Chapter 10 Monroe
MONROE
Seven Months Prior to Present Day,
Beginning of February, Junior Year,
Dornell University
“Hello?” I answer, but my greeting is cut short by a phone operator who announces, “You have an incoming call from the Federal Correction Institute, Otisville, New York. Do you accept this call?”
“Yes,” I grouse because it’s my fucking mom. Again.
I wait with annoyance as the line pauses, debating if I should hang up.
“Monroe?” My mother’s grating voice rings loud in my ear, and I grimace.
“Mom,” I respond, careful not to emit any emotion. I don’t want to rile her up, and I cannot afford to let this pathetic excuse of a parental figure drain any more of my energy today.
A delicate, icy-cold kiss lands on my nose. The predicted snowfall has begun, and we’re expected to get six inches by morning. My last class ended ten minutes ago, yet I’m still a mile away from the sorority house.
“How’s my rich daughter?” my mom asks. Words cannot express how much I fucking hate this woman.
“Mom, I’ve told you a thousand times. Grandma Sadie’s house wasn’t worth shit.
Proceeds from the sale after the mortgage was paid off will hardly cover my bills for the next few years.
Other than what little equity she had in the house, she had no money.
No savings. No hidden bars of gold in her basement like you claimed.
So, stop asking me to send you fucking money, because I don’t have any. ”
“You’re a terrible liar, Monroe. Always have been.”
“Why don’t you call your upright citizen of a husband and ask him for money?”
“I’m prohibited from contacting him, and you know that.”
“What about his cousins or his sister?”
“You mean the one you snubbed for Christmas? Yeah, I heard about that, Monroe. I got an earful from your Aunt Nikki. She said you didn’t so much as call to wish them a Merry Christmas.”
I scoff a bitter laugh. “Why would I call her? She’s not family. Besides, I don’t see her picking up the phone to reach out.”
“Where were you over Christmas?” my mom interjects.
“Waiting fucking tables,” I sneer.
“Oh, then you do have cash. I’m sure those perky tits of yours made good money.”
“I was waitressing, not sucking dick on the corner,” I snap.
“Language!” she scolds, which is ludicrous coming from the woman who fucked her way to a prison sentence.
My grudge isn’t so much with my stepdad – as far as temperament goes, he was always decent to me, and tolerated far more verbal abuse from my mom than he should.
But he was involved in some shady shit. I remember being eight and watching him count stacks of cash on our living room coffee table; my mom by his side with a cigarette dangling from her mouth.
His ‘cousins’, although I’m not convinced there was any blood relation, were always in and out of the house.
I mostly kept to my room, but when he and my mom were charged with multiple accounts of money laundering four years later, it all made sense.
As a twelve-year-old, I didn’t fully understand how money laundering worked, but it didn’t surprise me to learn my mom had been a willing accomplice.
Once my stepdad, Kerry, came into our lives, all of a sudden, my mom started wearing designer clothes and a brand-new white Mercedes magically appeared in our driveway.
She’s so fucking dumb. Both of them, actually. Rule number one of being involved with organized crime is don’t act like you’re involved with organized crime. Don’t buy hundred-thousand-dollar cars and Chanel handbags when you could barely put food on the table six months prior.
“Listen, I don’t have much time left on my phone card, so just send me some money, will you?”
I sigh. “I’ll drop a few hundred in your commissary account. Just give me a few days. Things are really busy at school.”
“That’s my sweet girl. I knew you weren’t completely ungrateful for everything I did for you, after all. And call your Aunt Nikki. She only wants to make sure you’re okay, Monroe. She means well. It’s got to be scary, being all on your own.”
No, it’s a fucking delight, I want to yell, but I instead mumble something about calling my stepdad’s sister and hang up. Nicole, or Nikki for short, is not my aunt – not by blood – and my personal position on the matter is I owe her nothing.
I’m preoccupied with my seething thoughts when I hear my name. Turning, I see a black BMW roll to a stop on the street beside me.
“Get in,” Kieren shouts from the driver’s seat. I debate ignoring him, since that is what he’s done to me for the past few weeks, but it’s freezing, my fingers are numb from holding my phone, and the idea of a warm car is too tempting to resist.
“Came to your senses?” Kieren asks when I shut the passenger-side door.
I roll my eyes at him.
“I thought you’d ghosted me again,” he says.
“Kieren, you’re the one who ghosted me! Each time I text you back, you don’t respond for days. I’m sorry I was preoccupied with classes and new member events the one time I didn’t get back to you right away.”
“That’s not at all accurate, but okay,” he snips. I think he’s joking, but I can never tell with him. “Do you have somewhere to be right now?” he asks.
“I was headed to DG.”
“Hmm. Well, now you’re headed home with me to Sigma.”
“Only if you’re going to give me answers,” I complain.
He rolls his neck and sucks his bottom lip between his teeth. I can’t tell if he’s frustrated or contemplating telling me the truth.
“I’m not getting out of this car until you tell me why you didn’t return to Dornell last semester,” I say in my most defiant tone.
“You forget that I’m significantly stronger than you,” he says with an unamused smirk.
“Fine, I’m not fucking you until you tell me what happened.”
“Again, you forget that I’m comically bigger and stronger than you, and that you also happen to desperately want my cock.”
I scoff. “You wouldn’t.”
“I wouldn’t what? Pin you down on my bed, put restraints around all your appendages, and fuck you until you forget your name?
Pretty sure I’ve done that countless times before, Monroe.
In fact, I bet your pussy is wet right now just thinking about how good it would feel to be tied up with my cock buried deep inside you. ”
He leans his head back on the headrest and groans. “Fuck, now I’m getting hard imagining you spread open and helpless,” he says, adjusting the front of his pants as they strain to tent around his obvious erection.
“Give me what I want, and I’ll give you what you want,” I banter.
He grunts a laugh. “I don’t think it works that way, Monroe. Not when you want my cock just as badly as I want your pussy.”
“What makes you think I want it as badly as you do, Kieren?”
He looks at me with a cocky grin. “Touch yourself.”
“What? No!”
“Then I’ll do it.”
His hand shoots across the center console and paws wildly at my buttoned coat. His erratic movements cause the car to lurch violently to the right, and I scream.
“Fine! Fine, Kieren. Jesus, just don’t kill us.”
I pull at my layers of clothing until the waistband of my jeans is exposed, and I unfasten the top button.
I slide my frigid hand down my pants, tensing at the cold, until two of my fingers reach my hot center, already slick with the beginnings of arousal.
I close my eyes and lean back, playing lightly with my clit before sliding my fingers down to my wet entrance.
“That’s enough, Monroe,” Kieren commands, but I ignore him.
“Give me your fucking hand,” Kieren barks, ready to yank my pleasure away.
I reluctantly pull my hand from my pants and extend it in his direction. He snatches it like a greedy child and presses it to his mouth, smearing my arousal across his lips. He smiles at me with animalistic delight as his tongue darts out to lick up my taste.
“I hate you,” I huff.
“Tastes like it,” he grins, popping both my fingers into his mouth then languidly sucking them clean.
He releases my hand, and I cross my arms over my chest as we approach the statuesque stone castle that is Sigma.
We pull into the long driveway, and I hear the familiar crunch of gravel under his tires.
My throat constricts with hurt as Kieren guides his car into a parking spot at the back of the fraternity.
I still don’t have answers.
He turns the car off and unclips his seatbelt, readying to jump out, but I don’t move.
“What’s wrong Monroe?” he asks. He repeats the question, but I refuse to look at him.
“Talk to me,” he demands, gently pulling on the collar of my coat. I shrug him off, furious.
“How can you be so nonchalant about what happened to you? What you put me through our sophomore year was unforgivable. You were horrible to me.”
“I know,” he admits. His accountability takes me by surprise.
“By the end of the year, I hardly recognized you. Honestly, I was worried you would overdose.”
“If you were so worried, why did you leave?”
“Why did I leave?” I ask incredulously, my voice rising an octave. “Because I couldn’t stomach watching you destroy yourself.”
His laugh is cold and bitter. “Everyone claims they care until you’re standing alone in your bathroom at three a.m. with a razor to your wrist. I was fucking suicidal Monroe and you abandoned me.”
Tears land on the collar of my camel-colored coat. “I didn’t abandon you,” I say, shaking my head. “I was there, Kieren, but you pushed me away.”
He reclines his head against the headrest of his seat again and closes his eyes. I watch his Adam’s apple bob in his throat as he swallows.
“You left, Monroe. You were all I had, and you left. You don’t know what goes on in my head,” he says quietly.
“Then tell me,” I plead.
“My dad tried to kill himself,” he says out of the blue, and for a moment, I forget to breathe.
“It was right after finals in May of last year. I got the call from my mom. Obviously, I left right away. I’m surprised I even made it to the hospital.
I had taken a fuck ton of molly earlier that day to celebrate being done with exams, planning to trip my balls off, and then got the phone call and did three lines of cocaine to sober up before driving to Connecticut. ”
I want to scream at him for being so reckless, but I force myself to be still because this is the most vulnerable Kieren has been with me in ages.
“Honestly, the thought did cross my mind that I would get killed in a car accident, but at that point, I didn’t care. You had given me your ultimatum. I think by then it had been three weeks since I last saw you, so what difference did it make if I lived or died?”
“But somehow, I made it to the hospital. Staggered in like a strung-out junkie. My mom was a wreck, but she took one look at me and got me admitted. I spent a week puking my guts out. My dad was in a medically induced coma during this time, so my mom would go back and forth between our two hospital rooms. Once I was stable, we moved my dad home and were told he needed twenty-four-seven observation. My mom would sit with him for a few hours during the day, but it was mostly just me and the nurses. It took him another week to be fully coherent again. I’d say this was around mid-June.
I thought about coming back in the fall, but there were things I needed to take care of for my family.
Dornell granted me a leave of absence, no questions asked.
It took the rest of the summer and most of the fall to get things in order, but I managed. ”
He pauses, and the interior of the car is pin-drop quiet.
“Kieren, I’m so sorry,” I offer. My words catch in my throat; my heart breaks for him and what he went through last summer. I failed him because I wasn’t there when he needed me the most. It breaks me that he had to go through such a devastating ordeal alone.
“I would have come,” I say, even though I know it’s too late.
“I know you would have. That’s why I didn’t call or text. I was weak, and I knew if I heard your voice, I would beg to see you. Even if you were the one who left, you didn’t deserve what I put you through. I was a shell of myself, but I knew that much.”
“And I loved you anyway,” I admit, because it’s true. I was in love with him, despite what it cost me.
“You did,” he agrees. He turns to look at me, his eyes glassy with unshed tears.
“I want you back, Monroe. I need you. I can’t stomach the thought of existing on the same campus as you and being unable to call you mine.”
I huff with uncertainty. Letting Kieren Hunt back into my life is a massive gamble.
“How’s your dad now?” I deflect.
“Better,” Kiren says, nodding his head.
“Are you sober?” I ask.
“I’m trying,” he admits.
He turns to look at me with pleading eyes. “Please. I need you. You’re the only one who has accepted my faults. You’re the only one I trust with my demons. Tell me what I have to do to make this right. I’ll do whatever it takes if it means I can call you mine.”