DC Affairs (14 page)

“I have to live with that…my mom married my dad because he was loaded, good looking and could provide her the kind of life she wanted. I don’t know, I always thought she was calculating and a bit unfeeling for what she did. I lived my whole adolescent years waiting for her to decide she didn’t want to be with us anymore because she’d find another man who was richer than Dad. Seriously, if she could abandon Kylie so easily then why should I have felt secure with my place in her life? Suffice to say, the whole situation is so ugly, I don’t want to talk about it.”

“We can speculate about actions done to us by others our whole lives but when it comes down to it, no one really knows what happened between your mother and the two men who were her husbands. I’m sure she loved them both in her own way, and the complete reason why she left her first husband and Kylie is something you’ll never truly know. It’s not like you can ask her now.”

Russell glared in Sigourney’s direction. She lay back in her seat and her eyes were closed. She looked so peaceful but a part of him wanted to know if she could ever be that kind of person.

“Would you do that? I mean could you take off and leave a child behind?”

She opened her eyes and glanced at him. “No, I couldn’t but that’s me. My parents’ marriage is as tough as any marriage and although my mom and I don’t get along, she would have never left us. Even if she’d divorced my father, she would have taken us back to Norway.”

They settled into a comfortable silence as he navigated heavy Los Angeles traffic. Shortly after eleven in the morning, they arrived at his family’s Malibu home and parked the vehicle in the garage.

He and Sigourney got out of the car and she looked around before her gorgeous hazel-green eyes met his again. “That’s strange.”

“What, exactly?”

“Well, that H2 wasn’t there yesterday. Where the hell did it come from?”

Russell looked around at the other vehicles in the garage and sure enough, his father’s SUV was parked in the garage.

“Dad must be here though I didn’t think he would be spending any time in California this season. He was supposed to visit the Hamptons.”

“Looks like he changed his mind.”

He grabbed their luggage and walked hand in hand with Sigourney. Although he wasn’t the least bit worried about his father not liking her, he planned to stake his claim. After all, his father was quite the player and Sigourney definitely could have been his type.

“Dad!” Russell called out as they stepped into the house from the garage.

The place was quiet as a tomb and the cold, impersonal furniture did nothing to make the house seem anything more than a showcase home right out of
Architectural Digest
.

“Out here, son!” his father shouted with a slight Scottish brogue.

His heart fell slightly. He’d always planned to spend the long weekend with his newly acquired girlfriend alone and uninterrupted. Like the best laid plans of mice and men, his carefully crafted scheme seemed to have gone awry.

Sigourney turned toward him and smiled brightly. “Come on, why don’t you introduce us? I can’t wait to meet him.”

He set down their luggage, wrapped an arm around her waist and walked out to the pool area with his head held high.

Chapter Thirteen

Sigourney

“I
can’t believe Russell hasn’t introduced you to me before now. You’re like a breath of fresh air and a ray of sunshine rolled into a delightfully attractive package.”

I sipped from my white wine, an expensive bottle of Sauvignon Blanc. “Thank you, Hugh, but to be fair, Russell and I haven’t been together very long. And I love being here in L.A. It’s so pleasant and lovely in this beautiful place.”

“No worries, the pleasure is all mine.
Mi casa su casa
.”

Although I tried to smile at all the accolades Hugh had continually piled on me since we met, my cheeks were sore. I knew why I felt such disastrous nerves and they had everything to do with my reluctance to take Russell home to meet my own parents.

They weren’t scary or ultra-conservative but I didn’t quite know how they would react to someone like him. He was perfect on paper: educated, carried himself like he was upper middle-class but with the mention of various properties here, in the Hamptons and Martha’s Vineyard along with a fabulous upper eastside apartment in Manhattan, it was obvious he came from a
lot
of money.

Perhaps he was ashamed about the obscene amount of wealth his family had but American Express did not hand out Centurion cards like they were candy. When he paid for our dinner in Washington, D.C., it tipped me off whether he wanted to play down his family’s net worth or not.

My mother would have thought I’d done well for myself. I was her least favorite child so at least she would think in the end, I would be set for life even if my subsequent marriage to Russell didn’t last. Due to her being from the old continent
and
the old country, she’d already be planning our elaborate wedding in her head even if she never said anything to me.

My father, on the other hand, might have some serious issues with us, solely because Russell seemed too perfect and my dad didn’t believe in perfection. He would ask the hard questions until he got the answers he wanted and watch my newly acquired boyfriend’s resolve crumble. I couldn’t let that happen to him, not quite yet.

The moment his father stood and began to tend organic turkey hotdogs, chicken breast and vegetable kebabs on their state of the art grill, Russell leaned over to me and squeezed my thigh. “Are you doing all right? Believe me, my dad is expecting company or he wouldn’t be grilling so much food.”

“Don’t worry about me, I’m fine. Your dad’s not so bad so stop being so nervous.”

I looked at him and it hit me. This gorgeous man was mine. He asked me to go out with him and I’d said yes so why did I feel any pang of guilt for accepting his proposal? The man I’d spent the last few weeks lusting after was married and this sexy, single guy came along and wanted to date me. Of course I’d made the right decision. What other decision could I have possibly made?

Russell held out a lightly tanned hand toward me as we sat next to one another on matching luxurious sunbeds and I grasped it without too much thought.

“You know how much I want us to be happy, right?”

“Of course, and I don’t mind your father being here, really.” I set my glass of wine down and leaned closer to him. “Listen, your dad is around, so what? It doesn’t change anything and I get to know him better. There’s nothing wrong with that. This is a family holiday and I’m not having any less fun just because we aren’t alone.”

His aquamarine eyes burned bright in the golden sun set against a cloudless day. “I know but…now that we’ve crossed that threshold, do you really want to have sex with me knowing my dad is in the house?”

My smile turned into a knowing smirk. “It’s a big place, Russell. Whether your dad is here or not doesn’t really matter, you know. We can still get our groove on.”

“Are we playing that game again? Limp Bizkit circa
Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water
.”

“Maybe…it never gets old as far as I’m concerned. It just reminds me how much music affects our lives and we happen to be huge lovers of music—why shouldn’t we
know
our shit?”

“Pshh, it only further reminds me how unimaginative our generation is and how we have to continually ‘borrow’ from famous people because we don’t have a lot of unique and original thoughts of our own. But…YOLO, whatevs, to thine own self be motherfuckin’ real…okay, I made up the last one.”

I laughed out loud as I shook my head and leaned in even closer to him. “Oh. My. God. Berkeley, you’re a closet idealist who has lost his religion. Just because we don’t live the same way our parents do does not mean our generation is fucked up—”

“Oh come off it, Sigourney! Fucking
YOLO
? As in, You Only Live Once?! What the hell’s wrong with
carpe diem
? Oh, yeah, most people don’t even fucking know Latin anymore so they wouldn’t
know
it means pretty much the same motherfuckin’ thing.”

“In all fairness,
carpe diem
is ‘seize the day,’ son. YOLO, in my opinion, is different.” Hugh turned away from the grill and faced us with blue-green eyes the same as his son’s.

“How’s that, Dad? They pretty much mean the same thing.”

“Actually, they don’t,” I spoke up. “
Carpe diem
, to me, means don’t let good opportunities pass you by being ultra-cautious. None of us can predict how much time we have on earth and therefore, ‘live your best life’ is an equivalent moniker to the Latin phrase. YOLO, on the other hand, means to me that ‘I don’t really give a fuck and I’m young so that’s my excuse.’ It’s just a really careless way of explaining away every lousy thing a person does in their life for experience’s sake as opposed to actually caring about what they do, and whether their actions have consequences.”

Russell let go of my hand and stood suddenly. I thought he was angry at first before we walked over to the far side of the pool area, grabbed a wooden box on a glass table and brought it over.

“You two depress the hell out of me. My dad and my girlfriend siding with one another? Jesus fuck, kill me now.”

“Don’t be so combative, sweetie, we’re just talking, remember?” I reached out and stroked his silky hair as he began to roll a joint.

“Ignore him, Sigourney, Russell has always been a strange young man. Be sure to roll at least four joints. Kristen should be here any minute and besides whatever cutting edge prescription drug she’s taking to relax her, she could always use some pot to help aid her.”

“Kristen?” I mouthed to Russell as his father turned back toward the grill.

“The other woman,” he mouthed back before he finished the first joint and licked the paper, sealing it.

I actually moved seats and sat next to him, so close our thighs were touching in a completely intimate way. “Wait a minute? Your dad was cheating on your mom?”

He glared at me with somewhat cold aquamarine eyes. “Yeah, he was. It’s not like it’s any of my business. I mean, he’s only fifty-two and my mom was pushing sixty. It wasn’t much of an age difference but there was one. She was completely weirded out by her age though and she wouldn’t tell us how old she was. Neither my dad nor I found out until she died and we had to procure a copy of her birth certificate.”

“Wait, what about Kylie? Aren’t you two seven years apart?”

“Yeah but Mom told my dad she was damn near a child bride and she had Kylie at seventeen or something. He wouldn’t have known to investigate and he was in love with her. What can you say to that? Love makes you do some crazy shit, even go so far as to believe women who are pathological liars.”

Russell lit the joint and inhaled deeply before he passed it to me.

“So what does that mean, and how does Kristen fit into this again?” I dragged from the joint and the delicious smoke seemed to whisper into my lungs before I exhaled. This was
definitely
the good shit with no seeds.

He swigged from his wine, set it down and took the joint from between my fingers. “She’s my mother’s younger sister and my aunt.”

My stomach did a back flip as I stared at my boyfriend again. “Excuse me?”

“Kristen is my mother’s youngest sister. She’s fucking my father and don’t mention you know who she is, okay? The woman is one of those new-age hippies into organic food and vegan shit yet she drops acid, grows her own psychedelic mushrooms, and has prescriptions for Vicodin, Xanax, Oxycodone and Percocet in her medicine cabinet. To say she isn’t the most stable person in this family would be the understatement of the year.”

“Okaaay,” I mused dramatically. “At least the evening won’t be boring.”

And it wasn’t. In fact Kristen was a barrel of laughs with her ivory complexion, wild, wavy strawberry-blonde hair cascading down her back, green-gray eyes, intoxicating Irish features and infectious personality. She was one of those people filled with life and lived every moment to the fullest. In fact, it was hard to believe she shared a genetic link with Russell and Kylie, both of whom took staid and serious to a whole new level.

Russell didn’t even begin to relax in her presence until he’d had a couple of joints and more than enough white wine. Two empty bottles were on the table and a third was open. Shortly after we witnessed the fireworks, we both bid them goodnight and retired to our bedroom.

I undressed and put on a short red lace nightie. Although I wasn’t trying to look sexy, I was the type who preferred to sleep in little to nothing at all, and now Russell had seen the goods, it no longer mattered what I wore.

He lay in bed, wearing a pair of black boxer-briefs and nothing else. He held his iPad and scrolled through his Facebook feed before his blue-green eyes turned my way.

“So, what did you think of my crazy family?”

“Eh, they’re not so crazy,” I replied as I slid into the bed beside him and crawled closer until our bodies touched. “Besides, what the hell is considered a
normal
family? Let me know when you meet one.”