by Corri Lee
Lifeless grey eyes stared up at me, leaving only the look of dead panic. I was still smiling when I looked down at her and shoved the pillow back underneath her head. Her features still remained a mystery, but her eyes were just so... there, and I got a sense that they’d propelled all kinds of hate at me before.
She looked so small in that huge bed. One tiny life—what did it matter if she was gone? She deserved to die...
Gasping, I lurched out of the bed in Daniel and Jonathan’s guest room and staggered across the hallway to the bathroom. It had a been a night of too much wine, too much chocolate and too many musicals to top a day of too much emotional abuse, and consequentially, I looked like shit. My eyes were like huge craters in my pallid face, and my lips were starting to chap again.
And so began another cycle of illness.
The guys didn’t flinch at the sound of me retching, seduced into a coma by the cognac Jonathan had cracked open when he’d gotten home and heard the miserable tale of my failed relationship. I’d been right there with them in their alcoholic buzz up to a point but never quite managed to shake off that sense of uselessness.
I wished it wasn’t so late, or early. It was still mostly dark outside, so I knew it must be in the small numbers of the AM and not really an appropriate time to take a shower. The nightmare had left me drenched in a cold sweat and it made me feel dirty, just like last time.
I was vaguely aware that I’d been having a lot of bad dreams recently, but didn’t tend to remember them when I’d woke up. They were almost definitely the same one. There was no mistaking that triumphant flare of pride when my eyes first opened—the one I couldn’t control but made me feel awful anyway.
With no methods of hygiene available, I slouched back into the lounge to attack rather than drink some more wine. If it made me sick again, I didn’t care. I didn’t want to be capable of cognitive thought for at least a fortnight, or until scientists could develop an effective way to selectively erase memories like in Men In Black. Whichever came first.
I made the stupid mistake of looking at my phone. The picture of Blaze and I was still the wallpaper, but that wasn’t what felt like a dagger in my heart. He’d been trying to call me. A lot. For my own sanity, I dismissed the notification for his missed calls and erased all twelve of his text messages without reading them. If I let myself believe there was a way back, I was likely to take it.
I missed him, and my still throbbing muscles reminded me that he’d spent an afternoon making it clear that his place was inside me in every way. It was, and I’d probably feel him there for days, getting lost in the fantasies of how hotly we burned for each other, and how bone-shakingly awesome it would be if we found our ways back to each other.
Maybe I had handled it wrong. Maybe I should have just been happy to have had the chance at all...
“Hi, this is Blaze. Obviously you’re calling at a ridiculous hour and I’m sleeping so leave me a message and I’ll call you back when this man’s brain opens for business.”
I called five times before I gave up and told myself that I needed to cut my losses. He’s been upfront in telling me that he couldn’t get attached and obviously had a damn good reason. This was never meant to get serious; it was always supposed to just be both of us getting our end away, and he was going to realise that too. We’d just gotten swept up in the drama, but in a few days, this would all look much better. We might even be friends again one day. Purely platonic friends. Another notch in my ‘platonic penis’ belt.
I sat and drank for hours, but didn’t really feel like it was touching my sobriety. When the early rumble of traffic started to move outside, I sneaked out as quietly as possible with my sights set on a secluded café that kept stacks of books that people had left behind. Failing that, I’d buy a new book. I wanted to get lost in someone else’s woeful romance.
When I’d sourced my caffeine fix, I tried to distract myself with as much banal bullshit as possible to clear my mind before I started reading. I logged into my email account on my mobile phone and went through the tedious task of deleting all the junk mail. Depressingly, that left me only with emails from Hunter with various ‘URGENT’ titles. Idiot. He thought anything was urgent when it came from his mouth/fingers. I counted through all the change in my purse, taking out the copper change for the charity box. That was my good deed for the day.
It was around the time I was sorting through my old receipts that I was reminded of the last time I’d declared a good deed done.
A faded black and dog eared business card covered in gold font stared up at me from between the scraps of paper. A business card for one Calloway Ryan of New York—the sexy suit from Oxford street. What was it with these gorgeous men and their equally as impressive names? I hadn’t made good on my promise to call him and I still had his money clip...
And then I found the creased wedding invitation from Hunter stuffed into a credit card compartment. That invitation to Japan was still open. I knew the language, had the money and could contact the right people...
Or I could swallow my pride and throw myself into the lava pits. The moment I looked at my phone and saw Blaze’s face staring up at me was the same moment my mind was made up. I could sit around moping or I could start to make some big changes in my life—productive this time. I’d been offered so many opportunities and never taken advantage of them, and running away was my forte. It was my tendency to build bridges to replace those I’d burned, but now it was time to rebuild some of those that weren’t completely destroyed.
And if I had to sell a little of my soul to get there, it was a cost I’d gladly pay. Blaze wasn’t the only one who could find a way into an impenetrable vessel and make changes on the inside that pushed their way out.
I felt invincible when I made the call I swore I’d never make. He sounded shocked but pleasantly surprised when he answered, his voice bright, so I knew I hadn’t woken him.
“Emmeline, are you all right?” I wasn’t, not quite yet.
“I’m... Look, I know this is unexpected and I probably have no right to ask, but—”
“Just tell me what you need. I’d do anything for you, you know that.”
“I need your help.”
Calmly, I explained my plans and justified them completely so he had no reason to think that I was acting on a whim. He agreed that what I wanted was sensible and not unreasonable. We decided to meet in the café I was in to discuss the finer details and set a solid plan for the foreseeable future.
When the taxi arrived to take us back to the flat, I left Emmy White behind with my half-drunk cup of coffee. I left her there with all my behaviours and predispositions that had made me become such a weak person. I left her with my morals and my idea of what was ‘right’.
I left as Emmeline Tudor, mega-mogul’s daughter and heiress to billions, and my life had just begun.
part two
the brides
When I walked out of Hell, I walked right into the paradise next door. Strange, new smells filled the air that barely had space left between the sounds of blaring traffic and street sellers toting their goods. At night, the city lit up in neon and halogen, guiding club-goers into the chrome painted bars that hid behind inconspicuous staircases and curtained doorways right on the street.
By day, people coursed in rows around me, ably ducking between slower movers with the fluidity of dancers, racing between appointments the way they had in London.
But this wasn’t London. It was a whole new metropolis full of tiny samples of a huge population that cooperated despite it’s internal differences and difficulties. Life filled every corner, be it the chic coquettes who tiptoed on expensive heels or the trees that lined the streets. It was the urban interpretation of me; full of paradoxes, contradictions and compromise. Except I was anonymous. I was a nobody. I would be a somebody.
This was New York; a whole new kind of Hell —and boy, was I dying to become better acquainted with the sulphur pits and brimstone.
M
y decision to leave London didn’t go as unnoticed as I’d planned. My mother, the eminent Ivy Tudor, was sat in the family’s very expensive Mercedes when the driver, Oscar, arrived to collect me from my flat, her suitcase already packed in the boot.
That was a definite advantage of being a trophy wife to one of the richest men on the planet; she’d compromised on the ridiculous surname and bolshy husband, and been given a very liberal, comfortable life in return. As a result, she was coming with me to New York whether I liked or not, arguing that I’d never truly been alone in the world and needed breaking in.
She had no clue. I’d always been alone. If anything, I preferred it that way when my options for company were the dishonest, entitled cretins who always had a lie to spin. She should know, she married one.
In the past, I’d done my best to avoid the hilarity that surrounded us when my father, Henry Tudor, came into money very quickly and to great effect. We went from being a modest family living in an uncomfortable corner of Wales and quickly became the Tudor family of The Tudor Initiative.
Henry milked the extravagance, buying six buildings around the world as business centres and naming them after the six wives of Henry VIII. He should have stopped there, but loved the feeling of possession over everything.
In many ways, my father was an ugly man. His receding ochre hair, ruddy complexion and villainous pencil moustache was just a face to the power hungry, narcissistic spendthrift who’d been allowed to control far too much of the world’s economy. I’d gone out of my way to avoid any involvement with him and his business for it’s entire existence, despite the way he begged me to lend my brain to his ventures. However, if the old adage that ‘desperate times call for desperate measures’ was true, I was almost certainly screaming out for mercy.
Before my plane had even left the runway, I’d had several calls from my friends begging me to reconsider. How they’d found out, I had no idea. I’d wanted to slip away quietly without a fuss. Of all my pleading conversations, none came from the one person who might have actually made a difference, in spite of the flood of correspondence the night before. I was going to escape him but he might have been able to say something—anything to undo the damage.
I’d wasted my summer on Blaze, a man I’d wished for but had no idea what the cost of a granted wish was. After years of battling issues with anorexia nervosa, depression, hallucinations bordering on schizophrenic and self-harm, he was a hot blast of positivity I’d needed for too long.
What we’d had, we’d known would be complicated from the outset; I had my problems and my unrequited love for former best friend Hunter, and he had commitments to caring for a sick woman. I’d been led to believe that we’d just gotten carried away with something fated and that given half the chance, it could flourish, and that our inability to commit to each other was based on fear. I never imagined that he was babysitting a sick wife until she popped her clogs so he could reap the benefits of being next of kin. That kind of callous act was something I saw in Henry and something that had no place in my life. No amount of extravagant dates and expensive engagement rings could make me commit myself to a life of being a mistress and wondering if I was as inconsequential as she was.
I could have fixated on his mistakes until I was blue in the face. I could have obsessed over every detail and tried to twist them until my thoughts no longer made sense. I could have swallowed my pride and abandoned my morals, and gone back to a blissful life of waiting for him to spare me his free time at the weekends.
But he’d given me back the spirit I’d lost the last time I fell in love with the wrong man. His insistence that I’d be his gave me no choice but to make a stand and put myself permanently out of reach so he’d have to learn that he couldn’t have it all his way.
Yes, I admit that I was running away because I didn’t believe that I could hold on to my conviction if he found me again, and he would. But I honestly thought that it was my way forward. Better for both of us. I doubted that he’d miss me when he stopped and realised that I was far too much hard work.
The minute we touched down on American soil, I already felt like I was home. My flight had been spent poring over dozens of spreadsheets outlining the budgets for all of Henry’s companies. He hadn’t been happy about me wanting to leave London but I’d won his favour by agreeing to oversee a discrepancy in staff morale at his New York building, The Seymour. If anyone could relate to feeling oppressed and squandered, it was me.
Henry really was disgustingly rich. I whistled when I saw how much money he was pumping into each venture and felt positively queasy when I saw how much profit he reeled in despite being in the midst of a recession. I had to give the guy his dues, he never could have made it this big if he wasn’t smart. My frosty resolve towards my father might have started to thaw, but I still hated his ethics and cavalier attitude towards his business relationships.
To stop myself feeling dirty for finally involving myself in his affairs, I considered myself to be an external auditor rather than the boss’ brainy daughter, and the money I earned from my work was a wage, not an entitlement from playing my part in the family business. It really did work out to be a ridiculous salary, but delusion and I were keen bedfellows.
Besides, I had my own wicked scheme. I was going to iron out all the kinks in The Tudor Initiative and show Henry where he’d been going wrong in an attempt to make him change his ways. He wouldn’t be able to take his money with him when he died, and I was determined to make sure he still had a soul when that day came.
Ivy stayed with me for two weeks in Henry’s million dollar apartment on the Upper East Side—naturally—and as the urbane chameleon she was, she knew all the sweetest spots of The Big Apple set to exhaust and distract. She fearlessly joined the masses of dainty women battling the streets in stilettos while I stuck safely to my flats, knew exactly who to flatter and bribe for a table in the most exclusive of restaurants, and shopped until she dropped in the haute couture boutiques that charged more for one handbag than I’d earned in one month at my old job in Double Booked—a quiet independent bookshop hidden in the London back streets.
Of course, in the name of change, affluence was going to have to be something I learned to take in my stride. If I stood a chance of gaining the respect of Henry’s American clients and employees, I had to learn to stop batting an eyelid at the astronomical bills that arose from restaurants and the ridiculous price tags on the designer suits I was going to have to wear. At least that’s what I was told. Apparently there was a fine line between exerting myself in the manner befitting a billionaire’s daughter dripping in money and being a shrewd, financially sensible entrepreneur. If that line was really there, I sure as hell couldn’t make it out.
The mould I’d set myself into gradually cracked and chipped away over those first fourteen days. Refusing to let me mope over a man, Ivy took the broken daughter who’d used her maiden name, Emmy White, and rebuilt her into city savvy Emmeline Tudor, the business woman. Like a girl playing with her dollies, she took me out of the comfort of the smart casual clothes I’d had to adjust to after my last makeover and pushed me to the limits of my tolerance to turn me into a full throttle, no nonsense, cosmopolitan queen with cherry red lips and stilts for shoes.
That first week of transformation was painful in every way. It was like having to learn how to dress, walk and interact like a human all over again, not the mention the crippling beauty treatments designed to groom me into one of the sophisticated queens who prowled the city streets like sprinting in foot-deforming shoes was an innate talent. While I wanted to do nothing more than sit out on the apartment’s balcony wrapped in a blanket, drinking to mourn my failed engagement, my mother forced me to bounce around town with her, determined that a post-break up makeover would make me feel better and not at all like grieving. She didn’t understand that it almost hurt to breathe and my head throbbed from lack of sleep because I couldn’t close my eyes without seeing him. She just wanted me to look how she’d alw
ays dreamed; healthy and successful, even if I was emotionally stunted.
When I saw the final result, I honestly thought I looked a little scary—like a woman who chewed up and spat out homeless folk who asked for spare change, pausing to tell them to get their acts together. I was assured that was the point, but it would never stick. Not being able to recognise my own reflection played on my old insecurities. I’d left London to ensure that I didn’t lose my identity by succumbing to temptation. If I kept this up, I was going to lose that identity anyway.
Ivy joined me for the first week of meetings in The Seymour for moral support, proving that she was definitely more than a pretty face and was far more keyed into how the businesses worked than I’d expected. I got some invaluable opportunities to tap into some of the strong relationships already forged with the head management types and a few nuggets of inside information on the real problems areas that I might not have necessarily mined if I’d strolled in on my own like She-Ra making outrageous claims to be a miracle worker. We went out for meals with board members, rubbed shoulders with some of New York’s other top running executives, lunched a la carte in Bryant Park and spared our weekends to see the sights I’d have to learn to take for granted.
But the gravity of being Henry’s trophy wife soon lured Ivy back to the Old Smoke, and she left me to make my own impression on the city. As soon as she left and I was finally alone, I ditched the heels and lipstick and let the chaos free me, walking through Central Park alone at night to invite trouble, tipping badly and missing ferries back from Coney Island. I began to acclimatise to the swell and roar of the approaching subway trains that broke the silence when I tried to sleep, distinguish every separate word yelled by the street sellers, and made a sure and certain way through crowds that didn’t end up in me being knocked sideways. I found myself falling deeper in love with the city’s lazy nonchalance—it’s self-contained lack of care for anyone else’s business. My life had once been a catastrophe of everyone knowing everyone else’s affairs, while New York threw it’s heels up and relaxed, not probing and not wanting to be told a word.