Beauty and the Billionaire

“And a text when you get home, so I know you’re back safe?” she asks.

“Sure,” I answer.

“Okay,” she says and we stop walking. She looks up at me with big eyes and gives me a hug. “Let me know if you need anything, okay?” she says.

“Yeah,” I answer.

We part ways.

* * *

I wake in the morning as sore as if I’d been on the other side of last night’s beating. I’m not proud of myself.

Denial’s not going to work anymore, that much is clear. No matter how much I hate Chris, I still love him. It’s stupid and illogical, but that’s family I guess.

I’m mad at him. I’m almost always mad at him for something, but right now, I’d love to have a few minutes alone with whoever picked up the phone and put my brother behind bars. I’ve been told I can be rather persuasive when I want to be.

That’s not me, though. It’s not what I want, either. It is, whether I like it or not, the way I feel, though.

I feel bad that I went off on that guy last night, but I feel worse that I took out my pent-up aggression on Ash. She had nothing to do with any of it.

I’ve given up on denial, but now I can’t find the will to get out of bed. I barely want to move. Right now, I’m happy being here, alone in a room with a closed door in a house where no one but me lives anymore.

And now I’m back to thinking about Chris.

Before I decided my brother’s choice in illegal activities was beneath me, we actually used to get in trouble together. I couldn’t have been more than four or five, but I remember thinking Chris was the coolest guy in the world.

No matter what kind of trouble he got into, he could always talk his way out of it. He could talk his way out of fights, too, a faculty I never quite developed.

I’ve gone the rounds blaming myself for abandoning Chris, even going so far sometimes as to blame myself for his stupid messed up choices, but there’s no water left in that well. Chris is where he is because of his own choices and not because of mine.

Still, I’m thinking about kindergarten and getting my ass kicked by third-graders. I was doing my best to stay on my feet, but I didn’t know how to fight back then and I was a lot smaller than the guys who were picking on me.

I remember seeing Chris coming toward me as I was picking myself up off the ground, and I remember thinking he was going to jump into the mix, beat the snot out of those kids and save me, but that was never him.

Instead, he walked up casually, even waiting for a few more punches to land before he said anything.

“What are you guys up to?” he asked.

The third-graders looked over at him and hesitated a minute. He was a little bigger than them, but they still had us outnumbered and in retrospect, I don’t know how effective I really would have been if it went that way.

“None of your bees’ wax,” one of the kids called back.

I never said they were intelligent attackers.

Over the next five minutes or so, Chris just chatted with the kids who had so brutally assaulted me as if they were just having a normal day at recess. The funny thing is, the more Chris talked, even though he wasn’t saying anything about what they were doing, the kids slowly lost interest in me.

Finally, after talking about everything from the cartoons from the previous Saturday morning to which professional wrestler could make it in a fight with Bruce Lee—the conclusion was none of them, but a match with the Undertaker would be the coolest to watch—the kid who had picked me up by the shirt let me go. Without warning, the kids who had been so intent that I be taught a lesson for being smaller than them slowly started walking toward my brother.

I thought they were going to beat him up for wasting their time and then they were going to come back and beat me up that much worse for the interruption, but they just walked off, laughing and talking with each other.

I knew that Chris usually got what he wanted from just about everyone but our parents, but the concept of graft hadn’t really clicked in my young brain. When we got home, I was astounded to find out that those kids had bought him lunch and even given him some money so I could get something the next day.

Chris told me to take it as an apology, but I was a bit of a hothead as a child. I

yelled at him for not beating the crap out of the kids and I called him all sorts of names for going off and having lunch with my tormenters. I’m pretty sure I phrased it differently.

Chris just sat there and listened. I didn’t know back then that that was just part of his innate talent for manipulating people, but even as mad as I was, I couldn’t help but feel like he was really listening to me, really taking what I was saying to heart. By the time I was done going off on him, I didn’t even feel angry anymore and he hadn’t said a single word.