Pretty Little Mess

by Rhodes, Carmel

Erin comes up behind her and laughs, wrapping her sister into a hug. Apparently, our trip to Chicago was the longest they’d ever been apart. They’ve been glued at the hip ever since we got back. It would be adorable, save for the fact that I’d like to be glued to Ellie and it’s kind of hard to do that with the five-two chastity belt that is Erin Chase.

  “It’s not for you.” She nods, tipping her chin over my shoulder. Jalen saunters over and slides into the stool next to me.

  “Good looking out, Thing One,” he says with a grin. “Hey, Erin.” His eyes slide down her body discreetly, and if it wasn’t for the fact that he was supposed to be on a date, I’d wonder if there was more going on between them than a few friendly meals.

  “Jay,” Erin greets, “I thought you had a date?”

  “I did,” Jalen says, downing his drink in one gulp. He’s wearing a cream sweater and shit-eating grin.

  “That good, huh.” Ellie leans over the bar and her tits nearly pop out of her tank top.

  “Babe,” I growl and pull the shirt up as far as it will go.

  “Did you just say, babe?” Jalen’s eyes bug out of their sockets. Glass clatters down the bar, and I turn to see an older man with salt-and-pepper hair, hurry to pick up his overturned beer bottle. “What the hell happened in Chicago?”

  “P-Three called me his girlfriend and told me he loved me.” Ellie’s head bobs up and down matter-of-factly. “Also, how have you never taken him to see Black Panther?”

  “Oh.” Jalen grimaces. “I tried. He doesn’t like movies. Honestly, I was beginning to doubt the existence of his soul until I heard him call you babe.”

  “Jury’s still out on the soul thing.” Ellie snorts.

  I lift both my middle fingers, one for my girl and the other for my best friend. “Can we focus, please?” A few cheers ring out in the noisy bar. I look up to see the Knicks are up by two. The man next to us looks our way, and my hackles rise when I notice it’s the same tattooed douchebag from the night Ellie and I fucked in the back room. “Is there something I can help you with?” I arch my brow when what I really want to do is shove my fucking fist in his nose.

  “Nah, man, just watching the game,” Tattoo guy says.

  “Baby, it’s fine.” Ellie grabs my hand and brings it to her mouth, kissing each one of my knuckles. “Jalen, tell us about your date.”

  “The date was fine. We skipped dinner and went straight to the fucking portion of the evening.” Jalen adjusts on his stool, watching Erin’s face intently. She seems unaffected, but to be honest, I can’t get a read on her. She has the same exact face as Ellie, but that’s pretty much where their similarities end. “I came twice and figured I’d come to Brooklyn, and we can work on our plans for bringing down the Wicked Witch of Wall Street.”

  “Well, unfortunately, that plan isn’t going to include Howard. He bailed.” I scowl and finish my glass. At the moment, the plan doesn’t seem to include anyone, which, considering we don’t have office space, an LLC, or even a goddamned company name, I can’t be too surprised. But Jalen and I have made these rich bastards, filthy rich. You’d think that would count for something.

  “Fuck.” Jay’s fist comes down hard on the wood.

  “I’ll get more liquor.” Ellie scampers off to grab the bottle while I show Jalen the email.

  “I just don’t understand where she got the money to buy out your dad.” Jay’s brow furrows as I watch his eyes scan the email again.

  “Me either,” I say as a sudden feeling of foreboding washes over me. “Probably on her fucking back. That’s how she’d gotten everything up until this point.”

  “Follow the money,” Ellie adds, refilling our glasses. Jay and I look at her blankly

  “What?” She shrugs. “Not everything is so cut and dry. Follow the money. That just might be the key to taking her down.”

  “Baby, I love you, I do, but this isn’t a movie. Following the money requires access to the Anderson Capital computer system and I can guarantee you after the 2015 information breach, we doubled down on our cybersecurity measures. Even if I knew where to find a hacker, it would take him months to break in, and we don’t have months.”

  “Let me worry about that,” she says and I’m not sure if she’s joking or being serious.

  “I don’t want you anywhere near the Anderson Building, or out of my sight for that matter. Once the interview airs on Friday, we can talk, but until then I need to know you’re safe. I don’t want what happened to Erin to happen to you.”

  Erin grunts. “I’m going to try not to be offended because you’re being protective of my sister, but also fuck you.”

  “I promise, I can get you the information you need and stay safe,” Ellie says.

  “This isn’t a discussion,” I growl. “Moving on.”

  “What about Vann?” she presses. “Can we talk about him? His show is coming up. Maybe you guys don’t need your old clients, maybe you need new ones?”

  Jalen and I look at each other. “I mean, she’s right, no one is going to leave Anderson unless we get dirt on Karen. Maybe our focus should be somewhere else.”

  “Of course, I’m right.” Ellie rolls her eyes. “Vann probably isn’t even on Karen’s radar at the moment, and”—she pauses and leans in—“Erin knows the person catering the event and can probably sneak us into the kitchen.”

  “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?” I hiss, covering her breasts with my hands. I’m two seconds away from taping a napkin to her collarbone.

  “If you think I’m suggesting we crash the party and take back our whale, then you’d be correct.” She smiles smugly.

  “What do you mean we are going to crash the party?” Jay asks looking from me to Ellie like we are some sort of three-headed hydra. “Thing One, we don’t have time for a zany scheme.”

  “It’s not all that zany,” Ellie says. “Technically only Erin and I will be crashing, you and Max are like notorious model fuckers so it wouldn’t be out of place for you to show up.”

  “Reformed model fucker,” I correct, tipping back my glass. “Now, I only fuck Bratz dolls who smell like the C-train.”

  “It wasn’t funny the first time you said it, it isn’t funny now.” She narrows her eyes at me.

  “You love it.” I narrow my eyes right back. We stare at each other, long enough that the background noise fades and it’s just the two of us. This is like our foreplay. We bicker, then we hate fuck, then we cuddle. Being pussy-whipped isn’t so bad, especially because I actually give a shit about the person the pussy is attached to.

  “If you guys want to fuck or get married just let us know,” Jalen says, breaking the spell. “Erin and I can show ourselves out.” His face contorts in mock disgust and although I know he’s just being a dick, I can’t help the panic settling in my gut. Married. Me? No way. I mean, yes, I love Ellie, but marriage is another thing entirely. I reach for my glass, only to discover I’d already drained it, so instead, I swipe Jalen’s and down that one too.

  “Oh my God, Preston!” Ellie sighs exasperatedly. “You’re having a whole panic attack because he made a stupid joke. Calm down. No one even wants to marry you.” She throws a towel at me, then goes and grabs another beer for the tattooed ball sac.

  “Why the fuck not?” I growl, then suddenly, just to spite her, I have an urge to go out and buy the biggest ring I can find and force it on her goddamn finger.

  “Okay, you two are weird as fuck. Are we crashing this party or not?” I look to Jalen, and despite the million reasons that this is a terrible fucking idea, I go with my gut.

  “I guess we’re crashing the party.”

  A few days later Ellie gathers us all at Super Panda. According to her and Erin, it’s the best place to watch the Tasha King interview, because if it goes well, we can celebrate by gorging on fried rice, and if it goes bad, well, we can gorge ourselves on fried rice.

  Who was I to argue with that logic? So, Friday night, Ellie, Jalen, Erin, and I commandeered the back corne
r of the restaurant.

  “Where’s Ellie?” I ask Erin as I return to the table with a plate of questionably fresh sushi.

  “She ran outside for a minute. She said her surprise was here.”

  “Surprise?” Jalen and I ask in unison.

  “I don’t know?” Erin shrugs.

  “No fucking way.” Jalen’s smile is wide as he stands, his attention focused on the door. Ellie bounces in looking ridiculously pleased with herself. As well she should be; her surprise is a sight for sore eyes.

  I stand, grinning like an idiot, extending my hand to Dexter. “I’m gone for a month and all hell breaks loose,” he says, and for the first time since the Cooper Jones interview, I feel hopeful.

  “How was the big gay wedding?” I smirk.

  “Fabulous, but imagine my surprise when I come back from my honeymoon to find that my boss was taking advantage of my protégé.” We sit around the square table, and Ellie drags over a fifth chair from somewhere behind me. “Of course, the first thing I did was call to check on Ellie. She assured me everything was fine and gave me the lowdown on Winston and Karen.”

  I look to Ellie. “When was this?”

  “While I was at the spa in Chicago.” A guilty look flashes across her face.

  “Why didn’t you mention it?”

  “Because she knew you’d blow it,” Dex says, breaking a pair of chopsticks in half. “I’m a double agent.”

  “A what?” Jay asks around a mouthful of lo mein.

  “I went to Karen and begged for a job. I told her I was loyal to Anderson Capital, not Max Anderson, then I may or may not have shown her five years’ worth of hate mail I’d written you and never sent.”

  I can feel my lips twitch in delight. If he hadn’t passed that little tip off to Ellie and she wasn’t such a spazz, then maybe we wouldn’t be here.

  “Are you mad?” she says in a small voice.

  I pull her out of her chair and onto my lap. “Never, baby.”

  “Holy. Shit!” Dex squeals and claps. “You brought Manhattan’s Prince to his knees.”

  “Can we focus?” Ellie blushes.

  “Right.” Dexter reaches into the jacket of his paisley-print suit and pulls out a flash drive. “The contents of Karen’s hard drive. You don’t want to know what I had to do to get it.”

  “What?” I ask, flipping the drive over in my palm.

  “Nothing, I just waited until she went out for a lunch meeting and snuck into her office. Do you know she keeps her password on a Post-it under her keyboard? Rookie mistake.”

  “And she has control of my company.” I ball my hands into fists. “My father is a fucking idiot.”

  “That’s not all,” Dex says. “There’s a guy, a tattooed god, really. Anyway he’s been in the office a few times, which was weird, considering he’s nothing like our normal clientele, but neither is Vann so I figured hey, maybe he owns a string of tattoo shops and needed help diversifying.”

  “Tattooed?” I say and my instincts know what Dexter is about to confirm.

  “Yeah. I thought it was odd, so I checked her calendar, and she has her meetings with him blocked off as T. That’s it, everyone else has contact info and notes about their personal life, you know, so it seems like she remembers small details, but with tattoo guy, it’s just T. Before their meeting on Wednesday I hid my iPad in her office, and left it on record. Turns out he’s a private investigator and probably the source of all those pics of you two.” He nods to Ellie and me. “Anyway, he told her you were going after Vann, so she’s pulled some strings to get an invite to his show. He also spilled the beans about the Tasha interview, but there wasn’t much she could do about that, you know since it’s already been filmed.”

  “That fucking piece of shit,” Ellie blurts out. “I can’t believe I thought he was hot.”

  I spank the inside of her thigh. “You’re going to pay for that.”

  “Are they always like this?” Dex asks, and Erin and Jalen nod in annoyance.

  Before I get a chance to respond, Tasha’s voice filters through the quiet restaurant.

  “Tonight, on The Hot Seat with Tasha King, I sit down for a one-on-one with disgraced Prince of Manhattan, Max Anderson. Anderson, as well as his father, have been making headlines recently due to a string of sexual misconduct allegations from inside their financial empire. The board at Anderson Capital cleaned house, relieving both father and son from their day-to-day roles. It would also appear that Preston Anderson sold off his stake in the company in an effort to further distance himself and his scandal from the empire his father, the late Preston Anderson Senior, had built.

  Max came under fire after the now infamous Cooper Jones interview, where his relationship with one of his assistants came to light, a revelation that had many wondering if the apple didn’t fall far from the tree.

  Tonight, we hear Max’s side of the story, and for the first time anywhere, Ellie Chase, the girl who many believed to have been lured by charm and the promise of a better life.

  We filmed this interview over the weekend, and I think you’ll be amazed to find out the truth.”

  Tasha’s face fades and a grainy video pops up. It’s Ellie, pacing in the upstairs hall, just before our sit-down. I don’t remember there being cameras, then again this looks like it was shot on a cell phone. You can hear our voices, but Tasha’s team provides captions.

  “Baby, what’s wrong?” I ask, grabbing Ellie by the waist. I spin her to look at me, her eyes are wide and fearful.

  “I don’t think I can do this.” She shakes her head, the tendrils framing her face swing back and forth.

  “What? The interview?”

  “Yes, I can’t tell the entire world about how we used to bang in your executive bathroom.”

  I wince and look to Ellie who slaps her hand against her forehead. “Did you know they were filming this?” she asks, a hurt accusation in her tone.

  “No. No clue.”

  “Shhh.” The rest of the table hushes us and I return my attention back to the screen.

  “I don’t think Tasha is going to ask for explicit details,” I assure her, smoothing her hair back.

  “Yeah, but the implications are there, and when the truth comes out, I’ll be the slut that cost you everything.”

  “Ellie, where is this coming from?”

  “I just. I’m nervous. My dad is going to see this. My aunts. The world. I just…I’m freaking out.”

  “There’s no reason to freak out. If you don’t want to do this, then just say so. I’ll pull the plug.” I cup her face, forcing her to meet my gaze. “I will do anything for you, Piss Girl. Remember that.”

  She nods, her lips are puckered because her cheeks are squished between my hands, and I can’t help but press a small kiss to her lips. “I love you,” she whispers.

  “I love you more.” I kiss her again, then sigh. “Okay. You stay here, and I’ll go break the news to Tasha’s people.”

  I turn to leave, but Ellie grabs my hand. “Wait.” She closes her eyes and inhales. “I can do this.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, Max, they think you’re the bad guy.”

  “I don’t give a shit. They can think whatever they want about me. It’s you I care about.”

  “I can do this, for you.” She inhales a fortifying breath. “I can be strong for you.”

  “Okay?”

  “Okay.” She nods. We turn and head down the stairs. The last thing you see before the screen fades to black is Ellie slipping her hand in mine.

  Tasha’s face reappears. “We’ll be back after these messages.”

  “Oh. My. God.” Ellie smiles brightly.

  Jalen slaps me on the back hard. “That was fucking brilliant.”

  I’m speechless because while the interview we filmed was cute and quirky like only Ellie can bring, that candid moment, caught on a grainy cell phone, may have single-handedly resurrected my career.

  My new phone pings. I scan the most r
ecent email from Howard before turning the phone to face Jalen.

  To: Max Anderson@ gmail.com

  From: Howard Long, CEO of Long Wellness Group

  Subject: Re: Your Offer.

  Max,

  That two-minute video made every woman in the tri-state swoon. That is very good for business. I’m in.

  Howard.

  If you’d asked twenty-year-old me where I pictured myself in ten years, I would have said, spending my days leading Anderson Capital into its most successful years since its inception and my nights fucking every hot model within a five-mile radius. I would not have said, working from my home office, building a firm from the ground up, and in a committed relationshipy.

  I guess that’s life—a spiteful bitch who doesn’t give a fuck about your plans.

  There is good news though; it’s true what they say about the bitch handing you lemons, because in the twenty-four hours since the Tasha King interview aired, Jalen and I have been jizzing lemonade all over Manhattan.

  Although TW Financial (Two Wolf—Ellie came up with the name) is nothing more than a website and a handful of mid-range clients who have pledged allegiance to us, I’m confident Jay and I have what it takes to turn it into an industry powerhouse. We’ve been working nonstop since I got the email from Howard, our lawyers drafting contracts and submitting permits. Hopefully, after Vann’s show, things will settle down enough for us to start looking for office space.

  Karen’s hard drive proved useless on the follow the money front, but I was able to find out more information on Tattoo Trent. Turns out, he’s got a private investigation firm in Midtown. It also turns out, he hasn’t bothered paying Uncle Sam for the last two years. I may or may not have put a call into my contact at the IRS.

  The phone in my home office rings, and I lean back in my chair, rubbing my eyes with my thumb and index fingers. “Max,” I bark.

  “Well, hello to you too, Son.” My mom’s cheery voice instantly lifts my mood.

  “Sorry, things have been…hectic,” I say.

  “I’m sure. I won’t keep you long…I just…remember when you were here and I told you there was something I’d been forgetting?”