The Mentor (Necessary Lies Book 1) (10 page)

Reluctantly, but trusting Nolan, I colored up my chips and walked to the cashier, my initial stake of $9,500 now sitting just shy of $27,000. Was there
anything
at which Nolan Weston didn’t excel?

“Modeling? In New Guinea?” I asked as we walked.

“That’s the secret to lying. Make it something the other person wants to believe, that they need to believe, and they’ll buy it. And with your body, every man in here wishes he could see you on a beach in a bikini. Sell that kind of sizzle, and it doesn’t even matter if there’s a steak or not.”

I rolled my eyes, but being complimented by Nolan Weston put a little extra spring in my step. He definitely wasn’t just “telling me what I wanted to hear.” There was nothing deceptive about his body and what it did to mine.

As soon as Michael had driven away and we were inside the house again, I was back in Nolan’s arms. It’d been so hard to be close to him in the car, in the sub shop, walking near the lake, gambling at a casino, and not touch him. Now that I’d had Nolan, I couldn’t get enough. Especially when I had no idea how long this could last.

For now, the secrets of The Hunt Group were forgotten. Mr. Weston was back in my life for a moment, and I needed to be taught as much as possible.

We went to my room this time, where he slowly peeled off my clothes until I was wearing nothing. I lay back on the bed and watched him slowly undress himself.

He was hard already. Again.

I stared in disbelief. “How can you… do you just pop Viagra all day?”

“The company that makes Viagra would go out of business if every man had a woman who looked like you in his bed,” he replied, climbing up on top of me.

“You’re amazing,” I said out loud. “I don’t know how I can ever live without this again.”

“Without what?” he asked, that charming smirk across his lips again.

“Without this,” I said, kissing him hard, my arms wrapped around his shoulders as he slid inside me, filling me up with all I needed and wanted.

The pleasure of sex with Nolan was something I could never have put any sort of adequate emphasis on. When I say it was beyond what words can convey, I mean it. I’d never understood the hype of sex. Now I did. I’d just never had it with the only man I was meant to share my body with.

Nothing could take the place of something like that.

He beckoned to me with his body, pulling sensations out of me that I thought were legend.

I’d learned so much from him already. Like that I was easy to climax, that I liked to be kissed behind my knees, and that I had a sensitive spot deep inside me that only he could reach. I’d been a girl before I met Nolan. In just over 24 hours I’d turned into a woman.

A woman that was completely his.

Can you fall in love that quickly? I would never have said it was possible before now. But it was hard not to fall in love with Nolan. He pulled everything out of me and only wanted more. He only wanted me.

He made me feel worthy.

********

“Tell me something no one else knows about you.”

Me and my after-sex questions. We were sprawled out on the floor of another guest room now. We’d fucked all over my bedroom and then he’d carried me to the room next to mine so he could press me against the window as he took me from behind, his hands kneading my breasts as he finished inside of me.

So now we were wrapped up in a comforter we’d pulled off the bed in front of a roaring fire that Nolan had started while I was in the restroom. It was idyllic and romantic and perfect.

Nolan had his hands behind his head and I was nestled into the crook of him, my fingers running up and down his chest. I felt so small next to him, even when he was lying down I could feel the power in his body.

“Like what?” he asked. “You and your questions.”

“I want to know you,” I said, resting my chin now on his chest so I could look him in those gorgeous hazel eyes, eyes that were almost amber in the light of a crackling fire. “You know me so it’s only fair, right?”

He shook his head, “There isn’t much to know. I’m not that interesting, Camilla.”

“Such a lie,” I said sliding my body up towards his face, kissing his neck. “You’re from Kentucky. Tell me about that.”

His expression changed for a moment. It darkened and I wondered if maybe I’d said something wrong. Maybe I was being too pushy.

“Kentucky itself is great,” he said. “But growing up there was not. I come from a pretty dysfunctional family.”

“Don’t we all,” I said. “Tell me about it.” I touched his face. “Trust me.”

“I do,” he said, brushing my hair back behind my ear. “I just assumed nobody would ever want to hear about it. So I’ve never discussed it.”

“I want to know everything,” I said. “For my own files, of course.”

He smiled, “Okay, Camilla Grace. I’ll tell you, but only after you promise to let me have you one more time when this conversation is over and that it never be brought up again, okay?”

“That’s easy,” I said. “Promise.”

He wrapped his arms around me and pulled me close, kissing my forehead.

“My father was chronically unemployed and angry at the world for making him pay for his lousy decisions in life. My mother fell for him when they were both in high school. He was a basketball star. It’s all such a fucking cliché. They both came from dirt poor families and the only options you had in the town they grew up in were marriage and babies. Or working in the coal mines. Or both.

“My father was one of those people who basked in mediocrity. He was the most insecure person I’ve ever met. Someone who was much too outspoken about topics he had no business discussing, whether that was politics, Jesus, how much sex he was having with the women he openly cheated on my mother with, or how fast his shitty El Camino was. He thought he was smarter than he was, smarter than anyone he knew. He flunked out of high school, so all of a sudden getting an education was for ‘sheep’. He got fired from his shitty job at the paper mill and all of a sudden working was for ‘pathetic schmucks.’

“Every time he failed at something, it was never his fault. He had no ability to learn from any of his mistakes. But he loved pointing out the faults of others. Including my mother. Especially her. And including me. He hated everything about me. Despised me for trying to do well in school, for having dreams, and ambitions.

“Like I said, he grew up a hotshot basketball player. A coach from UK even came to see him once, when he was just a sophomore. But if there was anything my father couldn’t stand or handle in life, it was success. He had a big game in front of that scout, so he spent the next few days drinking with buddies, going coon hunting, blowing off school and practice. He showed up at school for the game that Friday night hungover, and the coach told him to get lost. No school, no practice, no game. Especially in his condition. But, being my father, he couldn’t understand consequences like a normal person. Hell, if the University of Kentucky was recruiting him, what could his high school coaches have to teach him? Anyway, he cussed the coach out, and when one of the assistants tried to defuse the situation, my dad punched him. The head coach intervened, and he punched him, too. Needless to say, the basketball dream ended that night.  So, according to my dear old dad, sports were for losers. But of course, without basketball to motivate him to attend school, he barely finished his sophomore year. And never bothered showing up for eleventh grade, or anything after that.

“People in our county love basketball, so high school diploma or no, he could rely on his name and helping lead his school to the state tournament his freshman year to get him in the door for jobs. But his attitude, temper, and drinking insured that none of them ever lasted very long.

“When I was a young kid, I was a huge fan of the Cincinnati Reds. It was the major league team closest to my Podunk town, and in 1990 they were on fire. They went wire to wire that year, meaning they started the season in first place and stayed there the entire season. 

“I used to have a little transistor radio I’d sneak under my pillow to listen to all the night games. Even when the team was on the west coast and games didn’t begin until ten o’clock or later. Their announcers were Marty and Joe, Joe being Joe Nuxhall, who’d pitched for the Reds a million years ago. The sweetest sound I ever heard was Joe’s tagline at the end of every broadcast. “This is the old lefthander, rounding third and heading for home. Good night, everybody.”

Nolan was lost in melancholy, his eyes focused on something nobody but him could see, something off in the distance. Anybody else talking at length about a baseball team from twenty-five years ago would have put me to sleep. Nolan had me on the edge of my seat.

“Anyway, late in the season one of my best friends, Russ, had a birthday. For his birthday, he got tickets to a Reds game. Against the Dodgers, which was a huge deal because the Dodgers were in second place almost all year.  So Russ got to invite a friend along, and he invited me. He brought my ticket over and you’d have thought we had golden tickets from Willy Wonka. We even got t-shirts with our favorite players on them, Chris Sabo for him, Barry Larkin for me. It was all we talked about for weeks. I put that ticket in my special desk drawer and pulled it out every morning just to stare at it.

“His grandparents were supposed to take us to Cincinnati for the game. Neither Russ nor I had ever been to a Major League game, and his grandad had been telling us all these stories, about how green the grass was at Riverfront Stadium, even though it turns out it was artificial turf, but what does a twelve-year-old know? And how huge the hot dogs were, how they had these little ice cream sundaes served in replica batter’s helmets. I mean he had us all sorts of pumped up. I don’t remember sleeping a wink for three days before we were supposed to go.

“So the big day arrived and I got up, put on my Barry Larkin shirt for what was probably the twentieth straight day, and went downstairs. My mom was already gone, she cut and colored hair sometimes, so she was probably at somebody’s house doing that, and my dad was asleep on the couch. I poured myself some cereal and tried to be quiet to avoid waking him up, but when I started eating it, I guess I slurped the milk a little too loud. He woke up in a rage. Told me I was a noisy little shit with no respect. I knew by then to remain quiet, so I just kept my head down and ate while he stomped around cussing. I couldn’t wait to get out of there. When I finished, I snuck back up to my room to retrieve the ticket. I figured I’d just hang out with Russ for the day until it was time to leave. My father couldn’t yell at m or hit me if he couldn’t find me. But when I opened the drawer, the ticket wasn’t there. I’d checked and re-checked it for weeks and it was always there. I memorized every inch of it. I couldn’t have misplaced it. I’d just held it my hands before going downstairs. I was frantic. I wanted to avoid my old man at all costs, but he was the only one who was home, so he was the only one to ask. I went down to the basement, where he went to smoke. He was sitting in his lawn chair by the back door, smoking, and I walked up and told him I couldn’t find my ticket. He acted like he didn’t know what I was talking about, so I explained what ticket I meant, the Reds ticket, that the game was that day, that I was leaving in a few hours and I couldn’t find my ticket.”

To my shock, Nolan paused and seemed to be choked up. It never occurred to me that Nolan Weston could get choked up about anything.  I took his hand, squeezing it tightly, kissing it to urge him to continue.

“My father just looked at me. Stared at me for a good long while. I was nearly in tears, but he showed no sympathy at all. Just annoyance. ‘It ain’t fucking lost, dummy. It’s right here.’ He motioned with his cigarette toward his ash tray. I didn’t realize what he meant. I thought it was under the ash tray or on the floor, that he was playing some kind of game with me. I looked all around and he just laughed. ‘You don’t have a brain in your head, do you? This is your ticket’ he said to me. He lifted up the ash tray and dumped it all over the basement floor.

“He’d burned the ticket. Because I woke him up. Burned it and then made me sweep up the ashes he’d dumped on the floor.”

I watched a single tear fall down his cheek. Even two and a half decades later, the memory stabbed him right in the heart. My tears fell in torrents from my eyes. Seeing him cry destroyed me.

“I knelt down on that floor with my bare hands and sifted through the ashes, looking for anything in the mess that could gain my entry to Riverfront Stadium. But there was nothing. All I’d thought and dreamt about for weeks was destroyed by a temper tantrum. My own father’s tantrum. Russ and his grandparents weren’t well off. That ticket, the whole trip, really, was beyond their means. I knew they couldn’t afford another one. And we couldn’t either. I had to walk over and tell Russ I couldn’t go, that I’d lost the ticket. Back in those days you couldn’t just bring it up on your phone, you know?

“After that, my friendship with Russ was never the same. He brought me back one of those little helmets they served sundaes in, but I had to hide it. I was afraid I’d piss off my father and he’d smash it or something. But anyway, yeah, that was a microcosm of my childhood. Just one shitty story of many. And you’re the only one who’s ever heard that one.”

I sat there, a complete mess of tears and despondency. He’d done what I asked. He’d told me something true, told me something no one else knew. And it was like seeing the inside of a bleeding heart. All I wanted to do was go back in time and hold that sweet boy that Nolan used to be. Tell him that none of this will be forever, that he would escape.

I wanted to tell Nolan that, but I sensed it was better I say nothing for now. When someone reveals their soul to you it’s often best to just listen; to accept it and bear the pain of it with them.