The Fidelity Files (Jennifer Hunter #1)(22)

The night my mother went to Chicago started out like any other night Elizabeth was hired to watch me. She stood in the doorway, waiting as I climbed into bed and pulled the covers up to my chin.

"Five more minutes," I tried to negotiate for the tenth time.

"Good night, Jenny," she said vacantly, and then turned off the light and closed the door behind her.

I lay awake, staring at the ceiling, my arms crossed, my whole world on the verge of collapsing, and, in truth, missing my mom terribly. I knew she wasn't coming home for another three days, and it saddened me to think about that.

I exhaled my frustration loudly, and then reluctantly turned onto my side, tucked my hands underneath my pillow, and tried to fall asleep.

I must have dozed off for nearly two hours, because when I was awoken by distant voices and muffled giggles, the clock on my nightstand said it was midnight.

I turned my ear toward the door and listened as the sounds became more and more intrusive. I rolled my eyes and groaned softly. Another late-night Elizabeth gabfest.

Most of the time, I was able to drift back to sleep despite the noise, but tonight was different. Tonight it seemed incessant. And unusually irritating. So I climbed out of bed, quietly opened my door, and tiptoed down the stairs, determined to put a stop to this annoying interference. But as I grew closer to the living room I heard something I had never heard before. I stopped and listened. It was the distinct sound of a male voice, coming from the next room.

I smiled mischievously as I continued to tiptoe my way down the hallway, hoping to catch my so-called "responsible and trustworthy" babysitter with an uninvited male visitor in the middle of my parents' living room.

I felt a surge of sinful exhilaration flow through my body, knowing full well that once I caught her in the middle of doing something inappropriate while I was under her care, it would be the end of her. That would certainly teach my parents to leave me alone with a lovesick college student.

Maybe they'd finally decide to loosen their death grip on that stupid "not until you're thirteen" rule, and next time I would finally be able to stay home by myself.

I placed my palms flat against the hallway wall and stealthily stuck my head around the corner of the living room, ready to jump out and scare them enough to send the unwanted guest packing.

But what I saw in that room sent me into a spiral of shock. It was a cold-blooded numbness like nothing I'd ever experienced before, not even when my friend Sophie and I found that videotape in her dad's closet. The one with naked men and women doing what we only assumed to be things that were done on TV and no place else.

But unlike the videotape we had found, which neither one of us was able to bring ourself to shut off, I had no trouble tearing my eyes from the sight that lay in front of me.

With a rush of sheer panic I spun my head back around the corner and shot up the stairs, careful to tread lightly so that the sound of my bare feet on the wooden steps wouldn't draw attention.

The last thing I wanted was to be discovered, seeing what I had seen.

The stairs seemed to go on forever. As though there were ten times as many as there had been when I came down less than a minute ago. When I finally reached the top I crept into my bedroom and silently closed the door behind me. The room was quiet. And I managed to drown out the whispered voices and muffled moans coming through my door by focusing on the sound of my heart thumping loudly in my chest.

I felt tears of fear and disbelief well up in my eyes as I allowed my body to crumple to the ground, trying desperately to make sense of what I had just witnessed. Trying to figure out what it meant and what it would mean for the future.

In the darkness of my bedroom the same image repeated in my mind. Like a scene from a movie, being rewound and played over and over again, without any signs of stopping.

It was Elizabeth, on the couch, her head tilted back on one of the throw pillows, her trendy top casually thrown onto the nearby coffee table. Her bra was red and black, like the kind I used to see in the Victoria's Secret catalogs that I would steal from the trash compactor after my mom had taken them from the mailbox and thrown them away. And the hand that was gratifyingly caressing up and down her bare stomach and ravenously around the sides of her slender waist... was my father's.

He was kissing her in a way I had never seen him kiss my mother. Like he was devouring her. But yet, her satisfied moans were agonizingly similar to the ones Sophie and I had heard on the videotape, and it made me believe that she didn't exactly mind being devoured.

When my parents kissed, it was tender and sweet. A gentle brushing of the lips that lasted maybe a second or two, three if they were saying good-bye before one of my dad's business trips.

But there was nothing tender and sweet about what my father was doing downstairs. His lips weren't even closed. They were open, and so were hers. It was almost like the way the eighth-graders kissed in front of their lockers, but much more adept.

Sophie had found out a few years before that it was called "French kissing." And I remembered asking my mom about it when I was nine years old. She laughed and explained, "Some people just like to kiss with their mouths open."

"Why?" I asked, clearly not understanding why anyone on earth would want to do that. At age nine the inside of a mouth was merely the place where chewed-up food lingered before it was swallowed. Far from an "erogenous" zone.

My mom shrugged, amused by my curiosity. "I don't know. Maybe because for some people it feels good."