Can't Stand the Heat

by Shelly Ellis

  “Is this what you were telling Stephanie about . . . what you had to give me?” Lauren nodded. “Yeah, she told me. She also told me how you manhandled her.” She pointed her finger up at him. “I may have let you push me around for two years, James, but if I ever hear of you doing anything like that to one of my sisters again, I’ll—”

  “Oh, Lauren,” he said, cutting her off. “Always full of bluster, aren’t you? I really do look forward to giving you these.”

  She watched cautiously as James pulled out several envelopes.

  “Bills.” He extended the white stack to her. “Lots and lots of bills . . . all addressed to you.”

  She took the stack. She slowly began to rifle through it.

  There were several bills there, all from credit card companies and department stores she didn’t use or go to anymore. She scanned the totals in the stack: $5,547 here, $9,032 there. These were charges she had made months ago, back when she would make daily trips to Saks Fifth Avenue and Nordstrom before heading to the local spa and later meeting her sisters for lunch.

  Lauren gave a dispirited sigh as she stared down at the pile of envelopes. These bills were a reminder of how sad and empty her life had been back then. She had traded so much—her talent, her self-respect, and her voice—for what? A six-thousand-dollar purse and a weekly manicure and pedicure?

  The bills also reminded her how she was still shackled to her old life by backbreaking debt. After she left James, he had decided to punish her the best way he knew how: with money, or lack thereof. He refused to pay the bills he had footed for so long, and Lauren would have proudly paid them herself . . . if she could afford it. The cards had all been in Lauren’s name and now she was nearly eighty thousand dollars in debt. Bill collectors called her apartment constantly. She rarely if ever answered her phone anymore.

  It’s my own fault, she thought as she continued to stare at the pile of envelopes with disappointment. I shouldn’t have been so careless. I shouldn’t have bought things I couldn’t afford to pay for myself.

  “I’m surprised they didn’t know that you don’t live at that address anymore,” James said, interrupting her thoughts. “It’s been months since you moved out. I’m surprised you haven’t told them, Lauren.”

  He was needling her, taunting her just like he did in the old days. But she didn’t have to take it anymore. She wasn’t going to take it.

  “Yeah, well, thanks for bringing these to me.” She began to climb inside her car. “Now if you’ll excuse me, James. I really have to—”

  Lauren stopped midsentence when she felt him grab her forearm. Half of her body was inside the car. Her other foot remained on the parking lot cement.

  Her eyes suddenly darted up to his face. She could see all his features now that he was no longer backlit. She could even see the brown freckles on his button nose. James still held his grin, but the smile didn’t go past his pink lips. The rest of his face looked angry, very angry. His dark brows were furrowed and his eyes had narrowed into thin slits. Veins bulged along his brow.

  She recognized this face. It was the precursor to his equivalent of a volcanic eruption.

  “Why are you rushing off?” he said with a false lightness. He took a step toward her. “That’s not all I had to say. Those bills aren’t the only debt you owe, Lauren. Have you forgotten that you owe me, too?”

  “James, I don’t . . . I don’t owe you anything,” she said, fighting to keep her voice calm and not to tease his anger. “What you gave me when we were together were gifts. You never said I had to pay you back.”

  “Perhaps, but when I gave your sisters or your mother money, that wasn’t a gift. Maybe you were paid”—he paused and looked her up and down—“for services rendered, but they weren’t. I loaned them money out of the kindness of my heart, because they are your family.”

  James was telling the truth. During the years she had dated him, he had spent liberally on her family, even giving her mother a six-figure loan when she asked for it.

  “But they all seem to have forgotten that,” he continued.

  “Where did all the niceness go when I was no longer footing the bill? Now they’re rude to me . . . abrupt. So now I want to collect. I want all my money back.”

  She shook her head. “That’s not fair. You never stated those terms in the beginning. If you had, they never would have taken it.”

  “Fair?” He laughed. “Who gives a shit about fair, Lauren? I want my money, but”—he paused, holding up his finger—“I am willing to reconsider. I’m willing to forget and let bygones be bygones if . . .”

  “If what?”

  “. . . if you come back to me.”

  “Why do you want me to come back, James? So you can beat me? Humiliate me?”

  “So I got angry one night and made a mistake! You made mistakes, too! But I forgave you! I love you, Lauren.”

  “Love me? You don’t love me! You want to own me, but you don’t. Find yourself another human punching bag! I’m not going back to you, and I’m not paying you a goddamn dime!”

  She tried to tug out of his grasp and climb into her car, but he wouldn’t release her. Her heartbeat began to accelerate again as she frantically looked around the parking lot. With the exception of her car and his car, the lot was mostly deserted. If James decided to try something and she screamed, no one would hear her out here, and even if they did hear her, it would take them time to get to her. She was on her own.

  “Let go of me!” She hoped that her voice wasn’t trembling, even though she was a quivering mass inside.

  He looked bored by her display of bravery.

  “I said, ‘Let go!’ ” She tried to tug her arm away, but to no avail. James’s grip only tightened. She winced at the pain in her arm.

  “Why do you insist on dragging this out, Lauren? What are you trying to prove? Huh? You know if you come back, I’ll take care of all of this for you. I’ll forget about what Stephanie owes me . . . what your mother owes me. I’ll wipe the slate clean. No more bills, and you get your old allowance back. Come on.” His voice dropped an octave. “Let daddy make it all go away.”

  Lauren cringed. She hated when he called himself “daddy.”

  “Let go of me, James!”

  “You can move out of that crappy little basement apartment you rent.” He glanced at her dented car. “I’ll give you back the keys to my Bentley. Wouldn’t you like to drive the Bentley again? Come on, Lauren, this isn’t you, honey. You and I both know you weren’t meant for the life of a pauper.”

  “If you don’t let go of me, I’m going to scream my head off! Is that what you want? For someone to call the police and for all your friends back at the firm and at the country club to find out the son of a bitch you really are?”

  He didn’t respond.

  “On the count of five, I will scream. Do you understand me?”

  She could see his jaw tighten.

  “One . . . two . . .” She nervously licked her lips. “Three . . . four . . .” She paused, waiting for his hold to slacken, but it didn’t. “Five.”

  Lauren opened her mouth, letting out an ear-piercing screech that made him wince. But no one came. The automatic doors to the grocery store stayed closed. No one drove down the road in her direction. She started to scream again.

  “Shut up! Shut up, damn it! Or I’ll give you something to yell about!”

  He let her go with a hard shove that sent her careening back against the car. Her shoulder slammed into the car door frame.

  Lauren’s scream caught in her throat. She bit back a moan and swallowed down the pain that now began to radiate across her shoulder and her upper arm. She didn’t want to give James the satisfaction of knowing that he had hurt her yet again.

  “You stupid bitch. You stupid little ungrateful bitch. I loved you. I gave you everything,” James said in a low, menacing voice. “Everything you ever needed. Everything you ever wanted. You didn’t have to ask or raise a finger. I just gave it to you! And this i
s how you repay me? Huh? By trying to embarrass me? This is the thanks I get?”

  He flexed the fingers of his right hand as if preparing to hit her. Lauren stared at the hand not in fear, but in anger.

  All his talk about what he had given her. Yes, he had draped her in jewels, but he paired that with a black eye, several cuts, and enough verbal abuse that she couldn’t look at her reflection in the mirror without contempt most days.

  She wanted to punch him. She wanted to make him hurt. She wanted to scratch his eyes out, but he was taller than her and stronger than her and she was alone and didn’t stand much of a chance of winning this fight. He had lots of power, too. James Sayers pulled a lot of weight in Chesterton. Calling the police would be a mistake. She had learned that lesson before.

  Just get in the car, Lauren, she told herself silently. He hasn’t hit you, but don’t push it. Just get in the car. Get far away from him.

  She wiped a stray lock of hair away from her face before climbing into her car and shutting the door behind her. She tossed her bills into the passenger seat beside her bag, winced at the pain in her shoulder as she put on her seat belt, and then put her key in the ignition. She didn’t look up at James as she shifted the car into drive.

  “Go ahead! Go ahead and pull off! Drive your junk heap to that closet you call an apartment and take your mountain of bills with you, because I’m done with you! You hear me? You were nothing when I met you, Lauren!”

  She began to ease out of the parking space.

  “You were nothing but a gold-digging whore from a long line of gold-digging whores! No brain and no talent to speak of! And what are you now without me? A short-order cook who’s damn near bankrupt!” He gave a caustic laugh. “When they repossess your car and evict you, you better not come crawling back to me! Because I’ll laugh in your face! You hear me, Lauren? I’ll laugh in your face!”

  As Lauren put more distance between her and James, his thundering voice began to fade. She drove ten blocks before she realized her hands were trembling. Not just her hands, but her entire body. She pulled over to a nearby curb and put the car in park.

  Oh, how she hated him. She hated him for telling her that she was useless and stupid, and she was angry at herself for letting him make her feel like she had to listen.

  “Hindsight’s twenty-twenty, chérie,” she could hear Phillip say in that easy way of his, and Phillip was right. Hindsight is twenty-twenty. She just wished she had had something remotely close to twenty-twenty vision when she’d first met James, before she racked up eighty thousand dollars of debt in clothes, shoes, purses, and spa treatments. She wished she would have warned her family never to accept money or gifts from a man like him. If she had better sight back then, maybe she wouldn’t be in the predicament she was in now.

  She glanced at the bills on her passenger seat, willing them to disappear. But they didn’t. They sat there silently mocking her naïveté. Lauren closed her eyes.

  “What am I going to do? What the hell am I going to do?”

  Chapter 7

  “You can put the sofa over there,” Cris said as he pointed to one side of the great room.

  The two movers nodded before carrying the piece of leather furniture across the cherrywood floors. They did it in a less-than-graceful manner, side shuffling across the room like hermit crabs on a sandbar. They gave loud grunts and occasional curses with each step they took. When they finally put the massive sofa down, it landed with a thud.

  “Damn, man, what you got in there?” one of them moaned as he wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. “Bricks?”

  “No, cement,” Cris muttered. “It keeps you from wearing out the cushions.”

  The young man frowned at Cris. He then looked over his shoulder at the other mover, gazing at him with an expression on his face that seemed to ask, “Have you ever heard of that?”

  His companion shrugged in response.

  “I’m just joking. It’s a regular couch, just a heavy one. And there are two more where that came from.” He jerked his thumb toward the doorway. “When you bring them in, you can put them over there, too.”

  The movers groaned. Their shoulders slumped as they walked back across the room and through the door before heading down the hall.

  “I don’t know why he hired us to move this stuff,” one of them whispered when they were out of earshot. “He’s big enough to do it his own damn self.”

  Cris stood alone in the great room. The house was finally nearing completion. The construction had ended, the painters were finishing touch-up work, and the movers had arrived two hours ago.

  It had taken four months, but he was finally near the finish line.

  “And it’s about damn time,” he mumbled.

  “Mr. Weaver,” someone said over his shoulder. “Where should we put these?”

  Cris turned to find a young man in his twenties standing in the great room’s doorway, holding up a walnut end table. Another one sat on the floor beside him.

  “You can put those in the living room. It’s two doors down.”

  The young man nodded.

  Just then, Cris’s cell phone began to ring in his pocket. He tugged it out and stared down at the numbers on the screen, squinting to see who was calling him. “Time to get some glasses, old man.”

  Cris held the screen closer to his face and read the numbers again. His eyes instantly widened. He quickly pressed the green button on the screen to answer.

  “Alex?”

  “Hey, Cris,” she answered in a sexy, throaty voice. “How’s Virginia?”

  He hadn’t spoken to Alex since the night she’d left his house outside of Dallas and told him she wasn’t moving to the East Coast with him. Frankly, he hadn’t expected to hear from her again.

  “Virginia’s . . . good. It’s hot.”

  “It’s hot here, too, honey.” She laughed. “But a lot less hot without you.”

  He didn’t respond.

  “I guess I should come straight out and say it.” She cleared her throat. “I miss you, Cris. It’s been hard being here the past few months without you, mi amor.”

  He cocked an eyebrow.

  “Well?” she said, after loudly huffing on the other end of the line.

  “Well, what, Alex?”

  “Aren’t you going to say that you miss me, too?”

  No, he thought. Frankly, he’d stopped missing her about a month after he’d moved out here. He had purposely pushed her to the back of his mind. But he couldn’t tell her all this. There wasn’t enough resentment or heartbreak left in him to be so mean, so he tried to think of a more delicate way to tell her the truth, but he couldn’t. He changed the subject instead.

  “How’re your mom and dad doing?”

  “How are my mom and dad doing?” Alex repeated with barely veiled outrage. She huffed again. “Cris, are you kidding me right now?”

  “Why would I be kidding?”

  “I tell you that I miss you and you ask me how my mom and dad are doing? What the hell is that?”

  He was getting the full brunt of her anger now. The old adage that said all Latin women had fiery tempers was a stereotype, but in the case of Alex, it was also the truth.

  “Alex,” he said calmly. “The last time I checked, you broke up with me. It wasn’t the other way around. You haven’t called me in months.”

  “You haven’t called me either!”

  “And now you call out of nowhere and tell me you miss me. What do you want me to say?”

  The line fell silent. After some seconds, she sighed. “I want to come to Virginia, Cris. We should be together. I thought I wanted to stay in Dallas, but I want to be with you out there.”

  That made him instantly suspicious. “Why the sudden change of heart?”

  “It wasn’t ‘sudden.’ I’ve . . . I’ve been feeling this way for a while now. Besides, I told you the reason why already. I miss you! I want to be with you! Is that so bad?”

  He shook his head. “It’s n
ot going to work, Alex.”

  She sucked her teeth on the other end. “Why?”

  “Because . . .” Cris stopped.

  . . . I’ve already moved on, he thought, but again he kept himself from saying something he believed might hurt her. He wasn’t sure why he was being so considerate. She hadn’t cared about hurting him that night when she dropped her bombshell and told him not only was she not leaving Dallas with him, but also they “needed to take a break for a while.” Despite how crushed he knew he looked that night, she hadn’t pulled any punches.

  When Cris didn’t finish his sentence and the pause on his end of the phone line lasted too long, Alex seized the opportunity.

  “I knew you didn’t have a good reason! You don’t have a good reason because you and I both know that we should be together.”

  “That’s not—”

  “Just say the words, Cris,” she cooed. “Just say the words, baby, and I’ll buy a plane ticket right now and be out there tomorrow.”

  Why wasn’t she listening? Didn’t she realize that they were over? Did he really seem like that much of a pushover that all she had to do was call him, make a quick apology, whisper sweet nothings into his ear, and things would be back to the way they were before?

  I don’t think so, he thought indignantly.

  “Cris? Cris? You didn’t hang up on me, did you?”

  He shoved his hand into his pocket and closed his eyes. “Let me think about it.”

  “What?”

  “I said, ‘Let me think about it.’ Look, I can’t say yes to something like that right now, Alex. I’m moving into my house today. I’ve got guys all over the place asking me questions. I can’t . . . I can’t make a split decision on this now.”

  The line went silent. He didn’t have to see Alex to know that she was fuming on the other end. He had been with her long enough to know her reaction to those words, but to her credit, she held back her temper and didn’t let it show even in the tone of her voice.