Need Me (Truthful Lies Trilogy Book Three)

by Dunning, Rachel

  But when Blaze was gone, the lack of atomic explosions in my life didn’t leave me feeling any happier. It left me feeling hollow and empty.

  I wanted to call her after we split up, tried desperately to patch things up. But things had gone so wrong, and so fast. I buried myself in work. The moving business picked up and soon I had ten men working under me. Skate became my right-hand guy. Money started rolling in. Dino Moretti, Gina’s brother, was convicted of arson in December. (Gina took that in her stride, which only goes to show how well she really was doing by then.) All the threats that Blaze and I had somehow suffered through, were now seemingly gone.

  Through Skate and Trev I heard that her single was moving up the underground charts, that she was now in even higher demand at all the top New York clubs, that she would soon be playing the European circuit as well.

  It stung.

  It was the Universe telling me that she and I were never meant to be. She and I had fought it, fought against “fate.” Despite everything that had gone wrong in our lives—the signs, the endless signs!—we’d ignored them, and persisted in our relationship.

  It wasn’t meant to be. And when I saw the success she was having, when I saw how well she was doing, I realized with cutting clarity that I had been wrong for her. So I stopped trying to reach her.

  I was happy she started succeeding. Ecstatic.

  But personally, I was miserable. Empty. Hollow. And dying.

  In my lonely nights I picked up Jacky Bourbon Daniels and dated her for a while. When the booze only left me with a lurching stomach and a headache to boot I decided to pick it up with women. But that left me feeling only more hollow. As the weeks and months rolled by I started to wonder at what had gone wrong, who had stuck their fingers in, and meddled with, the purist of loves that had ever been. Was it a person? Destiny? Fate?

  It was the nine-month anniversary of my break-up with Blaze, give or take a few days. I looked at the ink spanning my arm, the bright colors all over it, my mother’s name, the tiger’s head, the voluptuous nude riding that head, and the words Live In The Now on the inside, running down the length of it. I remembered Tatiana Watkins stroking that ink once...

  Tatiana Watkins...

  I was drunk, in my living room, spinning and angry.

  Tatiana Watkins...

  I remembered the photos. The look in Blaze’s eyes as if she’d never trust me again.

  Tatiana Fuckin Watkins! ...

  I gurgled Jack down my throat and let some of it roll down my cheeks onto my shorts and onto the couch. At a ghost in my living room I said out loud, “Tatiana Goddamn Watkins!” Only, it sounded more like “zhzhzhian gawwwwwdimin wogginzzzzz!”

  I stumbled over my living room table, looked up at my Asus tablet and remembered Blaze’s pristine figure, nude, standing right on that corner, putting Ellie Goulding on the speakers in preparation for us to make love.

  “Zhzhzhian gawwwwwdimin wogginzzzzz!”

  The room spun, the walls creaked. The open bottle sloshed in my hands. It was clear, clear as a rapturous light at the end of an Armageddon tunnel, what I needed to do. In my inebriated state of mind, spinning and whirling and unable to utter even a simple syllable out loud, I knew with all my might what I had to do.

  I had to do to Tatiana what she had done to me.

  And that’s exactly what I did.

  When you’re drunk, you never come up with great ideas. This must have been one of my worst.

  -5-

  There I was, drunk, having ludicrous epiphanies and bad ideas in my apartment.

  “Bitch.” I belched, but I said Bitch correctly. So I said it again. “Bitch!” Belch. “Fuggin BITCH!” I threw the booze bottle at the wall. It smashed. The shattered glass and amber liquid formed a pattern of psychedelic colors, like blood on a windshield.

  The room took a sudden turn to the left and I wondered how I’d gotten onto this ship.

  The ship lurched, waves rolled over me, my dinner rose up to my throat but I pushed it down. The floor came up to meet me, and I felt a dull thud near my eye as the carpet met my face. The pain traveled to my neck and down my back. The room spun faster, harder and faster and harder and fast—

  Hey, how did I get down here?

  I passed out.

  When I woke up the next morning, my head was in a vise. I was gonna have to hire somebody to clean the rug. I’d cut myself on the smashed glass of the Jack Daniels bottle.

  But I was happy.

  I was gloriously happy.

  I’d clean myself up, give my teeth a good brush and then jump in the shower.

  And then I was going to visit Tatiana Fuckin Watkins.

  -6-

  I drove up to Brooklyn Heights, Pier Six. Still a little drunk. I called Tatiana from my truck when I got there. I drove a Ford back then, sexy silver, paid for with my hard-earned money before I started making dough by the jugloads. She picked up instantly, and spoke in that husky Lauren Bacall voice, the kind of voice that says it wants to wrap itself around a certain member of yours and blow. “Why, Mr. Cocks, how nice to receive a call from you.”

  She never did get rid of the habit of elongating the sound of my last name, making it sound like that aforementioned member. And I never did get into the habit of liking her for it.

  “I take it your husband’s not home,” I said.

  “Oh, he’s home.”

  “Then get rid of him.”

  “My my my. Taking charge, are we?”

  “Yes, it’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”

  “Things not work out with the colorful one?”

  I didn’t like how Tatiana referred to Blaze as the “colorful one,” either referring to her green and pink hair (back then) or the beautiful art on her left arm. “She received your photos, yes.”

  “Well, Mr. Cocks, it can’t have been true love if she believed such a thing as that, now could it?”

  My hand clutched tight around the steering wheel. I was afraid I’d break it.

  I was looking out at the newly built park out by Pier Six, people barbecuing with their families, kids on swings. I could hear the wind coming through on the phone line, so I figured she must be out on her terrace.

  “Why don’t we leave Blaze out of this and take care of things ourselves.”

  “Hmmm, Blaze. Is that her name? I googled it, found it spelled in a strange language, could never imagine how the hell to pronounce it.” That explained the fact that Blaze had received the envelope of photos with her Polish name written on it.

  One thing was for sure, Tatiana was not someone you could mess with if you were afraid of getting your fingers burned. The bitch was dangerous. Is dangerous...

  “So what is it you want actually, Missus Watkins?”

  “Mmmmm, Declan.” The groan sounded like she had a vibrating toy in her hand... “You know damn well what I want. Now if you’d only given it to me the day I’d brought my friends over for you, your, uhm, girlfriend would not have received those ghastly photos, and you and I would be able to continue our clandestine relationship happily until we got sick of each other.” She sighed.

  I squeezed the phone in my hand, flaming and furious.

  “Get rid of your man and I’ll give you what you want. Get rid of him now.”

  She made a squeak of some sort, inhaled deeply. Her next words came through quivers. I began to understand a little about her mindset. She liked the idea of danger, of that element of a threat. I could use that to my advantage. “G—give me a minute.” In muffled tones (her hand was probably covering the receiver) I heard her French doors open, heard her mumbling something about “Oh honey ... now ... before ... yes ... please ... No, it must be now ... Manhattan! ... Oh, damnit! Can you not just fucking do what I damn well ask you to! ...” Then lots of kissing (I think she uncovered the mouthpiece just so I could get the sound of it.) Then she said to her husband, “Baby, do this for me and I’ll show you why you married me.” More kissing, him groaning.

  Oh God,
this is making me sick.

  Her husband left. I went up to her luxurious apartment and she didn’t wait a second. She lifted her skirt up and leaned against the wall. The view of Manhattan across the river gleamed richly behind her.

  I pressed the record button on my phone in my pants pocket, pushed up against her on the wall, rubbered up...and gave her what she’d wanted since she’d met me.

  Whatever revulsion you might feel for me at having told you this, just know that I’ve felt that revulsion a hundred times stronger for myself. And a million times more.

  At the beginning of this tale I promised to tell you the truth. The truth is sometimes ugly.

  She was grinning in the end, pushing her dress down and fixing her matted hair. “My oh my,” she said. “If I’d known it would be that good...I might have...well...never mind.”

  “You might have screwed up my life earlier?”

  She smirked, pushed out her silicone breasts and flicked her hair back. “Now now, Mr. Cocks, I didn’t screw up your life. Your girlfriend—”

  I put my hand up to stop her. “If you and I are gonna do this, we need to get some things straight. One: Don’t bring up Blaze again.” She smirked, and I moved in closer, hairsbreadth away from her lips. My eyes aimed at hers like two rifles. “I’m not fucking kidding.”

  She gulped. She understood I was serious.

  “You understand?”

  She nodded. Sweat trickled down her brow and it might just have been from the sun and the sex but was also very likely just plain fear. “And, two, I want your friends in on it. The other two.” It hadn’t only been Tatiana who’d maneuvered me into those photos, it had been her two friends as well. I wanted them all.

  “Oh, well, Dalya I might get over here but Samantha is married now—”

  “You’re also married.” My face was right up against hers. I looked down her blouse and saw her flinch, and grin. She widened her legs just a little bit.

  “Well...Declan Cox, maybe you’re just going to have to convince me to bring her over. Maybe I want you all to myself.” She smiled widely, looked up at me with Fuck-Me-Hard-And-Fuck-Me-Now eyes.

  I grinned back. “No. You got a taste today. Next time it’s gonna be the three of you, or you’ll be dreaming about that taste for the rest of your life. Unless, of course, Mr. Watkins can satisfy you like I can.”

  Her eyes lolled back. A drugged smile filled her dazed face. “Oh, Declan...you tease, you tease, you tease!”

  I let go of her, pushed my pelvis against her. “Get them here. Tomorrow.”

  “Oh, I can’t—”

  I pushed away. “Then forget—”

  “Wait!” Her cry was desperate. She put her hands out and the look on her face reminded me of Gina’s look in the early days of me going out to see her, her eyes wild and frenzied and seeing something else in front of her other than what was really there. And what did Tatiana the Nymphomaniac see when she looked at me—a toy? Someone to be cuckolded or teased or played with?

  It dawned on me, solidly and realistically, that Tatiana was evil, conniving, manipulative, and perhaps just a little bit mad.

  It dawned me as well, with no less terror to my heart, that the game I was currently playing placed me solidly in the same camp as her. Just a little bit mad...

  I was just like her now.

  I’d sunk down to her level.

  I’d lost everything. Lost my mother to cancer, my father to murder, and my girl to this crazed lunatic. The same crazed lunatic I was now, officially, having sex with!

  I was just a little bit mad myself now. I had nothing left to lose, nothing left to live for. And so I let the madness take over me. Another drug, another high.

  Tatiana and I and Dalya and Samantha fucked up an orgy in her bedroom the next day. It turns out Samantha was not too happily married either. I recorded the whole thing. I got some inside skinny on setting up cameras, just like Tatiana had done when she’d photographed her false sex-scene with me in this very bedroom.

  I’d planned it to be one night, and then I’d send the photos over to their husbands.

  But I’ve mentioned that sex has been a drug for me. Booze has been a drug for me. And drugs have been a drug for me. With Tatiana and her coven, I had all three together.

  For months.

  And so began my downfall, the one I hit before I finally crashed completely, months later, and Trev would be the one to dig me out.

  I’d lost all pride in myself, and somewhere along the line I’d even lost track of just what I’d been doing with these women to begin with. Sex led to more sex and more sex. The drug. The high. We pulled out the booze and then the weed and finally the Es. I lost track of life, even lost track of Blaze. I actually forgot her when I was cooked on enough dope. Months went by, living one day to the next, forgetting all meaning in life, all reason for getting up in the morning. Skate took over the business almost completely. I was never there. Before I knew it, a year had gone by since Blaze and I had split up. August of Year One.

  Tatiana and I had spent more and more time together. Alone. We’d felt—two demented souls—some sick need and solace in each other.

  The drugs took over.

  The booze took over.

  Sex with these three calamitous women took over.

  I was high every day, drunk every day. And intoxicated by sex every. single. day.

  A drug is a drug. You take it, you don’t question it, you get carried away by it. In a demented, twisted, altered, twilight-zone screwed up way, I came to “need” Tatiana in a way. Two lost souls. I came to “need” the debauchery that I and these three women had gotten involved in, the high, the delirium.

  But then something happened. Something that fired a bullet in the smoke cloud of my substance-affected mind:

  Tatiana wanted to play it rough, real rough. She wanted codewords and fighting and ropes and...the kind of sex I’m just...not really into, as such. I’m a vanilla guy, always have been. And what Tatiana wanted, where she’d scream “No” but that didn’t really mean no, slapped me in the face as to how far I’d come from what I’d had with...That Other Girl I Still Loved but Who I’d Forgotten.

  I’d come light-years from where I’d started, from what I’d had.

  I’d lost myself, sold my soul.

  What Tatiana was asking for now, three months into our “arrangement,” one year after Blaze and I had called it quits, was just a little more than I was willing to give. A lot more.

  So I pulled the plug.

  I got three envelopes. I put the evidence for Samantha Krissta née Ryder, Dalya Somerset, and Tatiana The Disaster Watkins into them. Then I hand-delivered each envelope to their respective husbands’ work addresses. Each one titled “Stay with them if you want to. But just so you know...”

  Then I got drunk. Paralytically plastered. And I got high, and drunk, and high, and drunk. After three weeks of not taking any calls, Trev found me. The Giants were in town and he wanted to hook up with me and Skate. He’d been trying to reach me but I never answered. Trev blasted the door of my apartment open with Skate, saw me sitting in the corner of the toilet, sick and dying. He lifted me up, made me retch up whatever poisons were still left in my system (booze booze and booze) and then made me drink water and coffee. Lots of water, and lots of coffee. I’ve never drunk so much water and so much coffee in one go. I drank so much that it almost made me retch again.

  But it didn’t. It cleaned me out.

  Technically, it was an intervention, just like we’d done for Xavier over a year before. Trev arranged to skip a few training sessions and Skate appointed another dude at Sexy Movers to be in charge for a few days. They hung out with me all day. And the next day. And the day after that. They hung out with me all week. This was regular season, September of Year One, and so Trev was needed on the team. Somehow he arranged it to take “personal time” or “family time” (and a whopper of a contractual fine) and made it happen to spend as much time with me as possible to get me ba
ck on my feet. Skate cleaned up my apartment, got some men in to clean up the old stains, the dropped red wine. Shards of glass and whiskey were still stuck in the carpet from when I’d thrown that bottle of Jack against the wall four months earlier, the night before my eventual tryst with Tatiana. I had never gotten that fully cleaned out.

  I got the shivers. I was a true alcoholic by now, through and through. I wanted E, I wanted booze, I wanted weed.

  I wanted Blaze.

  But mostly I wanted my self-respect back.

  I told Trev what I’d done, with Tatiana and her coven, and he didn’t care. He didn’t care that I’d done some broad and her friends and sent the tapes to their husbands. “They deserved it is how I see it,” he’d said. And that’s all that was said about it. The key thing was to get me back on my feet. That’s what I understood from my boys sitting there with me in the kitchen. Trev forced me to drink water for a week like it was some sort of panacea in the world of alcoholism.

  I confess that it helped. Maybe it was just the idea of having something touching the lips. The mind plays tricks, but it’s possible to play tricks on the mind as well. By drinking water until my bladder was bursting, I kept on fooling my mind that I was giving it what it wanted. And what it wanted was something—a liquid—to numb the pain.

  But life remained gray, remained hopeless. I saw the worry in Trev and Skate’s eyes as they tried to get me motivated in the business, tried to get me to look at life with some semblance of hope, tried to find some reason for me to get up in the morning.

  There was none. I’d lost it all. It had started with Ma, moved onto my father, and had ended with Blaze.

  Some more months went by. Trev carried on the season but Skate was assigned to watch over me. I got back into the business, but Skate stayed at my place and was always around me, making sure I wouldn’t relapse.