Make Me Beg, Daddy

Chapter 46

The truck compacts with a mechanical roar. I stand on the icy curb in yesterday’s boots, staring at the place where the antique disappeared. It’s matchsticks now, being swallowed up by the truck’s guts.

Kane comes around the SUV.

“That belonged to me!” I cry.

“Yes, it did—in the past tense. But you’re better off without it. It’s been defiled.”

“So you threw it away?”

“You deserve better.”

I whirl on him. “That is not your decision!”

He’s tall, a black-haired demon slouching against the side of the SUV, surrounded by fresh white snow. “It was the place where they disrespected you,” he says in a violent rumble. “I saw it in the recording.”

The cold catches in my lungs.

He glances past me at the garbage truck. “So did everyone in your mother’s living room. Now, strangers have seen it. That piece of wood became a landmark in your humiliation, and you were going to go right back to sleep under it like it was just a little mistake you could sweep under the rug.”

I feel my lip quivering. No words will come.

Kane steps closer. “They don’t get to keep lurking in your bedroom, haunting you. So if you won’t throw them out… I’ll do it for you.”

The garbage truck pulls away.

My grandmother’s headboard goes with it.

Kane’s not wrong: I have been picturing myself sleeping in that bed again someday. After eight nights on Chateau du Boulangerie’s finest cot, I was almost looking forward to it.

I was just gonna strip the bed, wash the sheets a couple times, and pretend like that fixed everything. It’d be fine.

But no.

It would not be “fine.”

I would have laid there looking at that crooked knob for the rest of my life.

“You could have asked me,” I say.

“You’d have said no.”

“Maybe!”

“That’s why I didn’t ask.”

Then he saunters up my front steps, cool as you like, holds my own door open for me, and waits.

Inside, my house is not my house.

The hall is the same. The closet with the sticking door is the same, and the scuff on the baseboard from when we moved in is the same.

Everything else is different.

The room looks like somebody fed my secret Pinterest board to a very rich burglar.

The green sectional is low-slung and tufted, upholstered in velvet. Beside it sits a walnut coffee table shaped like a kidney, with tapered legs and one brass-capped drawer.

Against the far wall is a teak credenza with tambour doors that slide into the sides. A smoked-glass lamp rises from it on a curved brass neck, beside an orange ceramic horse. The art above it is geometric: mustard half-moons crossing rust-colored blocks.

Actual framed art. Not Connor’s signed poster from a poker tournament where he placed eighty-fifth out of ninety.

The Eames chair has a molded walnut shell and black leather cushions so buttery I want to apologize before sitting. A starburst clock hangs over the mantel, a wonderwork of slim brass spokes and tiny black diamonds. Even the curtains are new: nubby oatmeal linen floating half an inch above the floor.

It is warm and weirdly mine.

Except I did not choose a single piece of it for myself.

Worse still, it’s not finished. Men I’ve never seen before pass through the hallway carrying boxes and floral arrangements. Another is on his knees behind the TV doing something with the cables. Somebody is running a vacuum upstairs.

I turn in a slow circle. “You refurnished my house?”

“I wanted no traces of them left in it.” He sweeps a hand around the room. “If there’s anything you don’t like, I’ll have it replaced today.”

“I couldn’t possibly⁠—”

“Say the word and it’s on a truck before noon,” he says over me. “Anything. All of it. There’s no discussion, there’s no invoice, and you don’t need a reason.”

I don’t know what to say to that, so I just go wandering through. I open a cabinet to see my yellow tea mugs perfectly in place—and possibly polished?—but Connor’s protein shaker collection is gone.

I keep exploring. Every room is just like the cabinet: mine, but altered. Familiar objects remain where they make sense.

His things have vanished as if they never existed.

Upstairs, the bedroom is almost empty. Fresh white paint dries on the wall where the headboard stood. Two men are measuring the window while another rolls up the old carpet.

Kane stops beside me.

I clear my throat. “I haven’t been back here since… since everything happened.”

“How do you feel?”

“I don’t know,” I admit honestly. “Just… strange.”

Kane reaches inside his coat and takes out a rigid black envelope.

I give it a wary glance. “If that’s another legally binding party favor, I’m going back to bed.”

“Look,” he insists.

He hands it to me.

I take it and open it up. Inside is a photograph printed on thick matte paper.

My breath catches.

It’s us in the coat closet.

Kane’s hand is spread over my hip. My fist is twisted in his shirt. His mouth covers mine while I strain up into him, every soft inch of me fitted against his hard body.

I’m not angling myself sideways to look smaller or hiding behind an inanimate object. I’m fully committed to the kiss, lost in it. Not thinking about my jaw or my hips or one single cruel thing that anybody has ever said about me.

“The photographer took this?” I whisper.

“Yes.”

“Is he still alive?”

“He’s fine,” Kane assures me. “… For now.”

He’s watching my face carefully, but I keep stealing new peeks at the photograph. In his arms, I look pretty. Wanted. Wanting and wanted in return.

What a concept.

My thumb strokes over the edge.

The headboard is gone. In my hand is proof of Kane kissing me beneath winter coats while a new year begins.

A good memory sweeping in and erasing the bad one.

I look at the photograph again.

Then at his mouth.

He notices. His eyes darken. And the vacuum’s still going out in the hall and there’s a drill downstairs and it is very cold in here because the window is cracked open, and it’s funny how none of that seems to matter even a little bit, because I am warmed from within in a way that doesn’t have anything to do with the physics of heat.

I take one step toward him.

He stands, huge and still, waiting for me to come close enough to touch.

Then the bedroom door swings open…

And my sister walks in.

Vivian stands in the bedroom doorway in knee-high leather boots and an off-white Max Mara coat, one hand still wrapped around the knob. Snow beads in her dark hair.

Her lipstick is the soft pink she wears when she wants to look harmless, which is a little like putting a cashmere sweater on a circular saw.

The photograph of Kane kissing me is still in my hand.

Vivian looks at it, but I turn it away before she can see. This is one thing I don’t want her to spoil.

Shrugging, she lifts her other hand. A brass key dangles from one finger.

“Before you freak out, I didn’t break in.”

There are several things I could say to that. Most begin with Who says I’m not freaking out already?

I look at the key. “How do you have that?”

Her gaze wobbles. It’s tiny, but I catch it.

Apparently, discovering your husband’s multi-year affair turns you into a forensic specialist in micro expressions.

“Connor gave it to me,” Vivian says.

“When?”

She rubs her thumb over the teeth of the key. “I don’t know. Like, last year?”

“Oh, give or take fourteen months ago?”

Vivian’s silence is all the answer I need.

She’s had a key to my house for fourteen months. She has walked through my front door whenever she wants.

Maybe she’s stood in my kitchen drinking from my yellow mugs with Connor’s scent all over her.

Maybe she’s used my shower after they had s*x and left before I get home from the bakery.

The headboard is gone, but it appears in my mind anyway. Dark oak. Crooked knob. Her heart tattoo flashing above my quilt.

Vivian takes my silence as an invitation and comes the rest of the way in. Her eyes go around the room first. Not to me. To the fresh paint. To the bare floor where the bed was. To the rolled carpet. Her mouth comes open when she gets to the space where it isn’t.

“Where’s Grandma’s bed?”

“Gone.”

“Gone where?”

“It got compacted into a garbage truck about fifteen minutes ago.”

Her jaw drops. Indignation, though I don’t know why. She didn’t give a f**k about our grandmother. She left the wake early to go see the Chainsmokers play an outdoor show in Prospect Park.

She blinks. Then her attention snags on the massive man standing next to me in a black suit with a rose gold chain at his throat.

“Who’s this?”

I don’t answer.

Her face cracks open with awed delight. “Oh my God. Are you seeing somebody? Already?” She presses her fingertips to her chest. “Dee. It’s been like a week!”

“It’s been nine days, actually.”

“That’s wild.” She’s grinning, so pleased with uncovering what she thinks is a juicy bit of gossip. “Wow. Okay. Well, good for you.”

Then she does the most obvious thing she’s ever done.