Chapter 49

Ira

There are certain moments in life that make you question whether you're secretly living in a reality show. I am having a whole day of that.

If my mother's pandering to the hearth gods wasn't enough, I now have a sight I would never want to see in a million years standing right in front of me.

My father. And Stephanie May.Together.

Let's get this straightened out, shall we? Stephanie, a woman I saw a total of two times and had sex with once. Stephanie, a woman even younger than Kathleen and looks like a centerfold model when done up right. My father, the man who raised me and continues to do business with me. My father, a man even older than Silas Allen, who has silver hair and talks at length about his arthritis.

My father. My ex-date.

Together.

It's all I can do to keep from confronting them, but my glare is enough to make my father uncomfortable, and my mother, the master of aggressing Donovan Mathison, is so visibly disgusted that I think she might get up and choke her ex-husband.

"Fuck you," she mutters, and looks away, past me, a flash of pain contouring her fair face. It's not enough that they're still supposedly in love. My father's tastes for younger women lives on even to this day, and my mother is getting a powerful reminder.

I take her hand beneath the table, and it seems to soothe her for now.

"Everyone, this is Stephanie." My father, who is apparently the most oblivious man in the room, continues to smile while Stephanie pats him. "Stephanie, you already met Silas here. This is my ex-wife Carolyn, our Ira, and their… well, I think it's their girlfriend, Kathleen."

His chuckle bounces off the walls to an emptier silence. The four of us are sitting here, each stewing in his or her own misery. My mother, slighted because the man she on-again off-again loves is gallivanting about with a young hot blonde. Silas Allen, trying not to imagine me defiling his daughter every chance he gets. Kathleen, clearly uncomfortable in this situation.

Me, irate that we're here to begin with, and now flummoxed at the presence of Stephanie May with my father.

Father pulls out a chair for Stephanie, right across from Kathleen. She sits down, grinning like she's won the lottery. The look she serves Kathleen is laced in a phoniness that makes me even more uncomfortable, and I only thought that was possible if my mother busted out pap photos of Kathleen and me in compromising positions.

Stephanie smiles at me. It's not polite.

Now that we're all here, my father summons lunch, a three-course affair beginning with fruit salad and culminating with salmon steaks served on spiced rice pilaf. The chef who works here is the same one I grew up with, and the tastes of this familiar food should make me feel more at home. They don't. I can't take my eyes off my father and his supposed date.

Doesn't he know? Is this some sort of gotcha? I have no idea what game my father is playing. Maybe the idea of his progeny having a serious girlfriend is making him feel old. Stephanie, though? How did they even meet?

Wait, I don't want to know.

The food only keeps us silent for so long. Once stomachs start filling, the conversation has to start flowing. Except nobody knows what to talk about. I came here expecting the fifth degree regarding my relationship with Kathleen, but instead we're all staring at the hot young starlet and the rich old man. All of us annoyed for different reasons.

Even the rich have the most agonizing family dinners.

"So, was I the only one who didn't know about this?"

Silas's voice shoots right into me, like a knife meant for my spleen, or kidney, or some other vital piece of my body meant to awaken my mortality. I know that voice. I've heard it a few times from other fathers over the years. Never thought I'd hear it from Silas Allen, who can look like a beast when he's put into father-bear mode.

I don't dare look at him. Nobody is in a hurry to answer. Not even my mother, who caused this whole mess.

"I told you, Daddy," Kathleen begins with a sweet tone I've never heard her use before. "There wasn't anything to tell, yet. As Ira said, it's not like that."

He glares at Kathleen, then me. "Don't ‘Daddy' me. You're implying something I never want to think about."

Yeah, that glare is reserved for me. "You're implying she's fucking you with no repercussions. Now I have to kill her." I'd count on my mother jumping in front of the line of fire, but I think she's preoccupied with a different kind of anger.

"Now, Silas," my father says with a haughty laugh. "Let's be realistic. They're adults."

His words have barely sunk into our ears when my mother makes every matter worse.

"Didn't you two used to date?"

She's got her elbow on the table, finger pointing between Stephanie and me. I drop my fork. Stephanie clears her throat.

"They did," Kathleen says. I'm floored by her rebellion. "Pretty hot and heavy, wasn't it?" She's looking at me, chunks of salmon smacking between her teeth. "That's gotta be weird."

A blanket of embarrassment descends upon the table. I'm choking on it, wishing that I could excuse myself from this bullshit and drive far, far away.

"It's only awkward because she was apparently dating you at the same time."

Stephanie May, Hollywood's biggest asshole.

"We weren't…"

"That's right." Kathleen tosses her napkin onto the table and readjusts her seat. "Ira and I were seeing each other when I found you two together."

Together? Found? What an interesting revision of history. If only this wasn't happening in front of our parents!

"See, Ira's right, everyone. We're not a serious couple. That would be preposterous. Everyone here knows what a lothario they are. Carolyn talks about the papers all the time!"

I pinch her leg, but it has no effect. The last thing I want to do is look anyone in the eye. All I can do is try not to break in front of some of the most important people we know.

"All I am is another notch in the bedpost. Another woman in a string of blondes. Another woman to be screwed."

Teeth bare in my direction. Eyes of steel attempt to puncture my skin. Hands curl into fists, and it's not Silas Allen getting up to come pummel my face in.

Kathleen beats him to it. Getting up, that is. I'm spared a beating as she tosses a fork onto her plate and excuses herself from this farce.

The silence is so unbearable that I get up and go after her before Silas decides to brave my parents and kick my ass.

Kathleen hasn't been in this part of the house before, as far as I know. So she has no idea where to go, where to hide, or where to get away from the likes of me, the lothario who is fucking another blonde. Shit, I don't have time to be incensed. I have to track Katie down before she blows up and does something even brasher.

It doesn't take long to find her. She's holed up down the hall in a small sunroom full of plants and a canary chirping in its cage. When she lived here, this was my mother's favorite room to read and talk on the phone in. Now it looks like my father hasn't touched a damned thing since his ex-wife divorced him and took half his fortune.

I shouldn't find Kathleen so entrancing in this moment. She's standing by the window, her blond hair down and shining like a golden light among the green foliage. She sniffs, and I don't know if she's crying or reacting to the plants. I latch the door shut and approach her.

"Katie," I say softly. "Are you all right?"

She sniffs again. "Do I look all right?"

"No." My hand goes to her shoulder, and she stiffens, body jerking away from me. "Do you want to talk about it?"

"What's there to talk about? Was anything I said a lie?"

I lower my arm. "You're not just another blonde, Kathleen. Or woman, for that matter.

"Aren't I, though? You said so yourself that we're not serious."

"Not like that, no."

"What does that mean?"

She has so much disdain in her visage that I want to both run away from her and embrace her, here and now. She needs someone to comfort her, and she's not going to find any comfort out in that dining room.

"You know what it means, Katie." I try so damned hard to be gentle in my reasoning. Clearly, she's vulnerable. Last thing I want to do is insult her after all that embarrassment. "We're casual. We're doing things in private we may not do with others, but it's not like it's going to end…." Do I have to say it?

She's quiet for a few moments, her eyes not focusing on anything in particular. I hope her self-reflection is going well.

"Are you fucking someone else?"

Kathleen's red in the face, that rosy hue nothing in comparison to the red beaded flowers blooming behind her. I'm so taken in by this image that I barely hear what she says.

"No." The hardest thing in the world right now is keeping my voice steady. "You're the only one I'm seeing."

Derision flows through her flared nostrils. "I don't believe you."

"What? Why?"

She shakes her head, that wavy blond hair snaking through the air. "It's not that I think you're lying. It's me having to keep my guard up so I don't…"

"Don't what?"

I catch a glimpse of her stone-cold fa?ade crumbling. "Don't fall in love with you."

I'm tired of these silences, yet it's like we can't avoid them. Especially after Katie says something like that. "You're falling in love with me?"

"For God's sake." Kathleen turns away again with a click in her throat. "Yes, Ira. I hate every second I spend falling in love with you. For every moment I feel your affection and what you do to me, I see who you really are and want to die."

"Who am I? Really?" This should be good.

Kathleen still won't let me touch her. Not that I blame her. "You heard what I said in there. You're a player. You have no interest in a serious relationship with anyone, least of all me." Before I question that as well, she laughs and says, "A Domme. Could you really see yourself spending the rest of your life with a Domme? The other night doesn't count. You're not going to be interested in that often enough to keep me happy."

She steps away from the window and passes me. I want to reach out and caress her arm. Hold her hand. Hold her to me. Except I don't dare.

"Why do we have to think about the rest of our lives?"

I instantly feel like an idiot when she looks at me with nothing but pity. "I always have to think about the rest of my life, Ira. If I don't stay one step ahead, I fall back ten more. Someone like me who doesn't have what will really make me happy in mind?" She shrugs. "They're a waste of my time. I don't care how good the sex is. You can't expect me to live on your terms."

"I don't…"

"You do." She's in my face, calm, but too cool for me to speak to. "It's always about what Ira Mathison wants. You want to have sex? We get to have sex. You want to dominate me? Those are your terms, fine. You want me to put on a cuckold BDSM show? Sure! Yet if I asked for any of that? You would run."

I don't say anything.

"I'm not a woman who can be bossed around every day of her life. The first thing you did in there was make sure everyone at the table knew that I was nothing more than a casual fuck to you. You said that in front of my father."

Wincing, I apologize.

"Sorry tires me right now. I dunno, maybe I need to cool off, but I'm dangerously close to making a huge mistake with you, and that's the last thing I want. We're working together. Perhaps we should drop whatever we have going on and go back to normal. Excuse me."

She pushes past me and leaves the room. I don't know where she goes. I'm frozen in place, looking at the spot where she stood a minute before.

There is no going back to normal.

Normal was not having her, even though I so desperately wanted her.

I've been carrying my secret for too long now. A few days, sure, but it's a few days of knowledge torturing my heart, my mind, and my weary soul. You see, I've never been in love before. I wasn't entirely sure I was, since the only times I thought "I think I love Kathleen" happened during sex, and that's never a good indicator of anything.

But the moment she walks out that door, I feel an emptiness I am not familiar with.

This isn't like the other times we parted, with hopes of seeing one another intimately again. Those separations were bearable.

This… this emptiness says I'm in love.

Kathleen thinks she's in danger of falling in love with me? I'm past danger. I'm mired in a hell gnawing at my tendons and making me want to throw up the bile simmering in this emptiness I'm drowning in.

Fucked up. That's what I did. I've fucked up big, and now I have to face my family and a woman who won't stop haunting me ever since that unfortunate night I first realized I'm attracted to Kathleen. Ha. More than attracted.

I'm pathetic.