Wild Aces

by Marni Mann

  There were at least twenty pregnancy tests lying there, their digital screens reading, Positive.

  “Oh my God. Is that—”

  “Yes!” she cried out.

  “All of them are yours?”

  “Yes!” she cried out again.

  “Holy mama!” I shouted, wrapping my arms around her. “Frankie, you’re going to have a baby!”

  “I…really am.” Her body started to shake. “Oh God.”

  I knew what she was worried about, and I needed to steer her thoughts in a different direction. “I’ve gotta say, I’m pretty impressed you had that much pee to tinkle on all those sticks. That’s a lot of sticks. A lot.”

  “Brea…” she breathed, her cries loud enough that I pulled away.

  “What’s wrong? Aren’t you happy about this news?” I pushed all the hair away from her face and waited for her to answer. “Is something going on with Derek?”

  “No. It’s not Derek.”

  I looked behind me to make sure I hadn’t passed him in the bedroom. “Is he here?”

  “He’ll be home in ten minutes.” She reached for a tissue and wiped her eyes. “He doesn’t know yet.”

  I gripped her hand the same way she had clung to mine, and I sat her on the end of her bed. “Frankie, this isn’t like last time. This is completely different.”

  “But I can’t stop thinking about the last time and how it felt, being pregnant as Reed and I were falling apart. I was so sick, and he was so unsupportive. Then I caught him cheating on me with Derek’s sister.”

  “Listen to me, my bestie, Reed is no longer in your life. Derek is. Do you understand that?”

  She nodded and cried even harder.

  I took the tissue from her and dabbed at the corner of her eyes. “You have the most wonderful, supportive husband who loves you more than humanly possible. If I’m not mistaken, he’s been trying to get you pregnant since he put a ring on it.”

  She was nodding, which told me I was making headway.

  “He’s going to go absolutely nuts when he finds out about this baby. He’s going to protect it, just like he protects you, and he’ll love it more than anything in the world. You have to remember that.”

  “You’re right.”

  I saw the anxiety start to leave her as thoughts of Reed were replaced with thoughts of Derek. There was no comparison.

  “This is supposed to be the most amazing time in your life, and it’s going to be. No more tears, no more sadness, no more comparisons to Mr. Dickhead. Just happiness, okay?”

  She let out a massive exhale.

  “Happiness…and chocolate.”

  She laughed. “God, I’ve been eating so much chocolate lately.”

  The tears were finally gone.

  “You really have,” I said, taking the seat next to her. “I was days away from staging an intervention or buying you a damn test myself.”

  “Wait—you knew?”

  “I had a feeling when you puked those cookies out of the window of your car on the way back from Cody’s parents’. Work stress, my ass.”

  “I just freaked out pretty hard, didn’t I?”

  “It’s okay. If a baby were going to be pushing its way out of my vag in nine months, I think I might get a little loco, too.”

  “My vag is never going to look the same, is it? Or my boobs.” She looked down and sighed.

  “Nope. None of it will.”

  “I might start crying again.”

  “We’ll get it fixed.” I traced the air above her body. “Aaaaall of it can be fixed, girl. Your client, Dr. Peterson, does the best tits in Boston. We’ll have him give us a consultation on revagination surgery and see what he recommends.”

  She looked at me from the corner of her eye.

  “What? It’s a real thing. They stitch—”

  “I’m having a C-section.”

  “Perfect. It’s all solved then. No tears needed. Your pussy will remain just as perfect as it was when Derek met it.”

  She was teary again. “I love you.”

  “I know. So, stop stressing. You’re going to be a wonderful mom, and I’m going to be the coolest aunt ever. Baby Block is going to be wearing flannel diapers, just like his father.”

  “Derek’s diapers are leopard print, just so you know.”

  I snorted. “TMI, girl. T. M. I.”

  The tears were back but not for the same reason. “I can’t wait to see him as a father, Brea. He’s going to be really great at it, isn’t he?”

  I was reminded of Jameson and Rachel and the look on their faces when they stared at their baby boy. “The best,” I told her.

  “Oh, shit, I think I just heard Derek come in.” She walked over to their bedroom door. “Hey, baby, is that you?”

  “Yeah, I’ll be right up! I’m just going to grab something to eat!” he yelled.

  “I’m outta here, Mama.” I gave her a quick hug. “Text me later, and tell me how it goes. Or text me in the morning since I might be too busy to reply tonight.”

  I hadn’t had a chance to talk to her about Trapper and that we had worked things out. I would never tell her about the compound, but she knew what I’d heard at the apartment that night, so Trapper and I would have to come up with something to tell her.

  “Too busy?” she asked.

  “Yeah. I have news, too, but I’ll tell you all about it in the morning. We both have very important matters to tend to right now.”

  I hurried down the stairs before she could ask anything else, and I stopped in the kitchen, catching him devouring a sandwich. “Hey, Derek.”

  “Brea.” He waved me over, swallowing, as we kissed cheeks. “I don’t think I’ve seen you since the party. How’ve you been?”

  I didn’t want to keep him long, knowing Frankie was upstairs, waiting with the most epic news ever. “Work is nuts, and Trapper is awesome. That pretty much sums it all up.”

  “I was going to ask you about him.” He reached into the freezer and took out a pint of ice cream and a spoon from the drawer.

  “We’ll set something up soon, so the four of us can hang.”

  “We’d really like that.”

  “Is that for you or your wife?” I pointed at the carton.

  “It’s for Frankie. I’m taking it up to her.”

  “Uh, I think you can skip it. I doubt she’s going to want ice cream tonight.”

  “Yeah?”

  I smiled. “Just head on up. She’s anxious to see you.” I waved good-bye and let myself out.

  Trapper

  “Hey,” Brea said. She jumped into my arms, her legs gripping my waist so fucking tight that I could feel the warmth of her pussy coming through her jeans. “I missed you.”

  “Mmm,” I groaned. I kissed her as I carried her back through the door and into the living room. “Are you too sore for what I’m about to do to you?”

  Other than the hours she spent at work and the few that I let her sleep, I’d been inside of her almost nonstop for two straight weeks.

  “I’m sore but not too sore for you.” She chewed on my bottom lip while I set her on the counter, my hand shooting up the back of her shirt to unhook her bra. “Before you do that,” she said, “I have something you might want to see.” Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes hungry for more than just conversation.

  My dick was so hard, it was about to burst through my fly. “What kind of news?”

  “My hacker friend is back in the States, and he sent over everything he found on you. A courier just dropped it off a few minutes ago.”

  “What does it say?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. I didn’t open it.” She lifted the envelope that was beside her on the counter and handed it to me.

  It was so thin; it didn’t even weigh half a pound. “My whole life fits in that tiny package…”

  “There’s nothing tiny about your package, baby.”

  I smirked. She loved to talk about the size of my cock, especially when it was inside her.
>
  “You’ll be getting it in a minute…once we get this over with.” I unsealed the top of the envelope. And then I froze. All the answers I’d been waiting on, all the details that separated me from my brother, were inside there. For something so light, it felt so fucking heavy.

  “I want you to read it here, but I don’t want you to feel like you have to read it in front of me.” She ran her heels down the backs of my thighs.

  The papers were now in my hands, the top sheet only listing my name, the address of my townhouse, and my date of birth. Nothing in this stack could be worse than what I’d gone through as a kid, and a lot of that, I’d already told her about. The rest she could probably guess, and she knew all about the compound. There was nothing left to hide, and nothing I wanted to hide from her.

  “No. I’m good. But let’s get comfortable first.” I lifted her off the counter and carried her to the couch, setting her on the cushion next to mine.

  The second page was a list of all the foster homes I’d stayed at over the years. “Jeffrey, Holland, Larry…” I said, my voice drifting off as I read the names faster than my mouth could keep up. All the fuckers who had beaten my ass were on there, faces I’d see when I closed my eyes but names I hadn’t thought about in a long time.

  “There are so many,” she whispered. “More than I realized.”

  I counted cards, and I ran statistics in my head, but that was one number I didn’t want to know. One I hadn’t kept track of as a kid.

  I flipped the page, and it showed the information about my adoption—Vera’s name and address, the date all the paperwork was processed. I turned to the next page to find a report from a hospital where I’d had my forehead stitched up.

  “There was glass found inside the laceration,” Brea read. “Oh my God…and traces of crack residue was found on the glass.”

  It said an emergency contact had been called. The contact had come to the hospital and confirmed abuse, and I was then taken into custody.

  “Jesus, Trapper, were you at your mom’s house when it happened?”

  “I don’t know.” I looked at her and then back at the papers. “I knew about the cut and the stitches, but I didn’t know any of the rest.” The next page had Cody’s name on it, his last known address, his date of birth and death. I flipped through the rest of the pages. “Everything else is about Cody.”

  “That’s really strange,” she said. “He’s usually so good at finding everything.”

  “Maybe there’s nothing else to find.” I handed her the stack. “You want to look through this part? I’m going to go grab some water.”

  “Sure…I’m sorry.”

  I brushed my scruff over her cheek before I kissed it. “Don’t be. You tried your best. You can’t help that there’s nothing out there on me.” I walked over to the sink and splashed cold water on my face. I knew her hacker friend would come through at some point, but I didn’t think he’d come up with almost nothing. Either it was a relief or just fucking sad.

  “Trapper, come here,” she called from the living room.

  I wiped my face and sat next to her on the couch, looking at the paper she held in front of me.

  “This is all about the attorney Cody’s parents hired to adopt him.”

  I read past the attorney’s bio and learned that Cody’s parents had paid $150,000 for the adoption. A copy of the check was attached. The attorney was rumored to have a ninety-five percent success rate in finding babies for her clients. There was an interview from a birth mother who claimed the attorney had given her less money than promised. Brea’s friend included a few similar stories, which drew the conclusion that her business was based on buying off mothers for their children and for their silence. It sounded similar to what I did. When he researched the attorney, she turned out to be another dead end; she’d passed away almost ten years ago.

  “If she accepted a check from Cody’s parents, it sounds like she ran things legally,” Brea said.

  “Or she made things appear that way. With a success rate that high, she had other connections—sure connections, not just birth moms who changed their minds all the time.”

  She threw her arm around me and moved in closer. “I thought we were going to get all the answers. Now, I just feel like I have even more questions.”

  “I know.” I leaned my cheek against her face. “I really wish I knew what the hell Cody was thinking about when he was driving that day.”

  “You know, I have some of his things here. Even some of his notes and paperwork. We could go through them, if you think it would help.”

  “Doubt it could hurt, but are you sure you want to do that? Those might be some memories you don’t want to see.”

  She took a deep breath and led me to her office. “It’s time for me to get past it, I think.”

  She reached into the back of the closet and pushed out a box. It was much bigger than I thought it would be.

  “This is everything that he left at my place. There are notes scattered all throughout the inside.”

  I stared at it, knowing everything in that box would bring me closer to my brother. I should have been able to hold his things and feel him and recall so many memories. But I had nothing. It was the most overwhelming emotion and the biggest goddamn letdown. What I wouldn’t give to have him standing here instead of all his stuff.

  I lifted the lid and pushed aside the clothes and the boots. The small scraps of paper were all underneath. Brea was right. They were everywhere, at least forty of them with names and colors and details written on each.

  “He left them all over my apartment,” she said. “Like he’d get some random thought and have to write it down.”

  I tried to pile them all up and read every one. “Nothing is standing out to me, not even a number or a date.”

  “Try the notebook.” She took it out from the bottom and handed it to me. “There might be more in there.”

  I flipped through the pages. None of it seemed to be in order, just names, random thoughts, street addresses. It was giving me access to his mind—a mind that functioned nothing like mine. His handwriting didn’t look like mine either. More differences. I turned the pages, scanning them quicker and quicker, until I finally saw something I recognized.

  “Brea…” I showed her the paper. “That’s my social security number and the address at Aced.”

  Her eyes went wide, and her mouth opened.

  “Do me a favor; look through that stack of papers again that your friend sent over, and tell me if anything seems off to you.”

  “I’m on it.”

  I turned another page and found a bunch of words written in a circle, all connected by arrows.

  JULY 12TH, HOSPITAL RECORDS, EMERGENCY CONTACT, CO-SIGNED LEASE, OD, AUTOPSY, BLOOD MATCH.

  “I think he figured it out.” I showed her the paper. “Whatever the hell all this means, I think it has something to do with me.”

  Her eyes traveled around the circle. “That’s your birth date, and he found your hospital records and saw that an emergency contact was called, but I don’t get the rest.”

  “Yeah, the rest makes no sense.” I stared at the words—co-signed lease, OD, autopsy, blood match—and repeated them in my head. What the hell was Cody thinking when he wrote these all down, and how were they all connected?

  “I have something,” she said. “I didn’t see it earlier; it must have been stuck to the paper behind it. Do you know who C. Pilarski is?”

  I slowly glanced up and took the paper from her hand. “That son of a bitch.” It was the number that had been listed as my emergency contact. It was no longer in service, but it had been registered to a C. Pilarski.

  “Who?” Brea asked. “What are you talking about?”

  “C. Pilarski stands for Charlene Pilarski. She’s Roman’s fucking wife.”

  Her hand went over her mouth. “Oh my God. You don’t think…”

  “The hospital wasn’t trying to get in touch with Charlene; they were trying to get in t
ouch with Roman, and there’s only one way they would have had his number.”

  She took the paper out of my hand. “Okay, let’s think this through before there’s any freaking out.”

  It was too fucking late for that.

  “Cody came across you somehow. Let’s just say, he saw you on TV playing in a poker tournament. He then found your hospital records, and from there, he tracked down Roman and his wife. The next thing on the list is a co-signed lease.”

  “Roman doesn’t have a lease on his house or on Aced. He owns both. He must have co-signed a lease for someone else.”

  “Maybe it was for your mom?”

  I reached over to the desk and picked up the notebook she had placed there, flipping to the next page. Missy Harmon was written at the top, and around this circle was, Mother, accidental acute crack cocaine toxicity, and her address, all connected by arrows.

  “Brea…” I looked up from the notebook.

  “I know.” She held me as she glared into my eyes. “It’s making sense, isn’t it?”

  I nodded.

  “Your mom died from a crack overdose.”

  “And it was her crack pipe that cut me.”

  “So then, Cody must have looked up her autopsy report.”

  “Yeah, and he saw that her blood type matched his and mine.”

  My birth mother’s name was Missy Harmon. As for my father…fuck.

  “There’s more,” I said, pointing to the notebook. The paper was so thin, I could almost see what was written on the next page. But I knew what it said even before Brea showed it to me.

  “Trapper…” Her eyes turned soft. Emotional.

  They confirmed what I feared.

  In the center of the sheet, traced over and over at least four times, were three words connected by an arrow.

  ROMAN PILARSKI. FATHER.

  “I spent all those years in those shitholes. I went through all that abuse. That whole time, I had wondered why in the hell no one cared about me enough to come in and save me, and my father—Roman—had known about me the entire time. He’d gone to the hospital when I was just a baby and told them there was abuse, so they took me into custody.”

  “But he came for you when you were twelve, didn’t he? I mean, Vera had to be sent by Roman, I would think.”