The Wallace Girl: The Feud Series

by Scott, Eliot

  "I doubt anyone gives two shits that I'm here. But..." I hold up a hand as I feel her start to argue. "I promise; if something gets me scared, I'll have that thing loaded and ready."

  She smiles, then pauses at the door, turning to face me, her cool hands finding my cheeks and holding my face while her eyes rake over my features.

  "You look so much like your mama, you know that?" She's biting at her lip again just as she did when she walked in. It makes my heart sick when she looks at me like this, but I know how happy it makes her to see my mom in my features, so I let her have her moment.

  "She was something." I hold in the tears.

  "By God, yes, JoJo. Yes she was." Shelly nods slowly, her lips curling even more as a breathy laugh escapes.

  Leaning into me, my aunt presses her lips to my forehead while her palms hold onto my cheeks, and I let my eyes fall shut, soaking in her love again as my thoughts go to my daughter. How I wish I could kiss her goodnight right now.

  "You lock this door behind me, and when Walt comes, I'll have him add one more bolt, okay?"

  I don't argue with that. It's one less project I'll have to do around here.

  "Sounds good." I hold the door open for her, breathing in the scent of my last real family member—lilacs and cigars—as she steps out to the wooden porch landing and hurries down the steps.

  I wave goodbye, then close and lock the door just as I promised I would, sliding the small card table in front of it for good measure.

  The desk by the wall is easy enough to move, and the moment I slide it away from the wall I see the loose board on the floor. Bending down with a pen in my hand, I stab at the crack between the boards until I'm able to wedge the pen in enough to pry the board up. Once in my fingers, it lifts easily—and my daddy's Smith and Wesson is quickly in my hands.

  The metal is cold in my touch, and my fingers buzz just from holding it. My father shot many deer in the woods just a few miles from this apartment. But there's an aching feeling in my gut as I hold it because it's one of the only surviving things we own that once belonged to my dad. I also wonder if the bullets fired from this weapon may have hit more than deer in the woods. Has it spilled human blood as well? Not by my daddy, but possibly by the devil's son himself?

  I grip the rifle and my mind spins with images of Alex’s beautiful angled face, how he looked at me today, and I wonder if the glimmer of the boy I once knew was really there or was it simply wishful thinking?

  Alex. Alex. Alex.

  I'm not able to push away the memories of our last night together. I think I've thought of that night, said his name over and over again, every day since. That night between us was almost perfection. Pure love quickly turned to absolute hell then so much hate.

  I can't regret one second of it. Not really. That night was the end of my life as I knew it, yes. But it was also the beginning of my entire future, of all things I've become thanks to school and life hitting me smack in the face. Alex ruined me, but he also gave me everything I now live for and hold dear. Our girl. My courage. My will.

  Alex. Alex. Alex.

  As much as my mind wants to hate him—as much as I know this man wants me to continue to hate him—after seeing him today, devil or not, my whole body, my entire essence, longs to be close to him again.

  Is this fate? Is this the irresistible feud—the very blood in my veins my parents and Alex's parents said was passed down from our ancestors, pushing me at him, or is this something else?

  I flip the rifle over in my hand again because it's grown hot under my fingers as I've stood here stewing on the past.

  My aunt used to keep it in a case. Alex had full privileges to use it any time he wanted, but I don’t think he ever took them up on it. Every time it was offered Alex always answered that he only hunted when his father forced him to do it.

  After I left town, my aunt told me Alex had come by to borrow the rifle, but instead of giving it to him, she'd told him it was lost. But in fact she'd decided to hide it. I never asked her why—I didn't really want to know, nor did I have to ask her why she'd brought it back out and up into this apartment for me today.

  I crawl into bed with the gun, safety on, and tuck it half hidden under the pillow and nestled under the covers on the other side of the bed. My palm rests along the trigger while my mind relives that moment not so long ago when May and I stared eye-to-eye. She’s always made me uneasy, but she has me feeling sick right now.

  I do my best to shake the weird feeling off. My phone lights up with a picture of Emily smiling out at me as I set it to charge next to me, and I snuggle up, comforted by the feel of hot metal by my side.

  I'm done with the feud. I'm done with secrets. I'm done with lies, hiding and being afraid. I'm also done with the Sinclairs. And if Alex isn't, then I'll have to admit defeat and be done with him too.

  No matter who he is to Emily.

  7.

  Alex, Present Day.

  I'm watching them from my top-floor penthouse of the 1894 remodeled apartment building my father gave to me as a gift after JoJo left town. It was a gift for my “job well done.”

  The cold glass cools my heated forehead as I press it against the tinted windows. I'm straining to watch the lights flick on and off in the two-story building next door.

  JoJo and her Aunt seem to be navigating the few rooms allocated to the Antique Shop's back room apartment. It’s a small place everyone in my family, hell everyone in town, has all but forgotten even exists, it’s been vacant so long. Everyone except me, that is.

  I only know about it because it's the place JoJo stayed the few short days before she left for college—after her parents’ farm house burned down and left her all but homeless.

  Thanks to me. Always…thanks to me.

  Back then, I'd watched her from the attic of this building through a blackened window, hiding behind the massive foundation crack that had split the entire front facing wall of this place from ground to sky.

  Tacoma was in an economic slump, and this place was an abandoned factory that had been boarded up for years. The facade was tilted, and had been so notoriously dangerous to any who’d entered it that not even the gang members or the homeless would occupy it.

  Just like I'd done back when it had become necessary to watch over Jojo when we were in high school, I wait for JoJo's Aunt Shelly to leave. After some time, she does, making her way slowly to her white Ford Focus. I nearly choke then flip my lid when I notice what looks like May—my mother—and my damn mother’s car pulling out of the alley behind the antique store fast, as though JoJo’s aunt’s appearance had startled her.

  I know my mother’s been tracking JoJo’s activities since they met face to face at the funeral, but I don’t know why. When we were kids, she did the same thing, but back then, I’d always thought my father had put her up to it. Just how he’d put us all up to tracking the Wallaces. I’m hoping this is just habit for her. Like scratching at an old wound that hurts now that my father is dead, or like some sort of cold and morbid curiosity she has to look at the one Wallace we collectively could not destroy.

  But then, I wonder if my mother is just like me—she’s after JoJo, she’s obsessed with tracking her because of something deeper. In my mom’s case is it more sinister…more dangerous than what I am to her?

  In case my mother decides to return, and because I can’t fucking stop myself, I stare at the empty alleyway, at the lights and shadows flickering in the windows that tell me JoJo’s still moving around in the place. I stare until my back hurts, until my legs hurt because I haven’t moved them, and I now doubly track and analyze any car that drives by. I prepare to battle any person who walks down the street, and I wonder what the hell my mother is up to by being in the alley behind Jojo’s place. When the windows darken, I wait longer, eyes boring into the last light—the light that must be by JoJo's bedside—to click off. And then, only then, after giving the darkened windows another hour of observation, and though I do not deserve it, I allow myself
to breathe fully and head toward my own bed.

  I don't often sleep in this apartment because I prefer sleeping up at the lake. I've slept there since the day JoJo left. First on the ground in a rolled out sleeping bag and pad, then in a tent, then in a shed I built myself, then inside a bigger shed, and finally I'd made a home inside what I'd told my father and brother was my fishing house.

  A small but beautiful place I'd used my trust fund to create and have been tweaking with additions and ideas since I'd turned twenty-one. Because Grady and my father never went to the lake, how it's developed is one of the secrets I was able to keep from the old man. Had he and Grady shown up, they would never have thought it was my main place of residence. Because who would leave a luxury penthouse like the one I'm standing in to sleep in what they'd consider a weekend cabin.

  But...of course like always, I'm not like them and the lakeside cabin they assumed I use only for fishing days is way more than just a cabin now. It's my home, my glass palace and the only solace I have. But with JoJo back in town, it's fitting that I stay here. I do have some affection for this pad, because the project of restoring it stopped me from ending my own life.

  I imagine how it was then. The horrific lightning strike cracks inside and out, the ancient defunct boiler that would never throw heat properly again. It’s cancerous asbestos layering every inch of it had appealed to me so much. As did it's central, winding yet delicate sea-shell staircase, one that allowed you to stand in the lobby and look up all ten floors like it was the entire spine of the building. The whole place was originally a hotel, designed by an architect from Paris. That staircase was riddled with sections that had fallen out, but it was the empty space that spoke to me more than the staircase itself.

  I would stand mesmerized by it, like I do when I find a particularly perfect spider's web.

  Because it was the building next to the last place I'd watched over JoJo—and because I was now in charge of watching over her nutcase aunt who spent her days in that antique shop, the building had to be mine.

  That staircase I repaired. The cracks I covered but even now I could show you where they were. I’ve memorized every nail, curve and dent.

  Convincing the old man to help me purchase it was easy. I told him just what he wanted to hear so he'd agree to the investment, because it would have been cheaper to tear it down. But once I told him I'd wanted a place that was in downtown Tacoma, a place with class that would honor our family name, a place that everyone in town would talk about while we were redoing it and a location that no other would have the courage to touch, he was hooked. He agreed that restoring a place like this would make the Sinclair name be seen in a good light. As if we were benefactors to the town's depressed spirit, not the reasons behind it all.

  When I also implied I needed a place where I could bring my women—a place I could fuck them and forget them, and shove them into cabs long before they sobered up—well that was the icing that closed the deal. Grady loved the idea too, only, as usual, he wanted his own project. So, because my father got stuck on the idea that our oil empire would book-end the entire downtown area, a second condemned building was purchased for my brother blocks away by the waterfront. It’s a building Grady used to one-up me on design, spending, and fucking as well. He'd even created a secret and discrete bachelor pad for my father to use for his…indiscretions, which really earned him the points.

  He and father would often pick up women together. I'd go with them sometimes so they wouldn't pester me or wonder too much about my real life. They'd even invited me and the girls who'd thrown themselves at me to come along and party with them. Of course, I never said yes to that. Father understood and never pressed. He knew Grady and I never shared our toys. I always saw my girls home safely. Or, if they insisted on staying—and only after I told them this could only be a one-night stand and they'd agreed to that—I’d bring them back here for a few selfish hours of the physical contact I craved, and the forgetting that comes with good, raw sex that I sometimes needed so I could wake up and go on another day.

  As I stare at JoJo's darkened windows now, I allow the memories I've been fighting against since I saw her—smelled her—at the funeral to flood into me with a vengeance.

  The force of it is so strong the room tilts and spins as I reel into a chair. Imagining JoJo breathing in, and then out, is what keeps me from blacking out completely. I think of my father next. I try to picture him six feet under a pile of fresh dirt, unmoving, unblinking and permanently still.

  I regret not breaking into the closed casket so I could see him like that, but I also know it would not be any sort of solace. Because even stone-cold dead, my dad is very much alive. All I have to do is look at myself to prove that fact.

  Even with his face shot off, he’s won. Does the man, even dead, watch me and smile? I feel like he does.

  Pushing away my father's face, I think only of JoJo. I welcome the memories. I will let them consume me so they will burn out the few heartbeats JoJo accidentally fired off inside my heart today, and when I see her tomorrow, I will be ready.

  She won't get in again.

  8.

  Alex, Senior Year, Just Before Graduation.

  "I hate when girls cry.”

  I spit out the first words that come to my head because my mind and my body is still scrambling for sanity because I just had sex with JoJo Wallace like I was some sort of animal, and then I dumped her.

  No…I broke her.

  How can I ever be human again after tonight? I'm reeling from what I'd just done with her and said to her—already longing for what I'll never get to do, touch, taste, smell and feel ever again.

  Why did I sleep with her? I’d resisted her so long. She doesn’t deserve this memory. Not this…it had been so important to her.

  I meant to set her aside just like I’d done all of the other times. I meant to end it—without things ever heating up. I’d been so damn strong for all of high school, fuck…on prom night she begged me so hard and we both had some beers and it was nearly impossible to resist, but I did; I put her off, using her birthday as an excuse.

  Now at least...at least, knowing her, maybe she will be twice as hurt, twice as angry with me. That thought doesn’t make me hate myself less, but it’s too late for any regrets now. After what happened with Mr. Wallace, and now Jojo’s mom, nothing will ever, ever make me likable to myself. Hell, tolerable even.

  Calmly—which is always her way—she replies, "I'm not crying, Alex. I'm asking you to make this stop. Please. You don't have to do this. We could run away. Love for love, Alex. Come on. It's not hard. We can change everything. “

  “My family motto is pain for pain—stop messing it up with your stupid ideas of something that does not exist.” I spit the words at her. They aren’t a lie; her version of our lives is impossible.

  “We're not hard. We are so very easy, me and you. The future can be what we want, not what your father envisions. Love for love. It’s going to win.”

  Fuck, I wonder, gritting my teeth. What am I supposed to say next?

  I'd planned this so carefully and for so many months. But the plan—my father’s fucking plan—never included me analyzing the sexy sheen of sweat shining on her golden tanned and naked skin. The plan never came with her biting her bottom lip and talking about a future I'm not allowed to have. I can't let this long-awaited moment pass me by just because I want to entertain her idea of love being capable of saving us. Saving me, anyhow. This pain will save her. And, because I do love her, I can't derail the plan now just because I long to believe the words that are coming through her sweet, quivering lips. She has no idea what my father—my brother, too—is capable of. I absolutely do.

  I glance back at her, hating myself for how she looks like some sort of otherworldly pearl against the bleached out boat tarp I'd hastily thrown to the ground as a makeshift bed. This girl should only ever have silk and rose petals next to her skin, and instead she got me, rough canvas, a few stolen moments in a damp bo
athouse for her first time—and her second—all after I promised to give her pillows and a bed.

  I retrieve my hastily kicked off jeans, working to keep my father's harsh and threatening face inside my head so I can remember to stay on task.

  First: Do not look at her face anymore.

  Second: Put one leg into the jeans and do the right thing.

  Third: Put the other leg into the jeans and do not fucking cry.

  Fourth: Say anything you need to say to make her understand. You've practiced this shit every month since you found out your part in the deal. Say it all. You can't run away with her, and she can't ever be near you again or she dies. That's the equation. Do the assignment. Complete the problem.

  From far away, I hear my own voice sneer out, "Looks like we rocked this dock so hard my fucking underwear fell in the water because I can’t find them.” I laugh. Then, when she still hasn't moved, I add, "Shouldn't you be getting dressed? I'm not down for giving you a ride home. Hope you don't mind taking the trail back to your place. Driving to the other side of the tracks feels pretty far out of my way all of a sudden."

  I snort out what I hope is a cruel-sounding laugh. "If you can walk at all after spreading your legs so wide."

  Keep going.

  Say it all like you mean it, because if you mess this up, the girl you love will die just like everyone else in the Wallace family died. Because she has no idea the Sinclairs killed her father. Because she has no idea my mom laughed the day her mother died.

  Because she has to leave this town hating you. She cannot have a reason to come back.

  "Why are you suddenly being someone I've never met?"

  I pull the jeans up over my bare ass and turn slightly away from her so I can slide off the condom. I zip up, working to get my voice colder than it was before. "I've never pretended to be anything other than just me. Maybe you're only seeing me right for the first time. Now that I've fucked you senseless maybe the dreamy cobwebs are finally gone."