Enemies & Lovers Read online

  Vaughn and I stood frozen, wide-eyed. My skin crawled with a sudden filth and I instantly wanted to back away and douse my eyes with bleach.

  Mr. Montgomery’s hands dropped, grabbing onto the woman’s hips, his fingers digging into her flesh. The woman’s hair spilled off her shoulders, cascading down her back in long golden curls.

  But Mrs. Montgomery didn’t have golden curls.

  It was a few moments before we came to understand what we were seeing, standing in the threshold of that room holding hands, our lives suddenly spinning out of orbit. “No fucking way,” Vaughn growled.

  “Mom?” I cried, stepping farther into the room, heart pounding. Vaughn grabbed at my arm, desperately trying to pull me away. I couldn’t go back, though. I wanted to rip them apart. I wanted to claw her skin away from his. “Mom? What are you doing? What are you doing!”

  She scrambled off Mr. Montgomery’s lap and jumped away, grabbing a pillow to cover her nakedness. The pillow was too small, of course. Way too small, because all I saw was her, every inch of her, and all Vaughn could see was every naked inch of my mother.

  Vaughn’s father sat frozen, his penis lay fat and long against his thigh, softening and shriveling as I stared down at it with a horror that exploded out of my mouth in high-pitched screams.

  A wave of nausea slammed through me. I stumbled back, eyes still locked on the wretched scene in front of me. My mother’s pale skin, her breasts trembling along with her shoulders as she sobbed into the palms of her hands, the pillow having dropped to the floor. Mr. Montgomery’s eyes full of hate locked on mine, his penis dangling awkwardly, still glistening from being inside someone it shouldn’t have been inside. A warm hard knot surged up through my chest and I keeled forward vomiting at his feet, where his pants pooled around his hairy ankles.

  “Get out of here!” Mr. Montgomery’s voice cracked like thunder, but my mother’s sobs were louder—so loud my father rushed in, and behind him, Mrs. Montgomery. Behind them Chloe and Matteo. Even the staff came running. Everyone got to witness their shame.

  Mrs. Montgomery lunged at my mother slapping her hard across the face. “You whore!” Her voice hoarse with rage. “Get these whores out of my house.”

  I looked at Vaughn through tears, his eyes fixed on mine as he slumped back against the far wall and slid down until his ass hit the floor.

  My father, red-faced and silent, stood apart from all of us, still as a statue, while Mrs. Montgomery tore at my mother’s hair and smacked at her face over and over. He pulled at his collar like the scene was choking him, but he made no move to stop it. He let Mrs. Montgomery beat on my mother until her lip was bloody and her cheeks turned an awful purplish blue.

  The maid and the private cook and some of other staff were the ones that separated us all. I screamed and cried into the palms of my hands as Matteo’s mother dragged me through the hallway away from it all. My life was over. My summer ruined. How could my mother do this to our family? How could she do this to my father? To me?

  Why did we follow the sounds? Why didn’t we just stay in the library? I wanted to go back to that spot, that time before I saw what I saw. I’m sorry we thought it was a hurt animal. I’m sorry we wanted to help it. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” That’s all I kept repeating.

  “You listen to me, child,” Matteo’s mother spoke softly, cupping my face in her hands to catch my attention and blot away my tears with the hem of her apron. “That had nothing to do with you. This was their mistake, their sin, not yours. You have nothing to be sorry for.”

  But that was a lie, because when I stepped out of the Montgomery house it was as if the doors to another life slammed closed behind me. Their infidelity may have been their sin, but I took the brunt of the consequences in its aftermath. I stood in the middle of my parents’ bitter divorce, where I was robbed of every cent my family had ever made, then was sent away to boarding school in a convent so I wouldn’t ever grow up to be like my whore of a mother.

  And I never saw Vaughn or Chloe or Matteo again.

  Chapter 1

  Hello, Claire.

  The private school where Claire Radcliffe teaches has barely any security. It’s like they don’t listen to the news. It’s located in an affluent neighborhood. Packed with rich white privileged brats who get raised by nannies while their mommies take the trendiest exercise classes at the gym before heading home to fuck their pool guys. These people are a bunch of sheep. They think they’re above anything happening to them.

  I could blow up this whole building right now if I wanted to with what I have in my trunk. But that would fuck up my plans for Claire.

  Right now, I need Claire. I need all the things she doesn’t yet know she has to offer me.

  She’s eating lunch with a handful of the other teachers in a small trendy deli across the street from the school. Her blue eyes are glued to the apple she just bought, which was probably too expensive for her to splurge on, but she’s hungry and her cabinets are empty at home. I know, because I rummaged through them this morning while she was in the shower. She lives on Ramen noodles and whatever else she could get to fill her belly at the Dollar Tree.

  Private school teachers don’t make much, I suppose. This meager life she leads is a far cry from what her family name implies. The Radcliffe family was a wealthy one at one time, a very wealthy one.

  Maybe she should call that family to buy her some new underwear, that drawer was pretty empty of anything good too, and now she’s out her favorite thong, because it’s currently balled up in my front pants pocket.

  I’m sitting two tables over from her, but she doesn’t notice. I’m quite vigilant. Invisible when I need to be. I’m layered in a hoodie and heavy coat, sipping on a nine-dollar cup of freshly ground bullshit, watching her. Every now and then I bring her panties out and sniff them. Her scent makes my mouth water. No one around me notices. Fucking amazing to me. How can you not notice someone sniffing a fistful of panties near you? Fucking snowflakes, every one of them.

  Claire’s got her lesson plan book out and she’s writing in the tiny calendar boxes. The male teacher next to her watches. The Jackass has probably been trying to fuck her for months, but she doesn’t notice—or if she does, she doesn’t let on. She always was a cock tease.

  I squeeze myself through my pants thinking about it.

  “You need to eat something more than an apple, Claire. Let me buy you a sandwich,” Jackass says. He leans in closer to her. Too close. I wait for her to smile up at him and bat those beautiful blues. Maybe try and seduce a sandwich and dessert out of him for free. But that’s not how it goes down.

  Good girl, Claire.

  She scoots away, taking back her personal space. Maybe she’s not good, maybe she’s just playing hard to get. Oh, Claire, I hope you’re not. “No thanks,” she says to Jackass. “I’m not hungry.” I know she’s lying, because I can hear her stomach growl as she nibbles on the skin of the Golden Delicious she’s holding in her tight little fist. In my personal opinion, Claire Radcliffe seems to be a walking cliché. There’re daddy issues written all over those pouty lips. Mommy issues too, Jesus, we can’t forget those. I see her bitterness and distrust in every gesture and expression she makes. It’s in the way she sits hunched over, no sign of self-confidence, or the way she talks to people in that clipped-off manner, giving nothing of herself away.

  I think I like this Claire Radcliffe. The one that hurts and isn’t such a perfect fucking Radcliffe anymore. This Claire is broken, and broken girls are always more fun. Most desperate to be loved. And I want Claire desperate.

  I press down on my cock again. A desperate Radcliffe is a huge turn-on.

  Her nails are bare, unlike the other women sitting with her, and her sweater is a plain, baggy turtleneck while the others wear bright colors to catch all the right attention. She wears no make-up, but her lips are naturally plump and pink, and for a brief moment I wonder how wet they’d feel wrapped around the head of my cock with those blue eyes lookin
g up at me. I take another deep inhale off her panties.

  She reaches across the table for a book lying by the half-eaten lunch of a woman whose hair is pulled back so tightly in a bun it makes her eyes look all wrong. My focus snaps from the bun to the soft expanse of Claire’s waist when I notice the hem of her sweater ride up as she stretches to take the book. I think I see the swirl of dark ink peeking out, and I wonder when or if she ever got a tattoo. Whose hand did she hold when the needle pierced her skin? Claire sits back down and looks at her watch. She’s counting the minutes until lunch is over. Her knee starts jumping. She still has thirty minutes but doesn’t want to stay another second.

  The rest of her party speak loud across the table to each other, laughing raucously. Yet Claire’s silence seems the most cacophonic.

  I don’t know much about Claire now. I did, once, another lifetime ago. And honestly, I haven’t thought about her for a while, not until a few days ago. Not until my life got pulled out from underneath my feet. Now, I’m trying to get to know her again, trying to see what kind of a person she turned into. I’ve been following her for four days. I know where she lives, where she works. I know she’s almost always alone. And when she’s home she reads too many romance novels and needs to make herself cum in utter silence twice before she can fall asleep, filling herself with her own fingers instead of any one of the willing men who circle around her perimeter like vultures. Is she waiting for her very own love story?

  I think she’d enjoy a family drama or a phycological thriller better, she’d relate to it more with all her mommy and daddy issues.

  I’m almost finished with my coffee when Claire’s cellphone rings. It takes her a moment to fish it out of her old worn bag and another to stare down at it curiously. Jackass leans over and says, “Where’s that area code from?”

  She doesn’t answer Jackass. She knows the area code, she knows where the call is from, she just doesn’t want to speak to anyone in that area. But she answers anyway. Which is good. It’s an integral part of this game and part of what must happen.

  “Hello?” she says into the phone, pushing herself away from the table, her colleagues. Jackass watches her closely, circling and circling, waiting to pick at her bones.

  “Yes, this is Claire Radcliffe.” She moves closer to my table as she listens to the voice on the other end of the phone. I already know what the voice is saying.

  Claire’s beautiful face turns a stark white, her free hand lifts up and trembling fingers touch her mouth. Her eyes squeeze closed and now she’s so close to my table and my empty cup of shitty coffee I could hear the person’s voice she’s listening to. “…found the body of one Libby Radcliffe, who hanged herself inside the living area of her home approximately four days prior.”

  “M-my mother’s dead?” she whispers into the phone. Jackass teacher guy jumps up to her rescue, running his hand through his hair pretending her worst news is his as well. He stands in front of her, waiting to comfort her, but she doesn’t get off the phone fast enough for him so he manhandles her into his chest. Jesus, Claire, I hope you’re not sleeping with this guy. She’s on the phone, crying into Jackass’s chest. He shrugs over her head at their other colleagues that are watching her meltdown. His hip bumps into my table. He doesn’t even say excuse me.

  Claire is inconsolable.

  Just the way I need her to be.

  Her colleagues gather up all her belongings and they rush her outside.

  I sit back and smile, waiting for my next move.

  Chapter 2

  Claire

  My mother had been dead for four days when they found her body hanging from one of the beams of her vaulted ceiling. It would have taken a longer time to find out about her suicide if the driver delivering whatever she ordered on Amazon hadn’t looked in the front window and called 911. Her body had already passed through rigor mortis and back into a relaxed state where bacteria started breaking down the tissues, eating away at her skin.

  I can still smell it, days later, as I pack up her few belongings.

  “Claire? Would you mind terribly if I head down the mountain before the storm fully hits? I don’t want to get stuck in the snow.”

  I look up through my tears toward the voice. Maria Lowell hadn’t changed a bit in the last ten years. Still the Montgomery’s maid, still keeping all their dirty little secrets. I sniffle and nod my head. I don’t want to be alone, but I can’t ask her to stay. This is far too personal, and I have way too many questions that I doubt she’ll be able to answer for me. Besides, I want to get out of this place as fast as I possibly can, before anyone finds out I was ever here. I don’t want to be tangled up in any of this. I have my own problems that are piling up at an alarming rate right now; my mother’s suicide is just the icing on a shit-filled cake.

  I hang my head in my hands and press my palms into my tears. Instantly the couch cushion dips next to me and Ms. Lowell takes my hands and pulls them to her lap. “Oh, Claire. I can’t tell you how sorry I am for your loss.”

  My loss. Right.

  I clear my throat and shrug. “Yeah, thanks.” Inside my blood boils and my teeth clench. Losing someone means at some point you had them, and I never had Libby Radcliffe. And now I’ll really never have her, because she’s dead. And all of it was her choice. Everything was always her way or no way at all.

  Ms. Lowell tilts her head and sighs. “When was the last time you saw your mother?”

  I dart my eyes up to meet hers and bark out a bitter laugh. “Uh, let’s see,” I say, removing my hands from her grip and wiping my eyes again. “Five years, maybe.” Five years. I didn’t even know where she lived. And I would have never thought it was less than an hour’s drive away from me, in a luxurious mountain retreat.

  Ms. Lowell sighs next to me and pats my back.

  “I didn’t know she lived here. I didn’t know about—” The words die on my tongue. I just gesture vaguely at a framed pictured of my mother and Mr. Montgomery. After all this time, after all that’s happened, how could she still have been his mistress?

  Selfish fucking assholes, the both of them.

  In my back pocket my phone beeps. I cry more.

  “Oh, Claire. You poor thing.” She shifts her body to face me. “I never did feel right about their arrangement. But your mother and Silas Montgomery were—”

  “Please don’t. I don’t want to hear about any fairy tale love story. They were two very selfish people, and I just want to clean up whatever she had here and put it all where it belongs, in the trash.”

  “You need to forgive her, Claire.” She leans closer and pulls my chin up gently with a finger. “You look just like her, you know?”

  A chill crawls down my spine and I lean back, away from her touch. “Yeah, well that’s been pretty much a curse for me, you know? Looking exactly like the whore who tore through the famous Montgomery family.” I didn’t even bat my eyes two weeks ago when I heard the news about Mr. Montgomery’s passing. I hadn’t seen a Montgomery in ten years, and I certainly hadn’t spoken to one or even about one.

  I heard about it on the morning news as I got ready for work. Apparently, multi-billionaire Silas Montgomery went for an hour-long jog each morning around his estate, rain or shine, even if it snowed. Except, on that particular day, he never came home. By the time anyone in the house realized he’d never returned from his daily exercise routine, it was dinnertime, and he’d been dead of a massive heart attack a quarter of a mile into his run.

  His loving wife held a press conference asking for privacy during the family’s time of grief. There was a slow sweep of the camera over the family, but I cut off the television dead before I could glimpse any of the Montgomery faces that once filled my heart with pure happiness.

  Now they could all go fuck themselves.

  A little more than a week later my mother committed suicide because the love of her life, another woman’s husband, she could not possibly live without. I guess she forgot again she had a daughter to stick
around for.

  “You need to forgive her, Claire, or everything in your life will be shadowed by your bitterness. You’ll never find happiness for yourself.”

  Ah, no.

  “My mother abandoned me for the man in that picture. Twice.” My phone beeps again in my pocket and I cringe. I can’t take it out and look at it in front of Ms. Lowell. She’ll know something is wrong and what’s going on in my life is none of her business. I’ll deal with whatever it is, I don’t need anyone pretending they could help me with their fake worry. Not when they never showed concern for me or my welfare before. I wasn’t part of the Montgomery family—wasn’t even a thought to any of them, and that became blatantly clear when I was fifteen years old.

  I avoid looking in her eyes and try to bring her attention to the big bay windows with my best expression of complete and utter horror, plus some excessively dramatic finger pointing. “Wow, that snow is really coming down now.” I wasn’t lying either; a few inches had accumulated since I arrived here an hour ago and I can’t have Ms. Lowell stuck here at the cabin with me. Not when I had my own secrets to deal with here. I need her to leave and I need her to leave soon.

  We both stand up from the couch at the same time, me shifting away, her moving toward me. “Let me fix you up a bit first,” she mumbles, pulling a tissue out from her apron pocket and dabbing my cheek with it. “Would you like some eyedrops for your eyes? They look so raw.”

  She’s worried about how red my eyes look from crying? That must be something she’s used to working for the high-maintenance elite, because I wouldn’t care if my eyes turned purple with tears, it’s not like I’d be posting any selfies from here at the tainted Montgomery love shack.

  “No,” I mutter, pulling myself away. “I’m just worried about you driving down the mountain in all this snow.” I hammer the idea in by grabbing her coat off the coat rack and helping her into it. “The weather reports were saying we could get over a foot here.”