Down and Dirty

by Taylor Holloway

  A knock on the door caused us both to jump.

  “Oh,” I said, remembering, “I ordered a vegan pizza from the place on your refrigerator. It’s probably just our food. I’ll go grab it.”

  Jenna and I laughed at ourselves. We were getting so paranoid. I checked the peephole before I opened the door, but it was indeed just the pizza guy. I returned with the pizza to find Jenna sitting on the couch with her phone ringing in her lap. She took a deep breath before putting it to her ear.

  “Hello Richard,” Jenna said calmly.

  27

  Jenna

  “Hello Jenna,” Richard replied in a neutral, even voice. His tone held no emotion whatsoever. I had no idea how he was feeling, or what he wanted. “How’s your evening going?”

  I took another deep breath before answering. I sat up straight and tried to project confidence through my body and into my tone.

  “It’s just fine,” I said. I was confused about why he would be calling me, but trying not to speculate and work myself into a panic. “And yours?”

  “It could be better, Jenna,” Richard answered. I could almost see him shaking his head in disappointment through the phone. “It really could be a lot better. I’m afraid we have to have a very serious, very regrettable conversation Jenna. I was hoping that this wouldn’t be necessary, but it seems like you didn’t listen to me when I told you to drop your investigation into my son. I thought that I’d been clear.”

  “I’m certain that I don’t understand, Richard,” I replied, carefully keeping my tone even and calm. No matter what, getting upset would only make things worse. I wouldn’t let him see me panicked or afraid. “I haven’t done anything to look into Nicholas’ activities since we last spoke about it.”

  Richard sighed in what was probably a mixture of resignation and frustration.

  “I wish that were true, Jenna, I really do,” he said. “But unfortunately, Terrence’s computer tells a different story. It shows that you had him doing some forensic accounting today.”

  “Yes, I did,” I told him, “I was doing some budget reconciliation when I realized there was some misallocated revenue in the Research and Development books. It was only logical for me to look into the issue. What could that possibly have to do with Nicholas?”

  “Right,” Richard said sarcastically, “I’m sure that was a completely coincidental discovery. I would have thought you’d learn your lesson with Fiona. You know I’m just going to have to fire Terrence, too, don’t you?”

  “That’s not very fair, Richard,” I told him, “You have no proof that anything I was doing is related to Nicholas in any way. You’re being more than a little bit paranoid. Fire me if you want to, but taking it out on Terrence and Fiona isn’t going to do any good at all. You’re taking out your frustration on the wrong people.”

  “Tell me, Jenna, is my son with you right now?” Richard’s voice had turned annoyed.

  “Excuse me?” I managed.

  “He is, isn’t he?” Richard replied irritably. “You’ve made a very foolish decision Jenna. I’m sorry you’ve been dragged into all this by Nicholas. You’re fired of course, and I’m sorry about that, too.”

  I felt vaguely out of my body. I hadn’t even finished my victory cake yet and I had already been fired. I’d never been fired before in my life. I hadn’t even finished moving into my fancy new office or checked out the executive gym. There was a whole break room I’d never even visited. It was supposed to be nice.

  “Jenna,” Richard was continuing. He did sound surprisingly contrite, although that was cold comfort at the moment. “I’m very sorry to have to fire you, but please listen to me. This isn’t going to end well if you don’t start putting some serious distance between you and Nicholas. You need to get away from him right now. Being near Nicholas is dangerous for you.”

  “Are you threatening me?” I asked, making a herculean effort to keep my voice calm. From across the room Nicholas tensed and his expression turned murderous. He was still holding the pizza and watching me with wide eyes. I held up a hand to stop him from coming closer and he froze. I needed to have all my wits about me for this conversation. Having Nicholas close to me tended to make me incoherently horny. I needed to focus.

  “Not at all,” Richard replied firmly, “I would never do that. I did everything I could to protect you. In fact, I’m still protecting you. That’s why I’m calling you. You know that Ryan is going to figure out everything very soon. He’s not an idiot. You and Nicholas both need to get out of Philadelphia sooner rather than later. I’m calling to warn you. You may have a few hours, or maybe not. I really have no idea. He doesn’t run his actions by me first.”

  “Why are you doing this, Richard?” I asked, “Why would you help create chemical weapons? Why would you help people who want to hurt your son? Or your friend Oliver?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Jenna,” Richard replied, “Are you recording this? I hope you got that part on the tape. I also hope my son hasn’t told you some tall tale. He’s quite unbalanced, just like his mother. He’s very prone to exaggeration. You aren’t sleeping with him, are you?”

  I had no idea how to reply. That was without a doubt the most inappropriate question I’d been asked in recent memory.

  “Jenna,” Richard said seriously, “Nicholas isn’t for you. You’re a nice girl with a bright future. Nicholas has never been known to spend time with nice girls who have bright futures. Nicholas likes sluts who spread their legs eagerly and don’t talk too much. Nicholas had probably fucked his way through half of the secretarial pool by the time he left. He has a notoriously short attention span for anything but very short skirts. I would hate to see you get hurt when he moves onto his next girl.”

  My breath hissed out of me in shock and disbelief.

  “You know, Richard, you’re embarrassing yourself and making me very uncomfortable,” I finally said. Richard had no right to speak to me this way. It didn’t matter if he was speaking as a father or an employer; I wasn’t going to put up with his bullshit. “I’m not sure how we got onto this subject, but I preferred the murder threats. Let’s go back to that.”

  “I can see I’m getting nowhere with you, Jenna,” Richard said sadly, “I really had high hopes for you at Durant Industries. You would have been a fantastic VP if you’d been better at listening. I wish you all the best in your future endeavors.”

  “Save it,” I snapped, “You’re either a murderer yourself or you facilitate murderers. Your chickens will come home to roost eventually Richard.”

  “Not before yours do, Jenna,” Richard told me. His voice had lost its disappointed edge and become icy cold. “I hope you enjoy your vegan pizza. Personally, I don’t think it even counts as a pizza if it doesn’t have cheese and pepperoni on it. But to each their own. Have a good night.”

  When the line went dead a moment later, I was frozen in shock. I blinked and rose in a daze. Nicholas was firing questions at me and gripping my shoulders, but I couldn’t seem to hear him over the ringing in my ears. His lips were moving but I couldn’t hear him. All I could hear was the deafening destruction of my career.

  “We have to get out of this apartment,” I managed to say. My voice sounded very far away in my own ears. “They’re watching this apartment. We have to go right now.”

  I saw Nicholas nod, drop the pizza, and run around the apartment doing… something. All I could do was stand, rooted to my spot in disbelief. My career, the career that had been my life, was over just like that. And that wasn’t even the bad part. My life—our lives—were in danger.

  Nicholas grabbed my hand and started leading me away from my apartment with gentle hands. Now that I was starting to be aware of details again, I saw that he’d packed us bags in record time. There was one for me and one for him. He was incredibly efficient. Maybe he’d drilled for this sort of thing in Alaska.

  We were halfway down the hallway and headed toward the stairwell when I stopped us.

 
“Wait,” I told him. “I want my victory cake.”

  “I’ll get you another cake,” Nicholas told me gently. He was treating me very oddly, probably because I was acting very oddly. “I promise.”

  I followed Nicholas into the unknown.

  28

  Nicholas

  “Nicholas,” Jenna begged desperately. “Please think this through. You know this isn’t a good idea. You’re going to be in danger. You’ll be walking straight into a trap.”

  We’d been going around in circles for hours. After sixteen hours, even this fancy hotel room was starting to feel restrictive. I had to do something before I went crazy. I couldn’t continue to let Jenna be the only one to bring us closer to our goal.

  “I’ve got to at least try this,” I told her, “talking to him face to face might be the only thing I can do to get through to him.”

  Going to talk to my father in person may have seemed like a stupid idea, but I knew that there was no chance that the Durant Mansion would ever be targeted by Skylark. The place was a literal fortress built by a European man who’d grown up thinking that actual castles were where rich people lived. So, when he had enough money, he built himself a castle. A really big one. The walls were three feet thick and a small army of security personnel patrolled the exterior from the peasantry beyond them. I would take an Uber to and from the mansion and then hop on public transportation where I couldn’t be followed. I was relatively sure I could get in and out without ever being identified. It was a calculated risk.

  Jenna sighed and ran her fingers through her strawberry-blond locks in frustration.

  “Please don’t do this?” she pleaded, trading her logical appeals for an emotional assault. She pouted and pushed her full, pink bottom lip out in frustration. My breath caught at the sight.

  That was my cue. If I stayed any longer, I would definitely be manipulated into staying. I rose up from the chair I’d been tying my shoes in, and Jenna sat up in bed and leaned forward. She let the comforter and sheet fall back from her full, bare chest. Her nipples were hard in the cool, conditioned air, and her hair was wild. She looked at me with half-lidded, bedroom eyes and extended a hand to me.

  “Come back to bed,” she purred.

  I shook my head and swallowed hard. She was as irresistible as she was insatiable. We’d done almost nothing but make love for the past eight hours. I wasn’t even sure if I could have her again, although I was more than willing to give it a try.

  Unfortunately, there were more pressing issues facing us than finding out if I could survive Jenna’s sexual appetite. Life or death issues. When Jenna told me about her conversation with my father, I’d initially been irate. But at the same time, I thought there was a chance he might be coming around. Maybe it was Jenna’s obvious innocence that tugged at his underdeveloped conscience. Maybe he actually missed me. I just couldn’t believe he would continue to try and suppress this information when his son, arguably his best friend, and an innocent woman were all about to become collateral damage. My father might be a slime ball, but he wasn’t a monster. There was still an ok person deep beneath his crusty exterior. Somewhere. I hoped.

  And that was how I found myself standing in front of Durant Mansion forty minutes later. It looked the same as it always did. Perhaps a little bit uglier, since it looked like it hadn’t been power washed lately.

  Built out of a grey stone that turned almost black in snow or rain, the house was so enormous that it was difficult to imagine a single family occupying it. Even when three generations of the Durant family had lived inside its gothic walls simultaneously, the endless marble corridors had been so quiet that it was possible to go days without running into anyone. Now it was even emptier. Only Richard and my uncle Alexander II lived in the mansion these days.

  I could hear the telltale sound of basketball playing at a deafening volume in my uncle’s “study”, but located my dad in the small kitchen that he and his brother shared. It was actually a service kitchen meant for caterers that were serving the ballroom, but it was the closest kitchen to their respective, palatial living quarters. He nearly dropped his coffee mug when he saw me. It splashed on the countertop and burned his hand.

  “Jesus Christ!” He exclaimed, shaking his burned hand and running cold water over it. “Nicholas what the fuck are you doing here?”

  I shrugged.

  “I thought I’d come say hi,” I told him, reaching past him to dig around in a cabinet until I located a snack. There were some cookies hiding back behind all the beer, but they were expired. I sighed and tossed them in the trash.

  “You shouldn’t have come here, Nicholas,” my dad said. His eyebrows were high on his prominent forehead. “Skylark might be watching the house, although one would think that you wouldn’t actually be stupid enough to just show up like you lived here.”

  “I used to live here,” I said, “Why wouldn’t I come visit?”

  “Can you please not be so fucking casual about this?” My dad snapped. “Your life is in danger. And Jenna’s. And Ollie’s. They would both be safe if you hadn’t said anything to them. You brought this on them and it’ll haunt them for the rest of their lives. People want you dead.”

  I rolled my eyes at him.

  “If anyone brought this on Jenna and Ollie, it was you,” I told him, “You allowed this program to exist--”

  “I did what I had to do,” he interrupted. He looked frustrated and furious. I wanted to probe further.

  “We’ve got the accounting records,” I told him, trying to appeal to whatever reasonable, moral core was still in him. “We can prove there’s a hidden program. If you helped us get the proof, we could bring Skylark down.”

  “Why would I want to do that?” He replied scathingly.

  My optimism drained out of me in a cold instant. I struggled to find the right reply. Because I’m your son? Too emotional. Because it’s wrong? Clearly, he didn’t care.

  “Richard?” A semi-familiar feminine voice called from my father’s adjacent living quarters. I didn’t get the chance to reply. I was unable. My jaw went involuntarily slack when the woman emerged into the kitchen.

  Angelica Hunt.

  She’d been Angelica Ellis the last time I’d seen her. That was before she married a ninety-year-old oil tycoon, let him die, got tried and acquitted for his murder, disinherited, and became the most hated woman in America. The only reason she wasn’t in jail was that her father was a US senator (and the target of our family’s extended patronage). I’d just finished reading about all the crazy stuff Angelica had been up to yesterday while I was catching up on my life and found out that Nathan had his own run-in with Angelica not long ago. She was the tabloid queen and one of the cruelest, most unpleasant, most beautiful women in the world.

  “Nicholas!” she cried, sweeping forward in her silk robe and four-inch heels to embrace and then kiss me on the cheek. I froze in confusion, revulsion, and disbelief.

  Why the fuck was she dressed like that? Why was she even here?

  My question was answered in the worst way possible.

  “I’m so glad you’re here, Nicholas,” Angelica told me excitedly. “You’re just in time for our engagement party at the Ritz tomorrow!”

  She flashed her massive, gaudy ring at me and it took a few seconds before it finally sunk in. My eyes swept from Angelica’s ring, to her ecstatic face, to my father’s resigned and slightly embarrassed expression.

  No way. No fucking way.

  The laugh started deep in my belly, and once begun was impossible to stop. I bent double, laughing my ass off at the revolting impossibility of having Angelica as my step-mother. We were the exact same age. We’d gone through school together. Richard and Angelica watched me laughing with small frowns on their respective faces. I had tears dragging down my cheeks in salt rivulets by the time it stopped. I hadn’t laughed so hard in decades. It literally hurt my ribs.

  “Angelica—Angelica—” I tried and then gave up shaking my head. “You’r
e marrying Angelica?” I choked out between bursts of laughter. “Holy shit. Holy shit.”

  Another earthquake of laughter hit me, and I had to put a hand out to steady myself. I had to fight to keep myself upright and not fall laughing hysterically into the fetal position on the floor.

  Throughout my outburst, which lasted at least five minutes, Angelica and my dad looked on with varying, increasing degrees of displeasure. By the time I finally calmed, my father’s jaw was set stubbornly, and Angelia drew herself up to her full height in an attempt to look dignified. They were quite the pair. Her silk boudoir robe had fur on the collar. In fact, her high heels were trimmed with fur as well. The worst part? It was probably real fur.

  Actually, that wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was that my father was marrying a woman who was my age. An awful woman who was my age. A woman who’d all but murdered her prior husband. Why anyone would marry a woman like Angelica was beyond belief. Sure, she was beautiful, but that hardly mattered when she was just letting you choke to death on a tuna fish sandwich (which was, consequently, exactly how her last husband died).

  “Angelica sweetheart,” my father said solicitously, “would you give us just a second? I’ll be right there.”

  She nodded politely and made her haughty grand exit, tossing her long blonde hair behind her shoulder and then twitching her plump round ass back and forth until it disappeared behind the door. As unbearable as Angelica was, she had a nice ass. Not as good as Jenna’s, but still pretty good.

  Richard shook his head when Angelica was out of sight.

  “That wasn’t very nice,” he said disapprovingly. I started to giggle again and suppressed it.

  “She’s not very nice,” I said, “She’s a murderer. Why the fuck would you marry Angelica Hunt. Are you in loooove?” I crooned dramatically.