AVERY (The Corbin Brothers Book 2)

by Lexie Ray

“That’s right.”

  “Ms. Crosby, did you knowingly sell your body for money?”

  “Yes. Mama did the pricing and negotiations, but I agreed to it.”

  “Why?”

  A sharp look from Snyder to Bash told me that this wasn’t one of the questions they’d agreed on asking.

  “Why did I start selling my body?” I repeated.

  “Yes,” Bash said. “We’re trying to understand this thing from every angle.”

  “Apparently,” Snyder muttered.

  “Please, Ms. Crosby,” Bash said, ignoring the other suit. “Why did you start working at the nightclub?”

  There were lots of reasons, really. I was desperate. I needed the money. I didn’t see any other way. There wasn’t anyone—or anywhere—to turn to. I thought I’d be good at it. I saw it as a means to an end.

  But if I was being perfectly honest, which I promised I’d be, there was really only one true reason I started working at Mama’s nightclub in the first place.

  “I did it for my treasure,” I said.

  “Your treasure, Ms. Crosby?”

  “Yes. My treasure—my Trevor. My son.”

  Chapter Two

  My son.

  I had been one of those girls who’d fallen in love—fast, hard, and deep—with a high school sweetheart.

  Ben was the captain of the basketball team, a vision on and off the court. He had everything: looks, grades, athletics, and popularity. Everything I didn’t have.

  He was sweet, too, not laughing off my advances or trying to use me, like so many other guys at our high school.

  “When are you going to take me to see a movie, Ben?” I’d wheedle, leaning against his locker suggestively. Back then, I always wore the top of my hair in cornrows, which I thought made me look tough, and the rest of it loose and curly, which I thought made me look feminine. I liked mixing it up, and always keeping people guessing.

  “Anytime you want me to, Shimmy,” he’d flirt back, always gracious and good-natured. Movies were well beyond my humble means, but Ben always seemed to have the latest sneakers or jeans or backpacks. Kids talked about how he was rich, but I had no idea until I went over to his home to work on a school project.

  First of all, he lived in a real house. Sure, it was squished in between all the other houses on a row of fine, old homes, but it had four stories and its own front door.

  “You live here?” I asked, unable to keep myself from gaping as trotted up the steps to the front door and produced a key from his backpack.

  “Yep,” he said grimly, in a way that told me he often fielded such questions.

  “How many other people live here?” I gasped as he opened the door. Inside, the ceilings were impossibly high, bright chandeliers dripping down like a terribly expensive leak.

  “It’s just me, my mom, and my dad,” Ben said.

  “Just three?” I knew I probably sounded obnoxious, but I was a girl from the ghetto. This was as good as a foreign country to me. “What do you do with all the extra space? You can’t need all this.”

  Ben just shrugged. “Let’s start on the project,” he said. “We can go to my office.”

  “You have your own office?” I demanded, sure that my eyes were going to bug out of my head and that I was going to trip over my own dropped jaw. Was it possible to live like this?

  I tried to behave myself, but with each corner we rounded, I saw more and more marvels that I had never even thought of. Couches and chairs that looked to fine for sitting, covered in a rich gold fabric that shone under the chandelier dangling from the ceiling.

  Ornate crown molding that bordered every wall, cherubs and butterflies and flowers forever preserved in the carvings that joined the wall to the ceiling.

  A kitchen bristling with stainless steel appliances and a dishwasher—a real, working dishwasher. At my home, I was the dishwasher. I knew another girl who had a dishwasher at home, but it was so beyond repair that her family just used it to store dishes.

  Stairs that didn’t lead to other people’s homes, but to other areas of a single family’s home. It was so strange to me to have such a simple thing as stairs belong to a person. When the elevator went out in my building and we had to hoof it up the stairs, we had to dodge around strangers and worse, sidling by in the dark corridors, footsteps echoing hollowly on the concrete steps.

  Ben’s office gleamed with the latest product models that I’d only seen in magazines or in storefront windows. I wanted to moon over them, to tell Ben how lucky he was, to run my fingers wonderingly over the smooth curves and planes, but I stopped myself. Ben seemed downright miserable, and I hated being the reason for it.

  “I like your office,” I said, promising myself not to gush anymore. “Let’s get started.”

  Evidently surprised, he blinked at me a couple of times before smiling gratefully and pulling out his textbook. Even his school-issued textbook was nicer than mine, probably for the simple fact that he had a nicer home to store it in, and a nicer backpack to tote it around.

  Maybe it was my decision to stop being a weirdo about his incredible digs, but Ben really warmed up to me that afternoon. We always had a decent relationship at school, but it never went beyond flirting. In his house that day, we opened to each other like blossoms, talking about everything and nothing under the sun. We didn’t do a lick of work on the project, instead talking about our hopes and dreams and fears.

  “I want to play basketball,” Ben said, “but my parents say there’s no future in it.”

  “Why?” I scoffed. I knew dozens of boys who wanted to play basketball, to be the next Jordan or Lebron or Shaq, but Ben was legitimately good on the court. “You’re good at it.”

  He shrugged. “My parents say I have to go to school, and that’s final,” he said. “I’m supposed to get a business degree and focus on my studies.”

  “Why can’t you focus on your studies and play basketball at school?” I asked. “Don’t you get to the NBA through college, anyways?”

  “I guess,” Ben said. “But my parents would never let me. What about yours? Are they ever unfair like that?”

  My parents would probably let me skip rope in the middle of the street if only for their utter lack of interest in me, but I didn’t think it’d be right to say so. My grandmother was raising me because of the fact that neither of my parents was responsible enough to raise a child. I couldn’t even remember what they looked like, sounded like, or smelled like. Gran didn’t keep any pictures around the house.

  “I want to be a fashion model,” I said softly, slowly raising my eyes to meet his. My glare was challenging, defiant, daring him to say different, but he nodded solemnly instead, considering it.

  “You’re tall,” he said, “and you have good skin. You like fashion?”

  “I love it,” I breathed, and I loved the boy in front of me for not ridiculing me for my dream.

  “You should wear prettier stuff to school,” Ben said. “It’s like you wear these ratty old jeans every day.”

  I swallowed as I fingered the faded denim. These were my only jeans, and I couldn’t afford any of the fashion I craved.

  “I wish I could,” I whispered, and Ben looked cowed.

  “I’m sorry—”

  I waved off his apology, and his pity.

  “I bet I could figure something out,” I said. “All right. I’ll start wearing prettier things to school, and you start standing up to your parents and telling them that you’re going to play basketball no matter what they think.”

  “I wish I could,” Ben said, shrugging helplessly.

  Ben’s butler—his butler!—brought us snacks to the office, commenting on how hard we must be working even if our textbooks remained firmly shut, resting on the floor. I gobbled down little doughy pockets of pizza, handfuls of chips I could tell were name brand, and slurped soda from a can with a bendy straw.

  Shoot. I’d do anything my parents told me to do if I lived in a house like Ben’s, I decided.

/>   It was hard to go home to my grandmother that night and the squalid apartment I’d been raised in.

  Gran was kind to me, but she rarely missed an opportunity to remind me that she took me in because her daughter—my mother—and the man who’d knocked her up were hapless losers. I hated to think of what that might make me, but Gran seemed to love me well enough. I hoped she didn’t hold my dubious parentage against me.

  We lived in a little hovel of an apartment on the sixteenth floor of a housing project. The walls were like cardboard, and I could hear every child’s cry, every domestic dispute, and every sexual act within three apartments on either side of ours.

  I was well versed in creative cursing—as well as various sexual practices—at what couldn’t have been an appropriate age. Gran survived on her pension checks, which we struggled to stretch from month to month. Gran wasn’t in good health, and the frequent trips to the doctor’s offices took as much out of her strength as they did her wallet. There were nights when I went to bed with my stomach grumbling, but I could stand that more than I could stand the thought of asking Gran for something else to eat. She made every scrap of food stretch, and nothing ever went to waste.

  I assessed my sad wardrobe that night, taking stock of what I had in an attempt to be more fashionable, for Ben’s sake. I had one pair of jeans, which I wore every day, a skirt, which I wore whenever Gran felt strong enough to walk the three blocks to church, about four T-shirts in varying states of wear and tear, one sweater, a coat, a pair of sneakers, and a pair of dress shoes.

  There were people worse off than me. I knew this because I passed them in the street as they begged for coins and drank from bottles swathed in paper bags. But there was no way I was anywhere near to being fashionable. If only we had a little money for me to buy just one new outfit to impress Ben.

  I knew that thought was impossible. We barely had enough money to buy dinner, let alone feed my fashion hysteria.

  I pored over old fashion magazines I’d found in trashcans or bought at discount from shops around the neighborhood, trying to glean ways to look good. I unbraided my cornrows and studied myself in the mirror. I had nice, tight curls, not like some of the other girls at school who had that loose, fluffy kink. I decided that I could rock a cute, hip fro and call it a throwback look to the 1970s. I snagged Gran’s scissors and did the best I could until my curls were even all around my head. It made me look older, more mature and less streetwise. I loved it.

  I’d do my makeup tomorrow, I decided, going through Gran’s drawer. There was a bit of red lipstick I could use on my own full lips, and I could rub a bit on my cheeks for a little color. I tried it out for practice and liked the ruddiness it brought to my mahogany skin. Gran didn’t have anything like eye shadow or mascara, but she did have an eyelash curler. I’d simply have to make do with that.

  I left the bathroom feeling like I was on top of the world, but I was brought back down to the ground again when I thought about my wardrobe situation. I twirled the scissors on my fingers, looking at my sad choices, back and forth from my pile of clothes to the models strutting down catwalks and striking poses on street corners on the pages of the magazines.

  I frowned and examined one of my rattier T-shirts critically, comparing it to a model in a fringed shirt. I could do that, couldn’t I? Take the torn hem at the bottom of the shirt and cut upward, again and again, until I had a dainty row of fringes.

  I tried it on over my skirt, then looped my lone sweater over my shoulders. I modeled that look in the bathroom mirror until a knock came on the door.

  “Shonda? What are you doing in there?”

  Gran was the only person who didn’t call me Shimmy, and it always made me feel funny, like I was a different person at home. Cringing, I opened the door, sure that she was going to fuss at me for cutting up perfectly good clothes and for mauling my hair.

  Instead of berating me, she gasped rapturously.

  “Look at my baby girl,” she cooed, pinching my reddened cheeks, “all grown up. How’d you do this, Shonda?”

  Guiltily, I held our Gran’s scissors.

  “You’re not mad, Gran?” I asked, hardly able to believe it.

  “If it makes you happy, it makes me happy,” she said. I hoped I wouldn’t have to soon add senility to the list of Gran’s health problems. A few short years earlier, she’d tan my hide for cutting up clothes or cutting on my own hair.

  “It looks good, doesn’t it?” I asked excitedly, turning back to the mirror. The fringes swung merrily, adding a high-fashion texture and dimension to my outfit. I’d wear my sneakers instead of my dress shoes, which would be both comfortable and unexpected. That’s what fashion was all about: doing something unexpected and succeeding at it.

  “You’re becoming a beautiful young woman right before my eyes,” Gran said. “I can hardly believe it. Honey, we need to have the talk.”

  My insides crawled. Talk? What talk? What knowledge could Gran possibly impart that I didn’t already know thanks to the thin walls of the apartment, the terrible neighborhood, or my classmates at school?

  “Don’t give me that look,” Gran said, dragging me from the bathroom and into the tiny living room that also doubled as a kitchen. There was a pot of pasta boiling on the hot plate for dinner.

  “Gran, I already know everything about everything,” I said, trying to head her off before things got awkward.

  “Uh-huh,” she said, her voice telling me she didn’t believe it for a second. “And do you know how to keep boys from breaking your heart?”

  Taken aback, I shook my head.

  “Don’t give it to them until you’re certain they won’t,” Gran said. “Don’t let boys tell you you’re pretty or ugly or fat or thin. You decide for yourself, and you stick to it. Put yourself first, Shonda, and remember that no one can bring you down but yourself.”

  Gran was a no-nonsense, few-frills woman, and this kind of advice floored me. I’d always felt like she was old-fashioned, but this was hardcore feminist shit.

  “And don’t just give it up for any boy you cross paths with,” Gran added, making me groan and cover my face.

  “Gran,” I groused. “Please. I’m eighteen years old.”

  “And you are ripe for the plucking,” she insisted.

  I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I’d been plucked by several different guys before this particular chat. There was one, though, who I had my eye on, the reason for my little makeover. I was falling head over heels for Ben, and I hoped that my transformation would show him I took him seriously.

  The next day at school, I got all kinds of attention. I didn’t even make it to the school building with no less than five passers-by making appraising remarks about my appearance. Once inside, I made a beeline to Ben’s locker, sneaking up and leaning against the cold metal so I’d surprise him once he slammed the door shut.

  He jumped when he did, staring at me before breaking into a grin.

  “Holy shit, Shimmy,” he said. “I almost didn’t recognize you. You look great!”

  I beamed and shook my hips a little, making the fringe on my shirt swing and dance.

  “Thanks,” I said. “I’m trying to be more fashionable. Someone told me I should. Have you told anyone your plans to play basketball after you graduate?”

  Ben laughed and shook his head. “I’m going to have to now, aren’t I?” he said.

  There wasn’t a thing I could do to hide my happy grin as we walked together to class, jealous classmates—male and female—eyeing us with jealousy. Girls were jealous of me being with Ben, and boys were jealous of Ben being with this latest incarnation of myself.

  I counted it as a victory when Ben started spending more time with me in and out of class, always walking with me to my locker and his, and spending afternoons at his home whether we were working on projects or not. It was not, more often than anything.

  He took me to the movie I’d bugged him about, and slipped his arm around my shoulder in the darkened
theater. If it was possible to be happier than the wild, wild high I was feeling, my heart floating somewhere above my body, I wouldn’t believe it.

  Gran took note of the changes in me and simply shook her head.

  “You remember what I told you, Shonda,” she’d say, shaking her finger and making me cringe.

  But all rules were out the window with Ben. Gran even gave me some of her old clothes that she didn’t wear anymore so I could cut them up and otherwise alter them to suit my new persona as a fashionista.

  I loved planning my outfits for the next day almost as much as I loved going over to Ben’s house after school was finished. I started pretending that I was his wife, and that we were going home to our married lives. Those rich golden couches? Mine. The butler who opened the door if Ben fumbled with the key for even five seconds? Mine. The state-of-the-art kitchen chock full of delicious junk food and name brand snacks? Also mine.

  More and more, I was even considering Ben as mine. We didn’t really talk about what we were to each other, but I liked to think he felt the same way about me. Of course, I never took him home to Gran’s apartment. I didn’t want him to see that. I only wanted him to see how glamorous I looked with my makeup and hair and ever-changing outfits.

  The first day we kissed, in one of the hallways at school, I walked on air for a solid week. The second time we kissed, I wanted more, the more I already knew was possible, the more that men could give to women.

  We were in his room, reading some assignment for our English class on his bed, when the possibility became a reality.

  His fingers traced the shape of my hip beneath my skirt, slipped onto my bare thigh, and tickled the sensitive skin behind my knee. I clapped my textbook shut and rolled over to face him, plastering what I hoped was a seductive look on my face.

  “Shimmy, have you ever been with someone before?” he asked, the look on his face showing me how much it pained him to ask.

  I wondered briefly what the right answer was. Would he shun me if I said no, laughing me out of his house for my lack of experience? Or would he throw me out of the house for being a slut if I said yes, not daring to dip his rich golden cock in a place that had known other boys before him.