CHAPTER
SIXTEEN
“Jealousy is always born with love but it does not die with it.”
~Francois de La Rochefoucauld
PAST
When the teenage years hit, what Dante and I had just sort of turned, shifted a bit. It was an unspoken rule that we belonged to each other in a new and more possessive way.
We just made sense. Something naive inside of me couldn’t imagine anything else.
Neither of us could have tolerated someone soft.
I’d chew up and spit out a soft boy, a fact I’d since then proven many times.
Dante would eat a soft girl for breakfast.
We fit together, and it wasn’t until I was nearly fourteen that it even occurred to me that anyone or anything could come between us.
We were at Dante’s house, which was rare. His mother didn’t work, and she hardly ever went anywhere, so being at his house was pretty much a guarantee of running into her, not to mention the fact that my grandma worked there and she’d kill me if she knew how much time I spent with Dante and that we were close enough he’d bring me to his home.
Dante had forgotten his backpack, though, and he was just running upstairs real quick to grab it.
He wasn’t quick enough.
His mother terrified me, but she was the kind of woman where you knew you shouldn’t let her see it.
But some things you just couldn’t hide.
I tried my best, but she was a shark and I was perpetually bleeding. There was no way she didn’t notice.
Usually I had a tough skin. I liked to think I had a tough everything, but I did have one weakness.
One. In my entire child/woman body, and we both knew it.
Dante. He was the chink in my armor. My soft underbelly.
She didn’t single me out often, but every time she did, it was memorable.
And terrible.
I’d grown several inches over the summer and I was awkward with it. Most of my clothes were ill-fitting. Gram helped some with it, well, she helped what little Grandma would let her. She wasn’t allowed to buy me anything nice or even anything new, but Gram still took an interest, making sure I went shopping a few times a year for the basics on consignment, but even she couldn’t keep up with how my body was growing.
I’d always been rail thin, skinny looking to the point of unhealthy, but all of a sudden, I had sprouted, and as I’d gone up, parts of me had started to grow out.
My legs had grown longer than was proportionate with my body, and I did not own one pair of pants that made it to my ankles, or one set of shorts that weren’t embarrassingly high, exposing way more of my upper thighs and butt than I was comfortable with. And nothing in the world fit comfortably over my shapely hips.
My shirts were too tight, my dresses small to the point of obscene, and on top of all of that, I kept having growth spurts, so I felt less coordinated by the day.
And my breasts—which were the bane of my existence, had grown too large to hide.
I couldn’t talk to a boy and have him look me in the eye anymore.
Except for Dante. He was good at being my exception.
Even when he pissed me off, he rarely disappointed me.
I knew he noticed my changing figure, but he never mentioned it, never teased me for it when we usually teased each other about everything. He seemed to sense it was a sensitive subject for me.
I was waiting for Dante in the intimidating entryway of their mansion when she approached me wearing her usual unpleasant smile.
“Scarlett,” she said, eyeing me with cold eyes. “Just look at you. Growing up so fast.” Each word was dripping in disdain.
I swallowed hard, my throat so dry the motion stung like sandpaper going down, and greeted her, keeping my most stoic mask firmly over my face.
“Come this way,” she ordered, turning her back on me to stride down the hallway to her wing of the house.
She just expected me to obey. She was a bitch like that.
I wished more than anything that I had the nerve to call her one to her face.
I hated that I followed her without a word.
As much as I rebelled against the very idea, she intimidated me, and some insecure part of me always ached for her approval.
She led me to her study, and my entire body clenched tightly in dread when she locked the door behind us.
I stayed where I was by the exit not moving a muscle as she glided with her smooth stride to her antique desk and retrieved something.
A picture, I realized as she brought it close.
It was of a girl, maybe my age or a bit older. She was beautiful, with pale blonde hair and wintry blue eyes. She was slender and elegant, and even in the picture I could tell she’d never had an awkward moment in her life.
She was dressed in the kind of clothes you never saw real teenagers wearing. The latest expensive trends, head to toe.
“Do you know who this is?” Dante’s mother asked me.
“A model?” I guessed. She fit the bill.
“She should be one, but no. This is Tiffany Vanderkamp. Have you heard the name?”
I shook my head. I knew this was headed somewhere bad, somewhere that would be disastrous to me, but I wasn’t quite sure which direction the disaster would come from.
“Dante hasn’t told you about her?”
I shook my head again.
She tutted, her face placing itself into something resembling sympathy. I knew it was a lie, but she still had me half convinced with her perfectly arranged expression. She was evil like that.
“Tiffany, or Fanny as we affectionately call her, is the young woman that Dante is going to marry when he graduates from college.”
Ah. There it was.
She was a dirty fighter, so of course she’d gone straight for my soft spot.
I felt my stoic mask slipping off, being replaced by something akin to dismay. I recovered it, but not quite quickly enough.
“Oh dear, I can see that he hasn’t been upfront with you about this, the boor.”
"I-i-i-i—" Oh God, the stutter was here. I’d known it wasn’t gone forever; it still came out to play at the most dreaded moments.
She smiled at me, looking delighted. “You’re upset, aren’t you? Did he lie to you? Did he say you were special to him? Naughty, naughty boy, just like his father. Are you two having sex yet?”
I was shocked. Completely. We hadn’t even kissed yet. "N-n-n-n—"
She threw back her head and laughed, the first time I’d ever seen her actually look happy. Apparently all it took was making someone else miserable.
“You are,” she incorrectly guessed. “Of course you are, you little slut. No wonder he thinks he’s in love with you, but that will all wear off soon enough. And of course you’re in love with him. He’s a beautiful boy, but he’s not for you, do you understand?
I did not. I set my jaw and shook my head at her, done with attempting to speak.
She was so wrong about so many things I wished I could have voiced it.
We had not done any of the things she seemed to assume, but she was right about one thing.
I was in love with her son.
But she was so wrong about the rest. I owned him. He was mine, and I was his. She was underestimating us both if she thought she could change that.
Mutely I tried to hand the picture back to her but she waved it away.
“You keep that. It’s yours. And go ahead, continue doing what you’re doing. Have your fun. Enjoy it all while you can. Be my son’s little plaything while he’s young and stupid. Just never forget that you aren’t his future. If he ever tries to put a ring on your finger, I’m cutting him off.”
Just then Dante began to pound on the door.
“Put that away,” she snarled at me.
I stuffed the picture in my bag. It was embarrassing how relieved I was that Dante was rescuing me from his malevolent mother.
It’s not like she was beating me. Her only weapons were words.
But they were lethal.
I didn’t bring up the incident or that girl to him for a long time. I was embarrassed to.
And what if he told me it was none of my business?
I’d be crushed.
So I sat on it for a long time, letting it simmer inside of me like an infected wound.
“Never back down from her, okay?” Dante told me when we were free of his house. “If she ever senses she can intimidate you, she’ll make your life hell.”