Текст книги "The Thrill of It"
Автор книги: Lauren Blakely
сообщить о нарушении
Текущая страница: 12 (всего у книги 17 страниц)
He shudders and hisses, and then he whistles. Yes, he actually whistles as I release him and slink up next to him. His eyes are closed, but his lips are curved into this crazy sexy grin, and he’s fucking humming.
“That’s adorable that you whistle after a blow job.”
“I’m whistling a happy tune,” he murmurs. Soon, he opens his eyes, and he looks drunk and happy. “Congratulations on your first blow job, Harley.”
I roll my eyes, swat his shoulder. He grabs me, pulls my naked body next to his.
“How was it?” I ask.
“You want to know?”
“Yes.”
“You really want to know?”
“Yes, idiot. That’s why I asked.”
“Now, I’m gonna tell you. But you can’t get mad at me. And you can’t analyze it. And you can’t hold it against me.”
I tense. “That’s not good.”
“No. It is good. It was good. Harley,” he says, holding my gaze, looking intensely serious. “It was the best ever. Because it was you.”
I melt and wriggle against him. Then, he slips his hand between my legs. Raises an eyebrow when he feels how wet I am. “You liked doing that to me evidently?”
“Yes,” I say, and I feel no shame. I did like it. I like him.
“A lot, huh?”
He slides his thumb across me, and in an instant I am gasping for breath.
“Yes,” I pant.
“So much that it made you this wet?” He draws a delicious line through all that wetness. I’m sure I’m coating his fingers right now, and I’m also sure I don’t care.
Nor does he. Because he brings his fingers to his mouth, licks them, them returns them to me. “You’re so fucking delicious,” he tells me, as he strokes me more, and I grab his shoulder to hold on. We’re lying next to each other, facing each other, and he slides his fingers across me, and I moan.
“Oh,” I say, and I start to close my eyes and just let go, let myself feel what he’s doing to me.
“Open your eyes, Harley,” he tells me, and I do. “I want to watch you when you come. I want you to look at me as I touch you.”
I nod, whimpering heavily as he rubs his thumb against me where I want him most. I open my legs more for him, hooking my thigh over his as he runs his finger across me. I’m so aroused again, throbbing with heat, and I can’t believe I am already this ratcheted up after what he did to me, but I am.
My body is unlocked. Everything I’ve kept inside, everything I’ve forbidden myself from feeling, is happening. It’s like I had lost my voice for ages and I didn’t even want to find it, but then I found it, he found it, and he opened the treasure chest and set me free. Now I’m feeling the most delicious, delirious, intense feelings in the world, in the solar system, in the whole damn universe as he strokes me, his fingers slipping across my wetness. “Rock into me,” he tells me in a hot whisper as I dig my nails into his shoulder. “Rock into my hand. I want you to get off again. I want to be the one who makes you come again and again. I want to hear my name on your lips.”
“Trey,” I whisper.
“Like that,” he says, and I move again, arching into his hand, his touch some kind of deliciousness, his eyes searching me, knowing all my past, all my secrets, all my shame, and even so, he still wants everything about me, every part of me, and this part too. I grip his shoulder harder, needing terribly to hold on to him as pleasure ripples through me, lighting me up, like fireworks sparkling through my whole body. My belly tightens and my breathing grows erratic as he sends me off into another orgasm.
“Trey,” I say, then I manage two more words. Words I have never said out loud to a man. “I’m coming.”
“Yes, you are. You’re coming for me Harley. You’re coming for me.”
“I’m coming for you,” I repeat as the pleasure floods me, and I close my eyes, rocking into his hand, the spasms and aftershocks rolling through me.
Chapter Eighteen
Harley
That’s how it goes for the next few days. We are together. We make it to our final classes and work. He takes me to the tree he planted for his brothers in Abingdon Square Park. We hold hands the whole time, until I see the tree. I let go of him so I can I wrap my arms around the tree and kiss the small trunk. Then we return to his place and we touch each other more. He gives me more orgasms than I ever knew I could have, and I learn how he likes everything.
We don’t go all the way though. I know we will. Just not yet.
I even hear back from Miranda. She emails me on Thursday morning.
The final file you sent has been received. The material contained in it has been approved. I will take care of everything from here. The terms of our agreement have been fulfilled.
It’s over then. My debt is paid. The slate is wiped clean.
I should feel light as a balloon. I should feel buoyant, ready to float to the sky on a cotton candy cloud. But I feel oddly unsettled when I see the next note. It’s from my mother.
I have to tell you about the story I’ve been trailing. Meeting with a source now. About to bust this wide open. Love, The Cleaner.
I remind myself that she’s investigating a congressman. That she busts big-time liars and cheaters. She’s probably going to call me soon, and want to celebrate her next potential award-winning piece.
But she’s not the only writer in the family. I can write again, and I can write for me.
While Trey’s showering, I take out the notebook Joanne gave me, opening it to the first page. It’s fresh and white, like falling snow. I imagine a dusky night sky, stars twinkling, and a bright shining moon. It’s cold, but a pair of walking, talking dogs joke about not needing jackets. It tickles a memory of when I was younger, of making up stories like this for someone. But who? I try to grasp at the memory, but it’s too hazy and it fades away. Still, the image is enough for me to go on, and I start jotting down notes about a new story. Because I can finally write what I want to write. Something simple, something magical, something for kids.
When Trey steps out of the shower, a towel wrapped around his waist, he tips his forehead to the notebook. “You writing?”
“Just playing around with some ideas,” I say.
He sits down next to me on the futon, and I’m thoroughly distracted by the fresh, clean, sexy smell of him. I lean into his neck and plant a quick kiss. He pulls at the strap on my tanktop, and I’m pretty sure we’re about to go for another round of something.
But he taps my shoulder instead. “Hey. Weren’t you going to tell about your red ribbon? You were supposed to tell me what it meant to you.”
I cast my eyes down. “You won’t like it.”
The muscles in his arms tense. “It better not be for Cam.”
I shake my head, then raise my eyes. “It’s for my mom. It’s to remind me of her. She used to put this red ribbon in my hair when she did my hair for her parties,” I say, and as I tell the story I hear it for the first time as a dispassionate observer. I was her pretty pony. Her little doll of a daughter. Then I became the prize to help her catch men.
He blows a long stream of air from his lips, shakes his head. I swear I can feel the fumes of his anger. But he’s not mad at me. He’s mad at her. And maybe, just maybe, I am too. I didn’t want to be dressed up and paraded around. I didn’t want to be her wingwoman. I wanted to be her daughter.
He grips my shoulders. Narrows his eyes. “When you’re ready, say the word. I’ll redo that tattoo for you.”
“You will?”
“Fuck yeah. Almost one-quarter of our business is redoing tats from years ago. Covering them up. Reworking them. I can do something else for you. When you’re ready.”
“Okay. I’ll think of something else.”
“But thank you for telling me, and you’re right. I don’t like it. And I don’t like your mom. And I don’t like what she did to you. But that’s just the way it goes.” He points to my notebook. “Will you show me sometime what you’re working on? Because I’d be a hell of a lot more interested in your stories about animal magic, and why you are so drawn to those stories, than about that shit Miranda was making you write because you were covering up for your mom.”
I laugh. “Definitely. And check this out,” I say, closing the notebook and showing him the cover. “Joanne gave it to me. Isn’t that a cool heart drawing?”
He traces the misshapen heart with his index finger. “That’s an awesome illustration. I love how it’s all stretched and pulled and twisted, but it’s still whole.”
“It is still whole. It’s the ugly beautiful.”
Trey raises an eyebrow. “The ugly beautiful?”
“It’s this saying, I guess. Joanne told me about it. I think it means that beautiful things can come from an ugly place. That it’s the flower that grows in a landfill. Or the stained glass window in an abandoned apartment building. Or maybe,” I say, then take a beat, my heart skittering, “It’s meeting you in the middle of all the awfulness. Because you’re the most amazing thing that’s ever happened to me.”
He closes his eyes briefly, then winces, as if the sentiment is too scary.
Fear grips me. I’ve said too much. I want to take it all back, and time stands still in the wretchedness of this moment that I’ve ruined.
Then it revs up and my heart is racing at the speed of light as he curves a hand around my neck and leans his forehead against mine in the most tender gesture. All the hairs on my arms are standing on end and I’m coated in warmth and anticipation and something else too. Hope. The most painful, wondrous, delirious kind of hope that’s unlike anything I’ve ever felt before. And this feeling is hope multiplied. My hope and the hope he is falling for real.
“I’m falling for you in a big way, Harley, and I have no clue what to do about it but let it happen.”
“Let’s let it happen.”
“It’s happening and I don’t want to stop it,” he says as he cups my cheeks. He brushes his lips to mine, and my breath catches from the softness, the sweetness.
But the kiss is cut short when my phone rings loudly.
My mother’s ringtone. I ignore it and return to Trey’s lips. But she calls again. And again. And again.
I finally pick up. “Hi. What’s going on?”
“I’ve been looking into a story. I saw some pages of a manuscript and – call it a reporter’s hunch – I feel like I might know the writer. Are you Layla?”
My blood freezes and my brain goes numb. The walls around all my secrets are cracking.
Even when I try to escape her, I can’t. She is at the beginning and the end and the middle of every twist and turn and dead end in this maze.
Miranda is my mom’s editor too.
* * *
Miranda is the most important person in my mother’s career.
Miranda plucked my mom from the lowly assignment desk, honed her journalist chops, and molded her into the fearless cutthroat reporter she is today.
Miranda is like a fairy godmother to my mom.
Miranda is also the woman cuckolded by her most prestigious investigative reporter’s daughter.
Phil is Twenty-Four on my list. I had an “almost affair” with my mom’s editor’s husband.
But I had my reasons, I swear I had them.
I never shared them with Miranda. Because I don’t want her to know my mom stole her husband first, and I walked into the trap I knew was being set. I walked into it with my arms wide open, ready for the photos to be snapped, the evidence to be amassed. Only I never expected Miranda would do what she did and handcuff me back. How could I? Those things don’t occur to you as possibilities. You don’t think, “Oh, if I have an affair with my mom’s editor’s husband to willingly get caught, the editor will then blackmail me into writing Memoirs of a Teenage Sex Addict.”
It’s a catchy title, isn’t it? Who wouldn’t pick that up? It has mega bestseller written all over it. Especially since it’ll be shrouded in secrecy when it hits bookstore shelves.
Because it’ll be by “Anonymous.” Everyone will be abuzz trying to figure out who this Layla character is who learned how to kiss at a carnival, then went pro and made money hand over fist when she became a high-priced call girl. But wait! The salaciousness doesn’t end there! The girl got caught! Gasp! The girl confessed! The girl then cleaned up her act! She went to recovery! Who doesn’t love a tale of redemption? The hooker with the heart of gold. The whore turned good. It’s Heidi Fleiss, it’s Elliot Spitzer, it’s Tiger Woods. Only sexier and scarier.
Because it could happen to your daughter. It could happen to your son. Your kid could be a sex addict. Your kid could be a prostitute.
You can just smell the movie rights, can’t you? Miranda could. So she kept them all for herself. Because Miranda is the only one who knows who “Anonymous” is. Miranda found the story. Miranda brought the story to the publishing house she runs. Miranda alone is “Anonymous’” editor. And Miranda alone will cut the checks – or claim to – for “Anonymous” when the book finally lands on shelves in a few months. After all, she’s done editing it. Anonymous won’t see a dime of the profits. Anonymous doesn’t want money from this story.
Anonymous wants to be free.
But I will never be free. I know that now. Because the secret only grows bigger. The wall only rises higher, more mortar slathered between each brick, superglue that’ll hold forever.
Until it topples. Because it will.
Because somewhere, some enterprising person, maybe another journalist, maybe some dogged detective, will want to know who Anonymous really is. And someone will recognize himself somewhere in the story, though names of course have all been changed. And enough someones will put enough somethings together that this enterprising reporter-detective-dog catcher will figure out that Anonymous is me.
Page one of New York Post! “Layla’s true identity revealed – the daughter of The Cleaner.”
Memoirs of a Teenage Sex Addict…
Page 212…
I don’t know a thing about Nathan. I never met him, never saw him, never heard him. But I heard her. And hearing your mom have sex with men is bad enough. But hearing your mom have phone sex is worse, especially when you are only thirteen. There’s nothing grosser I can think of in my whole life than hearing my mom masturbate every night for two weeks to Nathan on the phone.
“Oh Nathan, Oh Nathan, Oh Nathan.”
I wanted to die.
Chapter Nineteen
Harley
My past will never stop chasing me. It’s like a demon, a dark phantom, hunting me down across the streets of New York, always ready to trip me, topple me, wrestle me to the ground. I wonder how long I will spend trying to outpace my past, trying to stay one – no, many – steps ahead of what I have done. It’s exhausting, this race I’m running and I’m crawling now, my knees scraping against the rough asphalt. I’m nowhere near the finish line.
I stare at the door to my home. The cage I was raised in. It’s a big cage, but it’s a cage still, and my mom and I have been like two tigers in a pen at the zoo. Or maybe she’s the tiger and I’m the meal. That’s how I feel as I answer my summons.
Blackmail is the gift that keeps on giving. Because it means you have something to hide. And as long as that something is hidden, you will always owe.
I owe. I owe so much. I owe her everything.
The real debt was never to Miranda. The real debt was to my mother.
I open the door to my house. My mom is in the kitchen, stirring a large saucepan. Something hardens inside me – she’s still cooking for her lover, even while she’s planning on reaming me.
“I’m making risotto,” she says in a warm voice when she sees me. But it’s not the tone that worries me. It’s what she’s not saying. Her usual greeting–you look so pretty.
I walk to the kitchen, my legs feeling as if they have ankle weights.
She’s wearing black pressed pants, a royal blue blouse and black pumps with shiny piping around the chunky heel. Her hair is blow dried like she just stepped out of a salon. Her makeup has been applied with the perfection of a Hollywood stylist, long mascared lashes, smooth powdered skin and lips outlined precisely in plum lipliner.
“I bet it’s delish,” I say, and I’m not sure how I’m forming words, but somehow they’re coming out of my mouth as I take step after dreaded step into her kitchen, sun spilling in through the windows, the counters bright and white. But it’s as if I’m being marched into the darkened, shadowy back office of a mob boss who I’ve crossed. He’ll play with the mouse, bat it around, toy with his dinner.
Before he bites.
“Do you want some?” She waves me into the kitchen, the sleeves of her blue blouse billowing as she gestures.
“No thanks. I ate.”
“Good. Then we can get down to business. Because my heart tells me I’m mistaken, but my reporter’s instincts tell me I’m not. And my reporter’s instincts have never failed me before.”
So we’re done with the niceties. The food has been offered, the greetings dispensed, and now we get down to business.
I gulp, vaguely aware that I’m shaking. I try to collect myself, to draw on the same strength I felt with Joanne, the same courage I found when I told Kristen my truths, and the same well I tapped into this morning with Trey.
She places the spoon in a silver holder, turns down the heat on the stove, and then clasps her hands, steepling her fingers together. This is Barb Coleman The Cleaner. This is the woman who confronts seedy politicians. This is the lady who will tear a lying scumbag to pieces with her pen that has the teeth of a shark.
I am in her crosshairs for the first time.
“I have sources everywhere, Harley Coleman.” Her voice is cold and cruel. “And that includes at my publishing house. And an assistant editor told me about a certain anonymously penned Memoirs of a Teenage Sex Addict,” she says bitterly as if the title is vinegar on her tongue. “She thought I would find them particularly interesting given my credentials in investigating call girls and sex trafficking.”
I say nothing, but I don’t need to speak because Barb Coleman is on her high and mighty soapbox.
“So the assistant showed me some of the pages she’d received for production. Naturally names had been changed, and she didn’t know who the author was. Who this poor young teenage girl was. She thought I might be interested in looking into who’d written them, and if there was any sort of foul play involved.”
I dig my nails into my fists, relying on my old tricks when I felt tempted. Now I need them to stay grounded. To make it through the inquisition alive.
“I didn’t know who the girl was either at first. I didn’t know who the girl could be who told tawdry tales to clients of masturbating in lingerie. Or who informed a poorly-endowed man that he had a big penis. And I wasn’t sure at all who this girl was who led one of her clients around on a leash,” she says in her perfectly enunciated speech, sounding like a lawyer cross-examining a reluctant witness she’s about to corner in the lie. “But then I saw other parts. Sections about how her mother had tied a red ribbon in her hair. Stories about running into her mother’s lover in the hallway. And then came the piece de resistance. The story of the carnival.”
I try to shrink into the wall, willing myself to become dust and vapor.
My mother narrows her eyes, breathes through her nostrils. “Did you really think I wouldn’t know that was you?”
My jaw drops. This is what she has to say? I stumble through an answer, saying the first thing that comes to mind. “It never occurred to me you’d see it.”
“So it was you? You’re Layla.”
I could lie. I could try to spin a new tall tale. But what’s the point? I’m at the end of the rope, and it’s time she saw that I’m not beautiful. That I am ugly too. “Yes. I am Layla. I was a teenage call girl.”
It’s as if I slapped her. She raises her hands in the air, gesturing wildly as her tirade comes tumbling down.
“How could you do this to me? After everything I’ve gone through. After the way your father left me. After all I’ve done to expose this kind of horridness. There are girls all over the world who are forced, coerced, raped and brutalized to become prostitutes.” Her crispness falls away and her voice begins to break. But the tears that start flowing are tears of her own self-righteousness. Because I have made a hypocrite of the great Barb Coleman. “And I have fought and searched and investigated and done everything to expose that kind of crime. And to learn you willingly walked into it? You chose this life. You enjoyed it. You wanted it. You rolled around in it like a pig in shit.”
With that, she might as well have slammed a fist inside me, jamming hard on my guts.
The pain spills through every corner of my body. I am punched, beaten and torn into a million pieces with those awful words. I am shaking and sobbing as tears rain down my cheeks. I cover my face with my hands so she can’t see me. My whole body is wracked, and my heart, my lungs, my stomach, my spleen, every single part of me is quivering and twisting in on itself. Weeds are crawling up inside me, pulling, tugging, ripping, and turning my body into the dark shameful thing it is.
I feel her hand on me. Angrily peeling my fingers away from my face. She is so much stronger than me. She always has been.
“You have no right to cry,” she tells me, practically smearing the words on me through her own sanctimonious, superior tears. “What you did was disgusting.” She grips my chin, forces me to look at her. “And I don’t know how to ever forgive you.”
Another blow to the chest.
“Forgive me? You have to forgive me? I did it for you,” I shout.
“Oh! Don’t even go there. I’ve heard every backpedaling cover-up there ever was. There is nothing you can tell me that will make what you did okay. I’d be damn curious though how you were caught. Which one of your clients had something on you?”
“That’s what you think happened?”
She crosses her arms over her chest and nods, her eyes narrowed to slits. I can feel the fury building inside her. The storm clouds are growing darker, swirling closer. “That’s always how it happens.” Then like a hiss, she adds, “Layla.”
As if it burns her tongue.
Oh fine. She wants to play it like this, then I will roll up my pig-in-shit sleeves and fight harder. “You want to know?” I spit back at her. “You really want to know?”
“Sure. Try me.”
“Here’s your tip, The Cleaner,” I say, holding my hands out wide, taunting her. “Miranda is my editor too. That make things a bit clearer?”
She raises her eyebrows. She’s not putting two and two together yet. “Miranda? My Miranda? My editor? The woman who edits my articles and publishes my books? How is that even possible?”
“Yes. Mom. Your editor. Your Miranda. And what else do you share with Miranda?” I toss out, wagging my fingers in a come-and-get-it gesture. “It’s not that difficult. See if you can connect the dots.”
She clasps her hand over her mouth. “No,” she croaks. “Please tell me this has nothing to do with Phil.”
I nod, clenching my teeth. Then the tables are turned and I deliver the punishing blow. “It has everything to do with her husband, Phil. The man you were fucking. The man you had an affair with. The affair you told me every dirty, sordid detail like you thought I wanted to know how he liked it with you. That he liked to take you rough. That he’d bend you over the kitchen table. That he pulled your hair. You screwed your editor’s husband, and you thought you were smarter than her. You thought she’d never know because you were in love with him and because you knew how to cover your tracks. But guess what? She found out. And I saved your ass from her.”
* * *
My mom’s affair with Phil began last summer. I pegged it instantly.
Phil and Miranda were over for dinner along with a big group of publishing types. My mom’s agent, her agent’s assistant, publicists from the house and on and on.
The living room was abuzz with music, James Taylor or some other seventies singer type that all the adults loved. So much wine was in the air you practically smell the grapes. Drained bottles of reds and whites lined the dining room table and kitchen counter. Miranda was drunk already. Her eyelids fluttered as she struggled to keep them open, slumping down in a chair at the dining room table.
As I checked to see if I had any texts from Cam about a job, my mother sailed into the kitchen to open another bottle.
A Syrrah, she proclaimed.
“Let me help you, Barb,” Phil said. He stood up from the table and joined her, reaching for the bottle, placing both his hands on top of my mother’s.
“Why thank you, Phil,” she purred and they locked eyes.
She leaned in close to him, her shoulder brushing up against his as he opened the Syrrah. “You have such strong hands,” she said.
I watched as he raised an eyebrow. No one else was paying attention. They were too drunk. Then he said, “I can do a lot with these hands.”
“I bet you can.”
A few weeks later she told me she’d fallen for him. She grabbed my hands at dinner, like she had something incredibly important to say, and admitted she was in love with her editor’s husband. “I feel terrible. So terrible. But yet, he’s the first man I’ve truly fallen in love with since your father so long ago.”
“That’s great, Barb. But he’s married, you know. Maybe you want to look elsewhere?”
She didn’t look elsewhere and their affair continued into the fall. Every time I saw her, she’d drop a new detail. The necklace he bought for her in Soho, the dirty text message he sent the night before, the multiple orgasms he gave her while pounding her on the table. You know, the usual details any daughter wants to hear from her mom.
As they became more entwined, they grew increasingly careless, and soon Miranda started to become suspicious.
One morning while my mom was still fast asleep I dropped by to grab a book I’d left behind. I heard Phil pad out of the bedroom to make a call. He rarely spent the night, but Miranda was in London for business so he was free to come and go. Or so he thought.
“Hi darling,” he said quietly into the phone.
Pause.
“Oh, I’m just getting up and making some coffee.”
Pause.
“I didn’t hear the home phone ring.”
Pause.
“Five times? You called five times. I took a really long shower.”
Pause.
“Sometimes I shower before I make coffee. You know that’s true, darling. Anyway, how are you? How is London? I miss you so very much,” he said.
Idiot, I thought.
He was trying to nip it in the bud, allay her fears. But women are smart and Miranda is one of the smartest of all. Her hackles were raised and she wasn’t going to lower them on account of a shower-before-I-make-coffee cover-up from her philandering husband.
I tried to warn my mom. I tried to let her know she might want to cool it with him. But she would hear none of it. She was madly in love and nothing was going to stop her. Not even the private detective I spotted outside her building the next morning, leaning ever so casually against the building across the street. He held a blue cardboard coffee cup from the bodega around the corner and the New York Daily News, which he pretended to read. He had a mustache, naturally. I even nodded at him. He pretended not to notice and looked away.
As I walked to the subway that November morning, crunching on the last fallen leaves of the season, I counted off the things I knew for sure about the situation.
I knew my mom was going to get caught.
I knew I could prevent her from getting caught.
I also knew I didn’t want her to get caught. She depended on Miranda. She needed Miranda. She revered Miranda. As much as my mom made me crazy, she was still my mom and I would take a bullet for her.
I stayed at her house the next night, rose early, dressed in my sexiest schoolgirl costume, and timed my exit from the house to line up with his morning escape.
I walked out with Phil, chatted with him, linked my arm through his, and smiled flirtatiously at him. He probably thought it odd that his lover’s teenage daughter was being overly friendly. When we reached the corner of Central Park West, out of view of my mom, I grabbed him by the lapels and pulled him in for a long, hungry kiss.
I was going for broke. I had no clue if he’d push me away. All I knew was that cameras were snapping our picture, so I hoped to hell he’d like the way I kissed.
He did.
He liked it a lot. He kissed me back hard, twining his hands in my hair like I was his new lover.
I detested every single nanosecond of that kiss with Phil. I loathed everything about him. The way he turned on Miranda. The way he turned on my mom.
But I didn’t let on. I knew how to pretend. I pressed a finger to his lips. “Don’t tell her. We’ll do this again tomorrow,” I said.
“Come to my office later today. I can’t wait that long.”
“Of course,” I said, figuring more cold, hard evidence would only help. The private detectives followed me that afternoon as I walked into his building, rode up in the elevator, and visited him for a make-out session that necessitated the longest shower I ever took in my life. I needed to wash off his disgusting.
But I sucked it up. I took one for the team. I led him into the trap he didn’t know was being set.
What I didn’t bargain on was that Miranda would have her guys keep following me. That’s how she learned about all the other men Layla had lined up.
* * *
My mom shakes her head in denial, shock taking over. Her eyes are wide and glassy, and she can’t speak at first.
Then the smoke detector buzzes, a sharp bleeping directly above us. The risotto has charred. I grab a potholder, remove it from the heat and turn off the stove.
“Miranda was on to you. Miranda knew Phil was having an affair. She had private detectives outside the house. She was going to bust you. And I didn’t want you to get caught. So I took him from you. That’s why he stopped seeing you, Barb. Because he was busted. Because I walked into her trap. On purpose. I got caught for you. I did it so she would never know you were the one screwing her husband,” I say as I toss the potholder on the counter.
She parts her lips to speak but no words come out.
“That’s why I’m writing the book. Because she kept following me. Because she figured out that I was a working girl, and then she blackmailed me into writing the memoirs, and she told me if I didn’t do it she’d tell you everything. So now you know everything. You know I’m a whore, and a liar, and I kissed Phil, and even made out with him to make sure the evidence pointed to me, not you. And you also know I saved your ass and she has no clue you were involved. That the great Barb Coleman who sends scumbags to jail could turn around and do something shady herself. And she never has to know. Because I’m the pig in shit. Right, mom?”
