Ticked.
Everything about me was ticked.
My jaw.
The vein in my neck.
The vein on my temple.
The vein on my fucking cock.
Emery’s hand shot out, reaching blindly for the temperature control. She twisted it and stepped back. Water cascaded down her face, dripping past the curves of her eyelashes, over her lips, and lower.
I refused to pay attention to her body, even though she filled the room with her presence. Everything about her was too much.
Too destructive.
Too toxic.
Too reckless.
“Such a simpleton,” I lied, burning at the way those discordant eyes speared me.
Hot mist boiled the room, sheathing my clothes and whatever skin it could latch onto. I leaned back against the sink, letting the counter carry my weight as I stripped my suit jacket off, tossed it on the steam-coated tile, and took my time rolling up my silky button-down sleeves.
My neck felt choked, but I kept my collar buttoned, unwilling to strip anymore with a twenty-two-year-old girl naked in front of me. Especially when I noticed the distinct red bottle with the blue label and prowling wolf behind her.
She used my old body wash. Same brand. Same scent. A thief, stealing my essence for reasons that evaded me.
That’s why I recognized her scent in the elevator.
She rubbed me all over her body.
“I pity you, Miss Rhodes.” I emphasized her last name, taking pleasure in the way she reacted to it. Like I’d delivered a lashing onto her back. “Incapable of comprehending basic words. So dull. So desperate. You remind me of your mother.”
They were polar opposites, actually.
Virginia Winthrop’s societal contributions included encouraging anorexia in the Eastridge youth, slut-shaming housewives who got the dick she wanted but would never receive, and drinking enough champagne daily to render an overweight elephant unconscious.
Meanwhile, Emery made a sport of defying her mother, fighting against the Virginia 2.0 mold like her sanity depended on it. At the end of the day, however, she’d known about Gideon’s embezzlement and did nothing.
Thousands lost their jobs and savings. Angus Bedford died. Dad died. Maybe Emery was like Virginia after all.
“Take that back!” Defiance slammed into Emery’s posture as she shouted, sloping her chin upward and body forward. I had no doubt she would have lunged at me if thin glass and four feet of space didn’t separate us.
“It’s cute that you think you have any control over me.”
I stepped up to the shower until we stood nose-to-chest, the fine layer of glass and my diminishing thread of sanity the only things separating us. I dipped my fingers into my pocket and pulled out her wallet. My wallet.
The picture of Reed caught my eyes first. Sliding it out of the insert, I licked it exactly where her face sat and slammed the photo onto the shower door. The wetness bound the picture to the glass.
She flinched as it rattled, looking like she’d taken a punch in the gut. I allowed her three seconds to stare at it, memorize it, savor it one last time before I tore the Polaroid in half. A yelp traveled up her throat, and she lost the defiant edge to her face.
Good.
I wasn’t here to be friends with her.
I wasn’t even here to acknowledge her.
How desperate for attention was she that she needed to break into my penthouse and strip in my shower?
Two halves of the photograph fluttered to the floor, Reed on one half and Emery on the other. As far as I was concerned, I’d done her a favor.
Lesson number two, baby. There is no you and Reed. He is wrong for you. Docile. Predictable. Tame. The sooner you get that, the better.
“I hate you.” A faint hiss. Soft and oddly feminine. I wanted to bottle it up and listen to it whisper dirty things.
She’d said those words before in the elevator under the guise of darkness. She hadn’t meant them then, but maybe she meant them now.
“Strong words,” I taunted, kicking one ankle across the other. “Do they make you feel like you have a spine? Because all I see is something breakable.”
Fingers swiped at her hair, whipping the thick, black strands out of her face. That fire returned, tenfold, sucking up all the air in the room. If I looked down, I knew I’d see bare tits heaving with panted breaths.
I didn’t look down, but my dick wanted me to. It pointed straight at her in my dress slacks. Instead of noticing, she glared at me.
She looked so rebellious, it reminded me of when she’d turned sixteen and asked her mother for a car. I stood at the edge of the pool, cleaning it while Dad met with his doctor. Virginia reclined on a lounger, sunbathing topless as she read the latest US! Weekly.
“I know what I want for my birthday,” Emery declared before cannonballing into the pool. She popped back up at the shallow end a minute later. “A car. One of Dad’s old ones from the garage. He doesn’t use half of them.”
Virginia set her magazine down and tilted her oversized sunglasses on top of her head. “Sweetheart, the riff-raff drive cars. The Winthrops have drivers.”
And that was that.
Emery was gifted a Birkin bag made of ostrich skin the shade of vomit, which she sold the next week before begging me to drive her to the used car dealership in good ole Honda Yolanda, my 90s Accord that still ran a gazillion years later.
She bought a used junker, and on the way home, donated the rest of the Birkin money to the animal shelter, passing Virginia and her friends at the country club along the way.
The next day, Virginia had Dad drive the car to the junkyard to be crushed, and Emery had turned to Reed and said, “It was worth it,” her face making the same expression she wore now.
Defiant.
Smug.
Unbeaten.
I waited for her to say something, but she was doing that thing she did where she muttered words I couldn’t hear and drove me mad in the process. I studied her lips, trying to decipher what they were saying until I realized I was just staring at her lips.
Meanwhile, the shower head worked above her, pounding out enough water to save California from its next drought.
Finally, her eyes locked on mine, and she pressed a palm against the glass door, right beside my cheek. “I like when you call me Jailbait, Prescott. It means you want me.”
My nostrils flared, eyes ticking. I had no idea where she intended on taking this, but she was playing a dangerous game. One I had no intention of losing. Part of me considered she had an angle, and I wanted to nip it in the bud.
“Careful, Winthrop, you’re looking at me like you want to fuck me, and we both know the only way that will happen is if you pretend to be someone else.”
“You haven’t changed, Nash.” Her belittling scoff dug at my ego—I hated myself for it. “A decade later, and you’re still picking fights for the hell of it.”
She looked at me like she knew me.
I needed to prove to her she didn’t.
“You have no idea what you’re talking about.” I unbuttoned my collar and loosened it, my words and movements unhurried. Let her sweat at the hands of water. “I didn’t get into fights for the hell of it. I went out and bruised my knuckles, spilled my blood, broke my bones for my dad. That is the kind of loyalty a Winthrop would never understand.”
You don’t know me as well as you think you do. Do you, baby?
The bravado dropped like a curtain closing. “Your dad?” She faltered in an instant, but I didn’t fall for her tricks. I’d sooner trust Bin Laden with national security.
“Color me shocked—something the all-knowing Emery Winthrop doesn’t know.” I unfastened the top three buttons of my shirt, hating the way she caved and stared, hating the way I liked it. Hints of my chest peeked out, coated with torrid mist in an instant. “Dad had a heart condition that required monthly medication. Medication that cost more than my parents could afford. I found out when I overheard Ma and Dad arguing over bills.
“I needed a job, but none paid well enough. We had no healthcare, and the pills cost three grand a month. Wealthy Eastridgers would drive up to Eastridge High School and pick up some poor public-school kids who needed the money.” Two more buttons. “I had friends who told me about the fights. Next thing I knew, I was in the ring night after night.
“I won often, made a lot of money for myself—and even more for the assholes who bet on me. I told Ma I’d taken a job to help out with the bills. I think she always suspected I made my money fighting, but she never pushed it.”
“Until you got arrested,” Emery finished, recognition dawning in those eyes. “Betty made you promise to stop.”
I’d met Fika that night at the station. He stood near the front, flirting with an officer, but he’d stopped when he saw me, a frail palm rubbing at his bald head.
“You’re Hank Prescott’s kid,” he’d said, nodding to me.
I armed myself with a sneer, ignoring the blood when it trickled from my temple down my cheek. “What’s it to you?”
“I see him often. At the hospital.” Oh. The fight deflated as he continued, “What are ya in here for?”
“Fighting.”
He nodded and fist-bumped my shoulder because my arms remained cuffed behind my back. I didn’t see him again until an hour later when he kicked at my legs, waking me up.
“Come on. Let’s go.”
I scrambled up from my seat when he pulled a key out of his pocket and dangled it in between us. “Just like that?”
“Just like that.” He uncuffed me with the grace of a horse on ice, jabbing my wrists with the key twice in the process. “I got connections here, kid.”
“You stopped fighting after that,” Emery added. “I remember.”
Actually, I’d fought once since, but I would hardly consider that a fight. He was severely outmatched. I didn’t tell her any of this as I unbuttoned the final two buttons and let my shirt slide down my arms.
Emery’s eyes widened. They took me in. I knew what she saw. I had to look at them in the mirror every day, knowing they weren’t enough.
Constellations of scars and cuts littered my chest and arms. Below my ribcage, a knife wound stretched from my front to my back. It had healed poorly, still raised and angry against my skin.
She cataloged each one in silence, taking in the corded muscles and stains of battle, mismatched eyes lingering on my tattoo before she flicked them up to my face. Something gnawed at my stomach when I realized she liked what she saw.
“Why doesn’t Reed know?” she croaked.
“He does. Now.”
And the chip on his shoulder hunched his back as soon as he’d found out. He didn’t realize how good he had it. Ma, Dad, and I let him be the golden boy. For as long as Dad lived, we never let the problems touch Reed.
He never had to pick up food at the grocery store with Dad, wondering if he had to explain to Ma how Dad dropped dead in the feminine hygiene aisle.
He never had to give up a scholarship from an Ivy League school, knowing it was too far to visit and help Dad if something ever happened.
He never had to give up his body, submitting it to a battering of fists—and knives when some overprivileged asshole bet on the wrong side.
Reed remained pristine as a sacrificial virgin, a purity we all fought to maintain at all costs. So, he could be pissed at all of us, but his anger rested on a cracked foundation.
“He kept it a secret from me?” Oddly, Emery didn’t sound hurt. It made me study her closely, lured by the idea of peeking inside her head.
“No.” My fingers itched for a joint, something it hadn’t done since high school. “Ma and I didn’t tell him anything until after the funeral.” Actually, Ma had told him. Reed still hated me for the cotillion. “Dad didn’t want him to know. Reed would have quit football and used the gear and registration fee to pay for Dad’s meds.”
“He should have.”
An instant response, absent of hesitation.
It made me hate her a bit less, which transferred my irritation onto myself.
I wondered what she’d say if she knew Gideon had known. He’d offered to use his connections to get Dad into a trial. My parents didn’t give two shits about pride. They cared about their kids, staying out of trouble, and spending as much time with each other as they could. Nothing else.
The drug trial helped until the Winthrop Scandal broke, and the lead researcher booted Dad from the trial in retaliation. Like my parents, he’d invested all his savings in Winthrop Textiles. Like my parents, he lost it all. Unlike my parents, he lashed out.
“Dad didn’t want him to,” I finally said.
“Is that why Reed hates you? Because you three kept that from him?”
It struck me as an odd place to have this conversation, but I kept my face level with hers, even when the idea of water dripping down her bare flesh enticed me. “Part of it, but he was mad before that.”
Since the night of the cotillion when he’d almost gotten arrested, to be specific.
“Hank died of a heart attack… because he stopped taking his meds?”
“He couldn’t afford them after he and Ma lost their jobs for your parents and their savings.”
After he’d been cut off from the trial drugs, Dad was a ticking time bomb. He didn’t have three thousand a month for the other drugs. I had a plan, but I’d been too slow. Reed left for college, and I’d moved back to a shitty one-bedroom apartment in Eastridge and let my parents take the room.
“I’m sorry.” A strand of hair dropped over her eye, but she didn’t move. Surprise sliced across her face. It didn’t set well with me.
Always a great actress. From pretending to be Virginia’s bitch to stabbing my family in the back, you deserve an Oscar.
“Emery,” I warned.
More than anything, I hated apologies.
The thing about apologies is, they come after the fuck-up.
It’s like saying, “I admit it. I fucked you over, and now you have to forgive me for it.”
Why would I?
“No.” She stepped closer until the tip of her nose touched the glass. If the door was open, she’d be touching me. “Let me get this out. I know people throw the word sorry around like it means nothing, but I don’t. I believe in the power of words, and I’d never abuse them. So believe me when I say I am so incredibly sorry about your dad.”
Believe her? Never.
Water beat the floor. Flecks of liquid speckled the glass between us, fat teardrops chasing one another toward hell. She didn’t deserve a response, so I didn’t gift her one.
“That’s why you hate me,” she whispered.
So, so clueless.
I didn’t hate her for the sins of her parents. I hated her for knowing about them and doing nothing. I hated her because dad didn’t have to die.
It was why I hated myself, too.
“No, little Tiger.” My eyes finally caved, dipping to her tits. Two full, pear-shaped tits with hard nipples pointing right at me. If I looked lower, I could make out her pussy. I mustered the willpower not to and flicked my eyes back to hers. I promised, “I hate you for so much more.”
I’d told her about Dad. Got it over with, so she could wallow and languish in guilt like I did every day. A single lilac struggling to live without sunlight.
Wilted.
Withered.
Empty.
This conversation changed nothing.
There was still blood to be spilled.
Gideon’s.
Virginia’s.
Emery’s.
