LUCI (The Naughty Ones Book 2)

by Kristina Weaver

  I’d have been lying if I didn’t say I missed the man I’d cavorted with around New York City, but it was as painful to think about Peter as it was to be a witness to my mother’s suffering.

  I’d left Peter because he told me he was responsible for breaking off my mother’s upcoming wedding — just weeks away — to his father. This was all because of a stupid misunderstanding. I’d joked to Peter, while helping my mother make cake and dress decisions, that she was a gold digger for the family fortune, choosing the priciest options for the wedding. The joke fell flat.

  Troubled by what I’d said in jest, Peter had done some digging and discovered a quirk that he had no way of understanding. My mother had been asking for money from his father for various things, but instead of spending it, she was funneling it into a savings account.

  Her actions made sense to me, but they looked suspicious to an outsider — suspicious enough for Peter to take Frank aside and tell him his bride-to-be wasn’t all that she seemed.

  I was so ashamed that it was my idiot brain that had made the joke in the first place. Peter wouldn’t have hired a private investigator to go over my mother’s life and practices with a magnifying glass otherwise.

  I looked over at her, looking tiny and frail wrapped up in a crocheted blanket whose colors had faded significantly since my childhood.

  Her suffering was all my fault.

  I supposed I couldn’t guarantee that neither Peter nor Frank would’ve eventually run some kind of background check on her prior to the actual marriage, and I didn’t know if there was some kind of prenuptial agreement that would have been drafted up. The Bly family was worth billions, both father and son. It would probably make sense for such a thing to be signed. Net worth that ranged in the billions was a tricky thing. And Peter had mentioned, in that final, nasty fight we’d had, that his father had been deceived before.

  But it had been my stupidity that had made Peter think to dig into my mother, to see if she really rang true. And her savings account, if a person didn’t know her, didn’t know just what had happened to her to make her do it, did look suspicious.

  I was the one at fault for her wedding being called off. My mother had to contact all of the businesses she’d contracted — caterers and bakeries and dress shops and reception hall — herself, informing them that she would no longer be requiring their services. That had been just as difficult for me to witness. She had been thrilled to be marrying again, to throw a wedding to celebrate the love she had for Frank, and I had been the one responsible for all of it being taken away.

  I sighed and tapped at my phone, unable to watch the two happy lovers reuniting after overcoming their differences on the television. I ordered pizza online to spare us the effort of foraging in the kitchen for lunch. The bread had gone bad a couple of days ago, fuzzy blue mold colonizing the loaf, neither of us having much of an appetite after our hearts had broken. We mourned the same way, I realized, spending this time with my mother. We liked to hunker down and huddle around our misery. She preferred the television to distract her, and I escaped into my phone, paging through meaningless memes and quips and quotes on social media. Neither of us liked to eat, or to leave the house. We needed to eat, though, and if someone brought some hot pizza to the door for us, fresh and smelling good and already here, maybe we’d find it in ourselves. It had worked before, earlier in the week. The leftovers had just run out today at breakfast. It would surely work again.

  We did make quite a pair. It might’ve looked pathetic from the outside, but it made sense to the two of us. We didn’t want to see anyone or anything. It was a self-imposed hermitage, a time for us to untangle our lives, examine the places where things had gone wrong, and move forward again.

  I was unemployed and single and homeless all at once. My mother had graciously let me move back into her house, but she hadn’t had much of a choice. I’d shown up at her front door with just my purse, tears streaking black mascara down my cheeks. I hadn’t bothered even packing a bag at the penthouse. I hadn’t wanted anything there. It was full of things that Peter had bought me, or that I’d bought myself, with his money. I didn’t want anything to do with any of that. They were all tied to him, and I just wanted to purge him from my life, from my brain, from my memories and feelings. From my heart, too, but that was proving to be harder to achieve.

  Almost of their own accord, my fingers opened my messages on my phone, tapped on his contact. Still visible was the text that had cemented his suspicions about my mother. It was a photo of her posing sassily in a frilly, fluffy wedding dress. I’d joked that she’d asked for the most expensive dress in the entire store, and he hadn’t answered.

  He’d texted since then. Several times. The most recent of which was yesterday.

  That one read, “You have food rotting in your refrigerator in the penthouse. The bellhop had the room opened up. He thought it was a dead body. That you’d offed yourself in there. You could think of other people for once. Think about what I felt when they called me, when I rushed over there.”

  I snorted. What I thought about was how ridiculous it was for Peter to think that I would’ve killed myself over him. I wasn’t that torn up.

  “What’s funny?” my mother asked.

  “Just something stupid,” I told her. “A dumb joke.”

  She blinked at me as if she found it surprising that I could still have a capacity for enjoying jokes. She’d seen me cry a lot, but she couldn’t know the extent of those tears, or their motivations. I was sorry, sure, about the way things had ended with Peter. It was personally devastating. But it was even worse that I’d ruined my own mother’s relationship. I found myself crying over that more and more often and less over Peter.

  An older text from him, for example: “Very mature, Gemma, ignoring all attempts at communication. I guess I should’ve expected as much from a twenty-three-year-old.”

  When could I be done with twenty-three? I’d thought that this was going to finally be my year, the age when I’d come into my own, a job, a penthouse, a wonderful boyfriend. Instead, it had been a travesty. I was eager for twenty-four, if only to leave this entire year behind me.

  Case in point, the first text Peter had sent me after I’d left his office forever: “Don’t think you’re going to get to keep on living in the penthouse. I’ve learned my lesson with charity cases.”

  Such a prince.

  And yet here I was, agonizing over each character of each of those three messages, wondering if there was something hidden there, something I couldn’t discern. Maybe there was something I was missing, some meaning that could only be read between the lines.

  I was pathetic.

  “Don’t contact me again,” I typed, then sent it. I felt an odd finality when the indication that my message had been delivered popped up. But then I panicked when it changed to “read,” meaning that Peter was holding his own phone in this very minute, examining the words I’d sent him to divine their own meaning. I worked swiftly as another icon popped up, showing that he was writing a message back to me. I tapped on his contact and punched the block button with my finger. Instantly, his name grayed out, a red warning icon informing me that Peter Bly had been blocked from contacting me.

  I realized I’d been breathing hard during this entire encounter, as if I’d been running away. Whatever. It was done. I deleted Peter’s number, deleted those messages, as if doing so would scrub him from my brain. All I wanted to do was forget all of this and move forward.

  And I knew that I couldn’t do it without telling my mother the truth.

  “Mom?” She turned to me, and I almost faltered, but I steeled myself instead. She deserved this truth, and I deserved whatever consequences stemmed from its revelation. “I have to tell you something, and it is really hard.”

  “You’re not pregnant, are you?” she asked, sounding tired.

  “No. It’s worse than that. I…I know why your relationship with Frank ended.”

  “Gemma, I know why it ended,
too,” she said. “Because of dishonesty on my part. Because of Peter and his private investigator. Because Frank couldn’t trust me.”

  “No.” I shook my head. “It ended because of me.”

  “That just doesn’t make sense,” my mother said, attempting to dismiss me by turning back to the television. Something had driven the lovers apart again on the program. It was as if they couldn’t ever get it right.

  “It’s true,” I insisted. “Listen to me. Peter wouldn’t have been involved if it wasn’t for me. The private investigator wouldn’t have dug as deeply if it wasn’t for me.”

  She smiled sadly. “Your presence in Peter’s life, your relationship with him, didn’t end my relationship,” my mother said. “You can’t blame yourself for that.”

  “I can, and you should, too. I…made a joke. A bad joke. I don’t know why I made it. It was the day you and Frank came into Peter’s office, the day you and I went out to make all the decisions for your wedding.”

  My mother teared up at my mention of those joyful preparations, and I wished I could stop, wished I could avoid hurting her even more, but she had to know the truth. I had to tell it to her.

  “I said to Peter, in an offhand way, that you were eager to spend Frank’s money.” I swallowed hard. “That you were a gold digger. And I made the joke again when you tried on fancy dresses. You know. The one you only tried on for fun. With all the tulle.”

  “I remember the one,” my mother said faintly.

  “It wasn’t until later, after you had called me with the news that the wedding was canceled, when I confronted Peter about it, that he told me it was my comment that had prompted him to make the inquiries.” My heart was beating rapidly, my breath coming and going just as quickly as it had been when I blocked Peter’s number from my phone. The truth hurt so much, but after it was out of my mouth, just hanging in the air between us, I felt almost a great relief. Now my mother could understand that I was the only one to blame, not her. Now she could move on from her own heartache, stop watching these damn movies that gave too much stupid hope and not enough reality. Sometimes, the hero and heroine didn’t end up together again. Sometimes, they had to just pick it all up and tell themselves that life had to go on. That was the truth.

  “Do you really think I’m a gold digger?” my mother asked quietly.

  “No, of course not.”

  “Then why did you say that about me?” She looked at me as if she were seeing me for the first time, and that hurt even worse. “That’s not a kind thing to say about anyone, Gemma. Especially about your mother.”

  “It was just a joke.” It sounded like a weak excuse, and it was. If I hadn’t said it, maybe things would've been the same. Maybe we would’ve been making last-minute wedding preparations today instead of letting the shadows get long inside the house, neither of us interested in turning on a lamp.

  “I know you and I weren’t very rich, when you were younger and still living here,” she said, drawing herself up with broken dignity. “But I like to think we had what we needed. And we had each other. That was the important thing. I know our lives were frugal, that we had to be careful with the money, but I resent the idea that you imagined I might throw myself at money, given the opportunity.”

  “That’s not what I wanted to do,” I said. “And I agree. You gave me everything when I was young. I know…the sacrifices you made. And I’m thankful. It was a stupid joke. I was only trying to be funny, trying to impress Peter.”

  “A lot of truth is said in jest, Gemma.”

  “Nothing about this was true.” I shifted on the couch, thoroughly miserable now but embracing it. My mother deserved to be angry at me, to rake me over the coals, and it was up to me to take it. This was her right, just as it was my mistake. “I was just as uncomfortable as you to spend that money. Peter was always pushing me. Did you know he paid for everything? Every single expense I had was settled with his money. He said he wanted to do it because he had more money than he knew what to do with and I didn’t have any money at all.”

  “What do you mean?” my mother asked. “You had money. You had a savings account. I asked you about it.”

  “I didn’t have a savings account,” I said. “I was living from paycheck to paycheck. I didn’t make enough money to feed myself sometimes, and I was always late on rent. I worked two jobs until Peter gave me that one, and that wasn’t until we met you and Frank for dinner that night, on my birthday.”

  “What?” My mother gaped at me.

  I confessed everything. It seemed as if one hard truth had freed up the way for others. It was a catalyst for me to come clean about all of the lying I’d done since moving to New York City, all the false assurances to my mother that everything was, in fact, just fine, when nothing was. I told her about walking dogs, about cocktail waitressing, about the horrible apartment, the things I’d pawned to keep it even if I hated it, the way I’d scrimped and saved only to pay my bills, the utter despair I’d felt that I wasn’t living my dream, that I was barely surviving at all. I told her all of it, absolutely unloaded, and by the time I was done, I was hoarse and exhausted, emptied out.

  Seeing my mother’s mouth work wordlessly in disbelief and shock undid me. I had hurt her so badly that suddenly the truth had come pouring out of me: all the lies I’d fed her over the past months about my successes in New York City detangled. I didn’t understand what I was trying to do in this moment, only that I’d confessed to ruining my mother’s wedding and relationship and life and I wanted a completely clean slate while I was at it. It was the only way either of us was going to move forward.

  Maybe I was just trying to protect myself. And maybe it was a punishment.

  “Gemma, I don’t understand why you thought you had to lie to me about all of this,” she finally said in a small, sad voice. “I’m your mother. You can tell me anything.”

  And now I had to say the worst truth of all, the one buried at the heart of the world of lies I’d built.

  “I would imagine that I told you those lies to protect you,” I said. “Much like you lied all those years to protect me.”

  Chapter 14

  Childhood had, overall, been a positive experience for me, but it was only through the intervention — and lies — of my mother. If I had known the truth of the ugliness of that period, I wouldn’t have such an ambivalent attitude toward everything.

  It had been as normal as it could’ve been. I had gone to birthday parties my classmates held, played in the park after school in the kinds of quick and fluid friendships that form on monkey bars. From the outside, my little family looked normal. From the inside, from my perspective, anyway, it seemed that everything was normal. Sure, maybe the dads of all of the little girls I played with were more visible presences in their lives, but nothing else really seemed amiss.

  And that was exactly what my mother had wanted to do: present the illusion of normalcy. The truth was, our family situation was far from normal. I would never have known if I hadn’t witnessed the truth for myself.

  My father was absent often. When he was at home, he liked to exorcise whatever insecurities or frustrations he had inside himself by hitting my mother. I didn’t discover this until I was already in my teens — a child nearly grown — but it had been going on for the duration of their marriage. It was, perhaps, the reason why I played outside so often — if not in the park, then on the front lawn, the driveway. Why I attended sleepovers nearly every weekend but never hosted any of them myself. Why my mother skipped parent-teacher conferences or asked to conduct them by phone. Why she styled her hair to fall romantically over one eye. Why she caked on her makeup and kept the lights low throughout the house.

  None of it was strange to me because she had made it canon. My mother had shaped the reality that we needed to embrace. She’d edited out all the ugly parts and put together happiness for me from the footage that remained. She was so careful to protect me that I only saw my father in glimpses and backward glances as I was shooed upst
airs at his arrivals. I wouldn’t have been able to pick his face out of a lineup of other tall, dark-haired, mustached men. I didn’t even know, for sure, what he did for a living. Where he stayed when he wasn’t at home. I wasn’t to bother him. My mother made that much clear. And if anyone asked, he was a businessman — one who traveled almost constantly.

  “Go up and watch TV,” my mother would tell me. I was the envy of all my friends because I had a television in my room — one that was secondhand and peppered its programs with static snow, but a television nonetheless. It was only there because it was a distraction mechanism. Something I could turn on to drown out the loud music my mother would play as a distraction from her own private hell.

  My father would beat her to the tune of soaring gospel, golden oldies, sweeping classical arrangements, and whatever else the radio downstairs could pipe into our lives. She wasn’t picky about her music. He wasn’t picky about where his blows landed.

  How did I make it through my childhood without realizing anything was wrong? It was a testament to my mother’s misguided resilience, her careful blocking — sitting on a couch for two straight days as if nothing were wrong when he’d broken a couple of her ribs and she couldn’t walk without limping or crying out in pain, or always standing on my left if her left eye was blackened, or employing a platoon of scarves when he’d left fingermarks on her neck. Or maybe it was a testament of my ability to firmly believe that everything was okay.

  I wasn’t a rebellious teen, but I was very busy. My mother’s emphasis on spending as little time at home as possible translated into me signing up for all the extracurricular activities I thought I could handle. Academic teams and debate competitions and writing club deadlines kept me after school almost every afternoon into evening, or at the library nearby. My schedule was unpredictable. I could be home some days directly after school, or I could stay overnight at one of my girlfriends’ houses, preparing for a presentation the next day.