Page 30 of Privilege
“You’re fucking ridiculous,” I say. I start to walk away but she grabs my arm, digs her fake nails into my skin so hard I’m pretty sure I’ll bleed.
“Richie is going to live with Jamie. He is going tomarry her,and live up to his father’s name, unlike you did to yours,” she hisses.
Fucking. Richard. Van der Beer. The wall street mogul. The tycoon. The darling of Manhattan. Until he gambled it all away and jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge. Left Evelyn and Rich to fend for themselves.
Some fucking legacy.
I grab her upper arms and almost lift her off the ground, leaning in so we are nose to nose. “Enough,” I grit out.
That’s it. No other words. I stare at her for an eternity, chest heaving, and watch the fire in her eyes sizzle right out and fear creep in. She tries to wriggleaway but I don’t let her, hold her in place without a word as she starts to panic and tries to scratch at me.
I let go and shove her away, discard her like used athletic socks. She wobbles in her stupid shoes, falls sideways and catches herself on the wall.
“I’m glad we understand each other,” I say over my shoulder.
Chapter Fifteen
Rich
Dane is back andI don’t like it.
Cara says I’m scowling too much, but it’s making me nervous having him in the house. I can’t put my finger on it, but something is different between the two of them. I don’t know if I’d call them friends, but there’s some kind of armistice happening because I’ve never seen Dane be so unironically polite to anyone in my entire life.
It reminds me of how it used to be, with us. The only good memories I have of this place are all tangled up with him.
Racing up the lattice on the side of the house, before I fell and he caught me. He dislocated his shoulder making sure I didn’t eat dirt.
Pissing in the fountain at the front entrance, dicks swaying in the wind and middle fingers up. When the staff told our parents, he insisted it was just him. Mother took away his Audi for a week.
Trying to grow pot in the greenhouse. Martha, my SAT prep tutor, figured it out right away, but Dane talked her out of tattling.He never did tell me how.
School was always best, though. I lived for varsity sports at Waldron Prep: the teams were a place to channel my energy, my frustration, myeverything. Dane spent more time with the caretakers tinkering with the campus golf carts than in a classroom, and was definitely in the Headmaster’s office a hell of a lot more than I ever was. But he did well enough in school, which seemed to infuriate both his teachers and my mother for reasons I never understood.
Cara isstunning,sprawled out on the sun lounger with a giant floppy hat, wearing a teeny white string bikini that she bought at a boutique shop at the beach that isveryunlike her and that I suspect has a lot to do with the fact that Jamie is also lounging poolside, trying not to stare at her.
This was a mistake.
I feel like an idiot. She said it was fine for Jamie to come, and I know she meant it, but you’d need a chainsaw to cut through this tension. Part of me wishes I had Dane’s intuition for handling women. Sure he’s a dick about it, fucks anyone with who’s conscious and forgets their name as fast as I’m sure he makes them come, but he’s always had some secret radar for what girls not to fuck around with. Or what ones to bag on purpose, just to cause ascene.
Dane is sitting several loungers down, unusually focused on his laptop but clearly also eyeing Cara every chance he gets.
Yeah. I’m a fucking idiot.
“What are you reading?” Jamie asks Cara.
Cara peers over the tops of her sunglasses and holds up her book. Jamie wrinkles her nose.
“Educated?”she says. “Isn’t that about Mormons, or something?”
Cara shrugs and pushes her sunglasses back up her nose, resumes her reading, one of the tiny straps of her bathing suit slipping off her freckled shoulder.
Why did I let Jamie come here? I could be spreading Cara out on that lounger, right now.
“Wait, it’s about Mormons?” I ask Cara, raising an eyebrow.
“It’s about a woman who wasraisedMormon.”
“Don’t they have tons of wives?”
