Fifty Shades Later: An Inevitable Conclusion (Fifty Shades of Neigh Book 3)

by Anna Roberts

  Holy crap! My Inner Goddess is turning gay now?

  Show me a woman who wouldn't go gay for Maud Lebowski and I'll show you a woman who's given up on life. Besides, I'm part of you. I know you never went through that phase in college quite as energetically as Kate did, but don't tell me you haven't thought about it.

  - In case you haven't noticed, we're in the middle of a car chase scene. This is hardly a good time for me to be questioning my sexuality.

  Since when have you ever given a shit about pacing? Oops - mind that motorcycle.

  Jeez - if it had been any closer I'd have clipped it with the wing mirror. And now I have a bicurious backseat driver jabbering away in my head. Could this day get any worse?

  "Hanna, slow down!" yells my mother, throwing herself bodily on the pet carrier. "Do you want to get pulled over?"

  "Pulled over?"

  "Yes! Apparently that's a thing that can happen if you drive like a goddamned maniac - who knew?"

  I catch her eyes in the rear view mirror and frown. "I'm not going to get pulled over. I'm rich. And I'm in a badly written novel where rich assholes flout the law and get away with it, without even paying anyone off or calling in contacts from the East Coast prep school where they all used to subject each other to suspiciously homoerotic hazing rituals."

  "Hanna, are you insane? You've gone meta! You never go meta!"

  "Mom, I know what I'm doing!"

  "No you don't! How many martinis did you have at lunch? Stop this car at once!"

  Then her words give way to screams as the car is filled with wings and beak and pure, animal rage. The seagull is loose. Oh my God - ow ow ow! Shit fuck and holy crappity crap crap crap - it's got my ear!

  "MOOOOOM! IT'S GOT MY EAR IT'S BITING MOMMY IT'S BITING IT'S BITING!"

  "Shit shit shit...Hanna, slow down, slow down. Please, just slow down...I know it hurts, baby, but please slow down!"

  I'm doing about forty when we hit the crash barrier. The seagull hits the inside of the windscreen with a thud, leaving a streak of pizza grease, Mountain Dew and Cheeto dust on its wake. It lands in my lap and doesn't move. There is blood everywhere. I reach up to touch my earlobe and feel a strange, queasy jolt when I realise it's about two inches lower than it ought to be. "Call a doctor!" I wail.

  "Call a vetinarian!" yells my mother.

  A police car pulls up alongside. I roll down the window. "Are you okay, ma’am?" he starts to say, and then recoils. "Oh, that's nasty."

  "Help me!"

  "It's okay - we're gonna take care of you."

  When we get to the hospital I discover that my earlobe is hanging by a strip of skin, my new Chanel purse is full of blood, my hair extensions have been all but destroyed by that stupid fucking seagull and to add insult to injury the thing has swallowed one of my favourite Cartier teardrop earrings.

  The bird is dead. My mother is hysterical.

  "This is what happens," she yells at everyone who will listen and some who won't. "You create an environmental disaster area and look what happens when we try to intervene? He was scared. He was a wild animal!"

  "So why did you have it in a pet carrier in the back of your car?" says the doctor, examining my ear. About six different doctors have come in to look at it but have any of them thought to sew it back on? Oh no. That would be sensible.

  "We are responsible for the fate of that poor bird," says my mother. "If it wasn't covered in Cheeto dust and pizza grease..."

  "Off-brand," I murmur. While the bird was flapping about I tasted more of its wing than I ever wanted to taste, and I swear it tasted of off-brand Cheetos. A strange twinge of memory stirs in my loins.

  At that point my husband rushes in. "Bennett!"

  "Hanna!" He ignores me and focuses directly on my ear. "Ooh - lovely."

  "What do you mean, lovely? My fucking ear is hanging off!"

  "I know. I don't usually get to do earlobes. To most of my patients ears are just things you either pin back or hide the scars behind. But this should be fun. Hopefully shouldn't go necrotic, otherwise you'll have to get used to wearing just the one earring."

  "My other one is inside the bird," I say. "Get it out!"

  "No way," says my mother. "You are not desecrating that poor creature's corpse, not after everything its been through."

  "It's not desecration," I say. "It's a dead bird and it's swallowed half a pair of forty-five thousand dollar Cartier earrings."

  "He was an innocent creature," says my mother, who is covered in bird poop and bleeding from a scalp wound.

  "That's not the point. Those are my earrings. Did you ever stop to think I might be traumatised? I was just in a car chase, for God’s sake."

  “A car chase?” says Bennett. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, I’m sure! There was a car – well, a van – and it chased me. Unless you want to be really pedantic...”

  “No, no. That’s fine. Are you sure they weren’t just following you to tell you that you’d left your shopping on the roof, because you know that...”

  “...no! They weren’t!”

  “They?” says the doctor.

  “She’s always had a paranoid streak,” explains my mother, holding a sterile dressing to her head.

  “I am not paranoid! I told you – Anonymous are sending me threatening messages and there was a kidnapper’s van following me from the office. And that seagull tasted like off-brand Cheetos.”

  Everyone is staring at me.

  “Its wing was in my mouth,” I mutter. “While I was screaming. You’d scream too if you were in a car chase with a panicking seabird.”

  “Where did the seagull come from anyway?” asks Bennett.

  “It’s a probably a leitmotif,” I say, and pass out.

  Chapter Seven

  Into The West

  The rain is coming down in sheets. I carefully pull my heel out of the mud and hope the water doesn't get into the kitchen and rust the Gaggia. I should be having the wall fixed today, but oh no - we had to have a funeral instead, didn't we? And I can't even do that right. I dressed in black and the first thing my mother did was bawl me out because she wanted us all to dress in blue, to represent the great sky spirit or something.

  I glare down at the coffin. Why couldn't they have just cut the stupid thing open?

  "We commit the body of our brother Jonathan to the earth, to the sky and to the oceans," says my mother. "Although some would say he was only a bird..."

  I knew she was going to give me the stinkeye at some point.

  "...those of us who knew him knew of his vibrant spirit, his can-do attitude and above all, the soaring beauty of his avian soul."

  "Can-poo attitude, more like," whispers Kate. "It was no wonder she lost the deposit on that rental car - the inside was covered in blood and birdshit."

  Luckily she is upwind and my mother doesn't hear her. Alicia is not so lucky. My mother tosses a bunch of feathers in the air and the wind catches them and plasters them wetly against Alicia's cheek and monocle. Uncle Bob sneezes. Celestia whines.

  "Can we go indoors now?" asks Kate. "Before everyone gets pneumonia?"

  For the first time in her life, my mother admits that it might not be the best weather to hold a drum circle. We all troop inside. "I'm so glad she let us come in," says Bennett. "The architect is supposed to be here at three."

  I turn and scowl at him. “I’ve got a bone to pick with you, Bennett Neigh.”

  He sighs. “Oh, for the last time, Hanna – there is nothing going on with me and Betty Lorenzo.”

  “I’m not talking about her,” I hiss, pulling him into the wine cupboard. “I’m talking about selling RIP out from under me.”

  “Oh,” he says, flushing guiltily. “That.”

  “When were you going to tell me?”

  “Look, Hanna,” he says. “You knew when I bought the company that I didn’t know a thing about publishing...”

  “But I do.”

  He shakes his head. “That’s as maybe, Porkch
op, but I gather it’s a very difficult time for the publishing industry right now...”

  “...says the man who just admitted he doesn’t know anything about publishing...”

  “...I can’t ignore the entire digital revolution, darling. Or the accounts. The company is a money pit. I had to sell when I still had half a chance of breaking even on my initial investment.”

  I shake my head and glare at him. “And when did you intend to tell me about this decision?”

  “Well...” He turns a deeper shade of pink. “I was sort of hoping you wouldn’t notice, actually.”

  “Wouldn’t notice?” I gape at him. “Goddamit, Bennett – how are we supposed to have any kind of marriage if you keep secrets like that from me?”

  He blinks down at me, offended. “Secrets, Hanna? You want to talk secrets? When were you going to tell me that you’d changed your name to Princess Pigtails Tittyfuck, Grand Empress of Fantasia?”

  I stare for a moment and sigh. “Oh, shit. That was an e-mail error. She obviously entered it wrong in the subject line. I was just thinking it might be better if I went by my maiden name at work – that’s all.”

  “And you were going to tell me this when?”

  Kate knocks on the door and coughs loudly. “Um, excuse me? Guys?”

  “What?”

  She has an evil look on her face and her iPhone in hand. “Just to let you know that Betty Lorenzo’s just arrived,” she says, and smirks. “Your Imperial Highness.”

  I snort and shake my head. Typical. “You were listening at the door, weren’t you?”

  Kate shows me the phone screen. “E-mailed you to check out the autocomplete. But yeah, I was listening at the door too.”

  I walk away, seething.

  “Don’t sell yourself short, your Majesty,” Kate calls after me. “You’re the Grand Piss-Empress. That’s, like, so far above a shitlord it’s not even funny.”

  Bennett reaches out to grab my shoulder as we approach the door, but I shake him off. “Don’t touch me,” I snap, irritably. “And keep your eyes to yourself when that slutty architect waves her breasts in your face. I’ve seen you.”

  “She’s slutty, you say?” murmurs Bennett.

  “Extremely. And don’t sound hopeful when you say ‘slutty’, you pig.”

  The front doors open and we plaster company smiles on our faces. He puts his arm around my shoulders and I delicately crush his smallest toe with my heel.

  Betty Lasagne gets out of her car one leg at a time, just in case we didn't notice she was wearing back-seam stockings like a World War II pinup. She wears four inch red heels and when she walks she moves like Jessica Rabbit, her boobs going ahead of her by at least thirty seconds and her hips swaying so far out that it's a marvel she can even fit her ass through the door.

  "Sooo..." she says, puckering her fire-engine red lips as she looks about the house she's been charging us to partially destroy. "We're kind of a mess, huh?"

  "Kind of a mess?" I snort. "There's an entire wall missing."

  She frowns, pulling her ridiculous eyebrows down to almost a normal height. "Well, you did ask for an east facing glass wall," she says. "But then I got a call saying you didn't, but the wall was already gone by that point."

  My God, could she be any more obvious? She's looking directly at him. With her eyes. And she's standing there with all her boobs and legs and ass and just shoving it all in his face. "So which is it?" she says. "You want it bricked back up or glazed?"

  I can barely believe my ears. Bricked up? Glazed? Are these some kinds of appalling sexual euphemisms for acts so depraved that even my husband doesn't know about them? He's unphased, but all I can do is gape at her.

  "If it's glazed, you'd better yell now," she says. "Because we need to perform some major structural work if a glass wall is going to be safe and weatherproof."

  I gather my dignity around me like a priceless mink. "There was a duck in my bedroom," I say.

  Betty Lasagne just frowns. "Okay," she says.

  "It was your fault," I snap. "Because the wall was missing."

  "No," she says. "I told you that the wall was coming down this week and then you called me - after the work was started - saying you wanted a west facing glass wall."

  "I did no such thing."

  "You did. You called and told my assistant - who is still a little annoyed at being called 'Miss Piss' by the way - that you wanted me to stop work on the east facing wall and start work on a west facing wall."

  I shake my head. "The words 'west facing wall' have never crossed my lips. Do I look Jewish?"

  She shrugs. "Ashkenazi, maybe? Listen, Mrs. Neigh - you asked me to stop work on the east facing wall and make the opposite wall glass, is that right? Because either my assistant is going insane or you were under the impression that we'd demolished the wrong wall."

  "Right," I say. "Now we're getting somewhere. You see how much easier it is when you concentrate on the job in hand instead of slavering over my husband like the Whore of the Baskervilles?"

  Betty Lasagne stares at me. "I think you'll find that's The Hound of the Baskervilles," she says. "And the only reason I'd ever be interested in your husband is if I needed a tattoo removed. Believe me - he's not my type."

  "If," I say, with withering sarcasm. "You were paying such rapt attention, Ms. Lasagne, why is half my house missing?"

  She removes a small digital recorder from her purse, turns it on and sets it on the kitchen surface. "Did you or did you not ask me to demolish the west facing wall of your house so that it could be replaced with glass?"

  "Of course not," I say. "That's what I said a moment ago. I never asked you to do that."

  "Instead you told me to demolish the east facing wall, right?"

  "That's right. Except you demolished the wrong wall. I wanted the one with the view. Surely it should have been obvious I wanted a view?"

  Betty Lasagne shrugs. "You got one."

  "Of next-door's bathroom window, yes. Meanwhile on the other hand demolishing the opposite wall would have given me the panoramic vista I desired."

  "That would have meant demolishing the west facing wall," says Betty. "And you told me to take out the east. So I did."

  I groan. The woman's an idiot. "Yes," I say, slowly. "Because I wanted views of the sunset."

  She frowns at me for a moment and says, "But the sun sets in the west."

  "Since when?"

  "Since always. I don't mean to be rude, but is there a name for the thing that's wrong with you?"

  My mother appears from nowhere and wanders through the kitchen, clutching a carton of soya milk. "Hanna always had poor spatial awareness," she says. "When she was little I used to have to write L and R inside her shoes. Of course, she had high social anxiety even then so she used to sweat the letters off as fast as I could rewrite them.”

  "...Mom, is there a reason you're in here?"

  She eyes the Gaggia with malice aforethought. "Can this thing make me a Fairtrade organic non-GM soya cappucino?"

  “I don’t know. Can you remove over twenty thousand dollars worth of Cartier diamonds from the innards of a dead bird?”

  “His name,” says my mother, bursting into tears. “Was Jonathan.”

  Bennett mumbles something about wildlife and before I know it my mother is sobbing copiously into Betty Lasagne’s ridiculous cleavage while he looks on with what I really hope is not some kind of perverted sexual interest.

  On the other hand, it gives me an idea. I stomp out into the rain, where Uncle Bob is shovelling wet mud over the seagull’s shoebox coffin. I know the gardener is lurking down here somewhere – the last time I spoke to him we had a long argument about his failure to give me a meadow full of wildflowers so that I could have somewhere appropriate to re-read the Twilight series. According to the horticultural genius, meadows full of wildflowers – ‘don’t just happen overnight’.

  As it turns out, he’s a lot more helpful this time. He agrees to dig up the seagull and get my
earring back. It wasn’t even that degrading, not when I think about what I had to do to get those earrings; Bennett got to play with ‘Mr. Stretchy’ and I spent the next week clenching my buttocks, terrified about what might happen if I dared to pass gas.

  “I hope you’ll be discreet,” I tell the gardener, as I pull up my La Perla panties and button my blouse. “My mother’s very sensitive about environmental issues.”

  “Whatever,” he says. “But won’t she notice when you wear both earrings?”

  I gesture to my bandaged ear. “Um...hello? Vincent Van Gogh here.”

  “I think that’s pronounced with a silent G,” says the gardener. “And an H.”

  “Excuse me? Which of us here is the editor at a publishing firm?”

  He ripples his muscles at me. “Whatever, Lady Chatterley. Just remember I want oral when I get your bling back.”

  “Forget it. I’m not kneeling in here until you put some kind of rug down.”

  When I get back to the house I find Kate in the family room, clutching a bowl of pasta and eyeing my daughter in much the same way that commandos probably eye the terrain before going in. “Theoretically,” she murmurs. “The kid’s just a tube with a hole at the top. All I have to do is grab, hold on and dump the linguini down her throat.”

  “Traumatise my child, why don’t you?” I snap.

  “It’s not trauma. It’s dinner. The sooner she fucking eats it the sooner she’ll get ice-cream. It’s not rocket-science.”

  Celestia stirs at the sound of the words ‘ice-cream’. Kate motions to me to shush and we wait, motionless, as Celestia finds something more interesting inside of her nose and settles back down to watch the evening news.

  “What kind of child-care professional are you?” I hiss.

  “I’m not,” says Kate. “You don’t pay me, remember? Anyway, when are you going back to work?”

  “I can’t very well go back like this, can I?” I say, gesturing to my bandaged ear.

  “Why not?”

  “You know why not.”

  “No. Why? Because everyone will sing that Don McLean song at you?”

  “What Don McLean song? American Pie?”