by Kade Charest
“Taylor! Wake up!” Derrick’s voice shouted, and Taylor opened her eyes to find Derrick above her. She was still lying in his bed. Her hands were pushing against his chest, and Derrick’s face was full of bewilderment.
“It was a dream?” Taylor asked softly, the emotion and tears choking out her voice.
“Yeah, Tay, it was just a dream,” he answered her softly, pushing the hair back from her forehead. “Are you okay?”
Taylor nodded and bit her lower lip, but the tears fell anyway. “Do you want to talk about it?” Derrick asked, but all Taylor could do in response was tuck her head into his chest and let Derrick pull her into him.
The nightmares had been horrible right after Taylor had left. She had screamed so loud at one gross motel they had called the police, and she had left there in the middle of the night. But with more time and distance, the dreams got less intense, and then they stopped altogether. She couldn’t remember the last time she had one.
“Tell me something,” she said into Derrick’s neck.
“Okay.”
“Cedric is really dead, right?”
Derrick slid a hand to her face and tilted her head up so she could look at him, “Yes, Taylor. He is dead,” he said as he searched her face. “What did he do to you?”
“Nothing.”
Derrick raised his brows. “Yes, because when people do nothing it often causes their relatives to scream and fight in their sleep,” he responded sarcastically. “You said you were going to be honest with me,” he reminded her softly.
“He was just so crazy,” Taylor whispered.
“How?”
Taylor looked at Derrick. She could see he wanted to help her, but how did she put it into words? Taylor pushed up lightly on Derrick’s shoulders. “Let me up,” she said, and though he set his jaw, Derrick did in fact roll back and let her up.
Taylor scooted out of bed and sat in the chair Derrick had tried to sleep in the night before. She drew her knees to her chest and looked at Derrick. He looked surprised. “What?”
“I thought you were going to leave.”
Taylor wrinkled her forehead in confusion. “Why?”
“Uh, because that is sort of the way you have been handling things.”
Taylor rolled her eyes. “He was super controlling,” she started off. “He came back after my mom died—not right away, but when my Poppy got sick.” It was hard to talk about because Taylor had really tried to forget it. “I was almost eighteen, and when I heard he was coming back I wanted to leave, but I couldn’t leave Poppy behind. I knew he wasn’t going to be around much longer.”
“Why did you want to leave?”
“He had never been right,” Taylor said. She stared at a blank spot across the room and squinted, trying to remember. “Like, my first memory of him is him holding a knife to my dad.”
“What?” Derrick exclaimed. “What the hell happened?”
Taylor shook her head. She was calmer than she thought she would be telling this. “Nothing, my dad talked him down it seemed. I was little, like four maybe. I just remember being petrified and then my father scooping me up, and I didn’t see him for a while after that.
“But the next time, it was really tense. Everyone knew he was coming, there was a big dinner party planned, and there was like this buzz in the house—my house with Mom and Dad, before I moved to the mansion,” Taylor thought back. She could almost see the house, see the staff. “So I was playing, and I could hear my parents talking about how he needed help. My mom was saying something like, ‘We really need to help him. He is on a downward spiral.’ And then Dad was like, ‘I don’t know how to get through to him.’ I was eight, I think, maybe nine. So he comes over and he is sitting in our kitchen, he refused to ever leave the kitchen, I remember that too now, and I see him there and I think I can talk to him. So I go over and say, ‘I want to help you, Uncle Cedric,’ very serious, and he looks at me with that blank look he always had and whispers, “Help me? Why do you want to help me?” I say, ‘Because Mommy and Daddy said you need help.’”
Derrick groaned on the bed, and Taylor turned and met his stare, nodding, “I know. And then he was just quiet, and we just stared at each other, and then he walked over to me and crouched down and said, ‘You are just as fucked up as they are.’ And he walked through the kitchen to the main dining room. It was all set up, and with one hand he took this huge heavy wooden table covered with china and utensils and stuff and just flipped it right on top of itself,” Taylor said, shaking her head. “It was scary. I don’t even know what happened after that. There was yelling and lots of movement, and I ran away to my room.”
“You never said anything,” Derrick said. “All that time we hung out, and played—”
Taylor shrugged, “I don’t know, maybe because I was a kid, and he wasn’t around,” she guessed. “I mean, my parents came and talked to me and said Cedric was not right. I never told them what I said, though, I never told anyone.”
“This is the first time you have ever talked about this?”
Taylor nodded and stared into Derrick’s eyes. She had been terrified by what she had done, how Cedric had responded to what she had said. She wasn’t uncomfortable talking about it now, letting her skeletons out. And the realization that she had found the trust to share it with Derrick made her avert her eyes.
The silence stretched, and finally Derrick cleared his throat. “So what happened when he came back, after your mom …” he didn’t finish the sentence, letting the obvious hang in the air.
“My grandfather told me he was coming back. I think he was hoping he could transform him, get him to focus on the company.” Taylor shook her head. “But he was beyond help. Since the table incident, I had seen him two other times before he came to Preston Manor: my father’s funeral and my mother’s funeral,” she said counting the interactions off on her fingers. “When he came back he wouldn’t look at anyone, he didn’t speak to anyone, and if he did speak it was only in a whisper, like he either didn’t really want you to hear him. It was bizarre.”
“Did he ever go to the company?”
“A few times, I think. He left a few times with my grandfather, but they never came back together. I could tell he made my grandfather uneasy too, and that freaked me out. Poppy was like a boulder to me, I had never seen him shaken and unable to take on anything or anyone, and he walked on eggshells around Cedric. And about a month after he came back, Poppy got sick.” She swallowed. “Once he was confined to the bed, he was really unable to make decisions, and it all defaulted to Cedric,” she said, shaking her head. “He became a tyrant. He fired staff daily—a maid, a lawn guy, a chauffer. They all started hiding from him and passing the word of where he was because if he saw you, pretty much you were fired. And he got rid of all the phones—”
“The phones?” Derrick asked is disbelief.
Taylor nodded. “He had every phone removed from the house and had the wiring to it cut.”
Derrick’s mouth hung open. “Why?”
Taylor shrugged. “There was no talking to him. I had never tried since that time when I was a kid. I was petrified of him. Sometimes I would find him just glaring at me from windows while I was outside, or I would walk in a room, and it was like he was waiting for me in there.”
“So you never talked to him?”
“Only once. The phone thing was crazy, and I wanted to be able to call Poppy’s doctor if he was sick. The TVs and computers were, whatever … he threw those away and I didn’t care—”
“He got rid of all the electronics?”
“Yeah, first was the phones and then anything you could turn on, pretty much.”
“He obviously had a mental disturbance, Taylor. I mean, why was he getting rid of all that shit? It sounds like he was paranoid,” Derrick said.
Taylor shrugged. “He was an addict, Derrick. He was jumpy and panicked and paranoid. He was constantly snorting something or popping pills—”
“In your home?” Derr
ick said, incredulous.
“In the fucking kitchen,” Taylor said. “He didn’t care.”
“Taylor, I had no idea that he was that way. Why didn’t you leave? Why didn’t you—”
“What, Derrick? Where was I going to go? He controlled it all. He had all my sources of money. He had all my modes of transport. And he knew I wouldn’t leave my grandfather in the state he was in. Call the police? And, what, cause chaos and controversy? He would have bought his way out or lost everything, which, looking back, he almost did anyway. So, what the fuck.”
“What about Todd and Charlie? Didn’t they come to check—”
“They did, but their role was business,” Taylor said. “They would come and talk to my grandfather, try to talk to Cedric, but that was it. I think they thought my demeanor was just because I was a teenager who had lost pretty much everyone.”
“What about your friends?”
Taylor snorted in disgust. “Derrick, I didn’t have friends.”
“You always had friends in school—”
Taylor held up a hand. “Just stop. After junior high I went to an all-girls school of rich bitches who I couldn’t stand. I went to school and was kind to people, but they were all overindulged assholes.”
“What about the people at the Prep? We knew those people for years.” The Prep was the short name of the school Taylor, Derrick, and Marty had gone to most of their life. After her father died, Taylor’s mom had felt she would be better off at an all-girls school to focus on her studies, and it worked because the other girls had made Taylor so sick all she wanted to do was focus on something, anything other than them.
Taylor sighed in irritation and looked up to the ceiling. “Derrick, nobody at the Prep would talk to me after we stopped being friends.”
There was silence, and Taylor looked down to a horrified Derrick. “I … Why would … Why?”
“Because you were cool and popular, and if you didn’t like me I must be awful,” she answered. “I was quiet and reserved, Derrick. You were the boss of that school. If you didn’t like me, the trend would follow, and it did.”
Derrick looked like he was going to be sick. “Taylor—”
“Anyway,” Taylor said, blowing over anything Derrick was going to say, “I couldn’t tell my grandfather how crazy Cedric was because he was sick. What good would that stress do for him? And the no-phone thing was making me nervous. I had a cell phone, but he got rid of it, or someone did. It was gone one day. So I went to him and said I needed at least one phone that I could call someone in an emergency, and he just walked away from me. So I realized that was a lost cause, and I went out and got another phone.
“And when he found me on it one day, with Poppy’s hospice nurse about his meds, he went nutty. He took it and started shouting. It was scary, really scary. I had never heard him speak higher than a whisper, so just the boom of his voice was upsetting.”
“What did he say?”
Taylor groaned. “All kinds of things. ‘There are no phones here because I want it that way.’ And that if I didn’t like it, too bad. That we didn’t need to call anyone because soon Poppy would be dead ‘just like the rest of them.’ And that it was a curse—all the deaths were a curse, and one of us was the cause, and he was going to find out who.
“So one of the staff got me a pay-as-you-go phone, and I hid it. I didn’t need it for long because Poppy died a few days later. And then I was so busy with the funeral that I didn’t care what Cedric was doing. I just pushed through it all, getting the arrangements made and then the actual funeral. I was so numb from it all, and I just wanted to focus on what I needed to do because I had no idea what I was going to do from there on out.
“The night of the funeral, after I got home I was in my room when I heard these loud bangs from somewhere in the house. By this point there were only like three people still employed, and no one was there but Cedric and me. So I huddled up in my room, and I just kind of waited and hoped it would stop. But it didn’t, and I could hear it coming closer.”
Taylor swallowed as she remembered. “So, finally I opened the door to look out, and Cedric was coming up the corridor. He had no shirt on, and he was covered in blood, and behind him on the floor were smashed pictures. He was ripping them off the wall and smashing them, then digging through the glass, getting the actual pictures, and ripping them—just shredding all the pictures. Ones of the family, paintings, awards. Everything. And then when he was done shredding it, he would punch into the wall and pull it apart and grab inside, like he was looking for something.”
“Fuck, Taylor.”
“Yeah.” Taylor shuddered. “And then he saw me. He just suddenly stopped and turned to me, and his eyes got all wide. So I went to shut my door, but he was there and there was blood all over him.” Taylor felt tears slide down her cheek. “It was so fucking scary. It was like a horror movie, and I tried to push the door shut. I really tried, but he just pushed it open, and I couldn’t hold it—” Taylor was talking through sobs now as she relived the night.
Derrick went over to her and picked her up, holding her to him. He brought her to the bed. He didn’t say a word, and Taylor knew that he wouldn’t push her to go on, but she felt like she needed to. She wanted it out.
“So, he grabbed me by my arms, and he just stared at me, and then he said, ‘The curse needs to end.’ He said it so quiet and then he shook me and said, ‘Do you understand what I am saying? It will end tonight!’ And I, I think he was going to kill me. I think he thought I was cursed. That I was making everyone die, and he was next. I don’t know, but he was grabbing me so tight … so I kicked and pushed, and he let go of me, and then I, I grabbed this vase thing, I hit him, but he kept coming, and I kept swinging and hitting, and finally he fell. And I didn’t know what to do.” Taylor said, shaking her head. “I thought he was dead, and I just grabbed a bag and stuffed some clothes in it. I had this stash of money I had been keeping under my mattress, and I grabbed it, and then I stopped and realized I was going to have to call the police. And I was sick because of the scandal and bad press it was going to bring to the company, and the people who believed in us … and then he groaned. And then I was just scared he was going to come around and be even crazier and kill me, so I left. I left.”
Derrick pushed back Taylor’s hair and kissed her forehead as he pulled her tightly to him. “I’m so sorry, Tay,” he murmured against her forehead. “I’m going to take care of you from now on. That stuff is over,” he promised, pressing another kiss into her forehead.
I can take care of myself, Taylor thought. In fact, she opened her mouth to say it but clamped her lips together before it came out. It was nice to be taken care of, to have someone want to take care of her. It had been a long time, and she just wanted to be cared for now. Instead of fighting against it, she absorbed it all: Derrick rubbing her back, kissing her forehead, and just holding her. She wasn’t scared at this moment, she felt safe and relaxed.
“You wanna lay down, Tay? Try and get some more sleep?” Derrick asked, and Taylor thought she might melt. When he was holding her, it was easy to forget their past, and how he had hurt her, and how much she didn’t want to rely on him. It was easy to forget that she was taking on a business she knew nothing about and that she was in a world she had never felt like she belonged and now had to fit herself in. Right now in Derrick’s arms, she was safe.
Derrick slipped his fingers under her chin and tilted her face up to his. “Tay? You okay? You wanna talk more?” he asked her softly, his chocolate gaze coated in concern.
“No,” she whispered. She wanted to look at his lips, she wanted to lean in, but that was taking it the direction she was trying to avoid. She could feel her heart race and her body respond to him. “No, I’m tired,” she said as she sat up and slowly pulled from Derrick’s arms. “Thanks for letting me vent, Derrick,” she said as she slid back under the blankets.
“Anything for you, Taylor,” Derrick answered softly and slid in next to her.<
br />
Chapter Fourteen
Derrick slept like crap.
He’d had trouble falling asleep after Taylor’s revelations of horror about Cedric.
She had been stuck there, and he had done that to her. If he hadn’t turned her away, then she would have been able to come to him, to get help.
He watched her sleep for a while, not even hiding the fact that he was holding her as she slept. And it had nothing to do with her maybe needing comfort and everything to do with him needing to hold her so he could know she was safe.
Finally he did fall asleep, only to jostle wide awake every time Taylor moved or murmured in her sleep. He was so afraid she would fall back into her frenzied panic from earlier that he was on alert to everything she did.
And now he was awake because Taylor had shifted her leg against his. Derrick looked her over: she was fast asleep, her face relaxed, and she had her hand wrapped around his forearm, holding it to her. She was here, and she was safe. Derrick closed his eyes and let out the breath he had been holding since waking, and then he heard a beep.
His phone meeting. These goddamned meetings were starting to drive him mad, especially since they had yet to yield what he wanted. But this was his project; this was the one thing besides Taylor that he wanted the most, so he had to push through.
Derrick slowly unwrapped his legs from Taylor’s, slid his arm out from around her, and pulled his arm out from her grasp. Taylor furrowed her brow in her sleep as Derrick distanced himself and made a noise of discontentment. Derrick kissed her forehead. “I’ll be right here, Taylor,” he whispered. Taylor sighed and rolled onto her stomach.
Derrick moved silently around the room, throwing on some clothes and grabbing his phone. Then he kissed Taylor on the forehead again and left the room. He was slowly closing the door, doing everything he could to not make any noise, when he heard Marty’s door open.
“Oh, good, you guys are up. I was just headed in there to talk to Taylor,” Marty said through a yawn. Her hair was stuck up on one side, and she looked like she wasn’t sure if she was really awake.
