by S. Ann Cole
Swearing under his breath, he slaps a palm to his forehead as though the events that took place less than an hour ago are already a distant memory to him. “How about I make an appointment with my mechanic and tomorrow we can—”
“The car isn’t mine,” I cut him off, because I don’t like where that suggestion was headed. Unless I have a death wish, I have absolutely no intention of ever seeing this passenger again, let alone making mechanic dates with him. “It’s my boyfriend’s. And he’s kind of crazy, so it’s better to just give me the cash to pass on to him to have the dents compounded.” Palms sweating at just the thought of what Andrew’s reaction is going to be when he sees his car, I avert my gaze, uncross my arms and shake them out, shake out the apprehension, reminding myself to breathe. Breathe. Breathe. Breathe. It’s going to turn out fine, as long I get the compensation, it’ll be fine.
“Your boyfriend has you working a taxicab? At night?” He sounds furious. Which has me turning my eyes up at him to find that his expression matches his voice. He is furious. What the heck? “You don’t look a day older than eighteen. What kind of—”
“You’re wrong,” I bite back in defense. “I’m nineteen.”
“Same goddamn difference,” he grits out, stepping in to me. “You’re not—”
“What the hell do you care about my life?” I return, standing firm, refusing to be intimidated. “You don’t even know me.”
He stops advancing and chews on his lip, studying me. And then he nods, returning to his wallet. “You’re right. I don’t know you. Will five hundred do?”
“Six should cover it.”
He plucks out the bills and makes to hand them to me, and then pulls back at last minute. His eyes latch onto mine and don’t let go. They’re the green that the ocean appears to be closer to the shore; not too dark, not too light, but just right. Penetrating, invading, fierce.
“Just answer me this one thing,” he murmurs in that same soul-stripping soft voice he’d used on me in the elevator, the one that makes me feel unsheathed.
I snip out, “I wasn’t aware this was a negotiation?”
His chest rising on an inhale, he moves in even closer to me. Lifting two long, masculine fingers to my neck, he trails the tips across my skin, from one side to the other. And I stand frozen, not out of shock that he’s touching me so inappropriately, but because his touch lays siege on me.
The rabid feeling that his touch evokes, the rich desire that engulfs me, is unprecedented. Not even when I thought I liked Andrew in the beginning did his touch make me feel like this. This man’s touch makes me want to prostrate at his feet and tell him all my secrets.
“These fingerprints on your neck…” he whispers, ever so gently, “did your boyfriend leave them there?”
At this, I stiffen.
Utterly mortified.
He isn’t touching me intimately. He isn’t caressing me. He’s trailing Andrew’s frickin’ fingerprints left behind from my near-death strangulation earlier. I never even thought about the possibility that there might be residual marks from his assault. Maybe, subconsciously, I figured they wouldn’t be visible in the cab. But now, out under the glowing, expensive, penthouse lights, under the penetrating, discerning stare of a sculpted demon, all that’s wrong with my life is seen.
Maybe it’s my body language, or because I’m taking too long to respond, but his jaw tightens and his fingers still on my neck as he grounds out, “He did, didn’t he?”
To hell with this! I don’t owe this man an answer. I don’t even know him. He doesn’t know me. We’re complete strangers. Who does he think he is, anyway? Not because he looks like a Roman god does it mean I have to leave an offering at his feet.
Closing the minuscule gap between us, so my breasts are brushed up against him, I tip up on my toes, lick my lips, and then hiss in his face, “‘You know nothing, Jon Snow.’.”
Snatching the bills from his fingers, I spin and bolt it out of there before he can stop me.
TWO
IN THAT HOUR when the sky begins blushing a coy tangerine from the yawning sun, I park outside Andrew’s condo. I don’t know if the brunette—my “sister wife”—is sleeping over, and I don’t care. Neither do I feel like being strangled again. Therefore, I scribble a note on the back of an old receipt, explaining the minor scratches and dents from the events of the night. In it, I wrap three one-hundred-dollar bills from the six-hundred Sexy Demon gave me to cover the charges for the damages—yes, of course, I overcharged him! Wouldn’t you?—and place it, along with the car keys, in his mail box by the front door.
I catch a cab back to my apartment. A tiny one-bedroom on the second floor of a tumbledown apartment building that slants precariously in the air, as though it will collapse at any minute. Cockroach and mice infested, with a crap bathroom and kitchen, along with neighbors who’re noisier than a kindergarten classroom.
Under a cloud of exhaustion, I key open my door and plod in. Mom is up and in the kitchen making tea. At the key-jingle of my entrance, she glances up but says nothing. Ever since we got the news about Dad, she doesn’t talk to me unless she absolutely has to. She never leaves this stinking, suffocating apartment, and all her remaining days are spent out on the rusty, small square of a balcony, chain-smoking and imbibing alcohol like it’s fruit juice.
Tossing my keys to the rickety coffee table, I stand in the middle of the room and study her. My mother used to be utterly beautiful, utterly stunning. A Brazilian native, she had a mass of honey-blonde hair flowing down the middle of her back; wide, blue eyes; and a supple, voluptuous physique. In curves and beauty, she used to be the bomb. Hell, I used to pray I’d grow into a body like hers.
Now, though? That honey-blonde hair is chopped up to her neck in a brittle, uneven mess—this she did herself with a dull pair of scissors. Huge dark circles reside under vacant eyes, cheeks hollowed, and she has less skin on her bones than a roasted sparrow. She’s just a shell of the sprite, vivacious woman she used to be. A woman who used to turn heads she was so damn gorgeous.
Life can do that to a person.
She believes it’s her Karma. Her payback from wrecking a happy family.
See, Mom traveled to the US through a cleaning agency that recruited immigrants to work for the affluent. She was snatched up for employment as a live-in maid by the previous Cooley family, which consisted of Dad, his wife, Sarah, and my half-brother, Graham. Somewhere along the line, a clichéd torrid affair developed between Mom and Dad; an affair that went on for two years before Mom got knocked-up with me.
Mom decided she would move back to Brazil and raise me on her own, but by then Dad was gone for her, and not wanting to risk losing her, he divorced his wife and moved Mom in.
Well, at least that’s Mom’s side of the tale. Whenever I tried to corroborate this tale with Dad, he always got this solemn, faraway look right before he shut down.
Dad was a well-to-do investment banker, straddling billionaire status. He worked hard and deprived himself of nothing worth having. We lived in a penthouse in Manhattan, and indulged in a rather lavish life. And I supposedly had an insane trust fund to be unlocked at twenty-one.
Now here’s the sting: Dad never married Mom. And I, for the life of me, can’t understand why she never sought security in marriage. Love or not.
When Dad was arrested, and then charged, convicted, and sentenced to eight years for fraud and embezzlement, all our assets were seized and we were left with nothing. At all. Nada. We were castaways.
Bigger sting is, that to begin with, Mom was never accepted by the inner circle. Being labeled as home-wrecker, gold-digger, and social climber, she became a pariah the moment Dad divorced Sarah—a wealthy-by-name, well-respected upper-class woman—for her.
As a result, reaching out to anyone would be futile. Mom had some savings, and we did all right for the first couple of months. Said she would wait for Dad no matter what and was quite fine with being downgraded. A year later, however, Dad went to bed
in his cell and didn’t wake up. He was poisoned. Apparently, the embezzlement thing went deeper than it first appeared, and Dad, being the only fish from the tank caught and doing time, was being offered deals: If he gave up the names of all the others in this decades-long embezzlement ring, he’d walk free.
Unfortunately, the names involved in the ring were huge, and my father was just an irrelevant sprat. So when word got out that he might be cutting a deal for freedom, he was given a different kind of freedom. And that was the end of Raymond Cooley.
That’s when things started going downhill for us. Mom stopped caring, her savings started dwindling, and we started downgrading.
Four months ago, Mom was diagnosed with liver cancer and was given a loose estimation of six-to-nine months to live. At the rate she’s going with the daily intake alcohol and cigarettes, I’d be surprised if she lives past next month.
Now, this is where we are. Counting down the days until Mom fades into nothingness, and I’m left a pauper and an orphan.
My desperation to hustle nights working Andrew’s cab is for two reasons: I’m saving to bury a mother who stopped caring about me years ago, and I’m planning to flee to Brazil, to Mom’s side of the family, the moment it’s all over.
Brazil is my only hope for getting out from under Andrew’s thumb. As long as I’m where he can find me, he will. And then beat the breath out of me for attempting to run.
“Morning, Mom,” I mumble, collapsing into the single couch in the room. It’s the color of mustard, with all kinds of wears and tears.
She doesn’t answer. Opens a small bottle of rum, pours some into her tea, picks it up along with her box of cigarettes, and then zombies out onto the balcony.
I can’t tell where she keeps getting alcohol and cigarettes from, seeing as she claims to be flat broke and all the bills are paid by me, and she never leaves the house. Yet, I keep seeing new boxes of cigarettes and bottles of rum.
When I first found out about her cancer, I cried. A lot. I had nightmares and anxiety attacks. Until one day, I woke up and just stopped caring. If she doesn’t care enough to eliminate the substances that got her there in the first place, to try staying alive as long as she possibly can in the case a liver becomes available for a transplant, then why should I be stressing my battered little brain so hard?
I’ve just come to accept the fact that she’s going to die—much sooner than later by the looks of it—and I need to channel my focus and energy into preparing myself for after. Life after being impoverished and orphaned.
Kicking off my slippers, I curl up into the couch, aka my bed—Mom gets the bedroom.
As the noisome scent of Mom’s cigarette wafts into the apartment, I huff out a sigh and yank the blanket from off the back of the couch and haul it over my head to block it out.
I fall asleep. Not to the cigarette scent. Or to anxious thoughts about my craptastic life. But to flashes of Sexy Demon’s arched and exposed throat in the backseat of the cab.
Mom’s chain-smoking and excessive drinking—despite her illness—all made sense to me one dark and desolate evening. Turns out the cancer wasn’t executing its threat fast enough. Death was too far off. So she took matters into her own hands.
I got home one evening, after spending hours trying to get someone to hire me, and found Mom’s pale, lifeless body slumped on the kitchen floor. Beside her, a spilled bottle of rum, along with two empty pill bottles.
Selfish bitch that the woman is, she overdosed on her medication and finished what the cancer started.
I hurt. But I didn’t shed a tear. Instead, I went out on the balcony, took a seat in the rusty wrought-iron chair she sat in every day, and dialed 911.
I loved her, I really did. But, obviously, she loved Dad more than she loved me. I’d been her prize to winning Dad over. But when Dad faded, apparently so did I, as far as she was concerned. I no longer mattered. No longer had a purpose in her life. She ceased caring. About life. About me. She ceased caring long before the cancer.
So many times I would come home with wounds and bruises inflicted by Andrew and she never once inquired how, where, or why I got them. Or if I was alright. I’d have frequent anxiety attacks, sometimes crying for hours on end, unable to stop myself, and Mom, when I needed her the most, never looked my way once, or offered me a word of consolation. Never assured me everything would be alright, like a mother should. It’s as if I was nothing to her. She’d just moved around the house like a ghost. Leaving me completely on my own.
When we were living affluently in Manhattan, had her love and affection toward me all been for show? Did she ever really love me? Did she ever really care?
I don’t know. I don’t. But I do know that upon walking into the apartment to her lifeless body, I felt nothing but numbness. And a little bit of resentment, to be honest. The woman messed up my whole savings plan. Never considering that I’m broke and jobless and would have difficulty burying her. No. She hadn’t been thinking of me at all. Too eager to leave me and go chase after Dad.
Andrew volunteers to cover the funeral. All the while, as we go through the process together, ranting on how Mom was a “stupid bitch.” I don’t argue with him about his irreverence of the dead. Just let him be him, so long as he’s taking this sad and lumbering burden off my hands.
It’s the hour of the funeral. Only five attendants are present. My half-brother, Graham. My best friend, Kiera. Andrew, myself, and the priest.
The priest and I are the only ones here for Mom. Graham, Kiera, and Andrew are here to console me.
Graham is three years older than I am and absolutely despises Mom for ruining his family. He hated me in the beginning, too. His mother, Sarah, is a humble, benign woman, so despite Dad’s major misdemeanor, she remained friends with him and was the one to arrange things so Graham spent every other weekend with us, so he could get more time in with his Dad. Whenever he was over, he tried his best to shade me, block me, scowl and snarl at me, shove me away from him. But even as a kid, I was obdurate, as I never gave up trying to get to know my brother. I wore him down until he could no longer resist me, and we eventually grew a tight bond, loved each other, as we ought to. His enmity for Mom, however, never waned.
Even after Dad’s downfall and our downgrading, he phoned quite often to check up on me, but I was too embarrassed to let him see how deplorable our situation was, so I never asked him for help, no matter how badly I needed it. Plus he’d probably suggest I come live with him and leave Mom behind.
Graham made it clear the second he arrived, his shiny Aston Martin beeping behind him, that he was here for me and “not that evil bitch.” I just shrugged; his aversion understandable.
Mom’s funeral is quick and emotionless. No lamenting, or sorrowful singing, no kind words except from the priest.
Wooden and unfeeling, I watch as they lower her casket six feet under. Then I stoop down, scoop up a handful of dirt and sprinkle it over the top of her casket, whispering one final goodbye.
“Okay, is that it?” I hear Andrew ask from behind me in a rude and impatient tone. “Is this thing over or what?”
As the priest grouses something and ambles off with his Bible clutched to his chest, I whirl on Andrew and glare daggers at him. “This is my mother’s funeral. Not a thing!”
He gives a dismissive wave of his hand, shifting from foot to foot. “Whatever. Can we go now?”
Graham moves from his position at Kiera’s side and comes up to me, effectively blocking out Andrew, clasping my hands in his. “I really hate that I have to leave you, sis, but I have a plane to catch. Will you be okay? Are you sure you don’t want to come with Mom and me to Turks and Caicos for Spring Break? It would be the perfect getaway for you right now.”
Do I want to come? Of course, I want to come! I want to run so far, far away from here and never, ever look back.
But I see Andrew shifting from behind Graham, sending me an oblique warning with those empty black eyes. I can’t go. I can’t say yes. Andrew
won’t let me. He knows if I board a plane and leave this country he won’t ever see me again, because no way in hell would I come back to him. This is not the smart way to leave him, when he’s watching out for it. I have to go when he’s not expecting me to.
“A trip to Turks and Caicos sounds like the ultimate getaway,” I say with a small smile, struggling not to cringe as I squeeze the words out. “But now just isn’t the best time, Gray. I need to…I have to stay here and sort some things out.”
Graham studies me through a thin film of skepticism. Spitting image of our father, he’s tall and lean and handsome as all get out. Short blond hair parted at the side and groomed back in smooth waves, eyes a brighter blue than mine, courtesy of Raymond Cooley. Graham is this dashing, debonair, picture-perfect, most-wanted Bachelor, and I’m…nothing.
He moves in closer, lowering his voice to an octave only I can hear, “Lotty, you know you can tell me anything, right?”
My eyes flick over his shoulder to Andrew, who’s checking his watch and shifting restlessly.
‘Just tell him!’ urges Rational Lotty. ‘Swallow your shame and let him help us out of this! He has the means. He. Can. Help. Us.’
“Gray…” My throat is dry, my heartbeat ratcheting up in my chest. “I…I’m…I need—”
“Lotty, baby…” Andrew breaks in, striding up to us, wrapping his fingers around my upper arm. He seems nervous. “I’ve something to ask you.”
“Do you mind?” Graham bites at him. “We’re having a conversation here.”
Undeterred, Andrew shoulders himself between us, effectively placing a barrier between us. “And I don’t like how close you’re standing to my girl.”
Graham looks like he’s one second away from planting his fist in Andrew’s stupid face. “She’s my sister.”
“Yeah, well, from what I know about you rich kids, you all don’t have boundaries. No one’s off limits for you.”