6

AIDEN

 

 

It’s five o’clock Sunday afternoon, and I’m pulling into my parents’ driveway on my motorcycle. My mother is standing in the doorway, eyeing me disapprovingly. 

I rode in this way so that I could earn the disapproving look. I accomplish my chosen missions every day of the week. At work. At play. In hell, too. This? This is hell. Also known as my childhood home.

I get off, drop the helmet on the seat, put my shades on, and walk toward her, shades camouflaging my disdain for the woman who gave birth to me. She stops me and toys with my collar to straighten it with her perfectly manicured fingers. She does up the second-to-top button.

I don’t even like her hands on me.

“Thank you for not being late,” she says, voice chilly, throat, fingers, and wrists dripping with gemstones, smelling like Chanel and like she’s already had several martinis.

I sink my teeth into my tongue and say nothing.

“Sienna and her parents are also here for dinner. Be cordial, Aiden.” She emphasizes the be in that demand.

Fuck sakes. The Greers. Why?  I show no reaction. Audra doesn’t get the satisfaction of a reaction about Sienna Greer.

I go to move past her.

“Aiden,” she calls out with more than a hint of exasperation.

I stop and fix my gaze in her direction.

She pulls my sunglasses off my face and gets a full view of my expression, which doesn’t even try to hide how I feel about her.

She flinches and her mask slips for a moment. She puts them back on my face, her fingers trembling. My teeth are tight, and I know my jaw muscles are bulging.

The day I caught her getting fucked by not one, but two landscapers at the same time, on this very property in the shed almost two years ago was the final nail in the coffin of my already tenuous relationship with her, and probably the first day my face froze into what has become my default expression whenever we’re alone.

It wasn’t the first time she proved herself to be a shitty human, but it was the day I stopped making myself show her respect in our already precarious relationship. She chased me down and threatened me into keeping my mouth shut about it. She hates that I dare to look at her this way; when others are around she manages to pretend not to notice. She’s been pretending a lot for the 29 years I’ve been on the planet.

“Be nice,” she warns.

What’s she gonna do? Get me cut out of the will? Truth be told, I don’t even give a shit about the money.  I already have a healthy portfolio. And, I can make more money.  I’ve gotten half my trust fund, I get the other half at 35, and she can’t touch it, even if she takes my father to the cleaners in a divorce, which she wouldn’t be able to do, because I’ve kept all sorts of evidence against her, for my father to use, in a safe place should she decide to play that card.  She thinks I care about whatever else I’m due when my father croaks. I’m not one to turn down money, particularly if it means it winds up in my hands instead of hers, but I don’t need the money if getting it comes with any amount of dealing with her shit.

In fact, it was so important to me to show that I’m successful because of me, not my family name, that I’ve kept my trust fund money separate. I keep tabs on the wealth I’ve built because of my own earnings, my own investments from my salary. I do this to keep myself accountable to myself.

Today, I’ve got to go sit at a fake family dinner with my plastic cheating mother, my clueless workaholic father, my siblings and their significant others, and my parent’s friends, as well as their spoiled and entitled daughter, who I dated, disappointing the families that I never put a ring on her finger, because she is the biggest man-eater I’ve ever met.  I haven’t set eyes on the bitch in more than two years.

Lookin’ forward to this dinner even less than I was.

I hear laughter as I head into the room where they’re all lounging with drinks in their hands and trays of canapes on the table. I’m the only one in jeans. They’re all posed as if for a magazine spread for Better Homes and Gardens.

My older and pregnant sister, Adele, sits on a loveseat with her husband Dirk.  My younger brother Austin sits on another with his latest girlfriend, who I know he’s been seeing a few weeks because my sister keeps me updated on shit with weekly detailed texts about my nephew and whatever else is happening here.

Sienna Greer and her parents Roger and Suzette and my father, Quentin Carmichael, are on a long sofa. 

My father’s eyes are on me and they’re filled with concern. He’s been looking at me that way for two years.  He never bothers to ask questions. Just looks at me that way, like he’s concerned but afraid to broach it. We both know he doesn’t wanna hear what I have to say. I tried to talk to him about shit before moving to New York. Many times. I’m sick of him looking at me like that without saying a fucking word. If he started talking, though, maybe I wouldn’t be able to hold back all I’ve been holding back.

Austin and I both work for the family business. Austin, two years younger than me, is in finance, me in marketing. Adele is four years older than I am. She stays home with her two and a half -year-old, my nephew Braeden, who isn’t here today. He’d be the only thing that’d make this dinner tolerable. She’s due to have a baby girl in a little over a month.

Other than when I must, I don’t see my mother, Audra Carmichael. Cheating, lying whore. Blackmailer. Shitty mother.

If it weren’t for my father and my love for the company he and his late brother started out of college, I’d never step foot in this house, in her presence.

I’ve been in New York the past two years, working at another branch, but I’ve been summoned here, told I’m needed in the San Diego office for three months because George, the manager under me, is on medical leave and it all coincides with a bunch of important projects, including a massive product launch and another big acquisition.

If it’s up to me, I’ll be here a few weeks, make sure things are all set, then I’ll head back to New York and direct shit from afar. No reason for me to be here that length of time, not if I have the right team of people in place.  My father taught this to me so why he’s trying to pull the wool over my eyes pretending I’m needed here is obvious.

He wants me here, figuring if I’m here he’ll find a way to bridge the family rift. Not likely. I have no problem with my siblings. It’s my mother I take issue with. I can sit through fake dinners if I must. I can deal. It’s not going to change things; I’m not going to suddenly stop loathing her.

So, I’m here, staying at my apartment, which he bought me a year ago, giving it to me as my ‘bonus’. Truth be told, I suspect it’s because I refused to stay in his house, because I’m not sleeping under the same roof as her. Funny that he never asked me why.  Not.

Having to sit through this? It’s put me in a mood fouler than I’ve been in for months. And that’s saying something.

Sienna is eyeing me with a smirk as my father rises to pour me a drink. Everyone says their helloes.  Sienna’s father looks at me with fondness. Always got along well with him. Sienna’s mother is looking at my old motorcycle boots with judgement.

Sienna is looking at me like she’s gagging to take another bite out of me. Maybe I’ll let her have a taste. Licking, sucking, I’m down. But another bite? No bloody way. She’s the last bitch I trusted and that’s the last time I let myself get addicted enough to one pussy that I let it call the shots and make me vulnerable.

Sienna’s parents are friends with Audra and Quentin. She and I went to the same private school. Why are they here? It could be just that they’re here. The more likely probability? Audra has something up her sleeve.

I take a seat in the wingback chair beside my father, looking forward to getting this visit over with.