This is Not a Fairytale
Rebecca Kate
This is Not a Fairytale. Copyright © 2018 by Rebecca Kate
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author, except for the use of brief quotes in a book review. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, Characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. The use of any real company and/ or product names is for literary effect only. All other trademarks and copyrights are the property of their respective owners.
Cover design by Okay Creations
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Dedication
This book is dedicated to Morgan. Your curiosity and open-mindedness inspires me daily.
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Epilogue
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Prologue
This is not a fairytale. This is not boy meets girl, boy says clever thing and girl falls madly, truly, deeply in love. If that is what you seek, turn around right now. This isn’t the one for you. This story is not they lived happily ever after, had four perfect children, seventeen sweet grandchildren and retired to Florida. No, this is the story of a very ugly romance. It’s fucked up, it’s wrong, it’s chaos of epic and deeply beautiful proportions, and it hurt a lot of people. This is my story. This is our story.
One
I remember my first memory of him. Sure, he was in my life since the day I was born, before then even, but the real, meaningful memories weren’t instantaneous. Those strong, real memories that mean something to me began that day. He was larger than life, and beautiful even back then; even if the beauty I saw in him was completely different and innocent at the time.
I was playing on the playground directly across from my house, trying to swing but failing miserably. My mom and dad tried to teach me to pump my legs on previous occasions, but I still hadn’t understood the concept.
My mother was inside, entertaining the neighbors and making southern comfort punch, as per her usual, and my father was manning the grill. I was getting frustrated with the lack of attention to my situation, as any four-year-old does in a crisis that monumental. Though my huffing and puffing was sure to catch someone’s attention no one came to my rescue, until he did.
“Oh, come on, don’t get too frustrated,” Mason said. I looked at him from under my lashes as his long legs took him around the front of the swing right next to mine. He put his arms on the chains and hopped up.
He talked me through the steps as he thrust his legs out and then swung them back under him in example. He looked so funny, all larger than life on this little child’s swing set. My cheeks began to ache from smiling over my swinging success, and it was all because of him.
He had that sort of genuine care. Altruistic by nature. If he saw a person struggling to do something that he could help with, then he was going to do everything in his power to help. Placing bills in a homeless man’s cup, picking up the dropped belongings of a mother struggling to hold her child in one arm and her grocery bags in the other. He couldn’t let someone just struggle on their own.
I don’t remember what he was wearing that day on the swing set all those years ago, but I do remember his presence. He was powerful and confident, even teaching a four-year-old how to swing. I giggled as we pumped our legs side by side, his strides taking him higher than mine. But I was satisfied with my progress.
“That’s it! Look at you go! I knew you could do it! That’s my little superwoman! You can do anything!” He cheered me on like I was a rock star. And in that moment, I felt like one. Leah, his daughter and my best friend, eventually joined us, and the three of us pumped our legs forever, or at least until my mom yelled from the driveway about dinner being ready. Yes, even back then he made a big splash in my tiny life. He was my dad’s best friend. Was.
Through the years my relationship with Mason evolved. Nothing crossing a line, especially on his part, but more of just a natural progression of family-like friends. His ex-girlfriend, Leah’s mother, left them when Leah was just a toddler.
She decided being a wife and mother was not what she wanted. So she left. Leah did not have any memories of her. I don’t remember Leah ever needing a mother, Mason, her father, was always enough. I do remember him struggling though.
We lived in a stuffy gated community that cost entirely too much. This required him to work his ass off. Beyond just the cost of living, he was a single dad with a daughter in the best private school around and expensive extracurricular programs after school. That financial responsibility would require almost anyone to have to put in the extra hours to maintain.
I remember my parents having to pick Leah up from school a few times a month because he had meetings that ran late. I remember Leah and I took the exact same extracurricular activities for the convenience of carpooling.
I remember sleepovers where we would wake up in the morning with a box of toaster pastries on the counter because her dad had to run to work before we woke up and didn’t want us to starve at home alone. And I remember the loneliness in his eyes the times my parents had him over and would drink a little too much and flirt right there in front of him, turning him into the third wheel.
I would deny it if anyone pointed it out back then, but every time that happened, I couldn’t look away from him. I stared and stared, and committed his expression to memory. He’d smile politely and sometimes even slightly chuckle, and then turn his eyes away to give them privacy. Sometimes he would look down at the floor, searching for anything to look at instead of the couple in love in front of him.
His eyes said everything that he didn’t. He wanted that. He wanted a good woman to get drunk and flirt with. He wanted to make inside jokes and laugh about naughty romps on camping trips with the family.
Mason was lonely, but he put those feelings aside to be the best father he could be to Leah, and I loved him for it. I rarely remember him bringing dates to things, though looking back on it, I’m aware that his lack of a social life tied heavily to his demanding work schedule.
I spent the night more often than I should have. I wonder still to this day if my parents ever worried if I ate dinner, or went to bed on time, or got my homework done the nights I spent at Leah’s house. Will and Eliza, my doting parents, tended to be overbearing and be a little too strict, and Mason didn’t have that same privilege of being able to be strict with his schedule.
Yet interestingly enough, on the nights I spent at Mason and Leah’s house, they didn’t even call to check in. They never asked me if I brushed my teeth. They never asked me if I finished my book reports and kept away from television shows I wasn’t supposed to watch. Looking back, that says a lot about how much they truly trusted Mason.
He was my dad’s best friend since childhood, and they assumed he would look after me like his own daughter. They figured he did the best he could, and that was good
enough for them. For the most part he did, but even when he was home, he sat at his computer, typing away at the keys with a stern look on his face, and we got away with far more than we should have in his absence.
I love the way he looked at that computer those nights. Like a true artist, his hair was always a disheveled mess. Though I now know his work was more of solving puzzles and making business contract deals than creating art. The crease between his brows as he looked upon his work, inspired me. It drew me to the computer.
Back then I hadn't a clue what he did in his position, but I wanted to be like him from observation alone. I wanted to have that same look of determination on my face. Embarrassingly enough, I used to sit at my computer and click away at keys with a look of faux determination.
Eventually, I graduated from pretending I was him, to pretending I was clicking away at a typewriter, and that tiny moment in my youth breathed life to my journaling habit.
Unlike the role I had cast Mason into in my daydreams, typing up documents at home was only a fraction of what Mason did for his job. Truth was, he was gone more than he was around, and we became very comfortable with his absence as young teenagers.
This one time in particular, when we were thirteen, there was a teacher in-service day on a Friday. Leah and I knew it was coming up, so that prior Tuesday at a soccer meet, we begged my mother to let us go to Leah’s house straight from school Thursday and have a sleepover knowing Mason would still have to work all day Friday.
Our Oscar-worthy performance of sweet, innocent girls was too much for her to bear. I almost felt guilty. She finally caved after we promised her we would spend the entire day watching movies and doing in-home manicures.
Her one condition was that we call her if we needed to leave the house for any reason. Well, Thursday came, and knowing Mason would likely not be home until dark, we decided to experiment a little.
We were good kids for the most part. We got good grades in school and avoided the bad crowd. But a healthy curiosity lived within us, and we wanted to have a little fun. Those were the moments when you got your sea legs in life. When you said to hell with what you ought to be doing and did the things you knew were bad just to experience them. When you learned about real life things you aren’t taught in schools.
For as long as I could remember, Mason kept his alcohol in the top left cabinet beside the fridge in the kitchen. It was easy to get to as a full-grown adult, but just a little out of our range at the young age of thirteen. It wasn’t so impossible that we couldn’t get it with a little help from a kitchen chair, though.
Barefooted, Leah stood on the wooden chair and slapped her hands onto the countertop. She then hoisted herself up. She grabbed the first thing she could reach, which happened to be a bottle of Jameson.
Leah and I stared at the bottle, giddy with nervous excitement. Before this, we had each only tried random sips of beer that we stole while carrying bottles out to our inebriated fathers from time to time.
We had no frame of reference for hard liquor, but we were eager to experience it. We were eager to feel what it was like to be tipsy after seeing our parents laughing and having a grand time with glazed over eyes and alcohol on their breath. Seeing teenagers not much older than us drinking in television shows and in movies awakened a natural curiosity in our young minds. We figured it must be fun, and so we had to try it.
We didn’t know where Leah’s father kept his shot glasses, so we just used regular cups and only put a few tablespoons of alcohol in each one. The smell scared me. It burned my eyes when I got too close to it. It reminded me of nail polish remover. Still, I had no plans of backing out.
Grinning like the children we still very much were, we put the cups to our lips and tipped them back. The liquid burned like acid going down my throat, and we each gagged and coughed, unable to speak for the longest minute. Leah grabbed the container of milk out of the fridge, and we each took a large sip straight from the carton. It helped wash away the burning liquid, and rid our mouths of most of the bad taste.
All that was left of the experience was the lingering warmth of the alcohol traveling throughout our bodies, and the confidence that we would survive another sip. That was all the encouragement we needed to continue.
By the end of the night, we had stripped down to nothing but our training bras and Pink by Victoria’s Secret sporty thongs as we sat in the living room and giggled, spinning circles in crappy, old desk chairs. We fell over more times than we could count, and generally made complete fools of ourselves. It was one of the best nights of my life. Me, my best friend, and Jameson.
The morning after our rookie night of partying was also one I would never, in all my life, forget. “Leah Olivia Carpenter, get some goddamn clothes on! You and your friends can’t just walk around here practically naked! It’s wrong! What if I had brought a work colleague over for lunch? Then what? Get your ass up! Now!”
Leah and I were laid out on the couch, still in our undies from the drunken night before. Initially, I was completely offended. He had basically just called me a friend of Leah’s. Wasn’t I more than that? Wasn’t I like family? I wasn’t just a random girl from school; we were like sisters. It hurt to be referred to as something so disposable by him, and that was confusing.
My second thought was that when he was angry, a little vein popped out down the side of his neck, and it stirred something deep down inside me. It was sexy. It was exciting. It was also a very heavy and wrong feeling. I knew I shouldn’t have felt this way toward him, but knowing that didn’t make the feeling stop.
He was in a suit, and it hugged him in indecent ways that sent tingles to places that had just barely begun to bloom on my body. I was a practically naked thirteen-year-old girl with a crush. A crush on my best friend’s suit-clad father. A crush on my own father’s lifelong best friend. A crush on a man far too old and complicated for me.
I scrambled to cover myself with the sofa throw, and Leah just scowled, bored with his lecture. My practically naked, hungover, fierce best friend was not about to be told to put on clothes in her own home. I, on the other hand, was mortified to have passed out and been caught underdressed and exposed like that.
He never did mention the alcohol. Either he was so offended by our lack of clothes he didn’t notice, or he figured he would let us be normal, curious teenagers that experimented a little while at a sleepover.
Maybe it was a rite of passage, and he let us have it. I don’t know, but I was grateful. At the time, we were scared shitless because we assumed he would be home late and straight to bed, and then up early and straight to work. We figured he wouldn’t have even noticed us, much less the empty bottle and the shadows under our eyes. We had gotten away with it, and we felt proud.
Two
In the years that followed, I tried to ignore my feelings for Mason. I tried to not notice when he worked at his desk with his black-rimmed glasses on and his sleeves rolled up to his elbows. I tried not to notice the way those sleeves showcased tanned muscles on his forearms, and the way the veins rolled slightly as he typed away on his keyboard. I tried not to notice how he always seemed to smell masculine while also slightly citrusy, as he passed me in his kitchen.
But I could not ignore the way his eyes crinkled at the corners with age and the way his mouth tipped up on the left side as he teased me about boys. “What about you, Scarlet? What lucky boy did you ask to the Sadie Hawkins dance?” He had teased one evening my sophomore year of high school.
“Oh, she hasn’t yet,” Leah answered before I got the chance to. I elbowed her in the arm, and she laughed at my embarrassment. “But she should! Gabe, from our French class, has been eyeing her all semester. He would say ‘yes’ in a heartbeat! He’s really cute too!” she said, further embarrassing me in front of literally the only male I had ever thought about in that way. Or any way, for that matter.
“Gabe from French class, huh? Well, I think you should ask him. Life is short. Be young and dance.” He snickered as if he
was about to say a corny joke that he couldn’t hold back. Sure enough, he continued. “Unless this Gabe from French class is interested in a little French kissing. Then I say don’t. Cuz y’all are too young for tongue.”
Leah practically squealed in embarrassment and slapped him hard on the arm for that remark. He just laughed harder, letting us know what he said was meant to tease and embarrass us. Unfortunately, all it did was remind me of ways in which I’d love to not be too young for tongue in his eyes. Leah was not impressed, and changed the subject with an over exaggerated, “Anyways…”
Then of course, there was the night he told me if I ever needed him, he would be there. Well, maybe that’s a stretch from what he actually said, but it stuck with me all the same. There was some news program on, and in it was a story of a girl that had too much to drink at a college party and ended up getting sexually assaulted on campus.
With fire in his eyes, Mason turned to Leah and me and demanded that we call him at any time and he would come get us. It didn’t matter where we were or what we were doing, he would come get us immediately, no questions asked.
He said if we ever felt uncomfortable in a man’s presence for us to call him too and he’d come get us immediately after killing the guy. That made us all snicker a little, but we got the point. It felt good to know he cared about me just like he cared about Leah. It pleased me to see the fire in his eyes at the thought of something happening to me.
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