A tub of half-eaten cookie dough ice cream rested on the floor with the lid precariously hanging over one side and a spoon jutting out of the other. Magazines such as Glamour, Elle, and Italian Vogue lay in its wake like casualties of war with licorice guts and M&M organs strewn about for the world to see. The two Amazonian goddesses, the cause of the unholy massacre below, lay perched in the heavens with their backs to the destruction that they had caused. Their bodies lay plagued with emotions not even they were ready to deal with.
“You know what I wonder sometimes?” Christine stared upward at the French pedicure of her dainty toes drumming against the cotton candy wall that her bed was pushed up against in her bedroom. “What is a soul mate truly supposed to be?”
“What do you mean?” Zephyr turned her head of wavy blond locks on the mattress to stare at the side of her best friend’s face as she spoke and readjusted her bare feet against the wall as she did so.
“People are just always talking about finding their soul mates or that one person that they are meant to be with. What if you’re not really meant to be with your soul mate? What if you’re just meant to cross paths with them?” she wondered aloud. “What if they’re just meant to happen into your life for a brief moment in time in order to change you or set you in a different direction?”
“So the sex was that good, huh?” she cackled while casually chewing her gum.
“Shut up,” Christine couldn’t help but to laugh at her friend’s brashness. It was one of the things that she loved most about her. She spoke her mind no matter the consequences. “It was pretty amazing – the sex – I’m just speaking in general right now.”
“You’re crazy about him,” Zephyr shrugged her shoulders and rolled her head back to it’s previous position to gaze up into the mint sky through the skylights implanted into the ceiling of the guesthouse. “He was beyond sexy so I really can’t blame you for that.”
“It was more than that.”
“Amazing pipe…I know. We’ve been over that.”
“I’m serious, Z, it was like…I don’t even know how to explain it without sounding like some sort of hype. The connection we had was just unreal.”
“It’s been three days.” She rolled her eyes.
“He’s never going to call me again because I was such a skank and normally I wouldn’t even care but…”
“You’re crazy about him.”
“…I’m crazy about him. Yes,”
“I’d tell you to bite the bullet and call him but that is so unbelievably beyond being gay that I can’t believe I even uttered the words to say how gay it is. That’d be a cop out. I’d have to kick you out of the club.”
“I’m the only other member.”
“It’s that exclusive.”
Christine sighed heavily in disgust at the situation. “I should have known he was an asshole. Only genuine asses tell you at point blank range that they’re assholes and that you choose to hump them at your own risk.”
“He warned you too? Goddamn, he’s good.”
“How do you figure?”
“If you can tell someone to their face that you’re going to hit it and quit it, proceed to hit it, and then go ahead and quit it when you know damn well you’ve put you’re back into it…that’s golden.”
“Hey, are you his friend or mine?”
“In this situation I should be his because I need to take some notes!”
“God, whatever,” Christine let her feet slide down the wall before rolling over onto her side in a huff. “What am I going to do? It’s not like I can go running back to Gavin. He probably wouldn’t take me back anyway after Justin clobbered him at the bonfire.”
“You’re too good for that douche anyway so don’t even get going back to him in your head. Besides, you’ve proven that you can do better than him. Now you have to prove to yourself that you can do better than this new cat. You’re fucking Christine Davenport. It’s not like you’re a Pullman twin looking for a handout.”
“I know who I am. The problem is he doesn’t know who I am,” she breathed out heavily. “He’s just some fucking distant relative of Sylvia’s that doesn’t know shit about the hierarchy.”
“Well then you’re just going to have to show him who’s boss.” Zephyr stated with gumption and popped the bubble gum bubble she had just begun to blow.
“And how do you suppose I do that without calling him?”
“That’s easy. It’s called word of mouth.”
“Nobody knows him. He’s a fucking ghost.”
“Nobody but your mother and his dear Aunt Sylvia,” Zephyr pointed out deviously. “You see, I heard that you broke up with Gavin recently and in the wake you’ve been doing some serial dating and that perhaps you’ve already gotten serious with one of these suitors…”
“In three days?”
“Hush up and listen. It’s going to start off with the casual date here and there and then suddenly you’re spending more and more time away from home, right? Your mom is going to start chattering to her friends about it and Sylvia is going to happen to be giggling into the phone about it on one of the days her precious nephew is over and he’s going to be filled with rage.”
“Something like that could take decades.”
“It could but what else do you have to do with your time but to get cute and go on dates with other guys?”
***
He’d missed out on at least thirty-six thousand dollars in a seventy-two
hour span of time. He wasn’t hurting for the money but it still hurt him
to know how much wasn’t going into his already overflowing stash under
his mattress. He didn’t understand how things had gone so horribly wrong
in such a short period of time. Three days ago he was on top of the world and
had everything in order with his job and with his life. Three days ago he was
banging the daylights out of a girl he knew he shouldn’t have been screwing
in the first place but it was more than amazing and he had told himself it was
worth the leering trouble ahead. He just hadn’t expected the trouble to
come rearing its ugly head from another direction. He’d been sideswiped.
Around four in the morning he had taken Ms. Davenport back to her parents’ sprawling estate in the hills. He’d made it a point to stick his dick in her one more time for good measure just so that she knew that he meant business and that what they had started was in no way over. She’d told him that he was a rotten cheat for teasing her but didn’t deny the stolen kisses goodbye that he’d offered. As she scampered away he had called out of the window, in a hushed voice of course, that he’d call her later that night. She’d turned to look back at him over her shoulder with the most gorgeous smile he had ever seen and said she wasn’t going to hold her breath but he knew even then that she’d be waiting.
Pulling off down the road he knew what a risk this new endeavor would be but he had decided that it was a risk he was going to take. Christine’s mother had undoubtedly given him an in with her cockamamie story about being her friend’s nephew. Now he had a free pass into sun-tan land even if he hadn’t intended to use it when the opportunity had first arisen. She had made it all too convenient for him to pop up and ravage her daughter whenever he felt like it.
He’d play it cool of course. He wouldn’t let on to the fact that he was screwing the life out of her child. He’d still give the older woman what she needed and explain to her that he was keeping up appearances by hanging out with her daughter and her best friend. Cynthia, of course, would be a little weary of the idea but she’d know subconsciously that it was of her own doing and he was only trying to help her save face. It wasn’t like he was going to marry her daughter and as far as she knew he wasn’t actually fucking her either. These were the thoughts going through his mind until his personal line began to ring out of control.
Justin scratched his fingernails over the side of his head in frustration. If he had had any idea where he had gone he would have tracked him down and killed him. He would have slammed his head into the concrete and set him on fire without a second thought. He admittedly had a temper but when it came to his daughter and her treatment, or mistreatment in the case that it was, he was altogether a violent entity to be dealt with.
Ming had called him at 4:29am screaming out as if someone had mortally wounded her. He’d told her to calm down because he couldn’t understand what she was saying. She’d tried to collect herself but it was to no avail. The most that he could make out were the words ‘Jose’, ‘touch’, and ‘Mia’. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to put two and two together. He was on that side of town and in front of the house that they lived in off of his dollar in less than ten minutes when the drive should have taken at least twenty.
“No, I don’t want to fucking hear it!” he had shouted out at his baby’s mother in a rage as he stormed in and out of the house with armfuls of his child’s belongings stuffing his luxury automobile to capacity with the items he had bought her. Clothing, toys, the bed spread, crayons, and stuffed animals were squeezed into the front and backseats of the car pressing against the windows as if they were suffocating.
“Justin, I swear to God that I didn’t know! If I had known I would have told you sooner but I just found out, I fucking swear to you, I just found out! I fucking caught him looking at her!” Ming shook her arms at him as the tears streamed down her full cheeks. “God, please don’t take her away from me? Please?”
“Fuck you, Ming!” Justin slammed the car door and whipped around so quickly to point an accusing finger in her face that she nearly stumbled over backward into the grass. “Every fucking day you get all up inside of my ass about how I’d be an unfit parent to our kid and how I wouldn’t know shit to do with her but you know what? I damn for sure would keep her protected from a goddamn child molesting freak like that fucking dick you brought into this house with her! What the shit, Ming?! You left him alone with her?”
“No, no, I never left him alone with her! I never left her here with him if I left the house or anything! I just woke up with a bad feeling in my stomach and realized he wasn’t in bed with me…” she shook her head with wide eyes as if she were already reliving the moment that made her call her baby’s father in the first place. “I got up to see where he was and he was standing in the middle of her room watching her sleep…touching himself and…”
“I don’t want to hear shit else, Ming, because I swear I’ll fucking kill you too.” He took a step back away from her, moved to the side, and headed back into the house that he could no longer consider a home for his child. “Baby, did you get your Dora doll?”
Mia, whom had been stationed in the living room since her father had arrived, nodded her head and lifted her doll into the air to show him that she had been keeping an eye on what she considered to be her baby. She was still dressed in her Dora the Explorer pajamas but also her pink jacket and pink bunny rabbit slippers. She was too young to understand what was going on but she knew that she was leaving and that her mommy was not going with her.
“Alright, baby, let’s go,” Justin held out his arms to his daughter and she came to him without hesitation. Easily he lifted her into his strong arms and cradled her close to his chest. For a moment he stood there that way, holding her close, terrified to ever let her go again, before he regained his bearings and turned to exit the house to take her to the car.
“Oh, god, Justin, don’t take her!” Mia cried out desperately as the realization overtook her that he was really taking her child away from her. “I’ll call the fucking police! I’ll get a lawyer!”
“And tell them what? You’ll tell them that you moved a fucking pedophile into the house and found him jacking off in our daughter’s room in the middle of the night? Tell them that I whore around to get money to support all three of your mother fuckers?” he shouted back at her as he opened the back door behind the passenger’s seat and implanted his child into the car-seat that had been awaiting her. “Yeah, Ming, you go right ahead and you do that, alright? Tell them every fucking thing that has been going on because you’ll definitely be successful in not only taking her away from me but also taking her away from yourself, you fucking dingbat.”
“Don’t you act like I wanted this to happen, okay? Don’t you dare come out here acting like I wouldn’t give my life to keep my daughter out of harms way.”
“Where is that filthy fat fuck right now, Ming?” he inquired after securing his daughter’s seatbelt and closing the door so that she wasn’t privy to any more of the profanity being exchanged between her parents.
“I told you that I don’t know,” she stared up at him in disdain.
“You don’t know?”
“No. How many times do I have to tell you that before you get it through your thick fucking skull?”
“You’re going to have to tell me until I believe that you’re not fucking lying to me trying to protect that sick fuck because you’re retarded enough to think you can change him and that all will be right in the world if you get him some help.”
“I couldn’t find you help so what makes you think I’d bend over backwards to try to help another unfit man?”
“Sweetheart, you bend over at the drop of a goddamn dime so don’t pretend to be high and mighty right now.”
“From one whore to the next, am I right, Justin?”
“At least I’m not the one getting screwed,” he rolled his eyes at her, “you can see her on Sundays and even then I feel like those should be supervised visits.”
Ming wiped at the unending tears streaming from her eyes as she watched him walk around the front of the car to get into the driver’s seat. “Will you just take care of her for a little while until I find someplace else? I’ll find someplace else, okay?”
Justin didn’t respond to her pleas as he got into his vehicle and once again slammed the car door. All he remembered from that point on was starting the ignition and glancing back over his shoulder to see his daughter’s face. She was staring out of the window at her mother with empty eyes. There was no longing there. It was just empty and it sent a chill throughout her father’s entire body. As he pulled off she didn’t mutter a single word or whimper in protest. She simply turned her head and looked straight ahead as her mother chased after them for at least a block before falling to her knees in anguish at what she had unknowingly allowed to occur.
That had been three days ago. He hadn’t heard from Ming since it had happened. She hadn’t even called him to check him on his cares for their daughter which was out of the ordinary for her. She’d blow his phone up every hour on the hour on the Sundays that he had kept her in the past. Now that the shit had hit the fans she hadn’t made a peep.
He sat in his leather computer chair swaying back and forth ever so slightly as he watched his tiny child sleeping her life away in his enormously oversized bed. She had kicked off of the blankets and was barely covered by the sheet twisted around her. Her entire body seemed to rise and fall as she slept on her stomach with her tiny fist curled just under her left cheek as she slept. She was a beautiful little thing even with drool at the corner of her lips but beautiful in a completely innocent and fragile sort of way.
Justin tried not to think about that night. He tried not to think about however many nights before that Jose had watched his daughter with evil thoughts in his bloated head. He tried to only think of the here and now because when he thought of anything else it filled him with rage and he knew that he wouldn’t be able to control it. He knew that if it was released he may never see his daughter again. Murderers only got pictures, if that, while they did life sentences in jail. For what he would do he’d probably get the lethal injection.
His business line had been ringing non-stop. He’d had to turn it off. The money driven side of him wanted to make every appointment but the logical and paternal side knew that he couldn’t. Who would watch Mia if he left for a job? Did he even trust anyone to be alone with her? No, he had to stay. He had to stay there with her and watch her and keep her protected from the world because the world was an ugly and horrible place that feasted on the innocent. He’d be damned if anyone ever feasted on his offspring. She was the only good thing he’d ever done in his condemned life.
Running his hand over his face he yawned wearily. He missed her and he didn’t understand how that was already happening. It had only been a few days since they had parted but things were so strained. If he called her now it would only complicate things more. He’d convinced her of the truth about him being single but how was he going to introduce having a child into the picture? He’d never intended to tell her in all of his honesty. It was something that she didn’t need to know because his lives were separate. There was a distinct line between them. Now, everything was in disarray.
“J.R., I’m starting to worry. The ladies have started talking. Where are you?” Amelia’s voice played on his voicemail and haunted his thoughts as he continued to watch his daughter sleep.
They weren’t the only ones worried…
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