The public display of affection from him—not sexual, not bullying, but pure, naked affection—filled my chest with warmth, but I tried to swallow down my hope.
“What do you want?” I turned my gaze to meet his, and suddenly, we weren’t in New York, in a gallery full of people. We were in my old room. Ignoring the party and the world around us, a world that we constantly disregarded when we were together.
“I want you,” he said simply. “Just you. Nothing else. Only ever you,” he breathed out in pain, closing his eyes. “Fuck, Emilia. You.”
I wanted to kiss him hard like in the movies, but this was reality, and I was an employee and an artist who still had to carry herself in a certain way. But I hugged him close to me and inhaled his unique scent, allowing myself to get drunk on it. I held back all the emotions that flooded me. The relief. The happiness. Wariness and love. So much love.
When we finally pulled away, I looked down to his clutched hand. “What’s that in your hand, Vic?”
“This? I saw something I liked so I bought it when I got here.” He opened his fist and showed it to me.
It was a receipt for my painting. My heart stuttered.
He squeezed my hand in his and smiled. “It’s gonna look so fucking epic in my bedroom, don’t you think? I could fuck you and stare at myself as I do it. That’s some Napoleon shit right there.”
It was the best night of my life.
Because Vicious not only stayed the whole night, but because he also allowed me to soak in the recognition I had received. He stood beside me most of the time, cradling his tumbler of whiskey, messed on his phone, and occasionally took a picture of me when I was smiling or laughing with someone. He acted like a boyfriend. But not just any boyfriend. The boyfriend Vicious was supposed to be and never was.
And when the night ended, and I turned around, about to tell him that I wanted to take it slow, that I couldn’t give him only my body anymore, because it came as a single package with my heart and soul, he beat me to it.
Vicious ushered me to a taxi, planted a soft kiss on my forehead, and slammed the cab’s door shut, motioning for me to roll down the window. I did.
“I thought you’d try to take me home.” I arched a playful eyebrow.
“You thought wrong. Your pussy doesn’t interest me right now. Your heart does.”
Always so crude, even when he’s sweet.
He tapped the vehicle’s roof. “Try to sleep, despite the adrenaline. You rocked this shit, Emilia. I’m proud of you. I’ll pick you up for lunch tomorrow at twelve. Good night.”
THE UNIVERSE WAS ROOTING FOR me that week.
Dean had stopped being a pussy-ass motherfucker and decided to help me out. He not only threw a party complete with dozens of people who spotted me, in the unlikely event that Jo was going to explore prosecuting me for what happened to the mansion, but he actually took the LeBlancs to get furniture and go grocery shopping. It was with mixed feelings that I’d watched his interaction with Charlene, because the fucker was charming and she actually liked him. I could see it in the way she looked at him that she wished her daughter had stayed with him. She was going to have to get used to me.
Josephine was not on the premises when her house burst into flames. I’d asked a guy I knew to drive by on his Harley, with a ski mask, and throw a firebomb near the garage. He did.
Two hundred thousand dollars, it cost me.
But the Spencer mansion was gone. Wiped from the face of the earth. The scars on the blackened, muddy ground were the only proof that it had ever truly existed.
The next morning, my stepmother sent me a formal text informing me that she was moving to Maui. I texted back that she should leave her inheritance where I could fucking see it because she wasn’t going anywhere, hell included, with my money.
She didn’t reply, but the message was clear. I’d won. She’d lost. At life. At death. At everything that’d mattered.
It wasn’t easy to get back to New York in time for the gallery showing. I had to bribe someone who flew coach to sell me his ticket. I paid double the price, but I made it to the exhibition. And when I got to the gallery, unsure of what I was going to say to her, she did all the work for me.
She’d painted me.
Not only did she paint me (and arguably gave me a better nose than the one I was born with), but it was also what I was doing in the painting that made me smile like a sleaze ball. I was holding a joint and laughing into a non-existent camera—though my eyes were still mine, kind of sad and dark and fucking scary—and I wore a simple black T-shirt that said “Black” in white. The background was stark, stupid pink.
I was her black.
And she was my pink.
I bought the painting in a heartbeat, dragging her boss aside. Gay, thank fuck. He was there with his boyfriend, Roi. By that time, I noticed Emilia was standing next to my image, talking about it with a woman, and I hoped I wasn’t too late to buy it myself.
I wasn’t.
Emilia didn’t know it yet, but she was going to paint another painting, of herself wearing a pink shirt against a black background, and I was going to hang it next to mine.
The next day, I arrived at the gallery promptly at noon. She was standing in the doorway in a blue and white sailor dress and orange pumps, waiting for me with a smile. It looked so simple. Her, on this spring day, giving me what I wanted so easily. It didn’t look so easy while we were in high school. But I could see now that Trent had been right the night I’d found out she was dating Dean. I dragged everyone into a lot of dark shit because I couldn’t admit to myself this one, simple fact.
All I wanted was for her to be mine, but I kept thinking—believing—that I wasn’t enough. That something so broken couldn’t possibly deserve someone so whole.
I maintained my pace from the coffee shop where I’d been waiting, taking my time to appreciate the fact that she was waiting for me at the other end of the block. She lost her patience and sauntered in my direction, barely containing the grin on her face. When we were inches from each other, we both stopped. I wanted to kiss her, but it wasn’t time yet. So I tucked a lock of hair behind her ear and swallowed.
“Let’s go.”
We took a taxi. It was spring. It was gorgeous. The only good thing about New York City, other than the fact that Emilia LeBlanc lived here, was what I was about to show her.
“Where are we going?” She munched on her bottom lip.
“Ice skating,” I deadpanned. “Then I want to get a giant tattoo of an asshole on my forehead because it symbolizes me.”
She laughed that throaty laugh that made my cock twitch. “I can draw something out for you,” she said with a wink.
“I’d like that.”
The cab stopped on the edge of Central Park West, and we hopped out. I didn’t bring anything with me but my story. Nothing for a picnic. Not even a fucking blanket to sit on. I hoped it was enough. Emilia flashed me a Mona Lisa smile that widened into a full beam when I grabbed her hand and led her to the blossoming cherry tree near the little bridge. The tree was in full bloom. It was especially beautiful, just like her, and she stood and watched it in silence.
I’d rehearsed this moment yesterday just before I got to the gallery. Tracked my steps to make sure I knew exactly where the tree was located, and made sure it was actually blooming. Central Park was huge, and I didn’t want to mess it up. No more messing up with this woman.
She turned to face me. “Cherry blossoms?”
I shrugged. “I guess I can see what the fuss is all about.”
We sat under the tree.
The notion of telling someone everything, even her, was crippling. The lawyer in me wanted to drag me by the collar away from this. But the lawyer in me was dead near Emilia LeBlanc. Fucking her against my office door had pretty much proven so.
She looked at me expectantly before blurting out, “Listen, you don’t need to explain yourself to me. You are who you are. I knew who Vicious Spencer was before I’d
decided to work for you. Knew you’d pursue me. Knew you would ask me for things I might have a problem doing. And you were right, we weren’t exclusive. As much as it hurt, you had every right to sleep with Georgia—”
“You think I slept with Georgia?” I cut her off incredulously, frowning. “I didn’t touch her. I tried. Trust me, I did. But she wasn’t you. And I know you don’t expect me to give you answers, but I’m going to do it anyway because there’s a small part of me that thinks that maybe, just maybe, you’ll give me a chance afterward.”
But there was a bigger part that suspected she was going to call the police and hand me over. Still, I had to do this.
Silence fell between us. My eyes landed on the grass as I spoke. It was easier that way.
“After my mom got injured in that car accident when I was a kid, everything changed. My parents’ marriage was never the greatest from what I can remember, but it was after Mom became disabled when we stopped being a family. No more dinners together. No more vacations. He barely even spent time with us anymore. Drowned himself in work. When I was nine, my dad finally decided to leave my mother for Josephine. They were having an affair, but he couldn’t divorce the poor crippled wife, right? So Jo convinced him to send a man to make her go away. The man was Jo’s brother, Daryl Ryker.”
Emilia gasped, and she took my hand in hers.
I continued. “I overheard my dad’s conversation with Jo—back then she was his secretary, and because I was nine, I wasn’t sure what it meant. I let it slide. Then a few weeks later, I came home from school in the middle of the day because I was sick. Saw Daryl leaving my mom’s bedroom in a hurry. She died that day, and Josephine and my dad got married a year later.” The words tasted bitter in my mouth. I still hadn’t gotten over the fact he hated me so fucking much that he’d left me with practically nothing.
“After what happened to Mom, it felt almost evil to be happy. And Daryl…he eventually became a fixture in our home. Like an old, tattered, ugly-as-hell piece of furniture you wanted to get rid of. He was a drunk, and sometimes a junkie—cocaine was his weakness—and he was sadistic as fuck. I was young and broken, and it was easy to drag me to the library and beat the shit out of me and cut me. I had no one to complain to. They’d murdered the only person who loved me.”
“Jesus,” I heard Emilia mutter as she sniffed loudly and clutched my hand in a death grip. Her eyes were already welling up. “This is horrible, Vic.”
So am I, I thought.
“I thought about turning to the police and telling them about the whole thing, but by that point, I knew it was me against the world. Besides, it became personal. I knew what I was going to do. I had a plan. But as I moved toward it, I guess I became hardened. Too hard to notice everything that was beautiful and soft around me.”
Enter Emilia LeBlanc. I knew what was going to leave my mouth next and I tried to convince myself that it wasn’t a terrible mistake. Emilia wasn’t my girlfriend. She wasn’t even technically my friend. And I was going to admit something to her, knowing I was putting my balls in her hands, hoping she wouldn’t squeeze them to death.
“There was a game to be played, and I played it well. When you and I saw each other for the first time, Daryl had already stopped showing up at my house. He was coked-up again, and my dad had told Jo to take his keys away. Anyway, he hadn’t abused me in a few years. I was big by then. Maybe six two, six three, and a baller. He was just a frail junkie who was losing hair, but he thought he could still intimidate me. When I found you outside the library, I thought you’d heard too much, and the worst part was, when I looked at you, all I saw was Jo. You had her lips and her hair, her eyes, and her posture. It made me want to hate you.”
Emilia wiped her silent tears with the back of her hand and nestled her head in the crook of my shoulder. I let her. I took a deep breath of the fresh air, closing my eyes. I was going to do it.
“After you left Todos Santos, everything got worse. We were no longer in high school, and I was no longer a king. No one to play Defy with anymore, which made my frustration with the world simmer. Especially toward my stepmom and her brother. I wanted to kill Ryler. To fucking end him. I showed up at his house. I didn’t even have to kick the door in. He was in the backyard in his hot tub, relaxing, his eyes shut.”
I told her how I killed him. How I strode nonchalantly toward him, sat on the edge of his hot tub and dropped his phone, which was on the wooden deck, into the water.
The autopsy said Daryl drowned to death in a drug-induced stupor. It was an airtight story. It was also the right one. He had drowned…but I gave him the drugs to put him out.
After I was done, I stilled, not even daring to inhale my next dose of oxygen.
She didn’t stand up and walk away.
She didn’t scream at me.
She didn’t make a sound.
She just tensed next to my body and brushed her hand along my arm, prompting me to continue. I released the breath I was holding in my lungs and did just that.
“Then it was time to deal with Josephine and Dad. The gold-digger deserved to lose what she’d schemed so hard to have. The fact that my dad got sick took care of most of it. My plan for simple. My dad worked himself to death to create a business legacy. All I wanted was to confront him before he died. Let him know I knew all along about my mom and that I was going to get rid of what he’d built, starting with the mansion I hated. ”
“You burned down the house,” she finished gently.
I nodded, my chin digging into her temple. I felt lighter, somehow. I hoped it wasn’t going to bite me in the ass the next time Emilia and I went against each other, which was bound to happen, because that was the way we operated. She jerked her head from my chest and stared at me. And I let her. Because I had nothing to hide anymore.
“You did so many horrible things to avenge your mama,” she whispered. A tear escaped her right eye.
I nodded. I’d have said I was sorry, but that would’ve been a lie she didn’t deserve hearing.
“And you’re telling me this because…?”
“Because I trust you. Because I want to know if there’s still a chance you can know who I am, who I really am, and still…” Don’t say love me, don’t say love me, don’t say love me. “Be with me.”
“I want to be with you,” she confirmed without hesitation, and fuck, it just got a whole lot warmer. “I know that they damaged you, and I still want you. I don’t even want to fix you. I just want you as you are. Broken. Misunderstood. Jerk. I want the real version, the dark version, the one who made me the saddest I’ve ever been in my life, but also the happiest.”
Now was the time.
I pressed my lips against hers, and they were warm, and they were right, and they were mine. We kissed under the cherry blossom tree until I felt our lips were seconds from cracking before she pulled away, blinking at me. I got up and offered her my hand.
She took it.
She fucking took it.
Knowing what I’d done, she was still there. What’s more, she was still strong. That was the true beauty about this girl. She never cowered. She always stood tall and thought for herself, knowing what was right and what was wrong in her universe. Always.
That’s what Pink said all those years ago. That we weren’t above the law, but not beneath it either.
There were people around us. Cycling and setting up picnics, taking pictures, and walking their dogs. The place was buzzing with life, but I had just finished talking to her about the death I’d caused. I knew she still had a question in mind, so I waited, allowing her to voice it.
“What are you going to do about Josephine?” Her eyes jerked to me, and I smiled.
“I’m going to punish her where it hurts. I’m going to take her money.”
It was pretty amazing how fast six months could pass. I was in no position to talk shit about Dean because he stayed true to his word, sticking to LA and even helping Emilia’s parents settle in while I was courting their daugh
ter.
Yes, that’s right, courting.
I had no idea how we went from fucking in my office in every position known to man to me holding her bag while I escorted her from the subway to her shitty apartment every night, but it happened. I asked her if she wanted to move in with me, along with Rosie, back to their old apartment in Manhattan, the one I occupied now. I had more than enough space for the three of us, but after she said no, I never brought the subject up again.
We were going to do things her way. I got it. Her way sucked, but I needed to start learning how to play other people’s games if I ever wanted something meaningful.
We didn’t explicitly say out loud that we were dating, but we certainly weren’t fucking, and still, we saw each other every day. It went without saying that our weekends were booked, and we spent them together. Rosie tagged along more often than I would have liked, but I bit the bullet. We went to museums and to the movies. We took walks and even went to Coney Island once. Rosie brought a date along when that happened—a greasy guy named Hal—so I had a few hours to smuggle Emilia behind a building and make out with her until she had concrete burns all over her back from when I grinded against her.
Rosie kept teasing me about the Hamptons, asking what kind of rich person I was if I didn’t have a house there, until finally I caved and rented a place for the weekend, but not before I ran the idea past Emilia’s baby sister and told her that if she was not bringing Hal along, I’d be dumping her sorry ass on the road on the way to the beach house I’d leased.
The week before the beach trip, we visited the cherry blossom tree again. The flowers had long died by then, which was kind of depressing to think about, I guess. Worse, spring was almost over, and I knew I was running out of time.
That night we finally got into bed again, and it was nothing like our first times.
Rosie needed the apartment in the Bronx because her boyfriend was sleeping over at theirs. A perfect opportunity for me. I asked Emilia if she wanted to sleep at my place and she said yes. I didn’t arrange a fancy candlelit dinner or get her flowers because that would’ve been lying, and I promised myself I wasn’t gonna lie to her. But I did order us some Vietnamese from that place she liked and bought some booze. She came over after work and kicked off her high heels—lemon yellow with green dots—muttering something about how she was five seconds from caving and pairing sneakers with dresses like the rest of the female lawyers and accountants of NYC.