“How old is your sister? Is she single?”
Bart narrowed his eyes at me.
“Too young for you and whether she is single or not is none of your business,” he said.
“Yeah, you’re right. If she looks anything like you, I wouldn’t want to bang her anyway.”
He laughed and elbowed me in the side.
I felt a little sorry for him. I wasn’t going to pretend that I knew what it was like having kids, but Bart was the kind of guy that deserved a girl who wouldn’t simply abandon his children. What I meant was; banging the wrong broad was likely the only bad thing he had ever done in his life. If anything, he deserved a girl who was going to do the housewife and PTA mom thing for him.
The facts that we had been in the same class, done BUD/S together and were on the same team were the only things we had in common. I didn’t know why we were still friends to be perfectly honest, but he was a good guy. If he really wanted to tarnish his reputation by association, I wasn’t going to stop him. Drinking alone got boring—and dangerous—after a while.
He wouldn’t be home the day after next, but she would.
“Just go and tell her who you are and that we’re friends,” he had said. Maybe one day this would count as a good deed credit towards getting me into heaven. Ha. It would take a lot more than just this to erase the shit that I had done. I’d have to become an ordained minister or something, preaching the gospel to rural Peruvians, digging wells and shit to get in all the way with the big guy upstairs.
I wasn’t exactly looking for redemption. Bart wasn’t exactly offering it when he asked me to do this. It was just a favor. I could do him a solid when he was down on his luck. If the shoe was on the other foot, he would do the same for me. I could give him that. I was a mercenary, not an asshole.
I knocked at the door.
I heard feet running up to it before it opened. I dropped my eyes about a foot and a half to look at the child who had opened the door. It was a boy. Maybe between like, five and eleven years old? Tall enough to reach the door handle but still young enough to make you ask them whether they were alone if you saw them at the park by themselves. Definitely big enough to be making whole sentences, though, I assessed.
“Hi,” he said like he’d been expecting me. Which one was the boy...? Bart had told me their names, Nikki and...
“Christopher?” I asked the kid.
“Yeah. How did you know my name?”
“I’m friends with your dad. You aren’t home alone, are you?”
Before the kid could answer, there was activity inside. The door opened up wider, and there was a woman there who looked, well, nothing like I had expected. I got caught on her lips before taking in her whole face. They were pink and full, and she pursed them a little as she looked at me.
This was not Bart’s little sister.
She wasn’t a little anything first of all, and if she was anyone’s sister, she wasn’t Bart’s. His look was, put gently, very ‘south of the border,’ if you know what I mean. Her hair was blonde and was just a little too short to reach her shoulders. Her top had thin straps and was thin enough for me to see the outline of her nipples, and she wore shorts. There were light freckles across her nose and cheeks and her eyes—suspicious—were blue. Back to her lips, though, they were pink and pouty, but I didn’t think it was because of makeup.
The family resemblance was exactly zero unless it was there, and I just couldn’t see it. This girl was... well, she was hot. Was Bart going after girls from the university? Did he find a twenty-three-year-old Navy reserve to babysit his kids? At her waist appeared another kid, it looked exactly like the first one, but it had long hair. A girl.
“Can I help you?” she said. Her arm draped around the boy and pulled him gently into the house. I smiled, noticing the move.
“I was just talking to Christopher here, I’m a friend of their dad’s,” I told her.
“Their dad is not here. What’s your name? I’ll tell him you came by.”
“What about his sister?”
“Who’s looking for her?”
“I am. She should be expecting me.”
She looked at me from head to toe and then back up again.
“Are you on the same team as Bart?”
“Not anymore. Are you a student at NPS?”
“Excuse me?”
“You don’t exactly look like a lot of the girls trying to join the armed forces.”
She crossed her arms and cocked her head to the side like she was challenging me.
“You don’t think I could hack basic training?”
“Well, you’d pass my physical, but probably not the US military’s,” I replied.
“Is there something you want me to tell Bart for you?” she asked. All business. Alright. That was okay; she was a challenge. I’d get her.
“Suddenly talking to you sounds a lot more appealing,” I leered at her. Her top was tight, so I could see where it pulled over her hip bones and even the little dip in the fabric where her navel was. “Where’d Bart find a girl like you?”
“You said you guys were friends, why don’t you ask him.”
“Does Bart know there’s a half-naked woman watching his kids?”
“Guys, go inside,” she said, herding the children into the house.
“Bye, Mister,” the boy said as the woman closed the door with her on the outside.
“Thaddeus.”
“Huh?”
“My name. It’s Thaddeus. Why’d you make the kids leave?” I asked innocently.
“If you and Bart are friends, I imagine you have his phone number. He’s really busy for the next couple weeks. You should call him.” She turned to follow the kids inside, but then she stopped.
“Naked?” she asked, incredulous.
I laughed.
“You have clothes on, but you might as well be...” I said, staring at her tits. She crossed her arms over them, this time probably to cover them. It just pushed them together, causing her cleavage to peek out of the top of the shirt. “It’s summer. It’s hot out. I’d understand if you wanted to get rid of the top altogether. I definitely wouldn’t stop you.”
She made it all the way inside after that one, slamming the door on her way in as she did.
I couldn’t even blame her; I could have been smoother. She looked young; maybe going in with the thing about her tits was too soon? They were right there though; she expected me not to look? They weren’t very big, but they were nice. Great package all the way up and down. I didn’t get a good look at the back, but there was no way those thighs didn’t make a beautiful ass out of themselves underneath those shorts.
I laughed. No wonder Bart hadn’t mentioned this one, he probably wanted to keep her all to himself.
Who the hell was she? I was there to see his little sister, but she didn’t come to the door. The sluttiest member of the babysitter’s club did. The kids too. I realized seeing them that I never had before. I had seen pictures before, but that was when they were a lot smaller. He had never had them in Monterey before, always going up to the Bay to see them. They had blond hair, strangely, but they looked just like him.
Fuck, what if she’s their mom? Wait, he said she’d abandoned them, so she wasn’t their mom. There was no way they’d reconciled since we last talked. He wasn’t fucking her, was he? I hoped he wasn’t. He wouldn’t pick up a grad student to fuck for two weeks before he had to go back to work. No, he wouldn’t. That was what I would do… and was going to do. I should have at least gotten her number before she left.
Bart had told me not to touch his sister. He didn’t say anything about the hot blonde with her tits out.
I wouldn’t mind watching her at all.
4
Veronica
“Aunt Ron?” Christopher whined.
“What is it, sweetie?”
“Someone keeps calling you,” he complained.
The twins had commandeered my phone after breakfast and were curled
up on the couch waiting for their dad to come downstairs.
“Don’t they know you’re trying to watch The Simpsons?” I said, in a mock-outraged voice. I heard the phone vibrate and then the alert stop when Christopher ignored the call. It was like he knew how much I didn’t want to talk to Michael.
Bart was going to take them out; in the interim, they had managed to convince me to let them use my phone. They were clicking through Hulu Plus in no time. It looked like Michael hadn’t changed the password. I wasn’t even going to stop them. The kid shows they were searching were going to fuck up his algorithm.
“Who’s Michael?” Nicolette asked, reading the contact name. Despite how often I had spent time with them, they had never once met Michael. Sure, he worked during the day, but he had also never cared to meet any members of my family that he absolutely hadn’t had to. Michael is the man I’m trying to divorce, honey.
“Michael... Michael is someone who needs to stop calling me,” I said. “Here, let me call him back and tell him to stop bugging us.” Christopher handed the phone to me and dramatically flopped onto the couch like he was at a complete loss of things to do without it. I headed up the stairs, meeting Bart coming down.
“Hey, are they down there?”
“Yup. Dressed and fed, they’re waiting for you,” I said. I went into my room and shut the door. It was time. He had been served by now; I knew that for sure and he had had a bit of time to really get his blood boiling and think up a bunch of creative names to call me. He was miles away. I was settled—sort of. Everything would be fine. I called him back. He picked up before the first ring was done.
“Veronica?”
“Veronica’s not here at the moment, can I take a message?” I said.
“Veronica, where the fuck are you?”
“Currently unavailable. You’re supposed to communicate with me through my lawyer.”
“Divorce papers?! You petitioned on grounds of abuse?!”
“Sounds about right,” I said sagely. He was fuming. I wanted to see his face. He turned beet-red when he was mad, and he started sweating.
“I’ve never laid a hand on you!”
“You’re right. You didn’t. You were just a shitty husband. Listen. You aren’t even supposed to be talking to me. I want this to be over as fast as possible. Contact my lawyer and tell him all this crap.”
“You can’t hide from me, Veronica. I will find you.”
“Mm-hmm. When you do, make sure you sign the papers and give them to my lawyer to file them first,” I said sweetly.
“Veronica, I swear to God...”
He went quiet. He was probably pacing and dabbing his brow, winded from his own fury.
“Just come back. We can talk about this.”
“No, we can’t. What were those things you said? You didn’t know why you even married me? You were giving up on me and my barren wasteland of a uterus?”
“I was angry. You’ve said things you didn’t mean when you were angry too.”
“I’ve never emotionally distanced myself from my wife after she had a miscarriage. I’ve never gaslighted her and treated her like shit, making her think it was her fault. I’m not coming back so you can tell me how skipping one day of prenatal vitamins was what caused the pregnancy to fail. I don’t have to take that from you.”
It was a lot easier to talk to Michael over the phone. He was a lot bigger than I was; height, weight and wallet. He tried to exert the same dominance he did at his work on me at home. He had never hit me, although if there are guys who look like wife beaters, he was one of them. Over the phone, he couldn’t stand over me and make me feel like a kid. I had the option to hang up and block his number.
“You can’t hide from me. I’m going to find you.”
“Are you? Close your eyes and count to ten first so I have time to hide. No peeking,” I mocked him. I hung up and turned airplane mode on. I walked down the stairs and found the kids sitting with their dad at the table. Nicolette—Nikki—was sitting on top of the table stealing mouthfuls of his oatmeal and Christopher was in a chair, recounting something that had happened in the plane on their trip here.
“Off the table, Nikki,” I said to her as I re-entered the kitchen. She hopped off and dragged a chair as close to her dad as was possible before climbing into it. “What do you guys have planned today?”
“Dad’s gonna take us to the aquarium,” Christopher said, excitedly.
“Sounds like fun.” I looked at Bart between his two kids. They had light hair like their mother, but their faces were identical, first to each other’s, then to his. They were obviously not identical twins, but Christopher was still young enough that if his hair was longer and we put him in dresses, he would look just like Nikki. Nikki’s hair was curly, like Mariah’s in the nineties and I had tied it up into pigtails for her. It was pretty and went all the way down her back; her mom had never cut it even though it was the first thing Chris went for when they would fight.
Christopher liked his hair closely cropped, but it was getting a little long since they hadn’t been with their mom in a while. Where he was gregarious and outgoing, Nikki was shy and quiet. Christopher like his dad, and Nikki… well, like me. It was a reach, I know, but it made me feel good.
The pair of them didn’t really know their dad very well, but they were definitely fans. I wondered whether Laurie had had them around other men. There were never any around when I was with the kids, but then again, how had she ended up the single mother of twins in the first place. Was it a guy that had made her leave the kids? Because if it was, fuck her and fuck that guy too.
“Can you come with us?” Nikki asked.
“Sorry, not today. I have to go to court,” I said, amused by the phrase myself.
“Did you do something bad?”
“No, I have to go ask the judge really nicely whether they’ll let me become your legal guardian.”
“Is that like becoming our new mom?”
Wow. Just like that. It was like they didn’t even remember her.
“I can’t be your mom, Nikki. I’m your aunt. If the judge doesn’t let me become your guardian, I won’t be able to take you guys to the hospital when you get sick or enroll you in school.”
“When I leave, she’s going to be taking care of you,” Bart said.
“We’re not going back to Mom’s?” Christopher asked.
Bart looked at son and gently mussed his hair.
“No, Chris. You’re going to be staying here with me and Aunt Ron.”
“Oh,” he said. “Forever?”
“For a long time,” Bart told him.
I turned away from the scene and went back upstairs to grab my purse. It wasn’t fair. How did people like Laurie end up pregnant without even wanting to be and give birth to twins on top of that? How could they then just leave two young children in a house on their own and disappear? I’d been trying to get pregnant for the last six years of my life, and I couldn’t even get all the way through a second trimester. Laurie had two gorgeous seven-year-olds, and she left them in the house like the rest of her furniture. Some people didn’t deserve kids. It was like, some people exist having nothing to offer the world as far as their ability or humanity, so God made up for it by making them extremely fertile.
They won’t cure cancer, but they will propagate the human race.
I remembered the man who had come by the day before looking for Bart.
“Oh yeah. Bart, there was a guy here looking for you yesterday. He said you sent him.”
“Tall? Dark hair? Did he say he was called Thad?”
“Thaddeus? Yeah, that’s the one.”
Tall... dark hair... big... deep, sexy voice… Bart could have kept the list going. We had talked for a minute the day before, and I might have felt attraction to another man for the first time since I had married Michael. I wasn’t made blind to the attractiveness of other men when Michael put the ring on me; I was really, really faithful. To a fault, to be honest. He didn’
t like it when I made comments about other guys, so I didn’t. He’d been enough. During the better time of our marriage, I was madly in love and didn’t need anyone else. During the darker time, he had convinced me that I was lucky we were married because there was nobody who would ever. Not even under threat of death.
Part of me had known he was being dramatic, and he was trying to hurt me, but it was smaller than the part of me that believed him.
Thaddeus was probably one of the few guys who had even dared to talk to me like that since Michael and I had gotten married. The ring was a good deterrent when I had it, but I didn’t anymore, so he had thought it appropriate to tell me what he thought about my breasts. The shirt I was wearing wasn’t that bad, was it? I was in the house all day. It’s hot out. I’m not going to lie, though, I appreciated his appreciation of me, even if he put it in those particular, very vulgar terms it’s hard to still feel fuckable when the person legally obligated to give it to you wasn’t anymore.
Michael liked to withhold sex when he was mad at me. After the first miscarriage, we couldn’t have sex anyway because the bleeding continued a couple of days after, but he wouldn’t even let our arms touch under the comforter when we were in bed. He wanted nothing to do with me.
Getting pregnant the second time had been like pulling teeth. It happened finally by accident when we were both drunk. He had gone on like a broken record about the baby and how it was all my fault that it had happened again. Some of the greatest hits were, ‘you weren’t eating right,’ ‘you didn’t take your vitamins’ and ‘you got pregnant too soon after the first one’ like I had inseminated myself. So dumb.
My favorite and by far the vilest was ‘your one job is to have babies, and you can’t even do that right.’
At the time, I cried. I’ll admit it. Michael was the guy who made other people suspicious because we got married when I was eighteen, meaning we were dating when I was younger than that. He was older than that by eight years. He never made me do anything. Not cook, not clean, not do the laundry—nothing. All he wanted was some kids, and luckily for him, I had an eighteen-year-old uterus, never been used and was in the prime years of my fertility.
Thaddeus (Heartbreakers & Troublemakers Book 2) Page 3
