The Sexy Jerk World

by Kim Karr

  But then guilt set in, and I couldn’t shake it.

  Bending down, I picked up the band that had Tricia’s name engraved around the inside perimeter and ran my finger over the raised letters. Soon, I found myself sitting on the floor.

  If the ring wasn’t a sign, jerking off to the thought of someone else, was, and I knew what I had to do. I knew it was time to let Tricia go.

  Empty her closet.

  Clean out her drawers.

  Throw out her toothbrush.

  She wasn’t coming back. I knew that, of course, and still it wasn’t that easy. But it was time.

  Time to let her go.

  I’d love her forever, but I had to let her go.

  As I stared at the ring lying on top of the palm of my hand, I had no idea how much time had passed. Sometime in those minutes though, I’d decided I would call Fiona today. First to make things right between us, and second to tell her I was ready to donate Tricia’s clothes to Women Rejoining the Workforce. WRTW was a charity organization Fiona had started working with a couple of years ago. It was geared toward helping women who had stayed home, go back to work.

  “Daddy, what are you doing?”

  I looked up and blinked, and then blinked again. The sun was just rising and my daughter was standing in the space between my bedroom and bathroom in her pink nightgown. I squeezed my palm shut and jumped to my feet. “I was just thinking.”

  “About what?” she asked with that voice of concern that made her sound ten years older than she was.

  Honesty was always the best policy, when possible. “That we should donate Mommy’s things to that organization Aunt Fiona works with.”

  She brought her hands together. “Oh, Daddy, I think that’s a wonderful idea. Aunt Fiona says there are a lot of mommies who need new clothes to go back to work.”

  I grinned at her innate kindness. “And what are you doing up this early, princess?”

  Her tiny shoulders shrugged. “I woke up, and was thinking maybe you could put my hair in braids today.”

  Taking long strides toward her, I had her up in my arms and on my shoulders before she even finished talking. “You just happened to wake up early and have that thought, did you now?”

  My daughter giggled as I galloped toward my bed and tossed her on it. Once her fit of laughter subsided, she sat up. “Well, I might have set my alarm the way you showed me, so that I’d wake up early.”

  The clock read six twenty-five. Normally I didn’t wake her up until seven to get her ready, and we were both downstairs by seven thirty when Mrs. Sherman arrived. “Wow,” I said, offering her my hand, “you’re a quick learner.”

  Her little bare toes wiggled, and she looked up at me with wide green eyes. “You are too, Daddy, and I’m certain after that YouTube video we watched over the summer that you’ll be able to braid my hair just like Polly showed you.”

  Polly was the YouTuber who made a show of explaining to fathers how to do all kinds of things with their daughters’ hair, including braiding.

  This was going to be one interesting morning.

  I led her to her bathroom. “First you have to brush your teeth, and then get dressed. Once you finish that, I will try to braid you hair, but I make no promises,” I said with a wink.

  In the doorway to her bathroom, where the print of tiaras covered the walls, she attempted to comb her fingers through her tangled locks. “You’re the best.”

  I smiled at her and kissed the top of her head. I only hoped she still thought that after I was finished—with the hair brushing and the braiding.

  Of course, I knew what the braids were about. But Scarlett and I had discussed what happened at school last night, and although there was no doubt I’d broken at least a dozen parenting rules yesterday between my visit to her aggressor’s house and my advice to her, which I won’t repeat, I figured today I’d let her handle things her way.

  Besides, braids seemed reasonable. For a short-term solution, anyway.

  As I walked back to my room to finish getting dressed, I couldn’t help but wonder if there wasn’t an easy, short-term solution to Hannah having suddenly appeared back in my life.

  Perhaps we wouldn’t see each other again.

  I doubted that with our kids in the same class.

  I could forget I ever saw her.

  Probably not.

  I could invite her to lunch and let bygones be bygones.

  When hell froze over.

  Then I remembered the For Sale sign in her yard, and thought, maybe she’s moving away.

  “Not a chance,” I said out loud. “She was probably moving in.”

  There was no way I was going to be that God damn lucky, I thought.

  Then I stopped dead in my tracks because I wasn’t certain which one of those two options I was hoping for—her moving in or moving out?

  Even as I thought about the possibility of seeing her again, I felt my body shudder. All of a sudden the ring still in my palm felt like it burning, and my gut started to churn.

  I was seriously fucked.

  8

  Ten Years Earlier

  Hannah Michaels

  It turned out there were three of them—living in that rickety old house, that is.

  Jace Bennett and Nick Carrington lived with Ethan. By all assessment, they were best friends.

  Nick had come to MSU his junior year. When he arrived he answered an ad for a roommate that Jace and Ethan, who had met their freshman year, had tacked on a board in the Student Center. Just so happened Jace and Nick knew each other as kids, so the deal was pretty much sealed.

  Whereas before Thanksgiving break I never went to Ethan’s place, after Thanksgiving Break I couldn’t stay away. And it wasn’t because of Ethan, he was rarely there when I stopped by.

  It was because of Jace.

  And before I knew it, I knew a lot more about him than what I had observed.

  The week after Thanksgiving break, Ethan was busy, this time studying for finals. Nick was almost never around. I had come to find out that he went home to Chicago on the weekends and spent his weeknights shuffling between odd jobs and studying.

  Jace, on the other hand, seemed to always be around. Despite this, I knew very little about him other than what I’d observed—that he was a bad boy—he liked to drink, smoke, and he had a really bad temper.

  Ethan told me Jace preferred not to talk about his family, and left it at that, so I did too. The one thing Jace did tell me about himself was that he liked to play hockey, bungee jump, and ski.

  Hockey I understood, even skiing I got, but bungee jumping, now that was insane. He was a little insane to be honest. And yet I found myself being drawn to him in a way I couldn’t control.

  I liked being around him, and he didn’t seem to mind being around me. Things were easy between us. We talked without judgment about politics, movies, books, sex, drugs, music, and computers.

  Jace introduced me to his big, bad world—which included getting high, listening to punk rock, and his view on world politics. I, in turn introduced him to the big, giant world of computers.

  As much as his world fascinated me, my world quickly became his obsession. For a guy who pretended to be a devout agnostic, you’d think he’d found God when I introduced him to wireframing.

  Wireframing in the technology world was a glorified storyboard. Jace wanted to know everything about it. He couldn’t get enough, and soon he was bringing his sketches to digital life, and I was helping him.

  Ethan no longer slept in my dorm room. Instead I figured out the quickest bus route to his house and went there to sleep almost every night. Jace was always bringing girls home though, and banging them so loudly, there were times I wanted to leave. I hated hearing him, but I couldn’t exactly tell Ethan that, so I covered my head with a pillow and tried to go to sleep.

  The girls he was with never spent the night. As soon as I heard them leave, I’d tip toe out of bed and make my way downstairs to the kitchen. In there, I’d find
Jace eating whatever leftovers there were from dinner.

  Sitting at the table, loneliness seemed to swallow him whole. I hated to see him like that. At first he never talked about the girls he was with, but later the brooding mood he was in seemed to fade, and he would open up.

  After a week of that going on, I finally gathered the courage to ask him about it. “Jace,” I said, “why do you have sex with a different girl almost every night of the week?”

  “I have an overactive sex drive,” he laughed.

  The way he said it, I knew he was lying. There was so much I’d learned about him in a short period of time, but so much I had no idea about. “Tell me the truth, Jace,” I begged.

  He was quiet for a long time, but when he finally answered, he nearly broke me. “It makes me feel less alone in the world,” he whispered.

  I might not have been screwing someone different every night, but that didn’t mean I didn’t know what it felt like to be all alone.

  That was something I knew all too well.

  And it was that common feeling that bonded us in a way I could never bond with Ethan.

  9

  Present Day

  Jace Bennett

  The name on the sample invitation made me wince.

  It read,

  Mr. Malcolm Jackson Bennett III and Flirt Enterprises would like to cordially invite you to the Greater Area Chicago Outreach Fundraiser on December 18th —

  I closed my eyes and didn’t finish reading the rest. Being born with a name like Malcolm Jackson Bennett III certainly had its share of ups and downs.

  As one of the foremost families to invest in the oil industry in the early 20th century, power and money had accompanied the family name ever since.

  It was both a gift and a curse.

  The whole living up to the name thing was probably the most difficult.

  My grandfather, Malcolm Jackson Bennett I, was a poor boy from the south side who worked hard and invested his money in something he had no idea would make him millions.

  After making all that money, my grandfather had wisely diverted his funds into the banking industry. And up until four years after the death of my father, our family had maintained the prestigious control of B&B Bank.

  Malcolm Jackson Bennett II was the son of Malcolm Jackson Bennett I and Adeline Colchester, a pedigreed woman who was raised in high-society. They were both in their early thirties when they married, and my father was their only child.

  As the prodigal son, my father was sent to the finest schools and reared to become one of the most influential men of Chicago. That plan went awry though when he met my mother, Jane Wilmington, and fell in love.

  Love shouldn’t have been a problem, except my mother wasn’t from an affluent family or raised in the manner in which my father was, and because of this my grandmother resented her from day one, hence the resentment of me I always assumed.

  Having grown up in the very place my grandfather had, on the south side, my grandmother deemed my mother unsuitable wife material for a man of my father’s stature. My mother was a schoolteacher and met my father at a fundraiser to raise money to rebuild the playgrounds in south Chicago. Where she was from should have been irrelevant. She had a big heart and the kindest soul.

  Not that Adeline Colchester Bennett cared about those kinds of things. No, she cared about connections and affluence. Rearing and money. And because my mother had none of the things she valued, my grandmother refused to accept her as a part of the family, even after my father married my mother. And there was no forcing her to. Not even my grandfather had that power.

  Shortly after my parents wed, they had me, and soon after that my grandfather died from a sudden heart attack.

  At the age of thirty-one, my father took the helm of the family business. He was a great businessman and while he managed to keep afloat what my grandfather had built, my mother had started to champion a number of causes, including Chicago’s largest outreach program for children in need of assistance.

  Ten years later, my parents were killed at one of those outreach fundraisers. They’d decided to walk a bit before catching a cab and were robbed at gunpoint. Both were shot. At first, the police thought it was a robbery, but later they discovered the shooter was a disgruntled former employee. My grandmother refused to accept that her son had died as a result of the family business. She continued to believe a robbery gone wrong was the underlying cause. But I knew my parents would never have put their lives in danger over material things.

  Their brutal killings only flamed my grandmother’s hatred of my mother because she blamed my mother for my father being on the streets of the south side. It didn’t matter that my father supported the outreach program, nor did it matter that he loved helping others. In fact, my grandmother turned her back on those works, including the outreach program. Regardless of my protests, she promptly removed our family name and support from all of the charities my parents had been working with.

  At ten it wasn’t like I had a say in the matter, and besides, without my parents I was a lost boy. Nothing seemed to matter to me. I became wild and uncaring. As the years went on, I rebelled against my grandmother at every turn.

  If the death of first her husband, and then her son, had been hard on her, giving up control of what my grandfather had spent his life building had been even harder on my grandmother. She didn’t have a choice. The state of the bank was spiraling quickly. Sadly, even under new ownership, B&B went bankrupt.

  It was in those dark days, when I was around fourteen, after all of my badgering she agreed I could go by the nickname my mother had called me—Jace.

  I liked it because it was anonymous. I wasn’t easily identified. I didn’t have a reputation to live up to that I knew I never could. My grandmother liked it because every time she yelled it, it didn’t remind her of her dead husband or her dead son.

  There was no doubt I was a handful. But for a seventy-something year old woman I proved more trouble than she could manage.

  The demise of B&B had hurt her financially, and she spent a lot of time avoiding her situation.

  With so much time on her hands, she rejoined the ranks of the social circles of Chicago. One night she took me to a party at the mayor’s house, and when he caught me banging his daughter, he just about threw my grandmother and me out on our asses.

  That was when dear old granny decided to ship me off to boarding school in New Hampshire. I was fifteen. And I hated it.

  When I was expelled in my senior year for numerous instances of sexual misconduct, the final straw being allowing the school president’s daughter to blow me in the library stacks, my grandmother reluctantly brought me back to Chicago to finish high school.

  After I graduated though, she promptly cut me off. She’d had enough of my wayward ways. Sure, she’d agreed to pay for a basic college education and give me a meager monthly stipend, but I was stripped of my car and credit cards. My trust wouldn’t kick in until I was twenty-four, so I was basically penniless.

  By then my grandmother was almost eighty-years old, but you would have never known it. She was sharp as a tack and insisted everything she was doing was for my own good. She wanted me to learn that money didn’t buy self-respect.

  She wasn’t wrong.

  She also didn’t have much money left.

  The amount she did have wasn’t going to bail her out. I was never going to be the man she wanted me to be.

  She wasn’t wrong on that count either.

  In spite of her methods which only proved to push me further down the rabbit role, by the time I turned twenty-four, I had somehow gotten my shit together. My path wasn’t something she approved of, but by then she no longer had anything to say about it.

  That never stopped her from trying to mold me into what she wanted me to be. That had continued until her dying day, which happened to be the night I told her I was going to ask Tricia to marry me. She wanted me to marry within my station, as she called it. That sickened me. She’d n
ever approved of anyone I had been with, and I accepted she was more than likely incapable of doing so.

  The woman who tried to teach me money would never buy self-respect didn’t seem to truly believe that herself.

  Tricia was from Lansing, Michigan, and my grandmother called her a small-town girl with a bleeding heart.

  The small-town girl part was rather funny, as Tricia had grown up in the capital of Michigan. Her father was a professor of political science at Michigan State and her mother stayed at home. Tricia did, however, have a voice, and she was an advocate for many causes. In truth, I imagined she was a lot like my mother in that respect, and I think that was what scared my grandmother. I told her how I felt that night. Told her she no longer controlled me. And told her if she couldn’t accept Tricia, she was out of my life.

  That very same night, my grandmother passed away in her sleep. The medical examiner found she had died of natural causes, and yet I couldn’t help but feel it was because of me. That I’d gone too far. That I should have been gentler with her. My words kinder. Then again, I always regretted my harsh words. Always. I could just never stop them from escaping my mouth.

  The will she left had no provisions, like I had to marry an heiress or the President’s daughter. Everything she had left was left in full to me, her beloved grandson, as it read. I don’t think I ever knew how much I loved her until she was gone, and that was something I hated—for both her and for me.

  The light knock on the door had me blinking out of the past and wondering who the hell was stopping by at nine o’clock on a Thursday night.

  There was an ache in my chest as I quickly tacked the invitation that was still in my hand on the bulletin board in the kitchen. Mrs. Sherman insisted we use it to keep track of all of the household events. Once I was done, I strode past the dining room to the foyer.

  A peak out the window told me a white Infinity SUV was parked in my driveway. I had no fucking clue who it was. If it was someone selling something this late, I was going to go all postal on them.