Claimed

by Portia Moore

  “You think you’re going to get in?” my little sister Erin asks, flopping on my twin-sized bed.

  I shrug. “I don’t know. I can hope,” I say through a sigh, trying to finish my story for the school paper. I’m not interested in journalism at all. I’m more in love with the fairy tale. Fiction is always more interesting than the truth, but Marcus said it’d be the elective I need and would help hone my writing skills.

  “If you get in and get rich and famous, can I come live with you maybe? I hate it here.” She pouts. She’s only a few months from her twelfth birthday, the same age I was when I met Zach…

  “When I’m rich and famous, definitely,” I say through a giggle. We both hear my mom yelling at my dad outside the room, and it’s normal hearing it now. It doesn’t help though. My dad still drinks and spends his check on booze, and my mom still has to work other jobs to pay the bills.

  “You promise?” Erin says, locking eyes with me. I’m flattered that she thinks it could happen. I turn towards her, giving her my full attention.

  “I promise,” I tell her sincerely. If I was to ever get rich and famous, I’d definitely take her with me. It’s probably a long way off, but I’m optimistic.

  I still keep the little phone Zach gave me charged, hoping he’ll call, hoping for a text or even a letter, but they haven't come. It will be almost two years now. I promised myself if I don’t hear anything from him by senior year, I will bury what we have, the memory of the two of us, that I’ll let go and move on.

  But deep down, I know—regardless of how much time passes—it will be a promise I can’t keep.

  Chapter 35

  Rain

  Present day

  He looks as handsome as the day I first met him, but I can see his mild crossness underneath his million-dollar smile. “Dena, Mallory, it’s good to see you both,” he says, his voice just above flat. Obviously not happy about them being here.

  “Hi,” I sing, standing and making my way across the room to give him a quick kiss on the lips. My heart is beating so fast. I’m praying to God that he didn’t hear the conversation we were having.

  “Hi, Vincent,” Dena replies with her signature pageant-girl smile, but Mallory’s face is like stone and she barely grunts out a hello.

  “I thought we would be having dinner together since I’m just getting home from out of town and your little vacation,” he says with a joyless laugh.

  Dena interrupts him quickly. “Me and Mallory were just leaving, actually.” She’s standing and gesturing for Mallory to follow her lead.

  Vincent smiles at her, his iciness thawing a little, and his attention goes to Mallory.

  “Is everything okay, Mallory?” Vincent asks with almost a challenge in his voice. My stomach turns over. Did he hear us?

  “As long as my friend is okay, I’m okay,” she mutters. His eyes flash from her to me.

  “Is there a reason you think she’s not okay?” he says, pulling up a chair and sitting down across from her.

  “I’m fine, Mallory. You and Dena can go ahead.”

  “Yeah, come on Mallory,” Dena says, trying to pull her from the chair. Mallory gets up, but her eyes shoot daggers at Vincent. It’s so obvious she’s upset and whether Vincent heard us or not, he knows something happened. He turns towards me, his face hard but a smile still sitting on it.

  “Rain, tell your friend you’re okay. Or tell me why you aren’t?” he asks easily. I swallow hard.

  “I just want to talk, just us,” I say, pushing the words out of my throat. He does a half nod and gestures towards Mallory.

  “But it seems as if there have been conversations happening already, I think. It’s only fair that I be a part of the discussion, right?” he says, glaring at me, and my face goes red.

  “Rain, are you staying or coming with us?” Mallory asks with an edge to her voice that I’ve never heard. I scream at her with my eyes to not do this. Vincent is staring me down now.

  “Are you leaving Rain?” he asks, sounding more amused than upset.

  “No. Of course not. Mallory, I’ll call you tomorrow, I promise,” I tell her tightly.

  “Vincent, I’m sorry. Mallory has had a hard day, and the wine...” Dena says, her sweetness at odds with the tension in the room. Mallory gives me a pleading look to come with her and all I want her to do right now is leave. I didn’t want to talk to Vincent about things with this type of energy. Everything has gone so wrong.

  “Bye guys,” I say, forcing a smile.

  “You ladies know your way out?” Vincent asks.

  “We sure do. We’ll see you guys later,” Dena says with a little wave before following a disappointed Mallory out of the room. Vincent and I are both quiet until we hear them leave.

  “What the fuck was that?” he shouts, his face flushing.

  I flinch.

  I was expecting him to be upset but not like this, and he’s never yelled at me. I don’t know what to say, unsure if he’s heard my conversation with them, or if he’s reacting purely off of Mallory’s little performance.

  “I am sick of this,” he says, advancing towards me. I feel a cold chill in my stomach start to spread through my body. He comes over to where I’m sitting and yanks the chair so that I’m facing him and leans down in my face. “I am sick of the disrespect from all of the people who claim to care about you. If they really cared about you, they’d see everything that I do for you. I bend over backwards to give you everything you want, Poppy. I give you a job, people at your beck and call to do your hair and makeup and dress you for the smallest event, like you’re a princess.

  “I buy you anything you want and shower you in the best clothes and jewelry. You live in one of the best penthouses in the city. And I ask you to marry me. I do all of this, and still your family disrespects me, and now your so-called friends do the same. So, Poppy, you’re going to have to choose. Either you’re loyal to me, your future husband, or you choose your friends. You can go back to that squalid little hellhole that I dragged you out of, or you can never speak to Mallory again, and stay with me—someone who loves you and treats you the way you deserve.” His eyes are blazing.

  “You can count on that, Poppy. I will always treat you exactly how you deserve.”

  My eyes are welling up with tears. I can’t speak. The lump in my throat is so big, blocking off words, and air, and everything else. My tears start to fall, one after another, and then in a huge rush. “Vincent, please,” I beg. “Mallory didn’t mean it. She’s just worried about me. I’ll talk to her, I swear. She’s one of my closest friends. She’s always been there for me.”

  “My friends would never treat you how she treated me!” he barks.

  “Vincent, please understand. It’s not her fault. It was my fault. I shouldn’t have—”

  “There is no excuse for how she just acted. If you love me, you wouldn’t want anyone who treats me like that in your life! I already put up with it from your mom, and that was the last time!”

  I take his hands in mine. “Vincent, please. I know you’re upset.”

  “If you love me, you’ll choose me,” he says firmly. “But you’re going to have to pick, Poppy. Me, and the life I’m offering you, or your so-called friend.”

  He’s angry, and I know he has every right to be. He just needs time to cool down. And then I’ll talk to him, and he’ll be reasonable, and of course, I won’t have to cut Mallory out of my life. No reasonable person would really ask that. It’d be awful. And Vincent is a lot of things, but he isn’t awful.

  “I-I choose you,” I say softly, trying to pacify him. “I love you, Vincent, and I know you love me. This is just a rough patch, that’s all. Everyone goes through them eventually.”

  Vincent looks down at me, his eyes still dark and cold. “Well, until this rough patch is over, and I can trust that you mean what you say, I’ll need my ring back.”

  I stare at him, wanting to think he’s joking, but I know that he’s deadly serious. “What?”

&
nbsp; “You heard me. Don’t make me repeat myself, Poppy, I don’t like it. My ring. When you prove that you can be trusted, when you earn it, then you can have it back. I’ve spoiled you too much, I see that now.”

  Hands trembling, chin quivering as I try not to start crying again, I pull the ring off of my finger and drop it into his open palm. His fingers shut around it immediately, and I touch the space where it was, the skin there a pale, thin line.

  “I’ll take this with me,” he says, shoving it unceremoniously into his pocket. “I’m going away for the weekend on business, Poppy. I’ll be back late Sunday night or early Monday morning.”

  “But you just got back!” I’m still reeling, trying to keep myself from bursting into tears. Everything has spiraled out of control so quickly.

  “That doesn’t matter,” Vincent says coldly. “What matters is that you’re here when I get back, being a good girl and showing me that this little ‘rough patch,’ as you call it, is over. You’ll tell Mallory that she’s not welcome here, you won’t go to see her, and you won’t run off again. If you pull another stunt like you did the other day, don’t bother coming back. I don’t forgive twice.”

  “I’m sorry, Vincent, I just—”

  “Stop.” He holds up a hand. “This is done. I need to get to my plane.”

  He turns and leaves me without a kiss, a caress, or even goodbye. It’s like a cold gust of air, sucking the breath out of me as he closes the door behind him hard. I don’t know how things have gone so wrong. Completely and utterly wrong. My head is spinning, I’m all cried out, and I’m most likely dehydrated from crying.

  For the first several minutes after Vincent leaves the dining room, I’m frozen to the chair. My head is pounding. I feel sick. I look down at my hand again through blurry eyes, at the thin line where my ring used to be. For the first time, the real gravity of my situation hits me. When I took off to stay with Marcus, I felt in control. The ring was still securely on my finger. The ball was in my court. I was making a choice for my future, showing Vincent how I was going to be treated.

  But now I see very clearly that despite what Vincent said when he coaxed me back home, I’m not the one in charge here. I don’t even know if I’m a partner. I don’t have any control.

  It’s all him, and I have one last choice to make. I can do what he wants—I can stay here, like a “good little girl,” and I can be contrite and penitent when he comes home. I can put off my dreams of school and a life of my own—maybe forever—and I can settle into the role of a trophy wife, a kept woman with Vincent’s name and money but none of his power. I’ll have a babysitter disguised as a bodyguard, an overflowing bank account with more strings than a puppet show, and a husband whose love comes with conditions.

  Or I can leave. I can walk out of that door and disappear back into the world I came from. I’ll have to leave it all behind, like some kind of insane dream, all of the glamour and beautiful clothes and jewelry and money.

  But that’s not what matters to me, really. That’s not what ever mattered to me. I grew up without any of that, and I never needed it. What I wanted—what I desperately craved—was security. Safety. Stability.

  That’s what makes it hard to leave—not the things that Vincent gives me. It’s the knowledge that as long as I’m here, I’ll never be hungry. My family will never be hungry. I won’t have to steal or lie or beg for the things I need. I won’t have to endure the humiliation of working at a place like Funbags again just to survive.

  I can’t ever forget what it was like to grow up wondering if there would be food in the refrigerator, if I’d have to give up my breakfast so my sister wouldn’t be hungry, if my mother would make excuses for why the lights were turned off when I knew it was because my dad drank the money for the electric bill again.

  I don’t have to be afraid of any of that here. And it’s not just for me—but for my mother, and Erin. She’s almost a senior in high school. Maybe Vincent isn’t willing to support my dreams of going to school right now, but if I make him happy, he might be willing to help Erin. She could go to a good college, a better one than my mother can afford to send her to…

  You’re better than this, stronger than this.

  It’s not my voice that says that. It’s his. A voice I haven’t heard in years.

  My head spins. I don’t know how to move forward. I don’t know what the right thing to do is. The warning bells are going off all around me, red flags waving, and I know if it were Mallory or Dena, I’d have the same reaction that Mallory did. I’d say to run, that marriage isn’t going to make it better, that it’s just a trap tightening every minute.

  But isn’t it selfish to throw all of this away? Isn’t it stupid to walk away from the best chance at security I’ve ever had in my life, to willingly go back to poverty and struggle and abandon any chance to help my family?

  I bury my face in my hands, suppressing the urge to scream. God knows if I do that, April will hear somehow and come running up to see if anything’s wrong, and I don’t want to deal with her right now. I don’t want to talk to anyone.

  My phone buzzes on the table next to me, making me jump with a small, startled shriek. I don’t look at it, but it buzzes again and again, insistently. It might be Vincent, I think. Probably making sure that I haven’t run off. He’ll be furious if I don’t answer, and I reach for the phone…only to see my mother’s name on the display.

  Guilt floods me as I answer it, thinking of how close I am to leaving Vincent, to taking away all of the help I’ve been able to give them. My mother has never asked for it—but I see how much it’s changed things. How can I take that away, even make myself into a burden if I have to go running home?

  “Hi Mom,” I say quietly as I answer the phone. I half expect her to ask if I’m okay or to hear the tears I’m desperately holding back, but she doesn’t. Instead, when she speaks, I can tell that it’s her who’s been crying.

  “Rain, sweetheart, are you at home?”

  “Yeah,” I say cautiously. “Why? Mom, is everything okay?”

  “It’s your father,” she says, and my heart immediately constricts in my chest. I have visions of him drunk driving, wrapped around a telephone pole, or the cause of someone else’s death. My mom is good about keeping the keys away from him, but that doesn’t mean it can’t happen. There were a few close calls when I was still living at home.

  “Mom, what happened? Is he alright? Are you…what’s going on?”

  “He hasn’t been feeling well,” she says slowly. “Since before I came out to see you for Vincent’s birthday. I didn’t want to say anything because, well, we hoped it was nothing. But the results came back today. Rain…he has liver cancer. The prognosis isn’t good. And the treatments…”

  She doesn’t need to say anything else. My mother has insurance for the family through the school system, but it isn’t great. It isn’t going to cover the kind of expensive treatments that my father will need to beat this, and the in-network doctors in our tiny town in Indiana definitely aren’t going to have the kind of advanced, cutting-edge treatments that might save him.

  “Is he home? Or is he in the hospital?” I can feel the tears clogging my throat. I’ve had a hard time with how I feel about my father for years, since I was a teenager. I even came close to hating him for a long time, for how he’s neglected my mother, for the burden he put on her, for the way she’s stuck by him anyway. But when it’s all said and done—he’s still my father. The idea of him being gone makes my chest ache with a kind of pain I never knew I could feel. And my mother—she loves him, no matter what. She’s proven that over and over their entire marriage. To be facing this now, and to be helpless to do anything about it…I can only imagine how that’s making her feel.

  “He’s in the hospital, but they think he might be able to come home in a few days. He had a bad episode, and they want to observe him. But he can’t stay too long…” I can hear the fear in my mother’s voice—not just the fear of losing my father, but t
he fear of the medical bills that are multiplying by the minute. But she’d never ask me for help. I know that.

  Which is why I have to figure out a way to give it to her.

  She needs me. Vincent wants me to be here when he comes home, but he’ll understand. And if he doesn’t…

  This is my family. I can’t leave my mother alone to deal with this, or put the burden of it on Erin. I remember all too well what it felt like to be eighteen and trying to ease the strain on my mom.

  “I’m coming home,” I tell her quickly. “I don’t want you to be alone…”

  “You don’t have to do that,” she says, and I can hear the exhaustion in her voice.

  “I know, but I’m coming anyway,” I say firmly. “I want to see Dad, and you can’t do this by yourself.” I don’t say what I know we’re both thinking—that if this is as advanced as it sounds and there’s no money for treatments, that it might be my last chance to see him.

  “Okay,” she says, relenting. I know she doesn’t have it in her to argue with me.

  “I will. I’ll see you soon, okay? I love you.” I whisper it into the phone, my heart hammering in my chest as I think of Vincent’s reaction. What if he’s furious with me for leaving?

  I scramble up from the table and hurry into the bedroom, pulling out a suitcase and throwing some clothes into it. I don’t pay a lot of attention to what I’m taking, but I grab a couple pieces of my jewelry as well. If Vincent is angry enough to cut me off…

  I can’t think about it. I grab the suitcase and bolt for the front door, only to see April walking in.

  Her brow furrows. “Ms. Carlisle, do you need me to take you somewhere? Mr. Jamison said—”

  “Don’t follow me,” I say sharply, my eyes narrowing as I look at her. My knees are shaking, but I have to be strong. I have to get home.