Chapter 17
“Women really do make you go mental.” Zack sipped his drink before his current buzz could wear off. “I have absolutely no idea what’s going on with her.”
In the lounge chair beside him, Seth readjusted the umbrella protecting him from the sun. Zack didn’t give a shit. A man who spent so much time on a boat gained a healthy tan. I really should wear more sunscreen than I do. His mother was constantly chastising him, warning her youngest sun that his skin was going to be nothing but busted leather by the time he was his father’s age. It hadn’t done a damn thing to Uncle Roy, however, and that man was pushing seventy. Or is already seventy. I can’t remember.
“I’m the last one who should be giving you advice,” Seth said. “Between drinking this stuff and rolling on these waves… whoa…”
“Don’t get sick on my uncle’s boat.” Zack swung his legs over the side of the lounge chair and threatened to take the drink from his friend’s hand. “He’s cleaned up enough vomit over the years.”
“What was that about vomit?” Roy called from the bow of Retirement Fund.
“Nothing!” Zack shouted back. “Everything’s fine!”
Seth put his empty glass down and gave his friend a dire look. “I’m fine. Rethinking my decision to bring this cognac on board.”
“Not your fault you’re trying to class the place up.” Zack lowered his voice. “Between you and me, my uncle enjoys some finer things from when he was our age.”
Seth leveled his gaze at him. “I’m seven years older than you. Whose age, exactly?”
“Not the point.””
“Then what is the point?”
“The point is that I think I may have it bad for this woman.”
Seth flung himself back onto the lounge chair. He hit the bottom so hard that the umbrella above them destabilized and threatened to land on their heads.
“You’ve known her for like two weeks and you haven’t even slept with her.”
Zack fixed the umbrella with a huff. “You’re right. I haven’t slept with her. Maybe that’s the thing.”
“You haven’t slept with her, but she blew you.”
“Right. Forgot I told you that.”
Seth whipped off his sunglasses. “It’s the first thing you told me when I got out of my car!”
Zack wasn’t one to blush, but he wouldn’t stand for this misinformation. “I told you on the phone, not when you got out of your car.”
“Whatever.’
“Miss Tattle Talia over here…” Zack sank back down on the edge of his chair, hands rubbing between his legs as his elbows flexed against his knees – and his jaw set as if he were five and his nanny insisted he eat green beans. “What do you want from me? I’ve spent the past year listening to you go on about your girlfriend’s beautiful body.”
“I have not gone on about anything like that. You know I keep that shit private.”
“Riiiiight. I just get to look at her naked tits in your paintings.”
Seth shrugged. “She likes showing them off?”
No kidding. Zack swore he had seen Judith’s tits more than he had seen any of his ex-girlfriend’s. She was shameless in those tight white T-shirts. Not that Zack had any room to talk. He was first in line to paint some artistic nudity.
Even Rachel, if she would let him.
Jesus, listen to me. Next to what she had done to him in that bedroom, the only thing Zack could think about was the view of her body in that plain bra. Rachel may not have been a European supermodel or the latest it-girl in Hollywood in terms of physique, but there was a lot to be said for seeing an everyday woman baring even that much of her body to a man she trusted enough to see it.
Didn’t even get a nip slip yet here I am sobbing over her miraculous tits. What a loser.
“I would bet real money that Rachel still does it better than your pro girlfriend.”
Seth opened his arms wide. “Why are we talking about this? What is this? High school locker room?”
“I can only imagine what you were like in a high school locker room.”
“I was on the lacrosse team. I spent plenty of time in locker rooms with other jocks.”
“You a jock?”
“Yes, and thanks to my previous career, I’ve seen more pussy than the rest of my team combined.”
“How many of those pussies had mucus plugs and babies coming out of them, though?”
Seth was quick to reply. “Not as many as you may think.”
Roy sat down on another chair, a bottle of beer in his hand. His wild, white hair blew behind his head in the sea breeze, and his skinny legs spread wide as he leaned back and soaked up the sun without sunglasses on his beady blue eyes or a lick of sunscreen on his bronzed skin. “First vomiting, now babies popping out on my deck.”
“I know I’ve told you that Seth used to be a baby guy.”
“What the fuck?”
“Babies make the world go ‘round.” Roy held his bottle above his head. “Or so I’m told. Could never see the appeal for myself.”
“Same.”
Seth shrugged. “I’m so desensitized to pregnancy, childbirth, and all that shit babies do.”
“Which means you’re not going to have any, right?”
“Probably, at this rate.”
Zack often felt the same. He didn’t only idolize his uncle for his free-spirited lifestyle and laissez-faire attitude toward relationships, but for going against family protocol as the firstborn son. Not only did he refuse to get married and go into the family business, he also refused to have children in any way, shape, or form. That included adoption or letting Zack’s grandmother pay an unknown woman to carry a Feldman child to term. Luckily my father stepped up in more ways than one. Took over the family business and had three legitimate sons!
Zack wasn’t the fatherly type, either. He was fine with having nieces and nephews, maybe dating a woman with older kids once he reached a certain age, but he had never answered any call to fatherhood. Most of the other guys he talked to either said they had accepted their fates as future fathers or looked forward to it. More than one glibly said that he would do anything to stay on his family’s will and to shut his baby-crazy wife up. “That’s what the hefty personal bank accounts are for, Feldman,” they explained to him. “Fuck off for most of the year and let the wife and nannies take care of the little legacies.”
What a life.
Zack didn’t want to bail on people, though. He wanted to travel, he wanted the freedom to do as he pleased… but just because he had money didn’t mean he wanted to actually leave people hanging. That meant emotionally, too. His uncle had thoughts things through. He could have gone through the Marriage and Children Circus and then fucked off on his yacht, but he was above that. People had given Elroy Feldman a lot of shit, especially back in his day. Yet could anyone say that he had let anyone down in the end?
“Have you told your uncle about this woman you can’t get enough of?”
Roy gave his nephew a pointed look. “What woman?”
“I take that as a no, then.”
Sighing, Zack leaned back in his seat and forgot that he had a drink still in need of imbibing. “I have a friend…”
“Bullshit,” Seth coughed into his cupped hand.
“…who I may be becoming more serious with. Except she’s not super gung-ho about having a relationship that goes beyond platonic.”
“So what’s the problem?”
Zack raised his eyebrows.
“Son, if Rachel doesn’t want to go out with you, cut the landlubber go.”
“You remembered her name?”
“I remember the name of every hydrophobic woman who passes out on my deck.”
Zack shook his head. “What did you think of her beyond that?”
“I didn’t get to know her very well when she was passed out.”
“She hasn’t returned my calls anyway. Not since we, uh…”
Roy continued to glare at him while drinking his beer.
“We had minor relations.”
“Son, you either raised the mast to plunder her treasure or not.”
Seth cracked up. Zack was left to blush, after swearing to himself that he would never.
“Masts were raised, but no treasures plundered, I’m afraid.”
“Oh. So she polished the fishing rod.”
Zack gave up.
They spent another half hour out at sea before Roy finally agreed to take them back to the docks. Seth claimed to have a dinner party that night, and Zack… well, Zack was willing to sleep in his uncle’s guest room in the depths of the ship if it meant putting off going back to the city, but what else could he do? All that would happen was looking at his phone and sighing over the lack of a response from Rachel. Someone was avoiding him again.
She doesn’t know what she wants. She’s at odds with herself. She doesn’t know her own worth. It didn’t matter how much Zack told himself what he already knew. At the end of the day, he would only be bothering Rachel. If she wanted to talk to him again, she would. But does it have to be so maddening to want someone this badly and have them blow you off… after… blowing…
God. No matter how he approached it, Zack kept coming back to how good it felt.
There was one thing that would take his mind off Rachel. Namely, his mother, who stood beside Priss & Moan, waiting for her family as they pulled up in Retirement Fund.
“Think I’ll stay up here, thanks,” Roy mumbled, arms slung over the steering wheel. “Rather not deal with Cruella de Ville. No offense, son.”
“None taken.” Eloise Feldman would never condone the skinning of puppies for fur coats, but it was no secret that her disdain for her brother-in-law ran deep. While Roy’s abdication of the Feldman throne meant Eloise became the matriarch of the steel dynasty, she often lamented what a terrible, terrible influence he was on her children, particularly to Zack. Isaiah had always been the more lax when it came to their youngest son’s pursuits and hobbies. Eloise was often convinced that her baby was running with an international piracy scheme and using his sordid “art” to smuggle other indecent things around the world. Please. Like I have the energy for that.
“Mom?” Zack was the first down the ladder. Seth remained on deck with Roy. “What are you doing here?” Eloise hated the marina. Not only did it remind her of her brother-in-law, but she swore it stank like rotten fish and was where women came to lose their morals. I’m often glad that a nanny mostly raised me by the time she popped me out. Young women may have come to the marina to lose their morals, but three-time mother Eloise chose her bridge club to throw back mimosas and gab about what the other rich women of the city were up to. (It didn’t help that Seth’s infamous neighbor Caroline Grant-Mathers – yes, the mother of Ian Mathers, because the city was much smaller than it seemed – was a member of that same bridge club and was the most notorious propagator of scandal in New England. Zack didn’t believe the rumors that she ran tabloid gossip mill The Daily Social, but he did believe she gave them more money than anyone else.)
“What is this?” Eloise, dressed in white linen pants, a navy-blue blouse that fluttered in the breeze, and a giant sun hat that threatened to flop off her head and into the water, pulled out her iPad from her woven tote bag and thrust it into her son’s hands. “Who is this girl?”
“Love you too, Mom.” Zack raised his sunglasses so he could see the LCD better in the sunlight. “You’re looking very concerned.”
“Who is she?”
Zack squinted before turning around and thrusting the iPad into the shadows before him. It took him a few seconds to make out a digital page from The Daily Social that showcased grainy photos of him and Rachel over the past few weeks. Their two dates in the park, and…
And her hopping on his motorcycle a few days ago. When they returned, Rachel had been quick to hop off the bike and give Zack his spare helmet back. “I’ll call you when I’m ready to talk about it.” Zack barely had time to turn off his bike before Rachel had run into her building and refused to answer his texts and calls.
“That’s my friend Rachel.”
“Friend? Friend?”
Zack couldn’t understand why his mother was freaking out about this. Zack was caught by the paps more than any other family member because he brought the most sex and drama. He often joked that the tabloids would go out of business if they didn’t catch him at a cabana party at least twice a month. The more bikini clad women grinding up against him, the better.
Even the marina, which had some of the best security thanks to patrols both on and off the water, wasn’t impervious to their super cameras and the women who were willing to spill the deets for a few hundred bucks.
Eloise should have been used to her son’s philandering ways. She may not have approved of them, but he didn’t keep it a secret, and for the most part his mother left him alone now that he was almost thirty and “a hopeless case.”
“You’re in three different scenarios with her,” Eloise pointed out. “When was the last time the paps caught you with the same girl twice, let alone three times?”
“She’s my friend, Mom. Guys and girls can be just friends, you know. We hang out. We talk art. It’s not a serious thing. It’s not even a…”
“Keep scrolling!”
Zack had to wake his mother’s iPad back up to finish scrolling. Didn’t know there were more pics… thought it was clickbait and comments…
Or it could be a pic of him and Rachel at the lake house. That was a grainy shot of them making out on the dock, dearest Rachel straddling her just a friend… oh.
Oh.
Oh.
Zack handed the iPad back to his mother. Above him, Seth leaned against Retirement Fund’s railing, laughing his ass off again.
“Your turn!”
Yes, because Heaven forbid Zack not join his best friend’s caught getting a blowjob by the paps club.