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On any given night at the Sawyer mansion, it’s filled with people I don’t know. Tonight’s not any different. Everywhere you look, there are soulless people drinking, smoking, and some fucking.
Do you see me there? I’m the one on the couch, green Mohawk, twirling my cell phone in one hand, a half-empty beer in the other, and a blunt hanging from my lips. In front of me on the coffee table littered with empty beer cans, a line of coke I haven’t touched yet. I might not. Sometimes I don’t. Most of the time I do.
“Why’s your hair green?” the chick next to me asks, massaging my thighs, but I don’t touch her.
I arch one eyebrow, exhaling smoke through my nose, my eyes hooded with boredom. “Does it matter?”
Why is my hair green? I have no clue. Seemed like the thing to do at the time.
Her tits are in my face and she smells like coconut. “No, baby. I love it.”
“I didn’t do it for you, but. . .” Letting my phone drop to my lap, I press my hand to the left side of my chest, mocking her with a fake smile. “I’m fucking touched.”
She sneers at me, rising from her place. “You’re an ass.”
I laugh and stand up myself. Taking a hit off the blunt, I then toss it aside, blowing a cloud of smoke into the air. Outside, the moonlight reflects off the pool where about a dozen people are naked. My eyes roam, searching for something. What, I don’t know. I don’t make eye contact with anyone. I stare, slicing through the throngs until I move to the outside bar and reach for the vodka.
I want escape, and I don’t know if I want the high of the cocaine, or maybe just the numb of the vodka.
Ricky’s over there. He looks at the vodka in my hand, then my face. “You okay, man?”
“What kind of question is that?”
He shrugs.
Ricky’s my uncle. He raised me and my brothers after my dad died when I was five. Mom split a few years before that, so it’s been just us and Ricky. Raised by a bachelor, I can’t say I have any complaints about the way I was brought up.
Ricky took us in after the death of our dad during a motocross race in Baha. He died of a brain aneurysm while racing a supermoto. Dawson Sawyer, our dad, was a legend in motocross.
Mom? Bipolar drug-addict alcoholic, who couldn’t chose between her kids and the man she left my dad for. She’s dead now and I have no remorse for the last words I said to her when I was eleven. “I hate you. I hope you overdose.”
Harsh? You don’t know me very well if you think that’s harsh. Just wait.
This house, we hadn’t always lived here. Grew up couple miles away at Ricky’s house. He rents it out now. Couple years back, we built the twelve-bedroom mansion we’re in now on the fifteen-acre land our grandparents left us when they died. This place, this land, the motocross track behind the house, it’s our playground, and we do what we want here. We don’t have rules here, nor do we have to put on a show for anyone to judge us.
Ricky leans into the bar, his wavy brown hair standing on end. “What happened to After Dark?”
Unscrewing the cap to the vodka, I scowl at him. “I told you in the beginning I wasn’t doing that shit.”
“You signed a contract. You have to do it, or they’ll sue you.”
I drag my eyes from him, sighing. I’m so fucking done with this conversation. I had to have been high when I signed it because I don’t recall doing it. “Where’s your kid tonight?” My gaze is lazy, but my jaw’s tight. I can’t help it because I know I shouldn’t be an ass to my uncle. “Shouldn’t you be playing daddy?”
Ricky shakes his head, dark laughter blown out in a sigh. He knows what I’m doing. I twist any conversation I don’t want to have by being sarcastically bitter. “She’s with Willa tonight.”
There’s a story there. Ricky fucked around with our PR assistant and Scarlet’s boss, Willa, who’s been in our lives since we were kids. He knocked her up and now he has a one-year-old daughter running around. And he still hasn’t married her.
My phone vibrates in my shorts. I hadn’t realized I put it in there.
Amberly calls. Constantly. I don’t answer and I’m not entirely sure I can tell you why.
Amberly is everything I’m not. Loving, sweet, innocent. . . virgin. Maybe that’s why I can’t let her go. I know damn well she doesn’t need me. Her pussy owns me, and I haven’t even tasted it yet. All I know is I want it for myself, and I’ll kill any motherfucker who takes it before me. I know, I’m rude, arrogant, and there’s nothing you can say that I haven’t heard before.
Amberly still calls obsessively. One call after another. It fucking pisses me off to the point that I turn my phone off, but then, like a goddamn idiot, I turn it back on because I want to know she needs me. That’s why she keeps calling, isn’t it? Since I was five, this girl has kept me hanging on by a thread and I cling to it, waiting to see what she’ll do next.
I’m not sure why, but this time I slide my finger across the screen. “Blowing up my phone isn’t going to entice me to answer it. If anything, that’swhyI haven’t answered.”
She says nothing, and sniffs.