Break (20 page)

“I can’t take that chance.”

I straightened myself, hating the calmness on his face. He was determined to write me off like I meant nothing.
He’s not broke
. He had a job that, no doubt, paid an impressive salary and a house in the city that was probably worth around ten million dollars, but he still was so fucking greedy. It made me sick.

“What he wanted from you was to be treated like a person, not a bank. He’s going to lose respect for you if you do this, and you’ll never get your precious money.” The sight of Luke’s unyielding face made me erupt. “You know what? He’s right. You’re nothing but a selfish, greedy WASP. All you care about is money. You’ll be miserable forever, just like your father.”

It was the most hateful thing I ever said, but I felt satisfied when I saw Luke’s stony face falter a little bit.

“I’m sorry,” he said in a tight voice. “But it’s over. I’ll pay you the rest of the money.”

“I don’t want your fucking money!” I screamed at his face. “I wanted you.” I got one look of his face, wretched with grief, before I grabbed my suitcase. I ripped it across the floor as I crashed through the door. My suitcase bounced on the steps and I sped up the hill in a blind rage, determined not to look back.

I waited at the MUNI bus stop and half-expected Luke to storm up the hill, to demand an apology, to beg for my forgiveness. I waited fifteen minutes, but nothing happened. He didn’t come.

Chapter 10

I arrived at my apartment and slammed the door shut. It was satisfying to feel the walls shake, even if I felt a little childish for such a display of temper. I was angrier than I ever was in my life, but for the first time I didn’t blame myself.

“You’re back!”

Natalie stood up from the couch in shock, but quickly sank back down at the look on my face. I was not a violent person, but in that moment I really wanted to hit her.

“Jess, I’m so sorry. Ben swore he wouldn’t tell anyone.” Her arms trembled as she approached me and her face shined with tears. “Please believe me.”

“Yeah, well.” I softened a bit when I saw how upset she was over it, but I still thought she should have kept silent. “You told him when I asked you not to tell anyone. I made you promise.”

She gave a frustrated sigh and brushed her hair back with her right hand. “I know, I’m so sorry.”

When I looked at her hands, I saw that she wasn’t wearing her engagement ring. Distracted, I momentarily forgot my anger. “What happened?”

Natalie’s eyes slowly watered and then before I knew it, she had launched herself in my arms. She sobbed into my shoulder and I reached around to pat her back.

“I don’t know if I’m ready to marry him. I don’t know whether he’s the one. I was so sure before we got engaged, but then he got his new position at the law firm. We barely see each other now. I was so lonely when you were gone and he started this whole mess with your foster parents.”

I was so angry about my situation that I didn’t even consider how she must have suffered. I clutched her shoulder and felt shaken. She reminded me how much I needed my best friend, and how much I missed her while I was abroad.

“I don’t want you to break up with him because of me.”

She shook her head. “I don’t know what I want anymore.”

A small amount of guilt began to worm its way inside my heart.
I do not want this.
If Natalie and Ben weren’t meant together, that was one thing—but I didn’t want her to break up over this.
What if she regrets it years down the line and resents me for it?

I gently disengaged myself from her arms and sat down at the kitchen table. As I sat down, a wave of exhaustion slammed into me. I didn’t realize how tired I was from all the traveling.

Natalie sat down across from me, her hands balled on the table. “What are you going to do about your foster parents?”

A sick feeling turned my stomach at the mention of them. “What do you mean?”

“Well, they basically slandered you on television.”

I let out a hollow laugh. “I’ve no money to sue them. Besides, what they said was true. I did have a drug problem and I did act out.”

All of it seemed so long ago, and yet when I saw their faces I had such a visceral reaction.

“Only because they abused you.”

I heard the anger in her voice, but I felt strangely detached from the trauma. “Vincent, their son, raped me when I was ten. They knew about it, but they did nothing to stop it. I finally was able to leave at seventeen.”

I never told her that. I told Luke about it, a man I knew for no more than a couple months, but not my best friend. I could still hear his detached voice when he told me we were done. We shared each other’s dark secrets.
I slept with him.
He told me things that made me glow, but in the end nothing was more important than his money. I tried to swallow down the lump rising up my throat.

She bit her lip. When she spoke, it was in a quiet voice. “I didn’t know that it started so young, but I always knew something was wrong. Why didn’t you tell anyone?”

Her eyes gleamed with a bit of hurt.

I shook my head. “You don’t understand. He manipulated me. He told me I wanted it—that if I loved him I would have sex with him, that it was what good girls did. When that stopped working, he threatened to kill me, or himself. So, I did whatever he said. Then he had me under complete control and there was no need for threats. Sometimes, I could feel my body responding to him and it absolutely sickened me, because I hated him so much. I felt ruined and worthless.”

I waited for the tears to come, but they never did. I think I exhausted my ability to cry over the Kramers in the Chicago mansion. Another small victory.

Natalie’s face was frozen in that pitying, horrified expression that I loathed. “Jessica, you should turn him in. Go to the police.”

“No,” I said in a sharp voice. “I don’t want to relive everything. I don’t want to go through all of that only to see him walk. I don’t have any evidence.”

She looked like she wanted to argue, but she closed her mouth under my glare. “What about Luke?”

Suddenly, I was a lot less willing to discuss him. “What about him?”

Natalie rolled her eyes. “What happened between you guys?”

“He broke up with me,” I snapped.

She threw her hands up. “Geez, Jessica. I just wanted to know.”

My hands gripped the splintered edge of the crappy kitchen table. “He was the best thing in my life. When we first started out, I thought he was just going to be a typical spoiled rich boy, but he’s not at all like that. Luke made me feel like I was normal. He made me feel cherished, and I’ve never felt that in my life.”

There was a rattling sound as Natalie reached into the cupboard to grab two mugs. “I knew he would hurt you. I know that you think that he was great, but he still dumped you over a bit of money.”

“It wasn’t a bit of money,” I said hollowly. “His father’s worth five billion.”

She whirled around with the two mugs and one of them careened out of her grip to smash on the floor. She didn’t even look down.

“Natalie!”

“Five billion?” She ignored the smashed mug as a wistful look came over her face. “There’s no way his father would give him that much. Rich people always leave a portion to charity, to people in their lives—I don’t know.”

As Natalie sank to the floor, I traced a circle into the table with my finger.
Maybe I was a bit ridiculous to assume he would choose me over all that money.
“Anyways, his dad called and demanded that he stop seeing me, or Luke would never see a cent of that money. So he did.”

She looked up as she heard the tremble in my voice. “How are you holding up with all this?”

I covered my face with my hands. I tried to shrug it off, but my breath choked and Natalie sprang to her feet with broken bits of ceramic in her hands. The truth was that it hurt a lot to be passed over for money.
I told him I didn’t care. I didn’t want to take his money.
Ten grand a month was nothing compared to the amount that his father would leave him. If he left him any money at all.

I love him
. I thought of the old saying, “Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.”
Whoever came up with that was full of shit.
It was far worse to have a brief taste of true happiness, only to have it ripped away forever.
Ignorance is bliss.

Natalie’s gripped my shoulders and hugged my back. “Jessica, you deserve better. You will find better.”

“No, I won’t.”

“Yes, you will. I don’t care how much money it was. Do you think that money would make a difference in his hedonistic lifestyle? He already has millions. What’s the difference? Is there a super exclusive club for billionaires only, or something? Or maybe he wouldn’t be able to buy the private tropical island he always wanted. Cry me a goddamn river.”

My heart blazed because she was right, but then I remembered what Brandon told me. “It’s not about the money, it’s—his legacy.”

“You make your own legacy.”

My heart kept flip-flopping. It was a lot of money and Luke barely knew me. I gripped my hair and pulled.
Whatever
. It didn’t matter. It was no good to keep obsessing over him. The best thing I could do for myself was move on.

* * *

I spent the next day in a jet-lagged stupor. I felt like shit. The best thing I had in my life was gone, and the money in my bank was dwindling. I sat in my computer chair, staring at the four-digit number in my bank account. My eyes blurred. I would give it all to have him back. More than anything, I wanted to fall into his arms. His hands sliding up and down my body was a greater balm than any drug I ever took. I opened my phone, hoping to have a voicemail expressing his sincerest regret and begging me to come back, but there was nothing.

I should just Google him.
I promised Natalie I wouldn’t, but it was too easy for me to type his name into that white bar and hit ‘enter.’

Luke Pardini takes red-eye to Chicago without blonde escort

I balked at “blonde escort,” but at least they weren’t mentioning me by name. I clicked on the link as my stomach fell through.
He left already?
There was a picture of him dressed in the same clothes I’d seen him in yesterday. His suitcase was in his hand as he dashed across SFO. Another picture showed him arriving in Chicago. Had his father taken a turn for the worse? Is that why he left so abruptly?
Maybe he changed his mind.

“If he changed his mind, he would have told you. He’s done with you. Get over it,” I said to the empty room.

My email suddenly blinked and I realized I had several unread emails. Recognizing neither, I clicked on the first.
Holy shit!
I quickly scanned it and realized I had an interview at one of the places I had applied to before I left to London. The interview was in a few days. I hastily shot them an email, agreeing to the interview.

Finally! I tried not to get my hopes up, but I couldn’t help but grin as I reread the email. Suddenly, a horrifying thought popped in my head:
What if they Google my name and find all these escort articles?

I headed to the bookmarked sugarbaby website and typed in my username and password. I was determined to delete everything, but something happened.

Error: that username does not exist

What? Of course, it exists!
I tried it again. Nothing. I tried to log into the email I created for the account and that was gone too. Finally, I tried searching for myself on the sugarbaby website. Then I looked for Luke’s. Nothing. It was as if everything vanished.

Luke must have paid someone to do this. To hide the evidence.

The euphoria at getting a job interview quickly evaporated. Standing up, I decided to go to the store. I needed to get out of the stifling apartment. Natalie was at work and I hated the silence that permeated the walls. I grabbed my purse and flung open the door as a crowd of people surrounded me, screaming.
What the fuck?
I blinked in the unusually bright, winter sunlight.

“Miss Knight!”

They elbowed each other in their attempts to shove huge black cameras in my face. Flash. Click.

“Miss Knight, what did you and Luke do together? Would you like to sell a story to Huffington Post?”

The woman shoved a microphone under my nose. I stared at in shock for a second, refusing to look at the huge video camera aimed at my face, and smacked it away. Didn’t they understand that I didn’t want to be harassed?

“No. Get off of my lawn.”

None of them budged. When I was with Luke, he always shoved through the paparazzi like moving through a packed concert. I edged through them to get to my crappy car parked on the street. They followed me like a strange, nonthreatening mob and encircled my car. All of their requests were drowned by the car’s engine and they finally moved out of the way when it lurched forward.

They took pictures through the windshield; some of them still screaming requests.
Jesus. How long is this going to last?
Surely, people would get tired of reading about the blonde hooker—escort, or whatever it was they were calling me.

I didn’t really feel like going to the store because I knew I would have to drive back home with the groceries, where they were camped out. I veered my car into the highway and headed instead towards the soup kitchen.

I wasn’t scheduled to come in, but I couldn’t handle sitting in my apartment alone all day. As I walked towards the kitchen, I saw that half its windows were smashed.

“What happened?” I asked the men sweeping up the broken glass.

They shrugged. “I don’t think you’re supposed to go in there.”

Ignoring him, I pushed through the door and my shoes crunched over broken glass. Inside was a scene of devastation. Black graffiti covered the yellow walls in high arches. I bent over and righted a chair. As I walked through to the kitchen, a sick feeling descended over me.

Shelly was there with a clipboard in her hands, shaking her head. “Our inventory suffered a huge loss. They took our best pots and made a mess out of the pantry.”