Keep The House In Order
1276 Words
Cyril
The silence in the penthouse had become a physical weight over the last twenty-one days.
It was a cold, sterile vacuum where my father’s scent used to linger, expensive tobacco, aged bourbon, and the sharp, clean smell of ironed cotton.
Now, there was nothing but the hum of the central cooling system and the frantic, rhythmic thud of my own heart.
Three weeks.
It's been three weeks since I had finally dismantled the titan, Alan Vance.
I closed my eyes, and I could still feel the phantom pressure of his hands on my hips, bruising and desperate.
I could still hear the way his breath hitched, that low, guttural sound of a man who had finally stopped fighting his own nature.
He had been a revelation.
I knew he was a "hot stud" the kind of man women half his age whispered about in the galleries, but seeing him undone, seeing the sheer, raw power of his phallus as he finally surrendered to the inevitable, had left me breathless.
He was better than any boy my age could ever dream of being.
He handled me with a seasoned authority that made my blood boil with a different kind of fever.
It wasn't just s*x; it was reclaiming.
Since that afternoon, he had vanished.
No calls. No texts.
I had played every scenario in my head until my brain felt like it was bleeding.
Was I that bad?
Did I fail him?
Driven by a restless, gnawing hunger, I hailed a car and headed to the firm. If he wasn't at home, he would be at work.
Alan Vance didn't exist outside of those two spheres.
The lobby of Vance Conglomerate was as bustling as ever. I bypassed the security desk with a familiar nod, my heart hammering a frantic rhythm against my ribs.
I needed to see him. I needed to see that look in his eyes again, the one that told me I was the only thing in the world that mattered.
"Cyril? What are you doing here?"
I turned to see Sarah, his secretary, looking at me with a mixture of pity and confusion.
"I'm here to see my father, Sarah. Is he in?" I tried to keep my voice steady, but the tremor was there, lurking beneath the surface.
She sighed, a long, weary sound. "He hasn't been in, Cyril. Not for three weeks.”
The air left my lungs in a rush. "What do you mean he hasn't been in? He's the chairman and founder of this place. He has to sign documents. He has to attend meetings."
"He took an indefinite leave of absence," she said, lowering her voice as she stepped closer. "He sent an email three weeks ago saying that he needed to handle personal matters. He hasn't answered his phone since. We’ve been routing everything to the managers.”
I felt the floor tilt beneath my feet.
Disappeared.
He had run away.
The Great Alan Vance had been so terrified of what we had done, so shaken by our "sexcapade" that had felt like a coronation to me, that he had abandoned his empire.
Was I that repulsive to him afterward?
The rejection was a physical blow, a cold blade twisting in my gut.
I had expected him to be obsessed, to be unable to stay away from me just as I was unable to stay away from the memory of him. Instead, he had treated me like a chemical spill, something to be contained, scrubbed away, and fled from.
I left the office without another word, my vision blurring. I returned home, the vastness of the penthouse feeling like a tomb.
I spent the afternoon pacing the marble floors, my mind a storm of "why."
Why did he leave?
Why didn't he want more?
I had gone too far. I had broken the toy I wanted to play with.
The sun was beginning to dip below the skyline, casting long, orange shadows across the living room when I heard the heavy thud of the front door.
The chime of the security system made me sure that it was him.
My heart lept.
I didn't care about the three weeks of silence. I didn't care about the abandonment.
He was here now and I would make him remember why he had succumbed to me in the first place.
I smoothed my dress, checked my reflection in the hallway mirror, and rushed toward the foyer.
"Daddy!" I called out, the word tasting like honey and sin on my tongue. "You're finally….."
I stopped dead.
Alan was standing in the center of the room. But he wasn't the man I remembered.
He looked disheveled, his shirt unbuttoned halfway down his chest, his skin glistening with a thin sheen of sweat.
He looked like he had been run ragged, his hair messy, his eyes dark and unfocused.
"Daddy?" I breathed, moving toward him, my arms already reaching out to reclaim what was mine. I wanted to bury my face in his neck, to feel the heat of him against me.
But before I could reach him, a shadow moved from behind the pillar of the hallway.
A woman stepped out.
She was young…perhaps only five or six years older than me. She was stunning in a way that felt like a slap in the face.
Her blonde hair was a tangled mess, and she was wearing nothing but one of Alan’s dress shirts, the buttons done up incorrectly, leaving her long, tanned legs exposed.
She looked flushed, her lips swollen, her eyes heavy with the unmistakable languor of a woman who had just been thoroughly and repeatedly taken.
I froze, my hands dropping to my sides.
The betrayal was so sudden, so violent, that I felt my heart actually shatter. The sound of it seemed to echo in the silent room.
I had spent three weeks grieving him, obsessing over him, wondering if I had "broken" him. And all the while, he had been out finding a replacement.
He hadn't run from the act. He had run from me.
Alan didn't look guilty. He didn't look ashamed. He looked at me with a cold, distant clarity that I had never seen before.
It was the look he gave his enemies before he delivered a finishing blow.
He reached out and took the woman’s hand. He moved slowly and deliberately, raising her hand so the light from the chandelier caught the massive, blinding diamond sitting on her finger.
"We got married yesterday," he announced.
The words were like stones dropped into a deep well.
I couldn't breathe.
My throat felt like it was closing up.
Yesterday?
He had known this woman for what? Three weeks or less and he had bound himself to her?
He had used her to build a wall between us that I couldn't climb over.
Stunning me to death didn't even begin to describe how I felt.
I was a ghost in my own home.
"I realized I needed a change, Cyril," Alan continued, his voice devoid of the warmth he used to give me. "I needed a partner. Someone to help me keep this house in order."
He pulled the woman closer, his arm wrapping around her waist with a possessive strength that made me want to scream.
He looked down at her, and for a second, I saw a flicker of that raw hunger I thought was reserved for only me. But now, it was directed at this stranger.
He turned back to me, a cruel, thin smile playing on his lips.
"Cyril…" he said, his voice dropping an octave, ".....meet your new mom, Victoria."
- Writer
