Tempting BAD: VIP Spin Off by M. Robinson Read Free Book Online

loss. I felt like someone had died. That’s the best way to describe it; I mourned something I didn’t understand.
    I wept and brushed away all my tears, exactly the way my mom had done with my dad’s indiscretions.
    I found myself by the pier on South Beach. I sat underneath it for hours, contemplating life. How ironic that at sixteen, I was rationalizing life and all its glory. I didn’t want my life to change, not with my parents nor my friends. I wanted it to go away. I wanted to feel like the normal sixteen-year-old girl that I was when I woke up the day before. Excited that it was my birthday and that I had received a car. I wanted to end the summer and go into my junior year being captain of my squad and starting to look at colleges. All of the normal stuff, I didn’t want it taken away from me just as everything else had.
    I knew that if I told my parents that I was aware of it all then nothing of what I wanted would happen; everything would change, not just my outlook on love and marriage, but my life as well. My relationships with everyone would become corrupted and molded into something that I didn’t even want to think about. I wasn’t a coward. I would have been fully able to confront both of them, but a huge part of me didn’t want to.
    I was exhausted. And I guess I was also selfish because as much as I knew the truth, as much as I knew that it was lies and deceit tainted with I love you’s and promises of tomorrow… and you’re the only one… it didn’t matter because it was mine. It was mine to do with as I saw fit. I had the problem in the palm of my hand and the only solution I could conjure up was to make it all go away.
    And by that, I mean to keep my goddamn mouth shut.
    Beauty is in the eye of the beholder…
    And so is the truth.
     

“Mommy, will you play with me?”
    “No, honey, not right now. I need to get dinner ready for your dad. You play by yourself, okay? Like a good boy.”
    Lauren was taking a nap or she would play with me, and Mommy still had Alexis baking in her tummy or maybe she would play with me, but I didn’t think so because when Lauren was a baby, she didn’t do anything beside sleep, cry, and poop.
    Maybe my daddy would play with me?
    Nah… he never played with me. He was always busy or mad. I didn’t understand why he was always mad; we never did anything, especially mommy, she was the best ever.
    “Sweetie, I’m home,” Dad said from the front door.
    He was in a good mood; maybe he would play.
    “Hey, little man,” Dad’s partner Mark said, kneeling down to pat my head and look at my cars. I liked Mark; he was nice and he always played with me.
    “Hi, Mr. Mark, do you want to play?”
    “I sure do, let me just wash my hands and I’ll be right back, okay?”
    I happily nodded.
    “Hello, honey,” Mom greeted. She was wearing one of her new white dresses that we bought last week. She said it was for daddy.
    He smiled and kissed her on the mouth but then his eyes did some weird twitching thing.
    “What are you wearing?” he whispered loud enough for me to hear while holding onto the back of mommy’s neck. She didn’t look too comfortable with how he was holding her; her body was stiff and her face wasn’t normal.
    She looked at me and smiled, and it made me feel better. “Oh, I bought it for you,” she replied.
    “Well, you look like a—”
    “All right, little man; all washed up. You ready to play?” Mark announced, coming into the room and Daddy immediately let go of Mommy, smiling over at us.
    “Dinner is almost ready,” she added.
    “It’s not ready yet?” Dad replied.
    “Oh, come on, Rick; she has two kids to look after and one on the way. Cut her some slack; your house looks beautiful. I bet she spent all day cleaning for you and she still looks like a million bucks. I need to find me one of you, Jasmine,” he stated, winking.
    “She does … doesn’t she,” Dad said in a tone that I didn’t like, but Mark didn’t say