Sailor was sitting on the end of the crème leather seat, as far away from me as humanly possible, watching the city lights flickering to their slow, midnight death. People scurried into their homes like mice.
“Thank you,” her voice traveled between us, hoarse and smoky.
“Bet,” I mumbled, my thumb sliding over the screen. Kardashian on a cracker, I missed Cali. I had to remind myself this was going to be over in less than six months. I was going to make Da give me the dope apartment, make sure the door didn’t hit Sailor’s flat ass on her way out, and fuck until I fell into a coma.
“Aren’t you going to ask what for?” she challenged in her smart-ass voice.
Fuck. Even when she looked good (and she actually did look good in that dress with her hair up), she just had to ruin it by being so…herself.
I looked up from my phone unenthusiastically. “My bad. What for?”
“Managing the situation when I freaked out earlier…” She trailed off and frowned at my hand. It took me a second to realize why she was angry again. My screen was stuck on a thirst trap of Alice squeezing her tits together and winking at the camera with a cherry in her mouth, wearing nothing but a tiny, sunflower-patterned bikini.
“Who is this?” she asked.
I wasn’t keen on airing my shit, and I never told people who I fucked, how many times, where, and when. It seemed tacky—more so when it was to Sailor, who was probably more virginal than the punch in a pre-K after-school dance.
“A chick I went to school with.”
“Nice,” she said, in the way girls lilted the word when things were anything but nice.
She turned back to the window. I turned back to imagining myself fucking Alice’s tits.
When we got home, Sailor dashed straight to her room, slamming the door with a huff. As I made my way to mine, I heard her saying “stupid, stupid, stupid,” thumping her head against the wall. Figured she was feeling bad about that little meltdown earlier.
I closed my bedroom door and shot Alice a text.
Hunter: Send n00dz.
I followed it up with a GIF of a dog humping a pillow. Courting in the twenty-first century was the shit.
Instead of smarting off, or breaking down, or generally being a mess—cough, Sailor, cough—Alice replied with a picture of her from the neck down spread eagle on the bed, wearing nothing but a neon pink thong. I shimmied out of my cigar pants. I’d never really stopped being hard since I danced with Sailor.
Hunter: Now a video of you touching yourself.
Alice: Are u sure? Heard Daddy got you on lockdown.
Hunter: This is not breaking the rules. Just tilting them a little. To the right. ; )
Alice: LOL perv. They say you moved in with someone. A girl…
Hunter: Not what you think.
Alice: I don’t think anything.
Ain’t that the truth, baby.
I jerked off twice that night to unholy videos of Alice.
When I woke up, Sailor was gone.
Carrot Top didn’t bother coming home on Sunday. Not that I cared, but it was almost taunting to have the huge-ass apartment all to myself without being able to put it to good use. My father’s so-called bodyguards/private investigators were under the building, and based on the way half the goddamn world already knew I was living with Sailor, I gathered the staff in the premises also ran their mouths.
I spent the time studying statistics and other kill-me-now business-management subjects. I’d barely attended my evening classes because I’d been in the office all day every day last week—fetching coffee, answering spontaneous quizzes about the company’s history my brother and father threw at me, and generally being the designated office bitch.
When Sailor failed to show her face by dinnertime, I hit the building gym to let off some steam. Yesterday at the fundraiser, Mom had suggested I go back to playing polo in one of her attempts to strike up a conversation. I’d suggested she mind her own business. I didn’t want to play sports. I didn’t want to do anything.
And therein lay the problem. I had zero ambition when it didn’t involve fucking and partying. I felt hollow inside, the kind of empty that gnawed at the edges of my flesh, threatening to devour the rest of me.
I heard the front door to the apartment open around midnight. I was in my room, my door ajar, reading some bullshit textbook. To my surprise, I felt too butthurt to ask Carrot Top where she’d been. I heard her shuffling around the kitchen, pouring herself a glass of water and rummaging in the fridge. She fixed herself something to eat. She had a real good hand when it came to food. I smelled fresh bread, peanut butter, Nutella, and roasted nuts. She was either FaceTiming her family or had put them on speaker. Her brother and dad bickered about who got to take her for lunch the next day, since they were going to be in different parts of the city. I hated her surprisingly functional family.
Ten minutes later, she turned off the lights and shut her bedroom door, locking it for good measure.
HHH: No need to lock your door. Not gonna sneak in on you.
HHH: ?
HHH: Still giving me the silent treatment to punish me for absolutely fucking nothing?
HHH: Go to hell, CT.
It was a gray Monday morning, which brought with it the urge to hurl myself under a bus.
I started the day by helping the company’s executive accountant to go through the quarterly numbers. After being holed up for four hours in a dungeon with Excel sheets and middle-aged men who smelled like underwear crust, coffee, and diabetes, I took my lunch while studying in the kitchenette, enjoying the background noise of my father shrieking at people about the refinery, which was apparently at a shutdown state because of some minor explosion. After I finished, I was heading down to the compliance department to help out with filing some documents. Such was my rock-n-roll life.
I threw my empty poke bowl into the trash, rounded the hallway, and decided to take the emergency stairs instead of the elevators on a whim. Those were busy as fuck around lunch hour, and as it turned out, people in Royal Pipelines didn’t care for me. Apparently, they all knew I was a lazy fuck and weren’t pumped about my co-running the company with my tyrant brother when Da retired.
I took the stairs down two at a time until I heard a voice drifting from downstairs, two floors below. The echo carried it up, even though the person was obviously whispering.
“…really don’t care. As long as it’s done. Discretion is key. I’ll call you next week from another burner phone. Do not call me, understand? It’s too risky. I shouldn’t have even picked up your call today,” the voice seethed.
Syllie.
I wasn’t one to eavesdrop. Not out of good manners, God forbid, but because I gave zero-to-minus-thirty fucks about other people’s lives. Syllie, despite being an okay dudebro, was at the bottom of the list of people I was interested in. If he had a sidepiece, good for him. I shook my head, smiling to myself. Old sport was sampling other flavors secretly. Naughty. I waited, letting lover boy finish his call.
“I’m not worried about the old sod. He’s getting smugger by the second. His younger kid is also a literal fucking joke—wouldn’t recognize trouble if it gave him herpes and cut his dick off. But the older son is dangerous. We need to watch him.”
Whoa.