The Kiss (Addison #1)
Read The Kiss (Addison #1) Online
Authors: Erica M. Christensen
The Kiss
By Erica M. Christensen
The Kiss
Copyright © 2014 by Erica M. Christensen. All rights reserved.
First Print Edition: November 2014
Limitless Publishing, LLC
Kailua, HI 96734
Formatting: Limitless Publishing
ISBN-13: 978-1502709202
ISBN-10: 1502709201
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to locales, events, business establishments, or actual persons—living or dead—is entirely coincidental.
Dedication
To my parents for being irresponsible young people and creating me 23 years ago. If it weren’t for you guys, I wouldn’t be here to write this book nor any future books. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or not, yet. But, I love you guys!
Table of Contents
“Addison, my dear, take a seat.” My boss, Shelly Lewis, says while clicking her obnoxiously long hot pink acrylic nails onto her keyboard. I can’t understand how people can willingly get fake nails that are four inches long. It’s just so gross to me. Shelly scoots back in her leopard print leather swivel chair and clasps her hands together. This is going to be really good or really bad.
“I just wanted to let you know that you’re one of the best employees that we’ve ever had here…” Hell yes! I knew it! It’s going to be
really
good. Hopefully this means bitch face Brittany is getting canned finally and I’m getting promoted to the Marketing Director, but if not, at least a raise that’s more than a damn nickel would be fantastic.
“…I’m truly sorry to tell you this…” Wait, what? That definitely escalated quickly. “…unfortunately we have to cut back on staff due to the economy, and as a result, your position is the first to be eliminated. There aren’t any open positions available for you at this time, but I will contact you as soon as something opens up.” My heart stops, and my smile quickly fades.
“I’m sorry, Addison, I’m so very sad to see you go. But on a brighter note, you’re young and you’ll find something easily!” Shelly gives me a warm smile, pulls a tissue out of her fancy leopard print covered tissue box, and hands it to me.
Is this real life? I’m being laid off from my job two weeks before Christmas? This has to be some sort of fucking joke.
“Well, thank you for giving me this amazing opportunity. I loved working with you, Shelly, and everyone else here.” Tears start to fill my eyes. I grab the tissue from her, pull a few more out of the fancy box and walk out of her office. Merry fucking Christmas to me. I grab my cell and call my fiancé, Carlos.
“Carlos, baby! Can you come pick me up from work, I have some terrible news.” I sob uncontrollably. Carlos has to pick me up from work because my dumb ass thought it'd be a brilliant idea to drink and drive last weekend, the hot policeman did not. This year is obviously ending well, I just pray this isn’t an indication of what the new year has in store for me.
“Uh yeah, I’m kinda tied up with something right now. I, uh, I’ll be there in…ugh—” he pants and grunts. I can hear muffled moaning in the background, like sexual moans, but it doesn’t sound like a female’s muffled moans.
“Carlos, what the fuck are you doing? Where are you?” I holler. I see a taxi coming up and wave it down.
“I’m working out and I’m at home! I’ll be there in thirty minutes—chill!” he shouts back. None of this sounds right to me. For one, Carlos never seemed too busy for me when I called him before and he definitely never put working out before me. Two, he never fucking works out at home, he always goes to the gym.
I hand the taxi driver $200 for a five-mile drive so he’d hurry, and he did. I had him drop me off halfway down the block so Carlos wouldn’t hear a vehicle pull in. I slip out of my heels and power-walk into the house. I can still hear moaning, groaning, and manly screams. I storm up the white spiral stairs to our bedroom and find my fiancé face down, ass up, naked, while the pool boy plows him from behind. This is ludicrous!
“ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME, CARLOS? WHAT IS THIS?” I scream. The pool boy is startled and falls off the bed, then hurries to grab his clothes off the floor to cover himself. Carlos’s skin goes from a caramel brown to a maraschino cherry red. He frantically grabs the sheet and wraps it around himself.
“Baby, it’s not what you think,” Carlos says in his sexy Hispanic accent, but I’m not falling for that shit.
“It’s not what I think? You were just fucking our pool boy! How long has this been going on? Jesus Christ, Carlos! I can’t believe this, I can’t believe you! We’re done!” I shout. Carlos tries to comfort me by reaching his hand out to grab my shoulder, but I push him away.
“We’re not done, Addison. No one will know about this. You have a life anyone would die for. I don’t give a fuck what you do, sleep with other men. I won’t care, I promise. Do what you want, Addison, but we can’t call off the wedding. No one can know about this. We have to get married! Please, Addison! Whatever you want, you can have it. Do you want those new Jimmy Choo pumps you were telling me about? Please, Addison! ANYTHING AND IT’S YOURS!” he pleads.
I wipe the tears from my eyes. “Why, Carlos? Why can’t anyone know about this? Being gay is far more accepted now. So why the fuck can’t anyone know? Why would we
still
get married?” I start to bawl uncontrollably again.
“My dad can’t find out. If he finds out I’m gay I will have nothing. He’ll disown me, then fire me, and then I’ll never inherit the real estate agency when he dies. That company is my life, Addison!” He starts to cry.
This was the first time I’ve ever seen him cry and it makes my blood heat to a rolling boil. We never fight, ever. So I guess that’s why he’s never cried in front of me. His cry face is repulsive, I want to vomit. The sound of his crying and pleading makes me want to spartan kick his ass straight out of the window. I feel more hatred toward him than I do toward my sad excuse of a father who up and left me and my mom when I was seven.
“No, Carlos! The wedding is off! This is the lowest thing you could have ever done to me. I trusted you. I loved you, I was head over fucking heels in love with you! Or maybe it was just the materialistic shit that I loved because I was completely drowned in it. I moved here to start over and I ended up right back where I was before. I’m not pretending anymore. I’m not pretending for you. I can’t. It’s over.” I glance at the pool boy just sitting in the corner of the room with his head between his legs as if he’s embarrassed. I turn to walk out the door.
“If it wasn’t for me you wouldn’t have anything! You’d still be sleeping on couches at your random friends’ houses. You wouldn’t have all of your Gucci or Versace. You wouldn’t have shit, Addison! YOU NEED ME AND I NEED YOU!” Carlos shouts.
I turn back to look him in the eyes. “I’m done. We’re done.”
“Please, Addison! Whatever you want, you can have it! You name it and I will buy it! No one has to know. We’ll keep living how we’ve been living and everything will be okay. Right? We can do this, baby. You’re my best friend, I still love you. Please, Addison, please!”
“You have destroyed me, Carlos. You have no idea what you’ve done, and you will regret fucking me over.” I take my phone out and snap a picture of Carlos, naked in the sheet, and the pool boy, naked in the corner, and send it to his dad.
“Oh no! Oh hell no, Addison! Give me that phone. Don’t you dare send that to my father! I swear to God, I will throw you right back in the gutter I picked you up out of!” His voice shakes and he clenches his fist.
“I’d rather look like I have nothing and be loved and happy than look like I have everything and be lonely and miserable. So screw you and your million dollar house. Keep my Gucci and Versace and everything else. I don’t need it and I sure as hell don’t need you! All I need are my jeans and cowgirl boots.”
Winters in southern Florida are beautiful, I only needed jeans and a light jacket at the very most. Back home in Iowa, that’s autumn attire. I had to stop at the mall before my flight this morning to buy a heavy coat, gloves, and a scarf to prepare for back home. My mom said lately the highest it’s been outside is ten degrees. I’m obviously extremely excited to leave the beautiful sunny land of Florida to go back to the freezing land of snow-covered cow shit.
“Welcome on board Flight 784 to Willington, Iowa. Our aircraft is under the command of Captain Schlink. He has informed me that our flying time will be approximately five and a half hours…” Well, this is going to be a nice long flight.
I still can’t believe Carlos is gay, and has been the whole time we’ve been together. I kind of feel bad for sending his dad the picture, but I wanted to hurt him like he hurt me. I guess I should have known, though. He did always have the nicest sense of style. Hell, he picked out my clothes because he said I had no fashion sense. I will say he did a damn good job. Not that a straight man couldn’t do the same thing.
We were never really intimate either—occasionally we were—but not as often as we should have been. The sex was honestly awful, he never seemed to be into it, but I just thought he sucked in bed and eventually it would get better. His body is what made sex tolerable. I can’t believe I’m just now realizing all of this. It all makes sense now though. I just wish I wouldn’t have fallen in love with him. I mean, I also fell in love with all of the materialistic things he smothered me in, but that’s beside the point. I fell in love with him. He was caring, witty, goofy, and sensitive. He was my best friend and all I had in Florida. I should have just sucked it up and married him. I’d already spent the last couple of years as his cover-up, what’s a few more years?
Now that I think about it, the majority of my life has been a cover-up. For crying out loud, after my dad left us my mom told people around town that he’d gotten a new job in New York and was sending money to support us. Well, the town found out quickly it was all a façade when they saw her go from being a stay at home mom to working at the grocery store and the town bar. Her lying about it made grade school and middle school hell for me. Those little snot-nosed fucks I went to school with would go around saying my dad left us because I was so ugly and fat. They’d make fun of my clothes because I had to get them from the thrift store, and of course that was before thrift shopping became cool. Thanks, Macklemore and Ryan Lewis, for not coming out with the song “Thrift Shop” about fourteen years earlier. It wasn’t that we were poor or anything, my mom and grandparents just didn’t think it was necessary for me to have expensive name brand clothing because I grew out of them too quickly.
I got made fun of for getting good grades, for always having my nose stuck in a book, but that was the only escape I had from the cruelties of the little assholes I went to school with. I only had one friend, Stephen Hadan. He wasn’t much better off. He was tall and scrawny, with glasses and slightly crooked bottom teeth. He had fluffy curly brown hair that almost resembled an afro, and of course everyone made fun of him for it.
In grade school during recess we’d sit by the steps and read books together, or make up our own stories while all of the other kids played kickball and ran around on the playground. Once we hit middle school and no longer had recess, we quickly learned that we needed to sit in the back of the classroom so no one could stick notebook paper fringe in our hair and laugh at us. It was also way easier to hide a book inside of our textbooks—the teacher never really gave a shit anyway. We handed our homework in on time, always got an A, and we were basically invisible to them. The teachers were so caught up in trying to be a ‘
cool’
teacher that they’d basically praise the little douche bags for being ass clowns by turning their head and laughing.
Every day we’d ride the bus home from school and Stephen would come over. My grandpa would have fresh deer jerky for us to pig out on in the backyard while we talked shit about all of the people we had to put up with every day. Stephen and I both grew up in pretty shitty living situations. His dad didn’t run off like mine did, but his mom and dad fought a lot, which drove his mom to drink and then eventually led to her alcohol addiction.
During eighth grade his mom went to rehab and came back right before we started high school. His dad was constantly working, so Stephen always came over to my house for dinner and company. Stephen had always been my best friend and was almost like a brother to me,
almost
. He listened to me cry about being called ugly Addi and how the cutest, most popular boy, Nolan Shepard, wouldn’t even look at me without scrunching his nose and laughing whenever I failed at trying to flirt with him. I’m not sure an eighth grader can even be successful at flirting, but back then we thought we were so old. I laughed to myself thinking about how little eighth grade me always dreamt of being Mrs. Shepard one day. Thank God that didn’t pan out.
Stephen was always there for me. I hated everything about myself and he always had something good to say about everything I was ashamed of. He loved me as the fat, ugly Addi, but I didn’t want to be her anymore. I didn’t want to be picked on anymore. I wanted to be slutty Addi, like slutty in the hot way, not in the real slutty way. I wanted to get a boyfriend and feel what love was like. I wanted to be beautiful. I wanted to be perfect. I wanted everything.
The summer before our freshman year Stephen and I made a deal that we would practice kissing together every day, so that once high school came and we got into our first real relationship we wouldn’t suck horribly. I tried talking him into making a change too, but he refused. He understood why I wanted popularity, but he thought it was dumb.
I worked out that entire summer and basically starved myself. I forced Stephen to watch
Bring It On
with me every single day over and over and over. I got a part-time job as soon as I turned fourteen and worked my ass off to save up to buy a whole new wardrobe and to get my hair and nails done for the first week of school. I never had to tell Stephen that we’d have to keep our friendship on the down-low because he already knew. He knew things weren’t going to be the same anymore, but we’d still hang out outside of school…at night, when no one else was around.
High school was a whole new ball game and I was prepared to knock everyone out of the park, and that’s exactly what I did. No one recognized me, not even Stephen. It was hard for him to even talk to me at first, but eventually he got used to it.
I had the nicest clothes, the perfect hair, I got my nails done every two weeks, I’d make myself vomit if I gained a couple pounds. I worked my ass off to become the Varsity cheer captain my sophomore year. I probably would have been captain my freshman year, but freshmen weren’t allowed to be captain. I started campaigning my freshman year to win the vote for Class President my senior year—sure enough I won the vote five short years ago. I was also crowned Norton High Homecoming Queen.
Everyone thought the sun shined out of my ass. Ugly Addi was out and slutty Addi was in! Well, not
literally
slutty. I made all of the boys cream their gym shorts on squat day and made a lot of the girls question their sexuality in the locker room. Okay, that might be a bit of an exaggeration, but I was Queen Bee, and deep down I fucking hated it. I hated every single part of being popular, except for the fact that it covered up all of my problems at home. It made everyone forget about ugly Addi. Everyone saw me as a perfect person, completely unflawed.
Thinking of Stephen makes me wonder how he’s doing. I haven’t even talked to him in the five years that I’ve been down in Florida. I kind of pushed everyone and everything away. I wanted to start completely over. I don’t really remember why Stephen and I lost touch though, I guess life just happened for the both of us.
“Welcome to Willington, Iowa! The local time is approximately 4:46 p.m. We will be taxiing for a few more minutes, so please remain in your seat with your seatbelt fastened until Captain Schlink has parked us at the gate and turned off the seatbelt sign.”
I look out the window and it was, of course, snowing. I shut the shade on the window and died a little inside. I’m not ready for this shit.