Elias Read online

  For my darling Emma, always. You are the light of my life. I love you bigger than the whole giant world.

  And for my husband, who sacrifices his Saturday nights to plot with me, and has taken the toddler on too many Sunday afternoon adventures so that mommy can write.

  "All the world's a stage,

  And all the men and women merely players."

  ~ Shakespeare, As You Like It

  “Are you kidding me?” My voice sounded shrill to my ears, this weird high-pitched sound that was nothing like me. I wanted to strangle the girl whose voice it was. She sounded bitchy, desperate. This was not me. This was not the person I had become.

  “River,” he said. He didn’t even try to take his dick out of the girl’s mouth.

  Shit, she didn’t even stop blowing him.

  I couldn’t see her face. Her blonde hair spilled down her shoulders and back. She was skinny under the little dress she was wearing, the one that should have hugged her curves.

  It was my dress she was wearing.

  I could see her spine in the middle of her back.

  She was too skinny.

  I had told her a million times she needed to eat more. But she's always deprived herself. She'd say it was her fast metabolism, but she subsisted on saltines and diet soda. It was going to kill her eventually.

  My sister had never been one to listen to me. She was a model, had been since she was fifteen. First it was catalogs; then she got her first magazine shoot; now she was doing runway. She was famous.

  We were famous.

  I was about to be more famous- the realization hit me as I was standing there. I was about to be famous for this. Nothing else. This.

  It would be in the tabloids tomorrow. The tabloids loved salacious stories, families ripped apart by drama. And this was certainly salacious.

  It was like everything stood still, like someone just pushed the pause button on my life, as I looked back and forth from her to him, my mind completely numb.

  It was like I was watching it on television.

  I almost laughed. There was a part of me that wanted to laugh. I could feel it, bubbling up inside of me, threatening to spill out.

  Pretty soon everyone would be watching it on television. The camera crew was behind me, silent, the ones who were filming me for this piece, part of a live special tonight. They were waiting for me to react. Then they could capture it on film, right in the moment.

  A woman devastated.

  I wanted to cut off his cock. I wanted to pull a Lorena Bobbitt and cut it right off.

  I watched his face, screwed up, his hands threaded through her hair, forcing her head down on him, pushing himself further into her throat.

  I knew that expression on his face.

  I was just standing there like some kind of idiot, watching him. There was a camera crew behind me, and the asshole didn’t even bother to slow down. He didn’t even break his rhythm.

  Jesus H., he's going to come, I thought. She is going to fucking blow him, on camera, right in front of me, and he’s going to come.

  And it will be all over the television.

  I didn’t even look at him as I walked past the two of them.

  Traitors.

  I didn’t know if the camera crew was behind me or focused on the blow job. What a choice for them to have to make. Both would make equally good television.

  I felt strangely calm as I walked through the house, my heels echoing on the marble floors, click-click-clicking through the hall. I passed the photos of us on the wall, the framed pictures of ski trips and Paris and Bora Bora and the tour with the band. I entered his room, the one where he kept the things he loved, the vintage baseballs and cards. The walls were lined with rock memorabilia, the gold record and the guitars he collected. Shelves of stuff signed by his friends, mentors, his idols.

  I picked up a bat, this collectible thing that was his pride and joy. I stood there holding it. The objects in here were priceless. Mostly irreplaceable. It was enough to give me pause for a moment. I didn't take stuff like this lightly- I wasn’t one to just destroy precious objects.

  But I brought the bat up to my shoulder.

  Swing, batter, batter.

  And I started smashing.

  I heard them behind me. I heard them running, their footsteps, his voice indignant, hers shrill. The camera crew was saying something. But no one touched me. Not yet.

  I’m sure someone will call security. They should. I think the producers have security.

  Everyone was about to hate me. No one expected this kind of thing from me. I could already hear my mother’s disapproving voice in my head.

  This kind of behavior is unacceptable in public. No matter what happens, you smile for the camera and behave with grace.

  This was definitely not grace.

  But could you blame me?

  In exactly three and a half hours, I was supposed to marry that man on live television, the one with his cock lodged in my sister’s throat in the middle of the foyer in our house.

  When I got in the car, I waited until I was on the highway to take the SIM card from the phone and toss it out the window, watching it bounce on the road, shattering into pieces.

  The shards of my life.

  So why the hell did I feel so relieved?

  "Shit," Adam said, slapping me hard on the back. "Cheer the fuck up. It's your fucking retirement party."

  "Yeah, man," I said. "Just a little distracted, that's all."

  "Fuck yeah, you are!" He took a long pull on a beer. "All these tits, you should be fucking distracted."

  We were in a suite in a hotel room in Vegas, partying it up. At least, my buddies were, this whole group of guys I've known for the past few years, living in San Diego. We were mostly Navy guys, a couple of my Marine friends.

  Me? I was distracted at my own retirement party.

  Some fucking retirement.

  I didn't choose to leave the EOD. The explosive ordnance disposal unit, that was my job. It's what I had done for the last five years. That wasn't a long time to most people, but to me it was a lifetime. I'd joined the Navy at seventeen. EOD was everything to me. It was all I knew, and I didn't want to leave it. When the guys said I was having a retirement party, they weren't talking about the whole do-twenty-years, get-a-gold-watch bullshit. They were talking about getting medically retired. That was another thing entirely.

  That wasn't a goddamned retirement. Not after five years. Not in my books anyway.

  That was getting euthanized, put down like a fucking dog just because I lost my leg.

  "Man, have a drink and lighten the hell up." Adam handed me a beer. "I know you're going to fucking miss me and everything, but you're being a fucking pussy. We've got booze, girls, and a suite in Vegas. Ain’t got all that back in West Bend.”

  "Miss you, hah. Fuck you, man." But I took the beer anyway. It wasn’t his fault I was being an asshole. I wasn’t a drinker, didn't like being out of control. I couldn’t remember the last time I had a beer. It had been years. But this seemed like that kind of an occasion. The end of an era.

  That sounded goddamned melodramatic. And I wasn’t an over-emotional kind of guy.

  But hell, I was an EOD guy. Always had been, always would be. I didn’t know what to do outside of the Navy. It's all I'd known since I was seventeen. My mother was all too happy to sign that paperwork letting me go to boot camp early.

  And all I wanted was to get the hell away from West Bend and the shit that I grew up with.

  To get the hell away from the asshole. My father.

  Now, here I was, headed right back to that shit. Back to the shithole piece of land where I was raised. Back to being a fucking pariah because of m