Chapter Fifteen - Evangeline
I’m tingling with the pent-up sexual frustration possessing me so thoroughly, it hums through my body like electricity.
The property walls in the front of the house continue into the back, the thick, evergreen holly hedges high enough to make it feel cozy and confined. It’s a place all my own, I realize. Outside. Nothing like the terrace at my apartment. That’s not really private. At least it doesn’t feel private. This… this feels a million worlds away from that.
I begin picturing this yard in the summer when the trees are filled with leaves and the garden beds are blooming with flowers.
Someone loves this place.
Who?
Is it Lucinda’s house? It’s got a lot of bedrooms. And they’re all set up for a family. Two girls and a boy, I realize, picturing the children’s rooms on the second floor. And they must have a lot of friends or relatives to feel the need for so many guest rooms.
What would that be like?
The lives of other people fascinate me. Have always fascinated me, ever since I was a small child. I had my life. It was the only one I knew. But I saw the way others lived and it made me so curious. How they interacted and shared things. Stupid things like inside jokes. A shared history. Little—or big—experiences that bound them together into a unit.
Granted, the families I interacted with growing up weren’t typical in any way. They were celebrities. Royalty. High-powered political officials and blue-blood old money.
Their lives were nothing like mine.
So almost all of what I witnessed wasn’t anything close to a normal family. And it put a lot of ideas in my head.
My father’s words. Which was why I was not allowed to play with other children.
Maybe if I had played with children things would been different?
The first time I heard the word ‘vacation’ I was seven. Vacation. It baffled me that people didn’t get up and work every single day. I asked my mother about it and she grabbed me by the shoulders, spun me around, and marched me over to my father and said, “Your child wants to know what a vacation is.”
Whenever I did something that made my mother unhappy, she always called me Your Child. Your Child Rolaine. The first time I ever stepped into a school classroom I was ten. It was in the Philippines because we’d been living there for several months and the local authorities started coming around, asking questions. My father said they were looking for bribes, but I didn’t know what that meant back then and have no idea if it was true. But I went to school so my father didn’t have to pay hush money, as he called it, and when I was told to write my name on the top of a worksheet, I put Your Child Rolaine.
My father looked at me after my mother told him I wanted to know what vacation was. The same look he always gave me, one I assumed was fatherly well into my teens, but wasn’t. And he said, “A vacation is something we can’t afford.”
I remember being confused because I didn’t know what the word “afford” meant. So whenever people asked me things like, “Why don’t you have a home?” Or, “Why don’t you go to school?” I would reply, “Because we can’t afford one.” Even after I knew what “afford” meant, I still said that. It really pissed my mother off. Because of course we could afford one. Whatever “one” was, we could afford it. That’s why the word “vacation” didn’t exist in my family vocabulary.
I have no siblings. No cousins or aunts and uncles. I had grandparents once, on my mother’s side, but they both died when I was very young and I hardly remember them.
So it didn’t matter that the families I saw weren’t typical. They were more than what I had. They were something elusive and distant from my own life.
Something to wish for in a coveting way.
Wandering the garden on the intricately laid stone pathway, I look for cameras. The trees are all bare, which should make them easy to spot, but I find none and feel disappointed.
Can’t he see me out here?
A wave of panic washes over me. Irrational, I realize, since the panic I’m feeling is akin to that which overtakes me when strangers are watching, not when they’re not.
But he’s not just any stranger.
He’s my stranger.
I smile at that, hoping he can see my smile, wanting him to understand what it means. Just how long I’ve gone between smiles before this day.
How did this happen? Not seemingly overnight. But literally overnight.
Yesterday when I came here I was terrified of his incessant invisible gaze.
Today I’m craving it.
What does that say about me, I wonder?
Lucinda would analyze it. Overanalyze it, probably. It would be some clinical explanation about lack of true affection growing up. Feeling used and having no power to change that, so I crave attention, but punish myself at the same time, so my mind mentally breaks down with the paradox.
But maybe I’m just in need of a good, hard fuck with a stranger?
The first boyfriend I ever had was in Phoenix. We’d just come back to the States and we were living with a family near Camelback Mountain for a summer. Huge fucking mansion on several acres. We stayed in the guest house. They had a son a couple years older than me. He was leaving for college in the fall and I was just starting to have… issues. I was there to play at a few parties they were throwing over the summer. My career was winding down. I had tits after all. The child prodigy thing was over. I think they were important people, but I paid no attention to who they were or what they did.
His name was Austin. He fucked me in every room of that mansion. Like… every room.
God, my clit is throbbing just picturing how he took me from chaste to insatiable in the span of a few weeks. His cock never got soft. Or so it seemed.
That was a long time ago. And there’s been no one since.
I didn’t love him. Nothing of the sort. I just liked what he did to me.
I come upon a tree swing in the corner of the yard. Ropes hang down from a thick limb jutting out of a massive tree that must be quite impressive in the summer. The swing is long enough to fit a family. This family. The older boy, and the middle girl, and the infant girl in the mother’s lap. The father in the center, surrounded by the people who make up his life, his arm around his wife on one side and his middle daughter on the other, letting them know they’re cherished.
I picture this perfect family for a moment. Imagine all the times they’ve sat out here on this swing and just… swung together.
I sit in the middle and feel the loss. The understanding of what I don’t have sinks all my easy thoughts in an instant, the empty space on either side of me glaring proof that I’m very much alone in this world.
It’s not a husband I want. Not really. A husband isn’t enough for me.
Nothing’s enough for you, Evangeline.
That might be true.
It’s the sense of belonging I crave.
I just want to fit in somewhere. The way the older boy fits into the space on this family swing. The way the infant daughter fits into the lap of her mother. The way the mother and middle daughter fit into the embrace of the father.
I glance at the perfect house that holds the perfect family in this unobtainable embrace. The tall, slender, arched windows that might actually be original from the look of the threads of lead separating the glass panes into smaller rectangles. The aged, but still beautiful, smudged look of the moss-green stucco that looks more like an Italian plaster wall than the typical exterior stucco you see these days.
And this garden. It’s so perfect, I ache just thinking about the mother and her daughter as they wander through, pruning dead petals in the summer and…
They must be somewhere else, I decide. For the winter. This house is half what it can be in the winter, surely. They are somewhere warm. The south of France. Or the Fiji Islands. Or maybe somewhere more exotic like the Maldives. Regardless, they are on a beach right now.
I sigh as my feet push off from the stone pebbles beneath them and the ropes creak with the effort of swinging.
I can’t even imagine going to a beach. Not during the day. Not unless it was some uninhabited island, far from the spying eyes of watchers.
The cold wind hits me suddenly and I wonder how long I’m supposed to sit out here reflecting on all the things my life is lacking.
Does he even care? Is he even watching?
The sun is mostly shaded with cloud cover. Just a pale yellow blob filtering through gray, high overhead. It must be noon already. I’ve been out here for hours. Lost in the lives of the perfect family and feeling more morose and melancholy by the second.
This is stupid, I decide, getting up off the swing. I’m going back inside. Nothing about this exercise is helping me. There’s no point to it. Just another excuse for Evangeline to throw her own personal pity party.
My feet crunch into the still air as I walk along the stone pathway towards the house.
I should leave. This is crazy. Playing stupid games with a stranger. Imagining him watching me walking around my room, naked. What the fuck was I thinking?
I’m sick. Depraved. And this craziness is perverting my thoughts and making me wish…
I see it as soon as I enter the ballroom. On a console table, propped up against a lamp, is a notebook. Written on the cover, in the same boxy print as the other letters he’s left, is a title.
It doesn’t say my name. It says, Jordan’s Game: Total Exposure.
I pick it up, open the front cover, and read the now-familiar handwriting.