Almost Wrong

by Aubrey Parker

  Hunter stood. “I have money saved.”

  “From your music bullshit? From that little ‘club’ project with Jimmy?” He laughed again.

  “No, this other guy.”

  “Who?”

  “Duncan.”

  “The black guy?” He said it like my mom would say Jews. I cringed. “I suppose you have enough to get a place, huh? A big, swanky place, right? You got a security deposit, too, smartass? First and last month’s rent? How about utility deposits?”

  “Apparently, not all of us are permitted to freeload off someone who already has a place.”

  Bill’s hand moved like lightning. There was a flat smack, and Hunter’s head rocked on his neck. Hunter recovered and gave his father a small shake of his head—an of course shake, as if he’d been waiting.

  “You will respect me, Hunter. I put food on your table.”

  “And give me so much to respect.”

  I thought another slap might follow, but it didn’t. Between Hunter and Bill, Mom’s eyes were giant saucers. She seemed more surprised than aghast, but clearly didn’t know what to do.

  Finally, Bill’s shoulders slouched. “Look. It doesn’t have to be like this,” he said.

  “Right. But it does have to be this way. Your way. Right?”

  “It’s not just me, Hunter. Since your mother left, it hasn’t been easy. Now with us all moving in together, we have another chance to be a … well … a family. And after the wedding …”

  I gasped first. But then, looking over, I almost gasped again at the look on Hunter’s face. Another obvious fact had escaped me. If they were moving in together, of course Bill would be bringing his son. And if they moved in together, it shouldn’t have been at all shocking that they were planning to marry.

  But nobody had mentioned it to me … and by the looks of things, nobody had mentioned it to Hunter either.

  His jaw worked.

  “Fucking unbelievable,” he said, then walked out the front door and slammed it behind him. Bill had driven, so I have no idea where he went, but he never came back that day.

  That’s how I met Hunter — my stepbrother — for the first time.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  HUNTER

  I don’t do a lot of drugs these days. I used to do a ton, but I slowed down around the time I left the old neighborhood and my dad behind. Drugs impair your judgment and make you do stupid things.

  I’m thinking this while fucking Samantha’s ass on my terrace with this girl I don’t even know below and between us, licking my swinging balls.

  “Fuck me, Hunter!” Samantha yells back over her shoulder. “Stick that big cock of yours up my ass!”

  I oblige, ramming her harder.

  Samantha is the most black-and-white person I’ve ever met. She’s as slutty as they come, though Duncan found her while looking for a new foundation to throw millions of dollars at. I figured it out; my donations have reached official tithe level—just over 10 percent of my gross income, if you work it out just right. It’s simple for most people. Angela’s mom, for one, used to tithe down to the penny, giving 10 percent of her pay to the church. Even back when Maria was working, her tithes were probably, like, fifty bucks a week. Maybe less.

  For me, the numbers are bigger. My take-home pay, if you count Dreadnought’s IPO and ignore all the loopholes we threaded it through, was something like $1.4 billion. It’s not every year we have an IPO, so it’s not like that’s the figure I base things off of, but I’m still “tithing” almost eight figures.

  You run out of places to put that much money, so I’m always looking for foundations. Like the one run by Samantha, whose ass I’m about to come inside of.

  “Oh my god, your thick cock feels sooo good,” she growls. There’s no other word for it: growls. It’s not a purr. I’ve never been on the receiving end, but I imagine it’s hard to purr with your anus stretched. You grunt, groan, moan, shout, and growl.

  The woman who’s been licking my balls comes out from underneath and lies down on what I’m assuming is a vent. My part of the roof terrace is beautiful, and immaculately well-appointed. There’s a huge space for my helicopter to land, where we could be getting dirty. But the girls wanted something more exotic, so here we are among the compressors and cellular antennas. I hope this other girl, whose name I can’t remember, doesn’t fall through the vent before I finish fucking her.

  “Don’t you ever stop fucking my ass!” Samantha shouts. She’s totally naked. We all are. Low-flying planes can surely see us, but Sam’s been saying she wanted to get me more press.

  The other woman has spread her legs, slipping two fingers into the cutest little coin purse of a bald cunt. She has black hair and alabaster skin. Somehow, it works. Her lower lips are swollen and pink. I want to dive in and eat, but my dick is at the controls.

  My cock flops out of Sam’s ass. I’m suddenly bored with ass. Sam likes it because it’s filthy and she’s filthy, but I’m a pussy man. I’m also sublimely courteous, so while Sam’s panting for breath, I head down to the penthouse and get us all some more liquor. I wash my dick and balls in my two-thousand-dollar bathroom sink, then remember I’m not done yet and have guests waiting on my return. So I take my clean cock and the half of the bottle I didn’t drink yet and head back up to the deck, where I find Sam still bent over with her ass up as if she didn’t notice I took a breather.

  I sort of shove her aside, putting myself back into the middle. She thinks I want her to roll over, so she does, spreading herself beside the other woman (Carrie? Corinne? Connie?). Sam’s pussy is bright pink too, but her ass is still gaping its little hello.

  “Get your big cock back in here,” Samantha commands.

  I can’t satisfy everyone, so I compromise by shoving my dick balls deep into the black-haired woman and then leaning over to get a face full of Samantha’s soaking gash. She’s gushing like a fountain.

  Sam pretends to be upstanding, but once her Sunday benefit hat’s on the floor, she likes to be slapped, choked, spanked, hair pulled. When Sam’s holding the reins of our fuck sessions, it probably looks like a fight. She’s the kind of girl who could get me arrested for assault, then get me out by coming six times in a row.

  This must be okay with Sam, because with my tongue still on her clit, she rolls her top half-sideways and starts kissing the other woman, rubbing her tits, interfering with my thrusts by brushing the port of entry with her fingers.

  “Fuck her until she cries,” Sam tells me.

  I don’t know if she’s going to cry, but I sure feel like I’m going to come. This whoever-she-is has a tight little snapper, and right now it feels like I’m being vigorously milked.

  “What’s your name?” I ask her.

  But she’s coming now and can’t answer. Then, breathlessly, she does:

  “Angie.”

  That almost stops me. I had a moment of vertigo in the lobby, and it felt for a while like I was in two places at once. For most people, life is a slow, creeping progression. You grow a little each day, and although you might be a very different person at the end of your days than you were in your youth, there’s a logical curve journeying from one to the other.

  For me, things were more abrupt. The kid I once was would barely recognize the man I am today. I grew like bamboo. One day a sprout, the next day a skyscraper.

  I used to be an asshole who treated people horribly. I’m not like that anymore.

  I’m thinking this while fucking this girl I don’t know, wondering if I should come while choking the shit out of Samantha.

  “Angie?”

  Something’s bothering me. I don’t know what it is. Probably the fact that I’ve been smacked with too much past in the last hour or so. It’s my birthday. I’m thirty, the point when you finally have to admit you’re no longer a kid. And that card from my dad’s family. Not my family, not really. Dad decided to tie that knot, not me. Angela, that other Angela, is just the daughter of that woman my father married. That’s all Dad’
s business; he and I have never been friends. If that son of a bitch doesn’t deserve my money, neither do they. So what if I lived with them for a while? So what if we ate meals at the same table? You do that at summer camp, too. Sharing room and bread and board doesn’t make anyone blood.

  I’m sure of all of this, because if I did consider them blood, things would be so much more complicated. I wouldn’t be able to divorce myself so fully, for one. And as far as Angela …

  “Angie,” the black-haired woman confirms for me, breathlessly.

  Her hair is black, not chestnut brown. She’s short, not tall. She’s slight, almost bony, not lush with subtle curves.

  “Angie,” Samantha echoes.

  “Come inside me,” Angie purrs. She manages a purr because I’m in her tight little snatch, not her ass. Sam is the experienced workhorse. This other girl is just … just …

  I pull out, flip her over, and bang her from behind so I won’t have to see her face. Sam straddles her back, her still-sopping pussy leaving streak marks on the other woman’s pale skin. She’s fingering herself, rubbing her tits, saying “happy birthday” over and over, and asking if I’m enjoying my present.

  It’s too much discussion, so I take a few final thrusts, pull out, and aim upward to shoot my spunk into Samantha’s yapping mouth. I must be pent up because it’s a gusher. I hit her tits, icing her nipples. I hit her tongue. She laps it up, like the whore she is.

  Angie rolls over, and the two of them lie side by side, rubbing themselves, rubbing my shiny finale on their skin like finger paints.

  “Happy birthday,” Angie says.

  “Happy birthday, baby,” echoes Samantha.

  I don’t want to hear it. I wipe my flagging erection with my boxers and walk back to the finished part of the terrace, still naked, leaving my women to dry.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  ANGELA

  The phone rings in the kitchen. Not my cell — the house phone. The one we have because even though Mom has her cell, she can’t quite get over the idea of not having a corded thing connecting us to some sort of imagined security in some sort of upcoming disaster. In Mom’s world, it’s sensible to pay a monthly house phone bill because the apocalypse might come and cell phones will stop working. At that point, everyone will stop worrying about the apocalypse and instead go about protecting the hardwired phone lines so that people like us — those few left in the world with a phone on the wall — can call 911 and have Jesus come save us. Which he would because Mom tells him she hates Jews in her prayers.

  I pick up the receiver. “Hello?”

  But nobody’s there. Just a dial tone.

  I go into the living room. I left Hunter’s personal assistant’s birthday card on the coffee table, and its red-enveloped buffoonery insults my eye upon passing. I’ve already sacrificed my dignity enough by keeping the Olive Garden gift card, and have recovered some of that dignity by determining to use the thing no matter what Bill tries to insist. But I won’t keep the card. Or the envelope. The greeting inside is an insult. I don’t buy that Hunter signed it any more than he, hopefully, will believe that I signed the one Mom and Bill sent him without my permission.

  I can’t decide whose side I’m on. I hate Hunter for sure. I hate how he abandoned us. I hate the fact that there was a Rolling Stone feature on him a few months back and that I actually read it while at the Barnes & Noble in town. I hate that in the feature, he doesn’t mention his family, and I similarly hate that the reporter included his net worth (a number that began with a B), and that we’re still here in the town’s asshole, penniless.

  I don’t want his money, because I don’t want his pity. But at the same time I can’t help hating that we can see his apartment building downtown from our front porch — an address I know not because he sent us the address, but because it was in Rolling Stone. I hate that he’s just across town but in a whole other world, going out of his way to turn a cold shoulder from so relatively nearby.

  But on the other hand, I’m a little on Hunter’s side. Mom and Bill’s motives are so transparent, they might as well be a pair of windows. Happy birthday indeed. Life landmark indeed. Need to forgive, forget, and renew acquaintances indeed. They want his money. Hunter probably told Rolling Stone he didn’t have a family. He has one fucker of a dad, and the charity cases that his father glommed on to.

  As much as I hate Hunter, I think I might do the same things if I were in his shoes. His father belittled and hit him. Mom hates him and always has. Our relationship—as stepbrother and stepsister, or anything else—never had a chance at normality, sprouting from that weedy garden.

  Part of me, for sure, hopes Hunter sees that phony, obvious, insulting card for what it is: begging. Selling out. Debasing of pride. We don’t have much, but we’ve never taken county money. I don’t want pity from anyone, even if we did once share a bedroom wall.

  I’m thinking this while tossing the card in the trash, heading to the utility room, and grabbing my running shoes.

  The phone rings again. I pick it up. Nobody there.

  Sighing, I sit in one of the wooden chairs around the kitchen table. I bend over to lace up, and the dingy, flaking linoleum assaults me as if I haven’t been seeing it every day for half my life. The landlord won’t replace it, yet we’ve been here far longer than anyone should ever rent an armpit like this.

  I sit up to tug on the other shoe, and look at the kitchen table. It’s nicer, comparatively. We own the table; we don’t own the linoleum. And the table, for what it is, isn’t bad. I picked it out from a used furniture store. You can rent furniture — something I’d never realized. But after it’s rented, you can buy it, too. This table and chair set — the whole shebang — cost seventy bucks ten years ago. I bought it with my own money after sitting at the shitty old one Mom and Bill refused to replace and having a chair leg give out on me. Bill wanted to glue it back on, but I put my foot down. I found this set and brought it home.

  Every step other than loading it into Bill’s truck and bringing it inside I did on my own. I spent my own money. Nineteen years old, technically still a teenager. That may have been my first mistake: fronting the table without making them chip in. It was like feeding a stray animal. Now that I’d proved I would put out to support the household, they were dependent. I don’t remember agreeing to handle the whole rent. It happened gradually, like a frog slowly boiling to death.

  Once my running shoes are on tight, the phone rings again. It’s getting on my nerves. I snatch it up.

  “Who the hell is this?”

  The voice on the other end seems duly chastised. It stammers before answering. “Angela? This is Gina. Is … is your mom there, honey?”

  My face flushes. If there were a mirror in front of me, I’d find myself facing a tomato with almond-brown eyes. My skin is already a few shades darker than Bill’s, but I blush just fine.

  “Oh, I’m sorry, Gina. There were a few …”

  “It’s fine, honey. Can I talk to Maria?”

  Maria. Gina. Angela. Why does everyone seem to have a name that ends with A? By comparison, Bill’s and Hunter’s Anglo names are like sledgehammers.

  “Sure. Of course.” I shout for Mom, who picks up the phone in the other room, from her chair by the TV.

  I grab my keys. I grab my pepper spray. I grab my whistle. I don’t need anything else. That’s what’s so great about running: in the end, it’s me and the road. Two of the three things I always take are a necessity of this place, not the run itself. I’ve had to use the whistle once and the spray twice, though to be fair one of those times was on a dog. Now I don’t run after dark, but I can’t stomach the probably intelligent advice people give about women never running alone. “Alone” is the reason I run. Between my job at the restaurant and my chore-laden home life, it’s the only time I ever truly get to myself.

  I take our street to its end, and turn right. There’s a park farther on, with trails that look nice — but park areas are the most dangerous in a place lik
e this. I head farther up, finding the trail that snakes through a hilly patch of the dry but beautiful land that’s a hallmark of Southern California.

  It’s probably not a great idea to run alone here either, but it’s wide open and I’m fast enough that even if someone tried to pin me on the path, I could off-road to population and safety. I’d need to watch out for rattlesnakes, but I’ll take the reptilian sort of over the human variety any day.

  My mind wanders while I’m running. The path offers an even clearer view of downtown than our porch does, and I can clearly make out not just Hunter’s tower (I hate that I know he owns the penthouse), but the more angular building that I understand holds his company, Dreadnought Records.

  I hate how ubiquitous Dreadnought is. Two years ago, nobody had heard of them. Now, they’re everywhere. Dreadnought-signed artists are winning Grammys. They parlayed one of their catchier songs into a Super Bowl ad on Sunday and a viral hit by Monday morning. Normally, those of us on the bottom don’t know the companies behind our music, but the press loves Duncan Reed, and they’re curious about the much shyer Hunter Altman.

  Rolling Stone was only the start. Even from a distance, Hunter’s found a way to vex me forever.

  I don’t want to think about any of that.

  I run harder. At a certain point, once I push myself hard enough, all I can really do is focus on breathing. I don’t want to think about anything else. I only want to feel the pounding of my feet and the burning in my lungs. I can’t breathe through my nose anymore; I have to open my mouth to get enough oxygen to fuel me. But I keep going. Soon, I start to get lightheaded, and I know from experience that when I finally slow, I’m going to feel like puking.

  You’re not really supposed to sprint too long — short bursts only. Especially if you haven’t done a lot of sprinting, which I haven’t. It’s hard on your system, killer on your muscles and joints. And hey, I’m not a kid anymore. I just had a birthday. I’m twenty-nine, old enough to have a stepbrother who’s thirty.