Beautiful Elixir Read online

  No, Caleb isn’t greedy after all.

  * * *

  I didn’t spend the night. I couldn’t. God knows sleep wouldn’t come to me no matter how many times we made love—fucked, which is more accurate a term for last night’s endeavors. Caleb was angry, betrayed, annoyed as hell with me, and his every carnal action proved it. He’s supposed to be my defender, but, last night, he became my prosecutor. Maybe it’s time I stopped lying to Caleb, but first I think it’s time to stop lying to myself.

  There is a mental shift that occurs when you’re panicked, when you’re dreading, loathing, the idea of being caught at your own game—and so publicly at that. I land a cold, hard look at myself in the mirror. Then there is the awe-inspiring, frightening alarm that comes with having to face your demons and discovering your darkest nightmare has always been you. If I’m going to stop lying to people, I’ll be sure that I’m the first one I cross off that list, but, for now, I have a polygraph to pass.

  I head down stairs with a drunken wobble. I feel drugged, stupid, and sick. That’s where no sleep and a bottle of gin gets you. After I traipsed back home this early morning at the obnoxious hour of 3:00 a.m. I couldn’t sleep. Instead, I made myself a student of the impractical. I studied all of the information the Internet could provide regarding ways to pass a polygraph. My study in the art was brief but fastidious. I took notes. I memorized entire passages. I recited pages of resources that might make or break my passing result. Make sure your breathing is steady, control your heart rate, for God’s sake do not perspire—and it’s a good thing I don’t. It’s nearly impossible for me to break a sweat on a run around the lake in the middle of July so that part should be easy.

  I can just envision Keith’s smiling face, that arrogant snort he gives when he’s proven to be right. How he must love the fact he aced the exam of a lifetime. But, today it’s my turn up at bat, and I’m bright-eyed (lie) and bushytailed (more like bushed out. Not to mention my hair simply will not cooperate), ready and rearing to go (mostly true). Plus, I have Caleb on my side, Caleb who will have my back through anything. Those weren’t his exact words but close enough.

  I inspect myself in the mirror for a last look. I’m dressed to the nines, Chanel pantsuit, Prada heels, and matching handbag. This is the religion my mother passed down, we worship at the altar of couture, the designers are the demigods we serve. I give one last lackluster glance at myself. All of my sorority sisters, all of my friends from as far back as I can remember, have always echoed one sick sentiment. They all wished they could be me. Little did they know I would have traded places with any one of them. The only person on the planet who didn’t want to be me was in fact trapped inside this body.

  A flurry of voices sail from the entry as I make my way down.

  Fresh juice, three eggs, and two pieces of bacon—turkey bacon, no nitrates of course—I’ve meticulously planned out my breakfast. The polygraph cheat sheets (an irony in and of themselves) recommend a solid start to the day, lots and lots of protein, something that will stick to your ribs. My appetite is the last thing I need distracting me. I need to breathe even and calm, lower my blood pressure by focusing inwardly on my quiet place—the lake at midnight with the stars spraying above. This will all go as planned. Nothing is going to rattle my cage.

  I hit the last step and set down my purse. The voices have briefly halted their mad chatter, and I take one look at the bodies clogging up the foyer and gasp. My blood pressure spikes, my skin moistens with perspiration, and the last thing I’m able to do is catch my breath.

  Kamryn stares back at me with that face I haven’t seen in years, and yet I see every day in the mirror. We’re the spitting image of one another. And my father—the man who despises my existence, blinks at me as if trying to figure out if I were indeed who he thought.

  “Baby.” He takes a step forward, with his newly silver hair, his eyes still steel gray and ruthless. But something—something about his demeanor, his sagged shoulders, the heavy drawl in his choice moniker of affection, it strikes a chord with me as genuine. As good as I am at wielding my lies, I’m lousy at detecting them.

  The thought that my father might forgive me suctions the soul right back into my body. It feels good like this with him in the room. It feels necessary. But I know what his forgiveness would mean for my mother, and I refuse to have any of it. The battle lines were drawn years ago. I may have chosen my mother’s side, but he was the one who started the war. We were a loving family. We were a model of perfection until he took a dump all over us and flushed, once and for all.

  I am not having it.

  “They want to talk to you.” My mother hugs herself and shivers. “I think maybe this is a good idea.”

  “Kam, Daddy.” A dry laugh thumps through my chest. I haven’t said those names out loud in years, but I’ve wanted to.

  There, I had my fun.

  I walk briskly past them.

  “Kennedy.” My mother hurries to my side just as I pull out the frying pan. “Did you hear what I said? They drove all the way up here. They have things they want to say to you—to us. I think we should hear them out.”

  I slam the pan down over the stove. If I were a wise woman, I would still be next door fucking Caleb’s brains out.

  “What are you talking about?” I try to keep from shouting. “Who the hell cares what they have to say! It’s me and you forever, remember? What happened to all that no-matter-what-I’ve-got-your-back-bullshit?”

  “It wasn’t bullshit.” She pulls me in by the wrist, her chest heaving, her eyes bugging out—a classic sign of raised blood pressure, and now neither of us will pass a fucking polygraph today.

  “Excuse me”—I take back my arm—“but one of us has to eat a protein rich breakfast. I have a polygraph in two hours. So you see”—I seethe over at my father and Kam who have meandered in behind us—“I have a big day ahead of me. I’m not really looking to add anymore drama to it.”

  “Keith hasn’t filed any paperwork yet.” My father says it stern, looking over his brows as if this were a business meeting. “I took on his case to stall it. I didn’t do this to hurt you. I did it to protect you.”

  I smirk at the concept. My mother once told me that my father was the Prince of Lies. How he loved to deceive her. He went out of his way to fool her into believing they would have forever. My father was a cheat who never intended on getting caught. He was not sloppy like Keith. My mother had to hire outside sources to host a complete surveillance on the scallywag. (Her words not mine). It was cake from there. As determined as he was to keep his double-life hidden, he couldn’t keep his paws off his mistress, a then twenty-one year old named Sarah James. I’ve stalked sweet little Sarah on Facebook to learn she was “going through a rough patch” at the time my parents’ divorce was underway. Soon thereafter, she was “in a relationship!” with a basketball player from Duke. She was a simple slut, and my father traded in my mother and me for that contemptible whore. It was an unforgivable sin in my mother’s eyes, and, since hers is the only lens I can see the world through, it became one for me as well.

  “Kenny, let me cook for you.” Kamryn comes forward, arms outstretched like a zombie, and I audibly snarl at her.

  “Don’t you ever call me that again. I hated that pet name then, and I hate it now. My name is Kennedy, and you don’t know me at all, so why don’t you both get the fuck out!”

  “We’re not going anywhere,” my father insists. “We need to talk, and it’s about damn time we do it as a family.”

  “As a family?” A fire rips through my throat as the words burn from me. “What the hell do you know about family?” Tears come unexpected, hot and plentiful. I hate this. I hate that he’s making me feel anything. “She is my family!” I point hard to my mother as the copperware echoes my voice like a tuning fork. “You forgot our family when you started fucking twenty-year-olds!”

  “Kennedy!” My mother barks. “Enough. We’re going to bury the past. Enough, enough already!
” Her hands ride up to her ears as if she can’t stand the sound of her own voice. I know I can’t.

  “Bury the past?” A breath hitches in my throat as I step toward her. A tangible anger spills from my pores. “I died for you!” I scream into her so loud, I can taste the blood in my throat. “I laid down and became who you wanted me to be, and this is the thanks I get?”

  She shakes her head, trying to deny it, but her mouth opens, and she lacks the will to defend herself. She knows it’s true. My mother orchestrated a very long, elaborate scheme to make sure my father paid for his sins, that he never forgot them.

  “Take a long hard look at me, mother!” It’s my own chest I’m beating now. “I am all the family you have. Those are your words! I only use your words. Do you remember that rule? Because I sure as hell do.”

  I push past my mother and that pathetic look on her face, past Kam and her superficial version of me, past my father and the genuine hurt, the genuine ache in his eyes that says I love you, I forgive you, as I barrel out the door.

  I’ve become a master at reading expressions, the eyes in particular. It’s where the truth lives. Only the lips truly know how to lie.

  Caleb meets me in his driveway, and I jump into the passenger’s seat.

  We head down the mountain to my glory, to my doom. I’m not sure which will prevail.

  I never know what my lying lips will say next.

  My father’s face comes back to me, and the truth foams in the back of my throat like vomit.

  My mother didn’t give me any words this time.

  I might just be speechless.

  Caleb

  I saw a car in the driveway. A Bentley. I knew something was afoot because Chuck is out of town this week. Kennedy crawled out of bed around three, and I haven’t slept a wink ever since. There were so many ways I could have gone about it last night, and I chose to fuck things up, literally. In my defense, I have never been so thrown off base. Not even Solomon, in all his inglorious splendor, shocked me to the bone like Kennedy’s non-admission did. She didn’t even try to plead her innocence. There wasn’t an ounce of confusion on her face when I told her Keith passed with flying colors. There was something foreboding lingering in the air between us long before we ever got to that point, though. I’m hoping Kennedy hasn’t soured on the idea of there being an us. I rather like the way she tastes, the way she feels when she’s wrapped around my body, the way she challenges me, but, then, I’ve always liked that about her.

  Of course, I could never have foreseen the ways she would challenge me, the manner in which she would stretch that innocent ideal.

  “Who was at the house?” I ask, trying to play it off casually as we head down the mountain.

  “My father.” It comes from her catatonic. “My sister.”

  I swallow hard. She mentioned they haven’t spoken in years, and I saw with my own eyes how she stormed out of the house. I heard the shouting long before she flew out the door. Hell, if she didn’t come out, I was about to go in.

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “No.” She keeps her gaze set ahead. She’s staring through the road into some sad part of her psyche that she rarely visits. I should know, I’ve been to that same place quite a bit lately.

  I had my own family shake up call this morning. My phone buzzed at six a.m. on the button. It was a text from Abel. Solomon’s trial is nearing the end. I’m familiar with the process. It’s pretty much a downhill slide from here. Each side gives their closing arguments. The jury can sentence my brother to a horrible existence in just a matter of days.

  Acid bites through my stomach. It’s as if a trapdoor opened up, and Kennedy and I both fell through. Somehow this innocent labyrinth of lies has caught up to us, each in its own way.

  We get to the office and take the long elevator ride up. Kennedy is somber, her face flooding with grief, with frown lines, bags under her eyes an inch in diameter. She made provisions to dress well, her makeup is flawless, but her spirit is still back on that mountain. Today is a shit day to have a polygraph. Her father knew it was happening. Why throw her off her game? Is he that vindictive that he wants his own daughter to fall on the sword?

  The doors to the elevator glide open, and I block the exit, pulling Kennedy close to me until her eyes are forced to look into mine.

  “You don’t have to do this.” I wipe the lone tear from her cheek with my thumb. Kennedy is stone-faced, angry. She’s in no shape to spit forth information in the name of the truth. Not that I wanted her taking it in the first place, not that for a minute I thought she wouldn’t be telling the truth.

  “I can, and I will.” Kennedy glides past me, past Zoey, and takes a seat in my office.

  I bypass the elderly John Harwood, interpreter of the mysterious “computerized” polygraph and try not to show my disdain. This man, this grandfather who is in the latent years of his life is what’s going to cause the undoing of the woman I love? It feels like one horrible demise after another has come over us both.

  It doesn’t take long for him to set up his equipment, the square box that looks like some discarded record player, something more dated than that, a phonograph with the horn of plenty curling out the back. This archaic action has no place in a very modern world. This is old school barbarism coming into play in my twenty-first century office with its framed Jackson Pollock print in bold hues of mustards and reds, its otherwise monochromatic stainless appeal that screams we are in the future, and John Harwood should pack up his equipment and head for the nearest steam engine to transport him back to the 1900’s.

  A dull grin comes and goes as Kennedy willfully allows herself to be bomb-strapped to his mortal devices. Here I’ve never wanted to save a client more, and, yet, Kennedy is about to voluntarily skip through a minefield. It’s like watching her set fire to the building and sitting herself in the middle of the flames.

  One by one he asks her questions, and, one by one, Kennedy offers a slow, methodical response. Her eyes are set straight ahead at the wood overlaid plaque that bears my law degree. Kennedy focuses in on that as if she were speaking to it directly, as if it held the power to speak back. Mr. Harwood is unflinching, all business as he checks off the list of minutiae. When it’s over, he offers her a grandfatherly nod, unhooks her with a few simple tugs and is out of our life in minutes.

  “It’s done.” She leans back, her gaze still trained on the plaque. “We’ll know soon enough how I did.” She gives the shutter-like blink of a doll. “And then what?”

  “If you’re innocent we flip the ball back in their court.”

  “And if I’m not?” She cocks her head, her eyes still transfixed on my trophy from NYU.

  “If you’re not, we have a lot to talk about.”

  Kennedy rises to her feet in an odd manner as if someone were lifting her from a string on her head.

  “Caleb.” Her arms collapse around me, and she gives way to a heavy sigh.

  Here she is, my girl, the one I’ve loved for so long—the one I was finally able to make my own. Kennedy breaks down in a silent sob. Tears flush over my shoulder as Kennedy struggles to contain them with the writhing twists of her body, her angry, heavy breaths.

  “I’m here.” My lips find hers, and I use a simple kiss to maneuver her head up. “I’m always going to be here for you. I don’t care about the results. I’m not too concerned with any of this hot shit of a mess. I’m only concerned about you. Open up to me, Kennedy. You can trust me. Let me carry this burden with you. Don’t shut me out when I’m so desperate to get in.”

  She gives an easy nod, red blotches appear over her cheeks like rosy splatters. Kennedy is mimicking the Pollock hanging on my wall, and this makes me want to smile. She’s a modern girl in every capacity and perhaps to her own undoing no thanks to the Internet.

  “I will tell you everything, Caleb.” Her lips take on a devilish curve. “But first, I need to thank you for being so very kind to me.” Her lips crash to mine, rushed and fevered with
heat. She walks me backward, our lips still fused, until I land in the chair behind my desk. Kennedy falls to her knees, her fingers working my belt, unbuttoning, unzipping. My mind flits for a minute toward the closed yet unlocked door, and I let it go. Kennedy gives a drugged smile, before pulling out my cock and diving over it with her warm lips, her throat giving me a hug in the best way possible. I sit back and enjoy the ride. Kennedy pumps up and down in long, soothing strokes, her tongue wraps around me, pulling and rubbing soft one way then rough the other. A groan works its way up my throat. I’ve always figured she was part feline. Kennedy works me from under my desk—every businessman’s fantasy come to life. I’m not too sure I ever fantasized about having sex with a client, getting a blowjob on the clock with some hot girl tucked under my desk—I was too busy fantasizing about Kennedy, and, now, here she is, one and the same.

  The door flies open. Zoey shouts a stream of unintelligible words as an angry man stomps his way toward me.

  “Where the hell is my daughter?” he bellows.

  I pull out in a rush, getting scraped by Kennedy’s teeth in the process, and sit there holding my throbbing dick out in the open.

  A girl runs in behind them wearing Kennedy’s face like a mask.

  “Shit!” I stuff myself back into my pants as the girl looks like she might vomit. Zoey claps her hand over her mouth, but I can see the smile from behind her fingers.

  “Kennedy, when you’re done, your father would like to speak with you,” he says it gruff, leaving while cursing under his breath.

  I think I just met Peter Slade, Kennedy’s long lost father.

  I’m sure my dick and I made quite the impression.