Chapter Twelve
“Richard, how long has it been since we’ve gone to Carmel?”
I open the front door to Mom’s house. We’ve just arrived home from her geriatric physical therapy session.
“I can’t remember,” I say. “Do you remember the last time we went?”
A smile curls over Mom’s lips. “Oh yes darling, don’t you?” She closes her eyes and a glorious smile takes over her face. “Don’t you remember that lovely blue negligee that you brought me back from New York for the trip?”
Oh shit. TMI. Definitely do not want to talk about Mom and Dad’s Carmel trip if it involves negligeés.
“Hey Mom, want a snack?” I say, abruptly changing the subject. “Maybe some iced tea?”
We walk to the table in the kitchen and I help her sit in a chair. “Isn’t Tatianna supposed to be here?” I pull out two glasses and a plate. “How about butter cookies?” I know these are her favorite and maybe it’ll get her to think of something other than her trip to Carmel with Dad.
“Yes, please, and then I want you to tell me about Susie.”
My chest tightens. My breath catches and I swallow. My head drops forward and I look at the plate on the counter that I’ve taken down from the cabinet. On the plate is my name, my five-year-old handprint, and hearts.
Deep breath.
It’s emotional whiplash going from being my dead dad to the son with the dead fianceé that Mom can’t remember is dead.
“How is everything going for the wedding?”
I grip the knob on the cabinet with an intensity I fear could pull the whole damn thing off the wall.
“Mom, I …you know…” Times like these I struggle with the idea that I’m supposed to play along because playing along is just too damned painful. Luckily for me the phone rings, and I slip it from my pocket.
“It’s me.” Rachel is breathless as though she’s rushing and she probably is because she rushes most places. “Listen, I’ve got a problem.”
“Don’t we all.” I set the plate of cookies and the tea in front of Mom and walk out of the kitchen and into the dining room. “Isn’t Tatianna supposed to be here?”
“All day. Isn’t she there?”
“I haven’t seen her yet.” I walk to the sliders and look into the backyard. “So what’s your problem?”
“Lily.”
I stop. I pay attention, because nothing gets me to pay attention quite like the perfection that is my niece.
“I’ve been yanked into a meeting with the Chief Judge, an unscheduled meeting. Obviously he has a wife and childcare isn’t an issue that he’s ever had to deal with. I need a little help with Lily.”
“That’s not a problem. I can pick her up. Where is she?”
“She’s at George’s house for a play date.”
My jaw muscle tightens. George, as in son of Kendall, who is the woman I’ve Wonderfucked, and recently tried to fellate me while I was sleeping. None of which is known to Big Sis.
“I can do that,” I say, not wanting to at all. “But I’ve got Mom and I have no idea where Tatianna is—”
“I know Mom is wackadoo where Kendall is concerned, but I don’t have a choice. Tatianna might be napping upstairs. Sometimes she does that. Go look before you drag Mom to Kendall’s. Tatianna usually naps in your room.”
“My room? Why my room?”
“I guess the bed’s more comfortable than mine.”
“Fine. Tell Kendall I’ll be there in a half hour. I’ll let you know if Mom is with me.”
“Great. Thanks. You just saved my ass for sure.”
I hang up the phone not feeling so great about saving anyone today.
***
The house in Brentwood is big but not monstrous, as though the wealthy people inside are at least attempting to not be obnoxious. I pull onto the drive and stop the car. Luckily for me, Tatianna was napping in my room so Mom isn’t with me. Thank god for small mercies. I hop out of the car, walk to the door, and press the bell.
Last place I want to be.
Maybe second to last place.
Vida ranks number 1 on my list right now of places I don’t want to be, then number 2 would be here—
“Hello?” The woman at the front door is not Kendall.
“I’m here for Lily.”
“Mr. Reynolds, right?” She smiles. I nod. She leads me through the expansive house to the backyard where there is a ginormous rock pool equipped with a built-in waterslide. My gaze flicks across the pool to the woman lying on a lounge chair in a two-piece. A teeny-tiny two piece.
I check my cock. At this point I’m hopeful. I even envision the woman fellating me as she did not too long ago.
Fuck.
Nothing. Nada. Not even a twitch.
“Watch me Uncle Jake!” Lily calls from the top of the waterslide where she stands next to George. I wave and I watch. Out of the corner of my eye a flash of bikini as Kendall stands, slips on shoes, and walks around the pool toward me. Lily shrieks and plunges down the slide and into the water. George follows. They both break the surface and laugh.
Kendall sidles up beside me. This is the tiniest of two-pieces and to be fair the woman is a stone-cold fox. A MILF. Which I have.
“Hey, they’re having fun. Why don’t you stay awhile,” she says, brushing her hair behind her ear. Her sunglasses hide the look in her eyes, but her body language says all I need to know. Breasts angled out, hips tilted to the side, hand touching her face. She wants me to grab her and take her to the pool house at the far end of the pool and Wonderfuck her.
I have sunglasses too. Thankfully. “We’re meeting Rachel for dinner.”
“That’s not what Rachel said.” Kendall juts out her chin. “She told me she’d be stuck downtown for a while.”
Another shriek followed by giggles cuts through the air.
“Come on,” Kendall says, and pushes a smile onto her face. “Besides, I know you’re involved with someone now, so no worries.”
My chest tightens. Involved? How would Kendall know that I’m involved?
“Come have some iced tea. Let them play a little bit longer.”
Part of me doesn’t want to, but another part does. I have…I have questions and Kendall might have answers.
“Uncle Jake, can we stay?”
“Fifteen minutes,” I call back to Lily.
Both she and George clap and pull themselves out of the pool to go down the slide again. I turn and follow Kendall to the far side of the pool and sit on the lounge chair beside hers. She grabs her sunscreen and starts to slather it on her arm.
“You know that story about you?”
I say nothing, but lift an eyebrow.
“The reporter contacted me. The same woman you brought to the party.” Kendall turns her back to me. “Would you? Please?” She hands me the sunscreen over her shoulder and unties the top of her bikini.
Normally, rubbing sunscreen on a woman’s back would turn me on. I’d want her. I might even take her. Normally, I’d be more than willing to indulge her fantasy of me following her to the pool house and banging her against the wall. I squirt sunscreen onto the palms of my hands, rub them together, then glide my palms over her shoulders. But there is nothing normal anymore where my cock is concerned.
Nothing.
Fuck, my equipment is broken.
“Did you meet with her?” I ask.
Kendall holds her lush red hair up and out of the way of my hands. “I did. She seemed nice enough. Did you know she was a reporter?”
“I knew she was a journalist, but I didn’t know she was doing a story on….” I don’t say it. I can’t say it. I’ve worked hard to keep my life as Jake and my life as Wonderfuck completely separate, and these breaches, these narrow connections, they make me uncomfortable.
“I guessed as much. I asked her, but she wouldn’t tell me.”
“So what’d you tell her?” I pull my hands from her skin. Her back is completely covered. I wipe my hands on a towel.
She ties her swimsuit top and turns to me. Her gaze is intense, her expression solemn. “I told her the truth. I told her that you saved my life.”
My chest clamps tight.
“I don’t know if that’s true.”
“It is.” She picks up her wide-brimmed hat and fixes it to her head and leans back onto her lounge chair. “After you, I found myself again. And then after what happened at your mother’s, well, I went and talked to someone.” Her gaze tears from the kids in the pool and lands on me. “I went because of you and what you said that day.”
“Is that a good thing?”
“It’s a great thing,” She crosses her ankles and smiles. “George’s dad moved out last month.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. It’s exactly what needed to happen. All of it, but I couldn’t have seen it without you. Wouldn’t have known it. There’s something that happens when a woman gets married and has a child. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I wanted all of it.”
She turns her gaze toward Lily and George who are in the shallow end of the pool splashing and giggling. “I love George. I love being a mom, and I loved being a wife. But with all you gain, you also lose something. You give up some of yourself. I guess you have to, to do all those things for all those people.”
She turns back toward me. “I’d almost forgotten that piece of myself and that piece is important; that part of me that is wild and free and brave and it makes all the other pieces fit together, it was the piece of myself that had heart.”
She takes a deep breath and smiles. “I thought you should know. You brought that back to me, you made my heart beat again. That’s what I told her when we met. It didn’t make the article, but that’s what I said.”
“I don’t know what to say….I’m….”
“Don’t look so surprised. It might’ve just been sex to you, but I have a feeling for most of us women, being with you was much more than that.”
“It wasn’t just sex,” I say. I know that, although I’d wanted it to be ‘just sex’ it never remained that way. I couldn’t have cared this much about what I was doing if it was ‘just sex.’ “It was more than that for me too.” I say. “You know how it started and why?”
She shakes her head and I wonder if I should share the specifics with her, but I decide not now, not here, with this beautiful sunshiny day and happy kids giggling in the pool. The details are too sad and they will remain for another day. Instead of telling her specifics, I look at her and say, “There’d been a loss in my life. A big loss and so I ….well, that’s when I decided to do what I did. And it meant everything to me, the idea of it. It was something I needed to do to save myself and it was my—”
“—vocation,” she says.
She smiles. I smile back, and we share this moment that is kind and warm and for an instant, all the fractures and damage in my soul feel mended and less obvious because she’s fractured and damaged too. We all are. Every person has something that ripped them up, tore them apart, and shattered their world. We each rebuild from that place, that moment, that event that made us feel less than nothing. After that event, when we rebuild, we're the same person, and yet we're absolutely different.
“I thought you should know,” she says. Her voice soft with kindness.
“Thank you.”
“Mmhmm. You also asked how she contacted me? She phoned. At the time I thought you knew.”
“I’m surprised you had good things to say about me after what happened at my mother’s.”
“I’m still so embarrassed about that.” She presses her hand to her forehead. “I mean…she really played it off at the birthday party, didn’t she? That’s why I thought you knew about the article.”
My heart picks up speed. I squint behind my sunglasses.
“Wait, what? But she contacted you after the birthday party?”
“Oh, no, no, no.” Kendall shakes her head. “She contacted me before the birthday party. That’s why I thought you’d given her permission to speak to me, to all of us, because you were there with her.”
“I didn’t give her permission or anyone’s names or contact information. I didn’t know she was writing the story.” I smile and try to play the entire thing off as though this…this betrayal isn’t killing me. “She didn’t even tell me.”
Tara knew who I was.
She knew who I was long before she said she did.
“Right, I thought maybe you gave her my name or my number…but then the weird thing was that she didn’t know my name when she called me. She only knew my number. I don’t think she was honest with you.”
Heat sweeps through my body. What the fuck? I want to believe Tara, but every time I begin to believe her, another inconvenient fact knocks away the trust I start to build with her.
I wave to Lily and she climbs form the pool. It’s time for us to go.