Beauty and the Barbarian

by Nikki Winter

  “I don’t think—”

  “And didn’t she spray paint ‘I will make you love me, you son of a bitch!’ all over your cars?”

  “All right!” Hayden burst out. “Yes! I managed to gain a stalker because I wasn’t exactly able to see past her amazing, crazy person sex magic!”

  “I’ve always heard that crazy sex was the best kind, but I wouldn’t know considering my lack of insane romantic interests.” Ashleigh cut a swath through an attacking battalion. “And the irony of that is not lost on me considering the fact that I’m actually famous.”

  “Hey, hey, hey. I could be famous too. But I’d rather live my quiet, comfortable, modestly troglodyte lifestyle.”

  That wasn’t disputable. The game they were currently murdering hordes of victims on like scum lords? Hayden had designed it. But Hayden refused to take credit for any of the games he designed. He built the platforms and the basic concepts, worked with those well known for their graphic skills and sold his works to the highest bidder before disappearing quietly with a promised percentage of royalties. It was a career that had made him millions.

  Because their time together was few and far in between with Ashleigh’s never-ending travels, at least twice a week they put things on pause for a few hours to go on a mutual, constructive killing spree. It was a tension-relieving bond that both enjoyed but would never voice. Today, a simple Friday where neither was very busy, had led to each logging onto their consoles and finding one another before the carnage began. It was far better than Ashleigh’s previous activity of brooding. Later, he’d more than likely call Braxton and find out that she was backpacking her way through Europe again. She frequently took vacations from her business as a coach who worked with the rich and famous, helping them to develop what they deemed to be healthy and happy habits. She rarely stayed in one place long so it was few and far in between that they had a chance to speak.

  “The quiet, comfortable, modestly troglodyte lifestyle that got you set aflame?” Ashleigh teased instead of admitting how goddamn proud he was of his sibling. The odds were so highly stacked against them that it was a wonder they’d been able to see above and beyond the trauma of their childhood. A trauma brought on by an addict of a father.

  Narcissism had been Matthew's constant friend through every year of his life. Once a young football star himself, with what he thought was a promising future, he'd had to shoulder the weight of an unexpected family with the appearance of Ashleigh. His father had placed the blame of not going pro on his decision to stay home, but Ashleigh knew better. Matthew's excuses were bullshit. Just about every word that had ever left his mouth was bullshit. He hadn't gone pro because he hadn't done the work. He hadn't dedicated himself to being a better player. A little digging and a great deal of research had revealed this.

  Matthew had glided by in high school against other boys because of his brute strength and ability to mind fuck opponents before each game. However, when the time came for him to go up against men larger, stronger, faster and mentally fortified, Matthew had choked. He'd choked and the scouts had overlooked him.

  How ironic was it that he then had a child years later that exhibited all the qualities he'd lacked in his own athleticism? From day one Ashleigh had known that football would be his way out. As had Matthew. It took time for Ashleigh to understand that he'd been the physical manifestation of Matthew's failures. He'd been a consistent reminder to his father that Matthew would never be good enough.

  His own parent had been jealous of him. Of the popularity and the praise he'd received. He'd felt threatened by the constantly growing half-breed with the southern charm and talent. So he did his damndest to crush that spirit; did his damndest to crush that drive. He'd tried to literally beat the determination of escape out of his eldest son. And when that hadn't worked, he'd forced him out of his own family like a wounded predator being pushed out of their pack, screaming, “You don’t come back to my fucking house! You got me, boy?! You don’t come back to my goddamn house ever again! You don’t live there anymore!”

  Years later, when Ashleigh had deals literally falling at his feet, Matthew made a reappearance and was rebuffed. Turned away, the old man then placed his attention on making Braxton and Hayden's lives as hellish as possible. Sick of his father's inability to just let them be, Ashleigh made an offer to the devil. Five percent in one of his business ventures for Matthew's silence and distance. He could keep up with the preliminaries, make money and stay the fuck away from all of them. Like the scavenger he was, Matthew had taken it.

  It had been his entitled way of attempting to force Ashleigh to acknowledge him for success that he’d achieved without any of his father’s help or support. He, once again, wanted to bend his eldest son for his own amusement. Because of it, Ashleigh had momentarily forgotten about the glue that held the broken pieces of him together and he’d begun to live as hard and fast as his father once had. It cost him. But, as with most things, Matthew hadn’t been able to keep up his part of the arrangement and Ashleigh had been legally allowed to wiggle free. He hadn’t seen the bastard since their day in court a year ago and if he ever did again it would be too soon. He didn’t think his father would ever forgive him for the public humiliation that followed, but he couldn’t give a fuck.

  Their mother was different. Dana took what they gave and kept her distance despite the urging to do otherwise. Whether she stayed away out of guilt or genuine disinterest, none of them knew. They didn't pressure her for more and over the years, they'd come to overlook her failures.

  “You’re lingering on past mistakes and I’m attempting to talk to you about the now.”

  “Which consists of some poor, unsuspecting, well formed woman who isn’t remotely interested in your bodily fluids mixing with hers.”

  “I need you to understand how far my disdain reaches for you right now,” Hayden hissed. “So very far.”

  Chuckling, Ashleigh leaned back onto the cushions of his couch. “You’re a friend fucker, R2 D2. You’ve always been a friend fucker and you’re always going to be a friend fucker. You simply can’t help yourself. You see a friend and seem to automatically think, ‘Hey! Another warm, wet hole! How can I get into this one?’”

  “I’m so insulted right now, so insulted. I am selective and careful about any hole I pursue.”

  “I’m sure the woman ordered to stay at least three hundred feet away from you at all times feels the same,” he retorted dryly.

  “Let’s talk about your romantic history for a moment, big brother.”

  “Or you could avoid the potential bitch-slap coming your way and just…not.”

  “No, no,” Hayden insisted. “I want to discuss your pining. The pining that occurs at the mention of the mother of my perfect, incredible niece.”

  “Bitch. Slap. I won’t even give you the courtesy of an actual balled fist, bruh. I’m going for the all out disrespect of a backhand,” Ashleigh warned.

  “Oh, we can go open-season on my love life but we can’t touch the idiocy happening between you and Mackenzie?”

  “That’s exactly right.”

  “And ridiculous.”

  “Life saving,” Ashleigh told him. “It’s life saving. Because if you venture down this road, I’m going to fight you on sight.”

  He didn’t want to discuss Mackenzie or any of the emotions he had involving her. He didn’t want to examine the whys and hows of their call this morning. And he sure as fuck didn’t want to hear the name of that pretty bastard she planned to wed. Nah. He was good.

  Friends. That’s what she’d called them. Somehow he’d found himself in that godforsaken wasteland of disbelieving assholes that couldn’t deal with rejection properly so they compartmentalized it by calling it the “friend zone.”

  “Because we’re friends now,” she’d said in that lilting voice that he could never quite get past on his best day. And he’d agreed. Arguing led to frustration. And walking that path again, after they’d found away to peacefully coexist, ju
st wasn’t an option. Ashleigh couldn’t be the man who was consistently angry because he spent hours a day in social media wars with the mother of his child. He didn’t want that for them, for Arista. So he’d waved the white flag months after her leaving and settled comfortably in his own, personal self torment, reminding himself daily that he’d never had a right to touch her—know her—from the beginning. Mackenzie had been a good girl, a sweet girl, and he’d twisted that into someone else, plying and manipulating until she bent. Then he’d casually sat her aside so he could continue being the star with the goal of successfully quieting the whispers that told him he was a worthless burden that had tied two people together in a hellish matrimony; that he was a half breed bastard without much to offer outside of his brawn and the aesthetic that he’d inherited. In all that time, he’d never stopped to realize that he had nothing to prove to her or anyone else.

  He could drop his burdens at the first step of the porch and cross the threshold, becoming Papa Bear, Daddy, Ash and later—when all they could hear outside of their small world was the low hum of street noise—he’d been hers. He hadn’t taken advantage of that; he hadn’t hung onto it like he should have. Ashleigh simply, and stupidly, assumed that it would always be there. And then one day it wasn’t. His pride had been his downfall then and with every hour that passed, the regrets piled up in quick succession.

  “I’m going to leave it alone,” Hayden declared. “But only because I don’t want to suffer the indignity of being back handed by a man who essentially has to wear assless panties on a regular.”

  “Oh fuck you!” Ashleigh barked, laughing. “You spend days at a time trying to make nipples look realistic through computer generated images. I don’t need your judgment when I know you have a subscription, or six, to Hentai porn sites.”

  “To defeat the technology of those overseas, you have to understand them.”

  He snorted. “Because you really need to study the logistics of anal stimulation by tentacles.”

  “There is far more to that genre than tentacles and anal!”

  “Name three things, right now.”

  “Gangbangs, train groping and—”

  “I don’t need you to finish that,” he interrupted, shuddering. “I really don’t need you to finish that.”

  “Afraid of the last subject matter?”

  “Yes,” Ashleigh answered candidly, ignoring the chuckles that followed. “And I am not ashamed to admit it.”

  The conversation ebbed back into the game and soon he was lost again, killing virtually and fully distracted from the question pressing down on his shoulders—if Hayden thought his and Mackenzie’s separation was idiotic, who else did?

  Five

  “Oh my friend, you really do have dicks sprouting up from the ground like gourds.”

  Mackenzie closed her eyes at the morose tone of Nala’s voice and frowned down at her plate of untouched fettuccine. “Is this you helping me? I don’t think this is you helping me.”

  The other woman reached across the moderately sized dining table and patted Mackenzie’s hand. “I’m going to help you. I’m going to help you right now.”

  She waited.

  Nala shifted her eyes from left to right and leaned forward. Her voice dropped to a whisper when she advised, “Fuck. Him.”

  Mackenzie blinked, angled away and stared up at the chandelier-ridden ceiling of the small Italian restaurant they’d chosen for lunch. “Wait…what?”

  “When Ashleigh comes into town,” Nala said with all the earnest conviction of a politician, “fuck him.”

  “I don’t…your words…what are you saying to me right now?”

  “Look at me, Mac,” her friend demanded, “look at me and understand that I have your best interest at heart.”

  “Really? Because it sounds as though you’re telling me to mount my ex-fiancé and ruin my relationship with my current fiancé. That doesn’t sound like my best interest. That sounds like some next-level Blanche Devereaux slut antic that I am not, by any means, comfortable with.”

  “We’re not talking about Frost at the moment. We’re not concerned about Frost at the moment. We’re talking about you and your needs and the issue of confusion concerning these rotating emotions you’re experiencing due to Ashleigh’s decidedly different behavior.”

  “How would me sleeping with Ashleigh solve anything?” Mackenzie queried, genuinely confused.

  “Did the two of you have a closure bang when you split ways?” Nala asked. “Was there one last, earth shattering, sky crashing orgasm?”

  She stared. “I took Arista and went to a hotel for the night. When I came back in the morning, I explained to him what was happening and why. He told me that he wouldn’t stop me from leaving. He held the door open while I gathered my things just to prove a point.”

  “So that’s a no on the closure bang…”

  “Nala!”

  “I’m giving you life saving advice and you aren’t listening to me!”

  “Because your life saving advice is ridiculous and more than likely going to set my progress back years!”

  The other woman stopped and rubbed her temples as though she had reason to be frustrated. “The relationship between you and the disturbingly large man who fathered your child is one that has shaped the very foundation of the new relationship you’re in with Michael. You didn’t receive closure in the first and so the latter cannot be anywhere as near as solid as you want because believe it or not, Mac, you still belong to that man. You will always belong to that man. As your friend, as someone who has watched you grow and learn and love, whatever you think you have with Michael is simply an excuse to sever the cord between yourself and Ashleigh. Far be it from me to shove you back into the very hands that broke you to begin with but, and I say this with all the love in my heart, if you marry Michael, I will take out a contract on his life.”

  “Nala!” Mackenzie yelped for a second time.

  Jesus. This again? For Mackenzie’s sake, Nala had quieted down these feelings but it seemed they had returned with a vengeance, because she was expressing them now. Unable to pinpoint exactly why Nala wanted Michael assassinated, she’d left it alone, figuring that eventually she may just see what Mackenzie saw. It had been two years and it didn’t look like that was going to occur anytime soon.

  “I hate him. I hate his twitchy face and his plastic smile. I hate his mighty-white posture. He’s a dick. He’s awfully good with hiding how much of a dick he is, but I know men like him. I was married to a man like him. And believe me when I say, things are only going to get worse there. Get out now. Even if you never work things out with Ashleigh, hand Frost his ring back and leave him. Let him return to the darkened shadows from whence his pitch black and listless soul drifted.”

  She waited a moment and then… “You’ve been reading the original Dracula again, haven’t you?”

  “Do not think to persecute my interests in literature!”

  “And that answers all my questions,” she muttered, rubbing her thumb across her engagement ring. “I think you’re wrong about Michael. I think he’s better than the way you see him. He’s just—”

  “A dick?”

  “No! He’s simply—”

  “Dickish?”

  “I was going to say that he just happens to be slightly—”

  “A dick?”

  Mackenzie sighed. “Why do I have these conversations with you?”

  “You could have them with Marissa,” Nala offered helpfully, finishing off her linguine. “But she’ll just suggest that you involve yourself with someone in her group of persistent lesbians.”

  “Are we still calling them that?”

  “After the last party? Yes, yes we are.”

  “Chloe apologized.”

  “Don’t care,” she sung, clearly intent on never forgiving the incident that neither of them would mention unless under duress or interrogation by certain government types.

  “I think you need to let the hurt go.”


  “They got me drunk and convinced me to get a piercing in a place that should never come into contact with a needle, Mac.” Nala’s eyes turned wild. “I experience the hurt every time I get too enthusiastic with my loofa.”

  Mackenzie swallowed down her laughter, happy to be off the subject of herself and the men who were making her mental. “You could have simply taken it out.”

  Cheeks reddening, her friend admitted, “I could have…but then I had a date…and we experimented—”

  With one hand held up and the other wrapped around her wine goblet, Mackenzie advised, “Say no more.”

  And once again they decided to never speak of it.

  “Mackenzie, Mr. Frost is here and is requesting to see you.”

  Yikes. As if she hadn’t had several piles of bricks fall on her head today already. She wasn’t particularly sure she wanted to see Michael. Not after the way their last conversation had ended. And with Nala’s not-so-subtle voice of reason taking the wheel at lunch today, Mackenzie’s mind was incapable of filtering itself.

  Her forehead thumped against her desk and her intercom sounded off again with the voice of her P.A. “Mackenzie?”

  Right. Michael. Michael wanted to see her.

  “Yeah,” she replied drolly, leaning back in her chair. “Send him in.”

  Trepidation kept her from moving. She didn’t want to fight, wasn’t in the mood. Her office door swung open and through it came a several-sizes-too-big bouquet with legs. The legs she recognized. When it lowered slightly, Michael’s face peeked through the multitude of flowers.

  “I was an ass,” he announced without greeting. “A huge ass.” Setting the arrangement down on a nearby table, he spread his arms wide and told her, “I’m sorry.”

  Mackenzie released the breath she’d been holding and nodded at the flowers. “They’re pretty.”

  He walked forward a bit. “Am I forgiven?”

  “You bought me flowers and confessed to being an ass,” she retorted softly. “What reason would I have to stay angry?”