Shame: A Stepbrother Romance (20 page)

I don’t know on what level I know it, but I
do
know he’s right. It’s definitely not my mind that gets convinced first. It is too busy listing all the reasons I should just slap him across the face right now. It’s more of a gut feeling, an impulse reaction at the word ‘mistake’. I realize that’s how I’ve felt about the whole thing ever since I decided to come to the clinic.

I don’t want to kill the baby. I don’t want to have to live with that decision for the rest of my life even if I never get my clean break because of it. And isn’t that what the cards said after all, to follow my gut? Maybe the cards’ message wasn’t about the baby at all, maybe the future hadn’t come just yet and I was making rash decisions based on hatred.

Now my gut speaks as clearly as a bell. I want to listen to him. I need to hear what he has to say and that’s the gut feeling I go with.

I place my hand on top of his head, which is still pressed to my belly, and I stroke his smooth hair. The security guards look at each other confused.

“Okay,” I finally whisper, “Ten minutes.”

CHAPTER TWENTY

“How are you feeling?” Andrew asks and his face speaks genuine concern. All the way to my apartment he’s been treating me like I’m in my ninth month instead of my second. He’s opening all doors and not letting me touch a thing and scolding his chauffeur every time he makes a rash turn or goes over a more substantial bump without slowing down. “We’ve got a pregnant woman here, Oliver, not a sack of potatoes.” If I weren’t so preoccupied with my own raging thoughts, I’d have giggled.

“I’m okay,” I assure him as I sit down on my couch, moving away the blankets, pillows and books. I realize my apartment is a complete mess, but there’s no other place I’d rather discuss anything with him right now.

It will be a while before I start to feel like a real pregnant woman despite the dizziness and the sudden bouts of nausea. Right now, I assign these more to the shock I’ve lived through in the past half hour than to pregnancy.

“Thank you for doing this and hey, I want you to feel safe,” he says and sits down on the armchair next to the couch, respectfully keeping his distance. “I want you to know that I would never hurt you.”

“But you did, Andrew,” I say regretfully. It’s strange sitting here and discussing all this with him of all people. “And you didn’t just hurt me. You
ruined
me and I can’t think of anything I’ve done to deserve it.”

“You haven’t done anything!” he says passionately and reaches forward to touch my hand, but I pull away and he knows he can’t pass any more boundaries before he’s given me a decent explanation. He sinks back into the armchair and runs his fingers through his hair.

I can’t help but notice how attractive he is even in this ruffled state. I wish this was not how we had to meet and I wish there was a way of erasing the past. Whatever he has to say to me right now may explain why he did what he did, but I doubt I’ll ever be able forget the nightmare he’s brought on me.

“I think I should start from the very beginning,” he says eventually, “Maybe that will give you a better idea of why I did what I did.”

I only nod in agreement and pull a blanket from the floor, wrapping myself against the creeping chill in my feet. It’s not cold in the apartment, but his voice, my nervousness and the grave atmosphere that weighs down on us is making me shiver. I’m ready to listen.

“We all have things in our past we are less than proud of,” he begins, “I know even the smartest and most careful people manage to get themselves into real trouble at least once in their lives. Well, before we met, I was neither smart nor careful. On the contrary, I was spoiled and privileged and most of all, I was incredibly bored. I’d already done all the things any parent would try to prevent their children from.”

“I’d slept with more women than I could count and it was easy, maybe too easy to give me the thrill I was so desperately chasing at the time. I was young and had more money than I could spend, so even the most prized conquests—models, emerging actresses, high-school sweethearts—did not count as much of a challenge in my books.”

I’m having a hard time sympathizing with him if that’s his intention so far. Entrapping women and calling them conquests was far from the sob story I was expecting him to spin for me. I can feel the inklings of resentment take root in me at the mere thought of ‘models and actresses’ passing casually through his bed, but for the baby’s sake I force myself to listen further.

His eyes are glazed over and concentrated on a point on the wall behind me. It feels like he is no longer in the room with me, but has traveled back in time and is really seeing himself as he used to be all these years ago.

“I’ve done drugs,” he goes on, “I’ve got myself into meaningless fights, I’ve stolen and I’ve bullied innocent people for my and my closest friends’ enjoyment. I was spending recklessly and didn’t even stop to think where the money came from. Of course, I was blind to what I was doing and what it cost the people who cared about me, mostly my father. Still, it wasn’t enough.”

“Then I made the one mistake that finally proved too much for my father, who’d settled for closing his eyes for my self-indulgence and lack of restraint. He’d just got married to Eva, his second wife, who came in to live with us with her daughter Chloe.”

I really don’t like where all this is going and I feel my mouth going dry and the air become thicker and more difficult to breathe. I brace myself for what I know is coming. He’s done it before! He’s seduced his sister and he’s played her the way he played me. I wasn’t even his first victim and he’s come here to ask my understanding and forgiveness? My face grows red with rage as I wrap the blanket more tightly around my shaking body.

Still I find it in myself not to say a thing. I’ll have plenty to say when his little confession is over. It’s not like I haven’t spent the last week thinking of all the things I wanted to shout in his face if I ever got the chance.

“Jo, are you okay?” he asks and I assure him I am with a husky voice and squinting eyes.

He knows I’m at the end of my patience and he’d asked for his ten minutes, so he starts speaking faster.

“My father was so in love with his new wife, she was just what he needed to take his mind off of his son’s shameful debauchery. He became blind to whatever I did at the time, leaving me with no moral compass and no one to truly hurt. It’s then that I realized that the entire time I’d been acting out because of him. I’d been trying to pay him back for divorcing my mother and sending her away when I was too young to be able to articulate how I felt about the whole thing.”

“Every fight, every newspaper headline that involved my name and any of my scandalous relationships, every time I woke up barely sober at the police station, had been attempts to attack him in return for leaving me motherless. Now that he no longer cared what I did and even my basest actions didn’t appear to hurt him, I knew I had to step up my game to really get to him.”

“I went for the only thing he cared about,” he says quietly, “His wife.”

I feel the nausea rise up again and I start throwing away the pillows and blanket, making way for an urgent trip to the bathroom. Is it the baby? Is it the sticky, bilious disgust that floods my insides at the mere thought of Andrew sleeping with his step-mother? Has he ever had similar designs on
my
mother? I think I will never gather the strength to go back to him in the living room.

He’d dragged me out of the abortion clinic and come over here to try to redeem himself, to explain his actions, and so far all he’s done is make me even more embittered towards him.

I’ve hardly managed to fix myself after the stomach convulsions have finally settled down when he knocks on the bathroom door.

“Jo? Are you alright?”

I open the door and he steps back to let me out. His expression is pained and I suspect he knows how I feel about him after his confession.

“I don’t know if this was a good idea,” I say, pressing my hands over my rumbling stomach, “Maybe it’s best if you go now.”

“Please, Jo, let me finish. All this is history. It was a mistake I’ve paid for over and over, but I still need to tell you about Chloe.”

Chloe? I give him a horrified look. Did he sleep with her too? Did he sleep with them
both
? What kind of sick family does he come from? I’ve never imagined so much depravity could be concentrated within the same household. Did these people have no limits because of their wealth?

When he takes me by the waist and almost carries me back to the couch, I let him. It would have been either that or collapsing right there in the hallway. The morning so far has been way more than my already exhausted body can handle, so I let myself fall back onto the soft cushions and my eyes wander out the window where the snowfall has picked up again. The snowflakes are not tiny delicate crystals anymore, but lumpy, fat pieces of cotton, falling heavily on the window frame.

“I wasn’t even into Eva,” Andrew keeps going, probably hoping that even with the vacant look in my eyes, I’m still listening to him, “but the woman was filthy to begin with and the affair was dangerous and thrilling enough for me to sustain. It wasn’t hard getting her into my bed and since it all happened under my father’s roof, it wasn’t long before someone ratted us out to him. Whether it was Chloe or any of the staff members, I never found out. I don’t believe it was Chloe though. Even if she’d known something, she wouldn’t have risked the comfortable lifestyle she’d landed with her mother’s latest marriage.”

“As you already know, my father did not take the news well, and I don’t blame him. The love of his life and the son who’d only ever disappointed him had delivered a blow that was too hard to forgive and he got rid of us all. I was left with nothing and threatened that if I don’t leave town, worse things would follow. Eva and Chloe were left penniless and banished as well. I didn’t hear from them again, nor did I want to. I’d finally realized I’d gone too far, but I’d already lost everything.”

“I won’t go into detail about the next few years. I’ll only say that I found out what it meant not to have the safety cushion of my father’s name and money to land against. The moment you lose your money, you end up losing almost all of your friends, who are no longer interested in hanging out with a charity case. Helping out someone who’s on the brink of poverty was not considered
fun
in my previous circles, so I was now alone and clueless about how the world operated for the poor.”

Andrew’s gentle voice buzzes past my ears and I try to picture him miserable and alone, but I still cannot gather any sympathy towards him. If anything, his story convinces me that what goes around comes around and he’d got exactly what he’d deserved for what he did to Joe. I don’t harbor any warm feelings towards my step-father and still I can’t help but pity his cluelessness at his own son and wife’s betrayal.

“Someone came to my rescue when I was at the very bottom,” Andrew goes on, “I was practically living on the streets when Chloe found me. She had big news and it had taken her some time to locate me, but she’d been determined to find me. I was the missing piece in her scheme and she did her best to pull me out of the shit I’d buried myself in.”

“She told me my father had married again. Some woman named Olivia who also had a daughter. Only a few years after we’d been all kicked out of his home and his good graces, he was playing house again and pretended we never existed in his life.”

“Chloe was livid. She and her mother had lived modestly at best after the fallout and she couldn’t handle the fact that from a rich, prominent heiress, a socialite princess, she’d turned into an ordinary nobody, but even worse—there was another girl who was reaping the benefits that in her mind were rightfully hers. You.”

“She’d hatched a plan. She couldn’t hope for my dad to ever care about her again. Why would he? He seemed to have forgotten his own birth son in favor of some stranger. I, on the other hand, could still get back into his life if I played my cards well with her help.”

“She convinced me that I should clean up my act and go back home, and she also made me believe you were the enemy. I know what you are thinking and I know none of this was ever your fault, but from my position at the very bottom looking up, I couldn’t see it then. We’d agreed we needed to bring you down while at the same time establish me as the good, repentant son who’d changed his ways completely, so I could compete for my father’s affection once again.”

“By now you know Joe well and you know that almost all he cares about is his little empire and the immaculate facade he puts in front of his circles and society. A serious blow on his reputation that could be traced back to you was the easiest way to turn the tables in our favor.”

It finally started to all come together in my mind. Listening to him, I realize that moving in with a new family is never like getting a clean slate. On the contrary. There is usually so much buried in the past that you no longer just carry your own baggage. By becoming Joe’s daughter, I’ve ended up assuming all the old burdens—the history, the jealousies, the rivalries and the betrayals—along with the new house and the new dad.

I feel like a dumb puppet that’s been secretly observed and planned against without even having the slightest clue. Still, I can’t find the strength to kick him out of here. I need to hear everything. It’s sort of masochistic, the way I soak up his words and strain to hear what poison will come out of his perfect lips next.