My aunt swatted at the air as if it were nothing. Was it really minuscule, or was she just saying that? I raised my eyebrow at her again.
“Audrey caught him in your old bedroom. He found some of your … er … magazines.” My aunt’s cheeks turned red with embarrassment, but I couldn’t help but laugh at this. “Griffin! That’s not funny!”
“I’m sorry, Aunt Marlowe, but it kind of is.”
“You left that smut in there, and he found it.” My aunt rolled her eyes at me and slapped my forearm before she took a long sip from her floral coffee cup. “It’s like you’ve contributed to his delinquency. His poor mother caught him reading them.” The coffee cup went back toward her lips, but then she stopped to scold me again. “If Lars and I had caught you with those kinds of magazines, he would have spanked the shit out of you.”
I pulled the coffee cup away from my lips and added, “I probably would have liked it back then.”
“Griffin Miles Evans!” my aunt gasped my full name in shock. “It would have been one thing if they were those”—she frantically waved her hand around as she desperately searched for the words—“those swimsuit magazines.”
Laughing, I tilted my head back and stared at the ceiling. I had always been a curious young man, and very quickly I discovered that the run-of-the-mill pictures of tits and ass didn’t do a whole lot for me.
“But they were those … weird magazines.” Aunt Marlowe whispered “weird magazines” as if she’d be struck down on the spot for saying their name. She got up from her chair to pour herself more coffee.
“We’ve had this discussion multiple times, Aunt Marlowe,” I reminded her kindly. “There’s nothing wrong with kink or what I like.”
“Of course there isn’t, Griffin dear.” She sat and sipped her coffee. “You know that Lawrence and I support you and the decisions you’ve made.” Aunt Marlowe took another sip and then quickly added with a smile, “We’re both fine with the fact that you like women and men. It’s perfectly fine,” she reassured me, though I thought it was more for her benefit than mine. I was perfectly happy with who I was.
I sighed and drank my coffee while Riley was getting spanked for getting caught reading fetish and kink magazines. My aunt went on about how she had plans Saturday morning to get her hair and nails done for the party they hosted several times a year for the Evans Financial employees. It was a tradition that my father, grandfather, and great-grandfather all carried on, along with Uncle Lars. I would carry on the tradition as well, as soon as I stepped into the CEO role.
Moments later, rubber-soled sneakers scampered down the hallway toward the kitchen. Before Riley made his appearance, Audrey intercepted him, and my aunt and I could hear their hushed conversation in the hall.
“Riley!” Audrey hissed. “Griffin is in the kitchen. Don’t go starting any of your nonsense. You can have breakfast after he leaves with Mr. Walker.”
It was amusing to me that Audrey still called my aunt and uncle “Mr. and Mrs. Walker.” Lars finally came into the kitchen, wearing an expression that told me he had already had a long day. After he finished a quick cup of coffee, we headed out to make our way to work.
“Behave today, Riley. Don’t give your mother any trouble.” Lars’s stern voice filled the entryway as we pulled on our coats.
Riley watched me with swollen eyes while Lars spoke to him. The swollen eyes were no doubt from an embarrassing crying episode during his spanking. Fourteen was an awkward age. Riley was tall and lanky and hadn’t grown into his clothes yet. His dark jeans were too long for him and the bottoms were frayed in the back from dragging on the ground. Riley wore a navy University of Michigan sweatshirt that was also too big for him. Possibly from a second-hand store.
“Yes, sir,” Riley said to Lars, though his eyes were still on me. “Hey, Griffin,” he greeted me.
“Nice sweatshirt,” I commented before opening the door and walking outside into the humidity.
“Take the long route to work, Griffin,” Uncle Lars said the moment he closed the car door. “How’s your morning?”
“It’s all right,” I said as I turned onto the main road. “I dreamt about it again last night.” I paused to see if he was going to say anything right away.
While Lars knew what had happened, my aunt didn’t. My father told Lars, of course, and he kept it a secret from my aunt. Uncle Lars shared the same beliefs as my father, grandfather, and great-grandfather. In a nutshell, never trust a woman, because she will either cheat on you or deceive you and take your money. After my father died and I went to live with my aunt and uncle, Lars continued to preach the same thing to me. That belief had been burned into my heritage for decades. And I knew without a shadow of a doubt that Aunt Marlowe had remained faithful to him, simply because he hadn’t killed her.
Since it was a notion that the men in my family deeply believed, it was also a fundamental principle that they silently built Evans Financial on. The company was one of the best to work for in Grand Rapids, mainly because of the retirement and pension package. We had a lot of couples that worked for us, and if the men who founded and ran the company discovered any slips of faithfulness along the way, their names were entered into a journal to be handled at another time. And the guilty party usually just disappeared.
The corporate parties that were hosted quarterly were meant to be a way to bait any women, or men, to see if they’d sway and cheat when their spouse wasn’t looking. The majority of the time, it was to catch the women; however, there had been some instances of men. Since my eighteenth birthday, I’d been used as the bait to lure the women and men for Lars to discover. All I had to do was be my handsome self, flash a smile or two, and the women would come find me. I’d make sure we were “caught” by Lars. He’d record the name of the offending party in the black leather-bound journal that had been passed down several generations, and they’d be dealt with later.
“What part did you dream about?” he asked.
“The part where I walked in on him strangling her.”
“I often have dreams about telling your aunt.”
“She’d flip if she knew my dad killed her sister.” I paused for a moment, hoping my stomach would settle from that unnerving thought. I could picture my mother’s eyes looking into mine as I held her wrists down. “Or that I helped. It isn’t worth upsetting her.”
“Griffin, you were a child.”
“A child who helped his father kill his mom.”
“We’ve been through this, Griffin.”
