Almost Wrong

by Aubrey Parker

  “So you didn’t make the toast to cheer my health.”

  “No, of course not!” Samantha laughs. “Strategic moves, Hunter. This is why you need me. As a partner. You’re smart, but you don’t consider your image. Your profile. You’re a hot, single billionaire, baby. You parlay that, they won’t be able to get enough of you.”

  “You’re really on the ball, Sam.”

  She grabs my dick, right there in the lobby, puts her palm flat on my crotch and starts kneading. Carl and Telly are right in her line of sight. Her thinking this is appropriate means one of two things, maybe both: either she feels I pay enough for my penthouse that I should be able to act as lewd as I want, or she feels Carl and Telly aren’t human enough to be demure for. Doing it front of them, to Samantha, is probably like doing it in front of dogs.

  “Damn right I’m on the ball,” she purrs, still kneading my junk. “What do you think you fuck me so much for?” As if this is how I pay her. She has it backward, though she does tend to orgasm loudly and frequently, so she’s getting something for sure.

  I watch her for a second, stiffening despite my best efforts to stay neutral. She finally lets go, and my resolve to end it slips another temporary notch.

  I turn to the mailboxes and fish for my key. The boxes here are fancier than my first apartment. I’m barely exaggerating. Mine is giant — not because I want a massive mailbox, but because it’s required by management. I get too many perks and premiums from clients and wannabes. Last week alone, I received an Apple Watch, a silver Monopoly board, several Mont Blanc pens, and an Oliver Rugger umbrella — all just because.

  It’s funny; there was a day when the liquidated stuff I receive for free could have paid my rent for a decade. Back then, I had nothing. We had nothing. And yet it’s now — now that I own a Lear, a sprawling LA penthouse, two Teslas, and three Ferraris — that people give me everything I’d never want.

  “When we get upstairs, as your birthday present, I’m going to let you fuck me in the ass,” Samantha purrs.

  I catch Carl’s eye and see him smirk despite trying to hold it in. And despite my trying to hold it in, I’m already pipe hard again.

  Breaking up with Samantha can wait a little longer.

  I open my mailbox. Just letters today, and not many. It’s not really legal to mess with the mail, but I’ve asked the staff to sort it to lessen my load. I paid them enough to stop caring about the possible federal infraction. Now all my junk mail gets tossed, and bills are forwarded to my bookkeeper. I only see personal mail, so even though this mailbox is often stuffed with crap I don’t need, it’s also frequently empty.

  I don’t get much personal mail. But who does? It’s not that it’s lonely at the top — though there’s some truth to that, for sure — it’s that sending letters is a lost art.

  There are three cards in the mailbox. Obvious for what they are in oversized colorful envelopes.

  I pull them out. Samantha’s looking over my shoulder, her hair on my neck, perfume seductive, breath sweet from the gum she just spit out. Her breasts are against the back of my arm. I can’t help picturing them, feeling the press of her nipples. They’re high, firm, young, ripe. Sam is only twenty-one, and it bothers me that lately that’s felt almost too young for me, despite the filth she spouts from her experienced mouth when she’s not playing society girl.

  “Who’s wishing you happy birthday, birthday boy?”

  “This one is from Raymond,” I say, handing her the first.

  “Who’s Raymond?”

  “My lawyer.”

  No comment.

  “And this one is from that school. Where I did my last benefit, for literacy and entrepreneurism for kids.”

  The card is sweet. The kids all signed their names, and the inside’s a jumble. The idea of running their own businesses someday had hit home with the kids, but maybe I’d aimed too young. A disproportionate number had said they wanted to own their own fireman businesses, or that they’d wanted to run basketball player companies.

  Sam makes a sighing little “Aww” noise, proving she’s human.

  I’ve stopped at the final card. Sam is still looking over my shoulder, moving around. But I don’t want her to see this one. Not Sam. Not now. Maybe never.

  “Who’s that one from?”

  “My dad,” I say.

  She tries to peek at the card’s interior, but I’ve closed it and turned away, breaking her halfway embrace.

  “I thought you didn’t talk to your dad.”

  “I don’t.” I flap the envelope. “But they sent a card anyway.”

  “They?”

  “My dad and my stepmom.”

  Samantha’s small smile says nothing, other than that this part of our evening’s concluded. She moves around me instead, drawing a lazy finger across my chest, then down hers. The blue dress clings to her body as if painted on. I swear I can see everything, but despite my erection, I barely notice her.

  My attention is still on the card, which I keep sneaking peaks into.

  A birthday card from my dad.

  From my dad and my stepmom.

  And from Angela.

  Angela.

  CHAPTER SIX

  ANGELA

  I remember the day I met Hunter Altman.

  Back then, Mom was just trailing off with her drinking. She was in this fragile place where she no longer leaned on the bottle, but needed another crutch. It didn’t seem wrong to me that she hooked up with Bill, but I hadn’t yet come to understand codependence. I was in my own world, sixteen years old and totally selfish.

  Looking back, it’s hard to fault myself even from the perspective of a woman who grew into her twenties with regret, seeing her dreams subjugated, lost, forgotten. It only seemed right that I should give up on myself to take care of others who — let’s face it — were perfectly capable of stepping up and taking care of themselves. All teenagers are selfish — not because they want to be, but because that’s how their compasses are tuned. Back then, there was only me and my world. There was school, and there were boys. If it didn’t affect me, I remember not quite thinking, then it wasn’t really worth my attention.

  So it was with Mom and Bill.

  I didn’t see how he was probably wrong for her until it was too late — until it began to affect me. I knew I didn’t like him but I didn’t think he was bad, which he wasn’t. He was bad for her, it turned out. He dragged her down, enabled her, magnified her weaknesses while unintentionally muffling her strengths. I don’t think it was anyone’s fault, even now. But looking back, it was clearly the beginning of an end. Or the middle, seeing as we’d always been sort of trapped in our station, prisoners of our neighborhood.

  Some people dream big. I’d always dreamed moderately. In my teens, I knew I wanted my own place and a nice handsome man to love me. It was all I could imagine, but it was enough.

  Bill came casually into our life, and it didn’t seem all that odd that he wanted to move in. As long as it didn’t affect me, it didn’t matter … and until Bill brought over his first carload of stuff, I wasn’t affected and somehow never imagined I would be. They started talking about it; I went to school. Mom’s cessation from drink had freed up enough money to buy me a shitty car and grant me some precious independence.

  I had my car.

  I had my room, like my life, the way I wanted it.

  My mother had stopped drinking, and was better than she’d been since Dad had left her. Left us.

  I was in the middle of my high school’s social pecking order: not really popular but not unpopular either. I had enough self-confidence to know I was pretty, and was told by others that I was prettier than I realized. I rebuffed the attention because I’ve always been shy, maybe even standoffish, but it was good enough, and I had friends. I dated a little, though never seriously.

  For a long time, I was fine with the idea of Bill moving in.

  Until he brought his son to our house one day, to get us all acquainted.

&n
bsp; I should have known something was off when Bill was nervous.

  “Now, I should tell you,” he said, his jaw shifting, his eyes avoiding ours, “my son — Hunter. He’s … unique.”

  Unique. That’s what you say about someone who you can’t conjure another adjective for, so you say something vaguely upbeat. Kind of like how people call developmentally delayed people “special” or say that ugly people have nice personalities.

  I found it interesting that I was being prepped for “uniqueness.” In a normal world, that wouldn’t be something that people had to prepare for. If he were unique, I’d have met him without preamble, then thought, Wow, this boy is something special, and that would have been it. But here I was, being steeled for supposedly the same thing.

  “Okay,” I said.

  Mom looked at Bill, drumming her fingers on her knees. I was the only one being prepared. Whatever uniqueness this boy was infected with, she’d already had her vaccines. They were on the couch, and I was on the chair opposite the coffee table. They looked like two parents informing a child of a forthcoming divorce.

  “You can just stay a little while,” Mom said, as if granting a favor.

  “Just long enough to get a feel for him,” Bill echoed.

  “Okay,” I told them.

  Hunter didn’t come on his own. Bill had to go get him. Looking back, there was probably no way he would have come otherwise. Bill and his wife were divorced like Mom and Dad, but Bill had custody. I didn’t think that meant anything at the time. It also didn’t seem strange that Bill spent a lot of his nights at our house, drunk, leaving Hunter alone.

  When Bill came back, he knocked, though he already had the habit of walking right into our house. I opened the front door and saw Bill standing beside a boy I knew to be seventeen, a year older than me. But something in his half-lidded eyes looked older — easily in his twenties. He was wearing a plain white T-shirt and jeans, clearly annoyed to be where he was.

  “Angela, this is my son, Hunter.”

  Hunter’s eyes were on our ratty doormat.

  I said, “Hey.”

  Mumbling, he replied, “Hey.”

  “Hunter, this is Angela.”

  “I figured that out … Bill.”

  Bill’s eyes flicked to me. A tiny nod passed between us, and they both came in.

  Bill led Hunter into the living room and plunked him on the couch. Mom sat in the big chair. I sat where I’d been earlier, across from the coffee table. Our meeting should have been somewhere else — doing an activity rather than sitting around in the living room. I didn’t know if we were supposed to go around in a circle like a support group sharing our feelings, or what.

  “So,” said Hunter after a few moments of silence. “This is fun.”

  I thought he was joking. Hunter looked up, and because I was across from him, our eyes met. His were hard and angry. An almost-smile fell off my face. He’d come in with a chip on his shoulder and seemed determined to keep it. He looked toward his father, shook his head, and leaned back with his arms crossed.

  He had a lean, scrappy look. His arms were casually handsome with sharp striations of muscle. He had the same size frame as my boyfriend at the time — not too large, not too small. But the same weight on Hunter looked … somehow harder.

  “Hunter is into music,” Bill said.

  “Oh, yes,” Mom chimed. “He plays guitar.”

  Hunter looked at her. I wasn’t sure if the three of them had even met, but Mom had, I assumed, heard plenty. Enough to know that Hunter was going to be as cool and borderline rude as he was already being.

  Hunter looked at his feet, kicking at something under the table.

  “Tell them what kind of guitar you play, Hunter.”

  Hunter looked at his father. A smile rose on one half of his mouth. For a second, I thought it looked almost cute, then I realized it was condescension. He turned his gaze on us, his face falsely indulgent, his hair a pleasant mess, his jawline square, his eyes more experienced than any seventeen-year-old’s should be.

  “A blue one,” he said.

  Mom smiled. “Angela plays the flute.”

  Then no one spoke for fifteen seconds.

  “So.” Bill slapped his legs and stood. “Anyone want anything to drink?”

  Again, that smile tugged the corner of Hunter’s mouth. Without looking up from the floor, he said, “You do.”

  My mom’s eyes ticked toward Bill, then me. I was only observing, not sure what to think. I sat with my legs uncrossed in the chair, leaning back, sometimes running a hand idly through the sides of my long, chestnut-brown hair like I still do today. Mom and Bill both seemed as if they thought they shouldn’t let the comment go then decided to anyway—though I’m assuming the scene would have been different if I hadn’t been there.

  “Do you want anything, Angela?”

  “Maybe a Diet Coke.”

  Maybe it was the mention of “diet” that made Hunter look at me. Maybe he thought I was being prissy, like a girl who goes on a steakhouse date and orders a salad. His eyes were on me for maybe three seconds, but I felt the gaze a lot longer than that. In those three seconds, he traveled from my legs to my middle to my face. Then his eyes fell back down, and he resumed kicking at a ball of paper on the floor.

  “Anything for you, Hunter?”

  “No.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah.”

  Mom asked for a glass of water, but I’m sure she did it so I wouldn’t be the only one with an order. Bill, awkwardly, got nothing for himself. He handed me the Diet Coke and Mom her water. He didn’t sit.

  I cracked open the can and sipped, feeling heavy eyes upon me.

  “Maybe we should go look at rooms,” Bill said.

  Hunter looked up. “Good idea. We don’t have any rooms at our place.”

  “I mean …” Bill, now chewing his lip, looked at my mom. I’d seen Bill raging drunk, and it was uncomfortable — now, stone sober, he was worse. I almost wanted to tell him to take a few shots and recover his balls, because right now he was embarrassing himself. “I mean your room.”

  Hunter looked up, his head tilted, the sarcastic smile back on his face. He was handsome, his smile toothy and somehow disarming — or it would’ve been, I imagined, if he hadn’t aimed it at his father.

  “Now I know we have one of those at our place.” The smile vanished, and I saw it for the farce it was.

  Everything clicked.

  Why were we being introduced?

  Well, because there had been talk about Bill moving in.

  And what would happen when Bill moved in?

  Shit. I was suddenly not okay with this. At all.

  I knew which room they were talking about. The extra room next to mine — the one where we’d always tossed our junk. I’d noticed Mom clearing it out but thought she was thinning the hoard.

  I felt incredibly stupid. How could I not have realized that Bill and his son were a package? I’d honestly never considered it. I’d been off in my selfish teen-girl world, caring only about my car and my friends and my schoolwork. Things only mattered if they directly affected me.

  Well, a jaded, obnoxious asshole of a teen boy moving into the room beside mine — sharing my bathroom, becoming a presence in my living space — would affect me a lot.

  “Wait,” I said.

  Hunter effortlessly read my expression. He turned his hard gaze fully on me for the first time.

  I wanted to run.

  “What, you don’t want to be roomies?” He looked up at our parents. “I imagine this is news to you, too, huh?”

  “I told you, Hunter. I told you Maria and I were moving in together.”

  “Maria and you,” Hunter repeated.

  “And that means you, obviously.”

  “Why obviously?”

  “Where are you going to live? Obviously, you’ll live with me.”

  “I could live with Jimmy, like I said.”

  “You’re not going to bum off
your friends, Hunter.”

  “Oh, no. It’d be terrible, like a deadbeat, hitching onto someone else’s rent for a free ride.” Hunter looked at his father then at Mom, but both decided not to comment. Hopefully, they were trying to make peace, not refraining from response because it was true. Mom had too much stress and not enough money already.

  I wanted to weigh in, but it seemed ridiculous. I’d known Bill was thinking of moving in. I knew he had a son. I hadn’t known he had full custody, sure, but failing to put two and two together was dumb. I’d assumed somehow that this son (the one Bill had for some reason thus far avoided introducing) would either live with his mother or … well … anywhere else.

  Again, I was a teenager. Things weren’t in my world until they were smack-dab in my face.

  We’d been sitting together for maybe five minutes, and I’d already started counting seconds until he could leave. Duly introduced, we’d never have to meet again. His aura was unpleasant. I sensed anger, violence, irritation, annoyance. Maybe self-pity. Sharing the living room with him for an hour was proving to be terrible. I definitely didn’t want him here every day, camped on the couch when I wanted to do my homework, gunking up the bathroom, pissing all over the toilet. Thinking about it gave me chills. The house was meager; now it would be worse. Tense. With this dickhead around, I wouldn’t feel comfortable telling Mom about my day, because I wouldn’t want his ears to hear … or his sly, sarcastic mouth to mock me.

  “We talked about this at length already, Hunter, and —” Bill’s temper was beginning to flare. Even without alcohol, it was terrible.

  “Oh, well,” Hunter retorted. “If you talk about something long enough, it stops being unfair.”

  “Unfair?” Bill snapped.

  “Yes, Dad, unfair. I’m seventeen fucking years old, and—”

  “Watch your mouth.”

  “—and I don’t see how whatever bullshit you decide has to automatically affect me, especially if I can just go out and—”

  “And what, Hunter?”

  “I could get my own place.”

  Bill laughed. My mother half-stood, seeming unsure what to do or say.