Delusive (17 page)

“Hey,” I greeted her wryly.

She slipped her sunglasses down her nose, revealing bloodshot eyes and dilated pupils between her heavily kohl rimmed lash-line. Reaching inside her pocket, she retrieved my keys, and tossed them at me.

“Are you all right?” After placing the keys into my handbag, I scanned down her arms, not exactly sure what I was looking for beyond her tattoos.

“Do you really fucking care?”

Matching her scowl, my gaze met hers. “You’re doing a really good job of making it difficult to give a shit.”

“Never mind.” She moved to leave.

“Skylar…wait!” I matched her hurried stride and grabbed her shoulder.

She twirled around, her eyes wide with furor. “What?” she snapped at me.

“I’ve been worried about you.” I dropped my hand, shoving it inside the pocket of my blazer. “You won’t answer my calls or texts. Then, you show up here, I think for me, with an attitude. If you didn’t come here to see me, what is the problem? What is going on with you? What happened to the Skylar I met a few months ago?”

Folding her arms, she waltzed up to me. “Not everyone has a perfect family and a perfect future already in place, with a perfect house and a perfect boyfriend.” Her coral lips, sans lipstick, curled up in displeasure. Her peaches and cream complexion suddenly turned sallow.

“What you’ve said about my life proves how little you know me,” I replied coldly.

“All I know is the house you live in. You have no room to complain. Take my life for twenty-four hours and you’ll see why.”

“How about this.” Taking one large leap forward, I invaded her personal space. Without the heels that had seemed permanently attached to her feet, she barely matched my height. “Take
my
life for twenty-four hours. You think it’s so fucking pretty? My father went crazy after what happened to my mother and it wasn’t an accident. That’s right, Skylar,” I said to her shocked face, “someone wanted her dead. My mother never loved husband number one, two, three, or four. One? He was hard to love. He beat her. She stayed with him because she thought she needed the money. Her first husband was well off, so she endured his beatings until he died and left her with everything.
 

“There was always something more important to her than me, my dad, or my sister: her racing career.” I sighed, embarrassed I told her things I never should have. I sank back on the edge of the fountain and dropped my head, feeling defeated and exhausted.

“Jesus, Hanley, I had no idea.” I felt her pressure beside me and her arms around me. Resting her head on my shoulder, she held me tightly. “You hold it all together and act like you’re so…together. I didn’t know. I’m so sorry.”

I rested my head on the top of hers. “I haven’t told you everything. It gets worse. Don’t assume my life is perfect. It’s never been perfect. I’ve sacrificed the life I wanted and the person I wanted to be for my father. I can’t afford to be any other way.”

She reached over and took my hand, squeezing it. “I knew there was a reason I wanted to be around you. Your life is just as fucked up as mine.”

“You’re just very bad at dealing with it.”

She lifted her head and squinted at me, a smile twitching from the corner of her mouth. “So are you.”

“
Touché
.”

She ran her thumb across the back of my hand, staring at the place where we connected. Straightening her spine, she turned her head to survey the row of restaurants across the lot. “Do you want to grab a shake from Sed’s Diner and talk about it?”

“Yes to the diner. No to talking about it. We’re going to talk about you never taking me to a party and leaving me to act irresponsibly again. You’re better than that, Sky, and I think you know it. And another thing—don’t ever send me a picture of a dick in your mouth. It was…disgusting.”

“The cock or the fact that it was in my mouth?”

“Both, actually,” I said with my mouth twisted up in disgust.

She chuckled. “But you like Elias’s, huh? It must be made of diamonds.” Linking her arm in mine, she hurried us along.

ELEVEN

I SPENT MOST OF the day wandering around town. I knew there would be consequences for avoiding Elias on a day he told me not to take my newly fixed car because Jaco would be my transportation. He claimed he had plans for me after I left work. It was an early shift where I arrived at nine and left at three. Instead of indulging Elias, I decided to give myself a self-imposed sabbatical away from him. Every part of me wanted to be with him, but I fought for some semblance of normalcy, a way out of the insanity that was intrigue, desire, and an increasingly problematic obsession.

After discovering where Jaco’s car was parked, waiting to transport me to Elias, I used a different entrance. I walked for miles before taking a bus and letting its route determine where I went.

In the middle of reading a book at the public library, across the street from the elementary school, I had a sudden urge to call my sister. In the interest of safety, my sister kept a burner phone, and I, in turn, called her from the landline of random places or with a pay-as-you-go phone. Currently I used the phone at a local school after lying and telling the staff a story about my car breaking down.

“Hey, Hanley. Been a long time since I’ve heard from you,” Whitney, my sister’s wife, answered the phone. “Your sister is pretty busy.”

I glanced around the principal’s office and sat in the executive chair. “You give me that response every time I call,” I replied. “She can’t stay mad at us forever.”

“She doesn’t agree with what you and your dad are doing. It won’t erase what happened.”

“We know that,” I stated with an edge. “Can I please talk to her?”

“Hold on.”

After a brief pause, filled with muffled voices arguing on the other end of the line, Holden answered the phone. “I have a tight schedule. What is it you want?”

Her bitter tone burned right through me and made me wonder why I continuously bothered to have some sort of relationship with her. “I’m sorry. I won’t call you again.”

“Leina!” she called me back to the receiver. She used my birth name because she was adamantly against using the new one. “You obviously have something heavy going on. So talk.”

“How is Whitney?”

She sighed heavily, losing her patience. “You didn’t call to ask about my wife.”

“I haven’t spoken to you in a while. I wanted to catch up.” I bit my nails as I prepared to dive into a subject that had been bothering me for months. “Why didn’t I get an invitation to your wedding over the summer?”

“You wouldn’t have come without him,” she answered without a hint of remorse. “And our father wouldn’t have come without the baggage he refuses to let go of and his judgmental ways.”

I thought about Elias and the dangerous game I played with him. I tried my hardest not to feel for him, but my mind and body had other ideas. My torment delayed my need to push things forward and reveal my true intentions. “I’m hitting a roadblock, Holden. I’m not sure about things anymore.”

“Oh?” She laughed humorlessly. “Now you feel guilty after what you did to Roth? It’s a little late, isn’t it?”

“What I did to Roth?” Irateness bled into my words. Holden shut down when faced with anger—especially mine. It forced me to quickly take in soothing breaths to calm myself before she hung up on me. “What about what his father did to our family?”

“His
father
, Hanley. If you’re going to do anything, do the right thing and let the right people handle this. The authorities.”

I balked. “You don’t understand how revenge works.”
 

“Oh, I do. I know it consumes and kills. It killed our family—our mother, and it’s going to kill you. This isn’t you. None of it is you. You’re pretending to be someone you’re not, and even if you’re never found out about, you will be responsible for killing what little of you there is left alive.”

"What do you mean by that?” I questioned the way she related what happened to my mother as revenge, and was curious to know if she had knowledge of something I wasn’t privy to. “Our mother was innocent in the situation.”

Silence cut through on the other line.

“I have a boyfriend now.” I effortlessly changed the subject but immediately regretted disclosing it to her.

“Because you’re supposed to. I can hear it in your voice. You know what you’re doing is wrong, and maybe it’s because you feel for him. Whatever you do, wear a condom.”

“I will, and I’m also on birth control, but we haven’t…yet.”

“So?”

The principal peeped at me through the glass. When she turned around, I felt the sense of urgency to finish my conversation and get to the root of my issues. I needed to make sense of my feelings for Skylar. I disclosed it all to Holden; the shortened version.

Shortly after hearing my concerns, she took a long pause and finally just said, “Mmm.”

“I know what you’re going to say.”

“You’re burying yourself more and more every day. You are so much better than this. I blame him for making you be this way. For making you chase after him and do his dirty work for him. You should be living your life and being comfortable with who you are. He should be in a mental ward so he can let her go and stop fooling you into holding onto a lie.” She fell silent for a while.
 

“That was my coworker,” she said hastily, adding, “I have to go,” prior to hanging up on me.

MY BRIEF CONVERSATION with Holden replayed in my thoughts as I removed my work clothes and dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. I thought about seeing Elias, but instead I nestled into bed, in my clothes. I tossed and turned, feeling as though every little sound irritated me. The hard ping of the rain tapping on the windows. The downpour making a rhythmic sound on the roof.
 

I stuffed my hands underneath my pillow and stared at my phone as it buzzed every so often as it had been for the past three hours. Jamming my eyes shut, I talked myself out of answering.
 

The need to cure what ached overtook my will to hold stronger to my mission by taking time away from Elias.

I picked up my phone, scanning a handful of the numerous texts Elias sent me:

Saturday 4:00 Elias:
Jaco waited for an hour to pick you up
 

and was told you left on time.
 

Call me and let me know that you’re all right.

Saturday 4:18 Elias:
I just received information that you left
 

and boarded a bus.
 

Call me.

Saturday 6:13 Elias:
I know where you’ve been.
 

I know you’re blatantly ignoring me.

Saturday 7:34 Elias:
I’m on your street,
 

you have one hour to meet me here.

Saturday 8:46 Elias:
Get to my place. NOW.

I hadn’t returned home until ten o’clock. It was mostly due to not knowing the bus routes and schedules and having to take several different ones before walking two and a quarter miles in uncomfortable shoes to get home. The fact that he’d had someone search for me and maybe tailing me around town convinced me to take my time in responding.

Thirty minutes later, I sent Elias a text simply stating I was going to bed and would see him tomorrow. I held onto my phone for a few minutes, waiting for a response that never came.

Startling me, a loud horn resounded outside. I slipped out of bed and stepped into my sneakers before leaving the house through the French doors in my room. I strolled down the walkway that surrounded the perimeter of the house, heading toward the front walk. Cold rain pelted my body, cooling me down.

I expected to catch a glimpse of Elias in the driveway, but was instead faced with Jaco who barked at me, “Get in the back.”
 

“I’m not—”

“If you know what’s good for you”—he snarled, pointing a thick finger in my direction—“you’ll get in the goddamn car.”

His shout made me cringe and served as an incentive to obey. Like a wayward child, browbeaten into submission, I bowed my head, slid my sneaker adorned feet down the driveway, and got in the back of the car.

THE “HOUSEKEEPER”—I didn’t know Elias had—greeted Jaco and me at the front door. The rage of jealousy was put out before it had a chance to begin. The overly friendly greeting she gave Jaco, led me to believe the two might’ve been an item.
 

She guided me to the rear of the house—as though I needed the direction. In the game room, Elias sat on a stool at the back of the room while holding a glass tumbler. The look on his face indicated he was far from entertained with the sight of his comrades—who looked to be a good start for a well-dressed criminal organization—playing pool.
 

Elias’s housekeeper captured my attention the most, mainly due to the way she was dressed. She was wearing a ruffled apron with only a pair of G-string panties underneath. Her face was heavily made up and her chip-free manicure indicated she hadn’t done anything resembling housework.

She winked at Elias and he winked back at her, telling her, “Thank you,” in a tone I’d only witnessed him use on me.