100 PROOF

by Shanora Williams

  My mother would ask me constantly: “If you don’t respect yourself, why would anyone else, Vin?”

  She had a point, but the truth was I didn’t give a shit about what anyone thought of me. I didn’t need their respect, nor did I demand it.

  I just wanted to live and be left the fuck alone. I wanted to forget about all the bullshit in my life, pretend it never happened, and do whatever I wanted.

  Don’t get me wrong, I still did, but things changed dramatically when Marley walked away.

  I was the type to go to every party I heard about, make an appearance at every club in town—drink, snort, and smoke the night away, just to forget about it all.

  I couldn’t help myself. No, I really couldn’t help myself back then. Drinking both fueled and destroyed me. It mended and ruined me.

  Nothing could compare to that sweet buzz—the fire that filled my veins and awakened my dark, broken soul. Nothing else made me feel like I was on top of the world, soaring and dominating, like a wild bird.

  But someone could.

  Her.

  It’d been more than two years, and I hadn’t heard from her. Not since she left me behind, and she had every fucking reason to forget about my sorry ass. I couldn’t find her on Facebook or Twitter.

  She had no real friends left here for me to contact that would help me get in touch with her and her number had been disconnected. She became a ghost.

  I didn’t think it would get any worse. Losing her felt like enough. She tore my heart out, crushed it, and watched it shrivel to pieces before her very eyes. She left me behind like I meant nothing to her.

  A part of me wanted to hate her for making me fall in love, but hating her was damn near impossible. Despite the damage she did to me, it was all my fault. And despite how lonely and terrible I felt, I couldn’t shake her.

  Like now, her blue eyes were haunting me in my sleep. I tossed and turned, groaned and flopped. I was sweaty when my eyes peeled open, the California sun on the horizon.

  A loud buzz sounded when I turned flat on my back. I swiped a rough hand over my face, and then grabbed the buzzing culprit.

  I didn’t recognize the number calling, but it had a Texas area code. The only people I knew living in Texas were my mother, her dickhead of a husband, and my Goody Two-shoes little brother. I had Mom’s number saved—knew it by heart—but this number was new. It had to be one of them.

  I didn’t know if it was them, and I wasn’t up for talking to either one, so I ignored the call, grabbing a Marlboro from my nightstand instead.

  The buzzing started right back up as soon as I lit the end of the cigarette.

  “Goddamn it,” I muttered. I picked up the phone and answered. “Who the hell is this and what do you want?”

  “Wow,” the familiar voice chuckled. “Is that how you answer your phone now? I swear you have no manners at all, brother.” I pushed up on one elbow when Lloyd’s arrogant voice filled my ear. He never called. Ever. Shit, I couldn’t even remember the last time I spoke to him, to be honest.

  “What the hell do you want, Lloyd?”

  “I obviously need to talk to you about something important, otherwise I wouldn’t be calling.”

  “Well, fucking speak,” I grumbled.

  “Shit, Vincent. It’s been, what, three years since you last heard from me, and that’s how you treat me?”

  Yeah, and I had my reasons. We didn’t like each other. At all. Ever since I could remember, he always thought he was better than me . . . and maybe he was.

  He was the big shot pilot. He was the one who made more money than he knew what to do with. He was the little “big” brother—the one that never messed up. The one I should have been “looking up to”, as his dickhead of a dad always said.

  Oh, yeah, that’s another thing. We didn’t have the same father. I swam out of the sack of a drug-using accountant and popped out of the womb three years before Lloyd was born. Mom attended Princeton, but she was young, spontaneous, and apparently had one too many drinks and a little too much fun with my grandpa’s accountant.

  She had one crazy night with him and found out she was pregnant by him a month prior to her graduating college.

  My stepfather told me once, when I had really, really let them down, that I was an accident—that she was so close to getting an abortion with me, but couldn’t bear the thought of murdering an innocent child.

  Around the time she found out, she was already dating William, also-known-as Dickhead. Lloyd’s real father. Not mine. They were dating when she had her little sexcapade with the accountant. William loved Mom enough to stay with her. He knew the Chamber family came from wealth. He didn’t bail. He stuck it out, but only for his own personal gain.

  I wish I could say William raised and treated me as his own, took me under his wing and showed me the ins and outs of life. Well, he fucking didn’t. He resented me. He couldn’t stand the sight of me, and even now, he still couldn’t.

  I wasn’t his son. I wasn’t his priority. I was just a waste of space and air to him. He wouldn’t even give me his last name, hence the reason my last name is Chambers—Mom’s maiden name—and Lloyd’s is Harris.

  “Look, Dickhead Jr., you’re the one calling me at eight in the morning saying you need to talk so fucking talk before I hang up,” I retorted.

  He laughed, like I sounded stupid. Jackass. “Vin, I’m only doing this because Mom wants me to. She insists.” He paused. I waited, not really giving a fuck either way. “I’m engaged now—I asked her a few weeks ago—and Mom is hosting an engagement party for us next weekend to celebrate.”

  “Good for you,” I muttered after releasing a chain of smoke. “She must be one lucky lady to put up with a spoiled little shit like you.”

  “Anyway,” he went on, voice tighter. “The party is next Saturday. I mailed you an invitation but I assume you probably saw whom it was from and either threw it out or haven’t read it yet.” Yep. Threw it out like a champ. Didn’t even open it. “I hate that I’m even saying this, but Mom wants you there, and she also wants me to make you my best man.”

  I scoffed, nearly choking on the chain of smoke in my throat. “You’re fucking kidding, right?” I sputtered.

  “No, Vin. I’m serious.”

  I laughed and had to sit up fully on that one, swinging my legs over the edge of the bed. “Me, as your best man? You realize we aren’t even cool, right? We literally fucking despise each other.”

  “That may be so, but we’re brothers, and it’s what she wants. We all know you aren’t going to settle down and marry anyone, so she wants this wedding to be perfect. It’ll be the only one she can get her hands on. She wants this, and she’s the only reason I’m telling you.”

  “Fuck that,” I muttered, standing and walking to the floor-to-ceiling window. I looked out at the tennis court and then the pool. A few women were out there in bikinis, tanning. “Doesn’t benefit me at all. Why should I waste my time?”

  He huffed a heavy breath. The conversation was obviously irritating him now. “Fuck—I knew you were going to make this difficult! All right, look. Dad says he’ll give you $20,000 if you fly out here next week and also agree to be my best man.”

  My eyebrows drew together. I gripped the phone tighter in hand, turning away from the window. “Twenty thousand bucks just for me to pretend to be your best fucking man? Damn, you guys must really be desperate!” I didn’t know whether to start cracking jokes on him or to actually take him seriously for once. “Shit, man, you’ve got yourself a fucking deal then.”

  “You won’t get it until after the wedding happens. Everything has to work out before you even get a dime of it, Vin. And I mean it. No fucking up. No stupid drunk stunts. None of that crazy shit you always do.”

  “Yeah, yeah, whatever. When is the wedding?”

  “The end of July. That gives you three months to prepare.”

  “I assume one of you fuckers is paying for my flight and hotel for all of this too? I’m not paying a pe
nny for any of this.”

  “Yes. He’s going to email it all. Just . . . try and keep this arrangement between us three. Dad wants to make Mom happy, too. He knows she really wants it to happen. We know you don’t give a shit, but we’re doing this for her. Remember that.” Fucker. Knew just what to say to make me feel like an ass.

  I loved my mother to death, and she loved me just as much, if not more. I’d disappointed her several times, yeah, but she still loved me the same. She still called every other day, and seeing as she was the CEO of a franchise of banks—Titan Banking—I should have considered myself grateful. She still visited every chance she could, just to check on her first born. She didn’t see me as the low-life they did.

  “Yeah, whatever. I’ll be there. Just tell Dickhead Senior to start getting that twenty grand ready for me.”

  “Yeah,” he mumbled. “Sure thing, Vincent. Money is all you ever care about.”

  I hung up before he could say anymore or try to lower the number. That twenty grand was going to come in handy. Becks took care of things around here for me. The only reason I was living in a penthouse in Holly Estates was because she knew the owner of the building and had a good business relationship with her.

  It was a nice place, overlooking Laguna Beach and accommodated with three saltwater pools, a sauna, and a spa. It was like living in a resort.

  Mom lived in Texas with William. She’d moved there when William got some job as Vice President for an oil company right after I graduated. A few years down the road and, I don’t know how, but he became president and CEO of the company.

  Before that, we lived in Los Angeles. I refused to move with them. I wanted to be as far away as possible, and at the age of eighteen, when they decided to leave, I opted to stay.

  It was getting harder and harder to live here though. Everything reminded me of Marley. The three pools. The beach. The sauna. Even the fucking spa. We’d spent way too much time together, in a three-year relationship that was totally fucked up.

  Our morals were wrong.

  We were bad for one another, but we couldn’t, for the life of us, stay the hell away from each other.

  She was my kryptonite, but also my strength. She gave my life meaning—for a while, anyway.

  I walked out of my bedroom and looked around the penthouse. Every corner, every piece of furniture, took me back to her. The memories were seared in my brain—engraved.

  I flopped down on the couch, finishing off my cigarette and then sending Zay a text to meet up. I had to tell him about this. Twenty grand was going to do some good for the plans we had in store.

  I didn’t keep up with Lloyd at all. I didn’t care about his life so of course I didn’t care that he was getting married. The woman he was engaged to was probably some plastic bimbo who was only good at sucking his scrawny little dick and feeding his bloated ego.

  But, man, was I wrong.

  She wasn’t a plastic bimbo. She was someone I knew very well . . . I just didn’t know it yet.

  VIN

  Past

  I thought it was going to be another typical night when I met Marlena Winters.

  I came to my best friend Zay’s house with a bottle of Jack clutched in hand and a joint tucked behind my ear.

  It was meant to be the same routine: spark the joint, share it with Zay, get high as a fucking kite, and then drink until I couldn’t remember shit.

  I was twenty-four, and it was the middle of July in Santa Ana, California. It was humid as hell outside. I remember my shirt gluing to me in all the tight places, sweat dampening my forehead as Zay and I sat on the second-floor balcony, looking down at the people dancing on his deck.

  Something was different about tonight. There were new people around—people I’d never seen before. There were a few guys, younger and trying to fit in, but the group of girls on the middle of the dance floor caught my attention.

  I’d never seen them before. I’d visited Zay’s house for these parties plenty of times—way too many to count, really. His parties happened bi-weekly, and I’d see the same cluster of fuckers every time I visited.

  I’d never seen her or her friends before, though. They stood out from the crowd—I mean, they had to, for me to notice. I usually didn’t care for the women that came. Most of them were drug abusers, thieves, or alcoholics. Most came to get high, drunk as fuck, and to pass out. It’s what they did—what we did.

  But this girl and her friends weren’t like them.

  They stole the spotlight and owned it. They knew many were watching and they didn’t give a damn—especially her. The girl in the middle, the one wearing the blue dress. She caught my eye way more than the others.

  She had round hips and skin the color of light-brown sugar. Her lips were plump and glossed, her ebony hair dyed a bubblegum pink at the tips. She danced like she had no worries in this fucked up world, a red cup clutched in her right hand. Her hips swayed and shimmied to a song by Post Malone, and then she dropped low with the bass, grinning when her redheaded friend cheered her on.

  I had no idea who the hell this new girl was, or what she was even capable of. I didn’t know where she came from, or if she was one of those drug abusers, thieves, or alcoholics, but there was one thing I did know for sure. I wanted her, and one day I was going to end up needing her more than the very air I fucking breathed.

  “Who is the chick in the blue down there?” I asked when Zay passed the joint to me.

  He turned his head, his dreadlocks shifting behind him as he peered over the rail and at the four girls on the middle of the dance floor. The song changed to one by Chingy, and they squealed, like it was one of their throwback favorites. “She’s gotta be one of Noelle’s friends.”

  “Who the hell is Noelle?”

  “A girl I’ve been fucking.” He shrugged, picking up his glass of whiskey. “Told her she could come tonight if she brought a few friends.” He narrowed his eyes, zeroing in on the girl in the blue. “Never met the one in blue, though. She’s cute.”

  “Just cute?” I looked at him like he was stupid. “I should snatch that joint right away from your ass for saying that.”

  “What do you consider her?” he asked, laughing.

  I shrugged it off. I wasn’t about to tell him what I really thought. She wasn’t just cute. She was more than that. I wasn’t the type to refer to women as beautiful—especially party girls who clearly yearned for attention. The only woman I had ever called beautiful was my mother, but right now, it was the only word I could use to describe the girl in blue.

  Beautiful.

  Sexy.

  Her smile was perfect. Her body? Perfect. Everything about her was fucking perfect.

  Zay laughed, pulling me out of my own thoughts. “If you like what you see so much, go talk to her. Noelle hangs with easy bitches, and with the way she’s dancing down there, I’m sure that girl will be more than happy to spread her legs for you.”

  I sat back, kicking my feet up and reaching over for my drink. “Nah.”

  I said no, not knowing then that Zay was so fucking wrong about her. She wasn’t easy, or simple, or anything like the other girls. She was more—so much more. Deep, spontaneous, and sometimes complicated . . . I just didn’t know it yet.

  The girls finished dancing and then left the dance floor. The redhead looked up where we were and pointed at Zay. He bobbed his head, gesturing for her to come up. I assumed she was Noelle. She clung to the girl in blue, and they disappeared within the crowd, entering the house.

  I poured myself another drink and downed it. The music grew louder as I pulled from my joint again, shutting my eyes and tossing my head back, allowing it to drown out the sound, the way I needed it to be.

  When I opened my eyes, blue ones were staring right back at me from across the balcony. They were ice blue, sparkling from the strobe lights flashing from inside.

  My eyebrows instantly pulled together when she flashed a perfect white smile, revealing a row of straight, white teeth. She was sea
ted on the couch across from me, looking me all over like I was a puzzle she was trying to figure out.

  “Did you hear what I said?” she asked, fighting a laugh.

  “No.” I adjusted in my seat. “Wasn’t listening.”

  “Yeah, I can tell,” she noted. “You’re in your own little world over there.” She picked up a shot glass and downed what was probably vodka. After placing the glass down, she gasped and said, “I asked what you were smoking.”

  “Pot. Weed. Marijuana. Mary Jane—whatever you wanna call it.”

  “Well, duh,” she tittered. “Is it any good?”

  I glanced over at Zay, who had Noelle—the redhead— on his lap. He was too busy, with his fingers stuck in Noelle’s panties and his tongue down her throat, to pay me any mind.

  I picked up a joint paper from the clutter on the table. There were bongs, empty bottles, beer cans, weed stems, pills—you name it and it was there. We partied hard or not at all. I knew most of it was bad, but it helped ease my frustrations, and it made me feel good.

  “I’ll let you figure out if it’s any good.” I side-eyed her. “But for the record, I don’t smoke or drink weak shit.”

  She nodded, sinking her teeth into her plump bottom lip. “I can see that.” She sat back against the leather cushion, watching as I rolled the joint. Before I could finish, she asked, “What’s your name, anyway?”

  “Is knowing my name important?” I cocked a brow, looking her over. I couldn’t stop looking at her. She was even sexier up close, small brown freckles sprinkled on her cheeks and the bridge of her nose.

  And those eyes—those fucking eyes. They hooked me every time, clamping down on my soul, trapping me like I was in chains. They matched her, but then again, they didn’t. Though they were bright and almost clear, I couldn’t see through them worth a damn.

  She probably had a soul darker than mine. I should have known then to leave her alone. Her body language was both standoffish and welcoming. I couldn’t read her. I couldn’t tell if she was more into the marijuana or me.

  It didn’t matter.

  Like I’d said before, I wanted her and was going to take her anyway I could get her.