by Molly Hoffer
“Are you crazy!? What’s the matter with you?! It’s only 12am!” she yelled. “I got stamped. I drove out here. I’m going back in. Are you coming with me?” she said, as she saw that I was heading towards my limo, instead of just taking a short break outside.
We were at some non-exclusive new dance club that catered to rowdy celebrities, rather than to the wasps, so the bouncer stamped out hands to make sure we weren’t sneaking in without paying for a ticket.
“No. I’m really tired. I gotta go home,” I said.
“What’s going on with you?!” Meg asked, obviously seeing through my actions into some strange development in my personal life.
“It’s nothing. I’m just tired… You know from work.”
“Running your own business can’t be that hard. You can just take a day off if you’re so tired.”
“No. It wouldn’t be professional.”
“Whatever, whenever you decide you can tell me about it, do. Until that point, don’t invite me clubbing if you’re going to wig-out before 1am.”
I jumped in the limo and told the driver to speed out of there before I said anything else to Meg, who clearly had an ability to read me especially when I was trying to lie.
While that encounter was tough, hiding the relationship from my co-workers proved impossible from the get-go, when that maintenance worker found out. Then, I kept imagining that he had shared the news that the owner was screwing the manual laborer with everybody else at the company. We always left after everybody else to be discreet, and frequently this meant that we had to stay extremely late. My two designers were workaholics, and we happened to be a couple of months away from Fashion Week, which meant that they were researching every past line, and considering every innovation that they could imagine to integrate it into our new line. At least one of them was always staying 2-3 hours late to finish a sketch, or create a marketing presentation, or to do a bit more research. When we had fashion shoots, they’d stretch till 10pm. I never noticed the time before as I would burry myself in my work, and it didn’t really matter if I was working from home or from the workroom downstairs. But, knowing that I had to leave that room without being seen made it so that I kept thinking about escaping out of there at all times of the day, and this made the workplace seem like an imprisonment. Then, Nick occasionally would whisper obscene stuff to me, when he’d come by my office.
“Hey, why don’t I sit in your chair, and you give me a blow job under the desk?” he asked one day, loudly enough for me to scan the cubicles near my office to check if somebody overheard him.
“You wanna get caught?!”
“Yea, I do.”
“You do, you’re gonna just admit it?”
“Why da hell not? It’d turn me on.”
And even if I could deal with all of that, hiding it from my family proved to be a herculean task because they had a private investigator working for them, who interviewed most of the help for all members of the family to figure out if anything strange was going on. Since I had a regular cleaner, business shopper and a maintenance worker in on my live-in partner, they soon found out from them that there was some young guy staying with me. The only good thing about it was that they hadn’t yet collected photographs of this “guy” from security footage, and so they hadn’t connected him with the foster kid they took care of years earlier.
I stopped going to all family gatherings to avoid slipping upon being questioned about the mystery guy that was living with me. My mom would call and she’d start trying to get some information out of me.
“Who’s this guy I’ve been hearing about? Why don’t you bring him over some time? What are you ashamed of him?”
It was tough just saying, “I don’t want to talk about it,” or “Just leave it alone.” Any answer that was more detailed than that would’ve led to some betrayal of key secret information.
So, my relationship with Nick was the most sexually satisfying and emotionally entertaining relationship of my life, but there were a lot of problems that were crowding around us and threatening to break us apart in some horrific way that would be as tragic as the Lewinski scandal.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I had insisted that nobody I knew could come to visit me unannounced, but apparently, my parents took this as a challenge.
It was a Saturday. Nick and I had slept in late, after an extended night of screwing around while watching some DVDs of new R and X-rated releases. After a brunch at noon, we started making out, instead of dressing. We were both naked, having just showered, and not even gotten out panties or boxers on. We were sitting on the couch in the living room by the front entrance. We had some techno music on, which had initially made us frisky, so he didn’t hear much of anything aside from our own moaning and kisses.
Suddenly, a key turned on the other side of the locked front entrance and the door flung open. I instinctively shoved Nick’s face down into my pussy and turned to face the intruder.
Nick also heard the door opening, so he obediently stayed down there.
But, the new problem was that my parents had just come in and were staring at my naked boobs over the couch, which thankfully wasn’t facing them.
They couldn’t see Nick from where they were standing, just my boobs.
“Mom!” I yelled a moment later, realizing that their perspective meant I was safe.
“Oh, honey, sorry,” she replied, and they closed the door.
Just as they were shutting it, I realized that they would just wait for me to get decent and then would come back in.
“Guys, I’m busy, come back later,” I yelled at the door.
“We have some business to discuss with you…”
“I’ll come by the penthouse, not now though.”
“No, it’s urgent. We have a 3pm deadline.”
“On a Saturday?!” I exclaimed, unable to think of why they still really had to leave.
They didn’t reply.
So, I pulled Nick’s face out of my clit, and pointed for him to go and hide in our bedroom. I grabbed a loose shirt and exercise pants and put them on to look decent. Then, I yelled at the door, “OK, fine, come in.”
I was standing in the middle of the living room when they entered.
“So, what is all this commotion about?” I asked.
“We are putting together a fundraiser for the Szabo Foundation, and we need your signature on the new scholarship fund paperwork.”
“Why couldn’t you do it without me?”
“It’s in your name, the Vanessa Szabo scholarship fund at Columbia.”
“Since when is there a deadline to give somebody money? And on a Saturday,” I was frustrated, to say the least.
“They are awarding the funds on Monday, and they said there will be some glitches if we don’t put the money in the fund today before banks close. Their bank will be closed tomorrow.”
“OK, fine, just give me the paperwork.”
They took out a few folders out of a briefcase, and put them on the coffee table in front of me. Mom opened the document and showed me the pages with the x’s on them, where I had to sign. There were a dozen of these pages, and she had some trouble finding them amidst the hundred-page contract.
My attention was distracted for a few moments with this project. All of a sudden, we all heard something crashing to the floor in the bedroom.
“What was that?!” dad exclaimed, and started moving towards the door.
“It’s nothing, who cares,” I said quickly, but my face went white, and he could tell from this color that it was definitely something. “Oh, I see, so that guy we’ve been hearing about is here, is he?” he said, and before I could yell, “Stop! Do not go there!” he had flung open the door and was staring at Nick, still naked and sitting at the edge of our bed. I have no idea why he hadn’t put something on, but I guess he thought that it would be too noisy if he was dressing in the closet after my parents had come in.
Due to his nudity, there was no room for me to say t
hat he had just dropped by to visit me.
“Oh my god!” dad yelled, shutting his mouth with his hand, as if to stop an array of insults that were coming into his mind.
“Dominic! What are you thinking! This is absolutely inappropriate, and grotesque,” mom shouted, looking faint, as she looked away from Nick’s nude form for the sake of modesty.
“What’s the big deal?!” I exclaimed, working hard to come up with reasons why it might have been a light matter that they were exaggerating with their outbursts. “It’s not like you adopted him! You guys have a very Puritanical attitude about sex. What’s a little sex between friends?”
“Friends?! More like between brother and sister! It’s against the law! It has nothing to do with our religious beliefs! What if somebody from the press came in instead of us! This would be a media disaster for the whole Szabo family! Columbia would probably refuse to accept a scholarship award from you, if they knew about the lack of moral standards you are showing,” mom yelled, in a throaty panic.
“It so isn’t against the law. You’re exaggerating!”
“We aren’t exaggerating anything! Your actions are already as outlandish as any actions could’ve been, so there’s no further place to exaggerate!”
“Look, just go back home, and move on with your lives, and ignore all of this. I’ll just keep this at home. We won’t go out, or anything. And nobody in the media will get wind of this.”
“No. We’re not leaving until you tell us that this whole thing is completely over, and he packs his things and moves out.”
“You’re going to stand around and watch him dress and leave?!”
“Yes, if that’s what it takes.”
“I’m not a little baby. I’m an adult, and if I say that you need to leave the apartment that I’m paying for, you have to respect my wishes, and leave.”
“If you aren’t a little baby, then we don’t have to be paying for your little fashion experiment,” dad said, turning fully, so that Nick’s naked body wasn’t in his line of sight.
“You’re not paying for it. We signed a loan contract, and it says that I own this business as long as I later pay you back once I come into my trust.”
“Either you end it immediately, or we are going to disown you immediately,” James said sternly and with certainty.
“How can you do that?! That makes no legal sense!”
“You can either ask Dominic to leave, leave this apartment and the business behind, or we can take this matter to court,” James insisted, not flinching under my squinted stare.
“Wha? I don’t even know how to respond. What you’re saying makes no sense. How can you ask me something like that when you’re supposed to be my parents? It’s like you’re strangers trying to sabotage my life!”
“We aren’t sabotaging it, we are trying to stop you from committing a grave sin in the eyes of the law, of God, and of the paparazzi!” mom yelled in a frenzy.
At that moment, I couldn’t think straight. I was seeing red, and I just wanted to be completely independent from these two people that had just made an ultimatum like that. When I get extremely emotional, the thinking part of my brain is shut off, and the only thing I can do is get away from that situation, so I can find a quiet place where I can come up with an approach based on logic and not blind rage.
So, out of the three options, the only one that would’ve let me immediately be on my own, was moving out for now, and sorting the legal matters later on. I considered that if I moved out and abandoned my business, it might fail and go bankrupt under my parents’ deliberate neglect. I also briefly thought that abandoning my properties meant that I might have been giving them up without a fight, like I’d be abandoning a wallet I gave to a beggar on the street. I mean, if I came back to the beggar a few days later and asked him to give me back my wallet, he’d have a pretty good argument that it now belonged to him. But, as I said, I was thinking clearly.
I hopped up, and yelled over to Nick, “Come on Nick, pack your stuff. We’re leaving since we’re not wanted!”
Nick was pretty scared by this confrontation, and couldn’t say a word to defend either of us. He might have had doubts about the sanity of our relationship, but he hadn’t voiced them. Hearing my parents raving about how horrid it was must’ve brought those ideas up in his mind, and since he was probably partially agreeing with them, he couldn’t object to their claims, and supporting them when I was that upset would’ve probably ended our relationship at that very moment.
He found his old sports bag, and put whatever could fit in there. I had tossed out most of the stuff he originally brought with him, and he decided that unless my parents insisted that his shirts belonged to them too he was going to take the stuff he had gotten most used to wearing.
I had a bigger challenge trying to pack my stuff because I had a full walk-in closet of crap I had collected just from the last season, and then there were all of my cookware, kitchen appliances, and all those other things that I had bought with the money I got in the loan, which logically had to belong to me. But, I had no law book in front of me, and I didn’t have the focus of mind to take out the loan contract and go through it. So, I decided that it would’ve taken too long to pack everything, and that most of it had to remain where it was to hopefully come back into my possession after I figured the rest of the case out. I had three pieces of luggage that I usually took on my out-of-state trips with me, so I backed those three with all the clothing, utensils and other little bits that at the moment I thought I couldn’t live without.
I think that it was the fastest I had ever packed for a trip, and I was in a panic that I had forgotten a toothbrush or some other thing that would mean some awful situation later that night. Having packed, I would’ve liked to storm out, but since I packed the three bags, I could only carry a couple of them. Nick took one of them, and his own bag, and we were out-the-door, without bothering to close my old front door, seeing as how our hands were full. Nick put his bags down for a moment to press the down button on the elevator, and we were downstairs a few stunned moments later. I thought about getting a taxi, but I realized that if I was going to seriously attempt living as if I had been disinherited, I couldn’t use my cards, or even the cash I had in my wallet. Sure, it’s not likely my parents would find out I used some of my cash, but it was more of a moral stand against their tyranny that troubled me at the moment.
So, I looked over at Nick and asked, “Do you have enough money on you to pay for a cab?”
“No. I don’t have the money to pay for a cab. We’re going back to Brooklyn right?” he was dejected, but was trying not to raise his voice.
“I guess. You don’t think renting a motel would be better?”
“On my money? Are you kidding? Living here in Manhattan, do you think I have much left over?”
“But, I thought you weren’t using your money?” I said awkwardly.
“Even toothpaste costs $10 in Manhattan.”
I shrugged. There wasn’t really anything to say about it.
“I guess we’re going back to Brooklyn,” I agreed, preparing myself for the trial of surviving Sam’s studio.
We took the subway over there. My thoughts were temporarily distracted by the task of carrying those suitcases over the tolls, into quickly shutting doors, and then down a hundred steps down from the rail to the street level.
Nick kept glancing at the bags and shrugging, as if saying, “Do you really need everything in these 3 huge bags?!” But, as usual he restrained himself, and didn’t say it aloud to avoid a confrontation. I remembered that I put a mixer and some heavy metal pans in one of the bags I was dragging as I was carrying it down those stairs, and I seriously considered tossing the pan out right there, mid-stairs.
When we arrived at the studio, Sam was busy selling crack to three of his buddies. They were listening to heavy metal music, and smoking crack in blue pipes. It was crackling, as they took their lighters to it.
“Yow! Nicky!” Sam yelled in a
high dazed excitement, “What’s going on! Why the bags!?”
“We’re moving in here,” Nick said, suddenly looking like he might have now been willing to spend money on a motel, but still looking for a way to make this work.
“Nah! Really!? My boy’s coming back to chill with us!” Sam said, taking another hit from his pipe.
“Yea, I guess so,” Nick said, scanning me to see if I was going to insist that we leave immediately.
Since I was in one of those determined moods where I would’ve rather slept on the street outside than go back and ask my parents to forgive me when I didn’t think I did anything wrong, I nodded my head, and sat down on a chair in the kitchen, checking the table to make sure I didn’t put my elbow into a pile of crack. That table was clear, so I left my bags by the wall for the moment, and tried to watch the continued crack party with a bit of humor about it all. I realized that I had never seen crack before. I had seen guys snorting cocaine and other guys smoking pot, but smoking crack just looked off to me, as if somebody had mixed an unnatural activity with a substance. I mean, it seemed like a lot of crack would be lost in all that smoke. Maybe the crack in the air was making me a bit high, but I got pretty paranoid, and started thinking about weird ideas like that. The crack-heads left in a couple of hours. Nick made us a bed on the couch, and we went to sleep in long nightshirts and night pants to avoid being seen in the nude or semi-nude by some crack-head that might have stumbled into the studio in the middle of the night looking for a hit.