Page 36 of Embrace
“I got no use for a fucking boy who can’t fuck pussy. You understand? No use,” Arthur says from somewhere in the room. I can’t see him. I don’t want to see him.
“Get them out of here, pansies,” my father says.
I’m being pushed. My legs are trying to keep up with the force of the thrust. Then I’m out of the room.
That fuckingmemory had been buried somewhere deep inside me until then. No wonder Carter hated pussy, although I couldn’t say if he replaced his disdain for the female anatomy with a lust for his own. I always thought of him as asexual, preferring not to engage in the messy business of sexual intercourse. I came to that conclusion because when we were kids, he occasionally visited the mansion during the summers. He often joined Spencer and me when we went swimming in the sound. Spence and I would drop our trousers on the beach and change into our trunks. Carter would freeze, turn away from us, and beg us to let him know when we were covered “down there.” He had other quirks, too, like holding his piss until he almost urinated on himself because he didn’t like to whip his dick out and touch it.
But the memory…What would I have done if it were me being pushed toward the sexual organs of a pubescent girl?I wouldn’t have fucked her, that’s for sure. My father must’ve known that, which was why he was the one who’d put an end to the charade, saving himself from the same kind of embarrassment Valentine had suffered by his son’s reaction. Carter’s cowering had won me my escape. We weren’t the only ones traumatized by what happened either. The girl’s thighs, which looked like flagpoles, trembled like two reeds in the wind. Why had it taken so long for my father to die? If life was fair, he would’ve given up the ghost right then and there.
I rubbed the back of my neck as I shot to my feet, but then sat back down just as fast. I didn’t want to remember that. Fuck, I wished I hadn’t.
Julia was aware of Carter’s demons, bred by incidents like the ones I recalled, and how they haunted him all the way up until adulthood. He was as scared as hell of his father, Arthur Valentine. All she had to do was threaten to squeal on him, since Arthur reviled his son enough to always take her side, and Carter would do whatever she told him to do. She wanted to know more about my brothers and me, so she’d had him put cameras in our bedrooms.
Julia was more deceitful than intelligent. She wasn’t blessed with the capability to think things through. Since her cameras were wireless, their signals interfered with our surveillance systems, which were part of the daily monitoring of the estate. When Jasper found out, he pulled the recordings, which showed Carter putting the finishing touches on the cameras before tiptoeing out of the bedrooms.
As a child, Carter had been forced to hang with the boys, but when he got older, he preferred to keep Bryn company. That was why Jasper showed her the video first. Bryn swore that if Carter had done something like that, then Julia put him up to it. Regardless, Jasper banned him from the estate and threatened to take the incident to Father and Valentine.
Bryn asked if she could do something first—a plan to help Carter. After a lot of begging, Jasper acquiesced. Bryn was able to convince Carter to perform the impossible. In each bedroom, in front of every camera, the two of them crawled under the covers naked and pretended to fuck. He touched tits, rubbed thighs, and everything. Bryn told me that he puked his guts out after each session.
At first, the result worked in Carter’s favor. His father no longer questioned his sexuality, and he was still banned from the Christmas mansion, a place he hated. But a year before my father’s death, he and Valentine came up with a scheme to have Carter and Bryn marry each other. None of us knew it then, but that decision was the beginning of the end of the Christmases and the Valentines as we knew ourselves.
So Bryn had an expert’s aptitude for scheming, and that was why I wanted to seek her advice about how to get rid of Julia for good.
Are you being followed?I replied.
I don’t think so.Why?
Julia alertedthe media to my whereabouts and possibly more.
After several minutes,she wrote back,Come see me here,and she added an address.
Chapter Ten
Asher Christmas
Itook a cab to a modest house in Metairie next to a cemetery. When the car exited the offramp, I asked the driver how long we had before arrival.
“Not long, a matter of minutes,” he said in his lyrical New Orleans accent.
I called Bryn and told her I was close. When I arrived, she stood from sitting in a swinging bench on the porch and held up a bottle of bourbon and two whisky glasses. We stood smirking at each other, as we usually did when we hadn’t seen each other in a long time. Bryn and I had a way of conveying emotions to each other, a connection shared by those who escaped the womb on the same day and around the same time.
“Is that a cemetery behind the house?”
She sniffed. “Really? With all the demons haunting the place we grew up in, you’re scared of a horde of pissed-off Southern ghosts?”
I chortled as I made my approach. “Not in the least.”
“Plus, no one’s going to be looking for you out here.”
She had already set the bourbon and glasses down on a small round table, which freed her up to jump on me when I was close enough.
“Oh my God, Ash, don’t ever do that again!”
She kissed me multiple times on my cheek before releasing me.
“I won’t,” I said then gave her an up close once-over. She had on a pair of loose-fitting jeans and a white tank top. I was used to seeing her bones poke at her skin, but she had put on an attractive layer of weight. “You look good, Bryn—healthy.”
Her smile grew bigger and her eyes more excited. “I know. I’ve been happy, Ash,” she said, nodding. “Really happy.”
