Chapter 13
THIRTEEN
VORTEX
Connie is wearing very garish leggings, to go with her garish purse. Maybe I don’t understand modern fashion, or I’m too old or too male to really get what’s going on with women’s taste in clothes.
She smiles at me when she spots me walking toward her. “Hey, big brother!” she says with a big smile. “Ready to get your ass kicked?”
I roll my eyes. I’ve been kicking her ass at mini golf since we were kids, and if she thinks that’s going to change, she’s in for a rude awakening.
I wish I could’ve brought Seven. He’d probably enjoy it, but the two of them had instantly hated each other, and I hadn’t wanted to piss Connie off by asking if I could bring my “twink boyfriend” with us.
“Keep dreaming, sis,” I tell her as we head toward the front counter to purchase our passes for the day. I pay for us, and the kid at the counter hands over the little golf clubs and balls. I look ridiculous wielding one of these, but it’s one of the few things the two of us can do together .
“I think I figured out the trick to hole five,” Connie says as we make our way to the first hole. “I got a whole new technique worked out.”
“Wait, did you come without me? Did you practice? ” I ask with mock horror. “You know that’s cheating.”
She sticks out her tongue at me. “It isn’t! All’s fair in love and mini golf!” She sets her ball down on the starting area and makes a show of figuring out the angle for her shot.
The first hole is an easy one, with a few tiny mounds for obstacles. It still takes her three putts to get the ball into the hole.
I grin at her. “So much for practice, huh.”
“You’ll see!” Connie takes the ball out of the hole. “I’m just getting warmed up!”
“Uh-huh,” I say, unconvinced. My ball goes neatly into the hole on the first tap of the club. “Wow, it’s almost like I’m going to beat you. Badly.”
The banter is refreshing, familiar, and it’s nice to talk about something other than her constant need for money. See ? I want to tell Caleb. She’s fine .
We get through the next few holes with no issue, although I don’t get a hole-in-one again. I’m still ahead when we get to the fifth hole.
The fifth hole is the first that has a real challenge, with an obstacle down the middle that requires the ball to bounce off the sides, against a beam, and then into the hole. Neither of us has ever gotten a hole-in-one here.
“Should we play with handicaps?” I joke as she gets set up. “How about I double my strokes, to give you a chance.”
“You’re laughing now, but I’m going to make you eat those words,” Connie says haughtily. She gets into position and sets up an angle that looks wildly off.
I cough. “There’s no way you’re going to get it standing right there. Do you want me to show you how to get it done?”
“Nope! I’ve got it!” Connie draws the putter back for a larger swing, and now I’m imagining the ball going over the small barriers and into another hole’s area—or worse, somewhere inaccessible.
To my shock, though, she manages to get the ball near the hole. She doesn’t do a hole-in-one, but it’s close enough to where I quirk a brow at her. “Someone really has been practicing. What did you do, come out here just for the fifth hole?” I tease her. “Because I have way fewer swings on the first four than you do.”
“Yes, actually,” Connie says with a laugh. “There was this party ahead of me that was taking ages to get through things, so I spent forever on this hole. Then I got bored and skipped ahead.”
Of course she had. “You have the attention span of a squirrel,” I tell her, taking my time lining up for the hole. She manages to beat me, but those few strokes saved won’t win her the whole game. If she manages to play more like this, though, we might even tie.
I don’t mind it. She’s never been overly competitive, but she does like to win — especially when it’s me she’s beating.
“How are things with your underage boyfriend, by the way?” Connie asks.
I tense up, missing the next hole by a mile as she breaks my concentration. I grit my teeth. “He’s not underage,” I say as patiently as I can manage. “He’s twenty-one. He might be a young-looking twenty-one, but he still is old enough to be my boyfriend.”
“Sure,” Connie says, and there’s something different about her tone now that has me even more on edge. “But you know, young guys like him, they’re not looking for anything serious.”
I think about Seven, about how much he relies on the three of us, and almost laugh. Seven needs something serious, and it’s not only because the Lockwoods would steal him away if they were given half a chance. “Okay,” I say, though, not wanting to argue with her. I line up my next shot, pretending I’m not bothered by her bringing Seven into this — and glad I hadn’t asked if I could bring him along.
We go another three holes without any serious talk, and I think she got the hint to drop the subject.
Of course I’m not that lucky .
“Look, I wasn’t going to say anything,” Connie says, leaning on her putter. “But I saw your boyfriend with another guy.”
When had she managed to do that? “Are you spying on him?” I demand, flushing with anger at the idea that she might be keeping an eye on him for any reason — and that I wouldn’t know.
“Uh, no?” Connie gives me a look. “I was at the casino, meeting up with a potential TerBaby, and I saw your boy toy sitting on this Latino dude’s lap.”
TerBaby.
“Your… Ter… Baby?” I ask slowly.
Connie rolls her eyes. “Yeah. I have to nurture her so she can be a TerMom herself. You know that’s how sales work. She’s all in on the TerMa life, and soon she’ll be a big boss babe herself—and I get a percentage of all her sales.” She putts her ball into the vicinity of the hole. “Anyway, don’t derail! Your boyfriend is cheating on you, Sebby.”
“He isn’t cheating on me,” I say as steadily as I can manage — which isn’t as steady as I’d like it to be, because there’s an edge of anger in my voice. “But I’m not going to explain my love life to you.”
Connie’s next putt is too hard, and the ball rolls right past the hole. “But I always have to explain mine to you? You scared off all my boyfriends because they weren’t good enough, but when I kindly tell you that you could do better than some underage kid who is cheating on you , I need to butt out?”
“He’s not underage!” I burst out, so loudly that a few people turn and look at me. I lower my voice, continuing, “I appreciate you telling me what you saw, I really do. But he’s…”
What is Seven?
“Special,” I finish. “And I know he has another boyfriend.” I don’t tell her that he has two other boyfriends.
Connie lets out an incredulous laugh. “Are you serious? Sebby, that’s…” Her expression softens. “You know you deserve better, right? You’re a great guy, and you always look out for everyone. You should have somebody who respects you enough to be faithful. ”
She isn’t wrong that I think that every disgusting boyfriend she’s ever had hasn’t been good enough for her, and maybe it’s time she turned that around on me. But I’m so annoyed by her accusations that I would ever date someone underage that it’s hard to be rational.
“He does respect me,” I say, but something nags at me that I can’t quite push away because maybe, just maybe, he doesn’t respect me as much as I think he does.
He’d been so quick to manipulate me the last time we’d had sex, but I’d let him do it. I’d understood, at least on some level, that I was being pushed to do something I didn’t necessarily want to do. It hadn’t been right, and I’ve been meaning to talk to him about it when his immediate safety isn’t looming over my head.
But that’s not something I’m going to talk to Connie about. It’s not something I even wanted to tell Caleb about, though it’s an important facet about Seven. It’d been humiliating to admit to Caleb, but he’d only nodded and not judged me.
“Drop it,” I tell her. I’d been hoping we could at least get through the course and get lunch after, but I don’t think I can stand to be in her line of fire much longer.
“Fine,” she says with a frustrated sigh. “But I’m still worried.”
We’re quieter through the rest of the course, until we hit the final hole. It has a mechanical devil swinging an “axe” from side to side, blocking access to the tunnels behind it, only one of which leads directly to the hole.
“I don’t remember, was it the middle or the left tunnel?” Connie asks.
“Left,” I tell her, but my mind isn’t on the game.
My phone vibrates in my pocket, and I pull it out to see a text from Seven.
It’s a picture of Nacho, who’s sleeping with his face planted in the covers. I smile at it, sending a quick text back.
Cute, but not as cute as you .
I pause, then add a smiley face that makes me feel like I’m fifteen years old again.
I tense when Connie approaches and looks at my phone screen
“Aww, what a cute kitty.” She reaches out for my phone, and I instinctively pull it away. “What? I wanted to see a bigger version of the pic.”
I don’t want her to see the line of texts, though, especially if Seven decides to get graphic in his reply. “I’ll forward it to you,” I tell her. “Come on, let’s finish up here.”
Connie pouts but gets into position. She takes a wild swing and groans. “Great. That’s never getting past…”
She trails off when her ball miraculously avoids getting deflected by the devil’s axe. It goes into the left tunnel, and we both rush to the other side to see where the ball ends up.
It’s still going strong, going right past the hole. That should be the end of it, but it hits the beam on the other end, bounces back—and lands neatly into the hole.
We both stare at the hole for a few seconds.
“Oh my god,” Connie says. “Oh my god!”
“Holy shit.” I shake my head. Neither of us have ever managed this hole in less than four strokes.
“A hole in one!” Connie shouts, and she grins widely. “I did it!”
Her joy is contagious, and I slide my phone into my pocket so I can give her a high five. “That was great,” I tell her with an answering grin before teasing, “Not that you can ever do it again.”
“I won!” Connie declares. “This hole is worth like, ten times the other holes. This is an insta-win!”
I pull out the small scoring sheet. “Nope, I’m pretty sure I’m still in the lead?—”
“Nuh-uh! I win!” Connie takes the sheet from me and rips it in half. “I beat the devil, and I didn’t even have to sell my soul!”
I chuckle at that, deciding to let her have this. “All right, all right. You win. This time. But that hasn’t happened in… oh, five years?”
Connie knocks her fist against my shoulder. “You’ ll see! This is the start of my winning streak.” Her expression turns sly. “This means you’re buying lunch, right?”
I roll my eyes. “Yeah,” I tell her. “Where do you want to go?”
“We can grab hot dogs from the vendor across the street,” Connie says. She gets the ball out so we can return all the equipment. “I’ve got a meeting with Ylona—my new TerBaby—in forty minutes anyway.”
I want to groan at the mention of her TerBaby , but I keep it in check. “Yeah, okay,” I tell her. We check the equipment back in and head over to the vendor, where I buy us both hot dogs. “Thanks for coming with me,” I tell her. “It’s been a while since we’ve been here, huh?”
“Yeah,” Connie agrees. She takes her hot dog, which is loaded with every topping available. “Work’s been keeping us both busy. But I had a lot of fun.”
“I did, too.” I take a bite of my hot dog, my attention wandering back to Seven. He’d texted back, but I haven’t looked at it yet.
“So, um,” Connie gets suspiciously quiet. “You know, now that I have a TerBaby, I need more product to sell to her.”
“I thought you had plenty of product,” I tell her, baffled. “You’d had a ton left over.”
“Well, it’s how it works, right? If I don’t keep up with the releases, I lose my discount and have to start back at the bottom,” Connie says. “I’ve got a forty percent discount now. After I get Ylona signed up, I only need two more TerBabies to level up for the half-off.”
I know where this is going, and it kills my appetite.
“What about the rest that you had to sell?” I persist. “Didn’t you make enough to cover new purchases from that?”
She’s going to tell me it’s out of season or something. I brace myself for some other story that’s going to result in her asking me for money again.
“I mean, there’s rent, and food, and somehow my account is low?” Connie shrugs. “You know how it is. You gotta have money to earn money. ”
“No, I don’t know ‘how it is,’” I say, my voice sharper than I intended it to be. “That’s not how it works.”
“Of course it is!” Connie wipes ketchup from her mouth. “That’s why that place you work for has big ads all over the town! How much money is your boss investing in advertising and promotion? I had to buy bots to push my social media presence, so people would know how to find me!”
“Did it work?” I demand, tossing the rest of my hot dog into the trash. “Connie, have you made anything back from what you bought before?”
This is never-ending. This is a cycle — like Seven’s gambling — that Connie has no intention of putting the brakes on. No matter what I do, no matter how much money I give her, it keeps on happening.
“Yeah, I sold all that stock to Ylona! I made five hundred bucks right there!” Connie says proudly. “You’re just a hater, Sebby.”
“Five hundred?” I repeat, stunned and barely even registering the part where she’d sold it to her new TerBaby or whatever the fuck it’s called instead of to actual paying customers. “You borrowed over three grand.”
“Right, and that went toward rent and food and utilities and the marketing and some of the stock,” Connie repeats, like I’m slow. “Keep up, Sebby. We live in an unfair, capitalistic society that wants to keep us wage slaves down.”
Wage slaves.
Jesus. Not this again.
“You’re supposed to be making money from this,” I tell her, feeling as desperate as I do when I try to talk Seven down from gambling away Caleb’s money. “Connie, I really think you should take the job at the Roi de Pique. I talked to Caleb about it, and he’s willing to hire you.”
“I don’t want to work for Caleb Spade,” Connie counters with a disgusted scoff. “How many billions of dollars does he have? He’s one of the people exploiting us!”
I make my own frustrated sound. “It’s solid employment. He pays well, he gives bonuses, the benefits are good, and I know you don’t want to be a ‘wage slave,’ but sometimes, you have to admit when something isn’t working.” I narrow my eyes at her. “I’m not giving you money to buy more of that shit.”
Connie looks at me, her lip wibbling. “Oh. Okay. I see how it is.”
“How it—” I throw my hands up in the air, trying not to cave instantly when I see how upset she’s getting. “A regular job, Connie. That’s all I’m asking.”
“You want me to be unhappy.” Connie tosses the napkins and empty hot dog container into the nearby trash can. “I should have known. You work for the Spades, after all.”
I groan. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You hear about that online investigator?” Connie asks casually. “The guy who was looking into the Roi de Pique and other Spade investments? Oh no, suddenly, he’s gone!” She scoffs loudly. “My fellow TerMa babes in Calamity are sure he either had to flee or they dumped him out in the desert somewhere. Everybody knows what the Spades are like, Sebby. I have enough morals not to work for them.”
My mouth goes dry as I think back to how I’d killed the guy she’s talking about. I don’t usually have any compunctions about what I occasionally do for Caleb, but hearing this from my sister is surprisingly difficult. “That’s just people being people. You really think Caleb Spade, the owner of a highly profitable casino, needs to get rid of some random loser?”
“I know that if you want to take his blood money, fine, but I won’t,” Connie says with a loud sniff.
All the money she takes from me is blood money, by that logic, but I don’t mention that because she’s too close to the truth. If she knew what I’ve done for Caleb, if she knew that I was responsible for more than one death…
“And I’ll figure out how to make rent on my own,” she continues. “It’ll be tight, and I might need to move into a smaller place, and probably find some roommates. Maybe Peter will want to move in with me again.”
Peter.
I’d hated that squirrelly bastard, and she knows it. “Connie…” I begin, trying to keep my calm. “A smaller place might be better, but you don’t need someone like Peter. I can try to see if anyone at the casino needs a roommate.”
A few tears roll down her cheeks. “Wow. You’re really going to let me lose my apartment? After all that effort we put into decorating it?” She takes a big sniffle. “It’s fine. I’ll figure things out on my own. I know Peter has been looking for a new roommate anyway.” She pulls out her phone and taps at the screen.
It shows an outgoing call to Peter.
“Stop,” I hiss. “I’m not—” Another irritated, frustrated sound escapes me. “All right, Connie. Fine. How much do you need to pay rent and all that stuff?”
She stops the call before it connects and smiles through her tears. “Just two thousand.”
Just.
Just two grand.
“Okay,” I say, sighing. “But this is the last time, Connie. I’m serious. You need to look into a real job, even if you won’t take one at the casino. Being a TerMom or whatever isn’t working.”
“Sure,” Connie agrees, but I don’t believe her.
I sigh and open up the cash app on my phone to transfer the funds to her.
Are you sure? This is like giving away cash and can’t be undone , it warns me.
I grumble and hit the “yes” button.
Connie wraps her arms around me and smiles. “Thank you, Sebby! You’re the best big brother!”
No, I’m not. If I was the best big brother, I would’ve taught her work ethic and made sure she never got started with these MLM schemes in the first place. “Yeah,” I say with a heavy sigh as I pull away from the hug. I tap over to see Seven’s message.
Are you coming over soon?
I hesitate. I’m honestly not sure I want to see him right now, and that’s an unsettling thought. It isn’t fair to him. I know how he handles stress, and I could’ve told him no.
I hadn’t.
I’ll try. I have a few work things to catch up on.
“I love you,” Connie says, leaning up to kiss my cheek. “And now I gotta run to my meeting. See you soon, Sebby!”
“You too,” I say automatically, but I’m reminded of what Seven had said about me skipping over saying that I love her. “Good luck, Connie.”
She beams at me then heads toward her car, and I watch her go, wondering when I’d stopped being a good brother and started becoming an enabler.
I don’t think I like the answer to that question.