CHAPTER TWO - TATE

Waking up alone for the first time in months was a good thing. I hadn’t expected my relationship with Terri to last a lifetime, so our fight last night barely bothered me. She’d come back begging again when she realized how much money she’d given up access to. Unfortunately for her, I didn’t believe in second chances. Once you’ve crossed me, you’re history.

Acting like a child had been her downfall, and it led to her drinking too much at the club and behaving like a total slut on some other guy. Then screaming in my face was the final nail in her coffin. It was more than over; it was dead and buried as far as I was concerned.

I glanced down to the morning wood tenting my covers and got up to head to the shower. Not only did I need to take care of it, but I still smelled like the club from the night before. I set the temperature of the water and stepped in, slathering my palm with conditioner and gripping my cock with my slippery hand.

I was so sick of Terri’s games. She’d been begging for a breakup for a good month now, and this time there was no going back. I closed my eyes and tried to think of another girl, one who wasn’t like the usual plastic, gold-digging bitches I’d been dating for far too long. I searched my mind, visualizing a crowd of women, some real and some fantasy, all bare breasted and smiling, giving me seductive looks.

I went through about a hundred before I found her. She was a beautiful brunette, with gorgeous green eyes. Her pale, alabaster complexion and the long, naturally wavy hair that hung down to her shoulders made her an all-natural beauty. She was someone I didn’t even know, but someone I’d seen once, maybe twice. But where? I never could seem to remember, and I didn’t know her name. She was my ideal woman.

I thought about her tall, slender frame as I worked my cock, jerking the bastard from my base to tip, which was angry and swollen like a ripe berry waiting to be squeezed till it popped.

The girl smiled, showing a perfect row of pearly teeth, and she licked her lips seductively. I imagined her down on her knees, sticking out her tongue for me to place myself against it. Then she lapped and licked and sucked, taking me over the edge.

I came hard, the hot jets shooting out in thick ropes and finding the drain, I leaned against the shower wall and caught my breath as the image faded from my mind. The girl, gone for now, but stored away in mind for next time.

I made quick work of soaping the rest of me and washing my hair before I got out of the shower and toweled off. I went to the closet and found some loose jeans to put on with a gray T-shirt. I scrubbed at my stubbly face with my palm and knew I wasn’t ready to shave it off, even if it was annoying everyone who knew me.

I found my camera next to my bed and sat down on the messy covers to see what kind of pictures were on file. I had some of my shots on this particular one, but out of the five cameras I owned, this one was mostly for taking pictures of random objects and people. I didn’t like to adjust settings, so I’d just buy a new camera for each subject I was shooting.

This infuriated my father, who thought my love of photography was a colossal waste of time. He didn’t care about the fact that I’d already sold my astral photography for some of the highest premiums in the industry.

My dad’s disappointed was nothing new. Ever since my teenage years, I’d started a collection of tattoos on my arms, chest, and various other regions of my body. Every time he’d catch a glimpse of my inked skin he’d bark a long string of curse words.

Sorry Pops. You’re going to have to accept that your son is a complete fuck-up, as far as you’re concerned.

The memory card revealed several of Terri’s nudes, and for a moment I wondered if I should take to the internet to plaster her image on every porn site I could find, but that wasn’t my style. It might imply that I actually gave a shit. Besides, knowing her, she’d love the attention. I deleted the images and took the card out of the camera and walked it over to my computer. I had some others I wanted to download but wasn’t sure what I would do with them.

It was definitely time to focus on my work. It was also time for a trip out west, so I sat behind my computer and turned it on as I checked my calendar for the next new moon. When the moon was away, the stars would play, and that was when I photographed them in all their glory.

I needed to work on my latest project to give the proceeds from my next batch of portraits to a nonprofit that my mother got me into, Dream Weavers. They provide income to single moms in Nicaragua, with home-based businesses sewing authentic clothing items, to feed their families. I planned to match the profits from the project 100 percent from my own savings. It turned out this spoiled trust fund prick had an okay side to him. Maybe so, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to let that shit spread. I had a playboy reputation to uphold.

The phone rang before I could lose myself in planning my trip. “It figures,” I mumbled when I saw my old man’s mug on my phone’s screen. He had a knack for calling at the worst times.

“Hey, Dad.” I waited for the familiar attitude that always came through my phone when he called.

“Where are you?” The man always asked the same thing. Never hello, champ or how are you?

“I’m home.”

“Of course you are. You should be out looking for employment. I guess that girl of yours has you playing house again this morning?” He’d been upset to learn that Terri had been staying with me most of the tie instead of living with her roommate.

“No, and you’ll be pleased to know we broke up last night. So, she’s not around.”

“Well, I hope you didn’t let her make off with the credit cards.” He’d also been pissed when she’d accidentally took the wrong credit card from my wallet and bought dinner on it. It’d been an honest mistake since she’d meant to steal my own instead of the one for family emergencies, but my father wouldn’t let it go.

“It was fifty-five-dollars, Dad. I paid you back. And no, she didn’t get away with my credit cards.” I wanted to tell the old man off, but I held my tongue.

“Watch your tone, boy. I wanted to call and tell you that your trust check is here. The bank didn’t do a direct deposit this month. You’ll need to put some serious thought on settling down with a descent girl soon, if you expect to see your full inheritance.”

“I’m on it dad.”

That was a lie. I had zero fucking clue what I was going to do about my inheritance issue.

My grandmother left me a fortune in money that was to be paid out in a trust until next year, when I reached the age of thirty-five. At that time, I’d get the rest in a lump sum. The fact that his mother had split up her money between her grandchildren, claiming her no-good children had enough money of their own, had always chapped his ass, as well as the fact that he couldn’t tell me how to spend it.

The one thing he managed to do was convince my grandmother that I needed to be settled before the money came to me in full. Apparently, their definition of settled was married with at least one child. So I had exactly fifteen months to find a girl I wanted to be tied to for the rest of my life and get her pregnant. Great.

The fact that my father, who’d been a total womanizer who’d practically driven my mother away, would give a shit about family life was fucking laughable.

“Have you even looked into finding work?”

“I am working. I’m head deep on building my photography.”

My father thought if I didn’t work, I’d end up in trouble or running off like my oldest brother, Daniel. No one had heard from him in months. I wasn’t that close to him, though; not like I was with my sister, Megan.

“A man needs a job. A real job, not a hobby like that star photography shit you’re into.” That ‘shit’, as he liked to call it, meant a lot to me, but he didn’t care. And one day, I was going to make a huge name for myself, so that my dad could eat his words.

“Have you heard from your sister? I’m not sure I like that new roommate she’s living with. That girl is trouble. She’s only going to get Megan in trouble, and I’m afraid it will hurt her career. I want you to try and talk her into moving home. She’s still got a room here.”

“She doesn’t want to live with you. She’s a grown woman, and you treat her like a child. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that she hasn’t called.”

Or that Daniel took off.

“She was just upset that I brought Evangeline here to live with me. She'd still not forgiven me for the incident with your mother.”

“You cheated on her and divorced her; let’s call it what it is.”

“Yeah, well your mom moved away, and that’s not my fault. She should have stayed close.”

“We speak at least three times a week. She’s living her own life, like the rest of us. I’ll talk with Megan, but I’m not convincing her she needs to be anywhere she doesn’t want to be. I have an extra room, and she knows it’s hers if she wants it.” I wasn’t going to tell him that she’d used the extra room several times already and he sure didn’t need to know why.

The only thing my father and I agreed on was her roommate. That girl was trouble.

“Just check on Megan.” He hung up the phone.

I took a deep breath. I didn’t need his passive aggressive bullshit. I’d just lost a gold-digger with the same problem.

I needed a break more than ever, and planning a work trip out to West Texas would be a great way to clear my mind. With nothing but my camera and camping gear, I’d be able to escape. I hadn’t taken a trip to do my astral photography as often as I liked in months. Terri didn’t appreciate my hobby any more than my father did, and the only thing she wanted me taking pictures of was her; naked. She hadn’t been too pleased when I wanted to take her out to sleep in a tent and brave the wild animals and Texas-sized mosquitos to get pictures of the sky. She also didn’t want me going alone for some bullshit fear that I’d pick up a chick on the way out of town to warm my sleeping bag.

I spun around in my computer chair, still looking for the calendar and moon phases. I wanted to make sure I had everything planned out so I could leave town. The only person I’d tell I was leaving would be Megan, and I’d ask her to stay at my house while I was gone. It was a sure way to kill two birds with one stone. I’d get my rest and the images I needed for my project, and I’d know right where my sister was.

As I got up and headed down to the storage closet to find my sleeping bag and tent, I thought about how I couldn’t put off finally finding a girl to settle down with, if not for the damn clause in my inheritance but for my own sanity.

Next time, I was going to find a real girl who not only loved photography but didn’t mind roughing it.

I didn’t know if she existed, but I’d sure as hell do my best to find out.