“Fuck,” he groaned, bending to kiss my neck like he couldn’t contain himself anymore. “I need you.”
“I think I need you too.”
“You think?” he asked with a wolfish smile. “Then I think I have some work to do.”
He hiked my legs up around his waist, grinding into me through my pajamas and his jeans but leaving no doubt that he was fully erect and hungry for me. He devoured me with kisses, hands rough across my body and full of pent-up desire.
He wrapped his arms around my back and swung me off the wall, carrying me effortlessly to the couch and then throwing me not-so-gently down. I laughed with the suddenness of it, and he lowered his mouth to me, smothering the sound. His hands pulled at my clothes, freeing me of my pajama bottoms and undoing his jeans. We writhed together as we struggled to undress while horizontal, but I thoroughly enjoyed the struggle.
He fished a condom out of his jeans and slid it on before he guided himself inside me. He fucked me like he was starving, and God it was exactly what I needed. He pounded into me until I moaned so loudly that there was no longer any chance of someone walking in on us by mistake. I didn’t even care. Let them know he was taking me. I was his. He was my dark prince and I would happily be his princess. The world could know. It didn’t matter, as long as I had him.
“It’s so intense,” I gasped. “So good.”
He groaned into my neck, his pace increasing. “Cum for me. Cum,” he demanded.
I didn't need to be told twice. My body was already riding the edge of an explosion, and his rough voice in my ear was enough to push me into white-hot oblivion. Shards of pleasure burst through me, racking me from my core to my fingertips with dazzling bliss that tingled across my skin.
“Does this mean I can tell people I’m your girlfriend now?” I asked after we’d finished.
He was totally naked, standing by the mini fridge fishing out a water. He glanced at me over his broad shoulders. I let my eyes feast on every inch of him, from his sexy legs to his perfect ass and the lean, chiseled lines of his torso. He was a rockstar. My rockstar.
“Hmm,” he said. “I’ll have to think about that.”
I threw one of the couch pillows at him, but he ducked the missile with ease. “Please,” I asked.
He laughed. “Well damn, Gardener Girl. It sounds so good when you beg. I may have to drag this out.”
“Drag it out and you’re not going to get begging. You’re going to get blue balls.”
“Girlfriend it is.”
When there was a knock at my door the next morning, I opened it quickly, thinking it was Zach. My face fell when I saw a woman who looked like she had an unhealthy and unfortunate addiction to plastic surgery standing at the door.
She barged into my room without waiting for an invitation and set a huge bag down on the bed.
“Excuse me?” I asked. I wasn’t even dressed yet. I was just wearing a robe and my hair was still wet from the shower.
“This will only take a minute, darling.”
Darling? I’d darling her head off her shoulders if she thought she was going to talk down to me.
“You’re right. Because you’re leaving. I don’t know or care what this is about but—”
“I’m Tammy. Zach’s step-mom.”
I recognized her now, vaguely. She was the woman who had walked out of the room the night Zach made me leave Belvedere. The one who had abused him. For a single, psychotic moment, I looked at the standing lamp and wondered if I could kill her with it—
one quick, lethal blow to the head. I pushed that thought down.
She hurt my Zach. She was the reason he was so damaged. It was all her fault, and I had to clamp my mouth shut to keep from screaming at her like a wild animal and rushing forward to pull out her hair.
“I just wanted to show you this,” she said, holding up a folder. “Zach likes for everyone to think he’s tough. Untouchable, even. But he’s very touchable. In fact, I have evidence to prove it. I thought about showing him these photos, but I didn’t trust him to be reasonable. I thought maybe he would try to hurt me, so I’m showing you, and I trust you’ll be able to relay just how badly he’s going to want to keep this from reaching the media.”
Photos? My mind went straight to her abuse. Surely she wasn’t dumb enough to think she could put photos of herself sexually abusing a high school kid out to the media without going to jail?
She pulled several large prints out from the folder. I cringed back. It was vile to see him like this. Dirty and wrong. The first photo was of… him. And there was lipstick around his groin, and on his…
I looked away, shaking my head. The woman actually had the nerve to reach up to me and grip my chin with her claw-like nails, turning my head to face the next picture. She had him in her mouth, but her face was digitally blurred.
I slapped her hand away and snatched the photos from her. Rage pulsed through me like a living thing. I really could kill her. I could actually kill her, and if she pushed me any farther, I was afraid I would try.
“Go ahead. Keep those as souvenirs. I have plenty more.”
“Out,” was all I could manage to grit out through my clenched teeth.
“I can trust you to tell him, can’t I, darling?”
“You can trust that all the plastic in your face won’t be enough to stop the lamp I’m going to smash into it if you don’t leave. Now.”
She made a distasteful face. “I see why he likes you. You’re both savages.”
She wisely left, and I dropped the photos to the bed. I had no idea what she wanted to prove with this, but I knew I needed to tell Zach.
26
Zach
My hands shook as I looked at the photos. They were snapshots from the night I couldn’t remember, the night I’d spent my whole life trying to forget, to wish out of existence. I felt sick. Physically sick, and I had to hold back bile from rising in my throat.
The only thing keeping me grounded was Aribella’s small hand on my arm and her searching eyes, so full of empathy and hurt on my behalf that I knew I wasn’t alone in this. For once in my life, I wasn’t alone.
I hung my head and my thoughts raced. There was so much I could do. So many ways I could tackle this. If she thought photos of me getting drugged and raped were enough to stop me from taking my revenge, she was a fucking moron. Well, she was a moron. That much was certain.
“Zach? Say something.” Aribella’s voice was soft, laced with concern. “What is this even about? Why is she doing this now?”
“It’s okay,” I said. I breathed out all the tension in my muscles, feeling an odd peace come over me. “I went over to their house the day we arrived in Belvedere. I told them I’d taken financial control of their businesses and that I’d sabotage them if Tammy didn’t admit what she did to me to my father.” I laughed a little sadly. “It was my big grand plan for revenge. All these years. I spent almost as much time consulting with business gurus and investing money as I did working on my music. I wanted to have my dad by the balls, and by extension, Tammy. I thought it would be the thing to heal me. If my dad knew what she did, maybe he’d realize everything had been a mistake—the way he ignored me, the way he cast my mom out. Everything. And now I realize I didn’t need revenge to move on. I just needed you.”
She leaned into me and wrapped her arms around me. “Oh, Zach. I know I’m supposed to just be happy you think that, but… I’m not. I want her to pay. I want her to rot away in jail for what she did. I want her to live every last moment of her life in regret for being such a bitch. That unbelievable bitch. She can’t do this. She can’t get away with this. We could go to the police.”
“And say what? I was raped by this unidentifiable woman eight years ago? Besides, it’s okay. These photos won’t break me.”
“Zach. We can’t let her get away with this.”
We. I loved that we were “we” to her already, and that small victory was enough to outshine whatever Tammy could do to hurt me.
I leaned back, resting my head against the couch. “You wanting to make her pay so much is enough for me. Really. I just want to enjoy what I have with you.”
“No.” Aribella looked adorably determined. “I mean,” she sighed. “I’m so happy and proud that you’re saying that. But do this for me, then. You can be over revenge, after this. But this is not okay. What this woman did—” Aribella’s eyes welled with tears when she pointed at the photos, and I realized then why I had been such an idiot to keep her away. This girl bled for me. She was so goddamn pure that she was feeling my pain more strongly than I did, and God I loved her for it.
I nodded. “For you, then. We can make her pay if that’s what you want.”
“Hell yes it is.”
Aribella asked me to hire some private investigators, and we canceled the next concert under the pretense that, of all things, my asthma was acting up and I couldn’t sing. It meant we had four days more in Belvedere. Four days while ex FBI and police helped us look over the photos and search for details. It turned out we didn’t even need them. Within ten minutes, Aribella spotted a small scar on Tammy’s neck, just at the base of her jaw, like she had some kind of surgery there. When we searched my dad’s social media accounts, which he stupidly kept public, we confirmed that the scar was still in the exact same place as recently as a few weeks ago. It might not have been conclusive, but she also hadn’t blurred her hand in a picture where she was gripping my cock. Her middle finger had never had full mobility since she was a kid, and it meant there was no wrinkle at the top of her finger where everyone else had one.
The PI’s thought it might be strong enough evidence, and the lawyer I called agreed.
Within a day, I had a printed plan for the case against her drawn up, and Aribella insisted on coming with me to deliver it.
We showed up to my old beach house, and I felt a strange sense of dread. I don’t think I cared how Tammy and my father reacted for me. I cared for Aribella. She needed this, somehow.
Tammy answered the door with a smug smile, like she had been expecting us.
“I see you did tell him. Good girl,” she said to Aribella.
We both came inside, finding my father was nowhere to be seen.
“And I see you are making these little threats without your husband’s knowledge, of course,” I said.
Her face tightened at that. “It doesn’t matter what he knows. What matters is you won’t let these pictures reach the public. You’ll sell those shares back to us, and you’ll keep your fucking nose out of our lives from now on. Won’t you?”
“Actually,” Aribella said. “That’s not why we’re here. We just wanted to give you this.” She laid the packet from the lawyers on the table beside Tammy, who looked at it with open confusion.
“What the fuck is this?”
“It’s a summary of the case we will present against you,” I said.
She laughed, snatching it up and flipping quickly through the pages. Eventually, she landed on the spot where her identifying marks were highlighted in the pictures. The color drained from her face then.
“Even if I was scared by this, which I’m not,” she said, slapping the packet back down on the table. “What is it you think you could get from me?”
“A confession. I asked my lawyer. You’d probably get a lighter sentence if you confessed. Of course, you could also confess to your dear old husband. I think I could live with that, too. Who knows, maybe I could just show him this and he’d decide he would rather do what I want than deal with the smear on his precious family legacy. What do you think?”
She was shaking now. Her eyes kept darting to the packet like it might leap up and bite her. “I think you’re insane. My husband would go to the ends of the earth to protect me. And if you think—”
“What is this about?” my dad asked.
Aribella gripped my hand a little tighter. We had talked about this. She wanted me to pursue whichever option I thought was most likely to cause Tammy to pay. If I thought proving how fucked up she was to my dad was the way, she was happy with it. If I thought taking her to court was, then that’s what we’d do.
I followed my gut, and reached for the packet. Tammy slapped her hand down on it, eyes locking on mine, wide and afraid. “There’s no need for that.”
“Then you’ll talk to the cops?”
She shook harder. She looked like she was on the edge of absolutely losing it. The kind of losing it that makes people strip out of their clothes and run into the street screaming.
When she didn’t answer, I tugged the packet out from under her and lobbed it to my father, who caught it, sinking down in the couch and lowering his reading glasses to look it over.
“What is…” he murmured, but then his mouth was moving silently as he flipped through pages and his eyes widened when he saw the pictures. He threw the packet away in disgust when he realized who the dick belonged to. “Of all the disgusting and tasteless things you’ve ever done, this is a new low, Zachary.”
I shook my head. “You know who the woman is in that picture? You know how old I was there? Seventeen. Junior in high school. That woman is your lovely wife. The one you tossed mom away like trash for. That is the court case we’re going to bring against her. I guess the question you need to ask yourself is if you want her to have the Thornwood last name while she’s being dragged through court in a circus case that will be all over the news?”
“Baby,” said Tammy, who took a step toward my dad, but he raised a hand to her, stopping her in her tracks.
“This is true. Isn’t it?” he asked. “I always thought it was strange how he acted around you. Right under my goddamn nose…”
“We can fight this together. We can—”
“We’re done,” he said. “I won’t have my family legacy tarnished because of your perverse decisions.”
She clamped her mouth shut, straightened her back, and glared at him. “If you divorce me, I walk away with half of everything. You wouldn’t throw that much money away, would you?”
“The reputation of my family name is more important to me than the money. It always was.”
“But hey,” Aribella said. “I’ve heard money is really useful in prison.”
Tammy spun to face her. “Listen, you little bitch. I don’t know what makes you think this is going to work. It’s not going to. You’re going to be sorry you ever crossed me.”
“It already worked,” I said. “Face it. You lost. It’s over.”
After so many years, I finally got to watch the condescending glint in Tammy’s eyes go out. It felt small and inconsequential, nothing like I’d imagined, but only because Aribella had shown me what real satisfaction felt like. I didn’t need petty victories. I didn’t need to overcome the demons of my past. I wasn’t alone anymore. That was enough.
27
Epilogue - Aribella
Three Months Later
Tammy gave new meaning to “losing her shit” at the trial. By some stroke of insanity, she had decided to represent herself in the case. Zach’s dad had divorced her, and she apparently hadn’t taken all the bad news too well, because she came to the first few court hearings like a trainwreck. It was all over in what felt like record time.
The sentence was handed down shortly after Tammy decided her best defense was to try to justify why she had done what she did instead of proving she didn't do it. Needless to say, it went over poorly with the jury. She was slapped with forty years, and even though the judge didn't point this out, I liked to think she also realized it was forty years without access to a plastic surgeon or any of that money she had fought so hard to get her claws into.
All of that wrapped up a few weeks ago, along with the end of Zach’s tour. We were back in California, of all places. Zach had floated the idea of buying a house here—some big, sprawling monstrosity we would’ve needed a team of cleaners to keep up with. I convinced him to settle for a rental for now, since he was insisting on us living together. I wanted to
be able to contribute toward the rent, even though he kept fighting me on it.
We were at my parents' house. They had a small single-story in the suburbs a few miles outside Belvedere, the same house I spent those last few months of my childhood in. It had a fenced in backyard with a cozy garden and a stone patio where my dad was grilling burgers for us.
Zach looked wonderfully out of place on the patio chair. It never mattered if he tried or not. He looked like a rockstar, like a figment of my dreams and nightmares all rolled into one. The sun lit his blue eyes, and maybe I was just imagining it, but I felt like I saw less of a storm in them lately and more of a cool, clear sky.
“Have you decided what you’re going to do about your dad’s businesses?” I asked.
I was sipping a lemonade my mom had made, and as usual, it was loaded with sugar, but delicious. Mandy was inside helping mom make coleslaw, and my dad was too far away to hear. A lot of the details of the case had leaked to the public, except for what exactly Tammy had done to Zach. All that was known was that she had done something to him when he was a kid. Nobody knew about Zach’s quiet, but perfectly legal takeover of his father’s business holdings.
“I was thinking about doing nothing. Maybe it’s punishment enough for my dad to know I have him by the balls till the day he dies. People work at those places. If I tanked them, I’d be screwing over way more people than just my father.”
I cocked an eyebrow at him. “That might be the most considerate thing I’ve ever heard you say. Are you feeling okay?”
“Very funny,” he said.
“I’m proud. I mean it. I think you’re doing the right thing, and I’m sorry I kind of bullied you into going after Tammy. For once, you were the one trying to do the nice thing and I just couldn’t let you do it.”
He chuckled. “You did bully me, but I liked it. And I’m glad she’s fucked. I think my mom still loved my dad, for whatever reason, and I think she’d like me to go easy on him. This feels right.”
Hate at First Sight Page 19