Gage (Men of Honor 1)

The woman looking back at me now hadn’t always been there. She was my own creation, someone I’d envisioned and thought into existence with sheer will and determination. Well and with the help of aunt Marsha’s money of course.

I looked at my profile in the gilded mirror letting my eyes fall to the cleavage that now formed between the bountiful flesh of my very expensive manmade breasts. I hefted the double D sized beauties that had landed me the one thing I wanted most in life and on which I was now putting all my hopes of landing the man of my dreams.

As I remembered the fiasco of the day before I felt that old tremor of fear begin in my gut and there was no pushing it away this time. Not since my early twenties have I felt this putdown, this inconsequential. I could feel myself being sucked back into that time that I try so hard to forget, that other me that I’ve fought so hard to leave behind.

My roots could do with a touchup but the thought of taking the long flight out to L.A. did not appeal, not when I was this close to getting what I wanted. I thought for sure I’d been gaining ground with Gage Sievers, until yesterday that is. If I leave now it’ll only make things worst and I can’t have that.

I can’t give up on the one thing I’ve truly ever wanted since I came up for air. I won’t go back to being that mousy little fool who was always left in the corner, standing on the outskirts looking in at the rich and beautiful who life always seems to favor. I was one of them now so why was it so hard to get what I want?

Donna

* * *

Until the age of twenty I was damn near nonexistent, even in the little hick town where I was born and raised. In a town of less than three thousand I still managed to be invisible to my peers starting in kindergarten all through high school where I didn’t even score a date to the prom, not even from the less desirable boy in school; that had been crushing.

From my first day to my last there I’d been made to feel unwanted, undesirable, like I didn’t matter to anyone, not even the drunken slut of a mother who’d birthed me. Momma had been the town drunk among other things.

As her only daughter I hadn’t been spared the same disdain and contempt that the town had held for her and her mother before her. As a child I never understood the cruelty, the loneliness and the whispers behind hands as we went anywhere together.

It was only as I got older that I came to understand why it seemed like everyone shunned us. Momma had had an affair with the richest man in town who wasn’t really wealthy by any stretch of the imagination I’ve since come to find out, but he owned the only car dealership in town along with the one grocery store and the gas station at the edge of town.

The thing is that dear old dad had already been married with a wife and kids and everyone knew he was the biggest tomcat in the state but momma was the only idiot to get caught with her hand in the cookie jar.

Grandma who hadn’t fared much better years before when she had momma, had encouraged her only daughter to keep the child-me, and milk the situation for all it was worth. They didn’t count on daddy being the mean old drunk that he turned out to be.

A one time payment of a measly few grand was all he was willing to part with and amid threats of death and mayhem momma had no choice but to accept and go back to the trailer park that was and will always be her home with her tail between her legs and an unwanted pregnancy that was no longer of any use to her but was too advanced for her to get rid of.

Of course there was still the government assistance as she’d drunkenly sneered at me one detestable night. So I’d been brought into the world as a failure, the child who’d failed to gain her mother the life of luxury she’d been hankering after when she crawled into a married man’s bed.

I’d lived with the stigma and ridicule from everyone around and none more so than from my half siblings who took great delight in tormenting me every chance they got whether it was in the hallways of the local high school or out and about in the small town where it was hard to avoid them.

Even the teachers and principal had treated me different since daddy’s wife who was well aware of my parentage was part of the PTA and had gone out of her way to make things difficult for me, a child who’d had no hand and no say in what had gone on before she was born.