“Thanks.” I press the ball of towels to my eyes, staining it black with mascara. “I can’t believe he blamed you. I mean, it’s not like he’s spent any time with you at all.” I hiccup. “He felt as sure about you being a crook as you do about him being an ass. I can sort of attest to the ass part myself.” More blubbering. Crap. Isn’t this the exact scenario New Me was manufactured to avoid? Both crappy versions of me are fired. I don’t want anything to do with my fractured mind at the moment. It makes lousy decisions. Not to mention the fact that as soon as my personalities started to splinter, I should have run to the nearest mental institution.
“It’s not just you and I who think he’s an ass. There’s solid proof. If the Cannons want—hell, if any scorned investor wants—they can bring up insider-trading charges. There are lots of angles to consider, and none of them are favorable.”
“You mean he can go to prison?” My heart lurches in my chest. Ironically, I don’t want Lincoln going to prison or anything that might drag him away.
“Are you kidding?” He shakes his head, pulling his laptop from off the coffee table. “Lincoln Lionheart has been untouchable his entire life. I’m sure there are many times he should have gone to prison and plenty of times ‘daddy’s’ money got him off the hook.” He pulls something up on the computer and scoots into me. “You hear about this?”
It’s the girl from the picture frame—Jackie’s smiling face is cued in the right-hand corner. The headline next to it reads, Manslaughter Charges Dropped Against Tech Giant Tycoon’s Son.
“What?” I tug the laptop between us. My body goes numb. I can’t breathe.
“You can’t find this shit on the internet,” Luke says it with a smidge of pride. “They made sure this story was buried good, just like that poor girl he killed.”
“Killed?” I whisper in disbelief. “How did you find this?”
“I remember when it happened. Hans came out. He was shaken. Said he needed to spend the week to avoid the circus that was following him. Up until that point, Lincoln, Kinsley, Stevie, her sister Claire, and Aspen were figments of my father’s imagination. They were bathed in perfection. Children from another world that I could never live up to. He talked about Lincoln doing something unmentionable, and I had to know. So, I did a little research on my own. I saved this, knowing I might need it one day. Soon thereafter, my father had every server wiped clean. You can look up her name, and nothing shows—not even an obituary. He took everything away from her, including that last rite of passage.” He snaps the laptop shut.
For a second, I consider snatching it back, devouring each word as if it were the latest school gossip, my body already pumping with endorphins at the idea. But right now, I’m still choking on the headline, trying to stuff it down my throat like a sock soaked in ammonia.
“Don’t think too deep on it.” He rests his arm around my shoulder and turns on the TV. “Did you eat yet? I can order a pizza.”
“That sounds great,” I lie. Who the hell can eat?
Pizza with Luke sounds so normal, so far from the Asian fusion world—the gourmet Italian kitchens that Lincoln shuttled me off to. Maybe I need some normalcy, someone grounded in reality, someone without any direct links to homicides, like Luke in my life. Not now, of course, some day far from now, when I’m ready to start up my heart again like an old tired engine. That’s when I’ll sniff for normal. In the meantime, I’m still stuck on the fact Lincoln Lionheart wasn’t at all the person I had willed him to be. Jackie is dead, and he killed her. I can’t comprehend this. I just can’t.
When the pizza arrives, it smells too damn tempting to resist. Luke and I spend the night devouring carbs laden with layers of salted pork, an act I wonder if Lincoln would have found repugnant. We wash it down with beer from a can, and I try to hang on to the buzz until my lids won’t stay open anymore. We watch a string of old movies, dick flicks, lots of guns, lots of car chases, explosions left and right. It feels like my life is playing out on the big screen, my love life to be specific.
All of the Lionheart girls try with futility to get in touch with me, until finally Kinsley calls Luke, and he assures them I’m safe.
But Lincoln never calls. And it destroys me all over again.
That image of the gift I left over his bed etches into my brain.
I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t have anything nice to say to me anyway.
* * *
It takes heavy coaxing from Luke to get me to go back to Jinx.
“ReInvent is thriving,” he roars it out victoriously.
It’s true. Since its launch—which happened with no real fanfare from my uncles—it has skyrocketed to become one of Jinx’s top performing DIY hubs.
We walk through the hive, all the while my gaze flits across every angle of the room, keeping an eye out for Lincoln’s demanding presence. The girls in the vicinity all sigh at the sight of Luke. Rumor has it, he’s already mowed through half of them. Apparently, his appetite for women is another trait he has in common with his brother, and his father for that matter. He’s not that removed from Lionheart blood. No matter how hard Luke cries foul, he’s still drenched in Hans Lionheart’s DNA, just like the rest of them.
I spot Stevie and Aspen up ahead, and my stomach churns. Ford and Carter are with them, and then as if struck by an eight ball, they break and go off into their own pocket of the hive, revealing a tall, brooding, champagne god that I let into my body—that my insides still ache for.
Oh, shit.
Lincoln is ice cold. His eyes are an eerie combination of dead hatred and laughing. He’s piercing me with his stare, and I’m breaking, the darkness he colored my heart with is springing little pinholes of light. This ocular intrusion is as painful as the first time I let him inside me. He’s stretching and tearing, leaving me raw from the exchange without ever touching me.
Luke whispers something into my ear, but I can’t hear it. It’s as if the hive and all of its buzzing bodies disintegrate to nothing, as if time speeds up, days pass, and the two of us remain frozen in this game of chicken, our eyes unblinking, my heart drumming in my ears, furiously violent like a baseball bat whipping through the air.
“Let’s get to work.” Luke presses his body against mine as if trying to move a building. His words came at me slow, demonic, like an old record playing at abnormal speeds.
Something in Lincoln shifts. His glacial fortress thaws, and a rush of emotions swells around us. He takes a step in my direction, and I bolt. I hit the stairs with Luke hot on my heels. The hopeless Harlequin addict in me wishes it were his brother instead. I’m not ready to speak with Lincoln. I’m not ready to have a face-off with him like that ever again. I could feel the wrath emanating from him, his pure white-hot fury over what I had done pulsating from his flesh. A small part of me is proud to have shoved his shit in his face the way he shoved my heart back in mine.
I ask Luke to take me home.
I’m pretty sure this was my last day at Jinx.
* * *
Sometimes in life you make one stupid move after another, and for me this was the rut I had stalled in. This is where my wheels rusted and left me in a river of watery shit that for the life of me I could not make a single right move. Weeks swim by like water. I survive off Pop Tarts and stale pizza, whittling away on my laptop, ignoring both Stevie’s and Aspen’s pleas for me to come back to work. Everyone in general was fine with me taking a little time off. It’s not like what I was doing there couldn’t be done at home.
ReInvent has really taken off, and now I’m expanding my DIY app family to other types of artesian specific realms. But I needed to get back to where it all began—get back to my first love, breathing life into old pieces with my own two hands. Luke came with me and we dumpster dived for a few pieces of severely abused furniture that I could restore myself, two end tables and a trunk. I’ve enjoyed every minute that I’ve spent on his roomy porch, stroking bright blue paint over my new pieces, blue as Lincoln Lionheart’s lying eyes. In a
way, I enjoy the torture. I should wallow in this pain, in this misery, so I won’t be so apt to repeat it again. When just about everyone in your life tells you to be careful, maybe you should be. I was not careful, and my heart is shredded, rendered useless. I don’t think my heart ever understood what it was up against to begin with.
In the meanwhile, Luke reports on a daily basis how Jinx and Merlin continue to tank, pennies to the dollar, Lincoln’s deceptive move mopping up their net worth like dirty water.
Then late on a Saturday night, both Kinsley and Luke double-team me to get out of bed and head over to Gravity with them. I already sense the writing on the wall.
“Just for air,” Kinsley coaxed, but I already knew I would see him. A part of me needs to. It’s a sick fix I crave, if only from across the room. But what I don’t expect when I walk my Louboutin self (a splurge from my tattling-on-Lincoln money) down the narrow stairwell and into the bowels of the upscale club is to see my stepsister, Leah, with a bunch of her sorority bitches. To say Leah runs with the mean girl crowd would be to put down mean girls everywhere. Leah is the official queen bee. She’s the broken shard in which all of these broken daddy-craving skanks hobble after—aspire to be. Leah. A breath hitches in my throat. Her dark hair is set in large, frozen ringlets, her overblown lips outlined in a convincing blood red. Her eyes are heavily layered with false lashes and kohl, and her physical perfection, though heavily manufactured, screams for attention. And, by the looks of the male population proliferating around her, it seems to be working.
She struts over and nearly knocks Kinsley out with her wide-reaching grasp as she lunges at me with a hug.
“Oh my God! I tried to call you!”
She did. I ignored it.
“Gamma Beta Phi is having its L.A. chapter meeting this Monday, so we decided to make a weekend out of it. We’re at the Beverly Hills Hotel, but we had to come to Gravity. This club is the tits!” She squeals so loud my ears bleed. “Is Lincoln here?” Leah cranes her neck, ogling for the man who eviscerated me, culled my heart out, and ate it like a bear to honey.
“I don’t know.” I pull Kinsley in for camaraderie.
“You don’t know?” Leah bats Kinsley off me as if she were a common housefly. I glance over my shoulder to find Luke swarmed with the rest of Leah’s pussy posse. “You get a man like that in your life, you’d better hang on tooth and nail. Some L.A. club skank is probably offering to suck his dick right now. You don’t let him out of your sight.” Leah is incensed at my negligence, and this amuses me on some level. We both know she’s the club skank who would happily follow Lincoln into the bathroom and suck his parts until they fell right off.
If this was Leah’s version of protecting me, it would be heartwarming to a degree, but now that she’s espoused her strange diatribe, it’s become clear someone has already tipped her off to my breakup.
“Who told you?” I don’t even bother pulling her into the idea slow as taffy. That’s the way we conduct all of our conversations—manipulation to get the information we need. I guess in that respect we are the same.
She gives a few passive blinks as if she were trying to blow out a candle with her lashes. “Someone leaked your boardroom tiff.” Her lips part like the opening of a wound.
“There is no Gamma Beta Phi chapter meeting,” I say it mostly to myself, disgusted. I amble my way to Luke, push through the Cunt Crew, and free him from their octopussy limbs. This is simply a Leah-inspired road trip to score some Lionheart ass for herself.
“She’s here.” I pant, glaring at Leah from across the room. She’s already speaking with someone, looking up, ratcheting up those nylon lashes as if they were capable of propelling her to the ceiling.
“That chick talking to Lincoln?”
It’s really the first time I’ve heard Luke say his brother’s name, and it jolts through me like an electrical current, my foot lodged in a puddle of Leah’s piss. The combination is deadly.
I step around Luke to observe this for myself. There she is, attaching herself to him, her fingers suctioning onto his chest, her hips swaying to the music, grinding her pubic bone against his thigh. I bet Leah would take Lincoln’s girth first try. That canyon between her legs has seen many a men, probably a few equines as well. Lincoln might even get lost in that cavernous rotten cave. I would warn him if I cared.
My blood surges through me like lava at the sight of them.
A wave of nausea wafts over me as Kinsley shoves a glowing rose-colored drink at me. I don’t ask why the toxic liquid in this glass is neon, or if its radioactivity will shrivel my brain cells for the night. I’m hoping it will. I’d drink gasoline and chase it with a match if it would take the edge off this new visceral pain.
“It’s a Little Pink Pussy!” Kinsley screams, handing it to me gleefully as if in on the joke between Lincoln and me. “It’s the drink of the night.”
“It’s the drink of my life,” I mumble, touching my lips to the glass. Tastes like a mixture of cotton candy and Nyquil. I don’t waste any time draining that dainty little glass, the molten liquid burning a hot track straight to my intestines. I manage to catch an insta-buzz off the sickly sweet party favor. My head spins with the room, and I land softly against Luke’s chest. Some girls claim that champagne goes straight to their heads, and for me it’s just about every liquor, and oddly, sometimes coffee.
“Whoa.” He steadies me with his hands. “Are we dancing?” He moves beneath me, slow and melodic, but I simply continue to lean on him, unable to move as if I were on some gravity-sucking ride at an amusement park.
“I like you,” I say for no good reason. I do like Luke, in the platonic sense, but maybe tonight might be a good night to break from my sensibilities and sleep with him. Not as a segue to another unstable Lionheart romance, but to cleanse my body of all traces of Lincoln. Erase the muscle memory that his brother ingrained and take away the dull, hot ache in my belly to have him again. He is a murderer and a liar, isn’t he? Luke will be a great rebound to my rebound. That’s how far the mighty redheaded virgin has fallen.
A laugh stagnates around my mouth as if it lost its way while trying to escape.
I glance back at Leah and Lincoln, unable to spot them in the dimly lit room as bodies braid themselves into a giant human knot as the music picks up. Leah and Lincoln. I hate how their names sound so damned cutesy together. Macy and Lincoln. Macy and Luke. Macy and Bradley. My name doesn’t sound that great with anybody’s. That alone should be a sign.
I swivel my hips over Luke’s looking to see if I can incite a hard-on. Maybe he’ll whisk me home and carry me through the door the way Lincoln used to. It was very Me Tarzan, You Jane, and I lapped up every chauvinistic minute of it.
“Shit,” he muses, looking over my shoulder.
I give a lazy glance back, my head still glued to his chest as if an invisible force had its heavy hand over me.
Leah is swivel-hipped, loose-lipped, her hair greedily grabbing onto Lincoln’s body like a thousand tiny hands. Lincoln’s dead stare is aimed right at us. He catches my gaze, pumps a smile at Leah, and pinches her chin.
I bury my face in Luke’s neck to avoid seeing their lips conjoin. A knife of grief lances me, splits me wide open, spilling my anguish onto Luke like a watershed.
“Kiss me,” I demand, looking up at him with my hair sticking to my damp face, partially blinding me on the left.
Luke averts his gaze as if recognizing this misstep for what it is.
“I mean it!” I shout over the music. “Just fucking kiss me.” That’s mostly the Little Pink Pussy talking, but I want this, even on a minuscule level. I want his tongue to come in and scrape away any memory of Lincoln’s roving member. I want to take Luke into my mouth, that intimate part of him, and swallow him down so I can forget the taste of the most abhorrent man in the universe. Just once. One night should be enough to expunge Lincoln’s ghost from my body and replace him just as easily as he’s replacing me. He with Leah and me with Luke. A famil
ial trade for the ages—only he ends up with my trashy sister, and I end up with a Lionheart worthy of his regal name. Um, wait, isn’t he a Wolff? My head spins as I try to sort through it all.
My fingers thread through Luke’s much softer hair, pulling him closer to me as my lips aggressively pluck for him.
“You want to go home?” he offers.
“Yes,” I mouth, trying my best to be seductive in my sloppy, desperately heartbroken state. Luke spins me with the music, and my eyes snag on Leah, climbing Mount Lincoln with her skirt all but wrapped around her waist. He has his defiant stance set, letting her use him like a jungle gym, her lips moving over his ear, whispering, eating it while my brain splatters all over the ceiling from the visual. Lincoln glares at me. Glares at me.
Fuck it. I’ll give him something to hate. I will teach Lincoln Lionheart a lesson in love and hate, and that space we seem to be caught in between. In one Herculean move, I pull Luke to me, my lips sealing over his, sensing his resistance. I hike my hips over his thighs and force myself into his mouth, his tongue slowly mingling with mine in that sad way that says, No, not this, no, no—the way a married man might first resist the temptation of a mistress, but slowly he caves, cupping my cheeks in his hands, his tongue enjoying a full revolution around my—
My body jerks back as I fall against Kinsley’s cushioned breasts. At first, I think it’s her who’s pulled me away, but then I see him. Lincoln shoves Luke clear across the room and then turns to me with a vengeful look in his eyes as if I were next.
Lincoln is on me before I can think to make a move. His body, the warm scent of his cologne pushing me back through the crowd, his hands on my waist guiding me as if engaging in some aggressively exotic dance.
We take a turn out of the main clubroom and into a dark corridor. Lincoln pins my hands up near my face, my back pressed to the wall. His angry, wild eyes sear into mine.
For a second, I think about spitting in his face or kneeing his enormous donkey balls, but instead, I go for the jugular. “Are you going to kill me like you killed her?”