Bad seed, p.1
Bad Seed, page 1
bad seed
T.M. SHIVENER
Copyright © 2022 by T.M. Shivener
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, events, or real places portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Edited by: Lisa Lee & Dora
Proofread by: Sheina Kegley and Angie Lawrence
Cover design by: Murphy Rae www.murphyrae.net
Photographer: MOEments photography
ISBN: 9798849764320
ASIN: B0B2X34TWN
Imprint: Independently published by T.M. Shivener
Printed in the United States of America
For those with words in their mind just waiting for a way out. Fill the blank page. Take the leap.
bad seed
Introduction
playlist
Prologue
1. the world ends as i know it
2. the coldest beer in town
3. poor little rich girl
4. little sac grocery
5. chocolate
6. jeremy’s
7. back on my shit
8. old friends, new lovers
9. out of order
10. sweeter than candy
11. dr. burdette
12. family reunion
13. barn home
14. necessities
15. f*ck me for being alone
16. i do it too
17. dead doris
18. a heart broke
19. busy with you
20. about last night
21. chasing that first time high
22. she sings
23. wants & needs
24. stuff up the butt butter
25. love & a weak stomach
26. stupid city boys
27. more your speed
28. sold out
29. yes, please
30. to be needed by you
31. a better way to fall
Epilogue
afterword
acknowledgments
about the author
also by t.m. shivener
introduction
This book contains strong language and sexually graphic situations, much like the previous books I’ve written for 18+ readers. If you are sensitive to age-gap situations, scenarios that could come across as cheating, or cheap humor, it’s best to avoid reading. If none of the above bother you, then press on and I hope you enjoy.
playlist
I Told You I Was Mean by Elle King
Break Up With Your Girlfriend, I’m Bored by Ariana Grande
Cruel Intentions by Delay & G-Eazy
New Man by Ed Sheeran
Pacify Her by Melanie Martinez
Chateau Lobby #4 by Father John Misty
Ivy by Taylor Swift
Groupie Love by Lana Del Rey
Can I Be Him by James Arthur
Illicit Affairs by Taylor Swift
Play Date by Melanie Martinez
Angels Like You by Miley Cyrus
Drunk (And I Don’t Wanna Go Home) by Elle King
I Did Something Bad (cover) by Shoshana Bean
Loose Strings by Hailey Whitters
You Should Probably Leave by Chris Stapleton
prologue
“He wouldn’t let me eat his fries. I got up in the middle of the date and threw my fork at him. Then I called my dad’s driver to come get me and left his ass,” I divulge to my therapist.
Dr. Burdette taps her pen on her notepad in the same annoying way she has done once a week for the last five years of my life, before sighing, “You know, you have this way of finding something wrong with every man you date.”
“I didn’t even want to eat in the first place.” I matched with him on a hook-up app and then he asked to take me to dinner… I know other girls like to pretend that they don’t know what the app is really for, but I do. I know. That’s what I was there for.
Dr. Burdette looks at me in an accusatory way. She doesn’t say a thing, just writes in her pad, and I watch as her pen circles whatever she wrote.
“What did you just circle?”
“Do you really care, October?”
I huff and slouch back into her dark chocolate leather chair that I sit in at every session. “Tell me.”
She leans forward and shows me her pad. It says, still in denial about her sex compulsion.
“We’ve been over this before. I just like sex. I can go without it.”
“How many sexual partners do you think you’ve had since you became sexually active?”
I think about it, but I really don’t know. More than enough. I shrug.
“Okay, when you go out with your friends for the night, do you ever leave with them?”
“Are you asking like when I go out with Maite, Anya, and Hillary?”
“Yes.”
“Well, no. I never leave with them. I go home.”
“How often do you go home alone?”
“Always.” I very rarely let a guy come back to my place. There have only been a few of them.
“Okay, I’ll rephrase. How often do you leave a club alone and go home alone without performing any type of sexual act?”
“Any?”
She nods.
“Oh.” I have been going to clubs since well before I was old enough to be in one. Recently, I’ve been using restroom stalls to get my fill of men before even catching their name. I don’t care to remember. It’s easier to keep them from coming back if we don’t know each other.
She tilts her head side to side as if she is waiting for my answer.
“You know, I think we’re finished for the day.” I stand and grab my jacket from the arm of the chair.
CHAPTER 1
the world ends as i know it
OCTOBER
“Your father passed away last night while you were out on the town. I hope you’re happy, October,” Sally—my stepmom—briskly says to me as soon as I walk through the door to my childhood home.
Daddy’s driver had to come pick me up as I was so distraught when I received the news this morning, via text message. I came over as soon as I woke up and read the text on my phone. The news channels knew before I did. When I woke up this morning—to pee—there were seventeen new voicemails on my phone and a text from Este—the housekeeper—to come right away. Not one missed call or text from Sally.
I’m in shock, and she’s the last person I want to talk to. My daddy is dead. I rub my thumb and forefinger against my Daddy’s Little Girl gold locket around my neck. I’ve had it since I was three.
Her heels clack against the tile as she turns and leaves me alone in the foyer of my daddy’s mansion. Montgomery Manor. I wasn’t here last night because I don’t live here. Not anymore. I live in my penthouse apartment in the middle of the city, but I come home every Sunday for brunch with Daddy. It’s Sunday. It’s brunch day.
How is she just going to leave me alone in the foyer like I’m the help? Without any explanation as to what happened. It’s not like I expected my father to die at sixty. For all I knew, he was in good health. I had just talked to him yesterday about having pancakes and bacon today.
When I was little, I would refer to them as bancakes, and he still referred to them as that. My last text from him was:
Daddy: Bancakes tomorrow at 11?
Five years ago—on my eighteenth birthday—the world as I knew it, ended when my father was caught having an affair with Sally. She was hired to decorate, not to seduce. Mom was devastated. She felt as if Dad kicked her out like he hadn’t spent the last twenty years with her. I was so naïve; I thought my parents would be together forever. We were the family people idolized.
I did not take the news well.
She was my mom, but she left me. Not that I blame her for not wanting to be cheated on, but maybe if she’d stayed, he wouldn’t have married Satan Sally. I should be curled up in my mother’s warm embrace, but I don’t even know where she lives. I haven’t heard from Mom in five years. I guess she is alive, but she’s dead to me. Now, I’m an orphan. No mother or father.
Satan Sally is only thirteen years older than me. She could be my sister. She’s not even that attractive with her dishwater-blonde hair and overly thin frame.
As soon as she moved in, I moved out. Daddy got me an apartment but on the grounds that I would see a therapist.
I did not take the news of my parents separating well either.
I did not take my mom abandoning me—even if I was, as the law states, an adult—well.
I did not take the fact that my father was going to marry Satan Sally very well.
As soon as the divorce was final, they married the next day. No big wedding but there sure was a big-ass reception that I didn’t attend. I spent their wedding night with a man seven inches deep between my legs.
The past five years I have been living life in a way to keep myself from getting hurt. I love my daddy, but I’d never want to be kicked to the curb the way he did my mom.
The only thing that could possibly get me up be fore the sun woke up was a meeting with my father’s attorney. Which I just left.
He said Satan Sally had a will in her possession that stated Sally Montgomery was the sole heir to Ezra Montgomery’s estate. She gets everything.
Everything.
EVERYTHING!
I pull at my hair to keep myself from screaming in public as I walk to my car.
My daddy’s company he built from the ground up—Montgomery Media. The money. What was supposed to be my trust fund. All of it.
That doesn’t sound like my father at all. Daddy never mentioned anything like this to me. Not that we ever talked about a time when he would no longer be around. He was supposed to be around forever.
There’s no way he’d leave me out of everything, but the attorney said it’s going to hold up.
I have until the end of the day to get out of my apartment. Of course, fate would have it that my lease is up, and Satan Sally isn’t going to renew, and I’m now too poor to afford it.
Satan Sally wasn’t at the attorney’s office and I’m glad because I would have clawed her eyes out had she been.
I’ve been talking to my therapist, Dr. Burdette, for the last five years of my life. About men mostly and my lack in finding anyone to keep my attention longer than one date. Sometimes we talk about my mom, but mostly just my lack of a love life. She tells me I always find something wrong. It’s not my fault I bounce when I see the red flags instead of pretending not to…
She gave me her cell number for emergencies only.
Me: I know I message you more than I should about things that don’t matter, but my daddy is dead, and Satan Sally is taking everything!
She doesn’t answer.
The only things my father left me were my car and a house in the middle of nowhere in Ohio. Ohio! I have lived in New York City my entire life and now I must drive to Ohio. I can’t even fly. I don’t have any money.
The attorney told me that the bills to the house were paid up for one month, so I have exactly thirty days to start bringing in my own income. I’ve never worked, ever. I didn’t go to college. I have no career and no skills.
What am I going to do?
Now, I’m just a poor girl who used to be rich.
Satan Sally almost didn’t give me any money to move on until the attorney suggested she let me stay with her until I figured something else out. Only then was she all too eager to hand over two thousand dollars to get me out of her hair. Just so long as I left and never contacted her again.
I just pulled into the town of Indian Spring.
I look up at the dilapidated building in front of me, then at the address that was inside of the envelope that held the keys to the house the attorney said was mine free and clear. The address is the same. 4876 Percy Hill.
I lost cell service a few miles back, so I had to rely on my own skills to get me here. I only had to turn around in three different lanes before I found this one. Ready to throw in the towel, I turned down the drive only to be met with the house of my nightmares, and it’s mine.
The puke-green shutters are barely hanging on. It’s brick, that awful dingy red brick from back in the eighteen hundreds, not the updated gray brick you see nowadays.
A two-story old farmhouse at the end of a dirt lane. “Home sweet home,” I mumble to myself as I get out of my loaded down cherry-red two-year-old Audi. I was supposed to be trading her in next month for a brand-new Range Rover. Thankfully, Daddy had already put the car in my name before his passing, or Satan Sally would have taken it too.
Daddy never mentioned that he was going to write me out of the will.
He had this house deeded in my name years ago. We’ve never been here. Why would he buy a house in Ohio on five hundred acres of land?
On the way down to this shit hole, I tried to use one of my credit cards. It was declined. I tried another, declined. I ended up having to use part of the two thousand to fill up twice on the way here. One hundred dollars, gone, just like that. My father hasn’t been buried a day, and I’ve already been cut off from my life.
Satan Sally had a private memorial for Daddy, and I was only there for ten minutes before I left. I didn’t feel welcome at all. Daddy would not have wanted this. He wouldn’t have wanted me to drive eleven hours by myself to Ohio.
Thankfully, I was able to stay with Este a few days until after Daddy’s memorial was over. She has always been so kind to me.
I wanted to stop on the way to Ohio because I was tired, but the only rooms I could afford were at places called motels that still advertised that they had color TV, and I’ve never stayed anywhere that didn’t have a presidential suite.
I leave everything I brought in the car and head up the rickety steps of the porch. One of the planks is missing, so I step over the hole to reach for the doorknob. Using the key, I open the door which sticks, so I have to use my shoulder to shove it the rest of the way open. Oddly enough, the inside of the house looks to be in a lot better shape than the outside.
Dated, but not roach infested, as the outside had me to believe.
There is a carpeted staircase in front of me with closed doors on either side. I wander around the first floor, which contains a bedroom, a living room, a kitchen, a bathroom and a room with a wood stove, that also contains a second set of steps to the second floor. Every room on the first level—aside from the bathroom—has a fireplace, but none of them look as if they have been used in years. I need to look at the deed to see how old this place is.
There is quite a bit of dust floating in the stuffy air. There is some furniture. A full-size metal-framed bed in the downstairs bedroom. A dreadful floral couch in the living room facing the mantel. Above the mantel is a mounted deer head. In the kitchen, there is a gas stove, cabinets no newer than the late fifties, and a refrigerator. The room that holds the wood stove also contains a washer and dryer.
It looks as if the essentials are all here.
There aren’t any light fixtures in the ceilings, so I pull back the curtains to let in some natural light.
As I peer out the window, ten cars pass my new home. Where would they be headed?
My stomach growls. The last time I ate was at the last truck stop I passed at least a hundred miles from here. A granola bar and water. They only had purified and not spring. I prefer spring. Although, it’s probably not in my budget anymore…
In the kitchen, I find that the refrigerator is not stocked with any food, but the cabinets do hold some mismatched kitchenware. It reminds me of a cabin we once stayed in up in the Smokies. It had most of the essentials for cooking, but none of it matched.
Not that I’ve ever cooked a meal in my life. I haven’t. I either ate out or just didn’t eat when I was on one of my Hollywood diets. I’m just not sure I’m going to be able to do this. I look at the stainless-steel kitchen sink and regurgitate a little at the thought of having to drink tap water.
All I have is nineteen hundred dollars and a bunch of designer clothes and purses. I didn’t know what to bring, and I couldn’t fit everything from my apartment in my car. I brought all my purses and some of my clothes. I had lots of things, but nothing that really meant anything to me. Aside from the necklace around my neck.
There is a phone attached to the wall in the kitchen. On a whim, I pick it up and hold it to my ear. Sure enough, there is an actual dial tone. I click the buttons dialing the one person left who cares about me at all. Este.
“H—hello?” Her voice is soft and skeptical.
