Bad Boy Rich
Bang. Bang. Bang.
My eyelids, drooping and leaden with sleep, snap open, violently—the loud banging against the front door waking me up.
Several door chimes sound throughout the house; each pitch equally as annoying as the one that proceeds. Who the fuck would be here in the middle of the night? It better not be Troy—the fucker got his payment last month.
My head—spinning and out of control—looks over to my phone. The light is harsh, and I can barely make out the numbers. Five a.m.
There’s an irritating snore beside me. I turn over; the mattress sinking yet the movement doesn’t wake her. Felicity—Farrah’s younger sister—is sprawled out across my bed, her naked torso laying on top of the white sheets.
She still had traces of coke on her chest, and the more I looked at Felicity, the greater she disgusted me.
Don’t remember her face. Don’t remember the way she felt beneath you.
Remember that she left you…for him.
And that wound is fucking closed. I made sure of it.
I grab my pistol from my nightstand, throwing on my navy robe as I make my way to the door. The banging doesn’t stop, my name being called by someone familiar. The voice resonates, but I can’t seem to connect it to a face.
Turning the lights on, the glass doors leave nothing for anonymity. It’s Flynn, standing with a large duffel bag beside him.
“What the fuck are you doing here at this hour?”
He’s out of breath, panicked and his hair wildly messy. I hadn’t seen him for months, and the last time we spoke—he told me not to ask about her. He was pissed at me, and the small piece of information he did tell me was that she was doing really well.
I knew he had hit it big, signed up by Platinum Records and currently world-touring. Hollywood agents were desperate to sign him up. Flynn Beats—known by his new stage name—was killing it in his career.
“You need to clean your shit up,” he barks.
I’m stunned at his forwardness yet confused by ‘my shit’ needing to be cleaned up.
“What are you talking about?”
He bends down, reaching behind the duffel bag, and lifts a dark carrier by the handle. I stare, close my eyes, then open them again to finally figure out it’s a baby carrier.
“She’s yours.”
There’s a baby inside. Small, wrinkly and wrapped in a white blanket. The baby looked like some alien from outer space.
What the hell did he just say to me?
“She’s yours.”
“She’s yours.”
“She’s yours.”
“Dude, are you fucking listening to me?!”
Inside, my brain is a mess and refusing to compute the information. Closing my eyes, momentarily, I try to slowly process this information and ignore the heat trapped underneath my robe causing me to hyperventilate.
There’s a baby, yes. And Flynn is telling me it’s mine—not possible.
“I said, are you listening to me?” Flynn repeats, harshly.
“I’m listening!” I yell back. “But what the hell do you mean she’s mine?”
“Yours.” Flynn lowers his gaze towards the baby, quiet and non-responsive. Moments later, through a thickening voice, he explains, “Milly gave birth three weeks ago. The baby came early or something. I thought she was doing okay but she just ran off. Came to visit me yesterday. It’s because Mom’s not doing the best, it’s all fucked up.”
He begins to sob, panicked and gasping for air. Watching a grown man brought to tears was enough to hold my attention but I didn’t know how to comfort him.
“If I don’t show up for Coachella today I am fucked. I can’t take care of this baby.”
It’s like someone switched on the information overload. My mind cannot keep up, spitting out random questions in order to piece together this fucked-up puzzle.
“What…what do you mean Milana is gone?”
“Gone. Exactly that. She wrote me a letter…” He grabs a scrunched-up paper from his pocket but doesn’t read it out. “Take care of her please. I can’t cope…my sister…my mom…I don’t know how to take care of a baby.”
He pushes the carrier into my chest, and with quick thinking—I grab onto the handle before he lets go. “What do you want me to do?”
“Just take her, I need to go. I’ll be back tonight and we can talk more.”
I stare down at the baby again; my stomach churning from the sheer panic of taking care of this baby that is supposedly mine.
As he begins to walk away, towards his car, I shout anxiously, “You can’t leave her with me!”
Flynn stops in his tracks, turning around to face me. “She’s your daughter, Wesley, not mine. There’s no greater love than that from your own father, trust me—I know. So, if you want to do something right for once, take her, now, when she needs you the most.”
He turns back, only for me to yell at him one more time.
“Wait, what’s her name?”
Without turning around, he stops, posture slumped and his head falling forward. “Katerina. She’s named after our mom.”
The sadness lingers in his tone, and after a quick moment of silence between us—he walks to his car and drives off. As soon as his car is out of sight, the baby begins to stir. What the fuck do I do? Okay, breathe, take her inside, that would be the first step. I grab the carrier and the bag beside her. A balancing act which had me almost dropping the carrier.
Placing the carrier down on the lounge, I sit beside it and gaze at her face.
I had no connection to this kid. I thought that when you had babies, you supposedly looked at them and became overwhelmed with this love that was impossible to explain.
My anger towards Milana—overshadowed this moment. How the hell did she keep this from me? We were careful, used protection most of the time and I recall her telling me she took the pill religiously. She wasn’t interested in starting a family, odd yet I respected that decision. I only brought it up occasionally because I thought that’s what all women wanted and in order to keep her—I had to sacrifice a little, or a lot.
But this…this was fucking unbelievable.
And how could she abandon our kid? What type of monster had she become?
“Baby, where are you?” Felicity calls out, stumbling on the bottom step of the staircase and lunging forwards to the ground. With a delirious cackle, she searches the area, locking eyes with me in the living room.
“Who the hell is that?”
I keep quiet. I needed to process.
“Wesley… who is that?”
“Mine.”
“Yours? Is this some sort of sick joke? Let me see.”
Felicity moves closer, naked and barely able to compose herself. Armed with a look of disgust, she complains, “Jesus, Wesley, get rid of her. What a killjoy.”
This woman—an accessory to my over-indulging lifestyle—is the wake-up call I desperately needed. A snippet of my life, what it had become and who I had become. The more she breathed in my space, the more I am revolted by the person that I allowed myself to be. This is exactly what Milana envisioned. Why would she want me? A man that depended on pills, drugs, and anything that would erase the fucked-up life I built for myself.
I don’t know what came over me, this protective beast that wanted to unleash on Felicity. With a deliberate slow breath, my teeth clench upon saying, “Leave.”
Chuckling at what she thinks is a joke, “You want me to leave?”
“GET. THE. FUCK. OUT,” I bellow, almost lashing out. “Take your fucking dirty ass out of my house…NOW.”
Crossing her arms to cover her fake tits, she huffs at my request.
“You wouldn’t dare do this.”
This time, I laugh, foolishly. “Try me. Now get the fuck out.”
I remove my attention from her and back onto the baby. She stirs, again—no doubt from our raised voices. I didn’t have the nerve to remove her from the carrier but knew that I would need to, eventually.
Felicity shouts profanities into the room, dressed and with a bag in hand. I ignore her spiteful comments, welcoming the silence after she slams the door.
Then—the panic sets in.
I’m alone…with a baby that needed attention. As if she could read my thoughts, she begins to wail, only adding to my anxiety about having to lift her. The panic grips my throat, and with a mad rush, I run upstairs to grab my cell and call Em.
I’m talking, fast and incoherent. Trying to explain it all but not believing the words spilling out of my mouth.
“Slow down, you have what there?”
I take deep breaths, trying to calm the nervous energy and explain it again, slower.
“Wesley, I can’t believe it.” She sighs, loudly.
“Just get here, please, the kid is crying, I don’t know what to do.”
“Pick the baby up, watch its head and I’ll be there soon.”
She hangs up. What does she mean watch its head? Was it going to fall off? Fuck, this is stressing me out. I take more deep breaths, pushing aside the sickness settling in my stomach. I had seen this in movies, and I recall holding a baby once, maybe, years ago.
It takes me five minutes to get the goddamn seat belt off. After it finally unclasps, I try to figure out how to get my large hands under the baby and pull her out without her head falling off. Fuck—why is this so hard?
Sliding one hand under her head, and the other under her bottom, I pull her out, gently and slowly, holding her in the air because I didn’t know how to bring her close to me without moving one hand. What if I fucking dropped her? Shit, don’t fucking drop her.
After many failed attempts, and my poor judgment almost dropping her—I ease her into my chest which seems to calm her down until Em arrives.
“Did you know about this?” I question her, my voice low shielding the baby from the noise.
Emerson remains silent, sitting beside me on the sofa. I could tell she rushed over here; hair barely brushed, tied up and out of her face. She’s wearing baggy sweats, almost too baggy that I suspected they didn’t belong to her.
“You fucking knew and you didn’t tell me?”
She rolls her eyes, letting out a frustrated sigh at the same time.
“I didn’t know, okay. But I suspected something was wrong. It was unlike her to have zero contact. Her brother never breathed a word. Honestly, I thought she just went back to Liam and maybe they got hitched.”
It hadn’t crossed my mind. He hadn’t crossed my mind.
“What if it’s his?” I mumble, staring at the baby’s face.
She had no features to indicate she was mine. There was an Asian look about her, and that would be from Milana’s heritage.
“Wait…the timing is off,” Em says, counting numbers out loud that make no sense to me. “I don’t think Flynn would have brought her here if he didn’t believe you were her father.”
“Can’t I get that shit tested? I mean, fuck—what do I do now?”
“You be a daddy. Man the fuck up. We can start by ridding this place of the shit you’ve been snorting all night.”
Em disappears, and with the baby still quiet in my hands, I follow closely. Inside my room, Em looks around, recoiling with a disgusted expression, ripping my sheets off the bed and grabbing the small plastic bag that sat on my nightstand, flushing it down the toilet.
“Emerson, fuck!”
“Don’t even try to justify it.” She points her finger at me, her face turning red as her eyes widen with anger. “You are it, you are her dad. Until Milana is found, you are all she has. You need to get help, you understand me? For good. Or you’ll fuck her up too and she doesn’t deserve this.”
Speechless, and with my mouth slightly open, Em’s words begin to resonate. I can’t fuck up this kid’s life. I went through hell growing up and look how I turned out. Everyone’s Bad Boy. The guy that just can’t get his shit together and loses everyone he loves.
I needed help.
I knew this much.
“Stay, please,” I beg, desperately. “Just show me what I need to do with her.”
She removes the baby from my arms; the sudden loss of contact satisfying yet odd at the same time. Watching her smile and coo at the baby, like a natural-born mother, made me think about us. What we once had, what we could have been.
And although the thought brought me happiness, it didn’t erase what my heart completely craved.
I just needed to find her.
“I’ll show you how to feed her, change her, and bathe her. But then, it’s all you. You understand?”
I nod my head, grateful that Em still cared enough to help me during my lowest time. And hopefully, care enough to help me find the woman I love.