by R. J. Lewis
“Fuck you!” she shouted, glaring at him.
“No, fuck you for putting her at risk! Takes one man to turn his sights on her and then she’s fucked like the rest of us. You want another Thames fucked up beyond repair? Then make sure it’s yourself and not your fucking daughter.”
He stormed back out of the room, passing me with another gentle squeeze of the hip this time.
“Where are you going?” Ember screamed.
“I’m taking your daughter to Mom’s.”
“No, you’re not.”
“Try and fucking stop me.”
He disappeared down the hallway. As Ember cried in her hands, I looked her over. Her sleeves had risen only a few inches, but I spotted the dark bruises already. My heart sank at her despair. I felt sorry for her and her shitty choice of men.
“If he hurts you, don’t go back,” I said to her quietly.
She stopped crying and looked up at me. Her impeccable make up was totally fucked. Her watery eyes met my own and she shook her head slowly. “If I was you, I’d stay away from my brother. This is the shit he does.”
“He’s protecting you.”
Now, she looked like she was sorry for me. “Tell me what you think of him in five years-time. I can’t wait to know.”
It irked me she wasn’t considering the big picture of what he had just done.
“Hopefully he’s not in the slammer for putting another one of your boyfriends away,” I boldly responded.
Her eyes welled up with more tears and she didn’t respond. That was Ember for you, I’d learn. She couldn’t fight back. She internalized every abuse thrown her way. It was another one of those situations I wasn’t used to. I expected a verbal insult but got nothing. Instantly, I felt bad for saying that.
“I’m sorry,” I quickly whispered to her. It wasn’t my place. What was wrong with me? So used to arguments and constantly feeling the need to defend myself, I’d involved myself in something that was totally not my business.
“I’m sorry, Ember,” I repeated, shaking my head. “I didn’t mean that…”
I heard Conor’s footsteps emerge from the bedroom. He ambled out with the little girl in tow. God, she looked like her mom. Her hair was long, blonde, neatly braided down the back. Her eyes were big and so blue, they leaped out of her face. Despite the commotion, she was talking Conor’s ear off, staring up at him with stars in her eyes. She didn’t look in our direction once. Didn’t even blink at her Mom as they stopped at the front door. It was fucking adorable, even in the moment, how infatuated she was with her uncle.
“Come on, dove,” Conor said to me, waiting by the door.
I gave Ember one last look. Again, my heart pinched. She didn’t look like she should be alone, but I had work and work provided me the food I ate and the feminine products I needed to live in this fucking dysfunction.
I left her and went to him. When I got close enough, he took me by the arm and said in my ear just for me to hear, “Take Lily to the elevator and go straight down. I gotta take care of something.”
I nodded at him, and when he opened the door, I realized what he needed to take care of. I heard Dan’s groaning. We had to step over his legs just to get out.
“Go with Charlotte like I said,” Conor instructed Lily.
She nodded and took me by the hand, and it was so little and soft, I swallowed it whole with my own. Just as we walked down the hallway, I glanced over my shoulder and watched Conor kneel to Dan’s level.
The last thing I heard him say was, “If I fucking see you around my sister again…”
Chapter Five
Charlotte
Conor acted like nothing happened. My mind was reeling with what unfolded, but he was so calm. So, this was the violence people talked about. The unpredictable swings that left people hurt. I wished I wasn’t used to it, but the sad truth was my home life wasn’t much different. I knew random violence through and through.
Maybe that was why we worked. Maybe that was why I wasn’t shaking like a leaf or running the opposite way.
Conor grabbed my clothes from the laundromat in the building. They were folded neatly and smelled good. It was a pleasant surprise. He handed them to me as we strode out, his niece skipping feet in front of us like the happiest little bee.
“I can operate a washing machine,” he chuckled, noticing my reaction.
“Impressive,” I returned, smiling cheekily at him.
“I went through a lot of effort impressing you last night, dove. If I’d known working a washer would get this reaction out of you, I would have had you bent over a dryer.”
“Now you’re talking.”
He laughed.
We rode in the car with Lily partly in my lap and partly on the seat. She thought it was this giant adventure.
“Are you Conor’s friend?” she asked, looking up at me.
“Yes,” I answered, smiling warmly at her.
“You look different than all his friends.”
I shot Conor an amused look. “Really? How do his friends look like?”
“They have tattoos and they swear a lot.”
I laughed and Conor cracked a smile at her. “She’s the prettiest friend of them all, don’t you think?”
Lily nodded and I couldn’t help but blush.
His mother didn’t live far from his apartment. She was on a quiet street, in a townhouse complex. Conor dropped her off at the door. I saw a glimpse of his mother, again a spitting image of her children. Her hair was dyed blonde with caramel highlights, her make-up was done up to a tee, and she was dressed better than all the outfits in my closet. She rocked the same style as her daughter, or maybe it was her daughter that followed.
I was pretty sure she already knew what had happened. Maybe Ember had called her. She looked like she was scolding Conor. Her lips moved fast and then pursed when she stopped to listen to him. He kept smiling at her with the most blasé expression. He randomly interrupted her by wrapping her in a tight hug, which silenced her completely. She held him tightly, and I felt my chest tighten. I let out a breath, wondering how that kind of love felt. I’d never known it. Never would, either. The love of a mother made little sense to me.
When he left her standing there to come to me, his mother stood still, watching him carefully as he entered the car. Then she found me and her eyes narrowed curiously. God, she had the same hard look as Conor.
“Where to next?” Conor asked. “You need to go home to change?”
“I’ve got a change drawer at work,” I explained.
He gave me another one of those funny looks. “You change at work.”
“Yeah.”
“You do everything in your power to avoid going home, dove?”
I tapped the seatbelt, watching the street as he pulled out, anything than to look at him. “It’s easier at work.”
“What do you do, Charlotte?”
“Barista. Part-time until the summer.”
“That cover everything?”
I nodded. No. “Yes.”
Wanting to change the subject, I said, “I think you should go back to your sister. She didn’t look very well.”
“Ember is complicated. You think I’m a Neanderthal, but that’s the only way I can get rid of these losers from her life. If Lily wasn’t around, I wouldn’t have gotten so angry, and then he said those things about you –”
“You don’t need to defend yourself,” I interjected, looking at him. His lips were thin, his brows furrowed. “I get it, Conor.”
“You get that it takes a bit of violence.”
“I get what you did. I don’t think everything requires violence.” Looking a little uneasy, I said quietly, “I worry you like to be violent, though.”
He didn’t respond, but his face relaxed. Lips parted, he stared intently on the road. I knew I was right. I felt his adrenaline sitting here. It was electric, and not in a good way. He had that crazed look of someone that had gone too far and couldn’t stop. Conor got high off
violence, and he hadn’t had his fill. It was a pattern I would grow to understand as time went on. Getting him to calm down required more beatings or being fucked savagely (I’d always prefer the latter).
He took me to work with time to spare. Parking in front of the coffee shop, he kept the doors locked and took my hand. His skin was rough, calloused, bruised and swollen. I stared down at our intertwined fingers. My heart was beating through my chest. Where I felt fuzzy and warm with Reid, I felt like my entire skin was on fire with Conor.
“You’re going to break up with Reid,” he told me, his voice hard. He pierced me with a solemn gaze. “Agreed?”
I looked back at him, a small smile on my lips. “What do I get out of it?”
He let out a hard laugh and passively ran a hand over his short buzz. “Jesus, fuck, you get…well, you get me. If that’s enough.”
A tiny vulnerable look escaped him, and it twisted me. This was the man that had a girl sprawled on him last night, and the cockiest look in his eye. A man that made everyone in a room obey him. And he was looking humble with me for the briefest moment.
“I fucked up my year long relationship last night,” I told him, a hysterical laugh escaping me. “I did it for you, and I haven’t known you for a day, Conor.”
He smiled, his eyes shining bright as he looked at me. “Isn’t it great, dove?
Yes.
No.
Yes.
“I cheated on someone.” I swallowed. “I’ve never done that before.”
The magnitude of my crime still hadn’t hit me. I should have felt awful for it, or dread. I was so busy being high off whatever it was I had with Conor to notice how fucked up what I did was. Guilt sat there on the borders of my being, and its fangs were sharpened; it would pierce into my consciousness once I left the car.
“It wasn’t real,” he then said, tilting his head to the side as he watched me carefully. “What you had couldn’t have been real with him if it took so little to break it.”
“And you think this is? You’ll be in bed with another girl by tonight.”
“If I hadn’t met you, sure. Although, to be honest, I’m with a woman a little longer than that. Not a complete manwhore.”
“Charming,” I said, dryly.
“Honest,” he corrected. “You’ll only ever get honesty with me, pup.”
“Okay, Mr Honest, how are you so sure we’re real?”
“I want you. I know that much is real.”
He wants me.
Every time he said it, it went straight to a spot in my being that was hot and ravenous. Heat blossomed inside me. He undid me with one look, a few simple words, and the feel of his rough fingers tracing along mine. I moved across the car quickly, unable to stop myself and took his face into my hands. I kissed him hard, in seventh heaven at the feel of his unbearably soft lips crushed against mine. He wrapped an arm around my waist, gluing me to him as he ravaged my mouth, breathing me in with equal need.
When I finally pulled away for air, his eyes were already open, watching me.
“What if you realize I’m not what you want?” I asked, breathless and yearning.
“You already took a big piece of me last night, dove.”
Shaking, I breathed, “What if I realize you’re not what I want?”
Now his eyes hardened. “Then I’ll let you go, but not in one piece.”
“Why?”
“Because you’ll be so in love with me by then, you’ll have given me your heart. And you’ll find your way back to me, anyway, because you can’t live without your heart.”
He was sincere in his words, and it was a foreshadowing of what was to come. When you’re young, though, c’est la vie. This was a picture-perfect moment for me. The stuff you crave when you’re young and dreamy. Conor was like the bad boy in those sexy as sin movies. The kind you go to bed dreaming of with your thighs pressed tight together.
What the movies never told you was the sexy as sin bad boy you went to bed dreaming about never got the happy ending. Not in the real world, anyway.
“I have to go to work,” I sighed, glancing at the dashboard. “When will I see you?”
The question made his face fall just a little. I didn’t understand why. He kissed me tenderly, muttering, “Soon. Have a good day, Charlotte.”
I studied him for several moments, and then I kissed him one more time and slid to my side. He unlocked the door and I climbed out. I had to pull my pants up on my walk of shame to the coffee shop. He sat idle the entire time; his gaze glued to my back. When I glanced over my shoulder, I saw his smirk from the entrance door.
I didn’t know I had an audience until I stepped inside. Literally everyone in the coffee shop was staring at me, and it was mostly packed in the mornings with bookworms, hipsters, cute couples, laptop chained writers and elderly groups discussing politics/grandchildren/generation differences (because us young’uns were the disrespectful scum of the earth).
Cheeks red, I raced to the backroom office to change, disappearing out of view. The office was empty, my manager wasn’t around, but the second I entered the room, the door opened again, and my co-worker Ellen practically ran in with bug eyes. She pretended to be my friend, even though at school she looked right through me. To be fair, I did too. She was the nerdy girl, part of the nerdy crowd, and being with Reid meant I was stuck with his people.
“That was Conor Thames,” she proclaimed, staring at me. “I saw him. I saw you with him. I saw you leave his car. I saw everything, Charlotte.”
“You and thirty others,” I replied, throwing off his sweater and kicking off his pants. I opened the desk drawer and pulled out my clothes and last-minute Elf make-up products. Thank God my manager Mark didn’t care I stuffed his drawers with my shit.
Ellen was still standing behind my half-naked ass as I threw my black and brown uniform on. “Shouldn’t you be at the front counter, Ellen?”
“Everyone’s served.”
“You still have to be present.”
“I don’t care. I want to know why you’re in men’s clothes, why you left Conor Thames’ car, and why your hair has a just-fucked look.”
“Ellen, it wasn’t his car.”
Of all the things to say, that was my only response. Two minutes being in the room and I already felt the walls closing in on me. All those witnesses. God, Reid was going to find out before I even told him myself.
This was my personal hell. Figuratively, I was standing on the toilet seat, looking down at the drain, knowing my social life was going to get flushed away in a matter of hours and his heart was going to go down with it.
“I didn’t know you broke up with Reid,” she went on, her voice dripping with shock. “When did that happen?”
I huffed out with irritation and turned to her. “I didn’t take you as the gossip type, Ellen.”
“I’m not gossiping. I’m pulling information straight from the source.”
“Is it fun to interrogate someone about shit that isn’t your business?”
Ellen nodded, heartily. “God, Charlotte, this is the only place I can act like a freaking teenager. Did you know my parents made me memorize the Elements Table Chart by the age of eight? Imagine what they’re shoving down my throat now.”
I paused, thinking about it. “Alright, you have a point.”
“Yeah, and you were with the baddest guy in town.”
“Even I know baddest isn’t a word.”
“Charlotte!”
Despite her boring life at home, I would have given my left tit to trade places. Also, I still wasn’t going to say shit. I needed to talk to Reid first, and that meant going to work first before I even had that opportunity.
“Look,” I snapped, pointing a finger at her pretty little button nose, “I gotta work, Ellen. My period is in four days, and I get paid in two, and I need my paycheck to cover the two tampon boxes I’m going to need to shove up my vagina because my stomach is aching already and I know it’s going to be a tsunami of blo
od. I have only a handful of hours a week, and I need every cent I can get. So, please. Move.”
Dejected, Ellen moved, and I ran to the employee bathroom to scrub my face and apply my pathetic supply of make-up. I literally had nothing more than a few drops of foundation left, and my face looked washed-up as fuck. I looked at myself in the mirror, doing my best to apply the colour under my eyes so I didn’t look like a coked-out raccoon. I tied my dark hair up in a tight bun and let a few tendrils fall to frame my face.
“Can’t polish a turd,” I told my reflection.
Despite the washed-out look, my hazel eyes glowed. Rimmed red, sure, but man, they glowed like two stars. I was happy despite everything. I literally couldn’t bring myself to feel miserable.
“What’s wrong with you?” I admonished myself.
Conor.
Conor was wrong with me.
I felt a small smile tug on my lips. My heart did backflips in my chest. If I had to put my feelings in a picture, I was like those girls you find on Pinterest, dressed in a vintage yellow dress, running through a waist high flower field, feeling every petal glide between my fingers.
I was going to be the most hated person in school, but it was totally worth it.
I exited the bathroom and began my shift.
*
Oh, my God, I was going to be the most hated person in school.
I groaned into my hands two hours into work. Yeah, okay, now it was starting to hit. The picture in my head was now me dressed in a gothic black dress, running through a black field, and away from villagers with pitchforks in their hands.
I just fucked the town’s most notorious jerk and I had worn his clothes to work, and I was pretty sure the fifteen-year-old teeny boppers this morning saw everything.
I stared at the entrance doors nervously every time I served a customer. I was paranoid Reid was going to show up and lose it at me, even though that wasn’t his style. At some point, I got scolded for slacking. I fucked up two espresso orders, and this bleach blonde soccer mom with giant sized boobs had a go at me for adding sugar to her tea. I literally watched her boobs jiggle as she seethed at me, and God, I wished my boobs were just a little bigger.