Always & Forever, Vive Read online

  “Oh…you know what I mean. You’re one of us girls. Plus, I like it when they’re not here.”

  With their own bedrooms at the end of the hall, Lex and Taddy had been living with me ever since we’d started college the previous semester. Blake was the only one of us who lived in the dorms. He rather enjoyed campus life. Personally, I think he just liked seeing all those naked jocks running around in the halls.

  Sometimes when we were between classes, Taddy and I would sit outside Blake’s room with his roommate and gay best friend (GBF), Thor Edwards.

  When the boys, wrapped in their towels (or sometimes nothing at all), strutted from the showers to their sleeping quarters, we’d hold up scorecards, as if we were judges on some reality show where you had to dance for us.

  Usually, the boys would entertain us and do a spin or a shake of their hips and we’d be gracious, giving them an eight. If they were hung like Donkey Kong, a ten. If they weren’t, a two.

  Low scores were often followed by Thor booing and hissing at them. Yes, he’d go there. He always went there. Take Blake and make him ten times sassier and a millionaire. Basically me with boobs. That was Thor Edwards. I just loved that man.

  There was this one student from Russia, named Anton Shayk, who played on our college basketball team. Anyway…he strutted around the dorm twenty-four-seven, night and day, with his ginormous dick out. I swear he could knock someone unconscious if a strong breeze came by and caused his penis to upswing.

  “Sweet Freaky Dick Jesus. I’ve never seen anything like that before,” Taddy had muttered the first time we’d laid eyes on Anton, aka Donkey Kong. “How does he run down the basketball court without tripping over…it?”

  “That’s why they wear those jockstraps, to keep it up and in place,” I’d replied, as if I had some clue as to what I was talking about. I didn’t play sports. Heck, I didn’t believe in exercise.

  “Oh, darling, a jockstrap would cause his dick to point up toward the sun.”

  “So…” I didn’t follow.

  “If that happened, he’d be able to rest his chin on his cock.” Taddy clarified.

  “Ha!” Taddy laughed so hard at Lex wanting the penthouse all to herself, her snort dragged me out of my Donkey Kong memory. “Darling, you’re just saying that because the last time Jay Austin and Seneca came over, they ate all of your jellybeans.”

  “What. Ever. That seasonal candy just happens to be my favorite, and for good reason. It’s not as if I can just go to the grocery store anytime of the year and purchase fresh jellybeans. Shoot, I wait months for them to be stocked on the shelves. Months, I tell ‘ya.” Contentment flashed in Lex’s eyes as she popped a candy in her mouth and chewed slowly.

  For as long as I’d known her, Lex’s vice had been candy. Over the years, she’d tried to modify and sometimes even quit her sugar. The previous semester, after Lex had broken up with her boyfriend, Ford she’d sworn off men and doubled her sugar intake. I tried not to worry about her health, because in a way—for Lex, at least—it was her Xanax.

  Poor thing.

  “You and your sugar. Birdie has her cocaine, and you have candy,” Taddy sassed. “You know, studies show it releases the same ‘feeling’ in the brain.”

  “What does?” Lex asked, wiping her lips as she sat up from the sofa.

  “Cocaine and sugar.”

  “Oh, shut your pie-hole. They do not.” Lex threw a jellybean at her.

  Blake snapped his long fingers and shook his head at Taddy to stop it.

  Feeling annoyed, I put down the letter I’d been working on to Sanderloo’s parents. I was on my third draft, which wasn’t going to sell. “Stop picking on her.”

  If anyone could sympathize with addiction, it was me.

  Our senior year at Avon Porter, after we were released from juvie and I’d given up my baby, Rose—that was the name I picked for her—I’d gotten hooked on Oxycodone for a few months. Anything to numb the pain of having to give my baby up for adoption, I shoved down my throat. That drug got a hold of me in a way I never thought possible.

  For the first time in my life, I couldn’t feel anything.

  No more pain in my mind.

  No more sadness in my heart.

  No more loss in my spirit.

  Nothing. Only numbness.

  When I came off those pills, it was holy Hell on Earth. I wanted to die more than I wanted to live. So I tried to kill myself with a bottle of sleeping pills. In reality, I was truly tired. Tired of living. Tired of failing. Tired of everything, including being myself. I just wanted to sleep… forever.

  Shortly after Taddy and Lex had found me unconscious in my bed at Avon Porter, my folks had sent me to detox. They never took responsibility for me after I had to give my baby away. As if it was perfectly normal for a healthy, wealthy young woman, such as myself, to give birth to a beautiful baby girl and just give her away so she could graduate from boarding school and not shame the family.

  It wasn’t normal. It wasn’t the 1950’s, for Christ’s sake. There was no reason I couldn’t keep Baby Rose. However, my parents had threated to disown me and leave me penniless.

  Looking back, I should’ve taken my baby, dropped out of high school, and tried to make it on my own.

  Mama had argued, “Viveca, you killed the baby’s father. How are you going to explain that as she gets older and asks ‘where’s Daddy’?”

  She was right. I couldn’t explain it. I’d killed Sanderloo to protect Blake but nonetheless, I took a life. Ashamed, perhaps manipulated, I’d agreed to give up Baby Rose. However, if I could do it all over again, I would’ve kept her. I would’ve found a way to help her understand that I loved her father. He was messed-up that night, and I’d tried to make it right. It just didn’t go as I’d intended.

  Nothing in my life had ever gone the way I intended. Ever.

  Medically speaking, according to some doctors (not the one on Madison Avenue), I wasn’t supposed to drink alcohol or smoke pot because it could trigger my addictions, my need to be numb. Regardless, at this point, I couldn’t care less. One or two vodka tonics a day wasn’t going to kill me. It sure as hell didn’t numb me.

  But the letter I’d been trying to write to Sanderloo’s parents might help all that.

  Lex threw back a handful of jellybeans in her mouth and winked in my direction.

  The four of us always bickered, but we loved each other. Lex, Taddy, Blake, and I were family. But we’d been cooped up all weekend, studying our asses off for midterms and trying to do as Charmaine had suggested and keep a low profile. That basically meant no clubs, parties, or our usual hangouts.

  Just then, the phone rang.

  “Don’t answer it. We can’t look like we’re home. That’ll make us desperate, and no one wants to date a desperate girl,” Taddy informed the room, as if the recent fame of her modeling gigs had clearly gone to her head.

  The semester before, she had a long-distance relationship with this guy named Leon in Paris. Over the holidays, after he’d proposed and she’d accepted, they’d broken up. Don’t ask me why.

  “Good point.” I handed the phone to Lex and demanded, “You answer it.”

  “Hello,” she said after taking the phone off the hook. “Ah-huh...Yup. Vive’s right here, Thor. One sec.”

  “Heyyy, Thorlicious. Wasssup?”

  “Vive. When was the last time you saw Poppy White?”

  I sat back on the sofa and huffed, “Thursday. She and Jay Austin had an interview for that new tell-all trashy book she’s writing on us. Why?”

  “Because she’s missing,” he replied with a thread of hysteria in his voice.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, no one has seen or heard from her. She didn’t show up for her Thursday afternoon class, and she missed the Friday morning taping of her talk show. She’s never missed an episode. You know that girl lives to work.”

  Shit! “I have no idea, Thor. But I’m sure she’s okay. She’s probably off doing res
earch somewhere and lost track of time.”

  “Vive, Dr. Henry says you threatened her life the other day. Is that true?”

  Hearing the question caused a tinge of heat to sear up the back of my spine. My scalp suddenly felt itchy, too. “I don’t like what you’re implying, Thor, so you can just stop right there.”

  “Well, where in the hell is Poppy White?”

  “How the hell should I know?” Pissed off, I jumped to my feet. Deep down inside, I knew in my heart of hearts that, with the shitty-ass bad luck my besties and I had experienced over the years, this wasn’t going to end well. It never did for us. Like ever. “Hold on a second, Thor.” I muffled my hand over the receiver. “He says Poppy has gone missing. No one has seen or heard from her since Thursday.”

  “Sweet. Jesus. You mean the other day, when you basically threatened to kill her if she published that book?” Taddy’s recall of the afternoon was all too perfect.

  “Ohhh,” Lex started.

  “My,” Blake added.

  “Gawddd,” Taddy exaggerated.

  “I didn’t do shit. I haven’t seen her since. But Thor says she’s missing.”

  Lex and Taddy shook their heads at the same time as Blake raised his hands in the air.

  Putting the phone back up to my mouth, I asked, “Thor, have you called campus security?”

  “Duh.”

  “What about the NYPD?”

  “Totally.”

  “What can we do?”

  “Meet me here at the dorm in an hour. I’m organizing a search party.”

  “See you in sixty.”

  Sleeping Secrets

  Later that night, I lay in bed with Seneca. A sense of urgency to be together had caused me to invite him over.

  On his back, lean legs out, muscular arms spread wide, we’d had a quickie, more to relieve the stress of the whole ‘Poppy White gone missing’ ordeal than anything else.

  Earlier, we’d searched for her all over Manhattan. We’d gone to her favorite French restaurant on the Upper West Side, the usual coffee shop, talked to her friends on campus, the police, and everyone in her dorm. No sign of her.

  You couldn’t miss Poppy White if she were in sight. Tall, outspoken, as loud as a Mac truck horn, she got people’s attention, hence the reason she was fierce on TV. As much as I’d had my beef with her since college had started, I sure as fudge didn’t wish her any harm.

  I wasn’t that kind of person.

  Sure, there were a few people I’d like to see take a hike, or as Mama would say, “Hit the wall,” such as the probation officer I had my senior year at Avon Porter after juvie, Alisa Bellamy.

  Talk about a royal b-hole. She’d almost prevented me from getting into college.

  Not to mention the prosecuting attorney at the trial, Finn Donovan, who nearly screamed, “Murderer!” to my face (behind the judge’s back) every time I walked into the courtroom.

  Funny how I’d never forget them, considering they pushed me down so far into the depths of despair. That was really where I got my strength to move forward, though. Thinking about them winning in their crusade to destroy my life gave me the power to carry on. That, and the fact that one day I’d get to see my baby, Rose, again.

  Yes, those folks I’d like to see gone, but not Poppy. A part of me admired the girl. Coming on a scholarship from the Midwest with no money, she’d only been in town a short while and already had made a name for herself. If anything, Poppy’s parents rode her famous coattails, living the life at various social events.

  Barf!

  Sometimes, I wondered how I might’ve turned out if I wasn’t a Farnworth. Taddy held a similar drive as Poppy. I guess when you had nothing in life, you just naturally pushed yourself till you got where you needed to go. But if everything you’d ever wanted had been handed to you on a silver platter, where did you go from there?

  Mama would argue, “My little angel, you go from a silver platter to a platinum one.”

  Thinking about Mama, Papa, Alisa, Finn, and the apology letter I had yet to finish, I reached across the nightstand for my cocktail. I took a sip. Mmm. The juniper berries and herbs in the gin always tasted a bit medicinal to me. My medicine. I loved my gin. I stared at Seneca, admiring his male beauty, and tried to enjoy the buzz from the beverage.

  “Has Jay Austin texted you tonight?” He lit a cigarette.

  His tobacco emitted an earthy aroma in my room, which masked the usual sticky-sweet alcohol smell Taddy and Lex hated so much.

  “Nope.”

  Jay Austin had joined us in the search, but then he’d called it quits when we’d reached midtown to go home and prepare for his lecture the following day. Dr. Henry was starting to let him teach more of his classes; which was a good thing, because he was rather boring to listen to and even less stimulating to look at. He just didn’t grab me the way my boyfriend did when he taught journalism class.

  Trust me, Dr. Henry couldn’t sell us on studying Penny Press and the invention of the telegraph the way my boyfriend could.

  Like I mentioned earlier, there was something familiar with Jay Austin, as if I’d known him my entire life. It made being with him easy. At times, his demeanor reminded me of Sanderloo. Maybe that’s why I had such affection toward him. Mama said it was natural to be drawn to people who reminded you of your loved ones, especially if they’d passed on.

  “Do you think he behaved…odd tonight?” Seneca asked, pulling me roughly, almost violently, toward him. I tilted my head back, downing the last of my drink as he snuggled tightly to my bosom.

  “Perhaps. I haven’t thought much about it.” I chewed on the ice for a second, burying my face against his, before asking, “Why?”

  “He seemed manic. Pupils dilated. Sweating.” He took a long drag from his cigarette as I hung on his words for a minute. Softly, his exhale fanned my face. I didn’t mind; after all, I liked the smell.

  “The NYPD stated he was the last person to see Poppy White, so I’m sure that’s making him a bit nervous. He’s got a lot on his shoulders right now with school, too.”

  I was protective of everyone I loved. That was my whole problem. I was a ride-or-die chick. That was what Lex called me. I was that type of friend who would defend your honor, go to bat for you, and risk it all in your name. That was what I’d done for Blake, the night Sanderloo had died. It’s just how I’m wired.

  I’d like to think that at the end of the day, when all was said and done, I’d leave there knowing I had my friends’ backs. Money, smarts, social status—none of that mattered if you didn’t have true friends. Right?

  “Do you think he had anything to do with her disappearance?”

  At the sound of his question, I sat up and put my feet on the floor. “No. What makes you say that?”

  “Luyu, he loves you and would do anything for you.” His voice hardened. “If you were stressed out about that book, don’t you think he’d do everything in his power to put a stop to it?”

  “Hmmm. I hadn’t thought about it this way. Jay Austin is too much of a goodie-goodie to harm anyone, though.” I got up from the bed and walked over to the bar cart to make myself another cocktail.

  “How many drinks have you had tonight, Luyu?” His gaze searched my face for an honest answer.

  “A few.” I shrugged. Probably more than a few. “What’s it to you?”

  “Nothing. I just worry sometimes that you drink too much.” He let out a long, audible sigh of disdain.

  I filled the glass with ice, poured the thick, clear gin over the cubes and watched them settle before adding a splash of tonic. My soul was similar to the ice-cubes: frozen and harsh with square edges, but once one poured the liquor over them, they’d soften. “Mind your own business, Seneca.”

  “Come here, Luyu.” He held his arms wide, staring at me seductively, so I crawled on top and straddled him. When I went to take a sip, he took the glass from my hand, placing it on the nightstand.

  “Sen—” Gritting my teeth, I leaned over
to get it, but he grabbed playfully at my wrist.

  “Why do you drink so much?” he asked with a thread of impatience, pulling my face up to his. These glimpses of determination for me to be real with him caused my heart to beat more rapidly, so much so that the intensity in his dark brown eyes made me look away.

  I’d never shared my past with Seneca, or Jay Austin for that matter. It wasn’t as if I were hiding it from them. Any time you Googled me or my besties’ names you’d see headlines such as, “Avon Porter Kills One of Their Own,” or “Pregnant Farnworth Firewater Heiress Butchers Lover.”

  That headline stung the most. I didn’t butcher anyone.

  “You know why I drink, Seneca. Drop it,” I reflected with some bitterness.

  “Luyu. Tell me about it.” His stare—intense, caring, perhaps even loving—drilled into me as never before.

  Shifting my weight on top of him, I lowered my face against his muscular chest and raked my gold, glittery nails against his tan skin. “I don’t enjoy talking about my past. I’d much rather discuss my future.”

  “Okay, Luyu. What do you want for your future?” His silky voice held a challenge.

  “Hmm...To be married one day, have a big, white wedding with Lex, Taddy and Blake as my bridesmaids…maybe over at St. Bart’s on Park Avenue. You know that cathedral. I just love that church. Then after a year of traveling, seeing the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World and so on, I’d like to start a family.”

  I expected him to laugh or mock my words. Most boys did when I shared this with them, but not Seneca. Instead, his lips caught mine, kissing me passionately and sending spirals of ecstasy through me. Ohhh. Lawdy. I think I’m in love with this man.

  When we finally parted and my toes were beyond curled, he dipped his chin to look at me, our eyes locking as our breathing came in unison. The moonlight shone through the window, creating a warm glow between us. Normally, I’d run out the door when things got deep. However, Seneca had a way of keeping me focused.

  “You’d make a great mother, Luyu.”

  A knot formed in my throat. Tears, hot and wet, streaked my flushed cheeks. Overwhelmed by this compliment, I started to fake-laugh but realized he was on to me, and I stopped myself. Instead, I glared at him, searching for a response. I could barely see him through the wetness of my eyes, but his handsome smile, the one I was indeed falling for, widened. “Thank you.”