Chapter 1
Sometimes you can tell how expensive the clothes are in a store by how few they’ve decided to hang up on the rails. One end of a fat straw buried deeply in her frappuccino, and the other caught helplessly between perfect teeth, Sash sweeps her hand idly through the half a dozen thousand dollar dresses, as though more interested by the way they feel than the way they look.
Waiting anxiously at the supermarket check-out to see if her card was going to work, seems like a distant memory from someone else’s life. Not only does she have the power to buy anything that her heart desires, she’s finally got the one thing that money could never get her. Dante.
A sour faced assistant observes her closely, suspicious she’s just another one of these women that come in here to dream. Sash smiles at her, but the gesture isn’t returned. Instead the woman says, “You might find those a little out of your price range, I’m afraid. We’re a boutique shop.”
Sash doesn’t feel the need to rise to the bait. She’s happy today. She’s dancing again. She’s staying in one of the most expensive hotels in the city. Ok, Dante still hasn’t called, but after what happened last week, she knows exactly how he feels about her. She can still feel her pussy throb, her skin tingle with electricity just to think his name. Almost absentmindedly, she puts her hand on her belly and wonders whether it’ll be a boy or a girl.
Dante. If she plays by his rules, he’ll be hers. She just has to wait for him to come back to her. Like a queen waiting for her king to come back from a distant adventure and claim her once and for all.
“Do you have this in a size two?” Sash asks, picking one of the dresses out at random. She’s not even sure if she likes the design, but that wouldn’t really be the point of buying it anyway.
“That dress is six thousand dollars”, the woman says.
“Oh”, Sash says, letting it go quickly, a disgusted look on her face.
The assistant smiles smugly, her hands behind her back, while she rocks forward onto the balls of her feet. It’s an action that says “I knew it. I saw you a mile off. Your type, coming in here, thinking you can afford these clothes.”
“Don’t you have anything more expensive?” Sash says, as seriously as she can manage, delighted to see the color drain quickly from the woman’s stone-like face.
A little flustered now, the assistant says, “I hope you don’t think I’m being rude, but it’s important for me to check, especially with first time customers. Are you sure you are able-”
Even before the woman has finished her sentence, Sash pulls a huge wad of money out of her purse. There must be over ten thousand dollars there.
“Wait, maybe that’s not enough”, Sash says, and roots around again in her handbag, even though the assistant now has her hands up defensively and is telling her not to worry.
“No wait”, Sash says, making a point. “Here, hold this.”
She gives the woman her now empty frappuccino cup. The woman wrinkles her nose up at the chewed straw, before putting the container carefully on the counter with the very tips of her fake-nailed fingers, should Sash request it back again.
Sash pulls out
two more wads of cash. “Here you go”, she says, waving them excitedly in the air to show the lady. “I thought I had some change in here. Of course I can pay by card if it’s not enough. I only got it out because some places don’t accept plastic.”
The woman is crimson with embarrassment.
“I’m sorry”, she says. “We have to check. We get all sorts of people in here pretending to be able to afford it, you know.”
“That’s ok”, Sash says with a smile, “I would have done exactly the same with you. I mean look at the dress you’re wearing for a start. That’s definitely not from here is it? I’m surprised they let you work in here looking like that.”
The assistant’s mouth hangs open long enough for Sash to count her fillings.
“Did you have it in a size two?” Sash asks jovially.
“We make adjustments to every dress to ensure that they fit”, the assistant says evenly.
“Perfect”, Sash says.
“Which one was it that you wanted again?”
Sash flops into the large leather armchair usually reserved for well-heeled men, while they wait for their women to finish getting ready.
“Oh I don’t care”, Sash says with a big smile and a dismissive wave of her hand. “You choose.”
She does the same in several other boutique shops along the high street until she’s spent nearly fifty thousand dollars and is literally weighed down with armfuls of shopping bags. Dresses she hasn’t even bothered to try on. Jewelry she doesn’t know if she likes. Scarves, belts , accessories and shoes for occasions that might never roll around. It’s more money than Sash has earned in her short life so far, and perhaps more than she’ll ever earn in a lifetime, but it’s less than a dent in Dante’s finances. In the time she’s taken to spend it, Dante’s earned double the amount back. Sash feels like she deserves it too. She’s always been prudent with her cash, and never asked anyone for anything before. Even when she went to Dante in the first place, it was to ask for work and not a handout, so spending it so frivolously now feels like freedom and extravagance on an epic scale. A pair of sunglasses for leaving her in the lurch, a ten thousand dollar evening dress for making her move back home, a four thousand pound pair of hand made, jewel encrusted shoes, because, fuck you, Dante, that’s why. He owes her this for the way that he’s behaved, for the fact he’s been away for over a week and still not returned her messages, and most of all, because after finally dropping her guard, showing she was still in love with him and letting him back in, he went and slammed the door right in her face.
She’d often see women in Gucci sunglasses and Jimmy Choo shoes walking down the high street with arms loaded down by boutique bags on the way back from yet another failure of a job interview, but she never thought she’d ever be one of them. Sometimes those women would have an army of men with them, dressed in black suits like federal agents, only to carry their bags. As Sash meanders back to her hotel room now, eyeing herself in the mirrored glass of the shop windows she passes, she wonders whether that should be something for her to think about. She’d need a dog, of course, as well. A tiny little chihuahua with styled hair and diamond encrusted collar. It would fit perfectly in her Louis Vuitton handbag. Bodyguards, pet accessories, what else could she buy with Dante’s billions? She knew it would get boring after a while, that instead of his credit card she’d prefer the real thing a billion times over, but until he felt he could trust her, and came back home from California, this would have to act as a compromise.
The hotel receptionist greets her enthusiastically. He trips over his words to compliment her, keen, in a purely professional sense to see what his new best customer has spent her day buying. Sash humors him, happy to be the center of attention for a while, before passing the bags to a bell-boy and making her way with him into the elevator.
Her suite is palatial. Two bedrooms for little other reason than to give one of them the illusion of superiority, a huge living space, a vast bathroom with sauna and walk in shower room, and views over Manhattan from the landscaped terrace that Donald Trump would kill for.
The day after Dante left, Sash announced proudly to her father and stepmother over breakfast that she would be moving out again, having finally got in contact with her errant stepbrother, who much to her surprise, seemed more than happy to lend her a helping hand after all. Henry nodded quietly to the news as he sipped his coffee, congratulating Sash for finally getting through to him, while Tracy smiled in a kind of distracted way, jealous perhaps that her stepdaughter had succeeded where she had always failed.
She moved out that afternoon, this time in a taxi and not in her father’s beaten up, junkyard-bound Sedan. At first she had no idea how much she would be able to spend, or where she planned to go. Stopping in a hotel seemed like the most sensible thing to do, especially because she had no idea how long Dante would take to come back to get her. The taxi driver brought her to this one, and when she flashed the credit card and inquired at the desk, they seemed more than happy to accommodate her.
Sash dumps her shopping bags next to the grand piano. There are others there already from previous day’s outings that Sash still hasn’t had time to open. She gets herself a bottle of water from the mini-bar and then heads to the terrace to look out over the city. As the sun sets over the skyline, Dante’s tower seemingly always there in front of her, she wonders which direction Los Angles is in, and what Dante might be doing right this minute.
If he was here or she were there, they’d fuck. She’d make him hold her throat like last time and fuck her hard. She’d make him come inside her deeply, pull out and do it all over again. She’d suck his cock, indulge herself completely in his body, massage that perfect skin and run her hands through his tousled hair and over his bulging muscles. She’d make him show her he owned her. That she belonged to him. Again, she rubs her belly. A boy like him or a girl like me?
Before she heads back inside, she checks her phone for the fiftieth time today. There are messages from Abbey asking her where she’s gone, a reminder of an upcoming time-change to her dance class, an invitation to a friend’s party, a whole host of spam and junk-mail, but nothing at all from Dante. Not a single message to say where he is, what he’s doing or when he’s likely to be home.
Sash heads back inside. She flops down on the sofa and clicks on the oversized flat-screen TV. She’s been to local cinemas with viewing screens that haven’t been quite as big as this, and after a while the vibrancy of the image begins to give her a head ache. She flicks from channel to channel, each one seemingly more of the same. Holidays, soap romances, bad news and drug commercials. Eventually she turns it off, already bored and unable to be distracted. She turns over, stretches out legs that don’t even reach the arm of the sofa, and looks up towards the ceiling.
A million new dresses are just not the same, and three years has already been long enough. She needs her stepbrother back.
Chapter 2
Shopping bags cover almost every available space below the table and on it. Half of them have been opened, while the other half have been looked at briefly and pushed to the side. There is wrapping paper bundled up carelessly, some of which still litters the floor by their feet.
Oliver lies on the ground, absorbed in one of several new and very expensive toys. From time to time he goes to Dante either to gain approval or to ask him to explain how something works.
Dante is affectionate with the boy. He tries to lift him up and put him on his lap, but Oliver prefers to maintain his distance. He’s deferential but cautious, as though Dante hasn’t quite gained his trust yet. It’s a sentiment the boy shares with his mother. Tess looks from Oliver up to Dante. She can see so much of Dante in their boy it almost worries her. Aside from the dark skin he’s inherited from his mother, this is Dante’s child through and through. She wonders whether he’ll grow up with the cold and calculating attitude of his father, or inherit her own fiery, but fiercely protective nature. In short, she wonders whether he’ll ever find himself in
this situation, twenty years from now, looking across the table at the mother of a child he hardly ever sees. She hopes not. She’s going to do everything in her power to ensure he doesn’t too.
“You know his birthday was two months ago, right?” Tess says.
“I saw your message”, Dante says.
“I thought you might have called. I tried to get hold of you then, but, you know-.”
Tess cuts her own sentence short, tired of sounding like a broken record. “He wanted to see you.” she says instead.
“I’ve been busy, Tess”, Dante offers. “I couldn’t get away from work.”
“You never could”, she says. “That was part of the problem.”
“I didn’t come here to talk about that, Tess”, Dante says. “I came here to see you, to see Oliver. He looks good. He’s growing up.”
They both take a moment to regard him. He’s a gorgeous little boy and happy too. Dante feels inordinately proud of him, although has no desire to see him any more than he already does. Just knowing he exists seems to be sufficient enough for him.
“That’s what they do”, Tess says, as though Dante had never taken a moment to even consider it. “They grow up. Most parents notice it on a daily basis, you know.”
“Let’s not start that again, please”, Dante says. “I’m here Tess. I’m giving you my time.”
“He needs his father, Dante.”
“I did alright without one”, Dante says.
Tess is shocked to hear him say it. She pauses a moment before she composes an answer.
“Are you punishing your own child because of what happened to you?”
“That’s not what I meant”, Dante says.
Tess shakes her head. “You’re something else, you know that?”
“You and I have moved on.”
“You and I never-“, Tess reminds him. “We never were.”
“What do you want from me, Tess?” Dante asks.
“I want you to give this boy a proper life”, she says, pointing at him.