Read Big Brother Billionaire (Part Two) Online
Authors: Lexie Ray
Big Brother Billionaire (Part Two)
BIG BROTHER BILLIONAIRE
Part 2 of 3
L E X I E R A Y
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My dear Parker,
I’ve read your letter so many times that I’m sure I can recite it by heart. It’s so wonderful to hear from you, so amazing to know that you’re safe and doing well.
Your detective work paid off. I’m glad you figured out my address—without alerting the parents as to your whereabouts. You’re beyond their reach, legally, but I know how they can be. If you’re not careful, they’ll suck you back in.
I want to visit you. I want to call you. I want to hold you in my arms and never let you go. School is difficult right now, and it’s impossible to get time off to visit you, but I would leave all of this at your command.
Tell me to leave all of it. Tell me to come be by your side, as we are meant to be.
I love you so much.
You could say what you wanted about relationships with your parents. Those ties were different with everyone. I knew people who had horrible childhoods but appreciated their parents. And I knew others who had amazing childhoods but couldn’t stand to be in the same hemisphere as the people who raised them.
However, you could never predict how you’d react to hearing that the person who had shaped you in your formative years—for better or for worse—had died. It happened to almost everyone, except for the unlucky few who didn’t outlive their own parents.
My alert came in the form of a letter from the lawyer handling her estate—her estate, which was a valid legal term but something that was almost laughable. I remembered the battered house I’d grown up in, the street that wasn’t that safe once the sun went down. That estate?
I wasn’t even sure how the letter had found its way to me. I’d never had any contact whatsoever with my mom, not after I ran away from home and established myself in Miami, resolute on building a life apart if I couldn’t have the life I wanted with Marcus. The lawyer was good at what he did—that much was clear. He’d been tasked with finding the next of kin, wherever I might be hunkering down, and here I was, holding the summons like it was a bomb that was ready to explode in my face.
The most surprising thing was that I felt nothing. There wasn’t even a nostalgia for the days of “Parker and Patty, two beautiful broads.” The woman who had brought me into the world was gone, and it was just an inconvenient blip in my day.
I had to scrape some money together for a cheap plane ticket—discounted for bereavement—to fly back to the West Coast. She’d moved from the house she’d shared with Keith since I left, and I was looking at the frame of a house in a nice neighborhood—nothing frilly, but a place where you could walk your dog at night and feel good about it. Patty had finally made it to the perfect house I’d always imagined. There it was, the mailbox at the end of the driveway. The grass in the yard was a little long, but that could be understood. The person who took care of that was dead now.
I collected the mail from the box, put it inside, and started making phone calls. Death was a complicated business for something that seemed so simple. When someone drew their last breath, thousands of things started scrambling in place. There was the lawyer, who needed to meet with me about the will. The hospital, which needed to be paid for looking after her in her last days. The funeral home, which needed to know what she would look like for her service and where she would be interred in her final resting place. There was the realtor, who could liquidate this perfect little house to help fund my imperfect existence in Miami.
And there were all the details of all the things my mom had ever owned, waiting for me inside that perfect little home like an ambush.
I sat there, among all of the relics of my childhood, of my mother’s life up until this moment. There were photos of me that I wasn’t aware she’d ever taken, framed and preserved like a shrine on a bookshelf. There were some remnants of Marcus, too, probably leftovers from his father’s death several years prior. I hadn’t come back to the West Coast for that, too afraid of being in the same room as Marcus and my mom, too frightened of what would or wouldn’t happen.
She’d kept every scrap of my baby clothing, a sentimental nugget that I’d never realized she’d had. Before she married Keith, we’d had such a hard time that I didn’t recognize she had such feelings about my childhood. I didn’t care one way or another about the times I’d spent alone, her at work, trying to earn enough money to keep the two of us fed, in clothes, and a roof over our heads.
But the idea that she’d kept these baby clothes, probably for the baby she always hoped I’d have … did things to me. The baby I’d never have. That dream was dying with my mother. I’d donate these. Maybe they could help with someone else’s dream.
There was so much clutter. How did we collect so many things in life? How did they pile up like this? Things we thought were important to us didn’t mean a thing to the next person coming along. There had to be a reason my mom had kept all of this. Maybe, if I tried hard enough, I could piece together the reason, put the puzzle back together, and find out why my mom’s love for me had driven me away, across the country to start anew.
There was a knock on the door, and I frowned. I hoped it wasn’t the preacher from the funeral, or any well-wishers for those who had known my mom. I couldn’t stomach the idea of a gelatinous casserole I’d be expected to consume.
I threw the door open, resolute in dealing with whatever was on the other side of it as quickly as possible, and found myself enveloped in a hug.
“I missed you so much. I’m so sorry about the circumstances, but goddamn it, Parker, it’s good to see you.”
“Marcus,” I managed, my voice catching. “How…why…what are you doing here?”
“I wanted to make it for the funeral,” he said. “I’m so sorry, Parker, that I missed it. I didn’t want you to be there alone, but I didn’t receive word any of this had happened until it was too late. I was barely able to book the company jet.”
I blinked quickly. Company jet? Was Marcus that well off? I probably wouldn’t be able to make rent this month because of my little jaunt across the country, shoved back in coach between two overweight men.
“Why didn’t you call me the moment you knew?” he asked.
“I didn’t really want to bother you with it,” I said, shrugging. “She was never really your mother. She was mine. Same reason I didn’t go to your father’s funeral.”
“But I still called you about it,” he said, frowning. He was getting wrinkles already, or maybe more of a gentle weathering, even at our age, and a few silver hairs at either temple, but it suited him. I hoped I wasn’t aging as noticeably. Why did the years always treat men better? He would continue to get more desirable and I would simply wither away.
“I’m sorry for not calling you,” I said. “I didn’t think it would matter to you.”
“Of course it matters to me,” he said. I was still having a hard time believing that he was really here, that he was standing in front of me, in the flesh. It had been a while since we’d been together like this. “Don’t you know what this means?”
“What this means?” I repeated, a little confused. My mom was dead. I knew that much. I took a seat again among the odds and ends of her life, and Marcus joined me on the carpet.
“The last person acting as a barrier to our being together is dead,” he said, holding my face in his hands, forcing me to look at him. “Your mother is gone. She can watch whatever happens and cringe and rage at us with my father.”
“They were our parents,” I gasped, finally getting the strength to drag myself away from him. “They had their faults, Marcus, but they were still our parents.”
“I let go of that idea a long time ago,” he said, shaking his head. “If they couldn’t understand true love, then I didn’t want to waste my life trying to please them.”
“You’re not sorry at all that my mother is dead?” I asked him, but I was mostly asking myself. I realized that I hadn’t seen her since I’d fled from there, unwilling to endure life without Marcus. But I didn’t feel any of the emotions I thought would be appropriate for a parent dying—sadness, regret, despair. There was not even a minute amount of grief present in my heart.
Overall, I felt nothing. Nothingness tinged with relief.
“I’m not sorry that the person who planted the idea in your head that the love we share is wrong is gone, no,” Marcus said, lifting his chin defiantly, daring me to contradict him, to tell him he was wrong and unfeeling.
“How can you say that only one person told us we can’t be together?” I demanded.
“Well, to be fair, my father was just as much a part of that as she was,” Marcus allowed, but he missed my meaning.
“Our entire culture tells us this is wrong,” I argued. “Society looks down upon us. There are laws, Marcus…”
“There is no blood relation between us,” he said, his hands dropping by his sides, his palms upturned, his eyes wide with exasperation, with disbelief. “We were in love with each other before our parents married. Yes, for a time, we were raised under the same roof and told that we would be brother and sister, but there isn’t anything wrong with breaking past that, with recognizing each other as more than that. As lovers. As husband and wife.”
I exhaled heavily, putting my hands on my head, wondering if I should instead place them over my ears. I wasn’t ready to hear that. I wasn’t ready for Marcus to tell me that not only did he want to renew our physical relationship now that my mother was dead, but that he wanted to put a ring on my finger and make it official.
“You want to marry me?” I wished I could’ve shouted it in outrage, howled it at the ceiling of the house that had denied me everything and sent us careening to opposite ends of the country. However, I only had the strength to whisper it, stunned and hurt and finally finding the tears that had so far eluded me. My tears had betrayed me at the funeral home, ignored me at the cemetery, even as the coffin had been lowered into the ground, as the dirt had been pushed over it, as the feelings that were supposed to be buried with it instead came seeping out from between the loose dirt clods and reminded me that not even death could change things.
I couldn’t resolve the idea of Marcus and I ever being together.
“Of course I want to marry you,” he said, seizing my hands, squeezing them. “I’ve wanted it from the beginning, from the time I first set my eyes on you.”
“As a senior in high school?” I snorted.
“It might sound hokey to you, but it’s not to me,” he said. “Love at first sight. A premonition. Call it what you want, Parker, but don’t disrespect it. You know as well as I do that it was real. That it’s still real.”
“Even after all these years?” I wanted him to break down and admit that there had been many, many women, and that he had been trying as hard as I had to drive the love for me out of his heart and out of his life.
“Especially after all these years,” he said, lifting one of my hands to his mouth, kissing it. “Like a fine wine. Deeper. Richer. More meaningful. Most people never experience love like this, you know? We’re lucky.”
“Lucky?” I scoffed.
“You disagree.”
“I disagree,” I said, mocking his tone, his choice of words. He was talking like all his letters, with all that language and those turns of phrases he’d learned in college. “I don’t feel lucky at all.”
“Why not?” His face was calm, and his voice was even, but I could still tell that he was panicking. This wasn’t what he expected. He’d wanted me to fall into his arms, to tell him that this was all I’d been waiting for—my mother to die, so that we could be together. I felt a cruel curl of delight. I had suffered so much over all these years while Marcus had enjoyed a very successful life. It was time for him to share in the wealth of my despair.
“It’s easy for you to feel lucky,” I said. “You had all this leisure time at school—probably partying and fucking and making friends and having an amazing time—to dwell, academically, on the idea of the two of us, on the idea that we would someday be together. I’ve been struggling, Marcus, struggling to make a life for myself in a strange city, muddling through it alone, without any money or support. I haven’t had the luxury of wondering what could’ve been between us because I’m too busy trying to survive. These years haven’t been so good to me.”
“I told you that once we were together, things would be different for you,” he said, unshed tears glistening in his eyes. They made me hate him, that he could cry and I couldn’t. “I’m sorry that it’s been hard for you, Parker. I’m so sorry. You’re right. It’s not fair. But everything can be different now. Come with me. Leave Miami.”
“That’s the thing you don’t understand,” I said. “You can’t just come in here and sweep me off my feet and expect everything to be all right. Did it ever occur to you that maybe I wouldn’t want you to save me?”
“I didn’t mean for it to sound like that,” he said. “I know that you’re more than capable of taking care of yourself, Parker.”
“Then why doesn’t it seem that way?” I stared at him, daring him to have a comeback, frustrated at myself more than anyone.
“Give me a chance,” he pled. “Let me show you that it’s going to be good. We haven’t had our chance to be together. Neither of us really knows how it’s going to be. Do you want to keep on not knowing? Live in complete ignorance of what we could have if we opened ourselves to each other?”
I shook my head. “This is too much to take in right now, Marcus. My mother just died. I have to go through all of this…” I swept my hand out to indicate all of the packing boxes I was filling, all of the things I didn’t know what to do with, this life I was living, and how confused I was about it.