Preview of The Corey Effect by Casey Dembowski
Preview of The Corey Effect by Casey Dembowski
Chapter 1
Now
The familiar eerie melody of a classic horror-movie theme shook the desk under me. I untangled my hands from Harry’s hair and reached across my desk to ignore the call. My office returned to silence, the only sound Harry’s shallow breathing as he kissed the crook of my neck. His hands worked the buttons of my blouse as mine undid the one on his pants. He’d had yet another mediation meeting with his soon-to-be-ex wife—if she would only sign the damn papers—that morning. He only dared to have sex in the office on the days he had to deal with her.
Harry pushed me farther back, and the pages of a marketing plan for our newest client crunched under my weight. He slid his hand slowly up my skirt, teasing me. I wrapped my leg around his torso, pulling him into me. I’d missed him over the weekend. My cell phone vibrated under me, and the theme from Halloween rang through the office again. I picked it up with one hand and pushed his pants down with the other. My gaze shifted to the cell phone. It was my mother. Abso-fucking-lutely not. My mother could wait a few—several—more minutes.
Getting Harry out of my office as soon as possible was paramount. Yes, we’d had the good sense to lock the door, but the last thing we needed was to arouse suspicion. We’d kept quiet for two years. There was no reason to blow it now.
Harry pressed up against me. My body sprang to life, waking up for the first time in days. Oh, how I wanted him. I dropped the phone back onto my desk and let my hands roam through his hair and down his back, settling under his boxers. And then I felt it again—that damn vibrating phone. The music returned. Michael Myers was coming to get us.
Harry pulled away, barely an inch but enough for me to notice. “Just answer it, Andi.”
I grabbed the phone, my other hand still grasping Harry’s bare ass. “What is it, Mom? I’m in a meeting.”
“It’s about Ryan,” she said, her voice unusually low.
“Mom, I really don’t have time—”
“He died, Andi.”
I couldn’t breathe. I clutched my desk to steady myself, but Harry didn’t seem to notice or care. He lowered himself to his knees. His lips danced along my inner thigh, unaware that my world had stopped spinning. I placed a hand on his shoulder to pull his attention back to my face. My mother said my name again. She repeated herself with quick, succinct sentences, filling in more details, but the message was the same—my father had died.
“I’ll call you back,” I said.
The phone hadn’t even hit my desk before I pulled Harry to his feet and found my way back into his boxers. Everything fell away except his lips on my lips. Our breaths intermingled and dissolved. I slipped out of my underwear and twined my legs around him. I pressed him closer to me. Pleasure washed over me and erased all coherent thought. A gasp escaped my lips as he let his tongue linger on my ear. He smiled at me disapprovingly and covered the noises I couldn’t quiet with his mouth, swallowing my moans as he thrust deeper into me. Every extremity was piqued. My toes curled. I devoured him in another kiss as a scream worked its way up my throat. He shuddered and then collapsed against me with a laugh.
“Someone got a little carried away.” He stepped back and pulled his pants up.
I was usually better at shielding my excitement, but everything had collided inside me. My father—Ryan—was dead. The monster who had haunted me for the last decade had been slain. Processing that fact had been impossible with Harry half-naked and at full mast between my legs. All I’d wanted in that moment was to feel everything and nothing. Harry was good for that. I straightened my skirt and fumbled with the last button on my shirt before sitting down at my desk.
“What did your mother want?” he asked, taking the seat across from me.
Harry knew I wasn’t in contact with my father. He didn’t know why, and he didn’t ask. But if I explained my reasons out loud, they would become real. I wasn’t sure I was ready to open that hermetically sealed door back up.
I straightened the crushed marketing plan against the edge of my desk. “Ry—my father died.”
His brow furrowed, and he met my eyes. “How?”
I toggled a red pen between my fingers and focused on the pages again. My mom had sprinted through that part, but I’d heard her. “Cirrhosis.”
“Are you okay?”
Anger and resentment threatened to break through the barriers I’d buried them under. An ache settled in my right wrist as vestiges of that time seeped into my mind. I shook them away. “Appearances, Harry. This is the longest meeting you’ve ever had.” I smiled to lighten the dismissal, but our little tryst had taken a while. And everyone knew he held long meetings in his office because it was more comfortable than the windowless boxes the rest of us had.
He stood with a laugh. “You’re right. I’m already going to have to go sit in Craig’s office for at least fifteen minutes, listening to him drone on about his idea for the Nielsen campaign.”
“Nielsen… organic…”
“Baby food.” He groaned. “Trying to break into the baby bath products industry.” He stopped at the door. “Andi, you know that… well, you can talk to me if you need to.”
He was gone before I could muster up a response or a rejection. Typical Harry. I didn’t have time for his sympathy. I needed to call my mother back before she called me. She wouldn’t necessarily be upset about Ryan’s death, but she would be worried for me. My parents had been separated practically my entire life. I didn’t have a single memory of them together. The details of their marriage and divorce were a fuzzy tale I’d pieced together from relatives’ stories, but she’d never said anything about it directly. And with the exception of my father’s weekly arrival at my front door to pick me up when I was a kid, my parents had almost never interacted. My hands had passed letters and child-support checks between the two of them.
I needed to call her. But right then, I didn’t want to deal with her or think about him. Fortunately, my computer dinged, signaling yet another email. With a wiggle of the mouse, my screen woke up, and my inboxes appeared. Unread emails had piled up—from potential clients and current clients and several from Harry about what he would need on his upcoming trip—but what I mainly noticed was the single read message in my personal email from Steve Alridge, a friend from college and the director of communications at Marathon Integrated Systems.
A year earlier, while Harry and I had been taking a break, I’d asked Steve if there were any openings at Marathon, wanting not only to be away from Harry but to have normal hours, a specific set of job parameters, and a real chance for growth. After a year of talking and working it out and waiting for a position to open, Steve had gotten permission to hire another communications manager, and he wanted me. That knowledge, combined with the fact that Harry’s daughter was in town, had kept me avoiding Harry’s texts all weekend. The decision was too much. It was a simple choice, but making it would change everything—and not only on a personal level. I couldn’t be an associate project manager and Harry’s part-time assistant forever. Corporate communications was a logical next step in my career path—and maybe, for once, I’d feel deserving of my position, confident that I’d earned it on merit.
I picked up the marketing plan again. It was still a draft, but it would help the client focus their marketing and embrace a much-needed social media strategy, thinking locally first before expanding and using advertising in the trades instead of commercials. The plan needed more work. I knew the level of excellence Harry expected from each of us, and it wasn’t there yet. Revisiting the engineering journals and trade shows I’d listed, my mind turned away from everything not on the page—Harry, my mom, Ryan. And then the phone rang.
“Andrea Scott,” I said without looking at the caller ID. It was probably Craig, calling to ask my opinion on a slogan for the baby lotion campaign, as if I knew about babies simply because I had ovaries.
“I hate when you answer the phone like that.” Of course, it was my mother, calling me on my office line. She knew me too well. “Who exactly are you presenting yourself to?”
“Hello, Mom.”
“You hung up on me.”
I was tempted to do it again. Talking about my father was never high on my list of priorities, but discussing his death while I was at work was unacceptable. I had too much to do and needed to have my wits about me.
“I told you I was in a meeting.”
This wasn’t going to be a short conversation. My mother wasn’t one of those people who could tell when it wasn’t a good time to talk. We were meeting for yoga that night. She could have easily waited and told me then. She’d chosen to give me the news on the phone during the workday.
“Well, you’re not in a meeting now, are you?”
“No, but I’m working. I do actually have to do work on occasion.”
I typed the first name on my list of trades into my computer: Engineering News. Clicking through, I found their editorial calendar. Getting thought leaders in the news was always one of Harry’s top priorities for B2B clients.
“You’re avoiding me.”
An immature and completely beneath-me “Duh” stopped short of falling out of my mouth. “I’m not avoiding you. I’m just…” I trailed off, taking a second look at the calendar. Any theme that highlighted an understanding of regulatory changes would be a perfect issue to try to place an expert. Our client would want to submit a piece to this one. I scribbled November in the margin of the marketing plan.
“Busy? Everyone is always too busy for me.”
That was a cheap shot, even for her. My stepfather, Sam, had died almost three years ago. It was hard to believe. And while my mom had dated a bit, no one seemed to stick. My return to New York had eased some of her pain, but I had a life, and Sam’s kids were in Minnesota.
“I’m not too busy for you.” I said it calmly, trying to relax my tone and my body. Don’t kill the messenger.
“Have you really thought about what I told you, sweetie?” Just like that, she was back to being a worrisome mother. Sometimes, her mood swings gave me whiplash.
“I’m twenty-eight years old, Mom. I’m capable of comprehending death.” The truth was I had never thought about him dying. Not once. He’d been dead to me for so long already.
“Being an adult doesn’t make death any easier.”
She couldn’t be helped—my mother was a meddler. I rolled my eyes. “Am I supposed to break down and cry?”
My gaze flickered back to my computer and then the marketing plan. I added February to the margin. Earlier that year, Engineering News had done an article on the effects of site work on workers’ health. If they did something similar next year, this client would be a good match.
“I just want you to do something. You’re more concerned about me interrupting your business day than about your father dying.”
Which was true. I didn’t have a father—hadn’t had one in a decade. Letting those memories in, that pain and anguish… I couldn’t do it. I’d worked too hard for too long to fall apart at the mention of Ryan Scott. Except there was a difference between expelling someone from your life and them literally being off this earth. Something long buried stirred inside me.
No. I locked the doors around my heart. This wasn’t happening.
I cleared my throat. “Who even called you?”
The question had been gnawing at me since she first called: Who would have thought to call my mother, and how did they find her information? When I’d cut my father out of my life, I’d done it so completely that I didn’t even hear from him, not once. My mother had gotten me a new cell phone number, and she and I had moved across town. Only two people from that period of my life knew my information, and neither of them had spoken to me in years.
“I think you should go up there to the funeral—see Bethany and… your sister.”
A shiver ran up my spine. My mother had never casually referred to my father’s second wife and my half sister before. Not even when things had been “good” between all of us.
I started tapping my pen at a steady but rapid pace. “Bethany called you?”
“Will you go to the funeral?”
No, I wasn’t going to go to the funeral. I didn’t need to say goodbye or have some sort of postmortem closure. All the closure I needed had happened on the day I walked out of his house for the last time.
“Please go,” she said. “Just trust me on this one. You will regret not going.”
“I’ll think about it. I really do have a lot of work to do.” At least I wasn’t intentionally avoiding her. Several emails had come through, two of them marked high importance. “I’ll let you know what I decide.”
“I love you, Andi. You know that, right?”
“Yeah, Mom. I love you too.”
The phone hadn’t even fully dropped onto its base before it was ringing again. A quick look told me it was Craig. I diverted his call to voicemail and switched off my monitor. I sat cross-legged on my desk chair, leaning my head back in a stress-relieving position. The cushions squeaked as they always did when I pushed the structure to its limits. But I could feel the stress draining from my body, out of my toes and through my fingers. I concentrated on relaxing specific parts of my body as I’d been taught in a meditation class my mom and I had taken together in an attempt to bond. Our personalities were so similar that we fought a lot. Most of my stress came from her, yet so did most of my laughter. Our breaking point had come right around the time I accepted Harry’s invitation for drinks. My mom and I had both been heartbroken—she from her second husband’s recent passing and I from the fallout with my fiancé. Telling her anything about my dating life had seemed cruel—her grief had been so heavy—but sharing that I was dating my much older, still technically married boss wasn’t an option. But then, secret keeping was second nature for me when it came to my mother. It had become a necessity when I was younger and living under Ryan’s roof and then in the mess that followed. But it frayed the connections between us, creating static where there’d once been clarity.
My office was quiet except for the monotonous buzz of white noise. The lack of distraction allowed me to take in what my mother had said without having to spout off an answer on the spot. It wasn’t often that I wanted to sit in silence. Even when trying to concentrate on breathing and tuning out the world, I often listened to a carefully selected artist—usually Wilderness Weekend. Their music was a happy melancholy that I could lose myself in, relating to lyrics that I knew were completely unrelated to me. The right song at the right moment changed my mood, my perspective, even my life. The calm strumming of an acoustic guitar or the gentle flourish of piano keys that I’d fallen for when I was seventeen and making some of the hardest decisions of my life had lulled me into a love of music I’d never been able to let go.
And I needed the courage that music gave me more than ever. It would take every ounce of strength I had to reenter Ryan’s world and go back to Fairford, but my mother was right—if I didn’t go, I might wind up regretting it. I couldn’t afford to regret anything else.
My blood went cold, and the peace I’d reached just moments before vanished, replaced by hellish reminders and memories I’d long since banished. My heart ached, and the bad collided with the good as it had so often that year. I rubbed my wrist distractedly. I didn’t usually allow myself to wonder about Corey, my first love—though that didn’t even begin to describe what he’d been to me—but I couldn’t help it now. Is it possible that he’s still in Fairford after all this time? I hoped not, partially because we’d both wanted out of that town so badly and partially because I didn’t know if I could survive seeing him again.
My phone buzzed, and I looked down, expecting a text from my mom, but it was Harry: If you’re going to the funeral, I’m coming.
My fingers hovered over the keys as I thought of a million protests and all the consequences of bringing Harry to Fairford. He’d been separated from his wife for three years—long before we were ever involved—but until she signed the papers, we walked a fine line between right and wrong. Secret weekends away were one thing. A trip where members of my family—estranged or not—might be present was another. I glanced at his calendar, as if I didn’t have it memorized.
It’s the same day as your flight, I typed.
So, I’ll push the flight to the next day. I’m not letting you go to your father’s funeral alone.
I wasn’t sure why he was pushing this, but I knew better than to argue with him.
Fine, you can meet me there Tuesday night.
I nodded at the calendar as I adjusted the dates, trying to reassure myself that this wasn’t a colossal mistake. But the one hundred miles between Fairford and New York City might as well have been an ocean. I knew that better than anyone.
Maybe this trip would give me closure on more than just my father. Or maybe it would break me open again. Either way, Ryan was my cross to bear, and I was going back to Fairford.
Preview of The Corey Effect by Casey Dembowski
