Shane (Mallick Brothers 1)

“Phone is in my locker. Why? What’s up?”

“Sunday dinner.”

“What about it?” I asked, sitting down no the bench and reaching for weights. Sunday dinner was a mandatory thing in my family and had been since I was biting ankles. There was no excuse good enough to skip out so we all stopped trying to come up with any a decade past.

“We need to bring dates.”

“Oh, fuck off,” I said, shaking my head.

“And, I quote, ‘not some skanky chicks you pick up at a bar’,” Mark added.

“She does know who her sons are, right?” I asked. It was no secret that none of us, save for Hunt, showed any signs of settling down. Or even spending more than a night or two with any particular woman.

Mark held up his hands. “You don’t have to tell me, Shane. I don’t like this any more than you. But she said we bring dates or we don’t eat. And you know Ma; she means that shit.”

And she did.

Helen Mallick was nothing if not true to her word. And to be married to a man like Charlie Mallick and raise five sons like us, she had to be a strong, fearsome woman. But if there was one way a mother knew to control her sons, it was to take a good, hot, home-cooked meal away from them.

“Where the fuck am I supposed to find a woman around here that she’d approve of?” I asked, leaning back and raising my weights.TWOLeaThe first time a man pins you by the wrists and calls you a whore, your knee-jerk reaction isn’t always to run screaming. At least, not when you have been dating for a long time and had a very active and creative sex life and you were completely convinced he was just spicing it up, trying something new, indulging a dominant fantasy.

And, see, the first two or three times, that was true. Or, at least, I thought it was true.

Until it wasn’t true anymore.

That was the day I told him he could go take a flying fucking leap off a tall building and I would dance around his mangled remains, paint my body with his blood like some sick war goddess, wear his teeth like a pearl necklace.

Until that wasn’t an option

Because in my life, nothing could ever go to plan.

No decisions could ever be mine and mine alone.

I didn’t exactly have the basic human right of free will.

So for years after it first started, with no other choice, I stayed. I stayed and gritted my teeth and silently, or often, not so silently, seethed. When the anger was burned through and I could bring myself to ask, I asked to be let go. Then finally, when my pride was too shriveled to care anymore, I even begged.

I begged.

I had never been the begging kind of woman.

I had always been the kind of woman to do as she damned well pleased and fuck what you or anyone else thought of that.

So to get to the point of feeling like I needed to beg, yeah, that was my lowest place.

And even when I begged, it got me nowhere.

I guess I always knew it wouldn’t.

That day was the day that I knew there was only one choice.

I had to go.

I had to disappear.

I had to leave everyone I knew and loved to suffer whatever fate they would for my actions.

I had to become someone new and never show my face there again.

Because if I showed up, well, let’s just say that the consequences would be of the painful bloody death kind. If I was lucky.

And that, I reminded myself as I stood outside the unfamiliar building in a much less seedy part of town than the part where I was currently living, was why I was going on an interview to work at a freaking phone sex business.

It wasn’t that I was a prude. Actually, when I saw the ad, I figured it was right up my alley. I had never been shy about the dirty talk in my personal life and I was pretty sure there was no dark and twisted, disgusting, or outright silly fetish that I wasn’t aware of.

It was kind of a perfect fit.

The nervousness, yeah well, that had everything to do with the fact that I had forty bucks in my wallet and rent was due in six days and my fridge and cabinets were bare. While I had never lived an especially privileged or spoiled life, I had never been at the point where I ever had to worry about getting my next meal. I had never struggled to make rent or pay my water or light bills. But I had sank everything I had into getting as far away from my past as possible.

And apparently, this Navesink Bank place wasn’t handling the new economy super well. When I had looked online and checked the paper, expecting to see pages upon pages of job listings, all I had found was three places hiring part-time servers, an opening for a receptionist, and a big-as-life ad for phone sex operators.