Durga: Ever?
Benkinersophobia: No.
Durga: I call bullshit.
Reed groaned out. “Emery, are you even listening to me?”
Oops. How long had I been ignoring Reed?
Remorse had my fingers twitching. Reed didn’t know about Ben. No one did. That was the point. Hell, it was the single rule the Eastridge Fund swore by. Anonymity. That meant no meetings and no discussing identifying details.
I placed Reed on speaker again, tossed my old smartphone on my raggedy mattress, and massaged the back of my neck. “Yes. Sorry. I spaced out.”
“You’ve been doing that a lot.”
His evident frustration settled in my chest, the guilt nothing new to me. Reed and I had made a pact to attend Duke together. Instead, I’d left for Clifton University in Alabama without telling him.
The people of Eastridge hated my family—and me by default. The same people that had followed Reed to Duke. I’d needed to get out of North Carolina. As far away from the Prescott brothers, The Winthrop Scandal, and Eastridge as my wallet would take me.
Four years ago, that would have been far.
Then Dad became the subject of a very public F.B.I.-S.E.C. joint investigation for embezzlement and stock tampering, and the textiles business he owned—the same one that provided jobs for almost everyone in town—went out of business.
Dad still had money—a lot of it—and so did Mother, but I wanted nothing to do with the dirty money that, as far as I was concerned, had become blood money as soon as Reed’s dad and Angus Bedford had died.
“Who calls someone to read their emails? I’m not your assistant,” Reed complained.
It was almost odd how we pretended everything was normal, that my dad’s actions hadn’t led to his dad’s death, even if indirectly. I knew Dad hadn’t forced Hank’s heart to give out… just like I knew it never would have happened if he hadn’t been so stressed about losing his life’s savings and had to work three jobs to make it—and Reed’s college tuition—back.
“I know. I’m sorry.” I bit my lip and let my apology linger, because as always, I meant it as more than what I was supposed to be apologizing for. I’m sorry I’m too chicken shit to read my own emails. I’m sorry I screwed your brother. I’m sorry about your dad. “But I literally can’t bring myself to read the email.”
Tap.
Tap.
Tap.
Each click-clack of his keyboard sent my anxiety skyrocketing.
“Okay.” He let out a heavy breath. “Headline: Emery, prepare for your successful repayment.”
Next door, my neighbor’s chihuahua barked as if he could sense my anxiety. I heard my neighbor yelling at the puppy through the thin walls, but he barked louder. My spirit animal was a three-month-old chihuahua who weighed one pound and three ounces and responded to the name Muchacha.
(Muchacha was not, in fact, a young woman but a male dog with a very real penis I’d witnessed him licking on occasion.)
I switched my phone off speaker and drew it to my ears.
“I know what the headline says,” I snapped after Muchacha finally stopped barking. “Fuck. I’m sorry.”
Here’s something people often say about being poor but you never fully understand until it happens to you: being poor is stressful.
Unpaid bills always found a way into your mind, and when you stood in front of a grocery store cashier, holding up the line as she read out a number you were a few bucks short of, the desire for the ground to open up and swallow you whole became a permanent fixture of your life.
In reality, I knew what the email would say. I’d graduated a semester early, and my six-month student loan grace period would end soon. I needed a job. Preferably one away from home, not that anyone in the state would give me one.
The Winthrop name was radioactive in North Carolina. For good reason. Too many lives had been lost, including—I reminded myself for the millionth time—Reed’s dad.
“You good, Em?”
I could never thank Reed enough for his patience, especially when I got Hulk-like, which was often lately.
“Yeah. Continue, please?” I toyed with my hair, which I’d let grow back to its natural roots. For starters, I had no money for highlights and hair dye. Also, I’d never thought I looked good as a blonde carbon copy of Mother.
“Once your loans leave the grace status, your Monthly Payment begins. Blah. Blah. Blah.” I waited for him to finish reading. “Basically, your loan payments start in about two weeks.”
“Shit.”
I cursed myself for getting a degree in design when the present market for clothing designers in the South was practically non-existent and for not accepting the minimum-wage job I’d been offered last week. In my defense, at those rates, I might as well work for Daffy Dee’s Diner as a waitress on rollerblades, which was my current hustle.
“You could work for Nash,” Reed suggested, but I could gather how much he hated the idea.
I didn’t understand what had happened between them. I didn’t feel like it was my place to ask either. No matter how curious I was. A part of me always wondered if it had to do with me, but no way.
I shook my head, even though he couldn’t see me. “Nope.”
“Why not?”
Because four years later, I’m still mortified.
I hadn’t talked to Nash Prescott since that night in Reed’s bedroom. Not that we’d talked much before that. He was always Reed Prescott’s older brother to me. Unattainable. Forbidden. Something I’d never even considered.
Until he had given me the best sex I’d ever had, and I still revisited that night in my head when the Alabama nights got too cold and I had nothing but fantasies to keep me warm. One night, when Ben had sent a slew of dirty messages my way, I’d come to the image of Nash over me.
I shook my head and picked at the cheap threads of my swap meet sheets. “Because he’s your brother, and that’s weird. Plus, you hate him.”
I hate him, too.
“I don’t hate him,” Reed lied. “As for the rest, that’s a horrible reason to deny an opportunity most would kill for.”
I loathed that check-your-privilege tone of his, something he’d picked up from being my best friend during my high society days. The worst part was, he was right.
I’d left my parents and their money as soon as I’d turned eighteen, but that unshakeable guilt nagged me. It reminded me I was still more privileged than I deserved. I had a roof over my head, a bachelor’s degree, and a few Hamburger Helpers in my cabinet.
Truthfully, there were signs I’d ignored, conversations I’d overheard, and pieces I should have put together but didn’t. The way Mother never wanted me to visit the factory. The way Dad forced me out of the room every time his business partner Balthazar visited. The secret argument I’d heard between Mother, Dad, and Balthazar just weeks before the F.B.I. and S.E.C. raided our home.
When Mother had sat me down and told me Dad had defrauded everyone, that she was leaving him, and that she and Balthazar had tried to stop him, I hadn’t believed her. The fucking F.B.I. had been looking into Dad, and still, I loved him with a loyalty he didn’t deserve.
He’d screwed his business partner over. He’d screwed the town over. He’d screwed my mother over. And he’d screwed me over.
The worst part? My ignorance made me as complicit in The Winthrop Scandal as my dad. Sophomore year, on the heels of a bomb threat at Eastridge Prep that had turned out to be Teddy Grieger’s bail-out plan for the A.P. Physics test, the school’s administration had held an assembly with the Eastridge Police Department.
Officer Durham gave a cheesy speech about being young adults, having responsibility, and looking out for one another. He’d made one point that, years later, always echoed in my mind when I laid alone in bed and felt particularly masochistic.
If you see something, say something. This isn’t just a slogan. It’s a creed. There is no such thing as an innocent bystander.
I was n
ot an innocent bystander.
My sigh transformed into a long exhale as I bundled my design materials into a ball at the base of my mattress.
“If by horrible reason you mean horribly valid, yes, I agree.” I couldn’t be more petulant if I had jutted my bottom lip out.
“Mature.” I could almost hear Reed shaking his head. “What’s your beef with him? You know what? Don’t answer that. Nash won’t know you work there. The company is huge, and you’re going by Emery Rhodes. Plus, you haven’t seen him in four years, and you look nothing like you used to.”
“You mean, I look like a mess.”
Mother reminded me of this in her monthly emails.
Speak of the Devil…
My phone beeped with another call. I pulled it away from my ear and checked the caller ID. Mother flashed on the screen, a picture of her portrait-style in front of The Eastridge Junior Society displayed in full HD.
She was probably calling to pry info out of me, to see if I’d finally visited Dad or if I wanted to do brunch with her and her boyfriend Balthazar.
As in, Uncle Balthazar.
As in, my dad’s business partner Uncle Balthazar.
As in, the man who had been so close to my family that Mother had instructed me to call him “uncle” since birth.
I hadn’t talked to my mother in months and didn’t plan on starting now. I would sooner talk to Dad.
Anagapesis.
Aesthete.
Yūgen.
Gumusservi.
Muttering pretty words that made me happy, I declined the call and pressed my phone back to my ear in time to hear Reed laughing. “I didn’t say that.”
A woman’s voice drifted over the line in the background.
I winced, absently rubbing at my chest, right above the spot that housed my jealous heart. I wasn’t jealous because I wanted Reed. I knew that ship had sailed as soon as I’d slipped into bed with the wrong Prescott.
Loneliness fueled the jealousy. Mother had Uncle Balthazar. Reed had Basil. And I had a broken heater and endless Netflix binges of F.R.I.E.N.D.S. on my ex from freshman year’s account. I dreaded the day he realized I was using it and changed his password.
“Is that Basil?” I bit a strand of hair, a nasty habit Mother would disown me for. “Tell her I said, ‘hi.’”
We both knew I didn’t mean it. He thought I disliked her for the way she treated me in high school, and I let him believe that rather than tell him the truth, which was that I thought he deserved better.
My neighbor’s chihuahua, perhaps.
Whereas I’d ditched Reed for Clifton University, Basil and just about every other filthy rich Eastridger had followed him to Duke.
They’d been together since and were two seconds away from getting married and having perfectly behaved, blonde-haired, blue-eyed babies. Not the chaotic, wild, black-haired, heterochromia-eyed demon children I’d probably give birth to.
“She says you’d be a fool not to take a job with Nash.”
Another lie from Reed.
When had we started lying to each other so much?
“No, she didn’t.”
If there was anyone Basil Berkshire wanted more than Reed, it was Nash. Though he wasn’t as wealthy as us—as blue-blooded, as pedigreed, as groomed for nine-figure trust funds—he was always above us in some intangible way no one could explain but everyone gravitated toward.
And now, Nash Prescott was filthy rich. No one had an explanation for how it had happened, but it didn’t surprise anyone either.
“Okay, she didn’t,” Reed admitted, “but I think you should work for Prescott Hotels. At the very least, maybe take one of their design internships for new graduates. You’d be designing a hotel, not clothes, but at least it’s kind of close? Maybe? I don’t know. Either way, it’s a good, paying job. Nash doesn’t even need to know if you think it’s awkward. I can get Delilah to set it up for you. She owes me one.”
Beggars can’t be choosers.
Beggars can’t be choosers.
Beggars can’t be choosers.
I repeated the mantra in my head. Let’s be real, I was a fucking beggar. Probably would be for the rest of my life.
“Delilah?” The largest hole in the blanket widened as I toyed with the loose threads.
“The head of his legal department and his best friend, though he’d deny it, the cranky asshole. They’re opening a new hotel in Haling Cove. It’s in North Carolina, but it’s far enough away from Eastridge that…” Reed’s voice trailed off, but I got his point.
“I’ll think about it,” I relented before ending the call about the same time another email pinged on my phone. This time reminding me of a two-thousand-dollar payment I had to make.
Fuck.
I hit redial immediately.
“Yes?”
I ignored Reed’s amused tone and Basil’s whispers. “Set it up, please.”
I swear, I could be naked and on display in the Metropolitan Museum, and my heart would beat slower than it was beating now.
“Just do it, please,” I added when I sensed he’d give me shit for changing my mind so quickly.
“Under Emery Rhodes?”
Rhodes was my grandmama’s maiden name. I’d been using it since I had left Eastridge. Winthrops weren’t exactly popular in this neck of the woods, even as far as Alabama, but at least with my hair back to its natural black, I survived most of my undergrad with no one recognizing me.
That last month, though… I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. Not even Basil fucking Berkshire.
I chewed on another strand of hair, wondering how to ask this without sounding ridiculous. I spit it out, “Please, don’t tell Nash.”
“Keep a secret from my brother? Easily.”
No hesitation.
Nothing.
Reed liked people. Whereas I had gone full-on hermit in college, Reed joined a frat, went to parties, and made more friends than Facebook allowed. But for the past seven years, he liked everyone except his brother.
“What’s with you two? You used to be close.”
I’d broken the unspoken rule. Asked the question I’d known I instinctively shouldn’t have asked.
“Nothing.”
Flat.
Emotionless.
Not Reed, yet somehow Reed.
Some rustling on his end filled my ears, and instinct told me he was done with this phone call.
“Look, I have to go. I’ll talk to Delilah. This is the right decision,” Reed assured me before he hung up.
I knew he was right. There wasn’t a market for inexperienced twenty-two-year-olds with degrees in design in Clifton, Alabama, and there was nothing for me back in Eastridge, North Carolina. An internship at Prescott Hotels would afford me a head start I would be stupid to give up.
But the idea of seeing Nash again, of working for him…
I buried my face in my pillow and screamed before glaring at myself in the mirror. Desperation clashed with my pitch-black hair.
My phone pinged. Ben. The one person I could talk to about the Nash Prescott fiasco, but it felt weird to use Nash’s app to discuss accidentally having sex with Nash.
Benkinersophobia: I didn’t change it, because it reminds me of a girl I used to know.
My fingers twitched with the urge to ask him more, but I held back. I was better off not knowing.
Durga: If you had to change your username, what would you change it to?
I waited an hour for him to respond, and as soon as he did, the green active dot beside his name turned red.
Benkinersophobia: Sisyphus.
Sisyphus.
A fallen king.
A liar.
A cheat.
I could relate.
The one-word name should have been the first indicator I couldn’t trust Fika.
His name reminded me of Emery Winthrop and her penchant for obscure words, which should have been the second indicator.
Fika is Swedish for a moment to slow down a
nd appreciate the good things in life, and that should have been the third sign.
For starters, there were no good things in life.
And Fika wasn’t even Swedish.
He was a Wonder Bread white, North Carolinian, Keith Mars wannabe, a disgraced Eastridge sheriff ousted almost two decades ago, around the time I’d touched my first boob.
“I think you should stop this crusade of yours.” A curtain of bangs swept hair over one eye until he brushed them to the side. He resembled the Jonas Brothers before they’d realized straightening hair was for pussies. The leather chair squished under his weight as he leaned forward and placed two elbows on my office desk, close enough I could see my reflection in his eyes. “It’s destroying you. There’s no light in your eyes. I didn’t think it’s possible, but each time I see you, it’s worse, Nash.”
Fika patted his pockets as if searching for the cancer sticks that had fucked up his lungs in the first place. When he didn’t find them, he snapped at the litany of rubber bands that formed a colony up and down the length of his forearms.
“I didn’t invite you inside my home at four in the morning for your opinion of me. I hired you for a job.” Tracing my fingers along the stack of hundreds in front of me, I watched Fika’s eyes follow their path across Benjamin Franklin’s pasty, sunken-eyed face. “I tell you what to do. You get paid. That’s how this works.”
Thumbing the currency strap, I lifted the bills and fanned them, my fingers brushing against each hundred (and there were many). I should have shown mercy, but all I could feel at the mention of a Winthrop was rage.
The medical examiner had ruled my dad’s death a heart attack, but he’d left out the three jobs he’d taken that led to it. If he and Ma hadn’t lost their home, jobs, and savings, Dad would be alive and I wouldn’t catch Ma staring at an empty dinner setting with misty eyes every time I visited.
As far as I was concerned, the Winthrops killed Hank Prescott.
Devious Lies: A Standalone Enemies-to-Lovers Romance (Cruel Crown Book 1) Page 7