Heartbreaker Breaks (A Bittersweet Lottery Love Story) (Tangled Hearts & Broken Vows: Tales of Infidelity Book 1) (18 page)

  I looked into her eyes and wanted to reprimand her but saw nothing. She looked at me the way she always did. Everything had been my imagination. There was no lust emanating from her.

  “Have a good trip. Call me. I’ll call you and don’t worry. Danny...” I didn’t know what I meant to say. I walked out her door and did not look back.

  “Good-bye,” she called out.

  I held up my hand, waved and ran home.

  Marianne sat on the bed playing with my computer. Her plump body that had only improved with weight was hidden in her olive military style pants and oversized mustard cardigan. Her golden brown hair in two long braids, the cat eyes that looked up at me with a little smile on her face. Her hippie look I never really liked was in that moment seductive, enticing.

  I let her know that we would be going to a later showing and went at her with a fury. She loved it. She liked the lipstick too.

An excerpt from
Trashed by Paloma Meir

 
Finished with breakfast, I told my mother I was going for a bike ride. It was not a lie. I did ride my bike four blocks down the road to Serge’s house.

  I did not plan on burning any part of his house down but Q had given me a good idea. I would wait for him to come outside. I could pretend I was just walking by, on my way to down to Sunset to get something to eat.

  He would see my newfound sparkling mental health, be impressed that I hadn’t bombarded with crazy, angry messages and we would be in love again, happy forever or until we went off to separate colleges.

  Or maybe I would go to school in Boston too. I had hoped to go to Stanford as my parents had but I was sure Harvard would be just fine too. My mind spun fantasies of our life together on the East Coast as I stood in the middle of the street staring up at his house like a lost dog.

  The heat pounding down on me, making me perspire, woke me up to the fact of the ridiculousness of my position. He could look out his bedroom window and see me. Mentally healthy people didn’t do what I was doing.

  I did the only sensible thing. I hid my bike behind the overgrown bushes of the house I stood in front of. It didn’t look to me as if anyone were home. Even if they were, our street was overrun with kids leaving their bikes and sporting equipment around. I was a little older than the most of the kids that did that but passable.

  Bike taken care of, but I didn’t know what to do with my presence, so again I did the only sensible thing. I climbed up the tree in their front yard. That would be harder to explain if the occupants of the house noticed me but I had faith that I could come up with a plausible story.

  An added benefit of being in the tree? I could partially see into Serge’s room. The day was hot, his window and shades were open. I could only see the back of him sitting in his chair at the desk but sometimes he would lean back, put his hands behind his head and run his fingers through the front of his hair in a way that I always loved.

  I spent three uncomfortable hours in the tree that day. I did consider for a moment that what I was doing was stalking, a possibly dangerous and illegal act but I didn’t really care.

  I had always been a bit of a skulker, spying on people, eavesdropping on conversations, so this new activity, hiding in a tree for hours on end seemed a logical, almost natural continuation of my previous activities.

  It was boring. He didn’t leave his room and he didn’t get out of his chair. His mother and sister came in a few times. His mother to bring him food, pat him on the head. I could see she doted on him, that he was the favorite based on the one time all three of them were in the room together.

  His sister was annoying to him, coming in waving her arms around. I wished I could have heard what she was saying, such an animated girl. At some point in their talks she would make him laugh and it would travel across the road to my ears. The sound made the cramped position I sat in on the tree branch worthwhile.

  This went on for three days, I was about to give up, not because of how very wrong what I was doing was but because I didn’t see him ever coming out of the house.

  Cursed by what I saw or lucky, I don’t know but this is what happened.

  “No, Carolina,” I heard Serge’s voice from their front door, “I’ll take her home. No, no, no.”

  I looked down towards the front of his home. I was angry with myself for playing a word game on my phone and missing Serge leave his room.

  But he was coming outside. My plan had worked. I wanted to sing a song from the treetop, descend slowly like an angel onto the road.

  “Come on, Zelda, I have to get back to my work.” He said to the girls inside the house as I brushed the leaves out of my hair and tree dust off of my t-shirt and shorts.

  I could see them walk three feet out the front door together but then the branches of the tree obscured my vision. I counted to thirty slowly and climbed down, to see them a half a block down the road.

  I landed on my feet without much noise. I stared after them not knowing how to follow them without being caught. I decided to walk in the street, keep the same distance. I lived on the canyon too. It wouldn’t be unheard of for me to be walking down to Sunset. It was a part of my original plan anyway.

  Zelda was not part of my plan but I was curious about her. I had never seen her before. Serge had never described her beyond saying she was a very pretty girl but that was when I had thought her and Carolina were small children.

  I could hear them talking but couldn’t make out the words. I slightly closed the distance between us as silently as possible, by running on my tiptoes. Absolutely silly but it worked.

  As I drew closer to them, I could see that they were holding hands and my heart stopped for a moment. I calmed myself by remembering that he thought of himself as her older brother, a very protective older brother and he infantilized her. I accepted the handholding.

  What I couldn’t accept, and at this point I could only see her from behind, was her perfection. She was a hair taller than him, willowy, and when she walked you could see the peach-like shapes of her tiny backside. Her hair was white, like soap, shiny, healthy, halfway down her elegant back.

  I didn’t want her to turn around. I didn’t want to see how Serge had lied to me by saying “she was a very pretty girl.” I knew it would be an inconceivably deceptive understatement and his obsession with her was not brotherly. I seethed and it was only going to get to get worse.

  They stopped walking. He dropped her hand and went to a garden on the side road and picked a Gerber Daisy. I worried that he would see me, because I no longer wanted that to happen. But no worry, nothing could distract him from Zelda.

  He walked to her holding the flower in his hand. The two of them stood in profile. It wasn’t until that moment when I noticed what they were wearing. She wore a long white Victorian dress that was transparent in the sun, showing her camisole and boy-cut shorts like Cara had been wearing a few days before. For a slim body she had full breasts. I rolled my eyes to no one not believing that a girl like this existed in the world.

  Serge for some reason, and I had never seen him dress like this before, was wearing slim white shorts, not baggy ones that the boys of that time preferred and a white short sleeved button down shirt. The two of them looked that stepped out of a Jazz Age photograph.

  He was so dark, with his coffee colored hair and deep olive skin, and her so purely white. They didn’t look alike but they had an aura of twins as they stood together in the middle of the road.

  “What’s lovelier, Zelda, you or the flower?” He smiled at her, half joking, half serious.

  I almost vomited in the road.

  “Serge…” She lowered her head and looked up at him.

  Ridiculous, I could not believe what I was watching take place.

  He leaned in to kiss her. I didn’t think I was going to survive but it was just a kiss on the cheek. I could see from where I stood based on the pucker of Zelda’s lips that it hurt her even worse than myself.

  Serge was torturing her. I almost laughed. He could be so perceptive of others but so oblivious to what went on in his own life.

  He took her hand in his again and they walked down the road. All I could hear was his voice talking non-stop. He sounded excited. I thought he was probably talking about his project. Whatever it was, she was his captive audience staring at him while he led her home.

  They turned into her driveway. I hadn’t realized the house was hers. Serge had never pointed it out before. It was easily the most glamorous of the stately homes on the road. Of course the princess lived in a castle. Where else could she possibly live?

  I hated her, and I wasn’t too fond of Serge anymore either.

Thank You Pyre.