As I stare at her, pulling her pink hair into a ponytail and wiping the running makeup from her eyes, I realize that Sage and I truly are from two different worlds. We couldn’t be less compatible, and I’d be an even bigger asshole if I tried to pretend that it didn’t have anything to do with status and wealth. It has created two completely different people who will never see eye to eye.
“You can still stay,” she mumbles awkwardly as she moves toward her bedroom.
I clear my throat and zip up my pants. “Thanks, but I’m going to go.”
“Fine,” she mutters with her back to me.
“You’re…okay, right?” I ask, wanting to reach for her.
With a huff, she turns toward me with a sad smile. “Don’t try to be the nice guy now.”
I let my hands fall to my sides as I shrug. “I can’t help it.”
“Night, Adam,” she says, pinching her lips together and backing away, moving toward the door that leads to her bedroom.
“Night, Sage. Thanks again.” I awkwardly point to my nose.
Holding her arms crossed in front of her body, she lets her gaze linger on my face a moment, and I can tell there’s something heavy weighing on her mind. I wait for a moment before she finally mutters quietly.
“I wish there was a way we could make them both pay.”
A short huff escapes my lips.
“I’m not the revenge type,” I reply.
“It wouldn’t be revenge,” she says. Before disappearing through the door, she softly adds, “It would be atonement.”
Nine
Sage
M y dreams are filled with that word— atonement. Ringing through my sleeping mind. I just imagine myself full of rage and power, like a mastermind enacting some act of retribution for what’s been done, not only to me but also to Adam. The details are fuzzy, but I can tell that it feels good.
Roscoe wakes me up sometime around eight the next morning, actually in my bed too, which is strange. For a while, I just lie in bed and try to think about nothing, especially ignoring the fact that I cheated on Brett last night.
I should probably feel bad about that. I should…but I don’t. Not after the way he brushed me aside at the club, putting his VIPs before me. Leaving me to tend to a battered Adam in the parking lot. What the hell did he expect?
I guess that was my way of revenge, although it didn’t really affect Brett at all.
Before any guilt has the chance to creep in, I climb out of bed and shuffle into the kitchen.
As I’m making my coffee and feeding Roscoe, I keep replaying the events of last night in my mind. Everything from the argument with Brett in the office to the cartilage of Adam’s nose snapping back into place under my fingers.
And, of course, the quick fuck over the back of my couch.
That’s the moment my mind keeps getting stuck on. It was easily the most satisfying sex I’ve had in a long time. Just thinking about the way he flipped a switch has my thighs clenching together with warmth.
In the span of two weeks, I met him, shared a spark for a brief moment, fought with him, and fucked him.
He was betrayed. I was betrayed. And neither of us can do a damn thing about it.
After my coffee is made, I set it on the cherry-red-and-chrome table I picked up in a flea market when I moved to the
city. While I carry Roscoe down the fire escape, I wonder if Adam was silently judging the eclectic taste of my apartment.
Not a single thing matches, and I’m not sure if no style choice is a style choice in itself. But I keep it clean, and I value every single mismatched inch of the menagerie that is my home.
I imagine he lives in a cookie-cutter model home full of things that hold no value other than what some designer paid for them at the home goods store. Not that I’m knocking him for it. I’m sure his home is nice.
After Roscoe does his business, I take him back upstairs and put him in front of his food bowl while I scroll through my phone and drink my coffee. It doesn’t take long before I’m putting Adam’s full name in the Google search bar and deep diving into the results.
Why? I don’t know. I have no intention of ever seeing him again. But curiosity is a tempting bitch sometimes.
It turns out the whole Goode family has a squeaky-clean reputation. Melanie Goode might as well be president of the privileged white Christian wife club. She’s chaired tons of foundations and charities, and even though she’s in her fifties, she barely looks a day over thirty.
Adam has three brothers—Lucas, Caleb, and Isaac. All as attractive and prominent. Lucas is a professor at the university.
Caleb owns his own law firm.
The only one who doesn’t pop up much is Isaac. From what I can tell, he stopped showing up in family photos about eight years ago.
And at the head of the table—Truett.
It makes me wonder how much his family really knows about him. Does Melanie know her husband pays for sex at the club nearly every night of the week, often with a different girl each time? Do his sons know that he has been known to snort a line of blow on the very table he was caught licking pussy at last night?
Probably not.
I wish they did. I wish I could unveil every dirty secret that club keeps, and not because they shouldn’t be allowed to have a discreet place to fuck, but because men like Truett Goode abuse that right. He uses his platform to preach about all of the dangers of the very things he partakes in nightly. It’s the most hypocritical thing I’ve ever heard. And Brett lets him.
The club could be so much better. Instead of catering to rich men who manipulate the rest of us to hold their secrets, it could be a club for real people. No patronizing assholes or a toxic male-dominated environment.
It’s a pipe dream.
I’ll never be able to knock Brett and Truett down from their thrones. As long as Truett and his squeaky-clean, all-American family maintain that pure and holy reputation, Brett has all the power. If he didn’t hold Truett’s secrets in the palm of his hand, that entire club and its filthy VIP membership would crumble to pieces.
I’m deep in thought, my mind starting to buzz with some far-off notion, when a hard knock at the door yanks me from my concentration and Roscoe starts yipping his head off.
“It’s me,” Gladys calls from outside the front door. “I need your help fixing the TV again. I think someone taped over Days of Our Lives.”
With a chuckle, I stand up from the chair and open the front door. Gladys is standing on my welcome mat with a despondent look on her face. With long gray hair and a tie-dye T-shirt, Gladys is exactly what you’d expect a sixty-nine-year-old hippie to look like.
She’s as blunt and bold as she is kind and peaceful.
With a shake of my head, I smile while grabbing my keys from the table. “I told you. No one can tape over it. It saves digitally. There are no tapes.”
“Then where the hell is it?” she snaps.
Roscoe scurries down the stairs ahead of us as we make our way to the Laundromat. When we enter, I notice a few regulars in the front. People come in almost daily to either do
laundry or just enjoy the free TV and AC. I’ve never seen Gladys turn away a single person in the ten years I’ve been here.
Roscoe greets the regulars as I send them a quick hello and take the remote from the counter. I don’t bother showing Gladys how to find her recorded episodes anymore. I’ve done it enough to know she’s never going to get it. But as long as she doesn’t learn, then it means she needs me. And I’ll admit