Chapter 3
CAN I GO BACK TO NIGHTMARES ONLY WHEN I’M ASLEEP, PLEASE?
Oliver
My father is a giant hermit crab.
Yes, my glass cabin. My see-through glass cabin, where my father, with his beady little hermit crab eyes, is watching me panicking inside as he crushes my greenhouse with his giant hermit crab excrement.
He scuttles so hard that my bed shakes.
It’s a hermit crab earthquake.
I take a swing at him and he makes a weird, feminine oomph.
Feminine.
Pennsylvania.
Daphne.
My eyes fly open, and motherfucking fucker, there she is.
Daphne’s on the ground in the small cabin bedroom, hermit crab style, legs and arms on the ground, staring at me with big brown eyes that are telegraphing goddammit, he caught me.
“What are you doing?” I bark. She’s supposed to be sleeping on the couch in the next room.
Or sneaking out in the middle of the night to go do whatever it is she does.
Shit.
Shit. “Did I hit you?”
“As if. My reflexes can handle a sleeping man. Your snoring stopped so I thought you were dead. Glad to see you’re not. I hate police paperwork.”
She has a tell that she’s lying.
She has to.
I have no idea what it is, but there has to be a tell.
Doesn’t matter.
I know what she was doing. She was trying to get her phone.
I stare at her as it dawns on me that I can see her clearly against the wood-paneled wall, that she’s still in her dress, and that her dark hair has blue and green highlights in it.
Sun’s up.
Time to go.
“Unless you want to put your hands down my pants, you’re not going to find it,” I tell her.
“Already looked there when I thought you were dead.”
I freeze, momentarily believing her.
She smirks and settles on the floor, reaching between the mattress and the box spring of this ancient bed again.
I scoot closer to the edge to squish her hand. “What’s your price?”
Sleep has made everything clear.
I don’t know what she’s doing these days, but I know she doesn’t have money. Her family cut her off after one too many public scenes, and she’s living—actually, I don’t know where.
Most of what I know about her situation came from my best friend, since she was disinherited after Margot and I broke up. Not long after, but after. I wasn’t part of the family discussions on that one.
I know she has a real job somewhere outside the city where she’s relatively anonymous and she’s living like—dammit.
She’s living like I want to.
Like a normal person.
While I have the resources to live like she used to.
Never thought I’d see the day when I’d be jealous of Daphne Merriweather-Brown, but here we are.
“Price for what?” she asks.
“For your silence.”
She snorts again and pushes her arm deeper under the mattress like I weigh nothing, which is annoying. “Nothing about me is for sale.”
“You don’t want a pony? I thought all girls wanted a pony.”
She flips me off.
Probably deserve that.
I know full well my ex-fiancée’s sister has no interest in owning a pony. She’d rather set them free.
I heard about it enough times at various Merriweather-Brown family dinners while I was dating Margot.
“A donation to your favorite charity that rescues dogs from dog-fighting rings,” I try again.
I don’t care how late it might be in the morning, it’s still too early for that kind of side-eye.
“No, thank you,” she says primly.
Primly.
Daphne.
The girl who once told me to eat a bag of dicks in front of her grandparents because I’d suggested—kindly, I might add—that she suffer through not getting herself arrested for a few months so that she didn’t have to listen to her family berate her about it.
“Everyone has a price. What’s yours?”
“Why do you want to buy my silence?”
“Confidential spy project.”
“You turned on the windshield wipers when you were trying to adjust the air conditioning in the car last night, double-oh-seven. Try again.”
“Because I don’t trust you.”
“So you pay me off and I tell the world about your super-secret serial killer lair out here in the woods anyway, which we both know I’ll do. You’re never going to trust me no matter how much money you give me, so why offer me money at all?”
She’s had coffee.
Coffee that has given her an innate advantage over me. That has to be what’s going on here.
I left my thinking brain at the M2G headquarters when I walked out of the building for the last time because I wasn’t supposed to need it for anything beyond checking my itinerary every morning to plug my next destination into my GPS on this road that will eventually get me to a place that I’ll know when I find it.
The place where I’m supposed to begin my new life, somewhere in the middle or western states, far, far away from Manhattan.
I’m supposed to be waking up today free and clear of all obligations and responsibilities beyond making it to the next overnight stop on my road trip to explore all of the places I might consider settling.
Heading into a fresh start without the burden of generations of expectations from people who feel entitled to dictate my entire life simply because they made me.
After one good night of sleep.
Which was supposed to be last night.
I haven’t slept more than four hours in a single night since my father went to jail because I was holding his company together for the shareholders and employees and franchise owners all while realizing I don’t have the drive or the instincts for what I was trained to do from birth.
But here I am, with one more obligation smiling broadly as she plops onto her ass, pulling her arm out from between the mattress and box springs with her phone in hand.
It takes more effort than it should, but I snatch it from her and shove it under the covers and down my underwear.
Yes, my tighty-whities.
And you know what?
They’ll hold the goddamn phone.
Boxers wouldn’t do that.
“What. Do you. Want?” I growl as she stares at my midsection like she’s seriously contemplating coming after the phone.
Her brown eyes meet mine.
Margot has blue eyes. Blue eyes and light brown hair. Sharp wit. Strong moral compass. Good sense of humor. She’s a tad more slender than Daphne, though neither are the waif-thin model-types everyone expects children of the rich to be.
Daphne, on the other hand, is brown eyed and used to be brown-haired, though there are some streaks of color in it now.
Her fairy-tattooed arms are on full display this morning.
She was wearing a jacket over the cocktail dress last night, and the wig that’s still in my SUV was hiding her half-smushed, half-wild dark hair as it falls past her chin.
She has a diamond stud in one nostril, three piercings in each lower ear, and a loop in one upper ear.
And I’ve never understood her.
She was born with everything.
Everything.
Same as I was.
But while Margot and I worked our asses off to give back to the families that gave so much—to pay an invisible debt that we didn’t ask for but shouldered anyway—Daphne thumbed her nose at every convention and expectation.
And she actively sabotaged herself every step of the way.
Yes, yes, fine.
I’m walking away now too.
Actively self-sabotaging, some will say.
But at least I did my part to save the family’s company before I left and identified the best candidate to replace me as well.
I paid my debt. And I’m not only running away—I’m searching.
I’m looking for the good in the world, and I’m looking for how I can be the good in the world.
Quietly.
In a recluse kind of way.
Daphne just—I don’t even know what she does now.
She bites her lower lip and squints at me. “You know what I want?”
“I’m listening.”
“I want a ride.”
“To?”
“Wherever you’re headed.”
“This is it.”
“This isn’t it. There’s getting away to a weekend hunting cabin, and then there’s getting away to a secret place no one would ever expect you to go.
Nice cobwebs, by the way, you totally missed my dance moves this morning.
Also, there’s a car outside that no one would ever expect you to drive, with fake IDs that have your picture and someone else’s name, along with duffel bags stuffed with cash.
You’re not here to stay. You’re here as a stopover on your way to somewhere else. ”
My mother used to say I was the only child she knew without a temper.
The past few years have changed that.
There’s a boiling rage simmering beneath my skin, and Daphne’s announcement that she’s snooped through my getaway car is lava on the molten steel, igniting my wrath hotter.
“How—what—the fuck? I hid the keys.”
“Just because I never got caught picking locks doesn’t mean I never learned how to do it.
” She shrugs like it’s, as she used to say, no biggie.
“I have your passport and fake driver’s license, by the way.
Not telling where. The price of getting it back is giving me a ride to wherever you’re going.
Nice name, by the way. Tom Johnson. Very boring. Very…you. So. We’re going…where again?”
This trip is full of firsts.
First time driving myself in well over a decade.
First time having a stowaway.
First time almost feeling sorry for Daphne.
First time I’ve ever truly wanted to murder someone.
“No,” I say instead of answering her question.
“Do you know how to live in the woods, Oliver? Because I know how to live in the woods. I can pick a direction and start hiking and I’ll find a road and that road will lead to a town and I’ll talk someone into borrowing their phone and I’ll call Margot because not only do I have her personal cell number memorized, but I also know the password to get through to her at work if I had to call the corporate number on the website.
The minute I tell Margot you held me captive, I’ll also be able to tell her exactly where, because I’m a genius at navigating the woods.
I’ll give the cops the name on your fake passport, and I’ll do it all before you can reach Mexico, and you’ll be the second Cumberland to go to prison in under a decade. ”
I am.
I’m going to have to murder her.
Shit.
This isn’t how I wanted to start my new life.
She smirks at me again and leaps off the floor like she’s not wrapped in a too-tight black cocktail dress that now has cobwebs stuck to the ass.
“I’ll fix you coffee. A little caffeine, and you’ll see the bright side to this arrangement.
For instance, I’m a very good driver. Very good.
I had the best instructor ever. Re-instructor, I should say.
When I learned how to park well and not speed so much.
And I like the idea of how mad my father will be when he finds out you’ve wrecked all of his plans for merging the companies so much that you can rest assured of my silence so long as you take me where you’re going and don’t piss me off. ”
Her phone buzzes in my underwear, against my dick.
And my dick is a dick.
It’s not smart enough to be horrified by Daphne’s phone giving us a woody, or by the fact that she managed to turn it on before I got it back from her, potentially sending her location to someone.
And on top of all of that—she’s right.
She might be useful, and she might be the only person in the world who wouldn’t take reward money for bringing me home.
Not if spilling the beans would mean making her parents happy. And if she hates her parents as much as the vibe she’s giving off suggests she does.
Fuck me.
Just fuck me.