by Zoey Derrick
Before that, I open up the folder with all my shiny new Wellington Ad Management paperwork and start leafing through it.
There’s several papers clipped together with a note on top. “These will need to be signed on your first day.”
I flip through the paperwork and its various things like computer assignment items, a cell phone agreement, and other standard hiring paperwork. I find it rather odd that I’m receiving all this stuff as an entry level position but I shrug it off until I come across my offer letter. Tearing it open I read through it.
It has my name and all the legal mumbo jumbo about my job and then my eyes land on my title.
Marketing Team III
From all my research of Wellington I should have been a marketing assistant, not actually on the team. Which is where I want to be, eventually, but I expected to have to work my way onto the team, now I’m going to have to work extra hard to stay on the team.
My eyes keep reading through the letter, stuff about when benefits will be available, what kind of vacation time I get and then my eyes land on my salary and I scream.
Becca comes running into my room. “What’s wrong?”
Then she catches on to the fact that I’m beaming, laughing and ready to jump up and down. I haven’t felt this happy since Reese called me about my interview.
“Look!” I toss the paper at her while I lay back and smack my feet against the bed squealing with excitement.
“What am I…”
“Keep reading,” I tell her. I’m suddenly glad I didn’t look in the office and more importantly, I wish I would have looked when I got home. This would have changed my mind about going out. Maybe.
“Oh my god. Ireland, is this… seriously?”
I smile wide at her, taking the paper from her and standing up, tossing the paper behind me. “Yes,” I tell her and we spend the next few minutes bouncing and dancing around my room.
My measly estimate of a twenty-five grand salary just tripled.
Chapter 8
Ireland
“Go Ahead and Break My Heart” - Blake Shelton & Gwen Stefani
After Becca and I celebrated, I was wired. The emotional ups and downs of the day culminated into something good, something happy. I needed happy in my life. Getting my dream job with a desirable salary was exactly what I need to start putting the pieces of my life back together. Until I read that letter, I had no idea my dream job would become more than just a place to spend my days.
I drank several glasses of wine to help settle me down, but I still stayed up way too late finishing my book. The humor I’d missed in the first quarter of the book thanks to my mood really shined through. It was two in the morning when I fell asleep happy for the first time in more than a week.
I woke up to the sun shining in my room around eight-thirty with nothing to do for the day, so I lounged around until my phone rings at nine-thirty. It’s the lab company with an opening in the next two hours. Wow, that was really fast. I’m thankful I now have something to do, at least this morning, because I could feel the walls closing in on me again and I don’t want to go back there. Not now anyway.
Becca hasn’t left for work yet. Good, I need her car. Public transit in Phoenix is plentiful, however, getting somewhere quickly isn’t an easy feat and I need her car or I will miss my window.
“I need your car,” I tell her as I walk out of my room dressed in jeans, a t-shirt and my hair pulled up into a beanie; I don’t want to deal with it today.
“What for?” she asks with narrowed eyes. I often borrow her car but with more warning than this.
“I have to go take a drug test. I have two hours to get there and I don’t have time on the bus.”
“You’ll have to take me to work,” she tells me.
“No problem.”
“You know, making all that money, you can buy yourself a new car.”
I smirk at her. “What for? I have yours and the train.”
She shakes her head. She can’t seem to understand why I enjoy taking the train and public transportation, and sometimes I don’t understand it either, but it’s just easier this way. Sometimes I think I just use it as an excuse to stay close to home. On the nights we go out, she drives. I usually end up driving myself home in her car because she ends up finding someone to go home with, or I have to take her home.
With about fifteen minutes to spare, I manage to drop Becca off at work, get to the lab, fill out the paperwork, pee in the damn cup and sign the paperwork for the testing. I asked the nurse how long before the results would be available. She said by Thursday or Friday. I smiled at that, maybe I can start next week.
As I’m walking out to the car, I start thinking about the drug test. Drugs are not my thing, never have been. It’s been more than ten years since…the summer I turned fourteen. My brother, his friend, the dirt road that led to the pond. Violet eyes, gorgeous, the love of my life.
Reality slices through me like the blades of a knife.
I started my freshman year thinking that the best summer of my life was coming to a close. I was just about to turn fifteen and instead of spending that summer with my girlfriends – not that I had any to spend time with – I spent the entire summer hanging out with my brother Dusty, and his best friend.
That summer we smoked, we drank, we got into loads of trouble – usually for missing curfew – and we’d run all over town. That was the same summer my brother’s best friend finally seemed to notice me.
It had started small with winks and flirty fun – more so than usual – and it eventually led to full on flirting, then hugging, touching, kissing and finally first and second base.
I wasn’t ready to go all the way. Hell, I was only fourteen at the time. He was sixteen. We never actually dated, just hung out. When we were together he was always hugging on me, kissing me, and hanging on me like I was his reason for breathing.
On the rare day that I didn’t see him, or the days Dusty and I were grounded, were like an endless night. Then the next day he would show up with this megawatt smile and send butterflies crashing through my stomach, my heart would beat a little faster and sometimes I would even break out in a cold sweat from looking him up and down.
The feelings I had for him were undeniable.
Despite the two-year age difference, I fell in love with him the first time I laid eyes on him in elementary school. His gorgeous violet eyes seemed to see right into the very depths of my soul.
I wanted him.
He wanted me.
It was an irresistible attraction that never faded.
I was the little girl; he was the sexy older guy.
He was my brother’s best friend.
His name was Dyson Cole Richards.
He must be using his middle name as his last name. There is no denying it. No matter how hard I want to, Mr. Cole is the Dyson Richards of my childhood.
“What’s wrong with you?” Becca demands when I walk into the Dunkin’ Donuts where she works part-time and I hand over her keys.
“Don’t worry about it,” I tell her. She gives me a very skeptical look. “I’m fine, promise.” I kiss her on the cheek, put her keys in her hand. “I’ll see you tonight.”
“Uh, okay, but you’re telling me what the hell is wrong with you when I get there. You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“Ha. Ha.” I sass. The irony of her statement isn’t lost on me in the slightest. To Becca, I’m sure it looks like I’m sad about my mother, but she hasn’t the first clue. I leave the store, thankful for the small line that will keep her from running after me.
My ‘not so little’ revelation has me off kilter, on edge and paranoia has me looking behind me, thinking he’s watching me because my skin keeps prickling with an awareness of something or someone else.
Up until yesterday, I hadn’t seen Dyson since the first and last night he was between my legs.
Little did I know, at the time, he’d planned the whole thing all along.
He kn
ew what was going to happen the next day but I was completely clueless. Either I didn’t want to see it, or no one bothered to tell me. In hindsight, Dusty had been acting pretty strange for about a week before it happened. Whenever I tried to go out with him and Dyson, he’d yell at me and tell me to stay home. I’d just turned fifteen and was well aware of Dyson’s penchant for different girls, but it never occurred to me they wanted me out of the way. Once school had started, Dusty and Dyson did their thing. I often saw Dyson after school, but mostly on the weekends, but like everything else, he’d changed. Or rather, I thought he’d changed. No, Dyson was just doing what Dyson did before that summer and me.
I was in love with the most popular boy in school and behind closed doors he acted as though he was in love with me too. He was a little too excited to keep his distance from me in school. But he’d known how to keep me at bay with my own decision about drawing unwanted attention to myself. At the end of the day, when reality dawned and he left, I knew he was just keeping me as the ‘side chick’.
I was cool with the whole thing because I’d had a hard enough time fitting in. Between the four walls of our tiny ass high school dating Dyson would have brought me popularity, but it would have been the wrong kind. High school girls are catty bitches and these girls were no different. Dyson and I would have become the laughing stock of the school and neither one of us needed or wanted that.
At the time, it worked for us, or I thought it did. Again, hindsight is always twenty-twenty, right?
He spent school days ignoring me and a couple nights a week trying to convince me I was ready to take our relationship to the next level. I wasn’t ready and each time I turned him down, he’d try harder the next time. It became impossible to resist because Dyson was just that irresistible.
For nearly ten years I’ve thought about why I decided that night was thee night to give in and after those ten years, I’ve yet to come up with an answer. At least a logical one. But it happened. I handed him my virginity on a silver fucking platter because I was naïve enough to believe Dyson Richards loved me. I believed the sweet words he spoke to me were the truth, I had every reason to doubt his sincerity but yet when I looked into his eyes, the world fell away.
I believed him when he said we would be together forever.
As I step on the train to head home, I’m transported back to the barn that warm March night.
I can remember, like it was yesterday, the prickles of hay poking into my backside. The well-used smell of the barn and the hay so close to my nose.
Dyson’s violet eyes staring down at me, boring into my soul and capturing everything I have to give him as he slipped himself in and out of my body.
“Say my name,” he breathed.
“Dyson.”
“Love you, VeeVee,” he whispered as he thrust inside me.
“Say it again,” I begged.
“Love you, baby.”
I’ll never forget those words. They consumed me in that moment and tortured me for years to come. When he was done, he pulled out of me and pulled up his pants, leaving me on the hay. He said, “About fucking time you put out.”
His words were like daggers cutting every inch of me; my entire being was shattered in that instant. The hammer came down when he walked out of the barn and I never saw him again. His family had already packed up their house and they left early the next morning.
I never saw him again after that.
Until yesterday, in an unlikely place, in an impossible situation. I know with every fiber of my being that the man who works for Tigress is the man who still holds the shattered pieces of my broken heart.
A honk brings me back to the present and a new tremble washes over me at the memory of what Dyson did to me that night.
What the hell am I supposed to do now?
I spent the rest of Wednesday wallowing in the fact that Dyson Richards – well, Dyson Cole, now, is going to be upstairs from me every day I’m at work. When I was done drowning myself in my own self-pity, I did everything I could to tamp down the old feelings that threatened to return. Trying, in vein, to stifle the hope blossoming that maybe, just maybe, there was still something between us.
Yes, he hurt me in a way that no human being should ever be hurt, but he also helped me in a way he has no idea about. I was destroyed for months, years even, after his words and actions, but in the end, he’s helped me build up a wall around my heart that no one has come close to penetrating. A wall no one has been able to knock down, yet.
Unfortunately for me, he’s the kink in my armor.
I find a mountain of busy work to do around the apartment. Becca and I only moved in a week before everything went to hell in a hand basket. Our apartment is still littered with boxes needing to be unpacked. Mostly common room things, like the nonessential kitchen stuff. We haven’t done much cooking since we moved in. I kept myself busy unpacking and organizing the contents throughout our apartment, though I leave Becca’s stuff alone. I manage to completely unpack and decorate my room. It is all I could do to keep my mind off the anxiety I felt every time I thought about Wellington calling me, or that by working in the same building seeing Dyson again is inevitable.
By Friday afternoon, I’m going stir crazy. I text Becca, hoping she’s free because I need to get out of the house. I tell her I’ll take her up on that rain check and she’s more than happy to oblige. As we walk into my favorite bar, Blu Phoenix, I vow to wash away all thoughts of new jobs and old loves.
Chapter 9
Dyson
“I’m On Fire” - AWOLNATION
Somehow I managed to convince myself that going out was a good idea. It’s an awful idea. I have way too much work to do to be sitting inside a bar. But it was becoming impossible to ignore the old hungers inside me. Things I haven’t felt in a long time came bubbling to the surface and I couldn’t tamp them down anymore. I need to find a way to rid old and new Ireland from my system and this is the only way I know how. Find someone who is wholly and completely unlike her.
Finding a willing woman is easy, especially when you exude confidence and have the air of money, which I have both of in spades. I have the good looks and killer smile that leaves women eating out of the palm of my hand.
Yes, I’m that cocky. Why shouldn’t I be?
I’ve had females throwing themselves at me since I was eleven years old. I snort at the memory of a bouncy redheaded seven year old who grew into a woman capable of giving me fuck-me eyes at the age of fifteen. When we met, she was nine. It was my first day at a brand new school, in a brand new town my mother moved me to after divorcing my father. I was pissed off. I had to leave my friends in Chicago, and they were the only source of normal in my life because at home everything always imploded. Top it off with the fact I had no choice but to start over again. At eleven years old, that’s hard to do. My anger subsided when a little girl with a head full of crazy, curly red hair came bounding up to me with the biggest toothless smile on her adorable face. It was like watching an angel appear out of nowhere. That day she smiled at me like I was a breath of fresh air and handed me something, a silly little rock that looked like a tiger’s eye. The same rock that sits in my pocket still.
The memory of the gorgeous, fiery redhead named Ireland makes my cock twitch and pushes me further into finding something to wipe her from my mind. The feeling is only temporary, but at this point, I will take what I can get. Anyone who isn’t a tenacious redhead with eyes like a tiger will do.
I’m sitting in a dark corner near the inside bar of the club I’m in. The music is bumping some crazy techno dance shit that’s drowning out the band playing on the back patio for those who want away from the live music. I look over my bottle of beer and spot a tall blonde with stick straight hair as she walks into the bar. I look her up and down, small tits, next to no ass, and from here her eyes are dark, brown maybe. She’s definitely no Ireland with her curves, ample tits and fine ass. The blonde is a spitting image of every woman I’ve had on my cock
for the last eight, nine years. When you’re the star football player in high school, all the cheerleader types want you; you’re the epitome of everything they hope to accomplish during school. The blonde tonight is exactly what I’m looking for to take my mind off her. The tall, skinny, bony type is not my cup of tea. Ireland’s curves were the first thing, once I discovered what the thing dangling between my legs was good for, that attracted me to her. She was exactly the opposite of everyone who threw themselves at me and I found myself drawn to her. Maybe that’s what drew me to her in the beginning – she never threw herself at me. No, I had to fucking work for that one.
I watch the blonde, taking my time, finding the right moment to strike. She’s walking around the bar, talking to a couple of people, saying hi and laughing. I can hear her laugh over the sound of the music and it makes me cringe. She’s going to be one of those. It’s obvious she’s a regular here and I start to rethink my choice. I like the fish out of water types because when I walk away in the middle of the night, I haven’t ruined their favorite bar.
I continue to watch the blonde as she makes her way toward the back door and the live band. I’d been so focused on comparing everything about her that is not Ireland I managed to block out everything else around her. She steps outside the door then turns back, talking to someone and I look to where she’s looking. Stepping out from behind a group of guys is not someone I wanted to see tonight.
My living hell on legs is talking back to the blonde.
So much for drowning out all thoughts of Ireland with a leggy blonde and a hell of a lot of alcohol.
Chapter 10
