God, I’m in a foul mood.
Erika Ferrari. That stupid name must be fake.
She sneaks a peek down into her Chanel tote, where her phone lies face up. Suzanne gives me a sidelong, knowing glance.
I look desperately around the packed restaurant, searching for my drink. Most of the men are dapper. The women have great hair and designer ensembles – but those wearing makeup are a rarity. Why they think that’s acceptable is beyond me. Why go to the trouble of doing your hair if you can’t be bothered to put cosmetics on your face? Nothing is worse than half-assing it.
“How did you meet Darius?” Erika asks me, reaching for another roll from the breadbasket.
“Kane introduced us.”
She perks right up at the mention of his name. “And how did you meet Kane?”
I give it a second for effect, then, “I was leaving a restaurant, and he stopped me on the street. I look like his wife. That’s his kink. Dark hair and green eyes. Red lipstick really works for him, too.”
Erika’s smile wavers a bit. “Well, some men have a distinct type.”
Her hand lifts self-consciously to her hair, which falls in dark waves that would touch her bra band if she wore a bra. She isn’t and doesn’t need to; she’s small-breasted, like me. And like Kane’s wife, who had him by the balls and never let go.
Kane doesn’t care about anyone. If you’re not standing directly in front of him, he’s already forgotten you. If there is anyone who could be said to live in the moment, it’s Kane. He’s already discarded yesterday, doesn’t give a flying fuck about tomorrow, and has just enough interest to stroll through today. But he’s psychotically hanging on to Lily’s memory.
Which makes zero sense to me.
He’s not the type of guy who suffers willingly, so I have to believe that reminding himself she’s dead gives him pleasure somehow. Or it’s a gimmick to attract women, like a hot guy with an adorable puppy. How sick is that?
“We hit it off,” I go on, keeping my tone light. More like we hit it, period. All night long. “Then, we ran into each other a couple of times.” I stalked him. “On one occasion, Darius happened to be with him.”
And my now-husband had stepped right up as a replacement body in my bed. It should’ve ended there, but Aliyah ensured her middle son got what he wanted – his ring on my finger. And that she got what she wanted – my social media management company, Social Creamery. She regrets me now. That’s my sole comfort.
“What was she like?” Erika asks. “His wife.”
“In the writing world, we’d call her a Mary Sue,” Suzanne says with a giggle. “Amy prefers calling her Mary Poppins.”
Confusion crosses Erika’s face.
A humorless laugh escapes me. “Practically perfect in every way.”
“Oh.”
“At least that’s what the people who knew her would have you believe. None of the family ever met her because they’d had an estrangement from Kane for years. Her friends will tell you she was gorgeous, smart, glamorous, the perfect hostess, great at everything, so on and so forth, yada yada …” I tell her caustically. “Everyone loved her.”
“No one likes to speak ill of the dead,” she says primly, her gaze full of judgment.
“Waxing poetic doesn’t make them any less dead. And, weirdly, Kane won’t talk about her at all. As in don’t even mention her name within earshot because he turns glacial.”
“Yes, well … Maybe he’s ready to move on,” she says, with a smug smile that makes me want to yank her out of the chair by her hair and punch her in the mouth. I fight the urge to show her the selfies I’ve taken with all the women who could be our lookalikes, only because I don’t want her to think I’m insane.
I mirror her stuck-up smile. “I’m sure that’s why he still wears his wedding ring. Didn’t you notice the pattern on the china? The flower arrangements? Her name was Lily, and everything he owns has lilies on it.”
She gives a microscopic shrug. Right. Those critical details had escaped her. I don’t know why no one else sees what I do. Just mindlessly ignorant people fucking up the world. When I mentioned the explosion of lilies all over Kane’s shit, Darius told me I was reaching. He’s got girly taste, so what?
Erika’s smugness evaporates. By the time we finish lunch, she won’t be glowing anymore. She’ll feel used and a lot less special. Her self-confidence will carry a dent in it for a long time, maybe forever. I hate that she slept with Kane, but it’s nice to know I’m not the only one self-destructive enough to fall for his charm.
The server, handsome but overwhelmed, gets a genuine smile from me when he brings my drink. I swallow deeply, closing my eyes a minute to savor the cool bite of bourbon stirred with sweet vermouth. The resultant warm buzz from the alcohol takes the edge off my bitchiness, and suddenly, my eyes are stinging from the salt of tears.
Jesus. I shove the sadness back with anger.
It’s pathetic how I’ve let one night with Kane Black define my life. My shrink says I’ve got daddy abandonment issues that skew my decision-making. That pisses me off even more. What kind of woman lets men twist her up this way?
Kane will never understand or acknowledge what it felt like to be plucked off the street and whisked up to the penthouse by a man who looks and carries himself the way he does. In that one night, I began to feel like I might be worth something to someone extraordinary, that every wish I’d ever had might come true. I would be Mrs. Kane Black. I would live within the penthouse’s dramatic beauty, welcoming into my home as guests the very people who once made me grovel to win their business. Surely, he felt the same spark I did. That’s why he chose me, then charmed me so completely I was under his thrusting body within hours.
It was over a year later when Aliyah showed Darius the picture she’d secretly taken of Lily’s portrait tucked away in Kane’s bedroom, which none of us had seen because Witte somehow always materializes if anyone strays into that end of the penthouse. I’d peeked over Darius’s shoulder as he looked at Lily, and in a distant part of my mind, the screaming started and hasn’t ever stopped.
Erika touches my arm, trying to lure my attention back to her. “Do you work with Kane in the Crossfire Building?”
It rubs me the wrong way that she doesn’t call him Mr. Black. Who cares if she fucked him? He’s forgotten her already. They’re not friends and never will be.
“Social Creamery is headquartered in the Crossfire,” I answer, sliding my tongue along my bottom lip to catch every drop of my last sip, feeling the familiar surge of rage as I name my business. “But I don’t have to go in every day. I built it to run like a machine.”
Yet another cog in the growing Baharan Pharmaceuticals empire.
I can’t talk about the company I built from the ground up without resentment clogging my throat. Social Creamery had been my independence, my proof I could make something of myself. I studied social media trends comprehensively, finessed ways to exploit platforms’ strengths and weaknesses, built a stable of influencers who could market and sell damn near anything, hired copywriters who were witty and knew how to fucking spell – the world really is full of uneducated idiots – and I took my natural charm door-to-door to convince accounts to trust me with their brands.