Get Ready for War (2 page)

I was clearly behind enemy lines. And it was all Rich's, Spencer's, and Heather's fault because they didn't know how to handle their scandal.

 

I
couldn't sleep.

Couldn't eat.

All I could do was think...

And I didn't wanna think.

Thoughts, and memories, and maybes, and could've beens, would've beens, and should've beens were as useful as a pile of knockoff Louis V. bags. A bad attempt by my mind to redesign what I knew could never change. And no matter how hard I tried to hold back tears or swallow the ache in my throat, I knew that when the sun rose, my world would still be the same. Tumbling down.

I settled into the soft white Egyptian sheets that covered the hotel's king-size bed and did my all to outrun my thoughts . . .

 

I prayed hard that I'd slept for more than two hours. But as usual my prayers failed me . . .

And now I was having another round with coulda, woulda, and shoulda wreckin' my flow. Ugh! Feeling sorry for myself was so thirteen hours ago!

 

I was going stir-crazy. Insane. This was not where I was supposed to be. Not again. The first time maybe . . . but not this time. This time, I was supposed to toss everyone who didn't agree with me the peace sign, while telling them to kiss my . . .

Ugh!

I sat up in bed. Walked over to my hotel suite's Juliet balcony and looked out at the crimson-clay colored mountains. I was in the middle of nowhere . . . Population two hundred and eight. A three-hour plane ride away from civilization. The perfect place for affluent teenage girls—who didn't stick to their parents' scripts—to leave behind their most scandalous secrets on the town's only—and very well paid—ob-gyn's cold steel table.

Maybe...

Know what? Screw maybe.

 

 

I couldn't sleep at all last night. My thoughts were haunting me. This was so not the plan.

The plan was designer diaper bags, matching pink diamonds, Swarovski baby baths. The plan was blistering love between me and my man. Pushing a baby carriage. Having my publicist—something we all had for no other reason than to keep us relevant in the news—flood the media with pictures of my blue-blooded offspring. Maybe a shot at reality TV. Oh, and somewhere in between droppin' it and poppin' it and making my last rounds through a club or two was to be the royal marriage of the billionaire music mogul's princess and the low-money-millionaire commoner.

And no, I wasn't settling.

And yeah, I knew it sounded crazy.

And no, there was no way for me to help who I loved. Trust. My mother tried to stop me from loving him. And all it did was make me want my man more. Heck, I even tried leaving him alone. Twice. But all it did was leave me with two missed periods and two secrets to keep. So there was no fighting it. Knox was the only one I wanted. I had to have him. Period. No negotiation. No waving a white flag. I loved every inch of his six-foot, athletic-built, sexy-caesar, paper-bag brown deliciousness. And yeah, umm hmm, he was all of that.

Snap. Snap.

And yeah, yeah, yeah, sure, I could have any man that I wanted—with way more money and surname prestige. Heck, I was astoundingly beautiful: skin like chocolate silk, a Chinese bob that lay flush against my sharp jawline. Perfectly straight teeth encased by seductive, pouty lips. And my body was hella crazy: D-sized melon cups; molded, exquisitely round and dimple-free black-girl booty; hourglass hips; thick thighs; and luscious long legs. I was the embodiment of sweetness. Candy come to life. Swizz chocolate in human form. So there was no mistake I had it going on. Nevertheless I didn't want anyone else. I wanted Knox.

Even if I was mad at him and was too stubborn to answer his calls and tell him that.

This was way too much drama to only be sixteen.

According to my mother, the Know-Ev-ver-ry-thing-Queen, by the time I was grown, only God knew what kind of fresh-azz skeezer I would be.

I resented that.

Apparently my mother missed the memo: there was no more time for me to be grown. I was already grown. And I wasn't a skeezer—I just wasn't a virgin. Clearly there was a difference.

But did she care? Hell no. All Logan Montgomery cared about was what she had planned for me, and what I wanted didn't matter. My mother was such a dirty bitc—

Know what, I won't even say it, because truth be told, my mother was way worse than any female dog in heat.

What kind of person blackmails their daughter to come to the middle of nowhere by placing a gun—loaded with two lawyers, a Tiffany pen, and a threat to donate my trust fund to the humane society (How inhumane was that?)—to my head, if I didn't do what she said?

She left me with no choice. I had to come here and wait for the doctor to call the hotel suite and tell us when it was time.

She had me by the throat . . . but after this I was done with her. Finished. Because apparently she had me messed up. I was born with the platinum spoon; she was the ex-groupie. And her husband, the high school dropout turned rapper, turned billionaire CEO, was even worse than his wife.

I was sick of these people. And I was tired of my decisions being tied to their money. My life was bigger than that.

I was Rich Montgomery. Socialite extraordinaire. I walked on diamonds. I was the chick who put the
It
in the It Clique. I was the reason the Pampered Princesses could be considered pampered. I was that chick... Now all I needed was to feel like it...

 

White sheets, stirrups, blue scrubs, and bright lights...

“Close your eyes and count backward. By the time you get to three you will be asleep . . .”

 

I ran my hands across the cool white sheets. My palms were in search of Knox's hard, brown body. My fingertips needed to cup his muscular pecs. I needed his heat. His passion. His kisses. His love. To make love and erase the pain I felt easing into my chest and settling there. I needed him, but my palms felt nothing. No heat. No passion. Nothing. He wasn't there. A steel fist balled in my throat.

I opened my eyes and tears lined the rims. They slipped down my cheeks. I wasn't with Knox.

I was at the exclusive doctor's office.

Seated across the room on the left side of my bed, with her legs crossed and her eyes scrolling the pages of
O
magazine, was my mother—the dirty...

Tears continued to run down my cheeks. I reached for a Kleenex and my mother looked over the magazine she leafed through. “Oh, Rich, please, not the tears.”

If I could get out of this bed I would slap her face.
I narrowed my eyes and swallowed the fist in my throat. “Do you know how hard this was for me?”

“Considering that this is the second time we're here, I thought for sure that this had gotten easier.”

“You don't even care!”

“You have about two seconds to drop that tone at least two octaves.”

“Why, Ma? Are you scared someone may hear me?!” Instead of dropping my voice two octaves I raised it by two. “I swear you are sooo confused!”

“Oh, really?”

“Yeah, really, and you know it. You think that my life belongs to you!”

“That's right. That's exactly what I think.” She lowered her eyes back to the magazine and flipped a page. “I'm glad you realized that. Perhaps this'll be the last time we have to fly to this godforsaken place and pay way too much money because you refuse to use condoms and continue to sleep with the hired help's herd. You really need to stop acting like a spoiled, self-centered brat and appreciate how lucky you are. Now, enough. Get some rest because in a few hours we are out of here.”

“Oh, I'm sorry, Mother. Forgive me for not appreciating how you keep making me get abortions. I really apologize for the inconvenience—surely you'd rather be at the spa spending Daddy's money.”

My mother stared at me and closed the magazine. I knew I was teetering on the edge, but I didn't care. Everything was not about her and what she wanted. And she needed to know that. I was sick of this control freak. This was my life and from this moment I was going to live it. My way. So, I returned the same nasty look that she had given me and at this moment we were mirror images of one another . . . until she rose from her seat and I felt like a five-year-old about to get a spanking.

She crowded my personal space and hovered over me, nose practically to nose.

“What did you say?” my mother asked. Her coffee breath blew in the center of my face. I blinked and she leaned in even closer.

“With all due respect, Ma. I really need you to back up. Literally and figuratively.” She arched a brow and I continued. “I don't need you sweatin' me right now.”

“Sweatin' you?”

“Yeah, you're way too close. And another thing, since we're going there, I don't want to hear any lectures about what you think is best for me, especially since you've never asked me what I want.”

“Because what you want doesn't matter. Yo' azz,” she said with her Southern California drawl in full effect, “better want what da hell I tell you to want.”

“Okay. Since that's how you'd like to have it. I tell you what: after today I'll be your little robot. Will that please you?” I folded my hands in a prayer position and said in a sweet, sarcastic whine, “I won't get into any trouble, Mommy. I'll stay off the blogs, go to an Ivy League university—”

“And they would never have you.”

“Oh, you're right.” I placed one of my manicured hands over my heart. “Forgive me for that, too. From this abortion on, I'll be the born-again angelic virgin. Your little princess. Who keeps her legs closed and gets good grades. As a matter of fact, I'll be more like you. I'll leave the hired help's herd alone and instead I'll head to dressing rooms and stalk rappers and NBA players.”

My mother's hand sailed across my face and burned my cheek as it landed. I almost fell out the bed as my head jerked toward the guardrail.

I quickly collected myself and as I tried to sit up my mother's hand flew through the air to smack me again, but this time I caught her wrist, flung her hand away from my face, and gave her a look that dared her to bring it.

For the first time in my life I felt I could fight her. Like I could take her down.

My mother snatched her hand away and scanned my eyes. “Oh, you wanna fight me, huh? Okay. You think you can beat me now, is that it?” She took a step back, walked over to the door, and locked it. “Is that what they're doing in Hollywood High—little girls fighting their mothers?”

“That's the problem—I'm not a little girl. I'm a woman.” All I could see was red. The voice of reason went out the window, and at that moment I didn't give a freak about the consequences. If she whopped my azz so be it, but one thing was for sure and two things were for certain: I would fight for what I wanted.

“A woman?”
my mother said to me as she removed her wedding band and twenty-karat engagement ring.

“A woman.” I swallowed any and all fear that crept its way up on me. She had raised me to be a lot of things, but a punk wasn't one of them. So the look I gave her all but told her to try me.

“A woman. Okay.” My mother gathered the drapes and the light in the room dimmed.

“A woman,” she repeated.

I scooted to the edge of the bed. I was sore, but I was also willing to ignore the pain to prove my point.

My mother walked back over to me and said, “Let me help you out a bit.
A woman
has her own money and pays for her own abortions—actually a woman doesn't get pregnant by every Tom, Dick, and Knox she lies down with. A woman uses a condom and doesn't have to hold her mother's hand to the doctor's office—”

“I didn't ask you to bring me to the doctor's office!”

“Then you shouldn't have come. You're grown. You got this.”

“It's too late now.”

“You're right. It is too late, because if you keep runnin' your mouth, I'ma kill you.” She sounded as if she'd just stepped off the streets of Watts. “If I were you—”

“You may as well be; you're making all my decisions.”

“Oh, okay.” My mother removed her earrings. “I see I'ma have to go to jail again.”

“What? Jail?”

“Oh, you didn't know that, did you?”

I swallowed.

“Don't get scared now, sweetie. You wanna buck, so let's do this, homie. 'Cause see, obviously I need to reintroduce you to who I used to be and am only two seconds from becoming again: Shakeesha Logan Gatling. Grape Street Crippette. I put bullets in chicks' heads for less than the ruckus you just brought me.” She positioned her right hand like a gun, put it to my forehead, and as she mushed me in my forehead she pulled the trigger.

I felt a slight nervousness try to sneak up on me, but I swallowed.

“Too late now,” my mother said as if she'd read my mind. “You better shake that off. What, you need some Vaseline? Take your earrings off.” She quickly reached behind my ears and unfastened my hoops. She placed them on the table and said, “So you want babies, huh? You wanna be a woman. You wanna be with Knox. You're willing to get beat down for Knox? You love him that much—”