Vanessa turned to me, her dress pulled up to her thighs so it wouldn’t get wet. “My brother is so head over heels for you. It grosses me out, but it’s so cute that it cancels out the nausea. I’m really glad he’s finally found the woman to spend his life with. You know, I was afraid he’d be into some stuck-up, hoity-toity, high-maintenance, dumb bitch model type, and I’m so glad he’s not. I guess my brother has better judgment than he lets on.”
It was a flattering thing to say. Vanessa just gave me her approval to spend my life with her brother. Too bad it was all a lie. “We aren’t getting married, Vanessa. The relationship is still relatively new…”
“it doesn’t matter how long it’s been. I’ve never been in love, but I know it doesn’t work on a timetable. Whether it’s been a week or a hundred weeks, it doesn’t change the intensity of emotions. I don’t know much about love, personally, but I recognize it when I see it. I see it when Conway looks at you. It’s the same way my father looks at my mother.”
Another jolt of warmth filled my insides. I knew I was his possession, his lustful obsession. He promised to give me all of him, to be faithful to me since I was the only woman he wanted. It was a commitment, but not necessarily a relationship. What Vanessa saw was our connection, the physical infatuation we had for one another. The symptoms were so similar to love that it was easy to mistake them. Since I couldn’t correct her, I didn’t. “Conway is a good man. I’m very lucky.” I felt the sincerity throb in my heart when I said those words. If someone judged him in black and white, they’d see him as a terrible person. But when you really examined his actions in our context, he was full of goodness. He took care of me better than any other man ever could. I was nothing without him.
“Yeah, he’s not so bad,” she whispered. “You know, when he’s not stalking my dates or prying into my personal life.”
I chuckled. “Yeah, he’s a little extreme.”
“And he’s worse with you. You probably can’t even go to the store without him watching you.”
She was absolutely right, but for many different reasons.
10
Conway
I sat with my father on the patio while Uncle Cane, Aunt Adelina, Mom, and Carter talked on the other side of the table. They talked about cars most of the time, but then the subject changed to his personal life.
Carter didn’t have much of a personal life. It was all fucking and drinking, but of course, you couldn’t tell your family that.
Muse and Vanessa sat with their feet in the pool, sharing a bottle of wine and laughing together—probably at my expense. Vanessa was probably telling Muse every embarrassing story she could think of, and Muse would tease me about it once we were alone together.
My father was quiet, drinking his wine without making conversation. His eyes were trained on the girls in the pool, watching their movements like he might miss something. His silence was suffocating. It was obvious he was thinking something, but what, no one could figure out.
Well, except my mother.
He finished his wine then refilled his glass. “They get along really well.”
“Unfortunately. Vanessa has made Muse…Sapphire her new best friend.” Muse was the only name I ever used, and it was difficult for me to separate the names when I was around other people. My father called my mother Button, but to this day, I had no idea why. Every time I asked, he wouldn’t answer.
“Vanessa is friendly, but picky. She wouldn’t be friends with Sapphire if she didn’t genuinely like her.”
There was so much to like about my muse. She was easy to talk to, understanding, and she had carefully crafted responses when prompted. She was as smart as she was beautiful, but she was exceptionally humble. Her appearance didn’t mean much to her. She cared more about getting her hands dirty in the stables than lying by the pool all day in a bikini. “There’s very little to dislike about Sapphire…if there’s anything at all.” I drank my wine, an aged red that my father had pulled from his cellars underneath the house.
“You seem infatuated with her.” My father had never said anything like that to me before. When it came to my personal life, he never crossed that line. I’d been a man for ten years, and not once had it come up.
“Because I am.”
He continued to stare at the girls by the pool. “I respect her for working in the stables. She wants to contribute to your estate. She’s not just with you for your money, that’s clear.”
She was with me because I bought her. But if I said that to my father, he’d put me in a hospital bed. “She doesn’t like to sit around. She gets bored.”