Almost Wrong

by Aubrey Parker

  That explains the suit. It’s one Sam likes. Maybe she made me get dressed for her. She gets off on me being powerful. There’s this thing we used to do where I’d sit in a leather arm chair with a glass of scotch, all gussied up in one of my fanciest suits, sipping my liquor and acting like a big shot who was too good for her. Samantha would then debase herself in several ways and end up either sucking me off or backing onto my fuckstick while I — you guessed it — continued to act like I was above it all. Maybe that’s what happened, and this morning was supposed to be an encore. I don’t think so, though. I’m positive I haven’t had sex with Sam. As messed up as I am, that’s one thing I feel sure I know better than to do.

  I wanted to forget … something. But the need to keep my dick out of Sam is one thing I’ve remembered.

  The buzzing goes on for another few seconds, stirring Samantha. She’s still wearing that stringer of come on her cheek and I consider telling her to wipe it off, but it’s funnier to see her stumble around with it on.

  “That’s your phone,” Samantha says.

  I reach for my phone. It’s Angela. It takes me a while to remember Angela Who? then to remember why that particular Angela would be calling.

  The haze clears a little, and I start to remember last night’s events. It feels like a lifetime ago. What I’m doing now, that’s normal for Hunter Fucking Altman. What I did yesterday, that was the mistake. I live large. I don’t bottom-feed. I don’t like the lack of power I feel while down in the muck.

  Part of me calls out to Angela — to answer the call. But my defenses hold that part back, bound and gagged, and the call vanishes from my screen, sent to voicemail.

  “Who was it?” Sam asks me, craning to look at the darkening screen.

  “Nobody.”

  But since I’ve already got my phone out, I decide to check my email. I see that Angela’s sent me an email, too, in addition to calling. It starts with a line saying she has some stuff she needs to say. That’s why she’s writing rather than calling. But then, of course, she just called. It smacks of desperation.

  I decide that I haven’t made a mistake by … by doing whatever happened last night. What I did was to dodge a bullet. Angela’s hot and we had that thing back in the day, but she’s clearly needy. I’m not that guy anymore — that poor kid from the old neighborhood. None of that old stuff from those days was good: the home, the father, the stepmother, the emotionally messed-up and apparently needy stepsister. I had a moment of weakness. I’m over it now.

  Hunter Fucking Altman is cooler than affection. Cooler than teenage crushes with kind and pretty girls.

  I read the email anyway.

  Maybe I was wrong, Angela writes. Maybe I reacted without giving you a chance to explain.

  Maybe, like you once told me, I’m just letting Mom and Bill pile their crap on top of me.

  I hated you for too long, Hunter, and I think I wanted to believe what Samantha said without giving you a chance, maybe to protect myself and what I felt. About myself, about you, and about the fact that I knew at some point, I’d need to go back home.

  But I guess it was all, including last night, about me more than you.

  I shouldn’t have stormed out like that.

  I saw last night, before Samantha got under my skin, that you’re still the man you always were.

  And I’m sorry.

  The buzzer rings. Stupid doorman. He should know never to let anyone out front disturb a man as rich and powerful as me before — I check the time on my phone — 2 p.m.

  “That’s the breakfast I ordered.” Samantha stands and wraps herself in my robe, still with that hilarious jizz on her cheek.

  I’m sorry, Hunter, Angela writes.

  It was my choice to stay away from you all this time. You didn’t abandon us out of spite. You did what you had to do.

  You’re still the man you always were.

  And I’m sorry.

  Samantha takes the call on the intercom. The delivery girl’s voice, canned and distant, sounds somehow familiar. She doesn’t even say she has food for Sam. She just says, “Thank you,” after Sam says, “Come up to the penthouse.”

  I’m sorry.

  I’d like to see you again, Hunter.

  I need to go downtown tomorrow anyway, so I’ll stop by sometime around —

  My pulse accelerates as I look around the room. Part of that is probably the ecstasy hangover. Part of it might be coke, if I did any. Most of it is seeing the condition of my apartment. It looks like Samantha went ‘round the world with someone, not particularly caring if she cheated on me after I wanted nothing to do with her. She’s broken chairs before. The woman has fucked the foundations off more than one bed.

  — around two or three, Angela’s email concludes.

  Samantha, wrapped in my robe, her tits practically hanging out.

  The trashed penthouse.

  I know I haven’t had sex with anyone since Angela and I hooked up in the limo last night, but the condition of my penthouse sure indicates otherwise. I’m high; I’m hung over; I’m clearly the worst kind of guy this kind of life has to offer. Looking around, I can almost read a story that didn’t actually happen. The place looks like I fucked a dozen girls last night. It’s not true, but right now I feel like all those fictional women are tattooed in a list on my guilty face.

  There’s a knock on the door. Samantha answers with evidence still on her cheek.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  ANGELA

  I was stupid.

  I feel stupid.

  I don’t know why I reacted like I did. All I know is that something sprang within me, like tripping a mousetrap. Samantha was being a superior bitch, but that had nothing to do with Hunter. He’d already told me she was a bitch. He was divided about Duncan. He likes his old friend a lot, but Duncan’s always been an asshole.

  What about last night failed to meet my expectations? Samantha was a bitch; Duncan was an asshole; Hunter was neutral.

  Well, not neutral.

  If Samantha was telling the truth, it sounds like the current Hunter Altman is kind of a mess. And also kind of an asshole. He crapped on the old neighborhood; he did drugs and drank; he apparently had sex with more than one woman at once.

  But the more I thought about it at home, after dodging more of Mom and Bill’s questions (many involving their reverse inheritance, which they thought I was working on) and sprinting into my room and crying, I decided that not much has changed at all.

  I told Hunter that he was that guy. But was he really? Or was this the expected progression of a man who grew up so damaged?

  He craps on the old neighborhood today? He craps on his dad, my mom … maybe dusting me some in the process? Well, he did that growing up, too.

  He does drugs? He drinks? Check. Those were just two of the many things Mom said made him bound for the pit of Hell.

  He has sex with multiple women? He may have always done that, and now he’s a hot billionaire.

  I don’t want to be with that Hunter, but I strongly suspect he’s no longer on the path to being that Hunter. During the time we spent together, he was kind and sensitive. Honest. And that, too, seemed familiar. He was such a delinquent hardass when we were kids, but when I got him alone and past his defensive wall, he was kind, sensitive, honest. It was hard to blame Hunter for how he was back then, and I see that it’s not fair to blame him for it now. He’s broken. It’s the same way I’m broken, but with different results — and with money as an accelerant.

  Now that I’m in his building, I want to apologize, not blame him. I was unfair last night. I’d barely been back in his life for a day, and not only had I expected him to change all at once (or rather, to become more truly who he’s always been all at once), I’d also been expecting him not to have a past.

  I should only care about the moments since Hunter pulled up in front of my house — that, and who he is deep inside, at his wounded core. Anything before then is none of my business. When you date a
man, you shouldn’t care that he had sex with others before you. Same logic here, and even though it means ignoring groups of women rather than singles, the principle is the same.

  I’m at the door before it occurs to me that whoever buzzed me in was female.

  Perhaps Hunter has an assistant. I know he has one because his assistant sent my card. Maybe he has another one — a woman. Or a maid. Or an appointment in his apartment.

  But the door opens, and I see Samantha. She’s in a loose robe, and clearly naked underneath. I can tell her chest is surgically enhanced, and somehow this feels like a victory. She also has something on her cheek, but I barely register it before the smile crawls across her face.

  “Oh,” Samantha says, “this is so much better than breakfast.”

  Hunter scrambles into view behind her. He’s wearing a suit with the fly halfway open, and I realize that since we met again, I haven’t seen him out of formalwear — other than that time in the limo, of course. Those two times in the limo. The day that I joined the notches on the infamous Hunter Altman’s bedpost, I think, with a resurgence of anger.

  “Angela,” he says, rising. I can see him stumbling over himself, searching for a plausible excuse for what’s clearly happened here.

  But my eyes just take in the apartment. The conclusion, about what he did to celebrate my departure, is obvious.

  “Angela!” he shouts as my face sets, as I spin on my heel.

  The elevator doesn’t open into Hunter’s apartment. For security reasons, it’s accessible down a short private hallway ending in another locked door. I’m traversing that hallway now in reverse. The elevator should still be waiting; it’s dedicated for this floor. After getting Sam’s buzz, the lobby attendant had to unlock the elevator and let me in.

  Hunter will reach me before I get there.

  “Angela!” he yells, now running.

  I can’t believe I was such a gullible little girl. Such a naive, gutter-trash conquest. I look back to see his frantic face running toward me, his shirt now untucked, his cheeks seemingly kissed with bright-red lipstick. Samantha is visible at the far end, still posing in the doorway like a minx.

  I had all the evidence in front of me. Samantha laid it all out. It didn’t matter that she was only telling me things I mostly knew. In fact, it was worse that she was telling me what I already knew. If she’d given me new information, I could blame Hunter for hiding his true nature. But now it was clear that I was to blame.

  I let my heart get the most of me. No, no, wait; tell the truth: I let my vagina get the most of me. How the hell did I make the leap between “Hunter wants me” and “Hunter loves me”? Nowhere in our past or present had that been said or implied. That had been my heart.

  My foolish, stupid, naive heart made the leap from lust to affection, then sold it upstream to my brain, which was desperate to believe it. Because it’s one thing to do what I did for love, but another to do it for lust. The first would make me almost noble: defying others for love. The second makes me a disloyal, abandoning, sell-out slut.

  Hunter runs to the elevator door and holds it open. “Angela! This isn’t what you think!” Huffing, catching his breath. “But goddammit, you were right about me. You were exactly right and—”

  I’ve heard enough.

  I shove him hard with both hands, right in the chest, with all my strength. I hate myself for it, but I’ve already started to cry. Hunter is a brick wall, and I’m slight, but still he staggers back, his face an awful mix of guilty and sad. As it should be.

  “I know I was right,” I tell him.

  The doors close.

  I sink to the floor then journey to the street, sobbing.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  ANGELA

  It takes three weeks of the normal grind before I feel myself again. Three weeks of dealing with Mom’s crap and Bill’s errands. Three weeks of waiting tables at TGI Friday’s, trying not to hate people who leave shoddy tips. Three weeks of running my path over and over, trying not to stare out at the damning Los Angeles skyline.

  But, little by little, I find I’m able to look in the mirror again. I try to forgive myself, and I mostly succeed. Mom and Bill are less forgiving. In their minds, I had Hunter on the hook and let him slip away. I’d almost healed the gash and pulled this family from the ghetto for good (and, I suspect Bill thinks, moved us on up to a dee-luxe apartment in the sky), but then I blew it.

  Great job, Angela. Great job failing to provide for this family.

  They say this to me and give me disappointed looks while I vacuum, while I pay the bills, while I drop off Mom’s pain meds and mow our tiny lawn.

  But I have to at least forgive myself, seeing as nobody else will forgive me. I was weak. I was compromised from below the belt. Hunter, intentionally or not (I prefer to think intentionally), reached into our shared past and found a lever he could use to exploit me and get into my pants. Again.

  I got my itch scratched too, I suppose, and therefore I’m largely to blame—for believing him and surrendering myself. I’m also to blame for breaking a taboo that held us apart our entire adult lives, but that somehow now feels like no big deal. Mom and Bill got married; so what? I can’t let their actions define me.

  I’m thinking this while doing the dishes my mother claims she can’t do because of her imagined disability.

  I work. I come home. I run. I work. The cycle repeats.

  I can’t hate Hunter the way I used to, even after the worst of the pain abates. He abandoned me in the past, sure — right after taking my virginity, no less. And yes, he betrayed me in the present, too. But he’s just so broken. If anything, I feel sorry for him.

  I feel sorry for Hunter with his penthouse and his helicopter and his jet and his limousines. I feel sorry for his drink and his drugs and his meaningless sex. I feel sorry for the hell he must live in daily. He’s a man with everything, and nothing.

  I’m feeling superior for my willingness to turn the other cheek — to forgive and pity those who’ve wronged me rather than simply despising them — as I get out of my car. I’m pleased that Mom and Bill are away, leaving me a few hours with myself. I park on the street because some asshole has blocked our driveway with a busted-up Ford adorned with fancy rims and tinted windows — the poor man’s vision of luxury. It’s hard to see things like that anymore, now that I’ve known opulence firsthand.

  I open the mailbox. There’s a red envelope inside.

  I look down, curious. I turn it over. There’s no return address, but my name is on the front. It’s lumpier than it should be, and something rattles inside.

  I open the envelope, and a strange thing falls out. A key. Inside the card — a birthday greeting without any signature — there’s an address. Whose, I don’t know.

  “Just accept it,” says a voice.

  I look over and see Hunter getting out of the busted Ford. He must have borrowed it for this dramatic reveal, sure that I’d run at the sight of his billionairemobile.

  He doesn’t come closer. He’s twisting something nervously in his hands: probably the keys to that piece of shit.

  “I didn’t do what you think I did, Angela, but I did more than enough. I know you hate me. I won’t try to convince you I’m a good guy, if I ever was. I know who I am. I get that it’s who I’ll always be. But that doesn’t mean I can’t be at least decent, if I try hard enough.”

  I look down at the envelope in my hands.

  Just accept it, he said.

  “Please don’t fight me on this, Angela,” he says. “Please just take it. There are no strings attached in any way. In fact, I request you don’t even call me. I’m here because I want to be sure you take it, but you’ll never see me again after today unless you want to.”

  I turn the envelope over. “What is it?” I ask, more surprised than angry.

  “It’s a key to your apartment.”

  I look at my house.

  “Not theirs, Ang. Yours. They stay here. It’s a condition of accep
ting it. I’ve already arranged to buy the house from your landlord, but you can’t tell Maria or Dad it’s been sold, and especially to whom. I want you to have the utility bills sent to my accountant.”

  I look down at the key. Shockingly, I’m not angry, too tired for rage.

  “No,” I say.

  “No?”

  “I won’t let you pay my rent.”

  Hunter walks closer. Despite my imagined stoicism, my heart beats faster.

  He’s shaking his head. “I’m not going to pay your rent, Angela. I’m going to pay theirs — or, really, just buy the house. You are in charge of your rent for as long as you want to be. Just so you know, you’ll be paying my office because I bought that place, too. But we’ll charge you just under market.”

  I don’t know how to react. It’s not every day your billionaire stepbrother buys you an apartment, announces you’re moving into it, then declares himself your landlord.

  I look up, a query in my eyes.

  “Because you don’t want charity,” he says, answering the question I’ve not yet asked. Again, he nods toward the house. “But I won’t let you keep giving charity either.”

  I look down at the key. “I can’t accept this.”

  “You’re not accepting anything. I’m giving to them. I just don’t want them to know.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s really for you, Angela.”

  There’s a beat of silence between us. I understand what he’s doing, but as much as I want to stomp my foot and refuse, there’s no way. I’ll still pay about what I’m paying now, I imagine, but it’ll be in my own place. How I’ll explain this benefaction to Mom and Bill, I don’t know, but they’re used to handouts. It won’t be hard.

  “Why are you doing this?”

  His eyes are sad, regretful. “I have to do something. I don’t want to be tied to my dad or your mom anymore. At all. But it’s not fair for you to be holding the bag. This is my solution. I’ll pay, and you’ll pay, but you’ll at least have your own place. You’re off the hook, and I get an unburdened conscience without Dad on my back.”