Chapter 23
CHAPTER 23
E lijah. Monday
At the start of the new week, I called Barbara and let her know I’d be coming to the office late, knowing there would be questions when I got there. I just didn’t care.
I sat up fully dressed in bed — a bed that had felt emptier from Saturday night to now than it had ever felt before. That emptiness was exactly the opposite of the way I’d expected it to be.
I had expected to take Corinne back here to this bed and spend Saturday night fucking her pussy so passionately that she’d have no choice but to say yes when I asked if she would stay the weekend and let me fuck her straight on to Monday morning. I had wanted to wake up today naked with a hard-on below the sheets and a naked and beautiful Corinne next to me.
I wanted to kiss her good-morning, ask her for one of those blow jobs that she gave so enthusiastically, fuck her once in bed, and then take her to the shower to eat her out and fuck her again. We would have dressed for work together, playfully kissing and fondling each other, hating to put on every piece of clothing. I would have had to let her go home and put on something more businesslike than the casual things she’d been wearing from Saturday to now.
It would have been the perfect beginning to the week.
It would have been 180 degrees apart from the Monday morning I was having right now.
“I’m the boss,” I muttered to myself, sitting in my slacks and shirt and tie on my sheets that were ruffled from my tossing and turning instead of rolling around with Corinne and crazily humping her. “I can take the day off. I can call in a personal day. Being the boss has privileges…”
Sure, it had privileges. Just nothing like the privileges that I’d wanted to take with a certain girl who worked on the floor below me.
My startled nerves protested the ringing of my phone in the middle of hating my morning. When I looked at the caller ID, my stomach protested even worse. Damn it all , it was Dad.
Neither of us even bothered saying hello when I reluctantly took the call. My father started right in. “I saw Kane Marcus was arrested Saturday night. The address he was arrested at looked familiar.” He said it in a way that sounded like an indictment of me, not Kane.
“Yes, Dad, I was there,” I answered with a groan in my voice. “My downstairs neighbors could tell you all about it. The whole thing was a big Saturday night show for them.” I didn’t care how sarcastic I sounded. I already knew how this conversation was about to go, and how sympathetic and understanding my dear old Dad wouldn’t be.
“Oh, you think it’s funny, do you?” he retorted. “You think it’s funny that you and that drug-using thug made a public spectacle of yourselves until the police came and got him?”
“It wasn’t public, Dad,” I shot back. “It was in the lobby of my building, where only my neighbors could see it.”
“Make a joke of everything, why don’t you? Make light of it all, as if people didn’t see you and it isn’t now a matter of police record that you were actually brawling with that piece of trash. You, a respected member of the business community-”
“Well, at least the business community respects me more than some people I could mention.” If Dad wasn’t going to let up on me, I could at least give him as good as I got from him.
“Don’t you talk that way to me, boy!” he snapped. “Did you even once think of your reputation, of everything you’ve managed to accomplish in these last few years? Did you even once consider how you were practically throwing it all away by letting that lawless, debauched imbecile into your life?”
He was in good form this morning. I’d never heard him use the word debauched before.
“I didn’t ask for him to come, Dad,” I said. “I didn’t invite Kane back into my life. He just showed up. He came walking back in of his own accord. All I wanted was just to get the hell rid of him. And, I did. You should be happy I got rid of him, instead of haranguing me about him showing up uninvited.”
There were other choice words that I had for the situation, but I didn’t share them with Dad. I didn’t mention how Kane wanted to put his drugged-up hands all over the sweetest, most beautiful girl I’d ever met and how I’d had to send her running back up to the penthouse to get away from him while I fended him off.
I had no doubt that would have sent my father into an even more burning, judging tirade about how I’d exposed that innocent girl to Kane’s would-be-raping debauchery. That was someplace I absolutely did not want to go with Dad, so I kept my mouth shut about Kane and was grateful that I’d gotten Corinne out of there and saved her from being a part of the police report.
“He should never have been in your life in the first place!” Dad ranted. “You were not raised to associate with the likes of him! That man is a pure reprobate! Always has been, always will be! How it is that someone who has built a billion-dollar business and become someone that his family and community can be proud of can continue to associate with such human rubbish is beyond my comprehension! When are you going to learn once and for all to keep your hands out of the trash?”
“Someone that my family can be proud of? Really?” I cracked. “Listen to yourself, Dad. How proud do you sound right now?”
“How proud should I be to learn that you have once again let that piece of sewage into your life, boy?”
“Well, it looks like nothing I ever do will ever make you proud enough, for God’s sake!” I ranted back at him. “I could make a trillion dollars and you’d still be holding Kane and everything I did in the past over my head! I’ll never be free of that and I’ll never be clean enough for you, will I?
“You know what, Dad? I am sick and tired of you treating me like crap! I am a respected businessman, I do have a billion-dollar company, and I am damn proud of myself, even if you never will be! If you can’t accept once and for all that I’ve changed, then do us both a favor and stay the hell out of my life!”
Seething and fuming, I ended the call without giving my father a chance to answer. I threw the phone down on the bed and fell back against the pillows with my hands over my face. What had I just done?
I’d shouted in the heat of the moment. But, that heat and that moment had been coming on for years. Every time I’d seen my father since returning to Cincinnati to start my business had been either colored by Dad’s judgement of what a screw-up I used to be, or set aflame by his constant disapproval and my anger. I couldn’t remember the last “normal” father/son moment we’d ever had, and if the truth be told, I couldn’t remember if we’d ever had one, at all.
And, this was the worst possible time for him to be throwing it in my face again, right when I was feeling worthless and miserable about this sleazy hound from my past, with drugs in his veins and rape in his pants, chasing away the best thing that had ever happened to me in a long time.
So, I snapped on my father, as badly as I’d ever snapped on him before, and this time perhaps worse. Because now, after so many times of barely having a civil word for each other, I seriously wondered if Dad and I would ever speak to each other again.
_______________
I went to work late. When I got there, Barbara asked me if I was all right and if there was anything going on that she should know about. I suspected she’d heard or read in the news what happened in my lobby and was trying to be discrete. I hadn’t looked at the news or much of anything else, so I didn’t know what had or hadn’t gotten out to the public.
All that I told Barbara was that there was nothing going on and that I was not in to callers today, not even Leo. She gave me a surprised look, but respected my wishes and let me trudge into my office and shut the door hard behind me.
As late as I’d gotten there, I wasn’t there for long. At lunchtime, I came trudging back out, my face probably looking to Barbara as if I’d rip out the heart of the Devil himself if he came up to me just then. I told her I was leaving early for the day and left without another word, not even bothering to glance behind me for what must have been her very curious and concerned reaction. Poor Barbara, my mood wasn’t her fault. And there was only one thing I could really do about it.
_______________
I lost track of the number of reps I did on one of the arm machines at Diamond’s Gym, but I was at my sweatiest and my most sore that afternoon. And why the hell not? My heart was sore enough; why shouldn’t my body be sore to match? I thought. I never did arms and legs on the same day, but I was fit to make an exception. I’d be sore all over, and maybe the aching of my muscles would take my mind off other pains.
Ben had been standing at the leg machines that I had my eye on, quietly watching me work myself to the point of punishment. From the look that he gave me, I could tell my friend wanted to say something, but he was keeping his mouth shut until, at the end of how many reps on the arm machine I didn’t know, I stopped and sat there, sweating and puffing, and Ben finally came over.
At first he just stood with his arms crossed, silently trying to decide what to make of me today. He’d seen me in all kinds of moods, but it was a safe bet that he’d never seen me quite like this.
“What?” I asked him, breathing heavily.
“Are you going to tell me what’s going on?”
I slumped my sore shoulders a bit and said, “I don’t think so.”
He shook his head and screwed up his lips a bit, then said, “Look, Elijah, you know how much I’ve always respected you. You’re one of my very best friends. And, I know how self-reliant you are. You had to be, to get where you are. But, there are times, Elijah, when it’s okay to pull out the cork and let the feelings out. You can talk to me. So, talk.”
Ben’s caring, his understanding, his complete lack of judgement, his concern for me and nothing else... Why couldn’t I get from my own father what Ben was giving me? I wondered. Sometimes, I realized, it takes a friend when no one else will really do.
“You remember Kane Marcus,” I began.
He looked just about as happy to hear that name as I was to say it. “Yeah. I remember Kane.”
“He came to my house Saturday night. He was hopped-up on something, high and crazy. We got into it. He got arrested. And this morning, I got into it with my father about it. I had words with him. It’s not so unusual, Dad and me having words. But, I let him have it harder than usual this time.”
“Your father doesn’t think you were on something, too?” Ben worried.
I shook my head and ruffled my hair. “I don’t know, I don’t know. “I wouldn’t put it past him to think that. If there’s anything bad to think about me, that’s right where my father will always go.”
“Okay,” said Ben, calmly, acceptingly. “Okay, you fell out with your father. It’s not the first time. You’ve patched things up before, or at least gotten back to where you could speak, even if there wasn’t anything good to say. At least, you and he have always gotten back on arguing terms, I’ll put it that way.”
He paused meaningfully and gave me an even more meaningful look, as if with his eyes he could open me right up and see right inside me. Then, flatly, directly, he asked, “So, what else is it?”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re used to fighting with your old man. Whatever made you want to work this machine ‘til you nearly dropped wasn’t about him. So, what else is it? Tell me.”
Too tired to make the effort to deflect his question or pretend with him — and besides, Ben deserved way better than any pretense — I was honest. With my heart feeling heavier than any weight or piece of equipment in the place, I said, “Corinne and I aren’t going to see each other anymore. I thought we were starting something, but there’s a trust issue. And if I’m honest, Ben, I don’t deserve her trust.”
My friend reeled back in shock, a kind of shock I’d never seen from him. “What the hell are you talking about, ‘you don’t deserve her trust’? What the hell is that about?”
I gulped. “It’s about Kane trying to attack her, and Corinne realizing what kind of past I come from and that I’m not who she thought I was. I don’t know that much about where she comes from, but it’s not the kind of life where she ever knew anyone like me. She deserves better, and I told her we shouldn’t go on. I gave her the chance to find someone she deserves.”
He looked sad and disappointed, and I could tell what had disappointed him was me. It was as if I’d slacked off on a workout routine and let him down in training. All he said was, “If you ask me, she had someone she deserves.”
And without another word, Ben walked off to help someone else.