Page 65 of Push & Pull
She wasn’t much better than the women in the sitting area. As soon as Simone was in a stall, she pulled her prepaid phone and checked her notifications. Although she had no service in there, the texts from Hailey and Elena had downloaded while she was elsewhere.
“When will you be back home? I have something else to mail you,”Hailey wrote.
“We’ll be in New York City sometime this week.”That was Elena, the woman who had taken Simone under her wing in the days leading up to Rehab Part 2.She had nothing to do with that. It was all my problem.Elena had done her best to show Simone the kind of sex life she had envisioned for herself, but at the end of the day, Elena was a lifestyle kinkster and Simone would have rather died. Elena was now married to someone more her speed, anyway.“I have work there, but let me know if you’re in the area. I know you’ve been lurking there recently.”
Had she? Simone barely remembered life from a week ago.
Too bad she didn’t have service. She would have readily responded to Elena, asking her to meet at the club so she could get some heart-to-heart advice about what to do with her life now – and what to do about Petra, who kept dropping hints about quitting her job for her uncle and settling down in New England, which was conveniently close to Simone. New England was small enough that even if they lived in different states, traffic was the only real thing keeping them apart.
Fuck her for liking me.Simone put her phone back in her pocket and ran her hand through her hair.Fuck me for being a fuckup.
She could hear the therapist and other patients at group. A place where even the other billionaires’ kids had to wear the same off-white sweatpants and basic boring blue T-shirts like Simone’s. After taking turns talking about the addictions that landed them in rehab, often as a repeat guest, the therapist asked each member of the circle the one thing holding them back from recovering. While most talked about anger toward their families, abusive romantic relationships, or this unexplainable desire to keep doing dangerous things, Simone had quietly admitted that she was the one thing standing in her own way.“I don’t feel like I deserve love,”she had told those men and women.“Even before I got mixed up in this stuff, some part of my psyche didn’t understand why my parents loved me. Especially my mom. She was always so nice and understanding. She never judged me. That felt weird to me.”
The therapist had urged her to dig deeper.Whydid she feel that way? At the time, Simone couldn’t put it into words.
Now, as she sat in a stall in a kinky New York nightclub for the rich and sometimes famous, she realized that she had felt alone in how well she got along with her parents, even when her father’s old-fashioned sensibilities regarding children and girlhood led to arguments between them.
Nobody else I knew got along with their parents. Everyone hated the people they lived with. I was the weird one for talking about my mom andnotcalling her a bitch.
Naturally, it was Simone’s mother who passed away first in the friend group. Like a sign from the universe.
She finally had what she wanted in some dark, twisted way. She was alone. The state she had assumed would always be hers, even as a child.What kind of person craves that emptiness?
Her mother’s death hadn’t been a mere catalyst for Simone’s decline. It had unlocked something dark and sinister within her. That was probably as true as if it had happened when she was thirty instead of twenty, although the enabling culture of Zeta Nu and the other friend groups Simone mistakenly courted in her youth had not helped.
So where did that leave Simone and Petra?
Get over it. Wouldn’t it be weird as hell to start dating someone you met like this?What did they have in common? One friend. A friend Simone knew she needed to cut ties with until Hailey got her shit together, if she ever did. Just because Petra so quickly understood Simone in ways no other person really had…
Would it be weird to compare Petra to Elizabeth? Someone who had immediately accepted Simone for who she was and showed her nothing but some form of love? It didn’t matter if it was motherly or romantic. Deep down, what Simoneneededwas someone who would look past her fuckups, her innate anger, and see someone worthy of unconditional love.
Except romantic partners weren’t like mothers. They owed nobody unconditional love.
Simone didn’t look at her reflection as she washed her hands. Nor did she make eye contact with a woman who came in, loudly shouting something in German to a woman still sitting in the antechamber.
Petra had left the bar. While this didn’t surprise Simone, she still groaned to have to go looking for the woman who gave her such complex feelings.The ones I can’t turn down, for some inexplicable reason.
It had nothing to do with how good Petra looked, whether she wore her T-shirt and jeans in the car, or came into the club wearing the kind of thrifts that might as well have been grabbed off the racks of New York Fashion Week.Or the pajamas. Fuck me.That’s what Simone wanted to say every time she imagined Petra in the boxer shorts and tank tops. While Petra wasn’t carved from the marble of the Gods, she had aje ne sais quoiabout her person. An aura that wasn’t like any other Simone had seen before.
Wasn’t that why she didn’t completely freak out when she woke up in the Volvo a few days ago?
As Simone bypassed couples conversing and singles mingling, she recalled the strange circumstances that had led her to Petra’s rental car. They both trusted Hailey as an old friend, but something didn’t add up. Was it how Simone wasn’t one to drink that much anymore? Or that she felt like she had been hit by a different kind of hungover brick? Why would Hailey ask Petra to drive her somewhere instead of waiting for Simone to sober up before doing anything? How could they have forgotten her phone like that?
For the first time since everything happened, Simone wondered if Hailey had really mailed the phone to New England.
Yet Simone couldn’t dwell upon this new revelation, for she had finally found Petra.
What surprised her wasn’t that Petra had wandered to one of the back rooms, where a half-naked woman sensually danced around a stripper pole while others offered to gangbang her in the orgy room.This is par for the course.Something Petra would probably find amusing, based on what Simone had gleaned from her that past week.
No, what shocked poor Simone was who sat in Petra’s lap.
“Simone!” That flirty French accent was like a bucket of ice water over the head. “There you are! Like Petra promised!”
“Hey! Look who I found!” Petra, whose arm was securely around Daria Marseille’s waist, raised a shot of whatever liquor Daria was sharing with the room. “Does this European vagabond look familiar to you?”
Daria’s loud and potent giggles continued to keep Simone at two arm’s length. So did the way those dainty feet flailed when Daria started slipping off Petra’s lap. One stiletto heel clattered to the ground while Daria, who was barely dressed in anything but black hosiery and a lacy push-up bra, flung her arms around Petra’s shoulders and shoved those generously boosted tits right into a surprised face.
“Come join us, Simone!” All Simone saw now was that ass stuck up in the air. As Petra struggled to contain Daria, the two of them knocked their loveseat two whole inches to the right. More than a few people looked over in their direction, choosing to forego the stunning beauty of the woman dancing on the pole. “I want to be a cookie!”
