Chapter 3
THE ULTIMATUM
MAGGIE
Packing up my room served as a great excuse to throw away all the excess clutter I’d accumulated over the past few years.
Once Iris started getting fussy for her afternoon nap, Celeste left and I took bags upon bags out to the dumpster behind the building.
Our apartment complex was the only one in River’s Run, two buildings that sat perpendicular to one another, with a shared parking lot in the middle.
Most of the residents worked at the canning factory, the biggest employer in Smithson County.
The building supervisor hadn’t done much to maintain the units, and over half of them sat empty to disrepair.
When I compared it to the comfortable home that Celeste had, or even Wesley’s great aunt Shirley’s house back when we were younger, I couldn’t help but sigh.
My lot in life seemed to be that of the poor outcast. I never quite fit in and the places I lived in tended to demonstrate that I operated in the gray areas of society.
The roughnecks, the pariahs, the people who created the base of the societal foundation that everyone refused to see.
I longed for beauty, for recognition. Just once I wanted someone to notice me in a way that didn’t make my insides squirm.
But that wasn’t how life worked for people like me.
Just as I reached the open hallway for my building, Spencer Church hopped out of a parked vehicle to my left.
He was two classes ahead of mine in high school with a terrible reputation, especially with young girls.
Smoke wafted out behind him, and I could just make out the face of Max Daniels, one of my first crushes in River’s Run, in the driver’s seat.
“Hey there, Mags,” Spencer called, his voice oily in a way that made my skin break out in goosebumps. “You want in on this action?”
“No, thanks.” Knowing Spencer, his weed came from an unreliable dealer who laced it with something else just for the fun of it.
“Aw, c’mon. You don’t think we forgot all those times we had fun before.” Spencer looked at me expectantly, as if the very memory of that “fun” would make me change my mind.
It had been anything but.
I stumbled to the door in stiletto pumps I borrowed from Diana.
This was my first high school party, and from what I overheard Hilary Stanbrooke say in the girls’ bathroom, freshman almost never got invited to Lola Mae Kravitz’s house.
She was easily the most popular senior at Smithson High.
I had no idea how I managed to get an invite, but with Celeste and Wesley gone every weekend up to Atlanta, I needed the reason to get out of the house.
“You’re wearing that?” Diana asked from the kitchen. She had the food scale out to measure the ingredients of her salad. No more than 400 calories per meal, that was her rule.
Confused, I looked down at the jean mini-skirt and plain pink polo shirt I had on. “What’s wrong with it?”
Diana shrugged innocently. “I guess I just admire your confidence. That color makes you look so red in the face. I wouldn’t be caught dead in it if I had your complexion.” She flashed me a quick smile. “But that’s what’s so great about you, Maggie. You never care about things like that.”
Was my complexion really that bad? I didn’t want to wear a color that made me look ugly.
“I’ll go change,” I replied.
My mom nodded. “Put on something black. It’s so slimming!”
After changing quickly into a ruched black top that Diana insisted hid my belly fat, I tottered down the two flights of stairs to the ground floor of our apartment. A group of teens from our apartment complex had also been invited to Lola Mae’s and they offered to let me ride along.
Except, when I reached the red Pontiac, I counted far too many bodies for the five available seats.
“Don’t worry, Mags,” Spencer Church, a junior with the most chiseled jaw I’d ever seen, winked at me conspiratorially. “There’s plenty of room on my lap.”
Oh my god, SPENCER FRICKIN CHURCH was flirting with me!
Dopamine flooded my system, and I almost wished Diana had come down, too, so she could see the sexiest guy in the group paying attention to me. She could eat her heart out.
“Okay,” I replied with a breathy giggle.
Spencer slapped his buddy in the chest, wiggling his eyebrows in a way that communicated something in guy code.
I followed him around to the driver’s side where the car’s owner, Andy Figgs, held the seat forward so we could climb in.
Spencer folded himself in first before pulling me in to sit on his lap.
There wasn’t enough room to maneuver myself up and pull down my mini skirt that had ridden just a little too high for comfort.
Spencer didn’t seem to mind and instead wrapped his large hand around my thigh, his long fingers tracing lightly along the sensitive skin near my hemline.
Something hard wedged itself between my ass cheeks, but it wasn’t until Spencer shifted to lean against the window that I realized what it was.
The knowledge that Spencer Church had a hard on underneath me was as terrifying as it was exhilarating.
“You’re so sexy,” he breathed in my ear, pulling the hair away from my neck. “You wore this skirt just to tease me, didn’t you? I think it’s only fair that I do the same.”
His other hand came up between my thighs, a single finger grazing the front of my cotton panties. I jumped in surprise, making everyone in the car turn my way.
“Don’t say a word, Mags,” Spencer whispered in my ear. “They don’t need to know what a dirty, little slut you are for me.”
Spencer’s words made my blood run cold. I remembered my father hurtling that term at my mom when he found proof of yet another affair.
The cycle was always the same; she’d beg and plead with him to stay, swearing that if they moved to a new place where she didn’t know anybody, the cheating would stop. Only it never did.
“Hiccups,” I mumbled to everyone, my cheeks flushing pink. Spencer’s friend from earlier, someone I knew on sight but not by name, smirked at him over my shoulder.
This time his finger pressed harder against my panties, parting the lips of my pussy under the cotton.
“Please don’t.” I turned to him, my eyes pleading with him to stop. No matter how good looking Spencer was, I didn’t want our first experience together to be in a car full of teenagers. Fear made my breath hitch, which he noticed right away.
A sly grin crossed his face. “Oh, you’re gonna have to pay a rider’s tax somehow, Mags,” he promised. “You didn’t think we’d let you ride along for free, did you?”
Once we got to the party that night, I had my first experience giving a guy a blow job.
Spencer swore his friends wouldn’t take me home until I did it.
The only mercy he granted was allowing me to fumble my way through it in a darkened room without an audience.
I never used him for a ride to a party again after that.
And somehow even four years later he managed to make me feel as dirty now as he did then.
I glared at him. “Hard pass.”
Diana’s car pulled into the lot, parking on the other side of the walkway, and saved me from having to continue the conversation.
“Hi, there!” She smiled suggestively at Spencer as she got out of the car, batting her eyelashes in a way that made me want to gag. One half of his mouth turned up as if he enjoyed getting the attention of woman twice his age. As soon as Diana’s gaze turned to me, all of her charm disappeared.
“Lord alive, Maggie, you’re wearing that in public?” If my mom owned a set of pearls, she would’ve been clutching them at that moment. She scanned my body from head to toe, shaking her head in disapproval.
I glanced down at the simple tank top and dark gray sweatpants I wore.
Since I had been cleaning and packing all morning, it wasn’t like I wanted to put on good clothes.
My hair, that Diana always insisted I keep long despite my requests to cut it, had been shoved under one of my dad’s ratty baseball caps that he left behind.
Diana sighed. “I guess if I could get away without wearing a bra like you, I wouldn’t bother dressing up either. C’mon, we’ve got stuff to talk about.”
From the corner of my eye, I could see Spencer trying to hold back his laughter as I tried not to burst in flames from embarrassment. I stomped up the stairs behind her and secretly hoped that she noticed. I’d love a reason to pick a fight with her at the moment.
Once I shut the door behind me, Diana headed straight for the fridge and grabbed the bottle of Tylenol we kept in the cabinet on top.
She guzzled a water bottle as she swallowed down the pills and I sank onto one of the kitchen chairs across the room.
The apartment was small, but it had an open concept that allowed her to see me from all angles.
That was why I kept to my room any time Diana came home.
“We need to talk about last night,” she said.
A faint flicker of hope swelled in my chest. My plan had been to leave the apartment by the time she came back, but maybe this would be better.
“Yeah. We do,” I agreed after she didn’t say anything else.
Diana chewed on her bottom lip, eyes darting everywhere but my face. The flicker of hope snuffed out as I recognized her guilty ticks for what they were. Whatever was about to come out of her mouth wouldn’t be pretty.
“You know I wouldn’t have let Tyson say any of that stuff to you if I wasn’t drunk, right? I swear, that’s all it was, Maggie!”
Swallowing thickly, I nodded. My mom didn’t drink very often, which made her a total lightweight when it came to alcohol. One daiquiri was enough to send her to bed for the night. If they had any drinks last night, she was likely pretty wasted during our encounter.
“But when we woke up and went to breakfast this morning, Tyson brought it up again. Like, he genuinely thinks I’m gonna have a three way with my boyfriend and my daughter!” Diana huffed, blowing her bangs off her forehead and folding her arms over her chest.
I repressed a shiver at the image. I didn’t want to think about it.
“Anyways, it just got me thinking,” continued Diana, “you’re nineteen now, so it’s probably time for you to start thinking about moving out.
I let a lot of things slide after you graduated because you were doing that hair school stuff.
But you haven’t given me a free cut or nothing!
You tried everything out on Celeste, and she doesn’t even care about what she looks like.
It’s not like she has a man to impress!” Diana paused for several seconds as though steeling herself to deliver her next sentence.
“I just can’t share my apartment with a woman who’s more like my competition than my friend. ”
A torrent of anger, disbelief, and shame circled in my brain as I tried to form a response. Anything I could think of to say got caught on my tongue. Diana wanted me to leave because her sleazeball boyfriend hit on me? Like I would ever let a guy like that touch me!
“I haven’t said anything to Tyrell—” I started.
“Tyson!” she corrected me with a snap.
I rolled my eyes. “Whatever! I would never, ever do anything with him. I don’t want him.”
Diana sighed wearily, like the entire world’s problems rested on her shoulders.
“If it’s not him, it’ll be someone else.
Let’s face it, Maggie, you’re grown now!
It’s only a matter of time before we want the same guy!
Do you wanna let a man come between us? Is that the kind of relationship we’re gonna have? ”
Grinding my back teeth, I felt like I was on the verge of murder. “A man already did.”