Always & Forever Vive (The Undergrad Years #4) (4 page)

Anyways…Seneca had told me straight-out when we first met, in a deep baritone voice which sent an erotic shiver straight to my vajayjay, “Vive, you’re a beautiful girl who has the whole world ahead of you. I want to keep seeing you, but I’m not looking for a serious relationship. I’m focused on my studies, as you should be, too. Would you be okay with us just having something physical?”

“Hell to the no,” was my first response in a wavering voice of frustration. Followed by, “What kind of girl do you think I am, Seneca Seminole? I’m a Farnworth. My parents own the number one liquor company in the world. I could have any man on campus. Heck, I could take any man on the Upper West Side to be my boyfriend, such as Jay Austin, for example, and I am picking y-o-u.” The little hairs on the back of my neck had stiffened with annoyance. I wanted to knee him one in the nuts.

He’d smiled at me with those black eyes which sparkled, and attested, “I don’t want you to stop seeing Jay Austin. He’s good for you. He cares about you, and you deserve to have someone like him in your life.”

“Damn straight.” However, it had made me want Seneca that much more.

“You’re not exclusive, are you?”

I’d shaken my head, hoping he’d give in and be mine. All mine.

“Why don’t you date both of us?”

“At the same frickin’ time?” I’d huffed, thinking he had to be kidding. I mean…really.

“Yes. Sounds good, doesn’t it?”

“No. That sounds exhausting.” I tried to make a joke to lighten the mood, because otherwise I’d break down and cry. “You’ve got some serious donkey balls to come back at me with this malarkey.”

“Come on, whaddya say?” He’d persisted with an eager affection I wasn’t used to.

Annoyed for not getting exactly what I wanted, and the way I’d intended, I stuck my nearly manicured-to-perfection middle finger—lacquered with the season’s hottest polish trend and my favorite color, gold—way up in the air and shouted, “Honey, you can take your PhD and shove it where the sun don’t shine. Fuuuck you!”

Talk about annoying.

However, days passed, then weeks, and I missed hearing stories about his Native American people.

Did you know his father was from the Mohegan tribe and in the late ‘90’s designed the largest casino in the United States? Isn’t that cool?

One night, I broke down and called him. I had to. I couldn’t sleep. I’d lost ten pounds from the stress of it all, which was about ten percent of my total body weight.
I know
.

After he’d profusely apologized for offending me with his open relationship crap-on-a-stick bullshit, we’d agreed to meet up again and hang out as friends. We had a few drinks. He told me a story about his family and life on the Thames River. We might’ve smoked a ‘lil weed. Okay. Sometimes I smoke pot to take the edge off. Don’t get all judgy,
puh-lease
. I smoke for medical reasons. I get it from a doctor over on Madison Avenue. At least, I think he’s a doctor.

Anyway…I took a hit of pot and then
bam!
My top came off. With the second inhale, much deeper than the first, going straight to my toes,
bam!
My pants came down. And ya’ll already know that I never wear any underwear. So we started to fool around.

When he shoved his dark-skinned face between my peachy legs, he snarled as if he were some type of shape-shifting wolf from the wild. It was the freakiest thing. Like
ever
! He made me say his name in bed over and over again, as if he was channeling his Indian spirits from another tribe. And right before I came, he’d demanded that I “beg.”

Shocked into a state of total freaky-deaky-ness, I asked, “Huh?”

“If you want to come on my dick, and in my bed, you need to ask for permission.” His large hand took the side of my face. Holding me gently, sweetness in his eyes, he licked his lips and demanded, “Beg, woman, beg!”

Well, that right there, that very display of alpha perversion? Oh, Lawdy, it turned my insides out with a lightness in my chest, my mouth went dry, my senses heightened, and I had to be with him in whatever capacity he’d have me.

“Please, Seneca, may…I…come now?” I’d gotten all into it.

He’d growled in my ear as he planted himself firmly between my legs and started to drill deep inside me.

Whoever said that smart men were bad in bed clearly hadn’t been banged by Seneca Seminole. I swear on my Chanel handbag that we broke the bedframe, not to mention had my roomies up snickering from down the hall—until the wee hours of the morning. It was the best sex I’d ever had.

I’m not kidding when I say that I seriously heard the song “Final Countdown” by ‘80s’ Swedish glam metal band Europe in my head the entire time the man was inside me. My body felt as if it had left ground, I’d said goodbye to planet Earth and was headed for Venus. Like seriously.

After we had sex, we lay in bed for a minute, catching our breath. My mind raced a gazillion miles an hour trying to keep up with my pulse, which felt as if I were about to have a heart attack. It was as if a controlled, reformed, once-incarcerated part of me had finally been set free to fly in the wind. I’d tried to stand, to go take a shower, but my legs were too weak to walk. No kidding. Euphoria saturating every fiber of my being, instead, I crawled over and lay on top of him.

It was then that he’d given me the nickname. “Vive, I’ll call you, Luyu.”

With my face planted firmly on his hard chest, still seeing stars, I pressed my lips down on his hot skin before asking, “What does
Luyu
mean?”

“Wild dove…”

Right then. Right there. My heart, sometimes viewed by others as being cold and prickly, melted into a warm pool of love.

I’d thought back to his question about having a physical-only relationship and realized with Seneca it wasn’t just sex.
No, honey.
It was a spiritual awakening. One which I’d never known. With my skin flushed to near fire, I thought…
Hell to the yes. Yes! Dear God up above, thank you for bringing him to me and Y-E-S!!

Just then, my bathroom phone rang, jolting me back to the present.

Still on the bidet, leaning forward, I took the phone off the wall, and answered, “Hello.”

“Hallå, Viveca! This is your mama.”

“Morning…”

Getting ready to be bored out of my mind by her long-winded stories of grandeur, I flipped the switch on my bidet to pulse and let the water do its thing.

Ohhhh. Heaven.

“Don’t you dare
morgon
me, young lady,” she hissed into the phone.

“What now?” I asked, hating when she’d get like that. I was always in trouble.

Do you have any idea what it’s like to have parents who believe you to be a constant fuck-up? Debilitating.

Sure, I had a bad past. A horrific last few years that entailed the worst thing one could ever go through. Regardless, I didn’t want to talk about it. Not then.
Hello! I’m on the bidet.

“Your father and I are packing for a weekend trip to Gothenburg this morning to go visit your Aunt Birgitta, who’s hosting a charity dinner for the Swedish Peace and Arbitration Society.”

“Ah-huh.” I rolled my eyes. My parents might own a liquor company, but they hadn’t
worked
in years. Living off Grandmamma Greta Ann’s fortunes, they jetted around the globe, bouncing from one party to another, while their minions ran their enterprises.

“Well, your aunt called this morning to see what time we’d be getting in and while she had me on the phone, she told me that last night at a soirée she bumped into the Whites.”

Yuck-o-nasty.

The Whites had spawned my number one frenemy of all time: Poppy-freakin’-White, or as my besties and I had called her behind her back, Miss Poopy Wipe.

We hated, loathed, and detested Poppy. And for good reason!

The previous semester, her talk show broke the story on my besties and me sneaking into a club and getting roofied. It was all a big mistake and none of it was our fault. Well, except for the fact that we’d paid for some fake identification cards showing that we were over the age of twenty-one.

Clearly, we weren’t.

That girl could destroy ‘ya in a blink. Therefore, we’d done our best to keep her happy, which meant being her ‘friend’.

Before the roofie incident, my parents had even gone as far as running Farnworth Firewater advertisements on TV. When she’d aired that nasty segment on us, they pulled their ad dollars quicker than you could say
kackerlacka!
(That’s Swedish for cockroach.)

Regardless, it was too late. Poppy White’s once-regional Manhattan-only talk show had gone national that semester, picked up by every major network from Whynot, Mississippi to Pie Town, New Mexico.

Her success (at my expense) was enough to make anyone puke.

Especially me!

To be honest, I had other reasons for not liking Poppy besides the fact that she wouldn’t stay out of my life. I mean, who has a full-on-balls-to-the-wall career in television as the host of their own talk show, while attending freshman college classes full-time? The girl never slept. It was as if she snorted Adderall all day long to keep herself running around campus in fifth gear. She made all of us appear lazy and unmotivated.

I hated her for that, too.

Another reason I couldn’t stand Poppy was I couldn’t keep up with her schedule for success. For example, my stressed body requires a nap every day at 4 p.m. Also, when I was out late dancing on Thursday nights, I usually skipped Friday classes and spent the entire day on the sofa watching my favorite soap,
The Bold & the Beautiful
. Not to mention, on Monday mornings—which was usually when Pucci and Dior had their sample sales—I was always first in line. Always! Now I ask you, knowing my hectic schedule, when would I have the time to hold down a job?

Exactly!

I didn’t think that Poppy chick had ever watched a soap opera, gone clubbing or bought couture. The girl was no fun.

“Nice to see they’re on the same jet-set schedule as you and Papa.” I tried to hide my annoyance. “How are Mr. and Mrs. White?”

“Fine. Elated, in fact. They were bragging, going on and on about how their daughter had just secured a book deal with one of those top New York publishers.”

I knew where Mama was going with this conversation, and it was draining every fiber I had to get sober. So, I upped the pulse on the bidet to a firm stream of fabulousness, picked up a half-filled bottle of bubbly, left over from the night before, from the floor near the tub, took a few swigs, and tried to drown out her jabbering.

Yesss. Right there.

See, my parents may not ‘work’ but they sure took the family money and started a cow load of companies. From restaurant chains to cattle ranches, my folks had created dozens of enterprises. Don’t get all impressed, though. They didn’t roll up their sleeves and bust a sweat, or anything. They hired people to work their companies while they golfed, spa’d and lived the lifestyle
People
magazine had said they deserved.

Spare me!

However, they felt that as soon as a teenager could land a job, they should. And I never did. They reasoned that if a person had the resources available, one should start their own company. And again, I had millions left to me in a trust by my Grandmamma Greta Ann, but I hadn’t started much in my life…except trouble.

Don’t get me wrong. I had goals and dreams as any other Manhattanite.

One day, I’d like to own a magazine. Something glamorous like
Vogue,
lifestyle-focused such as
Town & Country,
but reaching a younger demographic. I already had a name for my publication:
Debauchery
. It’s brilliant, isn’t it? I plan on using it for my graduation thesis. That is, if I live long enough to see my graduation.

Swigging another sip of the warm champagne, I sighed at the thought of the last few years. They’d been very near-death experiences. I’ll get in to that later.

“Are you listening to me?” Mama shouted.

“Yes. Maybe.” I wiped my lips and asked, “What did you say?”

“I
said
that Poppy White is writing an exposé on you and your Manhattanites.”

“Whaaa?” A heaviness of concern filled my liquor-soaked stomach. I stood so fast the water from the bidet hit the ceiling.

Crap!

Hedda Hopper yapped, running around the bathroom as if a fire hydrant broke loose.

“That little tart is doing a whole book on you and your friends.”

Eyes blinking, wiping myself, I tried to collect my fuzzy thoughts. See, Mama was a bit of a drama queen. She could take the littlest thing and turn it into an epidemic. The key was to act as I always did, as if it was no big deal, which always drove her batty.

Pushing the red button to ‘off’, I took a deep breath, tried to still my heart, and asked in a calm tone with a fake smile on my lips, “I wonder what the book will be about?”

“Oh, I don’t know, Viveca.” She seethed. “It could be that you are the wealthiest eighteen-year-old in town, who runs around with
the
most famous group of teenagers in the world.”

“Hmmm, that…” I sighed, feeling a bit guilty as my insides quivered. It was all such old news. “Mama, who cares? Let Poppy write what she wants to. People have always talked about us. Sooo. What.”

“Meet with her. See if you can get your hands on a copy of the manuscript. Try and spin this into something positive.”

I laughed hard at what she wanted and at the palpitations in my heart. In the eyes of the general public, there was nothing positive about my group of friends. People loved to hate us. That reminded me…

“Thanks for telling me, Mama. I’ll see what I can do. Listen, I’m going to meet the girls today. We have an appointment for…something…special.”

“Tell your Manhattanites I send my regards and I’ll call you when I get back. I plan on seeing the Whites and talking to them.”

“Why do you care so much?” Unsure of how she’d respond, I bit my lower lip.

“Because, I love you and don’t want to see your name dragged through the mud more than it already has.”