17. Julian
JULIAN
I would have literally given anything to stay in that apartment. Even if I couldn’t have her to myself, just to be with her. Just to watch how happy she would be with her mom there. Just to see her laughing and smiling.
I’d give anything to be with her and not have to have Thanksgiving dinner with my own family. I take in a deep breath as Tyler peels away from the building, laying my head back against the leather headrest.
I close my eyes and replay the last few hours in my head, taking her to Bedell House, which, despite my complicated relationship with my family’s legacy, is actually one of my favorite places in the world. It’s one of the only places where I felt love. Where I saw it.
I loved watching her face as she took it all in, but mostly I loved when she asked about its secrets. She asks things that no one else would ever bother, or ever dare, to ask me.
And God, did I fucking love laying her down on that bed. Ravishing her lips. The things I wanted to do. The places I wanted to touch. The way I wanted to make her lose her pretty little mind.
And the fucking blue balls I got from stopping it all.
I’m in such a confusing place with her. I know our…friendship, for lack of a better word…is a bit unconventional and that it didn’t begin in the healthiest of ways. I know I’m sending her all kinds of mixed signals, and I know it’s not right, but I don’t know what the fuck is going on. I tell myself I need to keep my distance—if for nothing else than to spare her any unwanted attention from the entire fucking world after an extremely traumatic event. But I also know that I need to keep my distance for me. Relationships are complicated when you come from a family like mine. I learned young that no one sees you for you. They see you for your family name, for fame, for old money. They see you for your rich father, your grandfather, your great-grandfather. They see you for the things they can acquire just by being near you.
They don’t see you.
I’ve gotten close before. I’ve even put a ring on someone’s finger. And then I found the full boxes of her birth control in my trash can. I found the internet searches on alimony and child support and trust funds before we were even fucking married.
And it broke my fucking heart.
I watched the way my parents tore each other apart. I watched the way the world dragged my mother through the mud, because it must have been her. It couldn’t have been my dad. Not Cato Everett. It must have been her doing nothing but gold digging. Not her giving him everything she could, including two sons, for him to schedule his island getaways with twenty-somethings while she was in the same room.
It couldn’t be him.
I feel my blood pressure rise the closer we get to Bendmere, and to my father’s estate out on the island. The home he had built when I was five, where I was raised. Not by my father, of course, but by my mother and by the people my father paid to raise me after he kicked her out.
Tyler enters the code, scans his palm, and pulls through and up the long driveway that looks like a shorter version of the one at Bedell House. The house is as big and obnoxiously grand as one would imagine, and he’s had plenty of upgrades done to it as the years have passed. It sits at the farthest tip of the island, the only residence for three miles, as my father offered the state of Connecticut an obscene amount of money back in the eighties to purchase all the land in a four-mile radius for “privacy” reasons, which, in Cato language, just means he didn’t want any peasants disrupting his views.
I hate this house.
Just as Tyler puts the Escalade in park at the front circle, I feel my phone vibrate in my pocket. I open it to a text from the one person I really needed a text from.
Thank you, Julian. I hope your Thanksgiving is as wonderful as you’ve made mine.
I look down at the phone with a dumb smile on my face, and suddenly, I feel like I can breathe again.
I hope you ladies eat all the turkey your hearts desire. Happy Thanksgiving, Sawyer.
I take a breath then slide out of the car. I thank the butlers for holding the door for me then the ones that take my coat. Angelina is the first to greet me, my father’s third wife. She’s two years older than me. Before they got married, my father got a vasectomy. He said three heirs was enough.
Heirs. Like it’s a fucking kingdom.
Although, in some ways, it’s even more than that.
It’s a goddamn empire.
She runs to me, swallowing me in an overly enthusiastic hug, pressing her large breasts my dad bought her last year against me. I hug her back and hand her the bottle of champagne I brought her as a gift for hosting.
Behind her, I see my idiot brothers shooting me daggers, already with beers in their hand. I thank Angelina for having us then walk past her toward them.
Keaton is the middle brother. Typical middle-child syndrome, although none of us were ever hurting for much. He’s three years my junior but, in some ways, feels so much younger than that. He’s got a chip on his shoulder because he got even less time with our parents together than I did. He works out of the West Coast offices in Santa Cruz and comes back as rarely as possible.
Brooks is the baby, known to the world as the bastard child. My father impregnated a nineteen-year-old masseuse while on a “work trip” when I was ten years old. Shortly after, he served my mom divorce papers, moved the woman from Italy to Bendmere, and married her. That marriage was even shorter than my parents’, lasting just eleven months after Brooks was born. Brooks lives in the city too, but it’s embarrassing how infrequently we see each other. My father has him paying his dues, working as a sales manager at one of our realty companies until he feels he’s sweated enough. Not that it matters much, considering we were each handed four hundred million dollars when we graduated high school.
My father did everything he could not to give Brooks’s mother, Marta, a single fucking dime. It wasn’t until Brooks got his trust fund at eighteen that he could finally repay her for all she deserved.
Both of my brothers have a chip on their shoulder about Angelina. We’ve all seen this movie before. There was a contract signed along with the prenup. An undisclosed agreed-upon amount for if and when the marriage ends that she will walk away with. Not even a dent will be made in my father’s fortune. And then the next year, the massive painted portrait above the grand fireplace will be replaced by his latest catch.
No use getting attached.
But me? They don’t bother me anymore. Once I saw what he was capable of doing to my own mother, whom I truly believed he loved at one point, I knew he could do it to anyone. I knew nothing was permanent. I’m jaded that way.
My mother died from breast cancer when I was twenty-one, right before I graduated from NYU. Otherwise, I’d be with her tonight and as far away from here as possible.
“Fucking Barbie,” Brooks says as he throws back what’s left in his bottle. I laugh as I pull him in for a hug.
“Easy there, big guy,” I say, rubbing his head playfully, even though he’s an inch taller than I am. He is the pretty brother, hands down. He’s got his mom’s Italian features: the tan skin, dark hair, full lips. But he has our father’s eyes. He makes his looks work for him too. He’s got quite the reputation as the playboy of the family. He’s the one that used to be plastered all over the tabloids, drinking too much, partying on nude beaches in Spain or Italy.
“Brooksie just isn’t used to a new mommy running around every week yet,” Keaton says. He looks like our mother. Sandy-brown hair, gray eyes, tall and slender. I laugh as I pull him in for a hug too. Keaton is the intellectual of the three of us. He’s the president of our media enterprises, but he’s also been working to develop some sort of new concierge healthcare project. He knows we’re richer than Midas. But like me, there’s a part of him that knows how wrong it is that we have four houses in a thirty-mile radius, and millions of people have none.
Me, I’m the mule. The work horse of the family. The first born, sworn to fulfill the prophecy of running the world when it’s my time. No time for my own ventures. I have Everett Enterprises to think about.
“How have you been, brother?” I ask, clapping Keaton’s shoulder as Brooks hands me a beer. “How is the West Coast?”
“Still amazing,” he says with a shrug. “You should really come out there more, if for nothing else than to get away from this fucking—hey, Pops!” he cuts himself off as Cato walks in the room. We all turn to him, and the air grows a little bit colder.