Harley
This is quite the party.
I’ve never been to something quite extravagant, and as for Jasper, I don’t really think I’ve truly appreciated the man until now. He certainly is a great-looking man. Tall, slender, broad shoulders, wavy hair with streaks of grey running through it, and as I stare out into the crowd where he’s entertaining guests, he places both hands in his pockets. And yep, a perfectly tight ass.
Wait, what the fuck am I doing? I’m checking out my boss. Easy, Valentine, the guy is off-limits … wayyyy off-limits.
Clearing my throat, I take a sip of my second, perhaps third, glass of brandy, but who’s counting? This is a party after all, and when the boss is paying for your drinks and the entertainment, you take advantage of the situation to its fullest. I return to my seat and take another sip of my brandy, then look over at Violet who is picking out all the crumbs from her dress after just eating a cookie. I look over at Kit who is busy sipping on his soda, trying desperately not to spill any on his suit. And then my eyes finally meet on Tristan who is slumped back in the couch with his arms folded across his chest.
“This party sucks,” he says.
“Not enjoying yourself, Tristan?” I ask.
“Do I look like I’m enjoying myself, Einstein?”
“Look, you have to be here, so why not just make the most of the opportunity while you can? I believe I saw Drew carrying some pepperoni pizza earlier. Why don’t you go and see if she has any left.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“Okay, well how about a drink?”
I suggest.
“If I want a drink, I know where to go and find one.”
I lean forward in my chair, then place my glass on the coffee table. I then slide myself forward in the seat and lean in toward him.
“Dude, I know it sucks being grounded, but there’s no use whining about it. Trust me, I know.”
“So, you’re a therapist now?”
he replies.
“No. I just remember what it was like when I was sixteen. You feel like everyone is blaming you for everything and it’s the end of the world. Trust me, I get it.”
“You’re not my father and I don’t need to hear all this psychological babble from you. In fact, I don’t need to listen to a single word you have to say.”
“On the contrary, Tristan, you do because that’s what I get paid for.”
“No one told you to accept this job, . You just happened to be in the right place at the right time. When you learned who my father was and he offered you the job, you saw the dollar signs and jumped at the opportunity to work with him. So don’t give me all this bullshit that he’s paying you to look after us. I already told you; I don’t need babysitting.”
“No, but you do need to watch your tone and remember who you’re speaking with. You may not like the fact that I’m working for your father and that I have the right to tell you what to do. But this … attitude of yours, isn’t doing anyone, including yourself, any favors. My suggestion is that you suck it up the next two weeks and get through this grounding and everything will be okay again.”
He glares at me, and it’s obvious that he is far from impressed with my suggestion. I know I’m not his father, and maybe I am a little out of line here, but I need to do something to make him trust me. Only then I might be able to get him to open up to me.
“What’s going on over here? Everyone enjoying themselves?”
Jasper towers over me, and as I look up at him, he turns his head to each of his children.
“Tristan? Everything okay?”
“What do you think?”
Tristan snaps.
“Watch your mouth, young man. This is not the time or the place to have this discussion.”
That comment has Tristan leaping out of his seat and standing face-to-face with his father. The two men stare at one another, not saying anything for a few long seconds, and then Tristan opens his mouth.
“Once again, it’s all about you, Father. Not wanting to embarrass you or ruin your reputation because it’s so precious.”
Several sets of eyes narrow in on the duo from all across the room and Jasper looks around at his guests, trying to give them all a reassuring smile.
“We’ll talk about this some other time, Tristan,”
he says through a forced smile.
“Don’t bother because it’s not going to make one bit of difference. You’re never going to change, and all you’re going to do is continue to make my life miserable.”
“Tristan,” I warn.
“What? What are you going to do? Punish me in front of all your guests? Go on, I dare you. Then they can all see the kind of person you really are.”
Jasper removes his hand from his pants pocket and raises it across his chest, ready to strike at Tristan, so I quickly intervene.
“Tristan, I think it’s time you and I go outside for some fresh air,”
I say, grabbing him by the arm.
“I’m not going anywhere, especially with you,”
he says, shrugging my hand off his arm.
“Now, Tristan. Don’t embarrass yourself any more than you already have.”
He looks around the room at all the faces staring back at him. Then he locks eyes with his father before turning them to me, and I can see he’s ready to cry. I place a hand on his shoulder, and using my head, I signal for him to make his way outside. Reluctantly he moves forward and I follow close behind him.
“I’ll talk to him,”
I whisper as I walk past Jasper.
Several sets of eyes follow us as I walk Tristan out the front door, and once we’re outside, I sit down on the steps.
“Take a seat,” I offer.
“I’d rather stand,”
he replies.
“Okay, suit yourself,” I reply.
“You know you’re wasting your time, right? I don’t need you to get all fatherly and discipline me. I don’t listen to my father, so what makes you think I’m going to listen to anything you have to say?”
“Because I’m the one thing standing between you and your father. And that means, I can help you. So, we can either do this the easy way or the hard way. The choice is yours, Tristan.”
“You can help me?”
he replies in a patronizing tone.
“If you shut up and stop being a spoiled and selfish little brat, yes.”
He glares at me, like I’ve just insulted him, and I probably have or at least killed his ego, but if that’s what it takes to get his attention, then so be it.
“Come on, you have to admit, you’ve been behaving like a total …”
“Prick?”
he suggests.
“I wasn’t going to go there, but that’ll do.”
“It’s just not fair. I’m always being picked on and punished for things that I didn’t even do.”
I stare up at him at that remark. “Well, okay, so maybe I do stupid things. But you have no idea what it’s like growing up in a family like this.”
“Well, why don’t you sit down and tell me all about it,” I say.
I stare at him for a few long seconds and he hesitates but when I give him a reassuring smile and slide across the tiled stairs, he finally sits down beside me.
“There, that wasn’t so hard, was it?”
I ask. “Now talk to me. What’s all this really about?”
He lets out a long sigh and I know that he’s having reservations about talking to me. I don’t say anything but sit with my hands on my thighs and stare out into the sky with the stars twinkling above me.
“I just don’t know how else I can get Dad’s attention,”
he finally speaks.
“What do you mean?”
“I’m doing all these things because all I want is for him to notice me. I feel as though the only things that exists to him are Kit, Violet, and his job. It’s like I cease to exist,” he says.
“I don’t think that’s true at all,”
I tell him. “You’re the eldest child, his firstborn, so you have to understand that until Kit and Violet came along, you were his first and only child. Your dads would have spent all their time with you. Loving you. Playing with you. Cherishing you. And then when your brother and sister came along, it must have felt like all that was taken away, right?”
He nods.
“That’s perfectly normal for a kid your age to feel like you’ve been rejected and neglected. But you couldn’t be more wrong. I don’t have any brothers or sisters, so I don’t know what it’s like to have siblings. But what I do know is that just because you have a brother and a sister, doesn’t mean that your dad doesn’t love you just as much as he loves them. There’s plenty of love between the three of you to go around.”
“Then why do I feel like I’m trying to win his love all the time?”
It’s a simple enough question, for the most part. I still don’t know these kids well enough to make a judgement call, but what I do know is that Tristan is really hurting right now. And it certainly explains his behavior over the past few weeks. Now that I’m aware of the situation, I can only hope that he’ll open up to me moving forward and we can work through this together. I need to make sure he trusts me and that he’s comfortable enough to come to me with his problems. If I can achieve that, then everything else can be a work in progress.
“Can I be perfectly honest with you?” I ask.
“So, you haven’t been this whole time?”
he asks with a smile.
“Good one. What I mean is, you have to stop trying so hard. I remember what it was like to be sixteen and screaming for attention from your parents.”
“But you said you’re an only child.”
“I am. But that didn’t mean I had things easy for me. Like you, Tristan, my father was a very successful businessman, and most of the time it felt like I was more of a number than his kid. Whenever I needed help with my schoolwork or wanted to have some quality father-son time, he was always too busy, and yeah, it hurt.”
“You talk of your father in past tense as if he’s not here.”
The subject of my father is not something I have spoken about very often, well actually, if I’m being completely honest. It’s a subject matter that I prefer to keep in the past.
“He may as well not be. It’s a long and complicated story, but the long and short of it all is that my father had been having an affair while married to my mother. It had been going on for about five years before the two of us found out. What made it worse was that I caught him in bed with a much younger woman on the night of my twenty-first birthday. I immediately ran down the stairs and told my mother. When she called him out on it, he tried to deny it until the chick he was sleeping with walked out of the room wearing nothing but my father’s shirt.”
Relieving that moment in my life is never easy. Yaz is the only person in my life that knows about my past and I prefer to keep it that way. I realize that exposing all this information to a teenager is pretty full-on powerful stuff. But like I said, if it means that it’s a step in the direction of getting Tristan to trust me and open up to me, then I have to believe I’m making progress.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t realize you had it pretty tough yourself. I really should have been a lot nicer to you,” he says.
I give him a warm smile while trying to hold back the threatening tears. I inhale a deep breath and then exhale, as I slide my palms up and down my thighs.
“You had no idea what was going on in my personal life, and you have nothing to be sorry for. I guess the point I’m trying to make here is that, after that moment, I struggled to get my mother’s attention because she was so hurt and acted as though I never existed. I never took it personally because I knew it was out of anger. But it still hurt … a lot, and that’s what made it so hard for us to have a relationship.”
I close my eyes and place my head down between my thighs as my thoughts drift back to that moment all those years ago. Then all of a sudden, I hear him slide closer toward me and feel his hand press on my shoulder. I raise my head from where it is between my thighs and look up at him, my eyes meeting with his.
“, I really am sorry. It sounds like you and your mom have been through a lot. Do you mind me asking what happened to them?”
“I’m not sure it’s an appropriate conversation I should be having with a sixteen-year-old. I mean, after all you’re just …”
“A child? That’s what you want to say, right?”
“Tristan, I––”
“No, , I get it. You and my father think that I’m still a child. I’m sixteen, and very soon I’m going to be seventeen. I’d hardly say that’s a child,”
he says, removing his hand from my shoulder and sliding back to his original position.
“This is exactly what I’m talking about, Tristan. You get so defensive when there’s no need for it. What I was trying to say before you jumped to conclusions was that I just feel that my problems are too complicated and perhaps even far too sensitive to talk to you about. And I don’t mean that disrespectfully. Besides, we’re changing the focus of this conversation from you to me.”
“Why are you avoiding the question?”
“Because I already told you, it’s not something that I feel comfortable getting into with you.”
“See? This is exactly what I’m talking about. You bring me all the way out here to have a talk with me and try to win my trust to get me to open up to you and yet you won’t even show me the same courtesy.”
The kid makes a very compelling point.
This isn’t exactly what I had in mind when I escorted him out of the house and out here onto the front patio. Sure, I wanted to talk to him and build up his trust, but I also wanted to get him out of that living room as quickly as possible before he and Jasper said or did anything either of them would regret later. But I have to admit, he kind of has me over a barrel right now. I’ve never spoken about my parents, not to anyone, not even Yaz. And I know I don’t know Tristan very well but he’s the closest thing I’ll ever get to a family right now.
“Touché, Tristan. Touché. The truth is, after my mother found out about my father, she threw him out of the house and immediately filed for divorce shortly after. After the divorce was finalized, my father left the country with his little … tramp. Things more or less spiraled out of control from that moment. My parents had a prenup, which meant my mother got nothing in the divorce. Not a single penny. He owned the house they lived in, so he got that too, which meant Mom and I had no place to live in. We were in and out of homeless shelters because Mom didn’t have any money and I had no job. I was twenty-one, and most men my age would move out of the house and do their own thing. But after what my mother had just gone through, I was afraid to leave her.
Soon, not only did she start neglecting herself, but me also. The shelters were providing us food, water, clothes, and a place to stay and sleep free of charge. Mom eventually got social security benefits, and I was on unemployment, and we were barely making ends meet. But soon the nightmare started. As soon as Mom got her social security money, she’d spend it on alcohol, and the more she drank, the more dangerous she became. First it was the slurring of her words, then the swearing. Then, once she was out of money, she would ask me for mine. If I refused, she threatened to end her life and leave me all alone. I thought nothing of it at first and called her bluff, but then that night as I was getting out of the shower, I found that she’d overdosed on some pills in the medicine cabinet. I quickly called 9-1-1 and the ambulance arrived within a few minutes. The paramedics managed to revive her and drove her straight to the hospital, but she was in a very bad way and they weren’t sure she was going to make it through the night.
When we arrived at the hospital, the doctors and nurses began pumping all the drugs and alcohol out of her system they were doing everything to keep her alive. And after many hours, one of the nurses came out to tell me that she’d barely pulled through but was going to be okay. She spent many days in hospital after that and was only discharged after she had agreed to seek counselling and admit herself into a rehab for help. Of course she agreed, but only to shut the doctors up and get everyone off her case. I was still on unemployment benefits, trying to save as much money as I could to find a place for the two of us. I was barely eating and sleeping on the streets, just so I could save enough money to make sure we had a roof over our heads and that mom would be safe. I would visit her every single day, and even though she told me she was doing better, I could see that she was anything but. It pained me to see her that way, and while I didn’t have a lot of money saved, it was enough to rent us a small one-bedroom apartment. Mom would sleep in the bedroom and I would sleep on the sofa bed in the living room. The apartment was small and cramped but it came fully furnished and for the price I was paying, it was … decent, to say the least.
Anyway, a few months went by and it seemed as though Mom was making some progress. She hadn’t had a drink in a long time or taken any medication. She started to look healthy again and was starting to gain weight, at one point she was so thin, she was almost anorexic, and I was terrified I was going to lose her. Soon though, things started to look up and everything appeared to be okay … or so I thought.”
I turn to look at him for the first time since starting the conversation, and for the first time since I started working here, I notice the sincere look on his face.
“I finally managed to get a job in a restaurant as a waiter working five nights a week. It wasn’t the best job or pay, but it was paying the rent and bills and putting food on our table every night, and sometimes I would make some pretty hefty tips, so we were getting by. Weeks turned into months and soon I had been working there for a year and was eventually promoted to shift supervisor and given a raise. While I was making a decent wage and it was enough to get a bigger place for me and Mom, we decided that with the rent being so cheap, we could save the extra money I was earning to buy our own place rather than continue renting.
After a couple of months, I came home to find an eviction notice on the table. It said that our rent hadn’t been paid for months and I thought there must have been some mistake because I would always give Mom the rent money to pay the landlord because I was at work and wouldn’t be home in time before they closed. It turns out that all those times I was giving her money, she was secretly buying alcohol and cigarettes again. This time, she hid it well and could actually control her liquor, never causing suspicion. She would shower and wash all her clothes and even use mint spray in her mouth so I could never smell it on her. She thought she was getting away with it until I found a stash of alcohol and cigarettes in the basement that she’d tried to hide from me. I was hurt, angry, and felt extremely betrayed. All I could think about was how she could do this to the two of us. I was working long hours, day and night to make ends meet, and the whole time, she was using my money to get drunk.
I’d had it. After I found all her alcohol and cigarettes, I went back up to the house and called her out on everything. She knew she’d been sprung and couldn’t deny any of it, even though she looked me directly in the eyes and tried to lie to my face. I just couldn’t take it anymore. She was my mother, but our relationship had started to become extremely toxic over the past few months, and I knew that I had to do something about it. I had managed to save quite a bit of money in a secret bank account that I had set up so I could eventually buy my own place and live on my own when I was sure Mom was mentally capable of living and looking after herself. But after what happened that day, I knew that the only way I was going to be free was if she was gone and on her own. I went to the bank and withdrew ten thousand dollars. It was more than enough to give her a head start and find her own place. I handed her the money and told her that I wanted her gone by the time I got home from work the following day. I told her that as much as I loved her, I couldn’t keep protecting her and continue to neglect myself and my happiness. We agreed that from that moment on, it was best to cut off all communication, permanently. After handing her the money, I kissed her goodnight and told her I loved her, then went to bed, and that was the last time I ever saw her.
The following day, after I’d finished work, I came home to find that she’d gathered all her belongings and left, with not so much as even a note or anything. It hurt, and I cried for several hours because it was the first time in my life that I had been separated from my mom but I knew it was the only option. Several weeks passed and after I’d managed to finally catch up on the rent that we owed, I decided that I had to get out of that apartment. There were just too many painful memories. So, I went online and began searching for another place, and it wasn’t long before I found an apartment here in San Franscisco. It was far away from where my mother was, which meant I would be away from her and all the memories, not just of her, but my father, too. After I applied for the apartment, I got an answer within forty-eight hours telling me my application was successful. I quickly transferred over my first three months of rent and immediately started packing. I was out of there three days later and on my way to San Franscisco.
About a week after I had moved in, there was a knock on my front door. When I opened it, I found two police officers standing outside my apartment. After confirming my identity, they told me that they had found my mother dead in her apartment back in New Jersey. She had overdosed. Apparently, it took them several weeks to track me down due to the lack of information at the time. When they were going through her personal belongings, they came across a piece of paper with a number on it. After dialing the number, my father answered and the police asked him to come down to the station. He advised that he was out of the country and after he questioned the police asking them why, they told him about my mother. He explained that they had divorced many years prior and he gave them my cell number to contact me, as I was the one living with her. But after I moved to San Franscisco, I changed my number so that my mother couldn’t contact me. My father told the police my full name and thanks to my San Franscisco driver’s license, they managed to track me down. I had to be the one to fly back to New Jersey and formally identify her body. Afterward, I decided to have her cremated and once I received her ashes, I scattered them in the ocean. It was one of the darkest moments in my life.”
The tears stream down my face and I swallow the lump in my throat as Tristan slides toward me again. This time he rests his head on my shoulder and I hear him whisper, “, I’m so sorry.”
“Thank you,” I reply.
“I know how difficult it must have been to tell me that, so I appreciate you trusting me. I promise I won’t tell anyone,” he says.
“I know you won’t. Thank you. And this is why you need to talk to your father, Tristan. Life is too precious and too short for you to be angry at him all the time. He loves you just as much as he loves Kit and Violet. And just so you know, your dadda loves you too. You might think that he can’t see or hear you, but believe me, he’s always around watching over you.”
I notice him smile, then he raises his head and asks, “Whatever happened to your dad after that?”
“I honestly don’t know. I never spoke to him after the divorce when he skipped the country. I don’t even know if he’s still with the little tramp he left us for, or for that matter if he’s even still alive.”
“Do you miss her? Your mom?” he asks.
“Every day,” I reply.
He comforts me with a tight embrace and I wipe away the tears with the handkerchief from my pocket. After I’ve managed to compose myself, we both get to our feet and move toward the front door.
“Thank you,”
Tristan says.
“For what?”
“Everything. Making me realize just how selfish I’ve been about this whole thing when clearly, you’ve been through a lot worse than I have, and who knows how many more unfortunate people there are out there. I’m sorry I accused you of only moving in with us because you were after my father’s money. I really have been a brat.”
“You haven’t been a brat you’ve just been––”
“Stop trying to excuse my behavior. I’ve been nothing but a spoiled, selfish little brat.”
“Admitting it is the first step. Now what do you say the two of us go back inside, forget that anything ever happened between you and your dad, and we enjoy the rest of the party.”
“Deal,”
he says with a smile.
We move closer to the door and he reaches for the handle, and just as he’s about to turn the handle and pull the door open, I place my hand on top of his wrist.
“You know that you’re still grounded, right? This doesn’t change anything.”
“Yeah, I kind of guessed that,”
he replies with almost a whine.
“Two weeks will be over before you know it. Besides you could always give me a hand with those chores around the house to make my job easier, if you’re really bored. It could be fun.”
“There’s nothing fun about doing chores. And besides, you get paid to do those chores and look after me. It’s part of my punishment and not exactly motivating when you’re not getting paid to do it.”
“It was a nice try, I guess.”
With a wide smile, he pulls down on the door handle and the two of us walk back inside the house.