Curved (15 page)

Joseph swung his arm over my shoulder. Kissing my forehead, he lifted me up from the floor and carried me to the dining room, where we ate another gourmet meal.

One I didn’t feel I deserved.

Chapter 17

The next day we headed back for New York City, Joseph’s yacht departing behind us once we hit the ground. Stretching my arms, I cycled through the classes I would have for the upcoming afternoon.

“I’m going to miss you,” I said, standing on my toes, kissing Joseph on the nose. He held me in place, there in the midst of trees and some benches. People around us passed by, glancing over, but I didn’t care—no longer superficially interested in Joseph, I was invested in him as a person. He made my heart sing, my body soar to a different height.

“Do well in school, okay?” he said.

Nodding at him, I shrugged. “I’m not in high school here—I’ve got this.”

“Suddenly confident,” Joseph said, spanking side of my hips when no one was looking. Groping my ass, he massaged the skin of my flesh, moving his fingers between the crack of my cheeks. “Well, well, well, if we have time later, I’m definitely going to have to and myself a spot here.”

“You already have,” I said, pushing Joseph away slightly from me. Touching his nipples through his T-shirt, I hold him in for a deep, long kiss, roving my hands across his neck, the corded muscles bulging forth and into my hands, against me. “You have no reason to deny yourself from me.”

“None?”

“None,” I said, walking away with my head held high. “Remember me when you’re at work today, okay?”

Joseph winked at me, my eyes capturing the image of him as I walked away to the nearby subway station. Walking down a flight of stairs, sweat bolted out of my pores.

Wow. I really had turned into a brand-new person. Completely different than who I was before, I had the strength to confront Joseph and appropriately handle him plus our burgeoning relationship.

Before, before the girls had dumped me from the club, I would’ve spent so much time longing for the past, thinking about what had gone wrong, and pining for a better future.

But now? I was plugging away at the kiosk, swiping and clicking buttons for a new Metro card without even thinking—prior to the Manhattan’s Concern incident, I would’ve spent time fiddling with my purse, wondering if I was holding up the line.

Now?

In just a minute or so, I found myself passing the gates, straight through for one of the carriages which had pulled up down below in the belly of a tunnel. Straightening my hair out, I sat myself on a seat, not even scared about potential attackers or onlookers who might gawk at my body.

My curves were delicious to him, assets to be admired and hoarded, not thrown away and cast off to the side—they were marks of pride, not shame.

“How you doing miss?” a man nearby asked me. I glanced at him, not thinking at all about who he was.

I just savored the compliment in my head, realizing who I had become in a matter of days—who Joseph had unleashed.

The woman who would take care of her newly made nonprofit.

The girls would be sorry for what they did.

***

During the next couple of weeks, I paid no attention to Lindsay or the rest. Angela couldn’t even get my attention; I wanted space from here, needed space to have my own vision for myself without her interference.

Eventually though, she contacted me, kept calling, and I felt bad for having held out against her for so long. I mean, we were supposed to be best friends, and we did have each other’s backs as best as we could.

Still though, her actions had hurt me, and it was only until maybe the last couple of weeks before summer that I decided to give in.

I texted her to meet me at a local restaurant. By now, Joseph had filed for my nonprofit, and he had listed himself and Placarm Rhodes as part of the Board, in addition to me as the CEO.

Apparently, word had spread around town about what I was doing, and Angela craved for some details.

Part of the reason why I wanted to meet her again, besides patching up our relationship, was to brag to her.

We did Mexican for the day, ordering ourselves tacos and tequilas. She had on a sundress, Gucci glasses, and a pink Prada purse. I wore my favorite pair of sandals, plus some hot shorts, showing off my body—and signaling to her the person I was coming up to be.

“You look different,” Angela said, the moment we met. I slept on a glass of water, staring at her in the eye.

“Angela,” I said, “you know we’re both still friends, right?”

“Yeah,” Angela said, “but I just couldn’t stop them in time… I know why you’re angry at me. I would be too if I were you.”

“I’m not totally pissed,” I said. “Shit happens out that way. You can’t stop bitches from being nasty.” I slurped my drink again, just as our food came hot and ready. We thanked the waiters before chowing down, and then I said, “How’s Manhattan’s Concern doing?”

“Bad,” Angela said. “It’s really not going well at all. There’s too much infighting between the different girls.”

I thought so. Ricarda and Zena couldn’t last for much longer with the way they commanded everyone around.

“Being the mean girls doesn’t serve anyone right,” I said.

“No,” Angela said.

“Are you willing to come and work for me?”

“If you’re willing to have me,” Angela said.

“So,” I said, “you’ve heard of Homeless United now. What you think? Are you happy I pulled it off?”

“Oh,” Angela said, rubbing my hand across the table. “Girl, you know that I will always support you. Of course I’m happy for you. When I heard about it on the news, I was ecstatic—I wanted to text you, call you, but I wasn’t exactly sure how you would react.”

“I would never turn my back on a girlfriend.” Eating up my taco with one bite, I mumbled, “Anyways, I knew you wouldn’t last with Ricarda and Zena for too long. They’re insufferable.”

“Compared to you?”

I raised an eyebrow.

Angela smiled and giggled, slapping her hand on the table hard. “I’m kidding, I’m kidding,” she said. “Yeah, they’re terrible people. Constantly backbiting. I should’ve been able to see what they were doing from a mile away when they first wanted to kick you out, but even they kept me out of the picture whenever they had plans. It’s like they expected me to go. I shut off all contact with them. I walked out with you the first time, but they kept offering me more positions in the club after. It got so annoying. Girl, I’m glad to have you back as boss.”

“I’m glad to have you too,” I said. “They haven’t been saying shit about Joseph?”

“All the things,” Angela said. “They’re thinking you’re a total slut now that you to have come public with Homeless United.”

“Well,” I said, finishing up my taco, “they can think whatever they want.”

“They’re really jealous of you,” she said. “I mean, really, really jealous. They want the success you’re having. They even got Lindsay to join them. They have this idea that they can extract secrets from her since you guys spend so much time together in classes.”

I rolled my eyes, wondering what was going on with Lindsay. I felt bad for her family situation, but I still remembered how much of a pain in the ass she could be. “Well, that’s another thing,” I said.

“Lindsay’s is complying with them,” Angela said. “I sense something else brewing in the air. It’s not like the other times when the girls with scheme behind our backs.”

“Different how?”

“They have this way of being so shady,” Angela said. “They’re constantly casting darkness when we want light.”

“Just have to be careful of where we step then,” I said. “Keep a lookout, one foot ahead of the other, and then if we make it out of the woods the first time, then we should be good the rest of the way. They’ll want to trip us up from the get-go—we just have to prevent them from even getting to that part.”

“What you think they’ll do?” Angela said.

“Sue me,” I joked.

It would be closer to the truth to than I even realized. Socking away my taco, and casting off the garbage to a nearby bin, I wiped my hands on a napkin, cleaning up my face.

“They’ll try anything to take you out,” Angela said. “Last I heard from them, they were super drained from all of the finances to have to handle now. They don’t even realize how much both of us were doing for the organization—while they were busy flirting with guys and goofing off in class, we were the ones being the backbone of the entire endeavor.”

“When they get desperate,” I said, “is when they’ll really start bringing out the claws. They’ll come after us only because they feel threatened about the coming of their end. Whether that means the collapse of Manhattan’s Concern, I don’t know, but I can see them not lasting for much longer.”

“I hope so,” Angela said. “The two of them don’t deserve to have president status listed on their resume. Can you even imagine them walking into an interview and tricking people with that? That shit?”

I imagined Ricarda and Zena sitting in a swanky hotel with future bosses. I nearly vomited from the images.

“They can be so tacky,” I said.

Standing, and looking up at the sky, I had relief twirl in my soul. Walking away from our table, Angela held my hand, nodding at me.

“Girl,” she said, “if anything bad happens, I’ll be right with you.”

“That’s good to hear,” I said. “No more fighting between the two of us?”

“No more fighting between the two of us,” she said.

Chapter 18

I saw Lindsay in class again, and she looked much better than before. Because I hadn’t been at the apartment all the time, staying with Joseph in the interim, I never realized how much she had been out of New York State itself tending to her family ordeal. When she told me this, my jaw dropped. “No way,” I said, feeling the wave of empathy sweep tears up to my eyes. “I’m so sorry,” I said.

Lindsay shrugged, just as the professor walked in. She drilled a pencil against her desk, crossing her legs. “It’s like what I said before,” she mumbled, “whatever.”

“You don’t have to be so standoffish,” I said, crossing my legs too. I had read somewhere that imitating body language builds subconscious rapport with another human being. Hoping to get on her good side, I plucked out a pencil from my purse, and began to slap it silently on the side of my desk as well.

Lindsay notice of this. “Why do you even bother?”

“To annoy you,” I said, acknowledging every stroke of my nimble fingers. “Don’t you see? I’m trying to be nice.”

“And I’m not seeing it,” Lindsay said. “Why? We’re not even close.”

“You don’t have to be when you’re wanting to help,” I said.

“Yeah, well,” Lindsay said. “You’re not going to want to anymore after you hear what I have to tell you.”

I turned to her, my face scrunched up. “What are you talking about? What’s wrong?”

“Remember the program you gave me?”

“Yeah?”

“Have you been reading the news lately?”

I shook my head.

Lindsay took out her phone from her purse, scrolling to a couple of articles on the front side of a news aggregator. “Read this,” she said.

The headlines were appalling. More gruesome murders in some country. Abductions. And then…

Antonio and Alpha Suites. His company. Embezzlement. Illegal activities? And then the use of “specialty coding software…”

I glanced up at Lindsay, in shock. “What is this supposed to be?”

She handed me an envelope. From out of the slit, I pulled a letter, reading it quickly. It was an indictment—not official, just a copy—and aimed at the entirey of Alpha Suites. A list of top ranking personnel were covered plus some additional interns at the bottom. Lindsay’s name was somewhere in there.

“Well,” Lindsay said, “you told me I could use the programs for whatever I wanted.”

“Yeah,” I said, “but not like this. What’s happening with him?”

I read more of the headlines. They were all within the hour.

“Looks like you’ll be in a lot of trouble,” Lindsay said.

Anger boiled in my stomach. Clutching my fingers around my pencil, I nearly threw it at her, enraged by my fury rising up in my spirit. “What do you mean?”

“I mean what I mean,” Lindsay said. “It’s very probable that you’ll be pulled into court.”

“What?”

“Exactly,” Lindsay said. “I’m giving you a heads up now. You gave me help. I’m trying to help you now.”

“How? What were you doing at Alpha Suites?”

Lindsay told me her methods of working. Apparently, she had used my programs to finish her Excel macros faster than the rest, as well as complete her accounting scheduling and process of theory for any of her investment portfolios. Seeking to ease the strain of her work, and therefore unload the burden off her back so she could have some time to herself, she altered my programs, changing them to fit some of Antonio’s increasingly theoretical equations.

“You might be in trouble,” Lindsay said, “ because Antonio doesn’t take any prisoners. He’s going to slam down hard on everyone involved.”

“Why would you… Dammit, Lindsay, you did this on purpose, didn’t you?”

“No,” Lindsay said, “I didn’t… At least, I didn’t try to.”

“I know what you’ve been up to,” I said. “Lying behind my back. Sneaking around. Loafing about at the apartment. Using me to finish up your work as fast as possible. Like a mule. You’re just lying about your mom dying too, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” Lindsay said, grinning mischievously. My heart dropped into my bowels, a nauseated eruption dragging my mind down to the depths of hell. “Possibly…”

She turned her back to me, facing the front of our lecture. The professor kept talking as normal, pointing to a picture she had uploaded, droning on and on.

“You’re such a bitch,” I said, loudly. She glanced at me, giggling, her hands over her mouth.

“You said I could do whatever I wanted with them,” Lindsay murmured.

Lindsay wouldn’t talk to me for the rest of the lecture. She crossed her arms, keeping her head off to the side, not bothering with ever acknowledging me—a glance, a whisper, perhaps? Nope. She had her own agenda in her head, her own frame of thought—the same way she had framed me. She had a plan, from the very beginning, to make me nothing more than dirt.

Why had I ever felt empathy for her? Why let people assault me like this?

“You won’t do anything,” she finally said, at the end of our lecture. I packed my bags, gritting my teeth, tears running hot across my cheeks. Glaring at her, I watched as she ran out, her hands in her pockets, her head facing forward.

“What a cunt,” I said. “Seriously, could anyone be so, so terrible?”

Too embarrassed to even call Angela, I instead ran outside, clutching my books to my chest, my purse as well. I discovered a shady spot near some trees, preferring the darkness to the light.

“God,” I said, my hands digging into soil. “How could I reverse this? There was no going back. Antonio would somehow tie me into his shit—I knew it from the way Lindsay talked about the situation.

I had to contact Joseph. There was no other way about fixing my life now. He would have to undo the damage done to me.

But how could I even approach him? To talk to him about what I had done behind his back would incriminate me, wouldn’t it? Despite no wrongdoing on my part, I still had legal ties to my program which I gave away on my own behalf. Since anything I made during company hours truly was the company’s, I could be fucked in court.

And who knew how deep Lindsay’s links were to Antonio. Perhaps they were sleeping together like me and Joseph had been. If that was the case, then we would have a huge battle on our hands, a war, a schism. No investment banker would let their reputation disintegrate in the public’s eyes—already we had a bad taste on most people’s tongues.

“Dammit,” I said to myself, picking my body up from the ground. Men and women on the street passing by glanced at me, giving me a shake of their heads. “God dammit all.”

Standing and cleaning myself off, I couldn’t pity myself anymore. This was the time for a strong Ophelia O’Malley. This was the time for a true change to occur in my life—now I had to take control.

“Joseph,” I said, after dialing in his number, “we have to talk.”