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Her fist clenched around the bill. “Your father’s funeral is tomorrow.”
“Yes it is, isn’t it? I’ll drop by the next evening. After dark,” he added. “I assume you don’t want me seen.”
She wet her swollen lips.You’re a psychopath, she wanted to say, but she knew what his response would be. Her skin still stung from where the folded bill had scratched her.
Not even close.
“Where are you staying, anyway?” she asked harshly. “A motel?”
“Yes, but not the kind you’d want to be seen coming to.”
“Not the Welcome Back.” It was where the disreputable went to do drugs and fuck. People who went there came out of the rooms wiping their noses and scratching bug bites. But Rafe was already nodding.
“The very same. As it turns out, I don’t mind a little sleaze.” He looked at her house thoughtfully, the orange glow of the street lights frosting half of his features as he ran his thumb along his lip. “Are you staying here alone?”
“No. I keep a stable of young lovers in the garage.”
His mouth thinned. “Make sure you lock up at night. You’re right that people are angry. And they can’t get to Dad where he is now. But they can still get to you.”
She shivered, clutching at the front of her blouse. Her reading glasses were still all fogged up, but the condensation was rapidly fading. “What?” she asked stupidly.
Rafe tilted his head to one side, towards the direction of her house. “Your adoring fans.”
Painted across her door in dripping red paint were the wordsENJOY YOUR BLOOD MONEY, WHORE.
???????
He sometimes wondered if he would have felt differently about his stepmother if his mother had died. It was a cruel thought, but one he kept coming back to, because as much as he loved his mother, she didn’t feel like much of a mother at all. Mothers were supposed to be warm and caring, and his was neither.
She would go, periodically, into severe catatonic depressive episodes, which meant that when she stopped taking her pills, she stopped taking care of herself. She would stop moving entirely, like she’d gone into stasis. When Donni married his father, he’d taken it as an excuse to stop making the drives down to Bellwether and its expansive grounds and hospital wallpaper; he’d started to send Donni in his stead.
It was rather fucked up, when he thought about it. No new wife should be forced to see to her predecessor confined to her bed like that; it was like something out of a gothic novel. But Donni would drink shitty coffee with the nurse on duty, amusing them with stories of her time in Hollywood or playing cards, always keeping an eye on him as he looked at his mother, holding her limp hand in his small ones, until it was time to leave.
“Why do you come?” he’d asked eventually. “You don’t have to, you know.”
She’d looked surprised and a little hurt. “Do you not want me to?”
“I don’t care. But you don’t have to.” He had felt the need to make it very clear that he wasn’t a burden. Being clingy made people push you away or leave. “Do what you want. That’s what my dad does.”
But she had kept going with him—probably because his father made her. As much as his dad complained about the medical bills and the embarrassment, he cared more about appearances. Someone had to go and visit his mother, so it might as well be them.
“Your mother cares about you,” she had told him. “She’s just very sick. You know that, right?”
“She doesn’t care about anything,” he’d responded. “That’s why she’s here.”
Donni had recoiled a little at that, but as far as he knew, it was true. Even before her “episodes,” his mother had been a reserved and distant woman, as untouchable as a painting. She had come from money, the old kind where having money meant pretending it wasn’t there and everyone kept a stiff upper lip. Most of his childhood memories were of her with her hands full, either of weeds and flowers from the garden, or the old Victorian scraps that she had bought for decoupage. If he tried to wrap his arms around her, she would always gently but firmly push him away and say, “Not now, Rafe.”
As a child, he had wondered if she had gone to the hospital because she didn’t want to be around him anymore.
If someone were to have a rebound on such a woman, Donni was as different from his mother as night was from day. Beneath the glamor she was warm and impulsive and anxious and real. More like a babysitter than a mother. She had been the one he’d go to whenever he had a problem that wasn’t directly related to money because unlike his father, she had actually seemed to give a shit.
He had understood that she was famous but it was in the same nebulous, context-dependent sort of way that Rowena Burton, the local news anchor, was famous, “Bar famous,” he called it, because outside of a bar, such fame didn’t matter.
Deadly Beautiful, with its big budget and famous cast, had been different from her other roles, and it had opened up a window into a strange reality where someone could exist as both themselves and as a character they had played on TV. A character that his friends—and other men—might want to fuck.Realfamous.
He and two of his friends had sneaked into the Bellevue Cinema to watch it, and he had walked out feeling tense and weirdly angry. When Christophe Walters started cracking jokes about his MILF stepmom and how much he’d like to do her, something inside him had snapped and he’d punched his friend in the nose hard enough that his father had had to dole out some hush money to cover the hospital bills.
Still standing on the lawn, Rafe watched lights flicker on in the house as she moved from room to room. His cock throbbed, filling his lower belly with a painful, clenching heat. She smelled exactly the same, he thought. Incense and Marc Jacobs’s Daisy. He’d used to sit on the floor and watch her dab it on while she was dressed in one of her silky dressing gowns, before she began the lengthy process of doing her hair. His mother didn’t wear makeup and he had found the transformative process of it fascinating. But eventually she had stopped letting him into her room, saying that it was inappropriate.
