“I just needed to get away.”
“Well, I can understand that, but you didn’t have to run halfway across the world!”
I started to say ‘California,’ but I caught myself just in time. “Ca – come on, the beach isn’t halfway around the world, Dad.”
I couldn’t bring myself to lie and say ‘Florida,’ so I just stuck to what was technically true.
“When are you coming back?” my mother asked, her voice verging on panic.
“…I’m… not entirely sure I’m coming back.”
“Katherine!” my mom wailed. You would think I had just shot her. “How can you say that?!”
“I’m not saying I won’t come back home for, like, Christmas and visits – I’m just saying that I don’t know what I – ”
“Look,” my dad interrupted, “you’ll work this out with Rick, it’ll all blow over, and everything will go back to normal.”
“I don’t want to work it out with Rick!” I said vehemently. “And I definitely don’t want everything to go back to normal!”
“You’re not thinking rationally, Katie.”
“I don’t have to make all my decisions off a list of pros and cons, Dad!”
“Well, you shouldn’t throw something away because of an overly emotional reaction, either,” Dad snapped.
‘An overly emotional reaction.’
That’s what my dad thought my months in hell had been. An overly emotional reaction.
“He cheated on me, Dad,” I yelled.
“Oh,” my mother gasped, and I could practically see her clutching at her pearls. Not that she wore pearls any other time than fancy parties – but in my mind’s eye, she’d worn them specifically for this conversation.
“No, he didn’t,” Dad said patronizingly. “Rick explained it to you – it was all a mistake.”
I could hear the unspoken ‘on your part.’
“It wasn’t a mistake! He’s lying. That’s what he does.”
“You’re taking the opinion of some friend of yours over Rick’s word – you know that, don’t you?”
“Uh, YEAH. That’s kind of the point.”
“You’re making a horrible mistake.”
“No, I would be making a horrible mistake if I stayed with a cheater.”
“He already TOLD you – ”
“Do you really think he was going to admit to what he was doing? Rick knows if he pisses you off – ”
My mother gasped again.
“Language,” Dad said sharply.
I really hated having two sticks-up-their-asses for parents – but, dutiful daughter that I am, I course-corrected. “He knows if he makes you angry, his job is on the line.”
“That is immaterial, and frankly unfair,” Dad interrupted.
“It’s NOT immaterial, and it’s NOT unfair – it’s the truth.”
“I would never – ”
“What, are you saying you’d let him stay if I had hard proof he was cheating on me?”
My dad harrumphed. “There are certain legal considerations that – ”
“I don’t care about legal considerations!”
“What do you want from me, Katie?”
“I want you to listen to me!” I said, and suddenly it was hard to keep myself from crying. “I want you to take my side, not Rick’s!”
“You are my daughter. I will ALWAYS take your side.”
“What, like you’re taking my side now?” I asked sarcastically.
“Katherine, stop being disrespectful,” my mother snapped. She’d apparently decided ‘victim mode’ wasn’t working, and had now moved on to ‘attack dog’ phase. “You’ve put your father in a very difficult position.”
“I didn’t put him in a difficult position – RICK did!”
“Don’t you raise your voice with me – ”
“Katie, what are you living on right now?” my father cut in, his voice cool and unemotional.
My stomach turned. I knew where this was going. “I have some savings.”
“You’re living on your inheritance from your grandmother, aren’t you.”
“She left it to me to do what I wanted with it,” I said angrily.
“Not to waste it,” Mom scolded.
I had to use all my self-control not to yell at her. “Well, I can tell you this: if her money helped me escape a liar and a cheat, then Nina would have said it was money well spent.”
“He’s not a liar – you’re just confused,” Mom harangued me.
“I’m only confused about how many other women he’s slept with.”
“Katherine!”
Dad went back to his slightly subtler line of attack. “What are you going to do when your money runs out?”
“It won’t for a while.”
“But when it does, what will you do?”
“I’ll get a job like everybody else.”
“With an English degree?” he scoffed. “What, waiting tables at a restaurant? Being a secretary?”
“What’s wrong with either of those things?” I snarled.
“Nothing, nothing – but you have so much more potential than that.”
“I could go back to school – ”
“You’ll be paying for it yourself, then.”
I knew it.
My father’s leverage over most people was money. And he was plenty happy to use it on me.
“I see what you meant about taking my side, Daddy,” I said coldly.
“I’m just trying to get you to see reason.”
“No, you’re trying to blackmail me.”
“Extort.”
“What?”
“Blackmail would be threatening to reveal embarrassing information about you. You mean extortion.”
Jesus.
Trust a lawyer to make legal distinctions even in an argument with his daughter.
Of course, he’d set a trap for himself and walked right into it.
“Well, I’m glad you’re admitting what you’re actually doing,” I said.
BURN.
He ignored me. He obviously considered my opinions beneath any serious consideration, even when I was in the right. “I’m not doing either of those things. Do you realize how this has affected us?”
“I was a little busy with how it was affecting me, Dad.”
“Well, that’s the thing – it didn’t just affect YOU. You’ve caused a great deal of embarrassment for our family, Katie. People talk, you know. It’s been incredibly hard on your mother, and I for one am extremely disappointed in how you handled everything.”
Hot tears stung my eyes. I couldn’t believe this.
As angry as I was, though, I still couldn’t help but feel ashamed and guilty.
I wasn’t happy about what I’d done. I’d agonized over my decision, and following through on it had nearly torn me to pieces.
But to be told I was a bad daughter? That wasn’t so easy to shake off.
“Well, I’m soooo sorry you and Mom had to deal with some gossip from a bunch of little old church ladies.”
“Katie – ”
“I’m hanging up now.”
“Don’t you dare!” my mother cried out.
“Goodbye.”
I noticed that as I pressed the ‘End Call’ button, my hand was trembling.
7
I cried for a long while, obsessively replaying the past in my head.
I would have changed so much if I could have. I would have done my best to avoid hurting so many people – myself included. But I didn’t have a time machine… just a broken heart and a bunch of woulda, shoulda, coulda’s.
I tried to distract myself, but being alone with my thoughts slowly drove me crazy. I turned on the TV in the main room, but only wound up flipping nonstop through the channels. I cut the TV off and paced back and forth nervously, wishing Aisha was there to talk to.
The quietness of the house and the accusatory voices in my head finally got to me. I had to get out and go do something – maybe go f
or a walk.
I grabbed my keys out of my purse. I didn’t need any money, and I sure as hell didn’t want to deal with any more phone calls, so I left everything else behind. I stumbled out the front door, making sure to lock it behind me.
My eyes were red and puffy and I was still sniffling as I walked down the street towards the beach. It was dark, but there were a few people out and about. Some gave me strange looks as I walked past, but I ignored them. I was in my own little world of pain.
My mind wandered back to the college party where I met Rick, when I was a freshman and he was a senior. He seemed so worldly and smart at the time – an honest-to-God adult, a real man. Or at least that's what I thought at the time. I was just a naïve little girl from a sheltered life, swept away by a handsome stranger who knew how to say all the right things and flatter me in unexpected ways.
It helped that he wasn’t drunk off his ass like every other frat boy there, too.
“I have a question for you,” he said. I was expecting something along the lines of “What’s your major?” or “Did it hurt when you fell from heaven?” Something stupid.
Instead he said, “Imagine somebody gave you a million dollars. You have a year to spend it on something selfish – no buying a house for your parents or giving money away to charity. You can’t keep whatever you spend it on, so you don’t get to buy a house or a fancy car unless you only want to use them for one year. What would you do with the money?”
I narrowed my eyes. “That’s a weird question for a party.”
He grinned. “I like getting to know people really quickly. I don’t like all the usual fluff and B.S.”
Little did I know then, but fluff and B.S. were his stock-in-trade.
At the time, though, I put some effort into my answer. “Well… I would definitely travel. I want to see the world before I settle down, so I think I would go someplace cool. Someplace tropical, where I could learn new things, like sailing or scuba diving. And I’d probably just travel the world for a year and see as much as I could. That’s what you meant, right?”
“Yeah, that’s a pretty good answer.”
“What would you do?” I asked.
“I’d use the money to buy the best education I could. Coaches for public speaking, get into Harvard Law for a year, get an investing coaching session with Warren Buffet – ”
“Hey!” I exclaimed. “You said that you couldn’t take it with you after that first year!”
“I meant physical objects, like a house or a car.”
“Whatever,” I grumbled. “You cheated.”
He laughed. “No I didn’t! You get to keep the knowledge of what you did.”
“Well, you just made me sound like some party girl who wants to have fun and not do anything with her life.”
“I don’t believe that at all. Just like I’d remember everything from my education, you’d remember all your experiences, right? And, I have to admit, it would probably make you a whole lot more interesting than me.”
“You got that right,” I teased him.
“My parents always tell me that I’m too practical. I like your free-spiritedness.”
“Well, you can join me – but first, I’m going to need a million bucks. So when you get that figured out, let me know.”
He smiled. “What if we skipped the million bucks and just went on some cheaper, really incredible trips with each other? It doesn’t have to be luxurious. We could camp on a beach in Hawaii. We could stay in a hostel in Fiji.”
“Maybe,” I said coyly. “But I don’t go traveling around with strangers.”
“Well maybe we should get acquainted then. My name is Rick.”
He held out his hand and I shook it. I remember that his grip was powerful, maybe even too strong. At the time, I just thought he didn’t know his own strength. Later I realized that it was an omen of everything he was going to be in our relationship: controlling, domineering, insensitive.
But at the time, I was just a freshman in college, and a handsome guy’s touch was sending pleasurable shivers down my spine.
“I’m Katherine,” I said. “But my friends call me Katie.”
He grinned. “So can I call you Katie?”
“Depends. When are you taking me to Hawaii?”
We danced and talked for hours and ended up making out. I dated him for the rest of the year, and then stayed faithful to him while he went away to law school. We were going to buy a house with a picket fence, and have a family, and live happily ever after.
It didn’t turn out that way.
And of all the things we did during that time, none of them included a trip to Hawaii.
8
As I stumbled along in the darkness, I didn’t realize how few people were out on the boardwalk. I also didn’t realize the danger I was in until it was too late.
I was walking past a deserted lot when I heard a voice say, “Yo, baby, what’s wrong?”
I glanced back and saw three guys – all of them young, tattooed, and lanky. They had that hard edge you see in homeless kids who hung out on the boardwalk. The leader was a white boy with cornrows who looked like he desperately wanted to be a rapper – a cut-rate Eminem who thought his hairstyle made him cool.
As soon as I looked at them, I knew I shouldn’t have. I turned my head and kept walking, but I had already made a fatal mistake.
I heard their feet on the pavement behind me, walking quicker.
“What? Ain’t you gonna say somethin’? All I’m sayin’ is you so pretty you shouldn’t be cryin’. I can make you happy again, ain’t that right, boys?”
They hooted and cackled their agreement.
I walked faster, but their footsteps kept up with mine.
“Hey, where you goin’ so fast? You gonna hurt my feelings.”
He actually came up right next to me and walked sideways, his face turned towards me. Even in the dim light, I could see his beady eyes and acne-scarred cheeks, not to mention the sleazy attempt at a goatee around his mouth.
“Please, just leave me alone,” I said, and started to jog.
“Hey – hey, we just tryin’ to be friendly.” He picked up the pace and got right up next to me again. “What, you too much of a bitch, you can’t be friendly?”
And just like that, it went from threatening to terrifying.
“If you don’t leave me alone, I’m going to—”
His hand came up and slapped over my mouth as he forced me against the brick wall of a closed store front. I nearly gagged on the stale cigarette stench from his nicotine-stained fingers.
“You gonna what?” he snarled right in my face. “You ain’t gonna do shit, ‘cept let me and my boys have a real good time.”
I tried to scream, but the stinking hand over my mouth muffled my cries. I tried to wrench away from him, but his two friends pinned my arms.
I was completely helpless.
They were laughing, and there was no one around, and I knew something horrible was going to happen –
“Let her go,” said a new voice.
A deep, powerful, commanding voice.
The three scumbags stopped and looked behind them. I caught a glimpse of a man in a hoodie, with broad, powerful shoulders, carrying a surfboard under his arm.
The voice sounded vaguely familiar, though in my panic I couldn’t quite place it.
“Yo, asshole, this don’t concern you,” Cornrows spat.
“I think it does,” said the stranger in the hoodie. “The lady obviously doesn’t like you or what you’re doing, and I don’t like that, so I’m telling you to let her go and get the hell out of here.”
His words only fired up the three hoodlums.
“Oh man, you just beggin’ to get your ass beat,” Cornrows snarled.
“If you think you can, then come on and try,” the man with the surfboard said.
“Take him,” Cornrows ordered his two thugs.
They let go of my arms and approached the stranger on either side, angling i
n on him like wolves. I tried to fight and twist away but Cornrows braced himself against me even harder and hissed in my ear. “You move, I break your fuckin’ neck.”
I watched in terror as the other two lowlifes advanced on the surfer.
They were within five feet of him before he reacted – but when he did, it was incredibly fast.
He flung out the surfboard from under his arm, caught it by the end, and swung it through the air like a wooden plank.
WHAM!
It clocked the punk on his left in the head, sending him sprawling to the ground.
The guy on the right reared back his fist, winding up for a punch – but as he threw it, the surfer swung the board in front of him, and his fist hit the fiberglass surface with a sickening crack.
The thug screamed – but only until the surfer’s right cross slammed into his jaw and knocked him out.
Cornrows was the only one left standing. I could see the fear in his eyes and feel the hesitation in his body, but he was apparently just brave enough – or stupid enough – to take on the stranger one-on-one.
He threw me to the ground as hard as he could. I cried out as I hit the concrete on my knees and hands.
“Fool, I’m gonna kick your ass – ”
Cornrows had hardly taken two steps when the surfer flung the surf board, point first, directly at him. The sharp point slammed right into Cornrows’ chest, and drove him back into the wall where he had pinned me just a moment before.
Cornrows gasped and wheezed, a shocked look on his face.
By the time he realized what was happening, though, the man in the hoodie was right in front of him.
WHAM!
One punch to Cornrows’ head and he was laid out on the ground. He started whining and crying like a five-year-old, begging for his life.
“Come on, man – please, man – I didn’t mean nothin’, I wasn’t gonna hurt her –”
The guy in the hoodie grabbed my arm and hoisted me to my feet, but he was still looking back at Cornrows when he said, “You follow us, I will kill you. That’s a promise.”
He looked back at me. “Can you walk?”
I nodded in mute terror. I couldn’t even see his face yet because of the shadows under his hood.
“Come on, then,” he said, and pulled me by the hand. We raced down the boardwalk, leaving behind the three assholes groaning and writhing on the ground.
Sex On The Beach: Bad Boys Club Romance #1 Page 2