Quod Me Nutrit Me Destruit: That Which Destroys Me with The Alternate Ending (2 page)

The Fucking Shitty Life

“Seriously? Trina there isn’t
one fucking internship! Not one! Gahhhhh! Why? Dammit, I just won’t do the internship leg of this program. I refuse.”

I can’t take it anymore. My head hits my keyboard, as my perfect,
angelic, sister from another mister sets a glass of chilled Moscato next to my laptop. “Babe, listen to me.
You
need to pipe the fuck down. This is it. Right here, Stell. Everything you want is at your fingertips. Now jump on that motherfucking bull and ride that bitch for 8.” She leans over and pulls my pony tail until my neck is arched at an odd angle and locks eyes with mine, “And then, You. Are. Done.” Her smile is one she stole from Satan himself. I know it.

“Let go of my hair, bitch.” Trina kisses the air then heads towards the couch in the living room. I grab that perfect, beautiful, delicious glass of wine and chug that bitch. After a pleasure-filled moan and a exaggerated sigh I set the glass down and ask her over my shoulder, “You get enough bottles to get us both drunk, sis?”

“Nope, just one bottle. Not even enough to get one of us drunk.”

“The hell?
You fucking tease. That’s a waste!” I stand up and hurry into the kitchen and fill my glass to the rim with the chilled wine. I look up smirking like the Cheshire cat at my best friend from across the butcher block island that separates our loft’s living room from the kitchen. She is glaring knives at me. “What?”

“You know what,” s
he sets her kindle down on the end table. “I’ll let it slide tonight. Go on, get it all out. You’re pissed, you’re upset. Now come on, lets get this pity party done and over with so you can accept what you can’t change and move on with it.”

I damn near swallow half the contents of my glass. “Trina,
I will not
work for that asshole. He is a player. He is a pompous dick head that thinks he’s God’s gift to women. No.” Shaking my head to emphasize my adamancy, “Will. Not.”

“Why? I don’t understand that part, Stella. You of all people can handle anyone, and I mean
anyone
. That’s just his reputation, hell you’ll probably never even see the bastard!”

“Pasta’s ready, you want one or two pieces of garlic bread, babe?” I say while rationing out a cup on each of our plates.”

“Ahh, just half of one.” Trina fills both our glasses with the remaining wine before she and I head to the living room and sit at the coffee table to eat our supper.

This is the norm for us. Neither one of us has ever understood how people can sit in hard chairs to eat at an actual dinner table. To us, it’s at least in the lower twenties of our ‘Why the fuck do people?’ list.

I’ve known Trina for more than five years, we instantly became friends in junior college. She’s my kinda bitch and I’m her kinda bitch. Neither of us take shit from one another; but at the same time, we never hold back.

Trina’s a real ass bitch and I honestly love the hell out of her for it. One thing about me you’ll probably learn pretty quickly is I can’t stand being around fake ass bitches.

Another reason that I have always considered Trina my sister is because anytime I try to twist some shit up in my head, either to point the blame on me or on someone else and it’s bullshit, Trina calls my ass out. Calls it like she sees it and I’ll be damned if she isn’t
always
spot on.

I’d like to say I help her mentally o
vercome her own demons and shit too. But I get the feeling that if this were a friend competition, yeah… she’d kick my fucking ass.

“
Stell, answer the question. What is it about Jacobs Publishing House? You lived in complete and utter hell for the first sixteen years of your life, why can’t you live with working in a prestigious firm as an intern for one year?”

After I swallow the food in my mouth, I take a sip of wine. Setting it on the table, I look up at my friend. “You’re right, T. I can do it. I’ll be fine.”

She picks up a noodle and tosses it at my face, “Answer the question!”

“Shit! Just… look, okay I don’t want to fucking talk about it. Period. Just leave it alone.”

I scrape the remaining pasta into the trash, rinse it off in the sink and set it in the dishwasher. “You’re night to do dishes. I gotta go hop in the shower. I have five more firms to meet with tomorrow morning, starting at eight.” I sigh padding across the hardwood floors towards my bathroom.

Once I’ve showered and done my nightly routine—brushed my teeth, flossed, applied night moisturizer—I hop in bed and curl up with my Kindle and this hot as hell yet perfectly twisted motherfucker named Twitch.

Fuck yes, Twitch. Slap a belt around my neck and fuck me like you’re mad at me, baby.

I know, it is extremely odd that given the abuse I suffered by foster fathers, brothers and even weird ‘uncles’, you’d think I’d be more apt to find a nice boy. One that opens doors and holds me before and after making love. But, in all honesty, I can’t even make it through one date with a pussy-ass little boy.

Not that I date. Hell, if my hymen hadn’t been obliterated by my bastard father, then the bastard men I lived with in foster care... I’d probably still be a virgin… No, who am I kidding? I would still be a virgin.

I do just fine with my Twitch’s, Caleb’s, and Jesse Ward’s… Thank you.

My eyes begin getting heavy somewhere during a non-sex scene and I finally end up passing out. My dreams are fun at first, Twitch laden, if you will. But they take a dark turn right before I slip into a REM cycle.

Blood. Blood is everywhere. Soaking my hands, knees. It’s everywhere. I’m scared. I’m cold. There are no lights on. It’s dark, but I can still see his form silhouetted by the sliver of moon just outside the dirty trailer’s window. It’s cold. The blood is seeping into my sweatpants. It’s everywhere. So are the screams. They are everywhere too. I cover my ears to stop them, but the blood on my hands smears on the sides of my head. When I feel the blood drip down from the sides of my face and onto my neck, my vision blurs from my tears. Why am I crying? I don’t like this man. I hate him. I can’t remember a time where I didn’t hate him. All he does is hurt me. It’s all he has ever done, for as long as I can remember. He’s never been kind like my friend, Jill’s, daddy. I don’t know why my tears are falling. I don’t know who keeps screaming. But I need them to stop.

When I go to open my mouth and scream at them to stop, I realize I’m already screaming…

Those are my screams…

I’m jerked awake, drenched in a cold sweat with screams tearing through the membranes that cover my throat and esophagus. 

The entire frame of my body trembles as I pull myself from bed to start a warm bath. I peel the soaked clothing from myself. Instantly it causes flashbacks to bombard my consciousness.

As I sit in the tub huddled around myself with my chin resting on my knees, my eyes are fixed, staring at an old rust stain under the faucet.

My father’s breath in my ear, his weight on my back
, the sounds of him grunting. Pain. Fierce, agonizing pain shredding the lower half of my body. Until his weight finally cuts off the circulation to my lower torso and extremities making everything numb. I can’t evade them. The memories, they continue battering my mind. Piercing through my consciousness and all I’m able to manage is to sit there and stare, watching the water drip over that fucking rust stain.

I lose concept of time.

I want to fucking cut so goddamn bad. It makes shit more clear. Makes it easy to focus. Focus on the shit I need to do, the next step. Like I don’t know… Say, get out of the fucking bathtub. Change my sweaty sheets. I haven’t cut in almost ten years though.

I haven’t felt the urge, or need to - at least not this strong - in almost five years.

It has to be all this pressure I’m under. Fuck, I don’t want to go back to therapy. I really don’t want to talk about my repressed memories. All the therapist ever wanted to talk about is me killing my father at the young age of seven to stop him from hurting me again.

“Babe? You okay? I thought I heard you crying.” I feel Trina’s dark brown eyes scan, searching my turned face while I continue staring at the damn rust stain. “You’re still in your sports bra and panties, Stella.” She pulls my hand that was resting on the edge of the tub into hers. “Your hands are cold,” I see her fingertips brush the water from the corner of my eye, “The water’s ice cold, Stella, come on…” she pulls me from the water, my eyes still haven’t left the stain, I feel a warm towel swathe around me.
“Come on, sis, let’s get some clothes on you… You sleep with me, ‘kay?”

She turns the lights off in the bathroom and I blindly follow with that stain fixated now in my mind. I somewhat recall her drying me off, dressing me in a big warm hoodie and yoga pants, then tucking me into her warm bed.

I fall asleep, still staring at that fucking rust stain seared behind the lids of my eyes.

Familie
s are A Bitch- Even The Rich Ones

As I step out of my Audi R8, grab my brief case and Starbucks espresso, a nine walks by fucking the shit out of me with her eyes.

Are you kidding me, bitch? It’s too goddamn early for this shit.

No — I am not a morning person, nor am I a Monday person. Yes — I’m over these bitches constantly looking at me as if they hold sexual promises as well as all the answers to my deeply rooted, confounding disorientation where life is concerned.

The fuck did I say? Don’t look at me like that, dammit. It’s fucking Monday morning.

When I slam into my office,
Rach almost drops the bottle of water she has halfway to her mouth. “Rachel.” I nod as I make my way towards the solid mahogany double doors that lead to my inner-sanctuary, the head office, the throne that the king of Jacobs Publishing House sits upon, mothafuckas.

Rach
is hot on my heels, “Mr. Jacobs…”

I spin around and advance until I’m leaning over her like the prey she is, our faces a breath away when I whisper, “
Rach, It’s Wesley or Wes.” I grab her chin in between my thumb and forefinger. Grasping it hard, I growl, “My cock’s been in that pussy, Rach. From that point on, you lost the right to be polite. Stop acting so goddamn virtuous, do you understand me?”

My eyes slide down her face and I watch as her neck bobbles, trying to swallow… She does swallow too—Just in case you were wondering.

In a breathless fluster of mumbled words she finally replies, “Wes,” She clears her throat, “Wesley, your father, Mr. Jacobs is in your office, sir.”

Oh, huh. I should probably be embarrassed, especially after the way I’ve just, well whatever. I’m not. I’m pissed! Not at Rachel, at my fucking father. Mr. Jacobs.

The scowl on my face is not something I could mask, even if I wanted to. I stalk into
my
office and there they are - Victor and Josephine Jacobs - somehow looking down on me standing over them at my full six-foot-four stature.

They’re the embodiment of rich pompous pricks. So am I, but at least I don’t look down my nose like an asshole at people.

I’m a product of my father’s infidelity. Josephine, my step mother, was almost eighteen when she married my father at forty-five. On the day after my father’s forty-sixth birthday, yep, you guessed it—I was born to a stripper-slash-escort girl my father had been having an eight year affair with during his frequent business trips to New Orleans.

Now, anyone that knows me knows I love my ma. She’s a great fucking woman. I don’t blame her for what she had to do in order to feed her younger brothers and sisters while cancer ate her own mother alive.

My plans of becoming a football star with a law degree and being able to care for my mother financially, allowing her to live in the lap of luxury, were thwarted by a football injury they’d originally said would prevent me from ever walking - much less running - again.

For as long as I can remember,
I allow the simple fact that I run five miles a day help calm my demons, help soothe the hate that I’ve always had to keep reined in and in all honesty it isn’t working anymore.

After my scholarship was pulled because of the injury, my father brought me to the Dallas area a
nd tried to get me enrolled in several bitch ass schools. But when you come from playing quarterback for LSU, your square shape doesn’t fit in everyone else’s peg holes—well not those holes anyway.

We agreed on Texas A&M where I threw myself into every damn socialite and sorority girl’s pussy within a seventy-five mile radius. That and my studies, acing shit left and right until I’d graduated first in my class with a bachelors in Science of English, then my masters in communication.

With my father nearing his seventies, he eagerly handed over the power of our prestigious, and highly recognized family publishing business—to me, his single living heir.

In less than a year, I’d handed almost every one of the authors my dad represented
over to the very capable hands of a very different publishing firm than the one I had Jacobs headed towards becoming.

I kept two authors that pops had kept hidden in the basement. One, a very cutting edge and no-holds barred writer that, quite frankly, didn’t give a flying fuck if you liked his work or not. Scott’s books were out of this fucking world. His shit was raw. It was pure. It was fucking real. I kept him.

The other was an erotica author, but Melanie’s shit was much darker than the Fifty Shades books. Again, raw, gritty, erotic talent.

Melanie, Scott, and I packed up the whole fucking Dallas building and moved to NYC. The three of us slapped Jacobs on Madison Ave. Between the three of us, we brought in fifteen new upcoming erotica or cutting edge authors—no cookie cutter bullshit, no happily ever
afters. Fuck that. Those were a dime a dozen. And I wanted Jacobs Publishing to be one of a kind!

That was almost ten years ago. Now I have more than two hundred authors, every fucking one of them think outside the box and more than bend the rules
in the writing world. Seventy-eight percent of them have been at one time or another on bestseller lists.

Victor was once a millionaire. Now he was a fucking billionaire, many times over. Did he and Josephine spend that money like it there was no goddamn tomorrow? Fuck. Yes.

Did they approve of the direction I took their prominent publishing business that had been in the family for over a hundred years?

Fuck. No.

“Pops,” I nod, “Josephine…” I kiss her weathered cheek, “You’ve aged like shit, my love. Glad to see it.”

“Wesley.” My father chastises. “Do not speak to her that way. We’re here to discuss business, not squabble like children. Keep your petty childish behavior to …”

“Get. The. Fuck. Out.” I glare into his eyes. “There is no goddamn business for us to discuss, old man. You’re over eighty years old.” I glance at his crotch, then look over at Josephine, “Speaking of shit -  Josephine, is he in adult pampers, yet?”

In a flurry of mink, diamonds and curses, she stands quickly moving to exit my office. Before slamming the doors, she calls over her shoulder, “Victor I’ll be in the car, dear. I refuse to be treated this way by the son of one of your whores.”

The doors slam behind her as I move around to sit behind my massive mahogany desk, steeple my fingers and commence glaring at my father.

After I’m finished with our glaring contest, I jerk my head towards the double wood doors, “Leave. Now.”

“Son, acquiring an intern is the last business request I will make. JPH has always participated in, and been recognized in the Publishing Intern Accreditation Society. My grandfather, your grandfather and I helped not only make PIAS the respectable organization it is; Wesley, we built it. It’s important to at least continue, even if you do have them proofreading smut.”

The sinister laughter that rumbles from me has my old man’s spine straightening. In the most condescending tone I have, I reply, “Smut, huh? I must say, it is utterly bemusing to me how you can allow words like accredit and respect to roll so gallantly from your old shriveled tongue, then -
THEN -
have the audacity to spat the word smut, at me?!”

I abruptly stand, causing my chair to crash into the floor-to-ceiling glass wall behind me before stalking around my desk and grabbing this motherfucker by his tie. I jerk him up until our faces are an inch away from one another. “Get the fuck out of this building you old motherfucker. You needed an heir to head this business. Well, here I am. I needed you to at least attempt to take care of my mother, Kathy! My
MOTHER
. And you never lifted a finger to help us when I was a kid. Well guess what, the roles have reversed. I will take care of my mother. But I would do almost anything to ruin you financially. However, if I do, I can’t take care of the woman that raised me.”

I smooth his tie out before grasping the lapels of his suit jack
et. “You alright, pops?” I smile glacially at him.

“F-fine. I’m fine.” He stutters.

“Good,” I say patting his shoulder. “There’s the door. Please do us both a favor and excuse yourself.”

After he’s been gone for five or ten minutes, Rachel comes in with today’s schedule, rattling on.

I, however, am still seething pissed. I watch her mouth as it moves and the urge to fuck those red puffy lips isn’t what skates across my mind. My eyes slide to her throat. That, that little fucking neck, is what I want. My hands wrapped around it, choking her until her eyes bulge and she claws the skin from my wrists.

Chained. DAMMIT. I never called! I need to put a call into Paul, let him know I’m coming. Line up some subs for me. He knows my flavor.

And it ain’t fucking vanilla.

I chuckle at my thoughts, but
they’re interrupted by Rachel, “Sir? The intern list? I was explaining that I’ve researched the top twenty. Honestly, I can only see one, maybe two, candidates.” She nods to the list on my desk that’s gone unnoticed until this moment.

I snatch it up
with a sigh and look over the names, their degrees, and the colleges they attended. “Which two, Rach?”

“Well, Christopher Wells; he comes from a long line of highly respectable names. He’s the ‘maybe’. And Jackson Brands; his family also includes an incredible amount of well-known names. And his Master
’s degree is from Oxford, so…”

I look up from the list of names, blinking dumbly at her.

“I mean I went through… I researched every name on the list, Wes. What? Stop looking at me like that!” Her giggle instantly reminds me of C-names voice, causing my head to collapse back, hanging over the back of my chair. I shove my thumb and forefinger into my eyes.

Am I attempting to gouge my eyeballs out? Fuck no!

My goddamn brains? FUCK. YES.

Groaning in exhaustion, I remove my hand from its attempts at a digital lobotomy and raise it to shut her the hell up.

“Jesus Christ, Rach. Stop. Shut your mouth. You realize that this…” I point to the list, “…I am aptly capable of handling? These little pussies…” I glance down to the highlighted names, “…Christopher and Jackson, are not the caliber of interns I’m looking for.”

“Well, like I said, I went through every name. And those two gentleman,” She starts ticking her fingers off with her reasons—which leads my mind back to wrapping my hands around her throat, “Are extremely educated, come from a long line of some of the
best
publishers and editors. They each have exceptional references and are without
rap sheets
.”

I smirk at this cocky bitch, steeple my fingers and lean forward, “Rachel
… I want the ones with the seediest pasts, longest goddamn rap sheets, from families that have no idea how to even spell publishing… That are from the top colleges.
That
is what I want.” I point to the list, “And if there isn’t one here, I’ll need you to call my pops, and tell him to go fuck himself. Then, send him and Josephine a fucking Edible Arrangement, with nothing but chocolate covered bananas. Understood?”

As she rushes out of my office spitting, quite honestly the saddest attempts of curses and threats I’ve ever fucking heard, my eyes fall to the list of names.

I’m going to find a damn intern. And when I’m done, they’ll be nothing less than five goddamn stars.