by Cora Brent
He really was the luckiest bastard on the planet. He just knew it.
CHAPTER FIVE
EASTON
I figured I ought to be able to come up with another memory of being carelessly dismissed by a girl I wanted real bad. If I could do that, then Claudia’s rejection might not sting so much.
However, after sitting moodily on the edge of my bed for a solid fifteen minutes and trying really hard, I still couldn’t think of anything. But I was starting to calm down. I mean, did I really expect Claudia to jump my bones right there in her father’s living room?
On a whim I grabbed my phone and started scrolling through my contacts. Immediately I could count about a dozen girls who would go ape shit to hear from me, even if it was plainly a booty call.
There was a problem with that though. I was sick of all of them. I didn’t want to wash lip gloss off my dick again and be unable to remember the face of the girl who put it there.
What the hell was wrong with me?
Maybe I was getting mind-fucked by being in the same house with the sappiest version of True Love, courtesy of Anya and Jack. Maybe graduating from high school had automatically pushed me into some higher level of maturity.
Or maybe I just couldn’t handle being rejected by any girl, let alone the one I’d jacked off to for years.
I relaxed and stretched out on the bed with my phone in hand, searching for porno clips of chicks who looked like Claudia. She hadn’t exactly told me to fuck off. In fact several times tonight I had caught her looking me over with a meaning I understood. But then she would turn away and when we talked she seemed to go out of her way to insult me. Sure, she wanted me. But she was going to fight it. I got depressed as I pictured a long week of watching her cute ass trying to shake me loose.
After scrolling casually through a stack of brunettes in various x-rated poses, I found one who resembled Claudia. Same long brown hair, brown eyes, tight body. I played the video and watched her taking it from behind. It made me feel weirdly vindicated.
When Claudia was living here I always used to try to find a reason to take a turn around the block. For a while I even hung around with Eric Fontana solely because he lived two doors down from the Giordanos. Eventually I had to stop doing that because Eric didn’t really want to acknowledge that there was a world outside his Playstation and gaming was as dull to me as watching paint dry.
I remembered this one time I was trying to get the hang of skateboarding. Anya had scraped together enough cash to buy me a kickass board for my thirteenth birthday and I was getting banged up every day by trying a bunch of daredevil stunts I had no business trying to pull off.
Anyway, I was gliding down Carver Street when I saw Claudia coming out of her house in a white t-shirt and cutoff shorts. Usually whenever she noticed me her eyes would glaze over with disinterest and she would go back to whatever she was doing.
But on that fine spring afternoon I decided that she was going to get a glimpse of just how fucking spectacular Easton Malone could be. I was going to show her by jumping the curb right in front of her face, rolling the board over in midair and landing on it smoothly.
It would work. After all, I’d seen a video of a kid my age doing the exact same thing.
She heard me coming as I gained speed. She looked up, shielding her eyes from the glare of the sun and from the stunning image of my athletic prowess.
It didn’t work out as I’d planned. The board got stuck mid-flip and I failed to notice how close I was to a parked car. I wound up crashing face first into Carmine Giordano’s prized Chevelle and landed with a skateboard wheel up my ass.
“Oh my god!” Claudia said and it wasn’t because she was impressed. It was because I was sprawled on the asphalt and had blood pouring out of my nose.
She was suddenly at my side, pulling a wad of tissues out of her purse and pressing them against my face. Meanwhile, Carmine evidently sat at the kitchen window waiting for someone to fuck with his car because he was out of that house in a heartbeat.
“What the hell did you do to my car, kid?”
The blood was getting in my mouth and I couldn’t answer right away so Claudia answered for me.
“Cool it,” she scowled at her grandfather. “He’s hurt for Christ sake.” She pulled me up by the elbow. “Come on Easton, I’ll take you home.”
I’d been dying to hear Claudia utter my name. But sprawling beneath her pitying gaze as I bled all over the sidewalk wasn’t the situation I’d had in mind.
“I’m fine,” I told her, my eyes starting to tear up from the pain. When I tried to walk I limped a bit, a side effect of having a skateboard wheel momentarily jammed up my crack. “I’m just gonna walk home.”
She handed me my skateboard. “You sure? I don’t mind giving you a ride.”
Oh, how I’d been wishing to hear her say that. I’d been wishing it under very different circumstances though.
After that I practically ran home because in addition to my pulpy mess of a nose I was getting a hell of a boner.
Anya was home when I got there and she immediately freaked out. She shoved a dishtowel loaded with ice cubes against my face and hauled me to the emergency room. These days if I touched the upper bridge of my nose I could feel the slight bump, a souvenir from that break in the cartilage.
I didn’t know it at the time, but that awkward encounter would be the last time I would speak to Claudia Giordano.
Until today.
The girl in the video was getting excited. She was coming and she was loud about it, moaning and howling. Watching her made me intensely curious about what Claudia was doing at the moment.
I wondered what she would say if I left the garage, climbed those dark stairs, opened the door to her room and slid into bed beside her, ready to inject a dose of hot beef.
“Get lost, Junior.”
That’s what she’d say. Then she’d roll over and go to sleep, choosing to ignore what her body wanted because her head had already told her I was just a dumb kid.
But this was only day one. She could ignore me for the moment.
After tomorrow we’d be in the house together for the next week. And alone, aside from Papa’s vague presence.
Claudia could keep trying to build that wall for now but she wouldn’t be able to let it stand for long.
I wouldn’t let her.
CHAPTER SIX
CLAUDIA
The room smelled like a herd of men. It had belonged to Rocco and Getty and it seemed all the years of adolescent sweat had permeated the walls, leaving behind a enduring fog of male authority.
It was hot. Not Arizona kind of hot, but a typical June sticky humidity that was unknown in the desert. Ten feet to my left the creaky air conditioner rattled in the window frame and heaved a sigh before choking out a burst of cool air.
I was lying atop the tired comforter, wearing nothing but a t-shirt and panties. I wished I could summon the exhaustion I’d felt earlier when I climbed the stairs. I couldn’t sleep though, not even close. I kept thinking about everything that had happened since my plane landed.
Anya was trying really hard. I hadn’t expected that. She seemed nothing but eager for us to be friends and it made me feel kind of bad for thinking shitty thoughts about her since Jack dropped the ‘I’m marrying Anya Malone’ bomb. I believed Jack completely when he told me how much he loved her. He’d never said that about anyone before.
As for Anya, I shouldn’t hold a grudge just because she was an asshole when we were kids. I knew I could be one too sometimes and maybe somewhere there was someone who’d suffered for it but decided to move on. Kids didn’t always understand the impact of their actions.
Speaking of kids, there’d been one watching me with brazen interest earlier as I picked at a plate of macaroni salad. He didn’t exactly look like I remembered, but then I hadn’t thought of him at all, not even fleetingly, in the half dozen years or so since I’d seen him last. He was propped up against the wall in my grandparents’ fo
rmer living room for a reason. He was Anya’s brother. Of course I remembered that she had one since the Malones had lived so nearby. Jack had mentioned something about Easton staying at the house until he left for school but I hadn’t given the idea a second thought.
He had taken his time about approaching me but when he did he was cool about it.
“Hey, Claudia.”
“Easton. How have you been?”
He didn’t answer right away. He cocked his head to the side and surveyed me, allowing his blue-eyed gaze to linger on the curve of my breasts until my face grew hot. I felt like shaking him by his broad shoulders and shouting, “Cut the shit! You’re just a boy.”
It wasn’t true though, not anymore. The last time I saw Easton Malone he was a gawky collection of skin and elbows trying to eke his way through the terrible early teen years. I’d barely noticed him. He lived around the block with his mother and his sister. He was only on my radar at all because I felt vaguely sorry for the kid for having a crappy sister and a mother who’d been in a wheelchair for years.
Mrs. Malone had something dreadful wrong with her but if anyone had ever told me what it was I couldn’t remember. Some degenerative disease that killed slowly. I’d pretty much forgotten about her until Jack made his big announcement and mentioned that Anya’s mother had passed away about two years back.
When Easton finally spoke again, the thick, resonant timbre of his voice rolled over me like hot butter. “You changed,” he said casually. “Your clothes, I mean.”
“Ha. Yeah, my skirt was ripped and generally I try to avoid attending family reunions with my thong showing.”
What the hell possessed me to say the word ‘thong’ in front of Easton Malone?
Easton had merely shrugged though. “I wouldn’t complain if you wore nothing but a thong.” Then he flashed me a grin that was full of sex and confidence, a tool he obviously used to get what he wanted. He was playing with me because he could. To my supreme horror, a flush of heat rose between my legs and shot through my core. Damn, there’d been a long drought downtown. No one at all since Garrett. I was ripe to the point of my skin splitting and I could swear that charming little shit standing in front of me knew all about it.
“How’s school?” I asked him, crossing my arms and trying to look stern, adult-like.
“School,” Easton had repeated, rubbing his chin. He was still wearing the same shabby high school t-shirt he’d been wearing earlier and he was practically busting out of it.
“Yeah,” I said snottily. “What grade are you in now?” I was trying to be condescending. On purpose. Might as well let him know that whatever ideas were brewing behind those absurdly chiseled features weren’t going to come true.
But Easton Malone only smiled. “Graduated, Claud. Last week. You should have come out a few days sooner.”
Even now, hours later, I kept hearing him emphasize the word ‘come’. It was doing things to me. Things that couldn’t happen in real life.
Down there in the living room though I only pressed my legs together and gave him a hard glare. “And why is that, Easton?”
He raised his eyebrows. “Whole class had a wicked party down at the beach.”
I relaxed a little. “I think I would have been a little out of place there.”
“Nah. There were all kinds of old timers around.” He was grinning again. It was apparently Easton’s way of flirting.
“Well, I guess I would be something of an antique to you.” I said it rather haughtily. I also said it because I needed to remind myself that it was true.
But Easton turned sincere. “No. You’re absolutely perfect, Claudia.”
Jesus. Why didn’t any actual men say shit like this?
Things were heading in a dangerous direction though. I stood up and smiled. “Thanks, junior. Really, you’re sweet. Why don’t you run along and be sweet to someone your own age?”
He was insulted. A shadow crossed his face and he folded his impressive arms across his broad chest. I could have smiled to take the bite out of my words but my face was rather stuck. We stared at each other and the air suddenly felt a bit chilly.
Then Anya was there, pulling at my elbow and telling me a hundred and one things about her wedding dress. She seemed disappointed that I had no opinion about it. The thing was white. It had beads and frills and stuff.
Easton seemed to recover pretty quickly from his irritation. Within a few minutes he was having a boisterous argument about baseball with Getty, my other uncle. Seven years older than me, and eight years younger than Jack, Gaetano was sandwiched directly in the middle of the family demographic. He sat there regaling Easton with a sordid story about his encounter with two girls in a bar. Getty had a lot of stories. And a lot of girls.
Then Jack approached me somewhat timidly. He wanted to go for a walk. In the background Easton and my uncles roared with laughter over something profane and simple-minded. Anya wafted back into the room and shouted at them to watch their mouths as if she owned the place. Which, I realized with a start, she would very soon. Tomorrow, in fact. When she became Mrs. Jack Giordano.
“Give me a minute,” I told my father and dashed upstairs to find some shoes.
Reflexively I glanced at my left hand, which for a while had hosted a rather sizeable diamond because Garrett might be a lying, cheating waste of skin, but he wasn’t cheap. Right now I should have been planning my own wedding instead of grudgingly attending my father’s. Funny how I’d been engaged for almost a year and in all that time had given no thought at all to the actual wedding. Sometimes in my darker moments it occurred to me to wonder if I’d ever really loved Garrett, or if he was just a safety net, a placeholder, an ideal I’d convinced myself I should want. If that was the case I supposed I ought to be on my knees thanking the universe and the inventor of jumbotrons for sparing me a rotten fate.
Jack was nervous. I could tell. He wanted me to tell him everything was fine. That I was fine, that Anya and I were fine, that the whole world was one big ball of fine and dandy happiness now. Of course it was, I told him, because that’s what he wanted to hear, and because it should be true.
I’d have to be a real piece of work to resent the fact that my father had finally found someone to love. After the thing with Garrett, I’d started seeing a hundred-dollar-an-hour therapist. So far I’d learned that shrinks accept credit cards and I was allergic to the honeysuckle perfume that mine apparently bathed in. My therapist had suggested that I might harbor some unresolved emotional baggage concerning my father. She said it like it was a unique epiphany that had taken her months to develop. I had to resist the urge to slap her silly with one of the chintz couch pillows.
There couldn’t be a more obvious conclusion. Jack was fifteen years old when I was born. Of course there was going to be lingering fallout resulting from children raising children. Even if the more tiresome chores of making sure I had food and clothing in those early years fell mostly to my grandparents, I’d changed everything for him.
Where would Jack be now? How would his life have been different if he hadn’t become a father before he got his driver’s license?
There was no point in speculating.
Hours had passed since the awkward walk around the block with my father. Just before I left him standing in the front yard I thought he seemed somber, almost regretful. I really didn’t know why.
The air conditioner was doing a shitty job of cooling the room. I leaned over, fished my phone out of my bag, and noted that the time was after one am.
I was the only one staying upstairs. Papa was down in the back bedroom. Jack and Anya had taken over the master on the first floor. My uncles would have returned to their own habitat.
And Easton…
A shiver rolled through me and I cursed it.
I was a grown woman goddammit.
I could look at a hot guy and refuse to get all giddy.
Especially a hot guy who was too young and who was soon to be sort of a relative by marri
age.
I needed a damn drink.
I’d rather have a good fuck.
“Go to sleep you idiot,” I muttered and restlessly turned over to stare at the wall.
The wall stared back.
CHAPTER SEVEN
ANYA
The morning of her wedding she woke up in his arms and didn’t want to move. Anya felt that way every morning. A delicious little quiver rolled through her as Jack tightened his embrace possessively around her body. He let out a soft sigh in his sleep and even though there was so much she had to do, she couldn’t bear to leave the warmth of their bed.
She couldn’t bear to leave him, not even for a little while.
This would be the day she would become Mrs. Jack Giordano. It seemed impossible, like a dream she would never have dared to invent, would never even have thought of.
She’d known all the other Giordanos; Rocco was in her class and Getty a few years older. And then there was Claudia, the scrappy little tomboy who grew into a beauty. She could run circles around the boys and leave them staring after her in awed wonder. Boys liked to think they called all the shots but with Claudia they never got the chance. Maybe it was because she was growing up in a house filled with wild males, but from a distance Claudia was always sure of herself, immune to superficial nonsense. Anya admired her for that. But back then Anya wasn’t in the habit of handing out compliments, not when she was being flattened by her own life and didn’t have the energy to spend on a free-spirited girl who didn’t need anyone to tell her how awesome she was.
Anya never told anyone about how she’d lie awake every night, blinking at the ceiling. She was being crushed. Crushed from the outside by the weight of a dying mother and a little brother who needed someone to be his parent. Crushed from the inside by the knowledge of what stewed inside her body, waiting to show itself in a year, five years, ten years.
She was mean. She knew it even then but it didn’t bother her like it bothered her now. When she was young and stupid it seemed like a justifiable approach to life. She told herself it was because she didn’t have time to spend on the petty people who surrounded her at school. Their problems were small, their worries miniscule. There was a sick kind of relief that came with causing someone else’s tears. Why shouldn’t they cry? After all, Anya cried. She cried all the time. She did it when no one else could see. She did it when she stuck her fingers down her throat to bring up the vomit and bile because otherwise she would explode. That was what she used to do every afternoon for a long time until one day her little brother Easton found her in the bathroom. Her mother was lying quietly on her bed on the other side of the house and Easton was supposed to be at Little League. She’d foolishly left the bathroom door open.
