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More than once I consider going to Red Hall during dinner. I know she’ll be there and there’s a part of me that knows she won’t make a scene; not after Martin, and not after I seemingly foiled a robbery. That would be cheap and manipulative, though, and that’s exactly why she cut me off in the first place.
The only positive to come out of it all is that I’m finally ready to get out from under Reginald’s thumb. If I can get Janie to hear me out, to forgive me for being the worst person on earth, it’ll be worth it. That, and somehow finagle the kind of cash that I can start a business with. Maybe if I do that—if I pursue my own dream—it’ll show her that I’m serious, and that I want to change.
I mull that over for days. Paranoia has me looking over my shoulder every time Reginald is nearby. I can’t shake the feeling that he knows what’s going on, that he knows what I’m thinking. That’s how he made his fortune, after all. Subterfuge is Reginald’s air, water, and food.
He starts keeping me close, for one thing. Oh, he acts like he’s just taking me along, introducing me to all the movers and shakers that I’ll need to know to work more closely with him. A golf game? Really?
I’ve always hated golf, for one thing, and for another Reginald has never taken me anywhere for anything.
Suddenly, though, we’re a father and son team. He praises me in front of his buddies, and I’m expected to make friends with their sons—a lineup of carbon copies. Maybe it’s Reginald’s way of pointing out who he wants me to be. Fall in line, kiddo. All the other billionaire boys are doing it.
And around every corner we turn together, he’s needling me about Janie. I’ve started leaving for a day or two, going up state to the bar on the beach, just to make it look like I’m off securing his plans for Red Hall.
“How’s Janie doing? She let you put it in her ass yet?” He laughs like he made a joke.
I laugh as well, even though it makes me want to vomit, and I shrug helplessly. “Not yet, but soon.”
Another time he wants to know intimate details. “Did you have to train her to suck a dick right?” or “How tight is that pussy? Type A girls have the tightest pussies.”
I manage to avoid answering those questions with counter jabs. “Jealous you couldn’t get into her pants yourself?”
“No,” Reginald says to that. “I could have. I wanted you to do it so I could see what you’re made of.”
His eyes are searching; he’s testing me. All of his questions are tests. I’m under examination and I know it and I’m running out of answers to his questions.
When I’m around him, which is more and more often, I can’t show any weakness. I can’t be myself, and I can’t wear my feelings on my sleeve or anywhere else. So I suffer inside, stuffing it all down because the longer I’m in the dull gray light of purgatory, the more I miss the sun. Janie’s smile. The smell of her. The feeling I had for just a little while when I could be myself and open up to someone.
By the
time Reginald drags me off to a “gentleman’s dinner”—a lavish, obscenely expensive affair wherein the shareholders and some prospective business partners all get together to eat endangered species served on platters by women wearing pasties and loin cloths, who dance when they aren’t bringing food or drinks—I can feel a tear down the center of me.
I can’t do this much longer. It makes me feel sick, but I have to know how and when I can see her alone, so I carefully funnel some money into a friend’s business on the back of a few big-ticket purchases to get some cash to hire someone who isn’t a part of Reginald’s detail to follow her. No pictures, nothing incriminating. I just need to know what the right opportunity will be.
Within an hour of hiring the PI, I realize that this is exactly what Reginald would do in my situation. Looking in the mirror now, I can see more and more of him in my face. People always told me I was the spitting image of my father, but I never really saw it.
After a visit from his barber, and his personal shopper in advance of another bullshit excuse for him to interrogate me around his buddies, though… there it is. Those are my father’s eyes. That’s his jawline. Hell, I’ve even got his hairline with that little bit of widow’s peak.
It’s all I can do not to take the mirror off the wall and hurl it across the room. The sound of shattering glass feels like it would wake me up somehow, like this is all just a nightmare that I can wake up from if I shock myself out of it.
But it isn’t.
“Where are we on the Janie Hall situation?” Reginald asks me later, after he’s paraded me around like a prize pony. “It’s been weeks. I haven’t seen a whisper about the two of you.”
“She’s stubborn,” I tell him. “She wants to be sure I’m serious, so I’m being serious with her. You want me to run her off?”
His eyes bore into me. Any second he’s going to call bullshit and announce to the room that I’m no longer his son.
Please do that. Please see through me.
“Do whatever you need to,” he finally growls. “Propose, for all I care. Knock her up. I don’t give a fuck about the consequences. Are we clear?”
“Crystal,” I tell him.
I’m beyond fucked.
Chapter 69
Janie
