Consumed: A MMA Sports Romance (16 page)

There’s enough on my
plate with what’s going on with Mason and staying on top of school work and everything
else without having to worry about the latest crimes two people with more money
than common sense. The fact they’re my parents doesn’t change that.

“Have you not told them
about me or something?” Mason asks. “If that’s all this is, don’t worry about
it. I’m not going to get butt hurt if you don’t want to tell them about me
until you’re sure that I’m—”

“That’s not it,” I
interrupt. “I don’t talk to my parents very much, and I really have to prepare
for it when I do.”

“Hey, do you want to go
out tonight?” Mason asks. “I heard there’s a new club that opened a while ago
in Milwaukee called Uranus or something.”

“Neptune, actually,” I
chuckle. “And I’m pretty sure I’m the one that told you about it. In fact,” I
say, poking him in the arm, trying to nurture any levity we can possibly
conjure, “I’m pretty sure I told you about that the night we met.”

“How is it?” he asks.

“It’s uncomfortably loud,
people are drunk enough that personal space is the sort of thing you fantasize
about rather than expect, and the drinks cost enough to syphon away rent
money,” I answer.

“So, basically just a
regular club?” he asks.

“Pretty much,” I answer.
“They do a great Irish car bomb, though.”

Mason chuckles. “I always
pictured you as more the sex on the beach, fuzzy navel type,” he says and the
stifling tension is finally starting to ease up.

“Actually, it’s a very
smooth, attractive navel as you well know,” I tease. “I’m usually the red wine
with dinner type,” I explain, “but I do make exceptions for special occasions.”

“Hey, I just visited my
brother in jail,” Mason says. “That’s a special occasion—well, for now anyway.
I’ve got a feeling there are going to be a lot of days like today from here on
out.”

“I’m up for a good night
of hard drinking and bad decisions,” I tell him, but pause a moment before
continuing. “I really can’t pull off a phrase like that, can I?” I ask.

Mason smiles. “You’re a
terrible frat guy,” he says. “That’s actually a good thing in my opinion.”

“What a wonderfully
polite way of saying ‘No, you can’t even remotely pull it off,’” I laugh. “When
did you want to go?”

“Now’s good,” he says.
“What time do they open?”

“Not until later,” I tell
him. “If you want to go somewhere now, we can always hit a dive bar or two
while we’re waiting.”

“It doesn’t really
matter,” Mason says. “I’d rather just not go home right now.”

Yeah. I can understand
that.

*
                   
*
                   
*

We’ve been sitting in
this dive for about three hours now and, apart from catching and maintaining a
decent buzz, we’ve accomplished nothing else.

It feels pretty good.

The problem is that I
need to call my mom, but I don’t know what to tell Mason when I get off the
phone. There’s always the chance it’s something else, maybe dad’s finally
topped $100,000,000. That
has
been his
white whale ever since he found he and mom could make all sorts of money if
they were ethically flexible.

Still, Mason just got
done telling his brother to take responsibility for his own crimes. If I tell
him this same day that my parents are in trouble, but not to worry because they
already own the judge and the prosecutor… I don’t think Mason would blame me,
but I don’t think it would do any favors for our relationship.

Finally, I have an idea.

“I want you to get
prepared for something,” I tell him.

“What’s that?” he asks.

“Earlier you asked me
about Neptune, and I gave you a positive review of their Irish car bombs,” I
start.

“Yeah,” he answers.

He’s swaying a little.
Maybe he’s already drunk enough that I don’t have to do this.

“Have you ever had one?”
I ask.

Better to be on the safe
side.

“No,” he says. “I can’t
drink that often, doing what I do. Getting sloshed isn’t exactly the path
toward staying cut.”

“I think you should try
one at Neptune,” I tell him. “It’s one of those things like a beer bong that
everyone’s got to try at least once.”

“Oh, I plan on getting
blotto tonight,” he says.

“I’ll have to ask you
what that means later,” I tell him as I start growing impatient. “I think it
might be a good idea to do a test run with you and that particular drink before
we get to the club.”

“Is it one of those
things that involves like twenty steps and doesn’t end up being any different
than just pouring two drinks together?” he asks.

That’s almost exactly
what an Irish car bomb is, but I don’t think that’s going to help me sell this.

“It has a few steps,” I
tell him, “but the process is actually pretty necessary for what you’re
getting. Are you up for giving it the old college try?”

“You talk funny,” he says
with a sloppy laugh. “Yeah, I’ll give it a try.”

He really doesn’t hold
his liquor as well as I’d expected, but if there’s any chance I’m going to end
up telling him the family secret, I don’t want him buzzed. I want him drunk.

I motion for the
bartender and, when she’s arrived, I place the order. Every time I’ve ever
gotten one of these, even when I’m just ordering for someone else, I always
expect the bartender and everyone in the immediate proximity to stop and marvel
at my bravery.

It’s not the harshest
drink you can order in a bar, and it’s not the one with the highest alcohol
content, but this is by no means a casual drink. Still, it seems I’m going to
just go on waiting for the reverence and high regard I still think should
accompany an order like this.

“’kay,” the bartender
says and sets about the preparations.

While we’re waiting, I
glance around the bar. It won’t be a whole lot longer before Neptune’s open and
we can start throwing our money away there instead of here, but even as we
cruise through prime drinking time, the bar sits mostly empty.

There are a couple of
older guys playing pool and a few people scattered around in booths, but Mason
and I are the only ones sitting at the bar itself.

“Here you go,” the
bartender says, setting the shot glass and the beer glass in front of me.

I slide both in front of
Mason and give him the simple instructions. “What you want to do is drop the
shot into the beer and then chug until it’s all gone,” I tell him.

“Why not just take the
shot and drink the beer afterward?” he asks.

“It gives it a better flavor,”
I answer, though I’m not sure that’s necessarily accurate.

“What’s goes into all of
this?” he asks.

I sigh, getting impatient
at him for not just letting me get him drunker so I can sneak out, call my mom
and then come back in here to break whatever humiliating news she has to share.

“In the shot glass is
mostly Irish whiskey,” I tell him, “but Irish cream is mixed in for flavor. The
beer is Irish beer. Which one changes depending on what you ask for and what a
particular place has, but they call it an Irish car bomb because—”

“All the stuff in it’s
Irish,” Mason says, finishing the thought. “Okay,” he says. “I just drop the
shot in the beer and drink it all?”

“Yep,” I tell him.
“You’ll want to do it fast, though. You don’t want that cream mixing with the
beer too much before you drink it or it’s not going to be the most pleasant
experience in the world for you.”

It sounds believable. It
may even be true.

“Okay,” he says. “Here
goes.”

He gingerly places the
shot glass above his beer and takes a few long, deep breaths before dropping it
in. The shot hasn’t even hit the bottom of the beer glass before he’s drinking
the mix down.

Mason takes a breath
about halfway through, but he manages to finish it all in a respectable amount
of time.

He sets the empty glass
down on the bar a little too hard, causing the shot glass inside to clink
loudly, attracting the attention of the bartender. Mason wipes his mouth,
saying, “Wow.”

“Right?” I respond.
“How’d you like it?”

“I don’t know,” he says.
“It’s a bit hardcore for me, I think, but I’m glad I tried it at least.”

“Great,” I tell him, “order
up another one. I’ve got to pop over to the ladies’ room.” Almost as an
afterthought, I add, “I should probably see what my mom wanted, too.”

He apparently doesn’t
think this is nearly as big a deal as I know it is, so he just says, “Okay,”
and leaves it at that. As I’m walking away, I’m a little relieved when I hear
him ordering another drink.

The ladies’ room thing
was a total front, so while Mason’s back is turned, I slip out the front door
of the bar and make sure I’m a decent ways down the block before I pull out my
phone. I enter my mom’s number and make the call.

“There are some things we
need to discuss,” mom answers.

“Hi, mom, haven’t talked
to you in a while,” I scoff. “Things are all right, thanks for asking.”

“I’m sure you’re
attempting to make some sort of point, but we don’t have time for that now,”
she says.

“What did you do?” I ask.

She gasps like all
upper-class criminals gasp when they’re accused of something they’re guilty of
doing. “I am shocked that after not speaking with one another over such an
expanse of time, you would just assume that—” she starts.

I interrupt. “Could you
skip ahead to the part where you tell me what you and dad are in trouble for
this time?” I ask. “I’m kind of in the middle of something here.”

“We are your family!” my
overdramatic mother cries with that lilt in her voice, just at that crucial
moment. If I hadn’t heard that same lilt every day growing up, I might just buy
her indignation. “What could possibly take precedence over your own flesh and
blood?”

“Mom, I really don’t have
time or patience for you right now, so if there’s any way the two of you could
just figure out your own mess and leave me out of it, that would be fantastic,”
I tell her.

“There are some things
we’re going to need to discuss over the coming days,” mom says. “If you had
answered your phone when I called, we could have gotten it out of the way
today, but John’s gone home for the night.”

“John” is Johnson B.
Witherton VI, Esq., the Butcher/Weese family attorney. More exactly, he’s
head
of their legal team. All told,
their cadre of lawyers now into the double digits. Dad got mom lawyer number
ten for their twentieth anniversary.

This is my family.

“What did you do and how
bad is it?” I ask. “Are we talking about quietly paying a fine and maybe
donating a courthouse or are you in real trouble?”

“They think we were
trying to swindle people!” mom exclaims. “Can you believe the impertinence?”

That’s bad. That’s very
bad.

It may not sound like
much, but she just detailed the exact position she and dad are in right now.
“They” is the police. “They think” means they have mom and dad dead to rights.
The swindling thing is self-explanatory, but the fact that she used the word “people”
instead of “someone” means that there is more than one charge, possibly more
than one complainant.

I’m a little rusty.

“How long do you think
it’s going to be before they drop it?” I ask. Translation: “How many years in
prison are you looking at?”

“They’re not going to
drop it,” mom answers.

I stop walking and lean
up against the nearest building, taking a moment to collect myself. If she’d
said five months, they’d be looking at five months. If she’d said ten years,
they’d be looking at ten years.

When she says they’re not
going to drop it, what she means is that, if convicted, she and dad will likely
be in prison for the rest of their lives.

“What did you do?” I
repeat.

I know the codes. I know
what she’s telling me. This is too big, though. Something must have happened to
cause them to give up their much quieter, much safer M.O.

My parents aren’t smart
or moral or ethical or, indeed, objectively good people, but they’ve always
been careful enough, at least, to make sure they never got in over their heads.

This is different.

“We haven’t done
anything,” mom answers.

It’s a non-answer. She
doesn’t want to go into details over the phone. It makes sense. Chances are, if
things really are as bad as she seems to think they are, I’ve got to imagine
there’s at least one person on the line who isn’t me or my mom.

“Okay, well, it’s been
good talking to you,” I say and hang up the phone.

This is bad. This is so
bad.