negotiate appearances with. I’d grab her ass when we were getting off the bus. I’d sneak a kiss or nibble her ear when she didn’t expect it. It wasn’t a relationship. We didn’t stick around and have pillow talk or even act civil to each other most of the time. It was a fling. We were finally being honest about our physical attraction but sidelining the millions of emotional issues that stood between us and anything resembling a real relationship.
I’d never found a particular enjoyment in kissing before, and saw it more as a means to an end, but Aribella and I made a fucking art of it. I felt like I was in middle school again. We weren’t fucking, but I found myself ravenous for anything I could get with her, and not having sex didn’t feel like the end of the world. Not yet, at least. I knew my desires would eventually overcome my self-control.
The best part was that I’d been able to write again ever since that first kiss.
I passed Brent on the way out of our hotel that morning. We were in Belvedere for our next concert, and Aribella was out visiting her parents already. Surprise surprise, she had neglected to invite me.
Brent was in the lobby with a book in his lap.
“Reading? You nerd,” I said. All the animosity I felt toward him had mostly evaporated once I took Aribella for myself. She was the only thing that ever really strained what was otherwise a comfortable friendship.
“Yeah, I was, until some dumbass started talking to me and punching me,” he said.
“I bet it’s hard to read through distractions when you have a third-grade reading level. I understand.”
“Fuck off,” he said, sounding suddenly dejected.
The tone of his voice made me pull my head back. He was pissed about Aribella. It was written all over his face and in his tone. “You had your chance, Brent,” I said, knowing he’d understand what I was talking about.
“Did I?” He clapped his book shut and set it down, standing to square up with me. “Or were you scheming and manipulating behind my back to make sure it didn’t work with me and Aribella?”
“I didn’t need to scheme shit. She’s not into you. You must not be her type.”
Brent shook his head. “You don’t even get it, do you? So you won. You and Aribella are fucking across the country now. You get the grand prize. You expect me to just pat you on the back and act like we’re cool now?”
I threw up a hand in a sure, why not kind of way.
He rolled his eyes. “Flip the script then. What would you do if I was the one fucking her? If it was me that had won?”
I thought about correcting him. I wasn’t fucking her, as much as I would’ve liked to be, but it felt beside the point. “What I’d do isn’t important. What are you going to do?”
“Admit it,” he said. “You wouldn’t give up on her. You’d be acting like I was Hitler, and you’d be doing everything you could to break us up.”
“Oh come on,” I growled in frustration. “You’re still butthurt over some high school fling? It was eight years ago. Grow the fuck up.”
Brent shook his head, laughing, though there was no humor in the sound. “You don’t get it. This isn’t just about her. It’s about you. It’s about how you’ll use and abuse every goddamn thing within arm’s reach when it means getting what you want, especially me. Especially people who are supposed to be your friends.”
I almost punched him. I’d fought Brent more times in my life than anyone else, and there was a therapeutic quality to a good fist fight. Words weren’t always good enough, and the things that pissed us off weren’t always logical. Punching wasn’t logical. It was the purest form of emotional ventilation, like opening the airlock on a burning spaceship.
I almost did, but I didn’t, because I knew he was right. I was a bastard. A prick. A user. Abuser. All of the above. Worst of all? I wasn’t about to change, not if it got in the way of getting what I wanted, and I wanted her. Maybe I wanted to use her too, to suck her in, drink her dry, and toss her aside. I wasn’t sure, but I wasn’t going to stop.
“Yeah,” I said finally. “Then maybe you should choose your friends more wisely.”
I left then because there was nothing more to say. He was right. I was wrong. I wasn’t going to change, so fuck it. Time to move on. Still, I couldn’t help stewing on what he’d said as I walked back to my room.
I’d been taking it as a given that I would be happy to discard Aribella eventually. It was what I did with women. I used them and got rid of them. There was no point in keeping them around because I was never going to let them in. And without fail, they wanted in. They wanted to know what made me tick and what my childhood was like. I’d tried longer relationships a couple times when I was younger, and it always ended the same. Nobody wants to “date” a closed book.
They got tired of not knowing me, and I got tired of them trying. It was as simple as that. So I stopped bothering. It had all been working fine until I dragged Aribella into my mess.
But the idea nagged at me. When would it ever feel like enough? Every time I got a taste of Aribella, it only made me hungry for more. Giving up the pills and alcohol hadn’t been hard because I’d substituted my drug of choice, I realized. I was drunk and high on Aribella. She took my mind off all the things I had never been able to stop dwelling on. She made it easier to forget.
That was a bridge I’d cross when I got there, I decided. I was never one for forward planning, and seeing what happened was easier than trying to plan.
We were in California. Just a few miles outside Belvedere, to be exact. Brent and Taylor had been excited to visit their parents and some old friends from high school. Aribella was apparently going to a park with her parents and sister. If I was being honest, it did sting a little that she hadn’t asked me to come. It was a reminder that I wasn’t the only one keeping an emotional distance. I would’ve declined the offer, but hey, I still wanted her to ask.
Let them all have their reunions. I had my own reunion planned.
I was standing outside my childhood home. Tammy and my dad still lived here. I had also done some social media stalking last night and confirmed they were both currently in town, which was a stroke of luck.
I knocked on the door, waiting as I looked up and took in the house. I half-turned, seeing the beginning of the hedges that had separated Aribella and I on that first day. I remembered how so many of my parties had spilled out to this lawn and how this yard had been like a graveyard for unconscious teenagers.
That was my life. One long party. No consequences. Just a series of distractions to distance me from the shadows that had never stopped following me, the shadows that were born in this house.
The door opened, and I flashed a fake smile. “Dad. It’s good to see you.” I let myself in, enjoying the look of stunned astonishment on his face and the way his mouth was hanging open.
He looked like shit, but I was expecting that. Old, lazy, and rich tended to not be a winning cocktail as far as physical health went. He was in his seventies now, with liver spots, hanging jowls, and it looked like the sides of his face had continued to grow wider while his features all stayed concentrated in the center of his swollen, over-sized head.
A pang of sadness crept through me to think not just of the man he once was and could have been, but to think of what mom would think if she saw him now. I thought about how she had wasted her best years on him, her last years. She had to die knowing her husband had cast her off, feeling alone and unwanted by anyone except her son.
The hatred I felt toward him surged at the thought, like molten lava running through my veins.
I had spent m
ost of the last eight years slowly but surely eroding the foundation of his financial security. Even if I didn’t need to worry about secrecy—which I did—it wouldn’t have been an easy task. I could never make him poor. He simply had too much money. I knew them well enough to know I didn’t need to wipe out his funds to satisfy the urge I had for revenge. I just needed to make a mark. I had to strike him in the only place he cared. His wallet.
So I had been investing in his businesses, very quietly. My dad didn’t personally involve himself in anything, so it wasn’t too hard to do it all without notice. As I earned more money from touring, I was able to make quiet offers to some of his business partners and buy out their majority shares in his companies, granting myself control. The money from these businesses quickly let me invest more and more, until last year became the tipping point where I was able to cannibalize most of the available shares for every last business he owned.
Now was the part I’d been waiting my whole life for, the part where I got to watch that obnoxious, condescending glint in his eye fade, where I got to see Tammy’s cocky expression falter. It was the moment where they would finally realize they had been playing with fire when they fucked me over.
“Zach…” my dad said. He looked like he was trying to decide between open hostility and pretending nothing was wrong. Being the soft-spined toad he was, he decided to flash me a smile and motion for me to come inside. “Come on, let’s sit. It has been a long time.”
“It has,” I agreed.
Tammy was standing in the kitchen, cutting baby tomatoes and adding them to a huge salad bowl. She would be in her early thirties now, and it looked like her addiction to plastic surgery had only gotten worse. I couldn’t imagine what it was she was trying to “fix” in her early thirties, but I was sure she had made it worse. Her lips looked slightly bee-stung. They weren’t as bad as the horrific images they liked to plaster on gossip magazines when celebrities got bad plastic surgery, but they didn’t look natural. It was more of a Lindsay Lohan look. I think she wanted to glare at me, but her forehead seemed unnaturally stiff and smooth.
“What is going on?” she asked my dad.
“Zach, ah, he came by for a visit. Isn’t that right, Zach?”
“That’s right,” I said.
Tammy was a lot of things, but she wasn’t dumb when it came to manipulation and cruelty. She was watching me like a mouse watches a cat, knife still held above a tomato, motionless.
“I thought it was time I let you two know the state of our businesses.”
“Our businesses?” my dad asked. He chuckled then, like I had made a particularly good joke. Tammy was still motionless.
I tried to look at her. When I had imagined this moment during all the years I spent building toward it, I imagined looking at her defiantly, showing her that she hadn’t broken me back then when she drugged me and abused me, but now that I was here, I still felt that same shameful embarrassment, like I couldn’t look at her without reliving the moment, like she knew I was ashamed and she lorded it over me.
“Our businesses,” I said. I tossed my dad a thick folder. “You’ll find the shareholder reports in there for all of your businesses and you’ll see that I’m the primary stockholder in all but two of your businesses now—the two you were wise enough to hold more than fifty percent of shares in. The rest, well, your partners all had a price, and were willing to sell me enough to take the majority.”
He shook his head, flipping through the pages with increasing speed.
“That’s not possible, right? That isn’t possible, is it?” Tammy asked.
“It’s…” My dad cleared his throat. “It’s possible, I suppose. I don’t see what point you could possibly hope to prove with this ridiculous stunt, or how you managed to have the funds to—”
“The point is simple,” I said. I held up one hand and cupped an imaginary pair of balls in mid-air. “These are your balls,” I said, pointing. “And that,” I said, pointing to the folder, “is my hand gripping them oh-so-promisingly.”
He shook his head again, still trying to come to terms with what I was saying. “I still don’t—”
“You don’t need to be scared. Not really,” I said. “Even if I ran every last business of yours straight into the ground, you would still have hundreds of millions of dollars. It wouldn’t be billions, of course, but who keeps track of things like that anyway.”
“Why would you go to all this effort?” my dad asked. “What possible motivation could you have? Is this about the trust? You were the one who signed the papers to disinherit yourself. It was your choice, son. If you think this is—”
“It’s not about that.” I considered my next words. “It’s about her,” I said, pointing to Tammy but still unable to look her in the eyes. “It’s about mom.”
“Her? What could Tammy possibly have to do with anything. And your mother, what happened to her was terrible. If I had known she would pull through for so long maybe things would’ve been different. But you have to understand, there was no way I could have known.”
I waved him off. “There’s no need to make excuses. What’s done is done. This is about making things even. There’s only one thing I want. Give me this one thing, and you can buy all your shares back from me. No questions asked.”
My father gritted his teeth. He was soft, and he was weak, but he was proud, and I knew even asking me my terms wounded his pride.
“What?” he grated. All pretense of kindness was gone now. We had stripped away the masks, well, except those of us who wore masks of plastic surgery that couldn’t be stripped.
“I want her to tell you what she did. What she did to me,” I said.
My father’s eyes darted to Tammy and then back to me. “What?”
“Tell him!” I roared. I felt tears pricking at my eyes for the first time in as long as I could remember. All the emotion and hatred boiled up until it threatened to spill out. “Tell him what you fucking did to me!”
My voice echoed across the large room. It boomed.
The only sound was the clank of the knife when it fell from Tammy’s hand and clattered to the cutting board.
“Tammy? What the hell is this about.”
She swallowed, then looked at me with a pleading expression. “Zach,” she said so quietly I could barely hear.
I forced myself to calm. “What will it be, Tammy? The ball is in your court.”
A pause.
Pause.
Pause.
“I don’t know what he’s talking about. I have no fucking idea, but he’s obviously lost his mind. I want him out of my house.”
My father frowned at her. “Tammy, it doesn’t matter what happened. If he wants you to tell me, just tell me. These are my businesses,” he said, waving the folders at her. “This is everything my father and my grandfather and my great-grandfather worked for. Just tell me.”
“There’s nothing to tell. I want him out. Get him the fuck out of my house.”
21
Aribella
Eight Years Ago
Zach kissed me in my bedroom on a Thursday, and then my life as I knew it ended the following Friday.
I was dumb enough to go to his party that night. Dumb because I believed the kiss meant things had changed. Dumb because I should have known nothing meant anything to Zach, especially not me.
It was business as usual, as far as a Zach Thornwood party went. Beer. Music. Poolside antics. Bonfire on the beach. All the usual. The difference was Zach had personally invited me this time.
I had spent way too long getting ready. Way longer than I would have ever admitted, and I had imagined Zach coming out to let me in when I texted him that I had arrived. Of course, he didn’t. He just left me standing hopefully outside for five minutes before I sighed and came in, figuring I’d find him somewhere.
And I did find him.
I wandered his sprawling house for nearly ten minutes before I heard his voice from behind a door. It was muffled, but unmistak
ably his. I heard another voice, too. A woman’s. She sounded young, maybe not much older than us.
“Fuck you,” Zach said.
The woman made a clicking sound with her tongue. “Easy there, Zachie-pooh. You remember what happened last time you pissed me off, don’t you?”
I waited for the explosion that was Zach’s famous temper, but heard only silence.
She laughed through her nose. It was a knowing, condescending kind of laugh. “That’s what I thought. They all think you’re so tough, don’t they? But we know the truth.”
The door swung open suddenly and I was face-to-face with Zach, whose cheeks were red and whose eyes were aflame. I saw the woman then, too. She was maybe in her early twenties with huge boobs and a gorgeous face. Who the hell was she?
The woman walked past him, not even sparing me a glance, leaving me alone with Zach and the distant thump of music from outside.
“I was looking for you,” I said.
Emotion played across Zach’s face. Anger. Resentment. Outrage. Underneath it all, I thought I saw shame, too. “Yeah? Well you found me, and now you can find your way out of my fucking life.”
“What?” I asked.
“Want me to spell it out? Okay. First you pack up your shit. Second, you get in a car. Third, you go somewhere far away and never come back.”
“I don’t understand. What are you talking about?”
“Leave, Gardener Girl.”
His dismissive tone pissed me off, and I surprised myself when I shoved his chest, anger flooding me. “What is your problem? You’re the one who invited me here. And how deluded are you that you think I’d leave my family just because you told me to?”
“You’ll do what I’m telling you to because I know the truth about your parents. I know you took illegal supplements to help earn that number one spot on the tennis team. I know you cheated on Brent with me. And I know your sister used a stolen answer key to help preserve that perfect GPA of hers during midterms. I think that about covers it. I can ruin your family, your sport, your social life, and your sister’s academic future. Or, you can do what I say and get the fuck out of here.”
Hate at First Sight Page 15