by Emery Rose
After I disposed of the condom, we just lay on the bed together, her head on my chest, my arm wrapped around her and I felt this strange sense of peace come over me. We were quiet for a few long moments, no sound except for our breathing, and I realized that being with her made me happy.
“I’m going to hell for this,” Scarlett said as I smoked a post-coital cigarette, her head in my lap, my dick getting hard for her again.
A fallen angel. Call me Lucifer. “Good. I could use the company.”
I fucked her two more times and she fell asleep with her body draped over mine. Limbs tangled, her cheek pressed against my beating heart, my hand wrapped around her thigh. That was how we slept, our bodies fused together like star-crossed lovers.
And that was when I knew I was well and truly fucked.
When I woke up a few hours later, the sun was just starting to rise, fingers of pale yellow sunlight dancing across Scarlett’s golden skin. Careful not to wake her, I peeled her body off mine and pulled the covers over her.
Grabbing my phone from the bedside table, I cursed under my breath when I saw the missed calls and the voicemail from my mother. My phone had been on silent. I took it into the bathroom with me. Might as well see what my crazy mother wanted. After I took a piss and washed my hands I listened to her voicemail, and then I listened to it again before calling her back, a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach.
My call went to voicemail. I tried her again. And again. But she never picked up.
Fuck.
My premonitions hadn’t been about Remy. They had been about my mother.
I pulled on my jeans that I’d left on the floor and grabbed a clean shirt from my dresser.
“Hey,” came Scarlett’s sleep-groggy voice from behind me. I sat on the edge of the bed to put on my high-tops, my mind focused on the logistics of getting to Vegas as quickly as possible. She wrapped her arms around me from behind and rested her chin on my shoulder. “What are you doing up so early?”
I removed her hands and stood up, gathering her clothes from the floor and tossing them in her general direction. “Get dressed. I’ll drop you off,” I said brusquely.
She sat back on her heels and looked out the window. It was barely light outside. “Okay. Are we still going surfing?”
“Change of plan.”
Her brows drew together in confusion. “Oh. But—"
“For fuck’s sake. I don’t have time to debate this. I’ve got shit to do. Get dressed.” I stalked out of the room, feeling like shit for snapping at her when she’d done absolutely nothing wrong, but fear and dread had rendered me incapable of exchanging pleasantries.
We were silent on the ride to her apartment. She was chewing on her bottom lip, upset or hurt or both, but I couldn’t think of a damn thing to say to make it better. So I settled for my default mode. I said absolutely nothing.
“Was this a mistake?” she asked when I stopped in front of her apartment. “I mean, yeah, I know it was, but do you feel like—”
“Something’s come up,” I said, cutting her off. Right now, I didn’t have a fucking clue how I felt about anything, and I didn’t have the mental capacity to talk about feelings and shit. “I need to go.”
“Yeah, okay, I see how it is. God. I really am so stupid.” Before I could say another word, not that I had a ready response because my mind was elsewhere, she was out of the car and slamming the door.
No sooner was it closed, I hit the accelerator and tore off down the street, leaving Scarlett and Costa del Rey in my rearview.
20
Dylan
I decided to drive to Vegas. The way I drove, I could get there in under four hours. I’d have my car and wouldn’t have to deal with flights, rental cars or taxis.
Music blasting, I drove on autopilot, shattering the speed limit even though a part of me knew I was already too late. The problem with having hundreds of miles of road stretched out ahead of you and nothing to do but drive was that it gave you too much time to think. An onslaught of shitty memories assaulted me, things I’d tried hard to forget pushed to the forefront of my mind.
The time I was twelve and my mother’s douchebag boyfriend tried to rape Remy. When I’d burst into Remy’s locked bedroom, baseball bat in hand, Russell’s pants were down around his knees and he was on top of my sister, his meaty palm clamped over her mouth to keep her quiet, the piece of shit. I was still small and no match for a two-hundred-pound asshole, but I had always been a fighter so that hadn’t deterred me. Rage and adrenaline had fueled me, blocked the pain when he punched and kicked me. I kept bashing him with a baseball bat, fury rendering me deaf and blind and half-crazed. I would have kept going and left him for dead if Remy hadn’t stopped me.
My mother had finally turned up, late to the party as usual, and found us hiding behind the dumpsters. She told us to get in the car and then she just drove and drove, straight through the night and all the next day. Across the heartland and the flyover states until we reached the desert. That was how we wound up living in a trailer park in Vegas.
I remember sleeping on a lumpy sofa, one eye open, ever vigilant over the men my mother brought home. Sometimes I used to fall asleep on the floor right outside Remy’s bedroom door, so they’d have to get through me before getting to my sister.
Remy was beautiful, men noticed her, and I vowed never to let anything happen to her again. Not on my watch. One night while we were living in Vegas, my mother came home with a fucked-up face and broken ribs. I nearly cried myself to sleep when I found out that some asshole had knocked her around. But instead giving in to crying, I’d gotten drunk on my mom’s beer and punched the wall until the skin over my knuckles ripped and shredded.
My view on Vegas? It was the place where hopes and dreams went to die. Where else would you find pawn shops and strip clubs next door to wedding chapels? That right there said it all. This town set you up to fail.
So the last place I wanted to be right now was Sin Fucking City.
My mother’s apartment was in downtown Vegas, about a ten-minute drive from the strip. Her apartment complex was one of those places that promised an oasis but didn’t deliver. Two three-story faded yellow buildings faced an empty swimming pool surrounded by brown palm trees swaying in the desert wind, the sunshine highlighting the shabbiness. It was exactly the kind of place my mother would choose to live. You could give the woman millions of dollars and tell her she could live anywhere, sky’s the limit, and she would end up in a trashy trailer park or a derelict house on the wrong side of town.
She had never believed she deserved better and she had passed that belief on to her kids. Why strive for something good when the world was just going to kick you back down where you belonged?
After banging on her front door and getting no answer, I used my key and let myself into her apartment. Technically, the apartment was mine. The lease was in my name. I paid the rent. I paid the utilities. I took care of her the only way I knew how. By throwing money at her.
The air inside her apartment was stale and smelled like cigarettes from an overflowing ashtray filled with red lipstick-stained filters on the scarred coffee table. An ugly as shit brown plaid sofa with stains on the cushions sagged against the beige wall. It looked a lot like the one I’d slept on in my teens. Dust motes floated in the air, the sun filtering through the vertical blinds in the living room, and I took it all in, trying to process the mundane, everyday existence of my mother before I ventured farther into her apartment.
I scrubbed my hand over my face and stopped in the hallway, trying to breathe. My chest was tight, and my stomach was churning. “Mom. Get your ass out of bed.”
My voice echoed in the quiet apartment. Not a sound came from the other side of her closed bedroom door. And I just stood in the hallway with those dingy beige walls closing in on me and I waited. For nothing.
My footsteps were slow and measured, my leather high tops squeaking on the linoleum as I got closer and closer to the door, the dread increas
ing with every step I took. I wrapped my hand around the doorknob and turned it. Pushing the door open, I stepped inside my mother’s bedroom and nearly gagged on the scent of her cheap perfume. I fucking hated that perfume she wore. It was sweet and cloying and smelled like cheap chemicals. Her bedroom was empty.
She might not be here. She might have gone out.
That’s what I was hoping when I stopped outside her closed bathroom door. Same drill. Deep breaths. Inhale. Exhale. I wiped the sweat off my forehead with the back of my arm. The collar of my black Henley was choking me.
Fucking hell. I opened the door and stood in the hallway, my feet rooted to the spot as I tried to process the scene in front of me. At first, I was too shocked to register what I was seeing.
A sea of red.
So much fucking red.
Her dress. The blood on the white tiles. The bathwater. Her lipstick.
She was wearing a dress in the bathtub. Lips painted red. Nails to match. Her skin was ghostly pale, stark against her jet-black hair.
And the blood… it was everywhere.
Bile burned the back of my throat. I leaned over the toilet and vomited until there was nothing left in my stomach.
As I straightened up, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand, my eye caught on her phone. Lying in a pool of blood that had dripped from her wrist. Next to an empty bottle of Jack Daniels.
Without stopping to think, I scooped her up in my arms and carried my dead mother down the hallway and to her bedroom. I didn’t know why I didn’t leave her in that bathtub. I left a trail of red water from the bathroom to the bedroom and laid her down on top of her dusty rose bedspread. It was the cheap silky kind, like her dress that clung to her gaunt frame.
Mascara tears trailed down her cheeks and I returned to the bathroom and grabbed two cheap, thin towels, lathering one up with soap and water. I scrubbed her face clean, erasing every trace of makeup like it was my sole mission in life to peel back the layers of artifice and reveal her naked skin.
Why had she put on all that makeup? Like she’d put time and effort into her appearance before she slit her wrists. Vertically, not horizontally.
She knew I’d be the one to find her. She fucking knew it would be me.
When I was a little kid, I thought my mother was the most beautiful woman in the world. She taught me to dance. Slow dancing of all things. I used to lead her around the kitchen or the backyard of whatever place we lived in. Her hand in mine, my arm around her waist like I was a man and not a little kid, and we were two people from another century. I’d spin her out and reel her back in, embarrassed but secretly proud that I was so good at slow-dancing. It used to put a smile on her face. It brought her joy and that had made me feel like a fucking king.
Rae St. Clair used to be pretty before all the hard living caught up to her. She used to have dreams. I didn’t know what happened to them. Or to her. Life, I guess.
Sliding my phone out of my pocket, I replayed the voicemail she’d left at two in the morning when I’d neglected to answer, and I stood in the bedroom with my dead mother, bloody bathwater dripping onto the floor, leaving a puddle at my feet as I forced myself to listen to every word again.
“Wayne left me, baby. He promised he’d stay. I really thought he would be different. I wish you’d pick up the phone. I want a chance to tell you things I should have said before. I’m just so tired, baby. So weary, you know? I know I screwed up. I know I wasn’t a good mother, but I wanted to be, I really did. They all tried to talk me into giving up my babies, but I wouldn’t, so I ran away from those hypocrites and I never looked back. They called me the devil. Well, let me tell you, that Baptist minister was no saint, was he?
“I love you so much. You were my first love and I guess you’ll be my last. Hope you always remember that. Even though you’re all grown up now, you’ll always be my baby boy. It wasn’t all bad. We had some good times too, didn’t we? And look how far you’ve come. And your sister, well, I guess I was jealous of her--I still am. My own daughter. Imagine that. She was the beauty. Turned all the boys’ heads. When she got to be a teenager, men didn’t notice me anymore like they used to. They all wanted Remy, didn’t they? And I never wanted to believe that about Russell… I’m sorry. I just didn’t.”
She was crying, her words garbled by tears, and I heard the sound of running water in the background. She was pouring a bath, the bath that she was going to die in. “Truth is that I always loved you the most. And I guess that’s a terrible thing for a mother to admit. Your sister got so high and mighty, thinking she was better than me. And you… you always chose her over me. I guess I just wanted you all to myself. I hope you can forgive me someday. Goodbye, baby.”
Forgive her?
Son of a bitch!
I hurled my phone across the room. The mirror above her dresser shattered, a kaleidoscope of cracks distorting the image of the woman lying on the bed.
“No!” I roared, driving my fist into the drywall. “You don’t get to do this to us. You don’t fucking get to do this.”
I kept punching the wall, the skin over my knuckles busting, blood dripping onto the parquet floor. The plaster cracked, the wall riddled with holes and still it wasn’t enough. I wanted to tear down the world and set it on fire.
My chest heaved as I swept my arm across the dresser, sending makeup and perfume bottles flying. I tore up her room, upending furniture, the cheap wood splintering as it crashed against the wall, and when there was nothing left to destroy, I sagged against the wall, and slid down it, my ass hitting the floor. Dropping my head in my hands, I sat on my mother’s bedroom floor, amidst the wreckage, the weight of her love a burden that squeezed all the oxygen out of my lungs. I rubbed the blank space over my heart to ease the ache, but it didn’t help.
You call that love? What you did, what you have always done to me, is not love.
Her love was sick and twisted. Every single shitty, soul-destroying thing that had happened to me and Remy growing up was because of her. Our own mother. The person who was supposed to protect us from the big bad world when we were too young to do it for ourselves had brought trouble to our doorstep and robbed us of a childhood.
Now she’d taken the easy way out and once again, she’d left me to clean up her fucking mess.
I lit a cigarette, clamping it between the fingers of my fucked-up hand—the cuts raw and bloody—and took a drag, filling my lungs with nicotine and tar. After I smoked the cigarette and ground it out on the floor like the classy bastard that I was, I retrieved my phone. The screen was cracked but it still worked.
My thumb hovered over the green call button. There was the only person I wanted right now. I just wanted to hear her sweet voice. No lies, no empty promises, no cunning or manipulation. Honest and true and brave.
Instead of calling Scarlett, I dialed 9-1-1.
After the police arrived and I answered all their invasive questions, and after my mother’s body was removed, I cleaned up the mess.
Then I went in search of Wayne Briggs.
He spent the night in the ER. I spent the night in the drunk tank. Not the first time I’d spent a night in jail. But it would be the very last time I’d ever fight for my mother.
21
Scarlett
“Are you going to answer that?” Nic asked, shoving a handful of parmesan popcorn into her mouth. We were binge-watching Riverdale, like I needed more drama in my life, but now my eyes were glued to my phone screen.
Why was he calling me at midnight?
Four days. It had been four days since he’d dumped me outside my apartment and taken off like he couldn’t get away from last night’s mistake fast enough.
Being with him had been wrong on so many levels, yet so right in the ways it shouldn’t have been. Sure, the sex had been great. Had left me wanting more. But it was the moments between and the moments after that had consumed my thoughts over the past few days.
His kisses. Soft and sweet. Hungry. Teasing. Playful. His
hands and mouth caressing my skin like he wanted to memorize every inch of it.
If it had just been sex, it would have been easier to forget. And I think that’s what made Dylan so dangerous. Rough, to the point of being almost painful one minute, gentle and tender the next. He was the perfect storm. Wild. Unpredictable. Impossible to tame or control. A thing of beauty that could wreak havoc. Destroy you if you got too close.
And I always got too close to the storm.
But my heart couldn’t handle another rejection.
“I have no interest in talking to him,” I said when my phone stopped ringing. This time Nic didn’t try to defend him.
My phone started ringing again, and once again I didn’t answer. He called three more times before Nic grabbed my phone. “If you don’t answer, I will. Just see what he wants so we can get back to our show.”
I snatched the phone out of her hand and I answered. “What do you want?”
“Need you to pick me up,” Dylan said, his words slurring. I strained to hear him over the sound of Guns N Roses’ “Welcome To The Jungle” blaring in the background. “Need a ride to the hospital.”
“Why are you out getting drunk?”
“Come and get me, Starlet.”
“I don’t even have a car. Call a taxi.”
I cut the call and chewed on my thumbnail. Why should I feel guilty? I shouldn’t.
“What did he want?” Nic asked.
“A ride to the hospital. He’s drunk.”
“Asshole.”
“Exactly.”
“But he did nurse you back to health,” she added, our eyes drawn to the phone in my hand that had started ringing again.