No.
He wasn’t mine anymore, hadn’t been in seventeen years.
How could it have been so long?
I actually saw him today.
There was so much in his words that showed what he must have thought about me.
The tears I’d been holding back rolled down my cheeks and I gripped the edge of the sofa as if it could keep me from falling apart.
I gazed outside the window. As a light drizzle started to fall from the sky it reminded me of the day I’d left Wilmington. It was drizzling just like it was now.
Ryan hated me for leaving and he was right to. Everything he’d said in regards to the way I left was completely correct. Except at the time I wasn’t really given a choice when his beloved mother threw me out and threatened to destroy me if I didn’t stay away from her son.
That was what happened.
Kathy O’Shea told me to go. She told me to leave Ryan, get out of his life and stay away from him. She’d stopped me from meeting him.
I squeezed my eyes shut at the memory, willing it all to go away. However, the sting of her viperous tongue, came rushing back on me and it could have been happening right now.
In my mind I could see Kathy with her perfect blonde up do, bright red lips pursed together and a heavy scowl of distaste on her face along with pleasure from my reaction when she’d asked me if I thought I was good enough for her son.
Then she followed that up by telling me Ryan could and should do better, and if I loved him I’d leave so he could make better choices with his life.
Her tirade continued to inform me that I was the maid’s daughter and she didn’t want her son associating himself with the help.
The way she’d glowered at me as she told me Ryan needed to be with a girl of his own league left no doubt in my mind that it wasn’t just the fact that I was the help’s daughter that irked her. She also didn’t want him with me because I was black.
Having someone talk to you like that at eighteen years old was truly awful.
It was so much worse when you’d just lost everything. I’d buried my mother two months before and I was a mess.
I was a complete mess. My mind fragile and my heart shattered from the loss.
Over the time I’d known her Mrs. O’Shea had always been cold toward me and Mama, but she never truly expressed her pure dislike until that day.
I knew she didn’t like either of us, and worst because Mr. O’Shea did. He treated us like we were part of the family. She truly hated that and indicated it, just never outrightly said it.
It might have made it easier though if she’d shown her true colors before. It would have given me a heads up that she was actually evil.
Ryan and I were seeing each other in secret. We were supposed to leave for New York and she stepped in. Kathy O’Shea stepped in big time, intercepted, and well and truly put me in my place. When I told her I was in love with him and wanted the best for him it enraged her. The woman threw me out of her house herself, and that was when she threatened to destroy me.
I didn’t know what she meant by destroy, but I didn’t need to ask.
The thing was… it wasn’t that part that made me leave.
It was the worry of not being good enough for Ryan. It was clear I had nothing to offer him and he was giving up a lot to be with me.
I reached across the coffee table and grabbed a few tissues from the Kleenex box to dry my eyes.
Ryan might have been a rebel, but the guy was practically a genius with an IQ that was through the roof. I didn’t know anybody else who hated college as much as he did, and just turned up for their first batch of legal exams and aced them without a day of study. He’d said the answers he gave were logical and made sense.
He’d wanted to become an artist and that was what he was going to do in New York, while I went to design school. He was a fantastic artist but with his family business being law, he would have worked wonders. That was supposed to be the plan his parents thought he’d follow.
I wasn’t his problem to deal with. That’s what Kathy O’Shea said and I agreed.
She thought I would have just been using him for his money, a means to an end as I’d lost my mother.
I’d told myself that leaving him would allow him to be who he was supposed to be. So I left, leaving behind the boy I’d loved and the memory of my mother.
It made sense for Georgie to suggest telling Ryan the truth. It did. Especially seeing the state I was clearly in.
Many years ago, after I finished college, I nearly did find him to tell him what happened. But I’d stopped myself after I’d called his father’s law firm and was told he worked there.
That told me he’d made it.
It told me he was doing what he was supposed to be doing.
He was where he was supposed to be and it was right for me to have left.
The truth wouldn’t help anybody now, and not when Kathy had cancer.
When I’d dropped the comment that Mama’s suicide was suspicious, I didn’t actually aim it at anyone. It was suspicious because it simply was.
I was about to find out why.
I was about to go back to the past I’d run from.
Seeing Ryan today was something I never expected.
The memories and his presence took me right back to the moment things changed between us. It was like something unlocked.
Like truth was speaking and had allowed the walls of everything else to fade
so we could see there was more to us than met the eye. More than we even knew.
He was the bully I should have stayed away from.
I wished I had.
My shoulders wracked as I started to sob, crying tears that poured from my weeping soul.
Chapter 4
Lana
Nineteen years ago …
A series of laughter sounded behind my back. I turned and glared knowing it would mean nothing but I still did it anyway.
It was my way of retaliating. Even if all I could do was look and glower, I would do it.
The smell of tuna in my locker was overpowering, suggesting it had been in there from either last night or yesterday.
As the odor wafted out, the students passing by covered their noses. Some started laughing.
“Hey Connell, you stink!” cried Mort Peterson, the captain of the basketball team. His girlfriend Carolina started to laugh and the laughter continued with the bunch of hyenas who were responsible.
The main hyena laughed the loudest. It would have been his idea to do this to me, just like all the other shit he’d done to me since Mama and I went to live with him and his family eight years ago.
Mama had a live in maid position at the O’Shea mansion. For me it was like living in hell.
In fact, I felt certain that the devil might have had more compassion than him.
His father would have told him off, his mother was quiet. She always gave me the creeps with her cold calculating eyes. Always watching and observing. Never really saying much. She was the kind of woman who would give a disapproving glare and it would be enough to warn you.
I was sure though that Ryan O’Shea didn’t care one way or the other, because he had his parents wrapped around his thumb most of the time. Just not when it came to sneaking girls in the house.
He was doing this to me because apparently it was my fault his father caught Tiffany Tate in his room giving him a blow job.
My fault because I told his father I couldn’t get inside his room to clean it. Mama had to go to the dentist so I filled in for her afternoon work.
How the hell was I supposed to know Ryan was in the room with that skank and he’d locked the door from the inside. His father used a master key and found them. We found them.
My fault.
It was apparently my fault too that his father had punished him by taking away his motorcycle and the new convertible.
Poor Ryan… boohoo. How so, so very unfortunate for him that he had to use last year’s Pors
che at the start of his senior year, and all the other jocks and snobbish assholes had the latest.
Ugh, I hated living with him, and it was worse that I felt so stupid for feeling jealous.
Me jealous over the skank with the guy who treated me like shit. The said guy my very, very stupid heart warmed to whenever he was near me.
What the hell was wrong with me?
I was sixteen years old and had no form of sexual experience at all. I’d never even kissed a boy but I wasn’t stupid. I knew what she was doing to him and I actually felt jealous of the fact that she was the kind of girl Ryan went for.
The head cheerleader on the squad. The most popular girl at school who was of course beautiful and well loved by everyone. And yes rich, just like him.
Tiffany was on his arm now, laughing at me while I had to deal with the damn tuna in my locker. Freaking fantastic.
He glanced over at me and gave me the habitual sneer so I looked away, took the tuna out, and left the stupid locker open to air out.
I felt for certain this would be the first strike. Tomorrow was Mrs. O’Shea’s dinner party where I was sure he’d deal more torture to me.
I was wrong…
Before the day was out, I had one of my math books stolen and when I found it, all the pages were glued together. But my personal favorite was the petrified rat I found in my gym bag. The thing looked like it had been dead for weeks. Knowing Ryan, he’d probably found it and kept it specially for me.
This was what my life was like.
He was seventeen about to turn eighteen and in the year above me, he’d be going to college next year. I didn’t think it was insane for me to wonder why he thought he could act like such a brat with his childish pranks.
And I just had to take it.
Why?
Because Mama wanted to keep the peace. The Donovans paid her well, we got to live in a nice house for free, and she wanted to make sure she could save up to send me to college. She wanted to make sure she had enough to give me all that I wanted.
While I loved the thinking behind that, a majority of the time I truly wished she could do something else for work and I would happily take living in a box rather than being there in the O’Shea mansion.
I was definitely going away to college and counting down the days even though I had a little under two years before I went.
We’d been here for so long and year in, year out was the same.
The O’Sheas did pay Mama well and we would have had enough money for everything if my aunt wasn’t always in trouble and needing money to bail her out.
I knew Aunt Larissa was a drug addict, my cousin told me and by the same token I knew that Mama always being there to help her when she needed it wasn’t helping her. The only thing it was doing was robbing us of a better life.
Robbing me of a better life.
* * *
I stayed in the safety of my room for the whole morning the next day.
Usually on Saturday, I’d go to the library first thing at the community center to swim, but it was safer to stay in because I knew Ryan was just waiting for me to come out. I knew later on was going to be awful so I just wanted a quiet morning with my fashion magazines and design books. There was a skirt I wanted to make. I’d saved up to buy the cloth two weeks ago and the stones to put on it. I was going for a Boho chic look I’d seen a lot in the spring. Most designers were doing their collections with that in mind.
That was what I wanted to be. A fashion designer. I was going to college to study that. I was hoping to get into Parsons in New York. That was where I had my heart set. I tried not to think of it too much because realistically it was years away and seriously expensive.
Until that time though, I thought I could do what I loved. That meant making my own inspired designs on days like Saturday where I had a few spare hours.
I emerged just before the party started so I could help Mama. I’d managed to do some drawings for the pattern I’d follow for my skirt and created a little motif with the diamantes.
The plan was to do what was needed then get back up to my room and start sewing. I currently sewed by hand. The next round of savings would hopefully get me a sewing machine.
I went downstairs through the back hallway and found Mama in the kitchen with the kitchen staff. She already looked rushed off her feet.
“Good sweetie, you’re down,” she said, smiling at me. “Can you start serving the canapes? The guests have already started to arrive.”
“Sure.” I returned the smile. Anything for her, although I did wonder who’d be here at this time. Who got to a party this early?
I got the answer when I took the tray of canapes out to the poolside and saw Ryan and friends. Friends as in his stupid jerk football friends Tom, Paul, Carson, and Barney.
Barney, I didn’t know who could have a name like that and automatically think they were cool. No riches on earth could make that name cool, yet when this guy saw me, he wrinkled his nose like he’d just smelled something bad and looked at me like he’d stepped in shit.
“Maid girl.” He called out to me.
I didn’t answer. I did not speak to him or any of them for that matter.
I just walked up to the little buffet table and set down the tray. The asshole however thought it would be a good idea to come up to me and snap his fingers in front of my face.
His long blond hair was a matted mess today and his ice blue glacier-like eyes gave me an arctic stare.
“I’m talking to you,” he said in a harsh tone. When I didn’t answer and continued to glower at him the group started to laugh. “Oh she doesn’t speak. Something wrong with you?” He stepped closer, and closer and made the mistake of stepping in my personal space with that stupid finger-snapping shit in my face.
How I hated that. Talk to me badly, tease me even, but fingers snapping right in my face, as in an inch from my nose, was a hell no.
I shocked him by stepping forwards in a swift move and holding my hand up in front of him.
“Don’t do that,” I told him through gritted teeth. “And I’m not your maid, nor your girl so don’t speak to me.”
I may have sounded ballsy like I could take care of myself and maybe it would have worked on a different group. For these guys though, no, not so much. He just laughed, as did the others.
My gaze snapped to Ryan who to my surprise was just sitting on the deck chair watching me. This behavior from his friends was because of him. Head bully. He made them think it was okay to treat people the way they did.
A series of giggles cut into my glare at him and I looked to the top of the stairs to see the girls arriving. The bitch Tiffany spotted me and whispered something to her friend.
That was my cue to leave, so I did.
With the canapes delivered, I felt I could buy some time doing something else.
I went back to the kitchen and saw Mama making a pitcher of fruit punch.
“Sweetie can you go ask Ryan and his friends if they want some drinks? Mr. O’Shea wants me to make sure they have enough mocktails so they don’t sneak away the alcohol.” She chuckled.
My heart dropped into my stomach. “Can I do something else? Please?”
Maybe it was the defeat in my eyes and the withered expression on my face but she seemed to take note.
“Lana, what’s up? You’ve been in your room all day, now you’ve come down and you look like you’d rather be somewhere else.”
I glanced at Chef Moore and he raised his brows. It was funny everyone else seemed to see what was going on, except her.
“I would, I don’t want to go back outside with them. Mama, if I breathe the wrong way they all make fun of me.” I knew I sounded like a whiner but it was the truth.
“Oh sweetie they don’t mean anything by it. Come on help me out here. I need you. I want this part done so we can start on the food. The main guests will arrive soon.” She gave me a little pat on my back. “Come on sweetie. Remember every time you pout you encourage a wr
inkle.” Mama loved Marilyn Monroe and often quoted her.
“That’s not true, wrinkles just happen to come when they feel like,” I countered.
“Nope, I’m saving you. Trust me. Plus, how will you look on stage at the grand opening of your fashion show in a few years’ time with wrinkles when you’re only twenty something.” She giggled. “Imagine all your guests including me, wearing their finest get up, looking on at you. A girl has to be the queen of her own show.”
That made me smile. She always knew how to reach me. Somehow she’d say just the right thing to melt me like butter.
My own show. I would be happy to work for a big designer, but my own line of clothes in a fashion show was the stuff dreams were made of.
“Oh Mama.” I grinned, slumping my shoulders.
“Don’t you oh Mama me, sweet girl. I’m being serious. I’ll be the proud mother of the acclaimed fashion designer. Of course I’ll have my hair done and make you proud too.” she gave the flicks of her hair a little tap and the ends bounced. When she did that she always reminded me of someone classy like Billie Holliday. But Mama wore her shoulder length hair like Marilyn Monroe and had her figure too. Along with the winning smile she could get anybody to do anything.
“You win.” I sighed with a little laugh when Mama gave me what she called her Marylyn wink.
“Of course. Make a girl laugh and you can get her to do anything.”
Both Chef Moore and his assistant chuckled.
Putting on a brave face, I made my way back outside and that was where my disastrous evening really kicked off.
Because I’d told Barney not to speak to me or call me Maid Girl, the group did it even more and laughed.
What was worse was watching Ryan get friendly with Tiffany’s tongue. At one point I had to wonder if they were doing a thorough check of each other’s tonsils.
It rubbed me the wrong way that I took such great note of anything he did like that and no matter what I did to ignore my stupid reaction, I’d just end up feeling worse.
Today I was more inclined to agree with Barney. Maybe something was wrong with me. How else would I explain my fascination with a guy who’d bullied me since I was eight.
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