by Julia Kent
I'm certain I know which way I prefer him, now that I've had the opportunity to sample him both ways.
The kiss on my navel, tongue flicking out to tease, makes my hips rise up, his next move making me moan, my body a playground for Ian's mouth, ready for serious frolicking.
“Tell me how you like it. How you want it.” His grip on my ass lightens as he moves to part my thighs, the anticipation killing me, the pulsing need rising up in me like I'm possessed, part of me foreign and unreal, drawing power from his touch as if he's an angel melting my core with his hot golden light.
Or maybe he's a demon, here to make me sin.
Either one will do, as long as I get to feel it all with him.
“Do you bite your lip when you come, Hastings? Do you clench and writhe? Press your thighs so hard against my ears that you block out eternity?”
“I don't–I don't know,” I confess.
One finger strokes the soft, yielding flesh at the swell of my thigh, where I want his mouth, only a few inches up.
“How can you not know?”
Truth burns my cheeks. “It's been a long, long time, Ian. Too long.”
“How long?” He shakes me, hands on my shoulders, his question so urgent.
The answer sticks in my throat until all I can do is beg.
“Ian, I–”
“How long?” he demands.
“Please. Please Ian. Use your mouth. Your fingers. Your co–”
* * *
“Hastings? Honey? You've been asleep for a while. How long?”
“COCK!” I scream.
“WHAT?” Mom screams back.
Startled, I jump half a foot in the air in bed, body jolting with such force, I know my jaw will be sore tomorrow. Wildly disoriented, I stare at my mother, wondering how naked Ian turned into her.
“Mom?”
“Yes. Honey, were you dreaming about, um, chickens?”
“Yes!” I take the out. “Yes, I was.” Nervous laughter is my sister's thing. Not mine. But I use it now, wiping sweat-soaked hair off my face. “I had a crazy dream I was milking a chicken to make chicken cheese out of it.”
No self-respecting adult would ever believe that line of crap, but let me introduce you to Sharon Monahan.
“Ahahaha! Chicken cheese. Oh, Hastings, that must have been one hot dream you were having.”
“Hot?”
“You know... fevered? Your cheeks are burning red and your hair is a mess.”
“Right. Hot dream. Um hmmm.” My palm burns like I was holding Ian's, uh, chicken in my hand, before being rudely awakened.
Mom's wearing her special-occasion perfume, a scent that instantly transports me back twenty-five years, to nights she hired Karen Minsky from next door to babysit for Mallory and me.
“Rehearsal dinner. Right. How'd it go?” I ask, laying back on the bed, exhausted by my sickness, my unexpected erotic dream, and the shock of Mom's intrusion.
“It went very well. Helen thanked you for the cheese again, and said she can't believe someone so good at a hobby hasn't turned it into a business. Said that sheep's milk soap is the new thing in boutique retail and you could get ahead of the game.”
“Ha! What a hipster statement. Following your bliss is soooooo 2009, Mom.”
“Is it?”
“It's outdated.”
“No, I mean, your bliss. Is making sheep's cheese your bliss?”
“I have bills to pay, Mom. Bliss doesn't pay the bills.”
“You're good enough that it could, Hastings. Helen and Larry were raving.”
“Raving mad, maybe.”
“Why is it so hard to believe that something you take pleasure in and that you're good at could be worth pursuing?”
“Because it's too easy!” I clap my hands over my mouth as the words come out, horrified by the emotional storm my words are churning. I must be delirious from the strep.
“Too easy?” She's perplexed, a frown making long vertical lines between her eyes. “What's wrong with easy? It's wonderful to find something that fits in your heart and hands, Hastings. I want that for you. I want you to be happy.”
“Happy? Happy? Have you seen my life, Mom? Happiness isn't exactly in the top one hundred traits that define me.”
“I know, sweetie. That's your problem. If you think being happy is too easy, then ask yourself: Why do you assume that you have to work so hard for happiness? That you have to earn it through struggle or pain?”
“I never said that.”
“You just did.”
“No, I didn't. I said that–” Abruptly, I snap my jaw shut, the fight in me gone like a thunderclap.
Holy smokes.
She's right.
Her hand reaches up, tentative, the scent of her lemon verbena hand cream another tender reminder of my youth. As she touches my cheek, I sigh, unaware I'm doing it until it's been heard. Felt.
Noticed.
“You, Hastings, have always been a mystery to me. So ambitious. So contemptuous of our life here. You always wanted more. Bigger. Better. Higher. Taller. You wanted to climb to the top and shout it to the world, but...”
“But I failed.” I scoff. “I don't need my nose rubbed in it.” To my horror, tears fill my eyes.
She frowns again, pulling her hand back. “Oh, dear. You are hot. Still have a fever?”
I nod.
She reaches for my water and hands it to me. “Drink up. I'll refill it in a minute.”
“Mom, I'm not eleven. I can–”
Her eyes say drink.
So I do.
“You. Did. Not. Fail,” she says firmly as I gulp the room-temperature water, avoiding eye contact. It's easier to form a shield around myself if I don't look at her.
Lisa Frank's unicorns are less judgmental, anyhow.
“Hasty,” she says in a low voice that’s unlike her, the use of my childhood nickname filling me with an awe I don't expect. “You succeeded wildly.”
“Now I know I'm delirious, Mom, and the strep has invaded my brain, because no rational human being would ever say that to me.”
“I don't know if I'm rational, but I do know I'm human, and I'm absolutely certain you're wildly successful at being a good, kind person.”
If I hadn't already emptied my water, I'd have sprayed it all over her.
“Good? Kind? Have you met me, Mom? I'm none of those things.”
“Of course you are. You just buried it under this mission you had to conquer the world.”
“It conquered me, instead.”
“You are your own personal Battle of Hastings, sweetie.”
I groan. Haven't heard that lame joke since freshman year, European History.
“You're at war with yourself. And you won battle after battle with the outside world, striking deals and being savvy and moving up the ranks in finance, and those battles were important. Your father and I are proud of all you built.”
“Whatever I was trying to build, it doesn't even exist anymore! Burke ruined it and I was too stupid to realize what he was doing.”
“But you won the war, Hastings. You won in so many other ways. You are finding the center of who you are, unadorned by achievement.”
“Achievement is who I am! I'm nothing if I'm not an achiever. I'm not like you and Mallory! I'm different!”
Silence ripples out between us, growing in intensity.
Blinking rapidly, she just looks at me.
I close my eyes and whisper, “I don't know how to be like you and Mal. You just naturally have this peace inside you. I used to think you were settling, like you sold yourselves short. Then I realized that wasn't the case. That you were genuinely fulfilled by life itself. And I was so angry.”
“Angry?”
“Yes. Angry. Because I don't have that in me, Mom.” I look at her, letting my tears spill over. “I'm so jealous.”
“Jealous of... me?”
“And Mallory, yes.”
“I'm flabbergasted, Hastings.”
I don't know what to say. Shame fills my blood, a feeling I've spent my entire life fighting but didn't know it. This is my worst fear, come to life in my twin bed in my childhood home, where I'm sick as a dog, missing my sister's wedding activities, and confessing my innermost darkness.
To my mom.
“I just thought you were a bitch.”
Mom and I turn toward the voice that said that, finding red curls and an arched eyebrow. Mallory walks in like she's the alpha sister, plunks down on my bed, and looks at me with a gimlet eye.
“Mallory, I–”
“Stop.” Her palm is out to me, flat and vertical, her jaw tight, shoulders wide. “My turn to speak. You're sick–although non-contagious by now, or I wouldn't be here–so for once, Hastings, let me be in charge of the conversation.”
I expect her to add “okay?” but she doesn't.
Because she's not asking my permission.
“All these years, I thought you hated me. That I was beneath you. I never understood it, but it wasn't the same as my friends who had big sisters. Once I met Will and we shared stories, he didn't have the same dynamic with Veronica, but I chalked that up to the fact that he's a guy. I just resigned myself to having a prickly relationship with a sister who decided she was too good to be around me.”
Her sad stare elongates, stretching on and on as we sit in discomfort, my fever making my gut clench.
Finally, I have to say it. Have to give her something that was taken from me by Burke: the truth.
“You're right.”
Mom gasps, the sound a knife to my heart, but I steel myself.
Mallory's throat spasms as she swallows, the skin around her eyes wrinkling with pain.
“But,” I finish, “I don't feel that way now.”
“Because of Burke?” Mom rushes in. “He was the one who felt that way, and you were just going along?”
Easy.
It would be so easy to lie and say yes to another out Mom has given me.
A shaky sigh comes out of me, like the truth is breaking loose inside, an ice shelf melting in chunks. “No. I can't blame Burke for everything. He made it easy,” I say, spitting that word out. “Easy to feel good about myself by ranking the world. Figuring out how to network and leverage people as I moved up. Bigger and better deals, bigger and better contacts, one success on top of another. Until one day, I somehow let him leverage me. No,” I add, laughing bitterly, the taste of my own abdication a sour wine on my tongue, “I didn't let him. I begged. I threw myself at his feet and begged him to walk all over me. To use me.”
“Oh, Hasty,” Mal says. “I remember how you talked to Parker at the rehearsal rehearsal dinner. You kept mentioning Burke running for office in California. It seemed so crass.”
“Crass.” Sick memories flood me. “That's the word Burke used to describe my life back here. Whenever I told him a story from our childhood, he'd listen, but find some way to undercut it, you know?”
“Like being negged on a date?” Mallory gives me a knowing look.
“What's negging?” Mom asks.
“When a guy says something that's supposed to be a compliment, but it's really a way to make you feel insecure,” Mal explains. “Like saying, ‘That dress looks good on you. Most women carrying all that weight in their thighs couldn't pull it off.’”
Mom looks at me. “That's–that's how you talk to Mallory.”
Bow. Arrow. Release.
“It was. It was how I talked to you.” Years of being a bitch–Mal's dead right on that one–find their way into my diaphragm, choking me. Breathing through this is an act of heroism on my part.
I have to be my own hero.
And that means facing my hardest battle: fighting through the apologies I owe to the people I love.
“And I'm sorry.” Reaching for Mallory's hand is harder than the moment I was zip-tied back at Essentialz. Harder than watching my home raided by the Feds. Harder than the debriefing with the lawyers Ian hired, as they explained Burke's deception.
Harder than coming home with my tail between my legs.
But I can do hard things.
The hug takes me by surprise, my foot going off the edge of the bed to stop myself from sliding off. Mallory's coconut-scented hair is in my face, her arms wrapped around me, her breath hot against my already burning neck.
“I accept,” she says. “I always knew that underneath that mean-girl exterior, I had a kind sister. I just didn't know how to get her to come out.”
“It was never your job to get that part of me to come out, Mallory. It was mine.”
“Make room for me!” Mom says, crying with us, the Monahan girls a pile of emotional goo.
“By the way,” Mal whispers. “Chaz had to drop out of the wedding. Will's found a replacement, though. He couldn't come to the dinner tonight, but he'll be at the wedding.”
“Anyone I know?”
We pull away, Mom and Mal sharing a weird look.
“Yes,” Mallory says, eyes gleaming as she wipes tears away and laughs. “It's Ian McCrory.”
14
Leave it to my sister to choose an activity for her bachelorette party that reminds me more of her birth year than of her wedding.
That’s right. We’re at a piano bar.
A good old-fashioned dueling piano bar. You know why they put pianos in a bar? They do wonders for profits, because you need a lot of cocktails to tolerate the sing-along that inevitably comes in a place like this.
If I had been in charge of the bachelorette party activities, I would have rented a tasteful yacht to cruise the harbor islands, capped off with a private meal in a lighthouse. A helicopter would have waited nearby to whisk us all off to somewhere fun and exclusive on the Cape. We’d wake up to cranberry-tinis and stacks of low-carb pancakes, coated in the best maple syrup from a premier shop just outside of Sherbrooke, Quebec.
Or, if Mallory wanted a cookie-cutter, conventional event that screamed cliché, I'd find the best spa in Vegas and we'd do it up.
But no.
Instead, someone who’s wearing more flair around her neck than an Olympic medalist places a giant bucket filled with ice and bottled alcoholic monstrosities on the table. There’s enough food dye in there to turn a roomful of kids with ADHD into nuclear reactors.
“Hi!” she screams over the raucous cacophony behind us. “I’m Amber. I’ll be your server tonight. What can I get you?”
“Ooh! Raspberry lime hard seltzer!” Perky shouts, snatching the glass bottle inches from my face.
I turn to Amber. “Moscow Mule,” I inform her.
Fiona bursts out laughing. “You? I never would have taken you for a Mule type.”
I shrug. “I’m slumming.”
“They don’t need to add too much lime, because your face couldn’t get any more puckered than it already is, Hasty,” Perky says to me.
Mal elbows her. Their friend Raye just blinks, watching all of us. Teetering on heels that are an inch too high, Will’s sister, Veronica, comes back to the group, finally closing the circle.
It’s me, Perky, Fiona, Mallory, Raye, and Veronica. I don’t know what I’m supposed to talk about with these people for the next couple of hours, but I have a feeling it’ll involve a lot of screaming.
And Billy Joel lyrics.
The opening notes of Meat Loaf’s “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” sound through the open hall. The five of them stand up and start squealing. Amber walks past, snatching the empty bucket off the table. I grab the ribbon on the back of her apron and tug gently.
Or not so gently. I hold up two fingers. “Two.”
“Two Moscow Mules?”
“Two of whatever you’ve got. Mules, bottles, the city of Moscow. Anything to obliterate reality.”
She laughs. “I'll bring them out one at a time.”
I learn a lot in the next few minutes, as the song infuses every cell of my body. I learn that my little sister and Fiona have perfected the parts of this song all the way down to t
he baseball announcer in the middle. They know every single word, each nuanced, even as neither one of them comes anywhere close to hitting the right pitch.
Sweaty and giggling as the song ends, they sit down, grabbing their drinks and chugging.
Amber slips by with my first drink and sets a basket filled with fried clams, tartar sauce, and lemons in front of Perky.
She looks at me and points with a pen. I shake my head. She gestures at the charcuterie plate in front of us.
“I can refill anything you need.”
We wave her off. A Billy Joel song starts. It's the one about...
A piano bar.
See? I totally called it.
Veronica taps me on the elbow and I startle, realizing she’s trying to get my attention. I reach up and pull one earplug out.
“Yes?”
All five of them stare at me, look at the earplug, then back at me.
“Earplugs? Really?” Mallory asks.
“I’m here, aren’t I? Don’t judge.”
“C’mon! There has to be a song that you like,” Fiona prods. “Something you’ll get up and sing with us.”
I stare her down.
Veronica laughs. “You don’t know Hastings very well, do you? Nobody changes her mind.”
We get a reprieve, thankfully, as the piano shifts to the megahit from A Star is Born, two singers moving close to the baby grands, crooning at each other with an intensity that comes surprisingly close to Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga. I don't know if it's the alcohol, the camaraderie, or the slow release in my muscles as I let go of my own increasingly ridiculous judgment of my sister and her friends, but I'm starting to have fun.
Pure existence has its upside. I don't have to be on all the time.
“Hastings?” My name sounds muted, someone behind me asking. I turn around and in an instant, my tranquility disappears, running out of me like I'm a scared kindergartner and I've peed myself.
“Mullins?”
“What are you doing in a place like this?” we ask each other simultaneously, which would be hilarious under any other circumstances, but this is Mullins Pratt-Janklowski, the great-granddaughter of a famous head of the New York Stock Exchange.
