“You’d better sit down,” he suggested now, shifting James from one shoulder to the other. “And tell me what’s going on.”
“I was just remembering,” she said, spying a window ledge where the one animal she’d owned, a stray tiger-striped cat with wide green eyes and the ability to destroy every pair of panty hose in her drawers, had often sat. She’d dubbed him Vagabond and he’d left two years after he’d shown up. Kylie had never known what had happened to him, though she’d searched for weeks, calling shelters and friends, neighbors and even the police. The SFPD hadn’t been interested, of course, and she’d been left with the painful sensation that even her pet had abandoned her.
“Damn,” she whispered, vaguely aware of Nick watching her as she moved through the apartment. She opened a closet door. An array of cleaning supplies and equipment met her eyes.
In that second, with amazing clarity, she recalled the concrete and steel elementary school where she’d shone academically, making up for the fact that she’d been branded a bastard, a girl who didn’t know who her father was. She’d matured early, before anyone else in her class, and the older boys had teased her. One even, near the end of the school year, had lured her into a janitor’s closet and offered her ten dollars for a peek at the most bodacious breasts in all of Ben Franklin Elementary. It had been a dare and she’d never been one to back down from a challenge.
The closet had been stuffy, lit by a single bulb, surrounded by shelves filled with cleaning supplies, toilet paper and boxes of plastic bags. Three boys and Kylie had been wedged among the mops, trash baskets and fading posters of Farrah Fawcett and Raquel Welch.
“Come on, Kylie, why not?” Ian Perth had asked, his breath stinking, sweat pouring down his fleshy, red face.
“I heard you’d do anything for money,” Brent Mallory had added. He was sunburned, his teeth were way too big for his face, his blond hair stuck up at weird angles.
But it had been Lucas Yamhill, a tall, good-looking boy who had nearly convinced her. He was a freshman in high school but hung out with younger kids sometimes. His dad owned the local grocery store and another one in the next town south of San Leandro. “Come on, show us your titties. Ten bucks can buy a lot.”
She’d wanted to do it. Just to show creepy Brent and Ian that she wasn’t afraid and because she wanted to impress Lucas. She would have loved to have flashed Lucas. Why not? And it was worth ten dollars.
So she had. Right there in that hot, tight closet, she’d lifted her T-shirt, tugged it over her head and let it drop onto the painted cement floor.
Brent whistled through his teeth.
With a flourish, she’d tossed her hair like the models in those shampoo commercials did and it swung free to her shoulders, then didn’t move. Her cleavage was visible. That was enough.
“Hey, no fair. You’re wearing a bra!” Ian complained, feeling cheated.
“That’s right,” Brent agreed when he realized he’d been tricked. “I’m not payin’ to see that. I’ve seen my sister parading around in her bra plenty of times.”
Lucas’s evil leer caused a tingle to race through her blood. “I’ll make it twenty if you let me take that off you.”
“Twenty-five,” she said sassily, beginning to perspire. “And not with those two watching.”
“For twenty-five and a private viewing, I want to touch.” His eyes, when they looked at her, had darkened from light brown to nearly black and there was another signal in his murky gaze. “I want to touch all of you.”
She felt a palpitation between her legs and a flutter of her heart. A billion butterflies took flight in her stomach. “Lose them,” she said about Ian and Brent.
“No way. I paid three bucks!” Ian folded his beefy arms over his chest, but Lucas was older and had convinced the others to scram.
Lucas closed the door behind them. The lock clicked into place. Kylie could barely breathe. Slowly Lucas removed two ten dollar bills and a five and placed them on top of an overturned bucket, smoothing the bills flat. He also pulled out a thin foil packet—one that held a condom—and set it on top. “I’ll double it if you strip naked.”
“I—I don’t know.”
“And I’ll give you a hundred if you let me—you know. Touch you.”
“Touch me?”
“Yeah.” His voice lowered. “You know what I’m talking about.”
She bit her lip. Shook her head. It was hard to breathe. But she was starting to understand . . . and it scared her.
“Have you ever seen a guy?”
“No.”
“I could show you,” he offered.
“Would I have to pay?”
His laugh had a dirty ring to it. “Nah. I’d like to touch you with it.” He was a big boy, a year older than his classmates, nearly fifteen. Almost old enough to drive. She swallowed hard. She was curious and she liked Lucas. He was popular. Athletic. Rich. “We could . . . you know . . . get it on,” he suggested silkily.
“No!”
“I thought you’d do anything for money.” Lucas traced the slope of her jaw and went lower down her neck.
She batted his hand away. “Not that.”
“I won’t hurt you,” he whispered.
She thought of the money and of Ian and Brent probably listening on the other side of the door, their ears and eyes pressed to the keyhole. A sick feeling swept over her.
There was something in Lucas’s eyes that scared her. Something that tempted her. Something that caused her to breathe a little shallower and her blood to pound in her eardrums.
Her mother’s warnings echoed through her brain. “Don’t let any boy get into your pants, Kylie. They’ll just use you,” Dolly had told her. “You could catch something filthy or find yourself in big trouble. I’m way too young to be a grandma!”
When Lucas reached for the button of her jeans, she grabbed his hand. Stopped him short. “No . . . I don’t think this would be such a great idea,” she said, her voice unrecognizable. She wanted him to touch her. She was one of those kinds of girls, the kind who liked it.
“Oh, come on, Kylie. I want you so bad, baby.” He was touching her and kissing her and her mind was spinning crazily. “And no one will know.”
Just the whole universe! Ian and Brent and their big mouths would spread it all over the school. Not to mention Lucas himself. He’d brag to everyone and anyone else who would listen that he’d scored in the janitor’s closet!
Lucas kissed her. Hard. His hands opened her jeans. “Just feel good, baby.” He shoved a finger between the denim and her skin, groped and touched, squirming to reach lower.
“Don’t.” She pushed him away and nearly fell into the stack of trash cans. Her heart was thudding, her breathing rapid and she felt a forbidden want deep in the most secret part of her. “No!”
“But—”
“No way.” She shook her head and reached for the money, but he snatched it, and his stupid condom up in one fist.
“So you’re just a tease,” he snarled.
“I didn’t say I’d do anything like that!”
“Cunt. Cock tease.”
“Get out!” she cried, the horrid words echoing through her brain. Why had she agreed to come into this stupid closet anyway?
“Don’t worry. I will.”
He adjusted his fly and yanked open the door. Ian and Brent nearly toppled inside. Kylie turned around so they couldn’t see her breasts and sweeping her T-shirt off the floor, scrambled into it. She yanked it over her head. Tears streamed down her face.
“Ya get any?” Brent asked Lucas.
“Plenty.”
For the next three weeks, until school was out, Kylie’s life had been pure hell. Lucas had taunted her. Brent had snickered every time he’d seen her and Ian had avoided her eyes. The rest of the class had found out about her stripping in the closet and the story had been exaggerated a thousand horrid ways. Kylie had somehow managed to walk tall and survive, but the incident had been burned into her memory. Until the crash. All
those years ago she’d silently vowed that when she grew up she’d do anything, anything to escape the chains of poverty.
And she had. Even going so far as agreeing to give up her baby for the almighty buck.
“Oh, God,” she whispered now, tears running down her face as she sat in this tiny apartment which she’d called home for over five years. She looked into Nick’s worried eyes. “I’m . . . I’m Kylie Paris,” she whispered. Nick had never loved her. They’d never shared any romantic trysts or rendezvous. She swallowed hard, stared into his blue eyes.
“And Marla?” he asked, and the way he said her name made Kylie want to die inside. He loved another woman. Not her. “How is she involved in all this?” He motioned to the small, cozy, lived-in living room with its magazines and crossword puzzle books stacked on the tables.
Kylie sank onto the cushions of her yard-sale couch. “She’s my half sister. I—I found out about her about the time I started high school . . . my mother let it slip that Conrad Amhurst was my father, that there was a half brother who was retarded and an older sister who was . . . Conrad’s darling.” Her throat worked at the thought and remembered the day when tall glasses of iced tea had been sweltering on the small table in their apartment.
“You’ve known all along?” Kylie had challenged, glaring at her mother as Dolly sat at a small, scarred Formica table, casually leafing through the Enquirer while smoking a cigarette.
“I was sworn to secrecy,” her mother had admitted.
“About me? About my dad?” Kylie had been outraged. “Why?”
“You were an embarrassment.” Dolly, loose blond curls pulled away from her face by a headband, added, “He’s rich. Socially prominent. I was an embarrassment too.”
“But . . . but . . .” Kylie had leaned against a wheezing refrigerator. “Rich?”
“If you’re thinking about getting any of his money, forget it,” Dolly said with acrimony, her husky voice filled with recriminations. “He paid me off a long time ago.”
“That’s not legal.”
“Maybe not, but I signed some document—” She waved her long fingers in the air, disturbing the smoke curling toward the flickering fluorescent lights overhead in the tidy, spartan room. “I don’t think I want to take him and his lawyers on. I don’t have the time, or the money. It . . . it wouldn’t work.” She turned a page and tried to bury herself in an article on Princess Diana.
“Then you’re a wimp,” Kylie declared and snatched up her glass. The ice cubes clinked and she downed the tea in three long swallows.
“I know I’ll lose.” For the first time Kylie noticed the lines of strain around her mother’s eyes, the tired slump of her thin shoulders.
“I wouldn’t give up,” Kylie declared brashly, condemning the woman who had borne her as weak. “Never.”
“Then you’re foolish. Or like your father.”
“Who is?”
“Conrad Amhurst. He’s married. Has a couple of kids with his wife.”
“And doesn’t want to be bothered with me,” Kylie had added, wounded to her soul. She’d known she had a father of course, but hadn’t realized he’d lived so close and that he never saw her, either by choice or circumstance. “What kind of a bastard is he?” she asked, then she cringed at the use of the very derogatory term she’d heard about herself.
“Powerful. Harsh. Unforgiving. Relentless.”
“He sounds like a jerk.”
“He is. But he did give me some money and then there were the hand-me-downs.”
“Crap! You mean . . . you mean those dresses you said you got at the church . . . that they were from . . .”
“His daughter. Marla.”
“His real daughter.”
“You are his real daughter,” her mother had said, a little of her old backbone resurfacing.
“No, Mom, I’m not. I’m just the bastard. As you said, an embarrassment.” But she’d listened to every word as Dolly explained everything then, about being a waitress at an exclusive club and being swept off her feet by the dashing, rich and very married man who had eventually gotten her pregnant. Dolly had known of his children and of a wife who, he claimed, bled him dry and would never ever consider divorce. Dolly had also learned that she hadn’t meant a whit to her lover. “He gave me a hundred thousand dollars,” she admitted.
“And you blew it.”
“We lived on it, damn it, Kylie.” Dolly angrily jabbed her cigarette in the overflowing ashtray. “Someday you’ll understand.”
“Never. I’d never roll over and play dead like you did!” Kylie had gone to her bedroom, thrown open the closet door and hurled all her clothes on the bed, clothes with designer labels that, though a few years old, would rival and outdo any girls’ in her school. Skirts and sweaters and blouses that Kylie had worn self-consciously as they were so different from the jeans and T-shirts that her mother had bought at the discount stores.
“You have to know that you mean everything to me,” her mother had said, walking up behind her and wrapping her arms around Kylie’s waist as outrage burned through Kylie’s body, the sting of being unwanted biting deep. “I’ve always been proud of you and he should be, too. The odd thing is that you look so much like her, like Marla. The Amhurst genes run strong, I guess.”
Kylie had refused to cry but had decided to get even. With her father and with that snot of a privileged half sister. But first she had to meet them and to that end she’d devised a plan.
The first of many.
It hadn’t taken long. She was barely fifteen when she was able to sneak into the city. With the help of the telephone directory, Kylie had located the offices of Amhurst Limited and gained access as far as her father’s offices where a fussy secretary had bluntly told her that Mr. Amhurst was in meetings all day and far too busy a man to see her.
“Then I’ll wait,” Kylie had insisted and plopped down in a wingback chair in a reception area, while pretending interest in the Wall Street Journal. Men in business suits occupied the leather couches and fiddled with the clasps of their briefcases, only to be called one by one through the cherrywood doors emblazoned with gold letters that read, Conrad Amhurst, President. Kylie had waited until her bladder had been ready to burst.
At five minutes after five in the afternoon, she’d been ushered outside by a no-nonsense janitor who had flatly told her to go home.
She hadn’t. She’d parked herself on the bench across from the private parking lot. Chewing on red licorice and sipping a Coca-Cola, she watched as the expensive cars rolled away from their designated spaces and took off through the city. Finally, near dark, a sleek black town car with smoky windows purred out of the lot only to drive away. She’d known her father was in there, had seen a man’s profile, had imagined him locking eyes with her, only to turn from her.
As if he hated the sight of her.
She’d visited his country club, only to be told by a snooty receptionist that “members only” were allowed in. She’d left messages that were never answered, telephoned his office and home only to have no call returned. It was as if, to Conrad Amhurst, she didn’t exist.
Kylie didn’t give up.
One Sunday she had the confrontation she’d waited for.
She knew the church he attended, had seen him from afar, with his family, walking into the cathedral-like building one fog-shrouded spring Sunday. Kylie had worn one of Marla’s cast-off dresses, a deep green velvet that was too hot, but the nicest of the lot. She’d attended the service, sitting in a pew only a few rows back. Marla had seen her then, their eyes, so like each other’s, had locked for a few seconds. Marla was older, but her hair was the same red-brown as Kylie’s, her nose as straight, her chin a little sharper, her eyes the same green. It had been spooky, like looking into a mirror that was slightly off, the reflection not quite perfect. Victoria Amhurst had turned as if she’d sensed the intrusion into her perfect life, spied Kylie, whispered something to her husband and then quickly faced the altar, her back ramrod st
iff, not so much as another glance being tossed over her shoulder as the organist started to play and the congregation launched into the first hymn. She nudged her daughter and Marla, taking the cue, never looked over her shoulder again. But she knew Kylie was there, staring at her, Kylie had felt the other girl’s fascination, her curiosity.
After the service, on the church steps, she’d boldly walked up to the family as they were speaking with the minister. Conrad’s eyes had cut Kylie to the quick. He’d turned scarlet, made a quick apology to the preacher and with a smile that looked like a grimace, he grabbed her elbow so hard it hurt. Propelling her away from his family, down the steps and into a private sanctuary where cherry blossoms littered the ground and the trees were beginning to leaf, he turned on her. A soft wind had tugged at the hem of Kylie’s hand-me-down dress and ruffled the graying strands of Conrad’s dark hair as the first drops of rain had begun to fall from the overcast sky.
“I think you’d better leave,” he’d whispered in an angry, don’t-even-think-about-arguing-with-me tone. His face had been flushed but his lips bloodless. “And never come back to this church again.”
“It’s a free country,” she’d shot back.
The hard finger dug deeper into her arm. “But some people are freer than others. That’s a lesson you’d better learn.”
“I just want—”
“You get nothing. I’ve paid for you and paid dearly. Now leave or I’ll make your life miserable, a living hell.”
“You’ve done that already,” she’d whispered.
“That’s where you’re wrong. If you think things are bad now, just you wait. You may as well know that if you cross me, you’ll regret it for the rest of your life. Now.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out his wallet. From within he extracted five one hundred dollar bills. “Take this and buy yourself something nice and never, do you hear me, never accost me, or my family again. I won’t be bullied or blackmailed or compromised.” He’d pushed the crisp bills into her fist and turned on his heel, plowing through the churchyard unaware that pink blossoms were falling on the shoulders of his crisp gray suit or that Kylie would never give up.