I’d grown up as an only child.
Sharing seemed like a simple concept, mostly because it was foreign. I’d never been asked to share. Maybe a chip from a nearly empty bag (Dad did this when Ma wasn’t looking) or my bed on a rare occasion (Ma did this when Dad worked long hours and snored like a tractor). Insignificant sacrifices since my parents worked hard to make me happy, and everything else in my life felt like mine.
Until Reed came along.
The accidental child they couldn’t afford.
When I was eleven and Reed was one, Reed took over my bedroom. He cried so much, he messed up Dad’s sleep (and therefore work) schedule. Ma moved Reed from their room to mine, which left me on the living room couch. A dinky, secondhand thing that previously occupied the waiting area of the Chinese restaurant down the block.
When I was thirteen, Reed caught a bad case of croup and spent three days in the hospital for observation. Every spare dollar for the next five years went to that bill. That Christmas, Dad taught me how to play soccer in the snow with a half-flat ball he found somewhere in the apartment complex. All the other kids sat inside playing their new video games.
When I was fifteen, some asshole punk drew a dick on Reed’s forehead with Sharpie and stole his lunch bag. For the first time, he ran to me for help, and I accepted that sharing my parents wasn’t so bad, because in return, I’d gotten someone who looked at me like I was the solution to life, not a problem.
When I was twenty-five, Reed told me I was dead to him after the cotillion. Ma cried the entire night, then cried again the next morning when she realized he’d meant it.
Dad turned to me, placed his calloused palm on my shoulder, and said, “Life hurts something stupid, kid, but being brothers is a lifetime commitment. He’ll realize that.”
I listened to Dad and waited it out, convinced it was a phase, because from the moment Reed had been born, I’d done everything for him, given him all I could, and loved him more than I did myself.
Seven years later, I was still waiting.
The email sat on my laptop, the words unlikely to change in this lifetime, but I wasn’t opposed to funding time machine research. I’d go back and reverse a lot of things, starting with the cotillion. I told Durga I didn’t feel regret, but I lied, knowing she’d call me out on my bullshit. Someone had to.
Here’s what people who sit around smoking ganja and quoting Gandhi won’t tell you. There’s always that one mistake that changes your life. If you’re lucky, it’s for the better.
Spoiler alert: I’m not lucky, and regret is life’s longest punishment.
I felt it now, reading Ma’s email, wondering how someone who shared my blood could turn into a coxswain, Vineyard Vines-wearing, Niçois salad-ordering, country club-attending, nouveau riche douchebag, who surrounded himself with people named Brock, Chett, and Tripp with two Ps.
From: [email protected]
Subject: 4th of July Weekend
Hi, sweetheart!
I was hoping to catch you on your phone, but you didn’t answer and your voicemail inbox is full. (You should really consider hiring an assistant. It’s been like this for months. I’ve been meaning to tell you.)
Your brother says he’ll be spending the weekend in Eastridge with Basil, Chett, Brock, and Tripp for the country club’s fourth of July brunch. I think Reed and Basil are ready to take the next step. Seems like he’s gonna pop the question. I mean, we always knew this was coming, but I’m happy that he’s happy.
You know I love you, and I hate to ask you this, but would you mind not coming that week? We both know he won’t come home to see me unless I assure him you’re not in town, and I haven’t seen him in months.
I ain’t happy about this. It hurts to even ask, but it won’t always be like this, baby. I promise.
Love,
Ma
I couldn’t blame Ma.
Growing up, Reed used to think Ma favored me, so Ma worked extra hard to prove she didn’t. What Reed never got was, Ma didn’t love me more. She’d just loved me longer. Ma had ten extra years to learn how to love me best. She’d been figuring out how to love him, which he made infinitely harder by having mood swings that would make teenaged girls seem tame.
I typed out my reply.
One word.
Nash: Sure.
Then, I wired the allowance I sent Reed each month—apparently, he couldn’t take my calls, but he had no problems taking my money—and slammed my laptop shut, discarding it on the pillow next to my head.
Some asshole knocked on my door, but I sunk back into my mattress and closed my eyes. The knocking persisted. I muttered a curse, reached out to the nightstand, blindly fished out the bottle of painkillers, tossed two into my mouth, and swallowed them dry.
Padding barefoot to the door, I yanked it open, knowing I’d throttle whoever it was if they said the wrong thing. I didn’t know why I thought it’d be Emery, but it wasn’t. Disappointment burned my tongue.
A uniformed staff member stood on the other side. He tossed me a loopy grin, his feet shuffling back and forth like he bought a new bong and couldn’t wait to get out of here and try it.
“Mrs. Lowell sent this up for you.” Dudebro held up a folded piece of paper with the Prescott Hotels letterhead sticking out from the flap. “She left this letter for you, too.”
I snatched the letter and let him in. He pushed a cart past me, a smile on his face, too damn chirpy for a Saturday morning. My nudity didn’t faze him. I greeted him in boxer briefs, taking in the food as he unveiled it.
A full breakfast. Eggs, bacon, bagels, coffee, hash browns, and French toast. Beside the silverware, a fruit basket of bananas, strawberries, and Fuji apples had been arranged in a phallic shape, ejaculating into a bowl of Nutella.
The clock in the open-plan kitchen read eight in the morning exactly. This spread hadn’t been to feed me. It’d been to wake me up with an extra side of fuck you.
Delilah Lowell thrived on passive-aggressive bullshit.
Breakfasts screamed wake the fuck up.
Lunches doubled as a reminder not to pile any more lawsuits onto her plate.
Dinners cemented the fact that I’d be flat-out broke and most likely dead if she didn’t exist to put out my fires and occasionally feed me.
I never bothered with dessert. Learned my lesson the first time when she’d brought her rat and asked me to pet sit the monster. (Rosco and I do not and will never get along.)
The alarm on my spare phone set off two horns. I’d set it up last night after carefully sealing the broken phone in a plastic bag in my nightstand. Swiping the screen up, I shut off the noise and noticed the eight missed calls from Delilah.
Pressing the return button, I spared the guy feelings of inadequacy at the sight of my dick and stepped into the en suite bathroom before stripping out of my black Calvin Kleins. The rainfall shower heads shot out water.
I connected the phone to my shower’s Bluetooth speakers.
Delilah answered my call on the second ring with a tsk. Her voice came out in pants like she’d been walking. “Do you ever answer your phone?”
So much tact, this one.
“Eventually.” I dumped shampoo onto my head, wondering if I had any unread messages from Durga. “Is the breakfast from last night’s catering staff?”
The memory of Emery Winthrop against my body drove my line of questioning. Her existence pissed me off. A trust fund princess. A daughter of a thief and (as far as I was concerned) murderer. Someone complicit in his lies. Complicit in Dad’s death.
The worst part wasn’t seeing her last night. It was feeling her against me. I could write our first time off as a mistake, but she was still young. So damn young. She’d been an adult for all of two seconds, and I’d already fucked her.
Remembered it.
Liked it.
My dick hardened. I stroked it twice before telling it to fuck off.
“Nope. I bought it.” Delilah cooed at the naked rat she called a dog. “Did you pee, Rosco? Did you pee? Such a good boy.” Her voice came out louder this time, “From the place down the street. I paid some kid fifty bucks to dress in a uniform and cart breakfast to you. Cute, right?”
And I’d left him alone with a fat wad of cash in my suitcase, designer everything, and my company laptop.
Perfect.
“You are so extra.”
“And you are so fucked.” In the background, the wind whipped around her until I could barely make out her voice. “Why did building security call me this morning to inform me that a man from the Security and Exchanges Commission came here to see you?”
The S.E.C.—high-and-mighty, Paul Blart rent-a-cops who aspired to be the real thing. Unfortunately, the crimes they investigated included the ones I’d committed.
I bit back a curse and tightened my fingers into fists before returning my hands to my head and lathering the shampoo. “Is he still here?”
“I bought you an hour. He’ll be back. Do you need me there?”
“No.”
It was probably a good idea to have the head of my legal department with me because, let’s face it, I’d broken a shit ton of laws this decade, but I knew Delilah. She would demand that I spill everything to her, and that sounded as appealing to me as a blow job from a piranha.
“Nash…” she trailed off, and I could picture her scrunched up nose and crossed arms. That bulging vein on her forehead she claimed she only got around me. Apparently, I was responsible for aging her ten years, too.
“Delilah, if you can’t understand simple words like ‘no,’ you’re in the wrong line of work.” I rinsed the shampoo, watching it swirl down the drain in a Rorschach pattern. It looked like Sisyphus shouldering a boulder.
“You are such an ass.” The words held no bite.
“I’m also your boss.”
“Now that you mention that, I feel incredibly underpaid. You know, I may take the liberty of hiring you an assistant if you’re going to be too stubborn to do it yourself.” Rosco barked in the background, starting a chain reaction where five dozen dogs barked back. The last thing I wanted to hear with a hangover. “I didn’t go to law school to be your twenty-four-seven bitch, Nash.”
“What’s that? I think someone just called my name.”
“You’re in the shower,” she deadpanned.
“Gotta go, D.”
I finished showering, brushed my teeth, dried my hair off with a towel, and tossed on a Stuart Hughes suit, F.P. Journe watch, and a pair of Testonis.
Delilah liked to coat herself in diamonds and designer threads for country club dinners with her husband. She used her looks, her wealth, and her bitchiness to intimidate catty, rich housewives into submission.
For men to intimidate men, you needed to be taller, stronger, smarter. But a show of wealth and a sculpted face didn’t hurt, which was why I filled my closet with overpriced clothes I didn’t need and thanked Ma for my good genetics.
When I re-entered the bedroom of my suite, Rosco sat on my bed, the long strands of black and white hair sprouting from his gargantuan ears and onto my sheets. His bare ass pressed against my pillow, precisely where I liked to lay my head. The only fur he boasted budded from his head and tail, and he looked like a dog like Shawn Spencer looked like a psychic.
Delilah held a slice of French toast to her mouth, swallowing half in one bite like the damned Neanderthal she pretended she wasn’t. Grade-A syrup dropped from her lips to the carpet. Rosco yelped, then dove off the bed and lapped it up.
“The rat better not vomit on my carpet.” I grabbed the toast from her fingers and took a bite. Cold, like everything in this room, including me. “If this were 1690s Salem, you’d hang for witchcraft.”
She rolled her mint-green eyes and licked at the syrup that had smeared onto her cheek. Her tongue waggled across her cheek like one of those inflatable tube men at car dealerships. “I choppered in earlier this morning.” She allowed Rosco to lap at her fingers. I watched on, vowing never to get a pet rat. “Security just let me up.”
“Remind me to fire them.”
“I repeat, I am not your assistant.”
“I repeat, I don’t need you here.”
She ignored me, her favorite pastime and the sole person on my payroll I allowed the privilege. “I looked into the S.E.C. agent. They have a pending investigation into you, Nash. My source wouldn’t say much, which tells me this is serious.” Furrowed brows and a half scowl formed her don’t-bullshit-me face. “What did you do?”
“Delilah—”
“Are you going to tell me what you’ll be investigated for?”
This was what happened when you worked with someone for too long. They got comfortable and thought they could ask questions I didn’t want them asking.
“Do you remember the catering company from last night?” I redirected.
Why the hell was Emery Winthrop working a catering gig, anyway? I understood the modeling part. She had the height and face, but catering? Her family’s net worth dipped into the ten figures. Her trust fund had to be at least eight if not nine figures. She could finance a war and not want for money.
Maybe Virginia had sent her on the heiress equivalent of an apology tour. A few magazine covers, and I was supposed to fucking forget she’d known about her dad’s embezzlement.
“Don’t change the subject.” Delilah tucked a dirty blonde strand of hair back into her French chignon and folded her hands on her lap. She took a seat on the absolute edge of my bed, like she feared she would catch my germs. “I asked around about the lead investigator. Brandon Vu. He’s ambitious. Moved up the ladder fast, looking to be the chair of the S.E.C. If you did something, he’ll find it. You have to tell me everything.”
Like hell I would.
“No. Fika took care of it.” I didn’t elaborate, merely pulled out the bundles of bills from my suitcase and shoved them into the built-in safe I’d had installed yesterday. I thumbed through one of the ten-thousand-dollar stacks and pointed at Delilah with it. “You act like I’m a sketchy person. I’m entirely innocent.”
Delilah watched me shove half a million dollars into the safe, my ritual for every penthouse in all my hotels. A fail-safe in case I ever got caught and needed cash quickly and a go-bag to run. “Ugh. Fika. You trust him to take care of it?”
“Took care of it,” I corrected, cramming a small go-bag into the remaining space. “As in, it’s already done. Stop worrying about it. I think I see two new wrinkles on your forehead. You look forty.”
“I’m thirty-one, and I look twenty-six,” she corrected, fingers dabbing her forehead for the aforementioned wrinkles. “It’s Fika. Trusting Fika is like giving Rosco a full bag of treats and trusting him not to finish it.”
No love lost between them. Odd, considering they both shared similar views on the law. Fika pretended it didn’t exist. Delilah dedicated her life to defending people who bent it. Either way, they both treated it like a nuisance.
I didn’t acknowledge this. Keeping them at odds with one another compartmentalized the less-than-legal portion of my life.
“Don’t underestimate Fika.”
I closed the lock and set an anagram for Emery Winthrop as the password. When I realized what I’d done, I swore and jabbed at the keypad, trying to undo it, but I didn’t know how to change the password. Perfect.
Pivoting to face Delilah, I leaned against the wall and added, “Beneath the Jonas Brothers wig, the distressed jeans, and the litany of addictions, Fika is an ex-cop whose calling in life is to break the rules without getting caught.”
She scowled when I adjusted her fingers to where two non-existent wrinkles sat, just to fuck with her. “He literally got caught. It’s why the people of Eastridge fired him as the sheriff.”
“Semantics.”
“No.” Both hands met the air as she tossed them up. “That is not what semantics means. Look, I need to know what you did. How do you expect me to do my job with my hands tied behind my back?”
Readjusting my tie, I pulled off the tag and made a point of feeding it to Rosco in case D got any crazy ideas of asking me to pet sit again. “If you need hand-holding, you’re in the wrong building. I’m sure some midlevel firm will be happy to have you.”
Delilah snatched the tag away from Rosco’s thin lips. “Fuck you, Nash.”
“I’d rather eat a bag of dicks, thank you.”
She glanced down at her phone when it vibrated. “He’s on his way up. Let me do the talking.”
“Fine.”
“Say as little as possible.”
“No shit.”
“I mean it. I will do all the talking,” she repeated slowly, like I’d given her a reason not to trust me in the past.
She’d stopped trusting me the week we’d met when I fired a supplier without pay and suggested he take his shriveled-up dick and shove it into a pussy that didn’t belong to the now-ex-wife of one of my board members.
The lawsuit hadn’t been pretty, but that’s why I paid Delilah double what she would earn anywhere else. She won cases no one else could. Better—she rarely had to step foot in court because she performed miracles before the cases ever reached the steps of Lady Justice.
I mocked a zipper across my lips and pretended to feed the key to her rat. “Maybe you can get your rat to bite him and give him rabies.”
“He’s not a rat.” She picked Rosco up, held him close to her chest, and followed me into the living room, where Cayden from the design department had set up a mini-office for me two days ago. A mahogany desk and a high-back leather chair. “Rosco is a hairless Chinese Crested Dog. A four-thousand-dollar dog, for the record.”
“I could blow four grand on a flea-infested crack den in North Korea, and it’d be a better investment.”
She pressed a kiss to her pet rat’s temple and whispered, “Don’t listen to the bad man, Rosco.”
My knuckles flexed along the handles of my chair. She set Rosco down and swung the front door open.
Delilah didn’t understand the accuracy of her words.
I was a bad man.
Sisyphus.
With blood on my hands.
Penance in my future.
Tick.
Tock.
