Chapter 12 Chapter Twelve
CANDY’S POV
It’s been a few days since the incident in my room and I’ve spent most of it going in and out the security room for questioning. Did you lose your key card at any point before the incident? Did you give it to anyone? Do you have any issues with anyone we should know about? If I have to answer no or I don’t know one more time this week, I might just throw myself into the clear and deceptively calm waters not so far from here.
I can’t swim.
It’s been exhausting doing the same thing over and over again without any results. The first questioning had been the hardest and most overwhelming because I’d gone alone to face the peering, judgemental eyes of the burly looking man that passes for head of security. He’s absolutely nothing like the kind men that had responded to my distress call that night, just the total opposite if I must say.
All he did was look for ways to make it my fault that I’d been attacked in their facility and therefore not their responsibility and I’d found it quite ridiculous, even more so when he switched up as soon as Mr. Neighbor’s work thing that’d been tying him down cleared up and he started accompanying me.
If I’m being honest, when he’s the best part of this holiday. He’s made an art of spoiling me since I moved into his room, spa dates, shopping to replace the things that’d been ruined in the hate crime that’d been done to my room, dinner dates that he watches me dress for and takes time to undress me from.
God, I feel myself losing a piece of me to him every time I wake to his cloudy grey eyes watching me or his lips peppering me with the most gentle of kissed like I mean something to him and that’s the scary part. He makes me want things that have no part in our agreement. An agreement he’s made no mention of disregarding. Ughhhh!
Sighing, I throw myself back on the bed, next to my laptop, the access denied notification displayed boldly on my screen mocking me. I was trying to get some work done after I woke up this morning to find my new roommate gone again, but it had taken trying to log into the company’s main network to shove the hard reality that I’d been fired in my face. It’s the one part of this whole ordeal that I keep forgetting about and every time I’m rudely reminded, an overwhelming sense of loss just envelops me. That job had been everything to me.
Resignedly, I dump the laptop back on the bedside drawer, facing it away from me so it can’t mock me anymore. I pick up my phone instead looking for anything to distract me from the fact that I’m not doing I would usually be doing at this time which is working. Unlocking it, I go through my texts and calls. There are a few from my mom, mostly asking me to call her, to make sure I’m eating well and not wallowing, to tell me that Terry, her Bichon Frisé lap dog, has learnt yet another trick. My mom really should be the poster girl for bored housewives trapped in their shallow worlds void of ambition.
I don’t entirely blame her for it because she’d been raised to be and only to be a trophy wife to a wealthy man and she’d kind of achieved that by marrying dad in his prime, but now what? All her kids are grown and mostly away from home and she has nothing to keep her mind busy beside Terry. She should have wanted more and fought for it like I did her. If I hadn’t, maybe all Peach and I would have now will be socially acceptable faces and skills that only serve to please the next man rich enough to prove to my mom that she did an excellent job. She’d damn near lost her mind the first time daddy’s company hit an iceberg and started to sink cutting the excess flow of funds that keep her fickle hobbies alive.
I don’t want that life for myself, if anything I despise it.
The next few texts are from Peach and they’re just like her, asking if I’ve started putting myself back out there and getting dicked down by all the hot men she knows must be vacationing here. She ends the last one literally asking me to spread my legs the way I’ve been spreading my heart and that has me both cringing so bad and laughing so hard.
There was no mention of Brent and or Lindsay in her text, I guess it’s because there’s nothing new there to say. I don’t even know why I care, why I want to torture my poor soul with them. Force of habit I guess.
There’s nothing from my dad and I kind of half expected it.
Since the fall out we had about his decisions on the company, he’s not been my biggest fan. I miss him though and I hope whatever it is Peach had been on about the last time isn’t him and his team of know it all walking the company into another pit.
Besides my mom and Peach, there’s no one else in my inbox checking up on me and that’s because I don’t have any close friends back home. I never got around to it and I’ve never been one for big circles. In hindsight, I should have tried, it’d have been nice to have someone else bugging me besides my sister.
Exiting my messages before I give in to the temptation to dig deeper and unearth worse hurts, I open Instagram, scrolling mindlessly through the latest celebrity gossip, dark humor jokes and the overly flashy daily lives of unbothered teenagers that the algorithm throws at me every once in a while when something catch my eyes, stopping my scrolling immediately.
My whole body goes rigid with dread as my brain registers what I’m looking at, my eyes burning with tears. I will my fingers to scroll past it, to ignore this pure act of torture but they too are frozen and refuse to obey me.
The gall of them, I think as I stare at the nauseatingly bright and sweet looking picture of the two people that had meant the world to me announcing their engagement to the world like it’s not the most disgusting they could come up with after everything they did.
It’s been barely two weeks since I came home early from the worst day of work I’ve ever had, fired without excuse, to walk in on the forbidden scene that is my boyfriend since high school buried balls deep in my best friend since middle school while she screamed his name and begged for more, begged him not to stop.
But he did stop because he’d seen me seeing them fuck like bunnies and scampered off the bed like a priest caught in a whore house. He’d tried to beg and then to blame and even to gaslight me when none of the other two worked, and all the while she’d just laid back unbothered, waiting for him to finish with me so he could return to her on the bed that I paid foe with the money that I worked for.
I’d handled that more gracefully than I would have liked, asking them to leave before I got back and then driving off to go weep my heart out in my sister’s arms. In hindsight, I should have taken off the damned five inches heel I’d been wearing that day and plunged it into one of their eyes each.
Maybe then, it won’t hurt so bad to see that he’s proposed to her with the ring I’d thought was for me the cursed morning I’d found it in his fucking jacket.
God, I’ve been so damned stupid. Blind and stupid!
Tossing my phone away from me, I bury my face into my pillow to weep for the blind fool I was who didn’t notice any of that while it happened under my nose. I didn’t even suspect him of cheating, ever. And then I wept for the idiot I am now, thinking that running here will save me.
I wish Mr. Hot neighbor was here, so I can bury this too under another mindless sex that’ll leave me too spent to think. At least, he fucks me good enough to make me realize there’s not a single thing I’m missing with Brent.
Absolutely nothing.